ABSTRACT
The social history of the Reformation became a flourishing field of research during the 1970s, when interest in the urban context of religious reform supplanted older questions about how social forces or class interests determined the Reformation. Many new studies of the urban Reformation explored how the religious interests of urban lay people predisposed them toward accepting new religious ideas, how social and political dissent within individual towns helped or hindered the reception and implementation of reform, and how the urban mentality left its imprint on the new churches that emerged from the religious upheaval. The burghers of 16th-century Europe, and Germany in particular, created a civic religion that brought the conduct of religious life firmly under secular control. Historians of the 1970s tended to regard the urban Reformation as a “people’s reformation” and to emphasize the importance of social protest in creating impetus for reform. This view was modified by research of the 1980s which showed that such movements were invariably taken over by urban oligarchies or by territorial rulers who sought above all else to establish social order combined with magisterial control of the church. Imposition of control went hand in hand with the creation of a new bureaucratized clergy, so that classic Reformation doctrines of the priesthood of all believers and the rights of communities to elect their own pastors came to have little real meaning. Similarly, lay people were not trusted to interpret the Bible for themselves, lest they fall into the dangers of religious extremism (Anabaptism). In the course of time, the new Protestant pastorate met with continued lay hostility, its neoclericalism with a “Protestant anticlericalism.”
