Nearly 500 years and still Counting: The Reformation in Recent Scholarship and Debates

Abstract

The sixteenth-century Reformation remains important to historians and theologians. Over the past 15 years new and revised accounts have appeared, both textbooks and more speculative pieces. Digitization of key texts is impacting the discipline. The ‘cultural turn’ has opened up Reformation history beyond ideas, politics and economics to include gender, the emotions, architecture and the arts (including music). It has identified psychological needs that the reformers had to address. Literary scholars have joined in Reformation studies. The vitality of the pre-Reformation church is now generally recognized; the question of how far the Reformation adumbrated ‘modernity’ remains controversial. New fronts in intellectual history are opening up in historiography, and biblical scholarship and exegesis.