Book Review: The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland by Steven E. Ozment

In his Introduction, Ozment explains that this book weds two methods of examining the Reformation: first, from the perspective of its intellectual history (the “medieval perspective”), and, second, by examining its social history and development of modern institutions (the “urban perspective”) (1). Regarding the medieval perspective, he identifies three scholarly schools: One tends to “make Reformation studies a science of pinpointing the breakdown of genuine Catholic teaching in late medieval humanism, Ockhamism, and popular piety” (3). Understandably, these are predominantly Roman Catholic historians. The second school “has opposed the image of harvest to the description of the late Middle Ages as a decline or a ‘waning’ . . . [calling the fourteenth century] the most fertile intellectual period of the late Middle Ages, a time when . . . new ‘historicocritical’ and ‘logicocritical’ attitudes confronted the contradictions and question-begging of the great system builders of the thirteenth century” (4). The last school “takes the novel tack of trying to persuade Catholics that Luther and Thomas Aquinas may have been saying the same thing in different ways” (5).

Regarding urban perspectives, they are more difficult to summarize, but here are a some ideas: governmental “regimes in which power is concentrated in the hands of a few tend, so long as they can, to restrict and even close altogether the avenues of religious and most other social change (centralist regimes remain Catholic); in contrast, regimes which are open to a diversity of self-interests and subject to regular citizen review are more susceptible to a variety of new ideas (decentralized regimes become Protestant)” (10). Another is that “Protestant dogma [particularly regarding the doctrine of man, namely, that men were fallen] was seen to confirm political experience and to sanction desired tough measures of social control” (11). Lastly, there is the idea “that Calvinist provision for congregational participation and vernacular liturgy helped to satisfy their ‘appetite for belonging to and participating in a meaningful collectivity’ at a time when they were bitterly alienated from their masters” (12).

Different views regarding late medieval lay religious life have been given. Some have held an optimistic view, arguing that it was strong and fertile (15-16). How inviting, it could be asked, was the church of that age for sincerely penitent sinners? Not very. The laity generally involved themselves in those religious activities related to the great turning points in their lives, “baptism, the last rites, a church funeral, and burial in holy grounds, rituals, it may be noted, which are the least burdensome forms of religious participation” (18), along with festivals such as Easter. This could only keep the religious indifferent content. For laity wanting religious experience, all that existed was penance and the Eucharist—the former being tediously painful and largely avoided, the latter not widely made available.

How did the reformers appeal to the cities? “A striking difference between late medieval and Reformation piety, which may go far toward explaining the latter’s appeal, is that, whereas the late medieval church measured lay by clerical life, the Reformation went a long way toward subjecting clerical to lay values” (21-22). Thus the Protestant “priesthood of all believers” sanctified the laity and secularized the clergy (84). “People did not then, as they do not now, readily respond to great distant events that left their daily lives untouched; they reacted to what was felt immediately. And where people most felt the originality and impact of the Reformation was in the psychological and social consequences of its revolutionary religious practices and institutions, which made lasting, tangible changes in the way they conceived and lived their lives locally from day to day” (108).

The civil authorities played an important role in the Reformation. In the imperial cities, “princes, magistrates, and city councils, which were finally to gain so much in power and prestige from the Reformation, were invariably the last and least eager to embrace it” (123). “The first Protestant groups did not succeed by violent political revolt but by winning established political support. Luther spoke for every major reformer and most Protestant congregations when he praised the politically nonrevolutionary character of the Reformation as a providential sign of its truthfulness” (124). Three distinct influential groups can be distinguished in the reform: “Preachers and laymen learned in Scripture provided the initial stimulus; ideologically and socially mobile burghers, primarily from the (larger) lower and middle strata, created a driving wedge of popular support; and government consolidated and moderated the new institutional changes. Depending upon the point at which one examines the process, it is possible to identify the Reformation as a preacher’s, a people’s, or a magistrate’s reform” (131). “Religious truth was determined by Protestant ministers in dialogue with their magistrates: the ministers interpreted Scripture, and the magistrates sat in judgment on their interpretations. That was the procedure by which the Reformation won its official way” (146). And so we see how reformation was accomplished in the cities, not by violent overthrow, but by more painstakingly gradual and peaceful routes.