The social history of the Reformation: recent trends and future agendas.

The advent of social history in the 1960s and 1970s as a methodologically new and innovative way to study the past significantly altered our understanding of many different areas of history. One of the fields most affected by social history has been the Protestant and Catholic reformations of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As recently as 1976, however, it was still possible to ask if there even was such a thing as a social history of the Reformation, as the late Bob Scribner wondered aloud in print. (1) While he was convinced there was, he was puzzled why Reformation historians had remained until then so much more resistant to social history than practitioners in most other fields. (2) It did not take long, though, before it became clear that social historians of the Reformation were already beginning to rewrite the accepted narratives of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (3) No longer were scholars solely interested in the official and prescribed religious doctrines of the established churches and their religious leaders, as lay religious practices seemed to offer new and in some cases alternative readings of the Reformation. Moreover, no longer were social historians prepared to accept the teleological and simplistic interpretations of earlier periods, which stressed that the Protestant Reformation offered up more modern and forward looking religions to replace a superstitious and outdated religion. With an emphasis on religious practices and the social relationships imbedded in those practices, social historians of the Reformation shifted attention away from older questions of why men such as Luther and Calvin left the Roman Catholic Church or questions about the doctrinal differences that most separated Protestants and Catholics. In their place social historians of the Reformation began to explore more socially infused questions such as who made the Reformation. That is, which social groups or cohorts--by estate, class, sex, occupation, family, etc.--actively sought to promote or to sustain the new religious movements, where, when and why? These questions also led to others, such as to whose benefit and to whose detriment did the Reformation serve> (4) A whole host of new studies soon emerged to answer Bob Scribner's early query in the affirmative: there clearly was a social history of the Reformation after all.

My purpose in this article is to summarize some of the most significant findings of social historians of the Reformation in the last twenty years or so, as well as to offer some thoughts on future areas of research. I make no attempt to be comprehensive here, so I cannot possibly mention every single contribution. What I shall try to do in the limited space afforded me is to indicate how the larger interpretations and narratives of the Reformation have changed or been revised as a result of the scholarship of social historians. I see several significant areas where social historians have made a difference, and I shall briefly describe the contributions of each of these: lay piety, or what some call popular religion; rituals; gender, marriage, and the family; confessionalization, a term coined by some German historians to describe the dual process of social disciplining and state-building; and finally, the transmission of ideas through print, images, and education. Along the way, I shall suggest what appear to me to be the most fruitful avenues of research for social historians of the Reformation in the future.

The earliest attempts to think of the Reformation in social rather than theological or doctrinal terms tended to be German, and they were built upon either the class-based paradigm established by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century or upon the ideas of two German sociologists at the turn of the twentieth century, Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch. Since Tom Brady has already surveyed the historical literature of the 1960s and 1970s, I shall do no more than summarize it here. (5) Many of those historians who based their approaches on class tended to focus on the Reformation as revolution, and not just the early bourgeois revolution first proposed by Engels. Some, like Peter Blickle, were drawn toward the Peasant Revolts of 1524-25, not just as an example of class conflict but as a "revolution of the common man." (6) While some historians did attempt to build upon the Weber thesis, most looked to other avenues of research, and one of the most appealing was the Reformation as an urban event. Bernd Moeller staked out the initial ground by arguing that the magistrates of the southern German Imperial cities turned to Protestantism, specifically the theology of Zwingli and Bucer, as a way of maintaining civic community and traditional communal values in the wake of the centralizing tendencies of both the Empire and the Catholic Church. (7) Other scholars like Natalie Davis and Tom Brady focused on the internal social dynamics of urban reform movements, seeking to know what kind of people were attracted to Protestantism and how municipal magistrates reacted to popular pressure for reform from below. (8) All these social historians, and many others like them, opened up new avenues of research and new questions for exploration. There were critics of this social history of the Reformation, to be sure, especially from intellectual historians, who continued to argue that it was the ideas of Protestant theology that were the main attraction, liberating city dwellers from the onerous oppression of Catholic beliefs and practices. (9)

Social historians of the last twenty years have followed in the footsteps of these trailblazers of the 1960s and 1970s. There were still a few who continued to press for a class-based model of the Reformation, especially in East Germany before re-unification. (10) For the most part, however, historians continued to focus on cities and the urban reformations spawned there. While German-speaking Europe continued to be the favorite focus of many scholars, it has become clear over the last twenty years that the Reformation was hardly just a German phenomenon. And although any list is inevitably going to be partial, studies of the Reformation in the cities exploded in this period: Jane Abray on Strasbourg, Philip Benedict on Rouen, Tom Brady on the South German free cities, Susan Brigden on London, Barbara Diefendorf on Paris, Kaspar von Greyerz on Colmar, Ronnie Hsia on Munster, Ben Kaplan on Utrecht, Susan Karant-Nunn on Zwickau, Guido Marnef on Antwerp, Hans-Christoph Rublack on Nordlingen, Joke Spaans on Haarlem, and Gunther Vogler on Nuremberg, to name but a few of the most important. (11) All of these studies tend to revise or move beyond the early paradigm of Moeller. While in many cases regional princes and local magistrates used the Reformation to create the kinds of communal bonds that Moeller defined, in many others this was not the case at all. Indeed, Catholic princes and magistrates were just as likely to use the traditional religion for the same purposes, as Hsia shows in Munster and Diefendorf shows in Paris. Indeed, what emerges from these urban studies is that the local social context and specific political situation mattered far more in determining the confessional outcome in any one city than any universal explanation could possibly provide. Moreover, these studies collectively showed that there were a variety of different reasons why some Europeans were attracted to Protestantism in the first half of the sixteenth century, rendering any monocausal explanation less than satisfactory. But even these social historians were expanding their interests beyond the urban dynamic of the Reformation, as the 1980s and 1990s witnessed growth in many new areas.

One such focus was the beliefs, perceptions, and practices of the laity. While lay piety, or popular religion as it is sometimes called, was not an entirely novel area of study by the 1980s, it did experience renewed interest, as the early studies of Keith Thomas, Jean Delumeau, Natalie Davis, Carlo Ginzburg, and John Bossy provided role models for many social historians. (12) Dissatisfied with the traditional approaches that tended to focus exclusively on the leading reformers, central doctrines, theology, and clerical institutions, they wished to know how the laity actually received and understood the various messages being preached, printed, and disseminated to them by the Protestant and Catholic Reformations. Unwilling to accept that the official tenets of faith were necessarily perceived and enacted by the laity in quite the same ways as the clergy had intended, like many social historians they had to forge new methodologies--they borrowed heavily from social and cultural anthropology--and seek out different sources in order to uncover the answers to the new questions they were asking. The consequence of all this was that this new emphasis on the religion of the laity produced an entirely new narrative of the Reformation. Social historians were no longer willing to draw such sharp boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy as their predecessors had been, as they were more interested in exploring religion as believed and understood by the laity in all its forms. Although they never ignored doctrine and theology altogether, they were certainly more interested in what these ideas meant to the laity, especially as they became embodied in practices and rituals such as the sacraments. The result of this social approach to religious beliefs and practices was a narrative of the Reformation that was anything but a bifurcation between Protestants and Catholics, as most traditional histories of the Reformation had been. Instead of the teleological narrative that privileged a superstitious and backward form of religion being replaced by a more forward-looking and modern religion, that is, instead of the narrative that emerged from the Protestant liberal tradition of the nineteenth century in the Anglophone world, social historians constructed a new narrative of the Reformation that looked at Protestantism and reformed Catholicism as parts of a common attempt to remake the kingdom of Christ on earth, to use a phrase many reformers would have recognized. Although doctrinal differences remained between reformed Protestants and Catholics, social historians focused on the goals they shared rather than exclusively on the doctrines that divided them, doctrines that contemporaries in the sixteenth century were willing to kill and die for, to be sure. This new version of the Reformation, however, broadened our understanding of religion as social practice; at the same time it underscored that the ideas and doctrines on which these practices were based had significant social implications. As Natalie Davis explained it so succinctly, social historians of the Reformation set an agenda to

   examine the range of people's relation with the sacred and the
   supernatural, so as not to fragment those rites, practises,
   symbols, beliefs and institutions which to villagers or
   citydwellers constitute a whole. We consider how all of these may
   provide groups and individuals some sense of the ordering of their
   world, some explanation for baffling events or injustice, and some
   notion of who and where they are. We ask what feelings, moods and
   motives they encourage or try to repress. We look to see what
   means are offered to move people through the stages of their
   lives, to prepare for their future, and to cope with suffering or
   catastrophe. (13)

There is still much to be done in the area of lay piety, not least of all to discern how much of the beliefs and practices of the laity are truly generated outside clerical supervision. One reason why the term lay piety is so unsatisfactory is that much of religious experience among the laity was a product of lay-clerical interaction. Social historians not only need to better delineate the various meanings of anticlericalism, but further investigate why relations between the secular clergy and laity could be close and meaningful in many parts of Europe at the same time as calls for reform among the regular clergy were being escalated.

Bob Scribner and Natalie Davis were among the first to discern that one of the best entries into popular religion was through liturgical and sacramental rituals. Scribner showed how a careful analysis of Catholic religious processions, celebrations of feast days and shrines, the sacraments, the blessing of candies on Candlemas, palms on Palm Sunday, etc., indeed every aspect of the way Christians celebrated the entire liturgical calendar, could yield new insights into Catholic popular religion. (14) This approach has been followed up by various scholars including, among others, Susan Karant-Nunn and David Myers for Germany, Richard Trexler and Edward Muir for Italy, Barbara Diefendorf and Keith Luria for France, William Christian and Sara Nalle for Spain, and Eamon Duffy, David Cressy, and Ronald Hutton for England. (15) And Davis, in a classic article first published in 1973, showed that an examination of the ritualistic violence that French Protestants enacted when they sacked and destroyed Catholic churches, or that French Catholics exacted on Protestants themselves in religious massacres, made clear that this violence was neither random nor spontaneous, but aimed at specific targets and carried out ritualistically in specific ways. Indeed, Davis shows how each group saw the other as polluting their respective sacred spaces and how each used violence in an attempt to purify and restore their communities from the profaning "other." (16)

Other scholars have focused on specific rituals, especially the sacraments, which John Bossy has called "the skeleton of the social body." (17) The most central as well as the most controversial of the sacraments during the Reformation was the Eucharist. The doctrine of transubstantiation separated Catholics from Protestants, while the issue of the real corporal presence of Christ in the elements separated Lutherans from all other Protestants. The Eucharist lay at the heart of the theological dispute over salvation that divided Christendom during the Reformation, and these divisions even forced the otherwise like-minded German Protestant reformers, Luther and Zwingli, to part company at the Colloquy of Marburg. Nevertheless, despite the theological wrangles over the Mass that so divided contemporaries in the sixteenth century, social historians have shown that for Protestants and Catholics alike the Mass, or Lord's Supper as Luther and Calvin preferred to call it, was actually perceived by the laity as a site of peace-keeping and reconciliation of the parish community. Not only did many refuse to attend and partake of the consecrated elements if they were feuding with another member of the parish, they also used the ritual as a symbol that they had resolved their differences and were now ready to rejoin the community their feud had threatened to disrupt. (18) This shows us how much contemporaries considered attending Mass as a thoroughly social occasion. It is impossible to deny that the spiritual efficacy was real for them and that, for Catholics at least, the very act of ingesting Christ's body was an act engendering grace and wholly connected to salvation. But we also know that Mass and the Lord's Supper were just as enfolded with communal solidarity based on Christian charity. It was Calvin, after all, who wrote that one of the principal benefits of partaking of the sacrament "consists in our having a vehement incitement to holy living, and above all to observe charity and brotherly love among us ... and especially that we have to one another such charity and concord as members of the same body ought to have." (19)

Another sacrament that underwent considerable change as a result of both the Protestant and Catholic Reformations was the sacrament of marriage. How did the various reformations affect marriage and married life, relations between husbands and wives, ties between parents and children? That is, did the Reformation produce different family cultures that can be delineated by confessional identity? And finally, did the Reformation have any impact on gender roles both within the family and in the public sphere? Social historians have made great inroads in the last twenty years, and while they have certainly not reached total consensus on all issues, there is a good deal of common ground. For starters, it seems clear that both Protestant and Catholic reformers hoped to better tame the beast of sexuality that had always haunted the sacrament of marriage and had forever tainted the act of procreation with the sin of lust, as St. Augustine spelled out so explicitly a thousand years before in Books 13 and 14 of The City of God. Moreover, because marriage was an economic as well as a socio-sexual union, both confessions also sought to elevate the roles of fathers in different ways to allow for more parental control than the medieval church had done. The practice of recognizing a marriage as valid in the eyes of God as long as both husband and wife exchanged vows of fidelity to each other, regardless of parental consent, economic ability of the husband to support his wife, or even any witnesses to vouch for the exchange of vows, had become too problematic to continue unaltered. The means by which the two faiths attempted to achieve these ends varied considerably, but what has proven controversial is how successful the reforms were and how much practice followed these confessional ideals. There is no question that Protestantism allowed wives whose husbands had abandoned them to remarry much sooner and much more easily than was possible within the Catholic church. (20) In addition, Protestantism allowed women whose husbands committed adultery to divorce them. So, in a variety of ways the Reformation clearly had an impact on marriage as an institution. Nevertheless, social historians have not been able to form a consensus on whether the Reformation as a whole positively benefited women, and clearly the rise of women's history as a sub-field of social history during the last forty years has been a factor in this dispute.

Some historians argue that an analysis of the prescriptive literature on marriage written by the Protestant reformers suggests a positive and more modern view of marriage that allowed women more freedom and more responsibility than under the Catholic church. Moreover, these historians claim that Protestantism elevated marriage and sexuality within it by denigrating the Catholic ideals of celibacy and sexual abstinence. Steven Ozment, who focuses primarily on Lutheran Germany, offers the strongest case for this view. (21) Others, however, like Merry Wiesner, challenge Ozment's view as being overly positive and deny that Luther had any intent to make married life more liberating for women. (22) But even if there is not a total consensus concerning the prescriptive literature of the reformers, what do archival studies based on the actual practice of marriage tell us? Here again, the conclusions are decidedly mixed. Both Merry Wiesner and Lyndal Roper offer well researched analyses based on the archives in a variety of German cities, and they conclude that the Reformation not only did not benefit women in many significant ways, but even led to the deterioration of their economic and legal standing. (23) Others, like Heide Wunder, however, argue that women's economic and legal standing in society did not deteriorate during the Reformation, while Ozment offers evidence from the correspondence of a married couple in Nuremberg that supports his more positive view of Lutheran marriage. (24) What seems clear is that the practice of marriage varied widely from place to place and from one confession to another, a view confirmed by a whole host of new work on marriage, divorce, and family life. The very best of these, such as Jeffrey Watt's study of marriage in Neuchatel and Joel Harrington's study of marriage in Germany, suggest that the reformers clearly tried to reorder marriage in significant ways, but that success or failure depended as much on local factors as on reforming zeal. (25) Simply put, there is still a great deal to be done by social historians in terms of analyzing social rituals and sacraments, and all the recent scholarly attention on marriage has underlined just how much we still don't know about the ways in which the prescriptive ideals of socialized behavior were actually experienced.

Related to the study of marriage is social discipline, another major area that social historians of the Reformation have come to call their own, particularly as it has come to be one of the principal features of what some German historians have called "confessionalization." Originally the idea of Walter Zeeden, Heinz Schilling, and Wolfgang Reinhard, it was an attempt to explain how the various confessional identities in Germany came to be delineated after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Ultimately Schilling and Reinhard tied this process to the church (whether Protestant or Catholic) working hand in hand with the state for the twin purposes of social disciplining and state-building. (26) Confessionalization has led to many insights, opening up many new questions for social historians. Social discipline was obviously stressed by Protestant and Catholic reformers alike, with perhaps Martin Bucer's De Regno Christi being the most explicit example (John Bossy called it "the ur-text of Reformation disciplina"). (27) Moreover, this entire approach has allowed historians of the Reformation to see the similarities and parallels among all the Protestant reformations as well as the Catholic Reformation. The best example of this is Ronnie Hsia's comparison of social discipline in the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic regions of German-speaking central Europe; despite different means, each was attempting to achieve similar ends. (28) The model is not without its critics, however, because of the simplistic and blunt way that social disciplining and state-building are lumped together, reservations that Hsia himself points out. One of the most convincing of the critics is Marc Forster, who demonstrates very nicely that confessional identity was often determined neither by the oppression of the church or the state from above, but by lay support from below. In southwestern Germany, for example, he shows conclusively that the success of reformed Catholicism was not the result of any church or state driven program of confessionalization, but was entirely due to the vitality and growth of traditional Catholic lay piety in the villages. (29) What is most important, however, is not whether the paradigm of confessionalization ultimately stands or falls, but that the entire debate about it has opened up new lines of research, and continuing research promises much for the future. For one thing, the debate has been limited almost entirely to historians of the German Reformation. (30) It is now time to see if confessionalization is a concept with broader applications outside the German experience after the Peace of Augsburg.

Finally, any review of the social history of the Reformation over the last twenty years must include at least a brief discussion of how the Reformation was communicated from clergy to laity. New studies of print, images, and education have opened up new avenues of research and have moved well beyond the traditional assessments of how the printing press revolutionized communication to the laity and allowed Luther to succeed in creating a mass movement where earlier reformers had failed. (31) We now know, for example, that in sixteenth-century France, books tended to reinforce the traditional oral culture of the non-literate rather than transform it into a print culture. And until literacy rates began to rise appreciably, even in the cities print was not as revolutionary a technology as many scholars have previously thought. (32) This is where the study of images and how they have transmitted ideas from clergy to laity have become so important. While Bob Scribner was certainly not the first historian of the Reformation to ask how such novel and complex theological ideas could be explained and disseminated to a largely non-literate audience, his work has transformed the field and inspired others to continue his early efforts. (33) Borrowing ideas about semiotics from social anthropology and ideas about iconography from art history, Scribner focused on the many broadsheets and cheaply printed images that circulated in Reformation Germany and argued persuasively that this was an efficacious weapon used by Luther and his supporters to win over a popular following. While it is true that many of the images he found were very complex and hardly much easier to read than printed texts for the unlettered, his work was a tour de force that inspired others to follow in his footsteps. (34)

Transmission of ideas obviously included education, and one of the principal successes of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations was the revival of the catechism as a means of educating the young about the doctrines of the faith. Luther and Calvin made it a centerpiece of their respective communities in Saxony and in Geneva. And it was by challenging the traditional view that the Lutheran catechism was an unqualified success that Gerald Strauss set off a firestorm of protest among Reformation scholars when he suggested that visitation records in rural Germany revealed that the catechism was not a completely efficacious means of transmitting doctrine. (35) To be sure, most of Strauss's critics were not social historians, and a few were incensed that anyone could suggest that the Lutheran Reformation could have been a failure in any way. Although the jury is still out on what visitation records have to say for other parts of Germany, especially the more urban areas, there is no question that this is a vital area of future research with much still to be determined.

So, where do we go from here? What are the most promising avenues of future research for social historians of the Reformation? As I have tried to point out already, social historians have grasped the Reformation firmly and there is no chance of them letting go. While there is still no shortage of criticism of social approaches to religion generally and to the Reformation in particular, most of this criticism stems from perceptions (incorrect, in my view) that social historians have either undervalued or are just not interested in doctrine, theology, and in short, the immanent. (36) Perhaps the most extreme statement of this view is that of Silvana Seidel Menchi, a historian of sixteenth-century Italy. "One can say that during the last thirty years a secularised historiography, addressed to an audience of agnostics, has tended to shelve the theological-religious interpretation of the Reformation." She even asserts that "social historians of the Reformation dismiss homo religiosus as a fiction." (37) While it is certainly true that we are all guilty from time to time of not explaining ourselves well enough, or at least not making clear that our interest in social factors does not preclude an interest in, much less the importance of, other factors, for the most part the historians I have discussed in this review are not guilty of charges of social reductionism, at [east not to the extent suggested above.

Criticisms apart, however, there appear to me to be several areas where social historians can continue to contribute to our understanding of the Reformation. As I have suggested already, we need to continue to explore the ways that confessional identity was delineated. The most promising avenue seems to me to eschew any exclusively top-down approach and search out the interaction between clergy and laity, between magistrate and citizen. Both confessionalization and popular religion will continue to be fruitful if we can focus more on how contemporaries believed and practiced their religion instead of on the dialectical polarities of high vs. low or learned vs. unlettered. The study of rituals still continues to be fruitful, and more detailed studies of how the sacraments in all the confessions were practiced and understood is a high priority. Finally, there is so much more to know about transmission of ideas. We are only just getting started in creating a history of reading for the Reformation, that is, how people read printed texts. (38) We shall need to do a lot of work here before we can begin to say how important the printing press was to the Reformation. The same could be said of images, and I think the work of art historians will be even more important for us in future in this respect. In the meantime, we also need to do more work on sermons and hymns, because we have hardly exploited all there is to know about how people heard and understood words and music. After all, the sixteenth century was still primarily an oral culture, even in the cities. So, there is still much work for social historians to do. But we have some great models to guide and inspire us and critics to keep us honest and ever on the lookout for better ways to explain the social history of the Reformation. Historians of the Reformation have finally abandoned the confessional battles of the past; now let us try to resolve the methodological and ideological confrontations of the present,

Department of History and Art History

Fairfax, VA 22030-4444

ENDNOTES

(1.) Robert W. Scribner, "Is There a Social History of the Reformation?" Social History 4 (1976): 483-505.

(2.) Obvious exceptions were some of the students of Harold Grimm. See, for example, the collection of essays, organized as a Festschrift for Grimm, by Lawrence E Buck and Jonathan W. Zophy, eds., The Social History of the Reformation (Columbus, 1972).

(3.) See the survey in 1982, for example, Steven Ozment, ed., Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research (St. Louis, 1982). See not only the chapter on "Social History" by Thomas A. Brady, but also the chapters on "The German Peasants' War" by Robert W. Scribner, "Witchcraft, Magic and the Occult" by H. C. Erik Midelfort, "From Popular Religion to Religious Cultures" by Natalie Zemon Davis, and "Society and the Sexes" by Joyce Irwin.

(4.) Brady, "Social History," in Ozment, ed., Reformation Europe, 161-2.

(5.) Ibid., 161-181.

(6.) Peter Blickle, Die Reformation yon 1525 (Munich, 1975), translated into English as The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants Revolution from a New Perspective, trans. H.C. Erik Midelfort and Thomas A. Brady (Baltimore, 1981). Blickle followed this up with his Gemeindereformation: Die Menschen des 16. Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Hell (Munich, 1985), translated into English as The Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, trans. Thomas Dunlap (London, 1992).

(7.) Bernd Moeller, Reichstadt und Reformation (Gutersloh, 1962), translated into English as Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards (Philadelphia, 1972).

(8.) Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), especially chaps. 1 and 3 on Lyon; and Thomas A. Brady, Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation at Strasbourg, 1520-1555 (Leiden, 1978).

(9.) Perhaps the most vocal was Steven E. Ozment, Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, 1975), especially pp. 1-14.

(10.) One non-German who continued to focus on class was Henry Heller, The Conquest of Poverty: The Calvinist Revolt in Sixteenth-Century France (Leiden, 1986) and the same author's Iron and Blood: Civil Wars in Sixteenth-Century France (Montreal, 1991).

(11.) Lorna Jane Abray, The People's Reformation: Magistrates, Clergy, and Commons in Strasbourg, 1500-1598 (Ithaca, 1985); Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge 1981); Thomas A. Brady, Turning Swiss: Cities and Empire, 1450-1550 (Cambridge, 1985); Susan Brigden, London and the Reformat on (Oxford, 1989); Barbara B. Diefendoff, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris (New York 1991) Kaspar yon Greyerz, The Late City Reformation in Germany: The Case of Calmar, 1522-1628 (Wiesbaden, 1980); R. Po-China Hsia, Society and Religion in Munster, 1535-1618 (New Haven, 1984); Benjamin J. Kaplan, Calvinists and Libertines: Confession and Community in Utrecht, 1578-1620 (Oxford, 1995); Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Zwickau in Transition, 1500-1547: The Reformation as an Agent of Change (Columbus, 1987); Guido Marnef, Antwerp in the Age of Reformation: Underground Protestantism in a Commercial Metropolis trans, J.C. Grayson (Baltimore, 1996); Hans-Christoph Rublack, Eine burgerliche Reformation: Nordlingen Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte (Gutersloh, 1982); Joke Spaans, Haarlem na de Reformatie: Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven, 1577-1620 (The Hague, 1989); and Gunther Vogler, Nurnberg 1524-25: Studien zur Geschichte der reformatorischen und sozialen Bewegung in der Reichstadt (East Berlin, 1982).

(12.) Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth" and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971); Jean Delumeau, Le Catholisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1971), translated into English as Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (Philadelphia, 1977) and the same author's La peur en Occident (XIVe-XVIIIe siecles): Une cite assiege (Paris, 1978); Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975) as well as the same author's "Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion," in Charles Trinkaus and Heiko A. Oberman, eds., The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (Leiden, 1974), 307-336; Carlo Ginzburg, Il formaggio e i vermi: Il cosmo di un mugnaio del '500 (Milan, 1976), translated into English as The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller, trans. J. and A. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980); and John Bossy, "The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past & Present 47 (1970): 51-70 as well as the same author's The English Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (London, 1976) and Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1985).

(13.) Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes," 312.

(14.) Robert W. Scribner, "Ritual and Popular Religion in Catholic Germany at the Time of the Reformation," Journal of Ecclesiastical History 35 (1984): 47-77 and also his Ritual and Reformation in his collection of essays, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987), 103-122.

(15.) Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London, 1997) W. David Myers, Poor Sinning Folk: Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Ithaca, 1996); Richard Trexler, Publ c Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980); Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981) and the same author's Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997); Diefendoff, Beneath the Cross; Keith P. Luria, Territories of Grace: Cultural Change in the Seventeenth-Century Diocese of Grenoble (Berkeley, 1991); William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981); Sara Nalle, God in La Mancha: Religious Reform and the People of Cuenca, 1500-1650 (Baltimore, 1992); Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, 1400-1580 (New Haven, 1992); David Cressy Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Tudor and Stuart England (London, 1989) and the same author s Birth, Marriage, and Death Ritual, Religion, and the Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1997); and Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1994).

(16.) Natalie Z. Davis, "The Rites of Violence: Religious Riot in Sixteenth-Century France," Past & Present 59 (1973): 51-91, reprinted in her Society and Culture in Early Modern France, 152-187. Other significant studies of religious violence and iconoclasm include Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge, 1995); and Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: La violence au temps des troubles de religion, vers 1525-vers 1610, 2 vols. (Seyssel, 1990).

(17.) Bossy, Christianity in the West, 115.

(18.) On the Catholic side, see John Bossy, "The Mass as a Social Institution," 1200-1700, Past & Present 100 (1983): 29451 and also his Christianity in the West, 66-70. And for the Protestant side, see David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), 37-60. For other work on the social history of the Eucharist, see Virginia Reinburg, "Liturgy and the Laity in Late Medieval and Reformation France," Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 526-47 and Mack E Holt, "Wine, Community and Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Burgundy," Past & Present 138 (1993), 58-93.

(19.) John Calvin, "Short Treatise on the Holy Supper of our Lord and Only Saviour Jesus Christ," in J. K. S. Reid, ed., Calvin: Theological Treatises (Philadelphia, 1954), 149.

(20.) The best example here is Natalie Z. Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

(21.) Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1983).

(22.) Merry E. Wiesner, "Luther and Women: The Death of Two Marys," in J. Obelkevich, L. Roper, and R. Samuel, eds., Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion, Politics, and Patriarchy (London, 1987), 295-308

(23.) Merry E. Wiesner, Working Women in Renaissance Germany (New Brunswick, 1986) as well as the same author's Christianity and Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (London, 2000); and Lyndal Roper, Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989).

(24.) Heide Wunder, Er ist die Sonn, sie ist der Mond: Frauen in der fruchen Neuzeit (Munich, 1992), translated into English as He is the Sun, She is the Moon: Women in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1998); and Steven Ozment, Magdelena and Balthasar: An Intimate Portrait of Life in Sixteenth-Century Europe Revealed in the Letters of a Nuremberg Husband and Wife (New York, 1986).

(25.) Jeffrey R. Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Newchatel, 1550-1800 (Ithaca, 1992); and Joel E Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge, 1995). Also see Thomas Max Safely, Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest: A Comparative Study, 1550-1600 (Kirksville, MO, 1984); Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex, and Marriage in England, 1570-1640 (Cambridge, 1987); and Robert M. Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce in Calvin's Geneva (Cambridge, Mass., 1995).

(26.) See, among many other writings, Waiter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskampfe (Munich, 1965); Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: Eine Fallstudie uber dos Verheilmis on religiosem und sozialem Wandel in der Fruhneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gutersloh, 1981); and Wolfgang Reinhard, "Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters," Archiv fur Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 226-252. The best statement of the theory of confessionalization in English is probably Heinz Schilling, "Confessional Europe," in T. A. Brady, H A. Oberman and J. D. Tracy, eds, Handbook of European History, 1400-1600, 2 vols. (Leiden, 19951, II, 641-81. A recent overview of the entire debate in English is Joel F. Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, "Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555-1870," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77-101.

(27.) Bossy, Christianity in the West, 180.

(28.) R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550-1750 (London, 1989).

(29.) Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560-1220 (Ithaca, 1992), and the same author's Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550-1750 (Cambridge, 2001).

(30.) One exception is Philip Benedict, The Faith and Fortunes of France's Huguenots, 1559-1685 (London, 2001).

(31.) A good statement of this traditional view is Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 1979).

(32.) Natalie Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France, especially pp. 189-267.

(33.) Robert W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, 1981). A revised paperback edition with a new introduction and much larger and better reproduced images was published by Oxford University Press in 1994.

(34.) See, for example, Lee Palmer Wandel, Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli's Zurich (Cambridge, 1990).

(35.) Gerald Strauss, "Success and Failure in the German Reformation," Past & Present 67 (1975): 30-63, and the same author's Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978).

(36.) This is the criticism of Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1999).

(37.) Silvana Seidel Menchi, "Italy," in B. Scribner, R. Porter, and M. Teich, eds., The Reformation in National Context (Cambridge, 1994), 183.

(38.) For some ideas how we might go about this, see Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, "How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy," Past & Present 129 (1990): 30-78; and Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making (Chicago, 1998).

By Mack P. Holt

George Mason University