The Politics of the Reformation in Germany: Jacob Storm (1489-1553) of Strasbourg.
This book is a skillful condensation of the author's Protestant Politics: Jacob Sturm (1489-1553) and the Protestant Reformation, published in 1995. With students approaching the Reformation for the first time in mind, Brady has shifted the focus of the present study from Sturm, who after 1524 was a prominent magistrate and political jack-of-all-trades in Strasbourg, to a Germany where Sturm's career takes on an emblematic role. The change dictated that the author add an introductory chapter on the empire that outlines the complexities of that polity, which he has done in an effective and accessible manner. Unlike the vast general bibliography of the earlier volume, the "Recommendations for Further Reading' in this one is for those who must work in English alone. A glossary to ease the novice through the often untranslatable terminology of institutional life in sixteenth-century Germany is sometimes redundant, but generally helpful. Most happily, within the limits of any academic product, the book is an awfully good read. The cast of characters sometimes gets a bit out of hand, but Brady is on speaking terms with most of them. Passion and excitement always has informed this historian's work, the current example included. He also has a sure feel for the apt contemporary citation, weaving these into his text so seamlessly that the flow of his story and argument is rarely interrupted. A reader will come away from the book with a keen appreciation of the language which shaped both the political and religious discourse of early modern Germany.Brady has long been among those who stress particularism as the driving force of sixteenth-century German politics. Taking him on his own terms, his conceit that Sturm's biography tells a far larger story about the empire and its confessional crisis as a whole has a natural logic. It is also arguable. Almost all Germans, and certainly the politically active ones, had a bit of the official Jacob Sturm in them. Sturm approached his many civic and diplomatic duties with the interest of Strasbourg uppermost in his mind; his counterparts throughout Germany did the same for their own territories and municipalities. Sturm both witnessed and participated in activities connected with several epochal moments of the German Protestant Reformation such as the Peasants' War of 1525, the 1530 Diet of Augsburg, and the formation of the Schmalkaldic League. His very conversations were central to these and many other significant events. Like many of his contemporaries, Sturm was genuinely concerned about establishment of a true faith, yet worldly enough to advance its cause in secular settings. He did not please everyone, including some citizens of Strasbourg, but that too was a fate that befell many among Germany's movers and shakers of the day. Indeed, to underscore his general point, Brady might have listed a few.
While the general framework of Brady's argument is workable and indeed productive, one can always question individual judgments. He has long had a sympathetic interest in the Peasants' War of 1525 and tries to assign it a crucial role in the religious thinking of Sturm and others. On page 91, however, he is reduced to a "likely" when evaluating its impact on his hero and that five pages after declaring the Reformation to have been a crisis of thirty years duration. Certainly the latter upheaval did enough to turn sixteenth-century Germany "topsy-turvy," as Brady says, without adding more debatable ones. And he may be overstating the entrenchment of the various confessions at the mid-point of the century. The religious peace of Augsburg of 1555 could be pulled off in part because its authors believed that there was still serious hope for the reunification of Christendom. But these are really no more than further questions to be put to a fine piece of work.
PAULA SUTTER FICHTNER Brooklyn College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
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| Author: | Fichtner, Paula Sutter |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Renaissance Quarterly |
| Article Type: | Book Review |
| Date: | Mar 22, 1998 |
| Words: | 640 |
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