When historians write on others’ reports of the past rather than on the past itself, historical interpretations immediately become documents of their own circumstances and time, with one eye on the event, the other on the circumstances of the author from whom the interpretation sprang. This collection of fourteen essays related to historical reporting on and usage of sixteenth-century events labeled the German Reformation, specifically the movement led by Martin Luther and his Wittenberg circle, provides stimulating, provocative assessments of historical reports and analysis of this movement, placing its earlier interpreters in context and revealing the perspectives and biases of twenty-first-century interpretations of these interpreters. Carina Johnson’s helpful orientation to the volume reviews several modern theories regarding the professional construal of biographical and historical writing, revealing that these theories reflect the biases of our age as much as the objects of their theorizing did of theirs.
A review can only present a few essays. Merry Wiesner-Hanks provides a fascinating, most useful overview of attempts to recognize women who played vital roles in the reformations of various parts of Western Christendom in the confessional histories of the eighteenth century, the amateur histories of the later nineteenth century, and the very slow progress of serious historical assessment of women that has taken place in the closing decades of the twentieth and opening decades of the twenty-first centuries. She reflects on the methods and contributions which she herself has made in the company of a group, largely of women scholars, in analyzing understandings of gender, marriage, and related topics as they have worked from the perspective of contemporary Western society.
Ralf-Peter Fuchs and Richard Schaefer provide two studies relating to nineteenth-century Roman Catholicism in the writing of Reformation history: Fuchs on how continuing Roman Catholic presence in the county of Mark was suppressed in several Protestant renderings of its religious history; Schaefer on Roman Catholic theologians’ interpretation of Luther’s impact on Western culture. They criticized his views of reason for leading to the ruination of thought and society in Protestant lands. Interesting is how often Luther’s own writings came much closer to their own insights into the nature of Christianity than did their caricature of his thought, fostered by his Protestant interpreters.
Dean Phillip Bell sensitively evaluates reactions of both the Jewish community and the Lutheran majority in Frankfurt am Main to the great fire of 1711, which destroyed the Jewish ghetto of the city. Jews and Christians alike regarded the fire as God’s judgment and a call to repentance; in addition to the majority’s unsurprisingly negative interpretation of the fire (theologically as judgment, practically as caused by Jewish living habits), Bell reports that Christians opened their homes to Jewish families and that the city administration (with some fits and starts) supported the reconstruction of the ghetto.
Robert Christman traces the reactions to and elucidations of the martyrdom of Heinrich Voes and Johann van den Esschen in 1523 by eyewitnesses (Roman Catholic and Evangelical), sixteenth-century martyrologists, and contemporary historians, reflecting how each group pursued specific goals based on its own concerns in putting reports and interpretations of these deaths to use. In his own inimitable way, Thomas Brady offers readers a concluding broad overview of the tensions between concerns for German national unity and the well-established religious plurality of German-speaking lands from the eighteenth century to the present. While one may question whether the jubilee literature produced in connection with the 2017 anniversaries is truly all that “scholarly in character” (326), his insights and perspectives on the use of the history for political and social purposes by various elements of the German population should stimulate and guide further discussion.
This volume brings together a wide spectrum of issues connected with the historiography of the Reformation from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries and will stimulate productive thinking and exchange, aiding the current generation of students of the period in exploring the documents from the past and forming new judgments and insights.
