Reformation History: New Interpretations, Trends, and Perspectives

From the sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, almost all interpreters agreed that the Protestant Reformation began in 1517 with Martin Luther’s acts of “heroic individualism.” As Bernd Moeller has described it, this now-outdated story of the origins of the Reformation pictured Luther as “a great sage, a kind of spiritual colossus, who attains his Reformation breakthrough, draws the broad consequences, and then drags people with him as he strides through history handing out his truths right and left.”[1] But sometime during the mid-1900s, scholars began to conclude that “Luther as sage and Wittenberg as Jerusalem” was an insufficient historical paradigm. Other people and places—like Huldrych Zwingli in Zurich, John Calvin in Geneva, and a number of lesser-known leaders and locations—were vital to the rise of Protestantism in the sixteenth century.[2] This change contributed to a new situation in which, over the past fifty years, Reformation historiography has not only grown more diverse, it has also grown in volume at an impressive pace. My purpose here is to describe and analyze some of the newer Reformation historiography, especially in regard to terminology, chronological scale, the rise of social history, what is called “deconfessionalization,” and revisionist interpretations that have emerged within the last forty years.

Terminology

As Euan Cameron has observed, what people have for hundreds of years called the Reformation was actually “a series of parallel movements; within each of which various sorts of people with differing perspectives for a crucial period in history combined forces to pursue objectives which they only partly understood.”[3] The majority of today’s Reformation scholars would agree with Cameron’s assessment, and this raises a question: If what we are describing was never a unified movement led by a single person who proclaimed a consistent set of teachings, is the singular term Reformation the most appropriate descriptor? Clearly, Cameron, who titled his own work The European Reformation, believed it was perfectly acceptable to combine his conclusion about “parallel movements” with the standard singular terminology. However, beginning in the mid-1990s, at least a few historians took such thinking to heart as they gave titles to their books. For example, Carter Lindberg titled his 1996 textbook The European Reformations. Regarding his choice of the plural, Lindbergh did not elaborate. He simply explained, “I view the Reformation era as a time of plural reform movements.”[4] Significantly, his coverage begins in the late fifteenth century and runs to the early seventeenth century, and includes a chapter on “Catholic Renewal and the Counter-Reformation.” In 1999, three years after Lindberg’s book first appeared, James D. Tracy published Europe’s Reformations 1450-1650. For his part, Tracy explained the plural by asserting that “we can best understand the historical significance of the Protestant movement by viewing it . . . as the high point in a series of ‘reformations’ that convulsed the Latin or western half of Christendom from the eleventh to the eighteenth centuries.”[5]

In an interesting twist on this theme, Diarmaid MacCulloch has written about the singular Reformation in a book that includes coverage of those reforms that were introduced even by popes and the Counter Reformation.[6] In contrast to MacCulloch’s approach, scholars like Bernd Moeller, Berndt Hamm, and Dorothea Wendebourg insist on an exclusive sense in which the terms Reformation and Protestant go together. C. Scott Dixon also subscribes to this view and explains specifically:

[W]hen I mention the Reformation I mean the Protestant Reformation, and not only the Protestant Reformation of Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin but the reformations of all the groups of western Europe that consciously broke away from the Catholic church in the early modern period in the wake of the Luther Affair.[7]

Thus, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, one of the unanswered questions of Reformation historiography asks whether expressions like Catholic Reformation and Counter Reformation deserve sections in a survey text about the Reformation.

Chronology

The term reformatio and its cognates were commonly used during the late medieval period to speak of reform impulses or movements in any number of different areas: the law, politics, and the academy, for example. Thus, when Luther and Zwingli preached a message of reform, they were using language that had long since become familiar. Reform was part of the atmosphere into which all sixteenth-century reformers were born.[8] Yet, by the end of the century, the Reformation had come to mean, specifically, the well-known movement most closely associated with Luther. Indeed, during the year 1617, any number of centennial sermons celebrated Luther’s triumph over the papacy and error. Also by that time, the Reformation had become an embattled, confessionalized expression among Protestants. For example, in his History of the Religion of the Reformed Churches (1721), Jacques Basnages de Beauval insisted that the first reformer was Zwingli, since he had preached against the abuses of Rome as early as 1516.[9] Thus, another reason for the diversity of the secondary literature relates to the question: When did the Reformation begin and end?

Scholars who have taken up the task of establishing chronological boundaries for the Reformation have followed one of two distinct patterns. The first maintains a focus on Martin Luther and especially seminal events from his life, most notably his posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in 1517. In this arrangement, end points might be identified with the death of Luther in 1546, or with the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, which provided a secure legal standing for Lutheranism in the Holy Roman Empire, or in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia marking the end of the Thirty Years War and the beginning of a more secular approach to political life.[10]

Those who espouse the alternative chronological framework insist that we cannot possibly understand specific memorable events of the Reformation without an appreciation for the much broader historical contexts in which those events occurred. Within such contexts, an upheaval no longer seems to have been so sudden, and a breakthrough appears as the natural result of pressures that had been growing over a relatively long period.[11] One remarkable such treatment is Peter G. Wallace's 2004 work titled The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity 1350-1750.[12] Wallace begins by describing late-medieval Christendom. In the wake of the first appearance of the Black Death and the ensuing devastation, he writes, survivors were motivated to pursue the ideal model of apostolic Christianity. Such motivations set the stage for an emerging Reformation whose values were eventually integrated “into the belief systems of common Christians.”[13] Indeed, by the middle of the eighteenth century, “the original goal of religious renewal could be documented all over Europe.” However, also by that time Reformed Christianity “had become pluralistic rather than unitary, and popularly inspired as much as officially determined.”[14] Wallace justifies his decision to tell the story of a European Reformation with roots that reached down to the Middle Ages and with ramifications that reached far into the eighteenth century. Europe’s experience of the Black Death had the effect of redoubling the calls for “spiritual renewal and structural reform.”[15] Four hundred years later, a new era began when the dynamic ideologies of Europe’s future— “democracy, nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and racism”—identified a time when “secular ideologies grounded in worldly interests” took over.[16]

Social History and “Deconfessionalization”

Two additional factors have contributed to the diversification and to the growth of Reformation historiography over the last half century. Conveniently, Philip Benedict specifies both of these in his 2002 work, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. Benedict introduces this fine piece of scholarship as a survey of “the history and significance of Reformed Protestantism in Europe from its origins until the end of the age of orthodoxy around 1700.”[17] He points out that no single author has attempted anything similar since John T. McNeill wrote The History and Character of Calvinism, first published in 1954. Since then, writes Benedict, the broad field of history and a specific part of that field, the corner known as Reformation studies, have each gone through what he describes as a dramatic sea change. What is the nature of that change?

First, in general, historians no longer report only those events surrounding “elite actors.” Instead, they now incorporate “the actions and aspirations of ordinary men and women.” Second, the fifty years following McNeill’s book witnessed what scholars have called the “deconfessionalization” of Reformation history. Benedict explains that, before, “most church history was written by members of the church in question eager to explore a critical moment in the formation of their religious tradition.” But since then a new scene has emerged where it is not uncommon, for example, for Roman Catholic scholars to offer “sympathetic and penetrating studies of Protestant theology.”[18] Clearly, Benedict hopes that his book will be a good example of both trends. He not only subtitles his work A Social History of Calvinism, he also describes himself as “a total outsider, an agnostic, nonpracticing Jew raised in a secular household.”[19]

Was There a Reformation? If So, Was it Good?

A related, but quite different approach to elongating the Reformation almost completely avoids the term. In the preface to his 1985 work, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700, John Bossy announces that he intends to describe “a way or ways of life and the features of Christian belief which seemed most relevant” to people at that time.[20] One can hardly help noticing that the dates of Bossy’s title place a foot on either side of what, according to long-standing tradition, marks the beginning of the Reformation. The author does not doubt that the Reformation was “an event in human life,” and he suggests that paying attention to both its background and foreground permits “some kind of purchase on the event.”[21] Part of what Bossy rejects, however, is the idea that “medieval Christianity was a burden which most of the population of the West was delighted to shake off,” and “that Christianity was brought to the people of the West during and after the sixteenth century.”[22] To the contrary, the basic outline of the Christian gospel, interpreted and mediated by the likes of Augustine of Hippo and Anselm of Canterbury, was known, inculcated, assumed to be true, and practiced by all echelons of society for many hundreds of years before any so-called Reformation. What is more, Christianity in the West during the Middle Ages functioned very well and consistently as an organizing principle for society. As Bossy puts it,

Christians of the late medieval West did not need reformers to tell them who their saviour was; not the pope, nor the learned Fathers of the Council of Constance who finally settled the Schism in 1417; not even, in the end, the hierarchical Church itself, but Christ.[23]

He agrees that “[s]omething important happened to Western Christianity in the sixteenth century,” and that the term Reformation can be used to describe it. What Bossy objects to is “the notion that a bad form of Christianity was being replaced by a good one.” Further, the Reformation, although “a necessary concept in the history of the Church as an institution . . . does not seem much use in the history of Christianity.” Why? Because the typical understanding of the Reformation “is too high-flowing to cope with actual social behavior, and not high-flown enough to deal sensitively with thought, feeling, or culture.”[24] In short, much like the so-called revisionist historians of the English Reformation, Bossy does not wish to celebrate anything that was supposedly won in the episode known as the Reformation. Rather, he laments what, between 1400 and 1700, was lost.

Along this line, he points out that “of those words whose meaning undoubtedly changed” from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, “several represented ideas and institutions at the heart of Christianity.”[25] The term satisfaction, for example, “had shifted “from meaning atonement to meaning (accept in duelling classes) contentment and gratification.”[26] Again, up to about the year 1400 “the word ‘religion’ . . . had for centuries usually meant a ‘religious’ rule or order and those who followed or belonged to it.” By the time of Calvin, the term meant “the primary posture of the Christian community, or of the individuals who composed it, towards God.” Still later, by 1700, “the world was full of religions, objective social and moral entities characterized by system, principles and hard edges.”[27] Bossy ends with the summary assertion that before the seventeenth century, “Christianity” meant “a body of people,” but that since then the word has meant “an ‘ism’ or body of beliefs.”[28]

Judging from the persistent historiography that Bossy’s tour de force represents, it seems clear that some scholars will continue to challenge what might be called Whig-Protestant interpretations of the Reformation. At the same time, however, revisionist laments will have to contend with what Patrick Collinson described as “the perception that those living through these events had of an almost total transformation,” and that it was good. To drive home his point, Collinson quoted a sixteenth-century Englishman who wished that God might bless his elderly uncle, “and make him to know that which in his tender years he could not see, for the world was then dark and we were blind in it.”[29]

Over the last half century, then, names for the Reformation have grown in number, while a much broader time frame now makes it seem more like an historic era than an episode. The name of Martin Luther, though still very important to historians, is now more often accompanied by the names of other reformers and members of their personal networks. In addition, the rise of social history has led to the deprivileging of theology and religion in Reformation studies, which are now produced by historians of all religious persuasions. Not surprisingly, the growing variety of topics and scholars means that Reformation studies now exhibits a wide array of competing interpretations.

Notes

[1] Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, trans. H. C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr. (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1982), 13, as quoted by C. Scott Dixon, Contesting the Reformation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 1-2.

[2] Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, 3.

[3] Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 1.

[4] Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), xii.

[5] James D. Tracy, Europe’s Reformations, 1450-1650 (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), 3.

[6] Diarmaid MacCulloch, Reformation (New York: Viking Penguin, 2004).

[7] Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, 13-14.

[8] For an insightful discussion of the terms reformatio and renovatio reaching back to the period of the Gregorian Reforms, see John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 16-20.

[9] Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, 8-10.

[10] Ibid., 15.

[11] This was certainly the opinion of Elizabeth Eisenstein. She argued that even if Luther and Zwingli had never lived, something very much like the Reformation that we know would have occurred due to the invention of the printing press. See Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chap. 6, esp. 208.

[12] Peter G. Wallace, The Long Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, 1350-1750 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004).

[13] Ibid., 7.

[14] Ibid., 166.

[15] Ibid., 218.

[16] Ibid., 222.

[17] Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), xvii.

[18] Ibid., xviii.

[19] Ibid., xxv.

[20] John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985).

[21] Ibid., 7.

[22] Ibid., viii.

[23] Ibid., 3.

[24] Ibid., 91.

[25] Ibid., 167.

[26] Ibid., 169.

[27] Ibid., 170.

[28] Ibid., 171.

[29] Patrick Collinson, The Reformation: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 9.

Works Cited

Benedict, Philip. Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002.

Bossy, John. Christianity in the West, 1400-1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985.

Cameron, Euan. The European Reformation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991.

Collinson, Patrick. The Reformation: A History. New York: Modern Library, 2006.

Dixon, C. Scott. Contesting the Reformation. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

George, Timothy. Theology of the Reformers. Nashville: Broadman Press, 1988.

Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Lindberg, Carter. The European Reformations. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation. New York: Viking Penguin, 2004.

O’Malley, John W. Trent And All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

Tracy, James D. Europe’s Reformations, 1450-1650. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.

Wallace, Peter G. The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, 1350-1750. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.

Carlo Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms: The Religion of 16th-Century Radical Rednecks

Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Translated by John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980.

Take a look at any list of classic studies in Renaissance and Reformation Europe and you're bound to see this title. First published in Italian in 1976, Ginzburg's The Cheese and the Worms would also make any list of classic microhistories. It's that significant.

So then, what's this book all about and why is it so popular? Start with the main character, the "sixteenth-century miller" of the subtitle. Domenico Scandella, commonly known by his nickname, Menocchio, was born in 1532 in a small town in a region of far northeastern Italy called the Friuli. One of the most basic things we know about him is that although he seems to have been well-liked by many of his contemporaries, he spent a lot of his time spewing religious heresy. He would argue theology anytime with anyone, including (and maybe especially) priests. So, Carlo Ginzburg raises the obvious question: what were the sources of his unorthodox ideas? Was he a Lutheran? An Anabaptist? Or what?

It's strange. Although Menocchio said any number of things that might seem to point in the direction of Lutheranism or especially Anabaptism, other things he said clearly show that no self-respecting Lutheran or Anabaptist would have acknowledged him as a brother in the faith. As an alternative to those theories, Ginzburg posits that the coming of the Reformation to Menocchio's world had opened up the way for an ancient peasant radicalism to bubble up to the surface. And that's what he espoused.

As you might guess, Menocchio's heresies combined with his big mouth and combativeness got him into trouble with the religious authorities of the day. His first appearance before inquisitors came in 1584, the year he turned 52. The reason we know as much about him as we do is because the record of his interrogations has survived. And it was here that he revealed his heresy for posterity, including the part about the cheese and the worms:

I have said that, in my opinion, all was chaos, that is, earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and out of that bulk a mass formed--just as cheese is made out of milk--and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels. The most holy majesty decreed that these should be God and the angels, and among that number of angels, there was also God, he too having been created out of that mass at the same time, and he was made lord, . . . (5-6).

Menocchio's opinion was that religion is a racket. Relics, images, the Atonement, and all of the sacraments, especially baptism and confirmation, were invented by priests and monks in order to keep the church in business. And the pope is no more than a man. God loves all people and, regardless of the religion they subscribe to, all of them can be saved in the same way: by loving one's neighbor.

So where does this come from? Again, Ginzburg argues that neither Lutheranism nor Anabaptist doctrine seem to be at the root of the strange miller's worldview: 

Provisionally, it's best to attribute [Menocchio's ideas] to a substratum of peasant beliefs perhaps centuries old, that were never wholly wiped out. . . . On the basis of this hypothesis, then, Mennochio's radical statements will not be explained by tracing them to Anabaptism or, worse yet, to a generic 'Lutheranism.' Rather, we should ask if they don't belong within the autonomous current of peasant radicalism, which the upheaval of the Reformation had helped to bring forth, but which was much older (21).

But what about Menocchio's books? It just so happened that he was quite literate, and that he owned and borrowed any number of books. Did he cobble his heresy together from them? In response to this question, Ginzburg is at pains to show that, although the miller was an avid reader for many years, he did not derive his ideas from books. It is much closer to the mark to say that he filtered all of his reading through the aforementioned "peasant radicalism" that Menocchio inherited by way of "oral tradition" (32-33).

The bulk of Ginzburg's work goes on in this way, revealing how Menocchio, in his interrogations, showed himself to be something other than a Lutheran, an Anabaptist, a dualistic Manichean, or a universalist follower of ancient church father Origen (the latter two types being what his inquisitors sometimes imagined he was). Eventually, he convinced his judges that not only was he a heretic, but a dangerous one at that. The Church had to protect innocent, ignorant people from a menace like him. They sentenced him to be compelled to reenter the Church, publicly forsake his heresies, fulfill penances, wear a penitential garment, and spend the rest of his life in prison at his children's expense (93).

After two terrible years in prison, Menocchio had had enough. With the help of a lawyer, apparently, he composed a letter begging for forgiveness and release. His request was granted, but he was confined to his village for life, and a friend had to act as a sort of bondsman who would guarantee the heretic's whereabouts and good behavior.

In time, Menocchio renewed his life in the community. He was back to work, and even held an official local position. But it seems he couldn't help himself. Soon, he was also back to his old tricks, talking with all sorts of people to whom he expressed his unorthodox, heretical views. According to reports, the same kinds of discussions he had with a man named Lunardo he also had with a Jew named Simon who stayed for a while at Mennochio's house. Clearly, he had not given up his old ideas. Nor had those two years in prison scared him into silence, at least now that he was out. As fate would have it, word made its way to the inquisitors, who had him arrested and confined in the prison at Aviano in June 1599 (103). By this point, he was 67 years old. His wife and his only devoted son had died. He was more or less without defense or help.

But was his a singular case? Ginzburg answers that it wasn't. There was, for example, a "rustic in the Lucchese countryside who hid behind the pseudonym Scolio." Like our main character, Scolio "projected onto the written page, elements taken from oral tradition" (112). For example, much like Menocchio, he was convinced that Judaism, Islam, and Christianity all preached some version of the Ten Commandments. Something else that the two men shared was "a common store of traditions, myths, and aspirations handed down orally over generations" (117).

Next, Ginzburg introduces yet another peasant radical, Pighino ("the fat one"), also a miller. The author notes that sixteenth-century millers had, at best, mixed reputations. And they were well known for their radicalism. Dealing with a wide variety of people, they worked in out-of-the-way places, where folks would freely exchange ideas much as they would at "the inn and the shop" (119). These were the places where the cultures of "peasant religious radicalism" and of "peasant egalitarianism" were kept alive (123). Consequently, we should reject any assumption that "ideas originate exclusively among the dominant classes." What is required of historians is a "more complicated hypothesis about relationships in this period between the culture of the dominant classes and the culture of the subordinate classes" (126). This, as I see it, represents the most significant contribution that Ginzburg's work offers to the historiography.

Oh, and what became of Menocchio, our backsliding heretic? I've given you enough to this point. You'll have to get the book and find out.

"Early Modern Catholicism"? O'Malley's Proposal

O'Malley, John W. Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000.

O'Malley begins with a simple observation: Protestantism, "the Reformation," has a name, one that people universally recognize and understand. On the other hand is the Counter Reformation, the Catholic Reformation, the Tridentine Reformation, and so on. What, exactly, is the right name for "the Catholic side"? What do these names mean?  Here, it's not so obvious. Having raised the question, O'Malley introduces his own solution:

"This book is about the problem of naming in early modern Catholicism. It proposes a solution to the problem by arguing that, first, we need to accept the multiplicity of names as a good thing, for each of them captures an important aspect of the reality. Second, for such acceptance to be fruitful, we must apply these names more reflectively than heretofore, careful to indicate precisely what we mean to convey by each of them. Third, we need to add "Early Modern Catholicism" to the list as a more comprehensive designation than the others, a designation that provides for aspects they let slip through their grasp" (5).

With that as his starting point, O'Malley traces the historiography of the problem and attempts to demonstrate the validity of his proposal.

In Chapter One, he reaches all the way back to the eleventh century, when the idea first emerged that the church itself "might be subject to reform and indeed, required it" (16). So it was that terms like reformatio and renovatio were circulated in religious contexts long before the sixteenth century. In time, of course, “the Reformation” came to refer to 1517 to 1555, the date for the Peace of Augsburg (19). The term Anti- or Counter Reformation was used for the first time in 1776 by Putter. As he saw things, Reformation meant 1517 to 1555 (again, to the time of the Peace of Augsburg) while the "Counter Reformation" lasted from 1555 to 1648 (that is, to the end of the Thirty Years War).

In the early nineteenth century, some Roman Catholic writers attempted to fight back with the term "Protestant Revolution," a name that obviously never caught on. Even later, historians began to accept the term "Catholic Reformation.” The two terms--Counter Reformation and Catholic Reformation--meant different things at different places and times in history. Above all, how those terms were heard had everything to do with the speaker and audience. Thus, for someone like Gustav Droysen, writing in the 1890s, the expression "Counter Reformation" sized up perfectly the essence of what he deemed to be reactionary and repressive Roman Catholicism (29). Coming into the twentieth century, the Catholic historian Pastor proudly used the term "Catholic Restoration." Of course, English Protestants typically preferred "Counter Reformation."

In Chapter Two, “Hubert Jedin and the Classical Position,” O’Malley contextualizes the life and work of the twentieth century’s great expert on Roman Catholicism during the sixteenth century, especially the Council of Trent. He notes that Jedin’s conclusions are so commonly known and accepted that "we never think to challenge the basic construct" (54). Yet, a crucial sentence in Jedin’s famous essay of 1946—“The Catholic Reform is the church's remembrance of the Catholic ideal of life through inner renewal, [and] the Counter Reformation is the self-assertion of the church in the struggle against Protestantism"—serves to remind us of how scholars operated in the old school, before the rise of what is called social history (55). Furthermore, the Council of Trent was something short of the "miracle" that Jedin made it out to be. Subsequent historians have observed that things were neither so bleak before Trent, nor so wonderful afterwards. And, not everything that improved within Catholicism after Trent was the result of Trent, as Jedin assumed.

Chapter Three, “England and Italy in Jedin’s Wake,” begins an exploration of the ways in which Jedin's scholarship on Catholic Reform, the Counter Reformation, and Trent inspired other scholars in various parts of Europe. H. Outram Evennett was Jedin's best-informed discussion partner from England. Unlike Jedin, Evennett did not have access to the resources of the Vatican. Still, he was able to advance the idea that what Jedin had called "Catholic Reform" was "the soul of the Catholic side" of the Reformation. The majority of this chapter focuses on Italy, where a variety of scholars, secular and religious, took up the challenge presented by Jedin's work. What was the essence of what many still called "the Catholic Reformation"? Was it Jedin's "Catholic Reform," or was it the "Counter Reformation"? And what were the sources of these: Trent, the Papacy, or the Jesuits? All of these options assumed causality "from above." But, again, twentieth century historiography turned that emphasis on its head.

The fourth chapter is titled, “France, Germany, and Beyond.” O’Malley observes that, compared to English and Italian academics, French scholars came to the question of Jedin’s work quite late. Of course, that is because they were busy changing the world. Still, as early as 1929, L. Febvre published a piece in French whose title means, "A Badly Put Question: The Origins of the French Reformation and the Problem of the Causes of the Reformation." It said that it was ridiculous to assume, as historiography did, that "revulsion at ecclesiastical abuses caused the Reformation" (95). The Reformation was about religious sentiment. To understand it, said Febvre, you have to study religion, not churches. Because he denied that "abuses" were at the root of the Reformation, he took the foundation out from underneath the old Counter Reformation and Catholic Reform. Fifteen years later, Jedin would hardly even take up Febvre's basic question. In addition to Febvre, there were others not connected with the Annales school who took much the same approach.

By contrast, in Germany Jedin became a hero after the appearance of the first two volumes of his Trent, though Protestant scholars paid little attention to him. Later, in 1976, Gottfried Maron attacked Jedin's distinctions between Catholic Reform and Counter Reformation. It seemed like a ploy to make Catholicism look better than it was (107). On a different front, E. W. Zeeden came up with a fresh approach to the period by examining confessions, the various groups that had them (Catholic, Lutheran, Calvinist/Reformed) and how the contents and processes were similar. Scholars in Italy and North America have more recently entered these conversations. By the 1990s, leading European scholars neglected the term "Counter Reformation."

In his Conclusion, O'Malley comes back to where he began. "What's in a name?" He now answers, "Very much, indeed." But, he observes, the names for "the Catholic side" have proliferated through the centuries, raising the question of their usefulness. In addition, "chronological demarcations have proliferated." Given these realities, the author acknowledges that "many of these names are here to stay" but that, often, too much has been claimed for them (120). And so it is that he offers yet another name: "Early Modern Catholicism." O’Malley suggests that this appellation does no damage to what is sublime and wondrous about the historical moment it describes. Moreover, "Catholicism with its sluggish continuities as well as its realities was bigger than what the other names intimate" (143).