








































[Expo. 3.2  (2009) 238–244] Expositions (print)  ISSN 1747-5368  
doi:10.1558/expo.v3i2.238 Expositions (online) ISSN 1747-5376 

© Equinox Publishing Ltd. 2009, Unit 6, The Village, 101 Amies Street, London SW11 2JW

Reformation Now

WILLIAM MONTER

Northwestern University (Emeritus)

Bridget Heal.  The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: 
Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2007. 358 pp, hb $103.99. ISBN-13: 9780521871037.

Benjamin J.  Kaplan.  Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Prac-
tice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard 
University Press, 2007. 432 pp, hb $29.95, ISBN-13: 9780674024304; 
pb $18.95. ISBN-13: 9780674034730.

James Simpson. Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Refor-
mation Opponents.  Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.  
368 pp, hb $27.95. ISBN-13: 9780674026711.

Kirsi Stjerna. Women and the Reformation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2009. 
280pp, hb $94.95. ISBN-13: 9781405114226; pb 34.95, ISBN -13: 
9781405114233.

The reviewer admits to a mild case of amnesia, not having taught the 
age of the Protestant and Catholic reformations in this millennium. In 
addition, this effort represents a very brief and timid dip into a bit of 
the deep waters of recent scholarship: I have sampled only a very few 
of several possible recent titles, all issued by prestigious presses. But I 
can report that the Protestant Reformation has survived, and probably 
even benefited from, the ecumenical second half of the twentieth cen-
tury. It has reacted to the feminist challenge by incorporating feminist 
scholarship—probably a necessary step. It even seems in reasonably 
good shape, judging from the fact that a large majority of the 150 
panels about to be presented during the Sixteenth Century Studies 
Conference at Geneva in April 2009 still deal with religious subjects.

I shall discuss these four works by moving from the most narrowly- 
focused to the broadest-gauged and from the least to the most noteworthy:



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1.  More than thirty years after first dipping into Roland Bainton’s  
elegantly-written three-volumes of biographical profiles entitled Wom-
en of the Reformation,1 I enjoyed a truly retro experience leafing through 
Stjerna’s volume with an almost identical title (which incidentally tells 
me that Bainton’s work has also been reprinted as recently as 2001).2 

It is specifically designed for the women who will ensure the contin-
uation of Protestant seminaries and ministries while learning about 
their historical marginalization by its founding fathers, but employs 
basically the same method as Bainton, concentrating on “mainstream” 
Protestant women worthies of the sixteenth century. Excluded are 
the confessionally-incorrect, although undeniably brave, Anabaptist  
female prophets and martyrs on the left, and the single most impor-
tant woman in the history of sixteenth-century Protestantism on the 
right (Elizabeth I “had her own reasons to remain in public as asexual 
and neutral in religious matters as possible” (17). Probably the most 
valuable section of the work is its bibliography, which offers impres-
sive testimony to the depth of scholarship produced by the generation 
working after Bainton.

2. James Simpson, a senior professor of English at Harvard by way of 
Australia, proposes to break a lance attacking what he polemically calls 
“English Bible-reading fundamentalism” through a close investigation 
of the circumstances surrounding its birth in the England of Henry 
VIII, Thomas More, and William Tyndale. While it is always laud-
able to watch one’s academic neighbors make an effort to venture into 
intellectual and social history, this work is by far the lightest of these 
three. It is elegant (what else can one expect from an author with these 
credentials?) but somehow seems destined to become as ephemeral as 
the polemical works by More and Tyndale which it dissects. There are 
no intellectual heroes here, only a single omnipresent villain.

Simpson’s polemical stance adopts the egregious tactic of frequently 
viewing Tyndale through the lens of a major uncritical recent admirer, 
David Daniell, who serves as the author’s surrogate defender of Tudor-
era Biblical “fundamentalism.” Here lays the book’s heart, filling half of 
its eight chapters, sandwiched between a brief retelling of the heroic age 
of English Bible translation and a profile of More as his rhetorical strat-
egies increasingly came to resemble those of his heretical enemies. For a 



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historian, one of Simpson’s most satisfying chapters revolves around the 
essentially ahistorical approach of early Evangelical Biblicism.

A narrowly British focus deprives Simpson of the reflection that 
Protestantism is not the only, and much less the first, scripturally-
bound major religion. To Anglo-American readers, the term “funda-
mentalism” evokes Iran rather than Utah. (Simpson might retort that 
non-Arabic versions of the Koran are officially prohibited for believ-
ers, so for them his topic of “vernacular fundamentalism” becomes an 
oxymoron.) A third major book-based religion, similarly omitted here, 
Judaism is much older than either Christianity or Islam. But none of 
Simpson’s intellectual players considered it, nor did Henry VIII until 
he became deeply enmeshed in Old Testament textual glosses during 
his divorce proceedings.

Looming in the background is a purely academic nemesis, the pow-
er of representations. Simpson deplores that the “historiographical  
default position” of humanistic scholarship since the 1980s has been 
that “everything is constructed” and warns against “forever relocat-
ing ‘reality’ into the field of ‘representation’ when we are dealing with 
how threats to life were experienced” (67). As Simpson and his readers 
know, both of his major protagonists, More the relentless persecutor 
of heretics and Tyndale the Bible translator, experienced public execu-
tions within a few years of each other. 

Discussing More’s precocious activism against Lutheran heresy, 
Simpson briefly evokes (47) his personal leadership of a raid on Lon-
don’s Steelyard, which lodged Hanseatic merchants from Germany, in 
December 1525, and the subsequent ceremony at London’s cathedral 
where four German merchants abjured heresy on pain of death while 
their books were burned. As this detail reminds us, early Protestantism, 
from its name downwards, was originally German; and we accordingly 
turn to German-centered essay in comparative religious history.

3. After the obligatory introduction to the state of her subject around 
1500, Bridget Heal’s meticulously-textured investigation of the cultur-
al impact of the Virgin Mary effectively begins where Simpson ends, 
around the mid-sixteenth century as Luther’s Reformation hardened 
into institutional rigidity. Here we confront a carefully revised ver-
sion of a 2001 doctoral thesis, done under the supervision of a leading  



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social historian, Robert Sribner, and revised after his death under guid-
ance from his star pupil, Lyndal Roper. Heal’s research design becomes 
simultaneously biconfessional and trilocal, comparing and contrasting 
the post-Reformation religious situation of the Virgin Mary in three 
carefully-selected major German free cities: Augsburg, Nuremberg, 
and Cologne.

The first was Germany’s largest biconfessional city, an early convert 
to Zwingli’s form of Reformation rather than Luther’s, but divided 
after 1555 between Lutherans and Catholics; it provided material for 
some of Germany’s sharpest contrasts between Protestant and Catholic 
devotional practices, including those involving Mary. The second was 
Germany’s first major city to adopt Lutheranism and it governed a 
sizable rural hinterland; both developments tended to produce more 
cautious responses to traditional forms of Marian devotion, for exam-
ple keeping about forty hausmadonnen (sculpted house signs depict-
ing the Virgin) into the mid-nineteenth century (23). Her third city,  
Cologne, was the only major Catholic free city. It remained deeply tradi-
tional and uninterested in the kinds of militant Counter-Reformation,  
Jesuit-led forms of Marian devotion that became dominant in bicon-
fessional Augsburg.   

Fortified by scholarship emerging between her thesis and her book, 
especially Beth Kreitzer’s Reforming Mary,3 which demonstrated a sharp 
downgrading of Mary in Lutheran sermons after 1550, Heal sustains 
her approach convincingly. It is, for example, useful and pertinent to 
note the different Protestant responses to both venerable and newer 
feast days honoring the Virgin.  Augsburg kept only one while Nurem-
berg maintained three, and traditionalist Cologne kept seven.

Gender history is deftly managed in Heal’s final chapter, which once 
again softens the oversimplified dichotomy between the powerless and 
insignificant Protestant mother of Jesus and the militaristic Jesuit-pro-
moted Queen of Heaven leading Catholic armies.  Catholic women 
expressed more agency than Protestants, sometimes with a Marian 
tinge: Cologne’s Margareta Lynnerie founded a community of devout 
virgins in the 1590s where the Mother of God “was to be emulated in 
daily life, [but] not imitated in fervent visions” (273–274).  

4. Last but best comes Benjamin Kaplan’s valuable and persuasive 



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reformulation of the outdated “rise of toleration” hypothesis. His 
well-written and broadly-gauged exploration of the modalities of con-
fessional coexistence from the early Protestant Reformation to 1800 
downplays the importance of the eighteenth-century “Enlightenment” 
while emphasizing the various processes of accommodation tried out 
almost everywhere that rival Christian confessions lived in close prox-
imity to one another. This book could only have been written by some-
one grounded in Dutch history—a land where confessional coexist-
ence was uniquely vital to political survival and where the eighteenth 
century is perceived as an age of relative decline, an “age of silver” 
following an “age of gold”—and its author teaches in both London 
and Amsterdam.  

Kaplan precedes the central section of his triptych with a sketch of 
the mutual exclusivity of various churches in post-Reformation Europe.  
This is now very well-explored terrain, thanks to the proliferation of 
studies of “confessionalization” (into which Heal’s mongraph fits), but 
it is a necessary prelude for a secularized European and American audi-
ence, because it emphasizes the seriousness of the problem that results 
from combining “no salvation outside the true church” with “com-
pel them to enter,” both of which were truisms for sixteenth-century 
Christendom.

The heart of Kaplan’s account is an elegant, richly-developed descrip-
tion and analysis of the workings of three major strategies (suburban 
churches, secret churches, and shared churches) which developed after 
Luther’s Reformation had hardened into rival confessional churches 
whose members lived in close proximity to each other, often in neigh-
boring villages or even inside the same set of city walls. Such situations, 
Kaplan points out, existed almost everywhere in Europe north of the 
Iberian and Italian peninsulas (a solidly Catholic bloc, policed by state 
Inquisitions) and south of Scandinavia (a solidly Lutheran bloc). He 
calls the three most workable strategies by their contemporary names 
(Auslauf, Schuilkerk, and Simultaneum) and introduces each with an 
especially vivid local example: Herstal, a suburban church serving the 
large Lutheran population of late sixteenth-century Vienna; “Our Lady 
of the Attic,” the best-preserved and one of the largest secret Catholic 
churches in Amsterdam; and Biberach’s single well-preserved parish 



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church, which served both the Lutheran and Catholic congregations 
of this small Imperial free city.

I had no idea of the extent of these practices across the heat of Europe 
before reading this section.  For example, I knew that his leading exam-
ple of a concealed Catholic church in seventeenth-century Amsterdam 
had become a museum, but I had not realized there were about twenty 
others functioning in the city at the same time, with proportionately 
smaller numbers in other major Dutch cities. It is also instructive to 
read Kaplan’s tales about Heal’s three exemplary cities. Augsburg, a 
much-studied city, fills eight lines in his index and provides some of 
his most interesting information about religiously-mixed marriages, 
including the memorable example of twins where the boy was raised 
Lutheran and the girl Catholic (281, 284, 288). Nuremberg served to 
illustrate “the high degree of sacral unity a city could achieve” through 
the Reformation and subsequently handled the problem of confession-
al coexistence through two “satellite communities” outside its walls, 
one for Jews and the other for French Huguenots (62, 169–170). At 
Cologne, Lutherans acquired a “secret, oppressed house-church” by the 
late sixteenth century; its Reformed Protestants subsequently devel-
oped two or three, for linguistic rather than doctrinal reasons.  And, in 
1716, its Catholic students went on a raid beyond the city’s border in 
order to destroy a Calvinist church being built in Protestant territory 
(183–184, 166–167).

I never expect to encounter a more persuasive explanation of why 
certain kinds of non-official Protestant churches should be partially 
(but not completely) concealed, nor a more sophisticated discussion of 
why non-Christian communities of this era not only accepted but gen-
erally welcomed their spatial segregation. The central part of Divided 
by Faith (chapters 5–8, headed “Arrangements”) should be required 
reading for anyone teaching an undergraduate course on Reformation 
Europe. If your students are motivated elitists, assign it; if they are cap-
tive time-servers, steal a lecture or two from it. The same advice applies 
to his tenth chapter on conversions and mixed marriages.

Nobody sees everything. Kaplan offers an excellent summary of the 
treatment of Europe’s Jews, while Orthodox Christians receive only 
negligible attention.  It seems significant that Kaplan pays consider-



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able attention to the peculiar circumstances of both Jews and Muslims 
in the city of Venice, by far the most tolerant oasis in Mediterranean  
Europe, but says virtually nothing about its numerous Greek Orthodox 
residents. This account also pays little attention to the social history of 
the Uniate church in Catholic Poland or the difficult conditions afflict-
ing “Old Believers” in Europe’s easternmost reaches. I also wish Kaplan 
had been able to discuss the situation in Europe’s largest traditionally-
Christian city under long-term Islamic rule during this period. When 
Budapest fell to the Ottomans in 1541, its Latin Christian population 
fled en masse; after its bloody reconquest by a Christian army 150 years 
later, most of its Orthodox residents fled. 

Kaplan also overlooked the only occasion in Reformation-era  
Europe when a sovereign territory split itself along purely religious 
lines.  The relatively small Swiss canton of Appenzell divided into Prot-
estant and Catholic micro-states at its annual general assembly in 1597, 
after reaching complete political deadlock over a fundamental political  
decision: whether or not to accept a perpetual military alliance with the 
Spanish monarchy (Appenzell’s Catholics pointed out that the alterna-
tive meant introducing taxation). The result created two intertwined 
“half-cantons” which still exist today, providing material for numerous 
jokes from their neighbors about Protestant/Catholic differences.  

Looking back at how I sketched the so-called “rise of toleration” over 
25 years ago, I am genuinely delighted that the current generation 
of Reformation historians has been able to describe and rearrange it 
with such subtlety and richness of detail. Benjamin Kaplan has made a 
convincing case for the significance of the various subterfuges through 
which Reformation-era Europeans persuaded themselves to accommo-
date religious diversity long before their leading cultural values became 
secularized. I wish I could have written such a work myself. 

Notes

1. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1971.

2. Lima, OH: C.S.S. Publishing, 2001.

3. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004.


