Assassinations, American Indians, Van Halen, and More! My 17 Favorite Books of 2017

I spent the first week of 2018 sick. The next thing I knew, we were halfway through January! So, a little later than I had meant to post it, here's my annual list of "best books." I'd love to hear about what you read last year. So please leave a note about some of your 2017 books, and why you liked them, or didn't.

U.S. Presidents

1. Destiny of the Republic: A Tale of Madness, Medicine,and the Murder of a President, by Candice Millard (2011). A well-written, easy-reading book about President James A. Garfield, his assassin, and the political world they lived in. From the bibliography, it's clear that Millard knows much more about Garfield's religious life, and how it made him the great man he was. But for some reason, she neglects this vital theme. Why?

2. The Kennedy Assassination--24 Hours After: Lyndon B. Johnson's Pivotal First Day as President, by Steven M. Gillon (2009). Take the TV series "24" and make it about the first day after the Kennedy assassination. That's what Gillon does in this interesting, detailed book. Gillon provides plenty of insight for those who want to understand Kennedy, Johnson, their politics, and their presidencies.

American Indians

3. The Chickasaws, Arrell M. Gibson (1971). The old acknowledged masterwork on the subject. Gibson often cities interesting primary sources. Still, Richard D. Green, the current historian of the Chickasaw Nation, notes that Gibson produced this book without interviewing a single Chickasaw. Since then, of course, a newer day in the historiography of American Indians has dawned.

4. American Indians in U.S. History, by Roger L. Nichols (2003). An engaging, brief survey by an expert. Longer and, in my opinion, more useful than the introduction by Perdue and Green (see next entry). Like them, Nichols takes a chronological approach. His text is not accompanied by reference notes, but each chapter ends with a brief list of “Suggested Readings” that represent the classic titles for that historical period.

5. North American Indians: A Very Short Introduction, by Theda Perdue and Michael D. Green (2010). More serviceable than most of the other volumes in the Very Short Introductions series that I’ve read. Chapter 4, “Indians in the West,” corresponds closely to Robert M. Utley, The Indian Frontier, 1846-1890, listed below.

6. The Indian Frontier, 1846-1890, by Robert M. Utley (2003). An interesting survey. The author essentially says, “For the moment, let’s hold onto the Frederick Jackson Turner thesis, but include Indians along that all-important frontier.” Just after I finished reading Utley, I posted a full summary of his book.

Mostly Just for Fun

7. Van Halen Rising: How a Southern California Backyard Party Band Saved Heavy Metal, by Greg Renoff (2015). Renoff begins with the early lives of the original members of Van Halen, and ends with the 11-month world tour that followed the release of their first album in 1978. The book is mostly about Van Halen before hardly anyone outside of Southern California knew who they were. I read it just after passing my qualifying exams, which made the experience that much better. Anyway, if you're interested here's a bit more about it.

8. Ford County: Stories, by John Grisham (2009). This book is Grisham's only published collection of short stories. Not many people like short stories anymore. I've always liked them. With novels, you sometimes don't know if you're going to like them until you're several pages in. With a short story, by that point you're done, and you know not to necessarily trust that author. For one thing, Grisham tends to write long short stories. I know, that's a weird description. But for comparison, check out one of the really-short short stories by Raymond Carver.

9. Bound for Glory, by Woody Guthrie (1943). Woody Guthrie's unique and colorful descriptions of early-twentieth century America will sometimes make you smile and laugh. At other times, his recollections of personal struggles--a family ravaged by disease, financial disaster, house fires, and destitution--might just make you cry. Through it all, you will admire and appreciate Guthrie's unbreakable spirit. Here we have on full display the mind and heart of a creative genius who never took himself too seriously.

Restoration Movement History

10. Among the Early Evangelicals: The Transatlantic Origins of the Stone-Campbell Movement, by James L. Gorman (2017). This is the most significant monograph dealing with the Stone-Campbell Restoration Movement to be published in the last several years. In this revision of his doctoral dissertation, Gorman reveals the transatlantic, pre-American roots of the Campbell Movement in America. A signal achievement, Gorman's work breaks new ground and resets the agenda for studying "Campbellism" in America.

11. The Sun Will Shine Again, Someday: A History of the Non-Class, One Cup Churches of Christ, by Ronny F. Wade (1986). The subtitle says it all: “A History of the Non-Class, One Cup Churches of Christ.” The author, Ronny F. Wade, is a long-time, widely-regarded preacher within this group. As one might expect, the history he writes is characterized by advocacy. He is much like the sports announcer who, while calling the game, always cheers for his team. Sometime back, I posted a brief review of Wade's book.

12. Oklahoma Christians: A History of Christian Churches and of the Start of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Oklahoma, by Stephen J. England (1975). England was a great biblical scholar, teacher, and leader within the Disciples denomination during the 20th century. Because he spent so much of his career serving as a professor and school administrator in Oklahoma, he took an interest in the history of his people in the Sooner State. For that particular topic, this book is a unique resource.

Still Other Sorts of History

13. Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America, by David Hackett Fischer (1989). The pick of the litter. This book, all by itself, is an education in several broad streams of American history. Fischer is one of those force-of-nature historians, and Albion's Seed is a delightful masterpiece. You'll never think of the various regions of the U.S. the same way after reading it.

14. Contesting the Reformation, by C. Scott Dixon (2012). Dixon has done a great service to students of the Protestant Reformation. A true expert on the literature, he writes each chapter as a detailed historiographical essay on some aspect of this massive topic. I found it to be an indispensable resource, especially as I prepared for qualifying exams on the Reformation! So, if you're getting ready for exams, or you just want to get a handle on the secondary literature about, say, Calvinism or the Radical Reformation, Dixon's book should be your first stop. It is both thorough and detailed. At least in English, there's nothing else quite like it.

15. Heading South to Teach: The World of Susan Nye Hutchison, 1815-1845, by Kim Tolley (2015). An outstanding new example of microhistory American style. By closely examining the life of an ordinary woman who did extraordinary things, Tolley is able to identify something of how the early U.S. changed especially as a result of the Second Great Awakening.

Texas History

16. Gone To Texas: A History of the Lone Star State, by Randolph B. Campbell (2003). This is likely the very best general survey of Texas history. Campbell relates the story of Texas "from prehistoric times to the beginning of the twenty-first century" (ix). The book is easy-reading, and is complemented by dozens of maps and illustrations. The history of the Lone Star State has often been told according to the traditional, great-people-and-events model. Some readers, especially Texans, might argue that given the topic, this approach is only natural. Either way, Campbell's book is no exception to the rule. Immigration, politics, and conflict, often violent conflict, are major features of the coverage. Neither footnotes nor endnotes accompany the text. Instead, each chapter has its own selected bibliography.

17. Sleuthing the Alamo: Davy Crockett's Last Stand and Other Mysteries of the Texas Revolution, by James E. Crisp (2005). In this delightful, unusual little book, a native Texan combines memoir and original research as he takes up two specific questions about the Texas Revolution. First, was Sam Houston, a president of the Republic of Texas, an anti-Mexican racist? Or, did someone else put words in his mouth? Second, did Davy Crockett really go down fighting at the Alamo, or did he surrender to Santa Anna's troops? Along the way, Crisp uncovers long-lost evidence, detects mistranslations, reveals secrets, and teaches the reader some of the deeper significance of history. He concludes that when, for whatever reason, we attempt to bury and silence the past we just wind up diminishing ourselves.

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.

Did the Reformation Really Begin in 1517? Pre-Conditions of the Protestant Movement

Later this year, the world will mark the 500th anniversary of the dawn of the Protestant Reformation. Don't worry, if you forget there will be plenty of reminders in late October.

That's all well and good. But it's not my focus here. Instead, with this post I want to highlight some of the historical factors that represent pre-conditions of Luther's posting of the Ninety-Five Theses in the fall of 1517.

From the sixteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, almost all interpreters agreed that the Protestant Reformation had its start with Martin Luther’s acts of “heroic individualism." As historian 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 incomplete story. 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]

What historians sometimes call the “Luther affair”—specifically, events from the life of Martin Luther beginning in 1517 and continuing into the early 1520s—was directly related to and grew out of the long crisis of late medieval Christendom.[3] This crisis can be described as a struggle between competing ideas about the recovery of apostolic Christianity, the quest for the true church. As many interpreters have noted, the late middle ages were characterized by a perceived absence of meaning in life, accompanied by deep anxiety over personal guilt and destiny. The consequences of sin were a deserved death and an uncertain eternal future.[4]

A common report about the young Martin Luther is that he experienced torturous dread and despair over matters of the spirit and his unanswered questions about relationship with a sovereign God. But we should add that Luther was not alone. It appears that what he called his Anfechtungen, his “afflictions” or “tribulations,” were not unique. They were typical, if not always so intense in other people.[5] However, the medieval combination of spiritual malaise and psychological disturbance were not the only preoccupations of the time. There was also in the pre-Reformation age something that Lucien Febvre called “an intense appetite for the divine.”[6]

Because the character of the true church was a focal question of the time, much of the contemporary discussion included words like renovatio and reformatio. Such terms pointed to a solution in the renewal of genuine Christianity, and especially in the rehabilitation of the apostolic church.[7] So towards that end, what kinds of proposals emerged during the decades leading up to the Luther affair?

Curialism

One prominent and lingering vision of the apostolic church centered on the pope and the Curia Romana, the papal court. The essence of this view, commonly known as Curialism, was unmistakably expressed in a papal bull issued by Boniface VIII in 1302 titled Unam sanctum; that is, The One Holy (Church). In it, Boniface makes a comparison: in the same way that there was only one ark of safety, constructed under the leadership of only one man, so there is only one apostolic and universal church, safeguarded by a single power and presided over by only one leader. The conclusion of the document epitomizes the claims of Curialism: “We declare, state, define and pronounce that it is altogether necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman Pontiff.”[8]

But the papal crises of the fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries did much to undermine all such pronouncements. After the death of Boniface, the so-called Babylonian Captivity (1309-1377), during which the papacy was exiled in Avignon, was followed by the Great Western Schism (1378-1417), when the loyalty of the Church was divided between two and sometimes three different popes. In short, no sooner did Boniface insist on the Curialist vision than unfortunate events practically renounced it.[9] Still, papal claims to authority did not die.

Conciliarism

Historians have given the name Conciliarism to a competing vision for the true church. Significantly, this alternative view, which asserted that ecumenical church councils were superior to papal authority, developed directly out of the crisis of Curialism. Its claim to authority grew from the conviction that in addition to Peter and his successors, the biblical witness also provides for the authority of councils, the first of these being the so-called “Jerusalem Council” recorded Acts chapter 15.

In response to the struggles over authority that had begun over a hundred years earlier, the Council of Constance (1414-1418) deposed all three of the current popes and elected Martin V as the new pope. It also provided for future ecumenical councils and, most tellingly, decreed that the decisions of these gatherings should serve as checks to papal authority. After all, in keeping with a phrase enshrined in canon law--“unless he deviates from the faith”--the decision of a pope was not above the judgment of the church. Conciliarism did not deny the authority of the pope. It did deny that his authority was absolute and unqualified. At any rate, although the Council of Constance succeeded in its goal to rescue the papacy, it failed to establish councils as an effective alternative to the model of absolute papal supremacy.[10]

Popular Heretics and Dissenters

In addition to Curialism and Conciliarism, the late medieval period saw the rise and lingering effects of any number of dissenters and heretics. The presence of these groups—Lollards, Hussites, Waldensians, and Spiritual Franciscans, to name a few—underscored the pressing desire and need for reform. Here, space provides for the discussion of only one prominent heresy.

Lollardy (sometimes spelled Lollardie) was the name given to an English heretical movement that began near the end of the fourteenth century. Its origins can be traced back to the teaching, the personal network and, above all, the writings of John Wyclif (c. 1324-1384). [11] In his early writings, Wyclif made a compelling argument for the disendowment of clerics who were not in grace but in mortal sin. In that state, he asserted, they had no divine right to position or power. This, of course, made him popular with the devout clergy who agreed with him. Most of all, it made him popular with the English Crown, eager to profit from prospective disendowments. Early on, Wyclif had a benefactor in John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster. It was primarily Gaunt’s influence that led to his entry into royal service as a sort of schooled advocate who could help to undermine church privilege and the authority of the pope. During those years, Wyclif stayed busy writing and preaching.

On May 22, 1377, Pope Gregory XI issued five papal bulls condemning the views of Wyclif. Detained for a time at Oxford, he was soon released due to popular support there. By the late 1370s, however, Wyclif was doing more than simply attacking the abuses of the church. Most significantly, he dismissed the traditional understanding of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, the doctrine of transubstantiation. Thus, in May of 1381, William Barton, chancellor of Oxford, presided over a committee that condemned such heresy, though without specifically naming Wyclif. Then, on June 13, 1381, Corpus Christi day, peasant rebels, angry over an attempt to freeze wages, came to the outskirts of London and entered the city.[12] During three days of mayhem, they killed Simon Sudbury, the Archbishop of Canterbury. In his De blasphemia, Wyclif mentioned the revolt. Although he never acknowledged even an indirect contribution to the catastrophe, at least some chroniclers of the day disagreed. They saw a connection between Wyclif's influence and popular sentiment. By then, Wyclif was no longer regarded as an interesting and useful radical, but more as a dangerous and loathsome heretic. He could no longer count on the critical support of some of the clergy and aristocracy, and by October 1381 he had retreated to his out-of-the-way parish in Lutterworth where he died at Mass on the last day of 1384. The period in which Wyclif wrote his more-popular works and led a public life had lasted hardly more than a decade. But he left behind many books and treatises, in English as well as in Latin, and not a few personal associates who were still at Oxford or who had since gone out from there, providing leadership for the group now known as the Lollards. Indirectly, this heresy was the source and inspiration for the later Hussite movement in Bohemia, which is where most of the surviving Wyclifite texts have been recovered.

Renaissance Humanism

One critical pre-condition to the rise of the Reformation was Humanism. Consistent with the goals of the Renaissance, Humanism was “the movement to recover, interpret and assimilate the language, literature, learning and values of ancient Greece and Rome.”[13] According to Charles Nauert, humanist culture began and grew from the time of Petrarch forward. As Nauert explains, it developed initially from a practical concern. In Italy, those who bore the responsibilities of civic leadership were searching for greater access to useful knowledge. In the Greek and Roman classics, they found what they believed was a superior wisdom, moral philosophy, and rhetorical theory.[14]

As most surveys relate, during the fifteenth century, humanism crossed the Alps and entered northern Europe. There, it took on a decidedly Christian form. In Italy, humanist scholars had searched for ancient wisdom, insight that could inform leaders amid changing economic times and political challenges. But north of the Alps, Christian Humanists sought ancient wisdom that was distinctively theological in content.[15] However, this distinction should not be taken too far. As R. N. Swanson points out, although Christian Humanism has been associated with the Renaissance once it had traversed the Alps, in fact virtually all Humanists, including those in Italy, were Christians. It is true, to take a prime example, that Lorenzo Valla used his skill in order to discredit the Donation of Constantine. Yet we should not conclude that Valla rejected Christianity. In fact, he “overtly accepted Christianity’s spiritual demands, producing a commentary on the Lord’s Prayer and asserting that philosophy and reason were insufficient tools for dealing with theology.”[16] And, according to the vision put forward by Marsilio Ficino around 1476, humans should achieve their potential by exercising individual will, thus becoming co-creators with God “in a re-ordering of the world, and in order to attain salvation after death.”[17]

There can be no doubt that Humanism was highly significant to every branch of the Reformation. Luther, for example, developed his views of Pauline theology while using a Greek New Testament edited by Erasmus, a signal achievement of the period. Zwingli and Calvin were likewise trained in humanistic studies before they emerged as reformers. A specific example of the connection can be identified in Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Decades earlier, Valla had shown that the Greek word metanoia did not mean “do penance,” but rather “repent.” That is, in its imperative form the word did not call for participation in the ritual of penance; instead, metanoia expected an about face, a change in heart that would lead to a change in life. According to this distinction, Luther identified a meaning, rooted in the original Greek text of the New Testament, that effectively undermined the sale of indulgences. It is no accident that the very first of Luther’s theses reads: “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, ‘Repent’ [Matt. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.” In this and in other ways, Renaissance Humanism served as part of the intellectual scaffolding that made the Reformation project a possibility.

The Printing Press and Movable Type

Any discussion of the Reformation must consider the invention of the printing press and the advent of movable type in the fifteenth century. In her ground-breaking 1979 work, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, Elizabeth Eisenstein linked this invention to three movements that unfolded in early modern Europe: the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Scientific Revolution.[18] Eisenstein argued that complaints and protests like those issued by Luther were hardly new. Therefore, we should regard the novelty of the printing press and not the theology of the reformers as the critical difference. Luther himself seems to have acknowledged as much when he wrote that printing was “God’s highest and extremest act of grace, whereby the business of the Gospel is driven forward.”[19] For example, the Ninety-Five Theses were composed in October 1517. By December, just a few short weeks later, three separate editions were printed almost simultaneously by printers located in three separate towns.[20] Along this line, Margaret Aston remarked:

The theses . . . were said to be known throughout Germany in a fortnight and throughout Europe in a month . . . Printing was recognized as a new power and publicity came into its own. In doing for Luther what the copyists had done for Wycliffe, the printing presses transformed the field of communications and fathered an international revolt. It was a revolution.[21]

Due to the printing press, the Reformation world featured much greater access to and knowledge of the biblical text in its original languages than ever before.[22] This, combined with consumers’ appetites for printed works fed by the lucrative publishing business, means that even if Luther and Zwingli had never been born, something on the order of the Reformation we know would have occurred.

The Political and Religious Context of Germany

Coming into the sixteenth century, the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation was, in the words of Peter G. Wallace, “a fragmented federation with over 500 semi-autonomous jurisdictions that extended over northern Italy and much of Central Europe under the theoretical suzerainty of an elected Emperor.”[23] Among the entities claiming both autonomy and authority were seven electors, dozens of lay and ecclesiastical princes, more than sixty Imperial free cities, and hundreds of Imperial knights. Within this context, in 1514 Albert of Brandenburg, already the bishop of both Magdeburg and Halberstadt, became the new cardinal-bishop of Mainz. But in exchange for his position, Albert had made big promises to the papal Curia. Along with his pledge to pay the annates, the first year’s income from his benefice, Albert promised to contribute to construction of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. To finance these obligations, he incurred huge debts. This was the very reason why Johannes Tetzel, the now infamous seller of indulgences, was hawking his wares just beyond the boundaries of Saxony. Frederick the Wise, Luther’s prince and the founder of the University of Wittenberg, had not allowed Tetzel and others like him to enter his territory. When Saxons crossed the border to purchase indulgences, Luther became incensed and vehemently preached against all such dubious exchanges. This episode, inherent to the politics of the day, is precisely what triggered the Luther affair.[24]

To summarize then, the late-middle ages were characterized by calls for religious reform and by renewal movements. During the many decades leading up to the Reformation, the Catholic Church resisted calls to restore to Western Christendom the security and satisfaction that people desire from religion. The development of Renaissance Humanism, combined with the printing press and the advent of movable type, created the matrix out of which a long-awaited Reformation quickly grew.

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] The expression “Luther Affair” is a favorite of C. Scott Dixon’s. See his Contesting the Reformation (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 3, 9, 14, 25, etc. Before Dixon, Peter G. Wallace used the term “Luther affair” in his work The Long European Reformation: Religion, Political Conflict, and the Search for Conformity, 1350-1750 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 75-81.

[4] For the late medieval period as “An Age of Anxiety,” see Timothy George, Theology of the Reformers (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1988), 22-30.

[5] Roland H. Bainton provides a portrait of young Luther’s turmoil and desperation in Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1950) ch. 2, esp. page 31, where Bainton states that Anfechtung is a word “for which there is no English equivalent. It may be a trial sent by God to test man, or an assault by the Devil to destroy man. It is all doubt, turmoil, pang, tremor, panic despair, desolation, and desperation which invade the spirit of man.” A fuller description can be found in David P. Scaer, “The Concept of Anfectung in Luther’s Thought,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 41, no. 1 (January 1983): 15-30.

[6] Lucien Febvre’s expression is reported in George, Theology of the Reformers, 30, n. 23.

[7] The Latin 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 Martin Luther and Huldrych Zwingli preached a message of reform, they were using language that was familiar. Yet, by the end of the sixteenth century the Reformation had come to mean, specifically, the well-known movement most closely associated with Luther. See Dixon, Contesting the Reformation, 8-9. John W. O’Malley relates that the idea of the need and even requirement of church reformation emerged as early as the eleventh century. As the two terms were used, reformatio meant “implementation of legal norms,” whereas renovatio referred to a much wider range of meaning. See O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 16-20.

[8] George, Theology of the Reformers, 31-32. Carter Lindberg’s discussion of this episode implies that the strong assertion of Boniface VIII was a reaction to the growing strength of secular powers and the decline of the pope’s authority. See Lindberg, The European Reformations (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 42-43.

[9] George, Theology of the Reformers, 33. On the people and events surrounding this chapter of church history, see also Patrick Collinson, The Reformation: A History (New York: Modern Library, 2006), 23-27.

[10] Fuller accounts are provided by, for example, George, Theology of the Reformers, 33-35; Lindberg, The European Reformations, 46-51; and Euan Cameron, The European Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 49-51.

[11] Here I depend heavily upon Anne Hudson and Anthony Kenny, “Wyclif [Wycliffe], John,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 60: 616-30.

[12] Norman F. Cantor, The English: A History of Politics and Society to 1760 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967), 253-54.

[13] Peter Burke, “The Spread of Italian Humanism,” 2, as quoted in R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215—c. 1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 175.

[14] Charles G. Nauert, Jr., Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 8-51.

[15] See, for example, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 138-43; C. Leonard Allen and Richard T. Hughes, Discovering Our Roots: The Ancestry of Churches of Christ (Abilene, TX: ACU Press, 1988), 15.

[16] Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, 176.

[17] Ibid., 176-77.

[18] Here, I will refer not to Eisenstein’s massive original work of 1979, but to the late edition of her abridgment: Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 2nd ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

[19] Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 165. For this quote, Eisenstein credits M. H. Black, “The Printed Bible,” in Cambridge History of the Bible, ed. S. L. Greenslade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), 3:432.

[20] Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 169.

[21] Ibid., 171. Here, Elizabeth Eisenstein cites Margaret Aston, The Fifteenth Century: The Prospect of Europe (London: Thames & Hudson, 1968), 76.

[22] Eisenstein, The Printing Revolution in Early Modern Europe, 179.

[23] Wallace, The Long European Reformation, 77.

[24] Wallace, The Long European Reformation, 75-77. See also Richard L. DeMolen, “The Age of Renaissance and Reformation,” in The Meaning of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Richard L. DeMolen (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1974), 1-25.

Works Cited

Bainton, Roland H. Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther. Nashville: Abingdon, 1950.

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

Cantor, Norman. The English: A History of Politics and Society to 1760. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1967.

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.

Hudson, Anne. The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Hudson, Anne, and Anthony Kenny, “Wyclif [Wycliffe], John,” in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, edited by H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison, 60: 616-30. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.

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

Nauert, Charles G., Jr. Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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

Scaer, David P. “The Concept of Anfectung in Luther’s Thought,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 41, no. 1 (January 1983): 15-30.

Swanson, R. N. Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215—c. 1515. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

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

Wiesner-Hanks, Merry E. Early Modern Europe, 1450-1789. 2nd ed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013.

Demons, Baseball, Skynyrd and More! My Sweet Sixteen Books of 2016

For someone pursuing a doctorate in History, I really didn't do that much reading last year. Much of the time I was skimming books by the dozens and reading lots of reviews. Still, I did manage to read from cover to cover a good number of books that I simply should have read, some of which I actually wanted to read. On occasion, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that a title I had been avoiding was much more engaging than I thought it would be. And, I wound up reading a few books that had almost nothing to do with my academic program. Anyway, out of that group of titles I thoroughly digested last year, here are sixteen of my favorites:

European History

1. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (Abingdon Press, 1950). Back in the day when I was hanging out at Yale Divinity School, people uttered the name Roland Bainton with something like reverence. The name plate below his giant portrait might just as well have read Solomon or Paul. After reading this book, I understand a bit more about why. Here I Stand was likely the twentieth century's best biography of Martin Luther in English. It was certainly the most popular and influential. Yes, it represents old-school historiography. More recent works, for example, rightly emphasize that Luther was no Lone Ranger of the Reformation. Without other leaders and places like Zwingli in Zurich and Calvin in Geneva, nothing from Luther's legacy would ever have worked out the way it did. But in an age when Europeans and Americans were more comfortable with the idea of a singular, patrician leader like Franklin Roosevelt, this book was the perfect biography. It's still a great read.

2. Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth Century Italy: A Primer in the Social History of Pictorial Style (Clarendon Press, 1972). The author begins this contemporary classic with a basic assertion: "the style of pictures is a proper material of social history." In other words, paintings do not simply illustrate history once it is established by documents. Instead, paintings should be thought of and used as primary sources, along with documents. Or, as the author concludes, "the visual is  . . . the proper complementary to the verbal." This book goes a long way in establishing works of art as primary sources for understanding history. Baxandall's reflection at the end of the book about the actual primacy of the visual is by itself worth the price of admission. More historians should know this book.

3. Jerry Brotton, The Renaissance: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2006). The Very Short Introductions series keeps reeling me back in. A year goes by, I forget everything I didn't like about the last volume I read, and I wind up trying out some other title. It's not that the authors of the series aren't great scholars. They are. The problem, in my opinion, is the format. The small size of these introductions means they're more than an article, less than a complete survey. It's a tough awkward job for any author. However, with this particular volume, Jerry Brotton manages to pull it off. His coverage of the Renaissance begins with a good survey of the historiography, and then proceeds with sections on art, literature, humanism, religious reformation(s), women, exploration, etc. If you don't read any other book on the topic, read this one.

4. George Huppert, After the Black Death: A Social History of Early Modern Europe, 2nd edition (Indiana University Press, 1998). Huppert specifies that his chronological coverage runs from the first outbreak of the Black Death in Europe in 1347 to its last appearance at Marseilles in 1721. Why this periodization? He explains: "After the Black Death had done its work, the survivors became more prudent. They did not allow themselves the luxury of multiplying again to the point of outstripping their resources as dramatically as they once had. To forestall famine, they learned to control population growth" (ix). This is the organizing theme for what has to be one of the most engaging social histories of the period. For students of Early Modern Europe, this is a must read.

5. Giovanni Levi, Inheriting Power: The Story of an Exorcist (University of Chicago Press, 1988). Don't be fooled by the sexy title. This book really isn't about an exorcist. It's about the complex world of a small-town priest in northwestern Italy in the 1690s. Along with a few other Italian historians, author Giovanni Levi is one of the founding fathers of a sub-discipline known as microhistory. No, that word doesn't refer to a tiny topic or bite-sized history. As Carlo Ginzburg explains it, think instead of what you do with a microscope: intense, detailed analysis. That's exactly what Levi gives the reader. If you want to learn about the history of exorcism, read something else. If you're interested in the detailed reasons why, for example, people in the early modern era sometimes got a much higher price when selling land to a family member as opposed to a complete stranger, then Inheriting Power might be for you. Just don't take it to the beach. It's not that kind of book.

6. Gary K. Waite, Eradicating the Devil’s Minions: Anabaptists and Witches in Reformation Europe, 1525-1600 (University of Toronto Press, 2007). According to the author, this work “examines the rhetoric used against Anabaptists and their specific treatment by churchmen, interrogators, and executioners in the light of the magical world view that we know dominated the culture of the sixteenth-century populace.” In other words, Eradicating the Devil’s Minions compares the persecution of religious dissidents with that of the largely fictitious sect of devil-worshipping, magic-performing witches. Bottom line: in the era of the early Reformation, some people treated religious devotees as though they were witches, and vice versa. Seems like that sort of thing has a way of coming back around.

American Religion

7. Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper’s Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837, 25th-Anniversary edition (Hill and Wang, 2004). The early-nineteenth century Protestant revivals collectively known as the Second Great Awakening have deeply influenced American religion from the antebellum period to the present day. Because of its broad, long-lasting significance, historians have raised questions about how the Awakening began, what contributed to its rise, and what its essential character was. Some time around the 1960s, historians began probing the possibility that the revivals involved something more than just religion. For example, were there social, economic, and cultural contexts to the revivals? First published in 1978, A Shopkeeper's Millennium is one of the seminal works along this line of study. We get a taste of what Johnson is up to when he writes: “Revivals were a means of building order and a sense of common purpose among sovereign, footloose, and money-hungry individualists." Some religious people who have read Johnson's work have accused him of being reductionistic. They think that Johnson has taken a thoroughly-religious episode in American history and has turned it into something else entirely. I'm not sure that that criticism will stick. Read it and see what you think. Either way, like many others, you'll probably be pulled in by this engaging book.

8. Michael J. Lee, The Erosion of Biblical Certainty: Battles over Authority and Interpretation in America (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). As the author describes it, this book "examines how learned Americans dealt with the new and often unsettling ideas" coming out of Europe in the early eighteenth century, and that raised critical questions about the status of the Christian Scriptures and how they should be understood. Lee argues that by taking up evidentialist challenges to conventional views and literal interpretations of the Bible, American biblical scholars "gradually became increasingly naturalistic in their understanding of revelation." In effect, they conceded "that the Bible was accountable to outside authorities and needed to be reconciled to new fields of knowledge." The majority of English rational Protestants were confident that true reason would never contradict what the Bible affirmed. They believed that, if anything, rational inquiry would always confirm the Scriptures. Their American counterparts agreed. But neither group seems to have anticipated that their latitudinarian approach would subject revelation to independent investigation to test its veracity. In effect, the assumptions and presuppositions of the debate turned out to be the sources of the decline of traditional positions during the nineteenth century.

9. Ussama Makdisi, Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East (Cornell University Press, 2008). On one level, Artillery of Heaven simply tells the story of American Protestant missionaries and one As’ad Shidyaq. Born in 1798, Shidyaq lived in that part of the Ottoman Empire now known as the Lebanese Republic. His life forever changed when he became the first convert to Protestant Christianity in that part of the world, and was subsequently tortured and killed. He thus became the first Protestant martyr of the American mission to the Middle East. As interesting and significant as this story is, Makdisi has received special notice for how he tells it. In general, most historical accounts of Christian missionary work are examples of institutional, denominational history. This is only natural since those producing the historiography are members of the community of faith that conceived and conducted the mission activities they describe. Makdisi presents another possibility. As he puts it, "[t]he only way to tell a story of a cross-cultural encounter involving Americans and Arabs is to enlarge dramatically the conventional scope of inquiry."

10. George M. Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture. New edition (Oxford University Press, 2006). The first edition of this book appeared in 1980 and instantly became a classic of American religious history. Marsden's basic conclusion was that fundamentalists of the late-19th and early-20th centuries  "experienced profound ambivalence toward the surrounding culture." He acknowledges that such is true of many distinct groups and movements. But, he notes, conservative Protestants in the U.S. went from being respectable in the 1870s to being peripheral and a laughingstock by the 1920s. What happened? Marsden answers that historians can only respond to such questions not by proving anything—not scientifically, anyway—but by an illumination that comes by way of what he calls "sympathetic insight." In his description of fundamentalism in America, Marsden begins by insisting that the phenomenon was essentially a religious movement. At the same time, like all other religious movements, fundamentalism lived within and responded to a distinctive culture. And that has everything to do with its character.

11. Mark R. Stoll, Inherit the Holy Mountain: Religion and the Rise of American Environmentalism (Oxford University Press, 2015). This book begins with an important historical footnote: back in 1967 Lynn White Jr. published an essay in Science magazine "claiming that Christianity had caused the environmental crisis." As Stoll points out, White's idea is one that lingers "in the back of a lot of people's minds when they think about religion and the environment." The author noticed, however, that many figures in the history of American environmentalism grew up in either Congregational or Presbyterian churches, both types "in the Calvinist tradition." What was the connection? Starting with questions like that, Stoll has written a unique book, one that "overlays American environmental history on American religious history." He makes a solid case that, in fact, religion had everything to do with the rise of American environmentalism, and that a person's formative religious outlook brings with it a controlling theology and view of the world, facets of thought that always make a difference in the way a person considers nature. Our environmental crises would not improve with the disappearance of religion, but it might improve with a religious tradition that could, like the old Calvinists, bring about systemic change for the better.

12. Molly Worthen, Apostles of Reason: The Crisis of Authority in American Evangelicalism (Oxford University Press, 2014). This book is an intellectual history of conservative Protestantism in America from the end of the Second World War to the early years of the twenty-first century. Worthen defends her approach by pointing out that while not all thoughts and thinkers are equally good, scholars must take into account "that all people think, and that material forces alone cannot explain human experience." Though not herself an evangelical, Worthen evinces a real appreciation for her subjects and what she calls their crisis of authority. So, what does she believe is the crisis? In order to hear her answer, we must first understand her idea that the identity of American evangelicals is revealed not so much by their beliefs, but by their struggles. Worthen insists that what unites modern evangelicals is not their doctrinal conformity--which they have never been able to achieve--but their shared questions "borne out of their peculiar relationship to the convulsions of the early modern era." In other words, if we want to comprehend who evangelicals are, we should listen not to their confident affirmations, but to the questions and doubts with which they constantly wrestle.

American Political and Cultural History

13. Karen Halttunen, Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-class Culture in America, 1830-1870 (Yale University Press, 1982). Ever wondered why charades is a well-known game in America? As Karen Halttunen explains, it has something to do with cultural changes that unfolded in the U.S. beginning in the 1830s. The so-called Market Revolution and the growth of cities in America generated a new social phenomenon: anonymity, the problem (and potential) of becoming a face in the crowd. In a sprawling city unknown by the young man who had recently moved there seeking a job, who could he trust? America's response to this question was to establish certain habits, manners, and clothing that would make up the look and the way of respectable people. These kinds of social and cultural markers would indicate, it was hoped, who the good people were. The weakness of the plan, of course, was that when motivated by some less-than-virtuous desire, bad people could adopt the look just as well as good folks could. There are reasons why con men often succeed.

14. Jill Lepore, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (Knopf, 2005). Grave suspicions about slave insurrections. The heartless treatment of black people: falsely accused, arrested, jailed, beaten, falsely convicted, and then burned at the stake or hanged, one after the other. It's all the stuff of the antebellum South, right? Not always. In this case, such horrors were perpetrated in pre-Revolutionary New York City! Read it and weep. The detail of this book will engage and impress you. The episode it relates will make you wonder about bigger questions: How is it that we human beings justify inhumanity? How do we legitimize incredible violence? Lepore is one of the most popular American historians of our day, and with good reason. She has an eye for great stories and tales that have yet to be really told.

15. Mark Ribowsky, Whiskey Bottles and Brand New Cars: The Fast Life and Sudden Death of Lynyrd Skynyrd (Chicago Review Press, 2015). Disclaimer: If you check out the Amazon reviews of this book, you'll hear it panned and pummeled again and again. Informed fans and self-appointed sleuths love to hate it. I decided to read it anyway, as a sort of guilty pleasure. Ribowsky is a good writer, maybe a bit too "good," as he often uses sappy language and way too many words for my taste. Sometimes, reading Ribowsky is like watching a B-rate movie that you just can't pull yourself away from. Sure it's kind of cheesy, but you don't want to miss what comes next. He emphasizes the essential and central role played by Ronnie Van Zandt. The band was always his band. In fact, Ribowsky convincingly argues that without Ronnie, there would never have been anything like Lynyrd Skynyrd.

16. George Vecsey, Baseball: A History of America's Favorite Game (Modern Library, 2006). If you're a long-time, well-versed fan of baseball, this book won't tell you much that you didn't already know. On the other hand, if you're more like me--someone who likes baseball, who keeps up with a certain team, but who doesn't know that much about the history of the game--then this book is for you. Vecsey is a veteran New York Times sports columnist who writes chapters as though they were long magazine articles. Some of his chapters tell stories of dark episodes (for example, "The Black Sox" and "Four Scandals"). Other chapters focus on the life and times of incredible players and personalities ("The Babe" and "Jackie Robinson"). Vecsey has a serious crush on almost all of his subjects, but he doesn't allow love to get in the way of insight. Above all, he knows how to write. The result is a book that, if you care anything about baseball, you'll wind up savoring like a good cup of coffee or a favorite dessert.

So, what were some of the better things you read in 2016? Has anyone else read the titles (or authors) I've listed here? And, what's on your reading agenda for 2017?

Production or Consumption: Which Comes First?

Jan de Vries, The Industrious Revolution: Consumer Behavior and the Household Economy, 1650 to the Present. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Jan de Vries says that this book “is a study in economic history,” one that addresses “consumer aspirations rather than productive activities,” and that focuses “on the household unit rather than the individual” (ix). He asserts that in the history of consumer behavior, demand does not simply follow supply. Instead, demand interacts with supply. A second part of his argument is that consumer demand is represented not by the tastes of individuals, but rather by the desires of family units. Consumer demand that stems from households, and a willingness to work more in order to meet that demand, is what de Vries means by the term industrious revolution (ix-x).

Most of the book deals with “northwestern Europe: England, the Low Countries, and parts of France and Germany” and also British North America during the so-called long eighteenth century, 1650-1850 (x). In short, de Vries says that the industrious revolution both preceded and helped to generate the industrial revolution. Along the way, he provides some answers to a few basic questions about the history of consumption. For example, is consumption guided more by consumer agency, or by structural and institutional forces like manufacturers, merchants, and cultural traditions? The author notes that most theorists have operated on the premise that supply precedes demand. He argues, by contrast, that the relationship between supply and demand is much more interactive. His thesis illustrates the idea of reciprocity:

[M]y historical claim is that northwestern Europe and British North America experienced an “industrious revolution” during the long eighteenth century, roughly 1650-1850, in which a growing number of households acted to reallocate their productive resources (which are chiefly the time of their members) in ways that increased both the supply of market-oriented, money-earning activities and the demand for goods offered in the marketplace (10).

Naturally, a simultaneous increase in both demand and supply, one that moves a society from poverty to relative prosperity, assumes a coordinated and increasingly-efficient system of labor and consumption. According to de Vries, that is exactly what happened in “significant parts of western Europe (and colonial North America)” over “the course of the long eighteenth century" (72).

I thoroughly enjoyed learning what I did from this book. Among other things, The Industrious Revolution corroborated and added to some things I have gained from a couple of my other recent books. In Chapter 3, a subsection titled “The Working Year” compares medieval and early modern Europe to what at least some parts of Europe became with the rise of the Protestant Reformation. Effectively, almost all of the many holy days were deleted from the annual cycle. As de Vries points out, the Reformation permitted people to work, at least, about 20% more each year (87-92). This part resonates with Robert Bartlett, Why Can the Dead Do Such Great Things? Saints and Worshippers from the Martyrs to the Reformation (Princeton, 2013), in which the author describes the effect that the Reformation had on the cult of the saints. The significant increase in available working days that came with the Reformation makes me wonder: which came first, assent to Protestant teachings, or a desire for more work for the sake of more consumption?

Also in Chapter 3, under “Agricultural Specialization,” de Vries notes that American historians have sometimes imagined that there were, at one time, many Jeffersonian, landed, and self-sufficient gentlemen. Afterward, beginning sometime around 1830, a Jacksonian market revolution changed everything in America. But the fact is, says de Vries, in the Jeffersonian period Americans were feverishly trading the natural resources of North America for consumer goods from abroad, especially England. In other words, long before the Jacksonian Era, Americans were neck-deep in the trans-Atlantic market (95-96). This observation completely matches the evidence presented by Kariann Yokota in her book, Unbecoming British: How Revolutionary America Became a Postcolonial Nation (Yale, 2011).

"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).