ABSTRACT
The lexeme “reform” has been in use since its Latinate origins, a root encountered in many European languages with a meaning that has shifted over the centuries. From the mid-nineteenth century, the modern sense of deliberate, structured, forward-looking change has been the general usage; but before 1800 the term, if used at all, denoted the restoration of real or fictional past conditions, not the creation of new ones. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century was in this light not conceived at the time as an ongoing process or struggle, but as a unique restoration of a past condition. While modern historians have tended to associate the Enlightenment with reform and modernisation, when contemporaries did actually use the term they were generally thinking in terms of restoring past conditions, not creating new ones. By emphasising that if reform was actually used, then it generally had a sense quite different from the modern sense, a new perspective is shed on the common association of Enlightenment, progress and reform.
