Preface

Abstract

Preface Exactly what significance should be attached to the 500th anniversary of Martin Luther’s 1517 protest? Luther could not foresee that his actions and those of his opponents would trigger a series of regional reform movements, culminating in the Catholic Reformation, that had multiple consequences both for western Europe and for the shaping of global Christianity. The short answer must be that historians will debate the question till kingdom come: the file, so to speak, will never be closed. What follows in this special issue of Studies comprises the contributions of distinguished Irish and British historians at the recent ‘Reformation 500’ conference held in Christ Church Cathedral, Dublin, and St Patrick’s campus of Dublin City University, on 20–21 October 2017. This conference was jointly organised by the Church of Ireland Historical Society and the Catholic Historical Society of Ireland to mark the anniversary of the onset of the European reformations. Both societies, it need scarcely be said, aspire to achieve high academic standards as the means of engaging with the complex religious history of Ireland in a European context. The measure of these essays will be the extent to which they reflect such standards. In disentangling the many issues raised by the European reformations, certain things need to be borne in mind. To begin with, the vertiginous political and dynastic complexity of early modern Europe provided the immediate context of these reforming movements. Valois-Habsburg rivalries, particularly in Italy, impacted on papal politics, complicating and frustrating repeated attempts to convene a General Council of the Church to address reform. In this situation the Medici Pope, Clement VII, became a prisoner of a Hapsburg army in 1527 in the Castel Sant’Angelo. The king of France could make and unmake alliances alternately with the Turks and the Protestant Schmalkaldic League. To such an unstable mix could be added the growing Turkish threat in the western Mediterranean and in central Europe, the complexities of the Habsburg state itself, the rivalries of the Italian cities, not to mention the rivalries within the Roman nobility. Such a political environment, as well as frustrating Catholic reform, enabled the Protestant reformations to establish themselves in some German states and cities, while simultaneously imposing territorial limits on their extension. It needs to be borne in mind that Protestant reformers did not set out with Studies • volume 106 • number 424 Preface: Winter 2017/18 401 the intention of dividing the Church. They expected that reform would eventually embrace the entire Church. What is our past was once their future, the outcome of which was no clearer to them then than ours is to us now. Indeed, the concept of ‘the Reformation’ was only first applied to the history of the Church by Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff at the end of the seventeenth century, and even then he limited its application to the Lutheran movement. The fact that our perceptions of what transpired in the past are often filtered through our unconscious modern biases raises a host of hermeneutical issues. All sorts of notions linking the Protestant Reformation(s) to the rise of capitalism, science, freedom of conscience, the emergence of nation states, have little basis in fact. Such ideas tell us more about historians and their times than about history. One way of gauging such influences is the study of reception history of the sort that Dr Scott Dixon deals with in the first essay in these pages, which was the opening address of the conference. Among the misperceptions of the Reformation period is the idea that the late medieval Church was incorrigibly corrupt. Historians today have a more nuanced understanding of a Church that, for all its faults – and this is a common theme across the entire spectrum of medieval governance – was not lacking in vitality, intellectual and spiritual vigour, and popular engagement. The need for reform of some of its structures was widely acknowledged. Reforming our political institutions after the financial collapse in 2008 has not been achieved, in spite of the fact that we know that failure to do so risks condemning ourselves to repeated disasters. We are not so different from those who went before us. We are happily past the...