ABSTRACT
The emergence of rivalling confessions in the sixteenth century has long been recognized as a key process in European history – for many scholars in fact it marks the dawn of a new era (‘Introduction’ in Part I). In a remarkably short period of time, theological arguments spilled over into the socio-political sphere and gripped large parts of the population, first within the Holy Roman Empire, but soon much further afield. The Eastern Orthodox Church had split from Rome in the High Middle Ages, but for Central and Western Europe the Reformation brought the first experience of formal religious division, leading to centuries of acrimonious conflict, sometimes with repercussions to the present day. There had been reform initiatives and unorthodox movements before (‘Church and people at the close of the Middle Ages’ in Part III), but they lacked the political backing, mass support and dissemination technology which – together with the spiritual appeal of radically new doctrines – gave the evangelical message such enormous power. What resulted from its stress on individual faith and adherence to the Scriptures was not a ‘purified’ universal Church (as Martin Luther had originally hoped), but two main branches of Protestantism – Lutheran and Reformed – and a host of dissenting groupings, while Catholicism survived and in turn embarked on a major regeneration programme. All across the confessional spectrum, furthermore, clergymen came to realize that it was relatively easy to alter ecclesiastical structures, but much more difficult to implant new beliefs in people’s souls. More and more Reformation historians thus adopt a long-term perspective, with some detecting real grass-roots change only from the late seventeenth century. To mark the Luther quincentenary – 500 years since his Ninety-five Theses – a flurry of new biographies and survey works appeared in or around 2017, testifying to the continued significance of the transformations. The following three chapters examine the major confessional contexts in turn. Their emphasis lies on Reformation change in a narrower sense, with the impact on gender relations, unorthodox practices and international politics addressed elsewhere in this volume (See ‘Gender and family’ in Part II, ‘Witchcraft and magic’ in Part V and ‘Dynastic politics, religious conflict and reason of state c. 1500–1650’ in Part VI).
