ABSTRACT
In narrative histories and textbooks of the German Reformation, as well as in those of the more broadly conceived European "Reformation Era," German Catholicism remains the ugly stepchild hidden beneath the stairs that no one wants to discuss—at least in the phases of its infancy and adolescence, before it grew up and flourished as the ecclesia militans of the counterreformation Church during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. When learned Catholic and Protestant lexica that treated church history began to appear around 1850, their terminological preferences betrayed historical and confessional ones. Hence when referring to what we now call the sixteenth-century "reformations," the Catholic Kirchenlexikon. Despite the vastly different subjects they studied, the researches of Pastor, Jedin, and Lortz all presupposed the primacy of Trent as both a structural and doctrinal norm against which any claims to "Catholic" in early modern Europe must be measured.
