The four articles in this issue follow a trajectory from the beginning of the Late Middle Ages through to the end of the seventeenth century. Running through them all is a strong political and ecclesiological thread engaging with pressing themes such as social reform, discipline, privacy and confessional identity. Central to them all is the complex dynamic relation of individuals and communities. While scholarship has sometimes tended to see confessions as static and fixed bodies, together these articles challenge that perspective and reveal a richer, more complex history of mutual dialogue, exchange and conflict.
The first article by Christopher M. Bellitto is ‘Fighting Feasting Fools: Nicolas de Clamanges and the Reform of Saints’ Feast Days’. Its focus is on Nicholas de Clamanages, the late medieval humanist and reformer, and two of his contrasting writings concerning new feasts in the Church. The first De nouis festiuitatibus marks a strident attack on the feast of fools and its riotous celebration during the Christmas season. Here Bellitto argues that Clamanges’ condemnation of this specific feast – which was often the target of Church reformers – also carried over into both a wider attack on the institution of new feasts and a marked prioritising of pious study of God’s Word over the burgeoning late medieval cult of the saints, especially in its popular excesses. Reading this in juxtaposition to his De sanctis innocentibus, a sermon for the feast of the holy innocents is surprising, as this feast was itself often co-opted into the wider revelry of Christmastide. For Clamanges has no hesitation in seeing the innocent children murdered by Herod as the first Christian martyrs and calls upon his listeners to return to a pattern of pious and sober devotion as marked the believers of the New Testament and was evident in the early centuries of the Church. In doing so, Bellitto suggests, Clamanages can be seen as typical of a wider fifteenth-century reform trend, anticipating both Reformation and Counter-Reformation, to both encourage the imitation of the saints and to attack the superstition associated with much popular devotion.
The second article by Jarosław Płuciennik and Marcin Hintz is on ‘The Sandomierz Agreeement as a Model for Eclectic Republicanism in Sixteenth-Century Poland’. The Sandomierz Agreement of 1570 is often highlighted in the historiography for its contribution to a mutual understanding between Protestants, as well as its role in preparing the way for the Warsaw Confederation of 1573 with its landmark statements on religious tolerance. Taking up a perspective of the Long Reformation in Poland, Płuciennik and Hintz argue for the need to consider not only its theological but also its political context. The Sandomierz Agreement was reached at a time when the Protestant nobility wielded considerable power in Poland and when it was still hoped that King Sigismund Augustus might declare for the Reformation. In these terms, Płuciennik and Hintz suggest that it has much to do with seeking to uphold the rights and freedoms of the nobility, as well as the forwarding of the Republican vision of Andrzej Frycz Modrzewski with its ideals of Christian concord and a Polish national Church. While this vision was never achieved, the entwining of Reformed theology and Republicanism remained a powerful combination.
The third article by Michaël Green concerns ‘Private and Public Decisions of the Walloon Consistories in the United Provinces of the Netherlands’. Drawing on the growing field of privacy studies, Green argues that this can help illuminate the lives of the Walloons, the French Reformed Christians, in the Netherlands. His focus is on the Livre Synodal, an important record of the Walloon Synod. Defining privacy in terms of the regulation of access to a person, he points to its complex blending of spatial and conceptual categories in early modernity – where a safe or private space for one person can become hostile territory for another, leading to the violation of their privacy. Green’s focus is on two different case-studies. The first concerns the refusal by a city consistory to pay a Walloon minister and the second concerns the sexual harrassment of a servant by a ministerial candidate. In the first case we find a marked tension between individual and communual privacy, amplified by the Dutch state’s supervision of both the Walloon and Dutch Reformed Church. In the second case the acknowledged violation of the servant’s privacy becomes subordinate to the wider desire for communal privacy and the avoidance of scandal. Green concludes that the dynamic relation between individual and communal privacy can become one important means of disentangling the relation of the political and religious in the Reformation and early modernity.
The final article by Ulrich Lehner is entitled ‘The Semantics of Religious Borders in Early Modern Confessions’ and offers an in-depth discussion of the metaphors of ‘border’ and ‘layer’ and their use in interpreting early modern accounts of confessional identity and dynamics. In particular, Lehner proposes that historians would benefit from using two important philosophical resources: the ontology of Nikolai Hartmann and the related anthropology of Helmuth Plessner. Synthesising both their accounts he argues that we must consider early moderns as layered individuals, in which one ‘determination layer’ can influence another, and the emergence of new strata serves to highlight important intellectual and religious borders. Illustrating the value of this approach, Lehner seeks to apply it to case-studies of the multi-confessional city and the much discussed example of the conversion and reconversion of Martha Zitter, a late seventeenth-century Ursuline nun. In the first case, he points out that the neglect of religious and theological layers of civic identity has tended to distort our understanding of religious confessions and their complex interaction. In the second case, he argues that a widespread failure to properly contextualise or even acknowledge Zitter’s reconversion to Catholicism has served to obscure both her own agency and her layered sense of identity.
Following consultation with the Board of the Society for Reformation Studies the reluctant decision has been taken to discontinue book reviews in the Journal. These have been successful over many years but with the limited number we can publish it has become increasingly clear that we cannot hope to provide a comprehensive review of the field, especially given the existence of Journals largely dedicated to reviews. However, while we will no longer have individual book reviews, we will hope to introduce a new category of review articles. I would therefore encourage anyone interested in writing a review article on a contained and coherent set of recently-released books to contact me as Editor to discuss further possibilities. I would also like to extend my thanks to those editors and contributors who have been involved in the review section of the Journal throughout its existence and who have helped to enrich its content.