Humanists and Reformers: A History of the Renaissance and Reformation. by BardThompson; A Short History of Renaissance and Reformation Europe: Dances over Fire andWater. by Jonathan W. Zophy; The European Reformations. by Carter LindbergReview by: Scott HendrixThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Autumn, 1997), pp. 831-833Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2542997 .

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Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII / 3 (1997)

Book Reviews

Humanists and Reformers: A History of the Renaissance and Reforma- tion. Bard Thompson. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1996. x + 742 pp. $36.00.

A Short History of Renaissance and Reformation Europe: Dances over Fire and Water. Jonathan W Zophy. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1996. xvi + 317 pp. $24.00.

The European Reformations. Carter Lindberg. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1996. xvi + 444 pp. $24.95.

The appearance of these textbooks in the same year is a welcome occasion to reflect on Renaissance and Reformation studies and on the written presentation best suited to teach them. All three authors taught or have taught these subjects for years and wrestled with the best way to conceive the material and to present it to their students. Reading these books together raises fundamental questions about European history between 1300 and 1600. Over and above the course of events described neutrally as fourteenth-, fifteenth-, or sixteenth- century studies, how do we appraise the value that interpreters old and new have placed upon the rebirth and reform that marked those centuries? This is the common question faced by the authors of these books, and their answers prompt us to confront this question again.

Humanists and Reformers is the most traditional and imposing of the three texts. Not yet completed at the time of Bard Thompson's death in 1987, the manuscript was updated, edited, and illustrated by several people, including his wife, Bertha T. Thompson, who com- piled the stunning illustrations from the slide collection that she had assembled for the course lectures of her husband. In addition to 140 black-and-white prints, 82 color plates are clus- tered among the 674 pages of text more or less evenly divided between Renaissance and Reformation. In addition, thirteen of the chapters contain excursuses on topics ranging from Castiglione's Book of the Courtier to Foxe's Book of Martyrs.Although he acknowledges that the Reformation was a popular movement in contrast to the more elite Renaissance,Thompson made no attempt to write the history of that movement. The English Reformation, for example, receives over one hundred pages in two chapters while the Anabaptists and the left wing take up only ten pages. "Nothing more distinguishes the Renaissance in all its parts than humanism," wrote Thompson, and the same might be said about his book. Renaissance humanism is the dominant theme. The first half is tellingly entitled the "Age of the Italian [emphasis mine] Renaissance." The second half, though called the "Age of the Reforma- tion," contains one part on the "Northern Renaissance" and an excursus on Saint Peter's Basilica that dominates the chapter on the Counter-Reformation.

In some obvious ways, Zophy's Short History is the antithesis of Thompson's tome. It is less than half as long and contains no color plates. The table of contents displays no clear demarcation of Renaissance and Reformation. Honoring requests from his classes, Zophy designed a "student-friendly" text. Every chapter but one contains a short chronology and a list of suggested readings. Instead of ideas and events, Zophy emphasized the people of the story, especially those women whose roles are not sufficiently recognized in traditional texts. A final chapter on the legacy of the period assesses the impact made by the Renaissance and the Reformation on religion and culture.Very helpful maps dot the text, and the style is readable, although some headings, like "Big Names in the Reform of Basel," seem out of

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832 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXVIII / 3 (1997)

place even in a text designed to capture student interest. For all that, Zophy's treatment differs from Thompson's more in style than in substance.

The concept of Renaissance still dominates the story. According to Zophy it refers to "the international cultural movement that emerged during the fourteenth century in Italy and spread to much of the rest of the world by the seventeenth century." By contrast, the Refor- mation seems secondary, limited to movements of religious reform that overlapped the Renaissance and including many of the same people. The Radical Reformation is included in the chapter on Zwingli and the Swiss while two chapters are once more devoted to the Reformation in England and Scotland. Although individual lives and their significance are prominent in the text and among the illustrations, Zophy's treatment of the period is no more popular than Thompson's. Martin Luther appears out of nowhere as the fomenter of a revolt against the papacy, and the English Reformation starts with "King Harry's Trouble with Women." The religion and politics of the late Middle Ages, treated in chapter 3 as an "Age of Disasters," form a dark background against which the awakened culture of the Renaissance can shine. No rationale for the Reformation is apparent; it just happened that a few enlightened individuals desired to reform the church.

The book by Lindberg offers a real alternative to both of the above. It is about the Ref- ormation, not the Renaissance, and it will best fit a course on the Reformation that empha- sizes the theology and religion of the sixteenth century.The Renaissance is reduced to an aspect of the late Middle Ages. As a noun it usually refers to humanism, or it appears occa- sionally in phrases like "the Renaissance papacy."This reduction means that the Reformation takes center stage and requires a definition worthy of its prominence. Lindberg seeks to meet this requirement in two ways. First, he decides to use the plural form "Reformations" because he views the Reformation as a time of"plural reform movements." Second, he offers a long historiographical discussion of the Reformation, which, though informative, is not explicitly related to his own decision to speak of Reformations.

In the end, no specific definition of the period seems to underlie the text; perhaps that is what Lindberg intended in the first place. The advantage of selecting the plural over the sin- gular is not always obvious, and it can be confusing when the titles of chapters contain both forms. For example, material usually treated as part of the Radical Reformation is contained in two chapters. Karlstadt, Miintzer, and the Peasants' Revolt appear together in a chapter entitled "The Reformation of the Common Man." The Anabaptists, however, appear in a chapter subtitled "The Radical Reformations." Lindberg openly confronts the difficulty of categorizing these groups, but his own decision about how to do it has disconcerting conse- quences. His division could be taken as a restatement of the approach that separates violent radicals from peaceful Anabaptists. His emphasis on "Anabaptist Multiplicity" and on radical reformations in the plural runs the danger of multiplying reformation pluralism to a mean- ingless number. If every visible religious statement in the sixteenth century was a different reformation, the term has little meaning beyond the sum of all attempts at religious reform in the sixteenth century.

Of course, a dedicated nominalist can write history as the story of particulars without applying general concepts.A textbook, however, owes it to students to make sense out of the phenomena and to argue why they should be studied in a course at all. To Lindberg's credit, his book does that effectively despite my reservations about choosing the plural form. I used the book in a course on the Reformation, and my students liked it.The pluralistic approach does have the advantage of not overwhelming the story with ideology.The teacher can offer a comprehensive interpretation, as I did, without having to argue constantly with the text. Lindberg's book also has other good features. His treatment of various movements and

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Book Reviews 833

regions is more evenhanded than most. England and Scotland receive one long chapter; the radicals are handled in the two aforementioned spots; events in the Netherlands are also described in a short chapter. A long chapter on the late Middle Ages, painted as a period in crisis, provides a serviceable context for the Reformation. While there will not be enough such material for social historians, the author's special research on welfare and education contributes to the richness of the story.The extensive literature on the Reformation is up- to-date and well integrated into the text. The aids are ample and excellent for private study and classroom use: a chronology, genealogies, maps, a glossary, bibliography, and index. Despite his pluralistic concept, Lindberg does indicate that the Eusebian model of a superior pre-Constantinian Christianity provided a common starting point for reformers. Further- more, the identification of "legacies of the Reformations," as his final chapter names them, suggests that there was more coherence to the Reformations than his use of the plural implies.

Textbooks are written and selected to fit typical courses already being offered, and any of these could be used with profit in the specific settings which they suit. One common feature they share is striking: in contrast to the debunking tone set by some recent research, these books convey the message that the Renaissance and Reformation are in fact significant and worthy of study even though they do not tell the whole story of fifteenth- and sixteenth- century Europe. I was also surprised to discover that Thompson's text, which subjugates the Reformation to the Renaissance and popular to elite culture, has the most meaningful state- ment to make about the nature of the sixteenth-century Reformation and why it still makes sense to study Reformation and Renaissance together. Appropriately for a textbook, he rec- ognized and stated the obvious: the Reformation was mainly about Christianity. Discussing the humanist conception of history adopted by Protestant reformers,Thompson wrote: "The revival of learning (the Renaissance) and the revival of Christianity (the Reformation) were both to be achieved by the same sort of curious historical procedure of overleaping the Middle Ages to rediscover the golden age of classical antiquity and primitive Christianity."

Actually, the procedure was not curious at all when one considers the purpose of the recovery envisioned by humanists and reformers alike.While Renaissance humanists were using classical antiquity to complete the stalled civilization of Europe, reformers of all stripes were using early Christianity to complete the wayward Christianization of Europe. Curious- ness aside, the daring agendas of humanists and reformers often overlapped each other to such an extent that an informed book on both, despite its obvious limitations, shines a wel- come coherent light on the period.This light comes from the top down, to be sure, and fails to illuminate much of life at the bottom that recent scholarship has worked so hard to exca- vate. Still, these textbooks teach a valuable lesson to all students of the period: the power of the categories Renaissance and Reformation to attract and to explain should not be under- estimated. Scott Hendrix ...... .... Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg

Renaissance Florence: The Invention of a New Art. A. Richard Turner. New York: Abrams, 1997. 176 pp. 117 b&w & color illus. $18.95 PB.

In this little volume Turner attempts to recover the historical consciousness of the early Renaissance by examining a number of interrelated topics in an Introduction and seven brief chapters. The Introduction lays out the geographical, civic, and economic situation of Flo- rence in relation to other towns and areas of the Italian peninsula.The author pays appropri- ate homage to Jacob Burckhardt's original and still important analysis of the development of

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