R. W. Scribner, C. Scott Dixon. The German Reformation. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. xiii + 121 pp. $11.99 (paper), ISBN 978-0-333-66528-2.

Reviewed by Joel F. Harrington (Department of History, Vanderbilt University)
Published on H-German (October, 2005)

Scott Dixon's updating of his late Doktorvater Bob Scribner's minor classic of 1986 is a fitting tribute to the scholar who more than any other during the past few decades helped to transform our understanding of the German Reformation. As a concise overview of the latest scholarship, or the "state of the debate," this slim volume is an unmitigated success. It will surely find appreciative readers among the students and teachers for whom the Studies in European History series is intended. Because of the nature of Dixon's revision, however--a twenty-three page supplementary chapter to Scribner's original text of sixty-three pages--the book also serves as a historical (and historiographical) document in itself, providing a succinct assessment of the ambitious research agenda laid out by Scribner sixteen years earlier.

In his 1986 introduction, Bob Scribner wrote of "a radical change in our understanding of the Reformation and its importance for early modern European history" (p. ix). The change, hardly unique to Reformation scholarship, emanated largely from the rise of social history during the 1960s and 1970s and its subsequent reconceptualization of many pivotal historical "events." Until then, most Reformation scholarship still focused on Luther and other reformers, often from a confessional perspective. By the time of Scribner's writing, however, the Reformation could no longer be viewed in isolation as a "purely" religious event, but was instead contextualized in social and cultural terms. Scholarly investigation now analyzed not only theological arguments but also the role of various media conveying and often reshaping that theology for diverse audiences, an aspect for which Scribner's own For the Sake of Simple Folk (1981) achieved just acclaim. In a number of local studies, historians weighed the significance of such factors as social status, occupational group, and gender in both reform agendas and their intended audiences. Politics had long been at the heart of most Reformation scholarship but now local politics--urban, guild, rural commune--received intense scrutiny for indications on the process of religious reform.

Acknowledging what Scribner called "the social location of the Reformation" inevitably led to some significant shifts in historical generalization. Most fundamentally, it was no longer acceptable to speak of "the" Reformation but rather several Reformations, each with distinctive and sometimes conflicting inspirations, goals, and methods. The confessionalization approach to the period, with its emphasis on parallel Protestant and Catholic social and political developments, is itself a product of this diversification process. Scribner was especially alert to the "savage divisions within [sixteenth-century] Lutheranism" (p. 53), as well as the transformation of several early evangelical messages into a genuinely institutionalized "Protestantism" by 1600. Socialization of the Reformation also led to various historical studies of the social impact of Protestant and Catholic reforms. The attempted transformation of religious liturgy and practices, sexual morality, marriage, education, and a variety of other targets were examined and found to be generally resistant to religious efforts at reform, at least in the short-term. Here too, Scribner's own research made several key contributions. In 1986 "popular religion," a topic that especially thrived during the 1970s and 1980s, was arguably just reaching its apogee and continues to inspire debate--albeit in altered terms--today. Confessionalization, meanwhile, had not yet reached it stride, perhaps accounting for Scribner's cautious understatement that "there are signs that [the process] was not as rigid in practice as it attempted in theory" (p. 63).

Scribner was quite committed to the fluid nature of Reformation scholarship and throughout his text reminds us that the recent findings and theories he enthusiastically describes are still provisional, with larger implications only sketched out at best. As a key leader of the revolutionary vanguard, he clearly had a stake in the academic tumult he had helped foment but his treatment of diverse approaches was always balanced and consistently constructive. His vision of future directions for Reformation research was also uncannily prescient. This impression is of course aided by Scott Dixon's (or his editor's) decision to divide the supplemental section into the same seven sections as Scribner's original work, sixteen years earlier. Still, Scribner had a rare grasp of the broad range of Reformation and early modern German scholarship and thus was able to detect significant trends and convergences well before the rest of us.

In 2002, Dixon wrote, historians of the German Reformation now universally recognized the "complex historical process" (p. 69) described by Scribner, spilling over into the seventeenth and even eighteenth centuries. While Martin Luther and other religious leaders continued to attract scholarly attention, exploration of various social contexts of reform, also part of Scribner's research agenda, now dominated the literature. Many of Scribner's other emphases--the stress on continuity rather than rupture, the plurality of Reformations, the significance of political context (especially urban vs. rural) in both goals and means, the diverse impact of these reforms on social institutions such as marriage and the household--have all received great attention during the past twenty years. Countless articles and monographs, including Dixon's own fine study of rural Franconia, have explored the long- and short-term impact of religious reform in various localities, reshaping in turn the larger picture of that "complex historical process."

Again, the general shift to social and cultural history in Reformation historiography reflects a discipline-wide phenomenon, evident in just about every field and sub-field of history since the 1980s. The ability to see familiar things quite differently, sometimes with startling consequences, remains, however, a rare gift among historians. Because of Bob Scribner's creative imagination, catholicity of interest, and unsurpassed skill with primary sources, our understanding of the German Reformation was fundamentally transformed and immeasurably enriched.

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Citation: Joel F. Harrington. Review of Scribner, R. W.; Dixon, C. Scott, The German Reformation. H-German, H-Net Reviews. October, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11177

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