The Politics Of History In The Swiss Reformation

Abstract

This chapter analyzes a previously much underestimated event of Reformation history in the Swiss Confederacy, and the uses to which historiography was put during and following this so-called Brunigzug by the governments of the communes involved. The analysis of the Brunigzug adds a subchapter to the many important results of a historian’s work that did a lot for breaking up the nation-centered view of Swiss and southern German politics of the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The chapter provides an overview of the events of late fall 1528 and looks at the way history was used by the two opposing parties during that standoff and the legal debate that followed. It then proceeds to the uses of historiography in the years after the Second Landfrieden of 1531. The chapter points out how the particularities of the historiographical genre affected the possible functions chronicles could assume in a political discourse. Keywords: Brunigzug; historiography; political discourse; Reformation history; southern German politics; Swiss Confederacy