The Reformation

"Yes, so my next choice is Reformation by Diarmaid MacCulloch. This book is not one you necessarily see on lists of the top books about the Renaissance. MacCulloch is fascinated by the key moment where many scholars would say that the Renaissance ends. Someone like Burckhardt would say that it concludes in the early sixteenth century. MacCulloch is fascinated by the fact that this coincides with the moment at which the Reformation happens. If we take it as starting in 1517—when Luther’s Theses are nailed to the church at Gutenberg—we see that that changes everything. All the things we’ve talked about were inevitably affected by that split in Christendom between the emergence of Protestantism and the Catholic attempt to crush that reformed religious belief. It partly comes down to the printing press. All the challenges to Catholic orthodoxy, before the Lutheran Reformation, had been crushed. But Luther was able to exploit the power of the printing press. Here, again, MacCulloch is very good about the idea of the ‘word.’ Luther always emphasised the overriding power of the word of God. It was now possible to circulate the word of God in hundreds—if not thousands—of copies of a printed book and that was one of the things that, of course, drove the Reformation. MacCulloch says it has affected culture, society and of course religion ever since. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a wonderful book coming from somebody who has such a strong but complicated relationship to religious belief as MacCulloch does. Many of the scholars we’ve been looking at are quite clear—with Baxandall being an exception—that they are not believers in a theological sense But MacCulloch takes very seriously the power of belief. He is also openly gay, and left the Anglican church because of its position on homosexuality. He can say we have to understand the powerfully held belief on both sides of this religious divide, Catholic and Protestant. He’s even-handed and quite brilliant at saying just how powerful that sense of faith is, even for whoever it is that is producing the agenda. For me, this has become a classic book that completely defines how we think about the Reformation. It’s also the period where you have texts being printed in the vernacular languages. We had been looking at a more elite, Latinate tradition and now you have Luther using the power of the printing press to circulate a copy of the Bible in German. They can reach a much wider readership and people can therefore have a much more intimate relationship to the book. Obviously, the book is a sacred object but the printed book, in its own right, is a magical sacred object. It’s a new piece of technology, it’s exciting and different. It’s also something that you can invest in much more. You can circulate books amongst your friends. Believers can start to standardise their beliefs, in a certain sense. MacCulloch is not only a great church historian but also a great historian of the book. So you can imagine someone like Augustine writing in quite an orthodox Catholic tradition. That can actually then be re-appropriated and gives rise to different forms of belief which might actually be antithetical to whatever Augustine may have wanted the text to say. You start to get this moment when readers can appropriate a text and say they want it to do something else. This is a period where religious and political authorities, in particular, have tried to limit the ways in which a text can be read. MacCulloch says there are unintended consequences about how those new forms of technology, those readerships, those networks, can create new forms of belief. It’s not hard and fast. It’s almost accidental. There are these unintended consequences of how people read. This is very important, and MacCulloch’s book made sure that we cannot ever go back to a sort of Burckhardtian, secular idea of the Renaissance. We often pay lip service to the idea of faith and religion in the Renaissance but the fact religion is absolutely central to everything is one of the great insights of this book. There’s a way in which there’s no other period that defines us in such a profound way. We never think of the medieval period as doing that. We never even think of the 18th century Enlightenment period as doing that. MacCulloch ends his book by looking forward and talking about the Enlightenment and how the Reformation affected it. But, still today, it’s always the Renaissance that we go back to in our search for origins. When we try and understand where the modern sense of self, the modern sense of political organisation, the modern sense of culture all come from, we always end up going back to this period: this late 15th/early 16th century moment that we still persist in calling the Renaissance. So, you’re right that this almost brings us full circle and brings us back to Burckhardt. Jacob Burckhardt’s book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860), really starts the whole tradition. It’s the classic argument that the Renaissance emerges in Italy. He says it’s a 14th century moment, that creates this sense of the ‘Renaissance’ that it defines through the Italian city-state, like the Sforza in Milan, and the Medici in Florence. At that time, there was no unified state of Italy, just a series of independent city states. In the medieval period, Burckhardt claims people are ‘dreaming’ under a ‘veil’ of faith and superstition. Medievalists are understandably furious about him saying this. They say it’s nonsense. But it’s a very seductive argument to say that in the Middle Ages people don’t have a sense of their self, and that that emerges through the genius of the Italian people in the fourteenth century and leads to the creation of the great outpouring of art and culture that we have. He talks about everything ending with the Reformation. He says Italy is, in effect, ripped to pieces by what happens, which is, again, a simplification. I tend to start teaching Renaissance courses by looking at Burckhardt. It sets up all the issues that you can then run with but also critique. What’s fascinating and ironic about it is that there is no description of art. There’s very little account of literature and when he tries it, it doesn’t really work. There isn’t really any sense of economic change. In fact, none of the things that we see as quintessentially Renaissance are in Burckhardt’s essay. It’s very much a polemical piece. My students are always very bemused because there are no footnotes, no analysis, it’s just an argument. It’s a very subjective argument, driven by Burckhardt’s position as a member of the Swiss bourgeoisie reacting badly to revolution in the mid-nineteenth century. You can still see traces of that argument in all the texts that we’ve looked at. Jardine is reacting explicitly to Burckhardt. Greenblatt does it as well, he mentions Burckhardt very clearly. Baxandall is coming out of that whole tradition of art history that has been informed by Burckhardt. Eisenstein is still producing a response around the secular drive that Burckhardt was so fascinated by. MacCulloch is probably about the only person who is not squarely interested because he is not a Renaissance scholar by training. He is interested in religious history and this moment is particularly significant. But, of course, he starts his book in 1490, and Burckhardt’s book concludes before 1490. So because of the bleeding-across of these boundaries, the concept of putting institutional, academic, or historical boundaries on the Renaissance is virtually impossible. If you’re an art historian like Baxandall you believe the Renaissance dates from 1350-1450. If you’re a literary scholar, you call it the ‘early modern’ period and you say its dates are 1500-1700. If you’re a church historian, you call it something else. Whereas Burckhardt is telling us it’s very specifically a late 14th to early 15th century phenomenon and then it’s done because it’s all about Italy."