Download PDF | The Age of Reform, 1250-1550_ An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Europe, Yale University Press 1980.
472 Pages
Preface
Scholarship on Reformation Europe has entered a new period of experimentation in both method and subject matter, and coming decades may witness a transformation of the field. In recent years urban social history, witchcraft and witch-hunts, prosopography, and popular culture have become new areas of study in their own right. So varied is Reformation historiography becoming that future generations ofscholars and students may find themselves able to glimpse the whole only through highly specialized parts. The present book is an interpretation of the intellectual and religious history of the period. It too is a partial perspective on the whole, but, I believe, the most telling one if we search the period for the issues that made it historically unique, generated institutional Lnange, and have most influenced subsequent generations. My presentation follows a traditional format, from which I have, however, departed by devoting a large portion ofthe book to the Middle Ages, a point of view I hope the reader will find illuminating.
This effort to view the Reformation from the perspective of the Middle Ages reflects the conviction that it was both a culmination and a transcendence of medieval intellectual and religious history. The book has evolved from lectures to Yale students between 1968 and 1978. It is fitting that I publish it at this time, when I depart Yale for another university and turn to new historical interests. Since my own student days I have been fascinated by the interplay of ideas and their extraordinary social force, especially in the Age of Reformation.
Throughout the book I have been concerned to make complex patterns of thought intelligible and show how closely intertwined with reality seemingly abstract ideas and beliefs in fact were. I have been particularly concerned to convey the important role individuals played in the formation of the laws and institutions of sixteenth-century society. I have also wanted to make the people and movements here treated memorable to the reader; the modern Western world, for good or ill, remains in ways both direct and indirect very much under their influence. Like all events in organized human society, the Reformation was embedded in the social reality of people's lives. Scholars who are today delineating the social structures and conflicts that made the sixteenth century susceptible to religious and other ideological change are bound to provide much data for speculation on the relationship between class, wealth, occupation, and religious choice. The basic religious options themselves, however, were not the simple result of collective modes of thought and action. Communities elected to turn Protestant, remain Catholic, strike compromises, or ignore both, but they did not create the basic alternatives.
The religious beliefs and practices that reshaped sixteenth-century towns and territories were the work of generations of intellectuals and reformers, trained theologians and educated laymen, who drew on ancient traditions and competed for the loyalty of a laity acutely sensitive to the societal consequences ofreligious issues. The present study concentrates especially on the evolution of these options and the individuals and movements who shaped them most decisively. Portions of the work have been previously published. The section "Luther and Scholasticism" in chapter 6 is a shortened version of "Luther and the Later Middle Ages: The Formation of Reformation Thought," in Transition and Revolution: Problems and Issues of European Renaissance and Reformation History, edited by Robert M. Kingdon (Minneapolis: Burgess Publishing Co., 1974), pp. 109-29.
The sections "Protestant Reformers: Biblical Humanists or New Scholastics?" and "Protestantism and Humanist Educational Reforms" in chapter 8 are condensed from "HumanisII1, Scholasticism, and the Intellectual Origins of the Reformation," in Continuity and Discontinuity in Church History: Essays Presented to George Huntston Williams on the Occasion ofHis 65th Birthday, edited by F. Forrester Church and Timothy George (Leiden: E.J · Brill, 1979), pp. 133-49. And chapter 12 revises an essay of the same title that appeared in Concilium 8 (1972):39-56. I am grateful to the editors and publishers for permission to reproduce this material.
The John Simon Guggenheim Foundation assisted the work by providing a fellowship for research and writing in 1978, and the A. Whitney Griswold Fund of Yale University paid the services of a typist. I received helpful criticism and/or advice from Abigail Freedman, Frank M. Turner, Michael Stoff, Walter Cahn, and especially Andrea Ozment, whose patience with the work was very great. I also owe a special debt of gratitude to Edward Tripp, without whose enterprise the book would have been a far lesser undertaking. S. O. Timothy Dwight College yale University June I979
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