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2. Protestantism in Mainland Europe: New Directions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

Diarmaid MacCulloch
Diarmaid MacCulloch*
Affiliation:
St Cross College, Oxford
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Abstract

Most stimulating — for this Anglophone historian, at least — has been the reintegration of religious history into mainstream social and political history generally, and also the heightened sense of an international movement embracing an entire continent and beyond. We no longer make artificial distinctions between the Reformations of the Atlantic Isles and those on the mainland; we can see more clearly what is local and what is part of an international phenomenon; and we can also appreciate the artificiality of considering Protestantism in isolation from reform movements in both the Pre-Reformation Western Church and Post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. I commend the advantages of emancipating religious history from specific religious commitment. I also discuss the effect of the breaking down of barriers to travel and research in the wake of the 1989–90 revolutions in the recovery of our sense of the importance of Reformations in Eastern Europe, and also highlight our realization that a heritage of Southern European dissent shaped the heterodoxy that dissolved Reformation certainties.

Type
Recent Trends in the Study of Christianity in Sixteenth-Century Europe
Information
Renaissance Quarterly , Volume 59 , Issue 3 , Fall 2006 , pp. 698 - 706
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 2006

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References

1 Stern, 247–48 (Lord Acton’s letter to the contributors to the Cambridge Modern History).

2 MacCulloch, 1999, 170–73. For Thomas Cartwrights’ similar comments on the “papist” origins of the name Puritan “very unbrotherly confirmed” by anti-Puritan or conformist Protestants in the Church of England, see Ayre, 1:172.

3 Schmidt, 21–26.

4 MacCulloch, 1996.

5 For an introduction, see Braaten and Jenson. Ibid., 1–41 (the first two essays by Tuomo Mannermaa and the response by Robert W. Jenson), reveals both the ecumenical dimension of the School and what the uncharitable might regard as wish-fulfilment on the subject of Luther’s theology.

6 For a more sympathetic critique than mine of the Finnish school from an Anglophone historian of the Reformation, see Hendrix, 256–58.

7 Benedict.

8 See Mühling; Taplin. There is still not much Anglophone literature on Laski: see instead (mostly) in German, Strohm; and in Polish, Bartel; Kowalska.

9 Williams.

10 Steinmetz and Bagchi, 255.

11 For a characteristically trenchant contemporary witness of the 1983 Luther celebrations, see Elton, 1984; for a good survey of changing perspectives in the literature on Müntzer during the 1980s, see Stayer.

12 Friedman.

13 Israel.

14 Murdock.

15 O’Malley, 1993; Copsey.

16 Benedict, xxv.

17 Starting points on the Familists are Hamilton; Marsh. On Nicodemism, see Zagorin; for a more recent treatment, see Overell.