The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations, ed. Ulinka Rublack

Abstract

Editor Ulinka Rublack begins this book with a programmatic Introduction which lays out a new paradigm for Reformation studies. Historians of the Reformation typically treat it as one of the defining events in European and world history, introducing a new force—Protestantism—that would have momentous consequences for the modern era. While hardly minimising the historical significance of the (decidedly plural) Protestant Reformations, Rublack de-centres them in any sweeping historical narrative of European or world history by arguing that ‘a history of the Protestant Reformations is not about “one tradition” and legacy and not even without qualifications about a dominating tradition constructed through static core beliefs, but permanent processes of adaptation, development, consolidation, and the questioning of religious practices and ideas which we actively discover and interpret from our particular position in the present’ (p. 5). These processes are ‘permanent’ and ongoing, neither beginning nor ending in the sixteenth century. Rublack thus has doubts about both triumphant and critical ‘linear grand narratives’ featuring the Reformations and writes that historians would ‘do well to approach Protestant beliefs since the Reformation in terms of their own time’ (p. 4).