What were the causes of the German Reformation?

Hello. My name is Bert. Come in.

I'm a social and cultural historian at the

University of Warwick in the English Midlands.

And I teach, among other things, a second year option on the German Reformation.

In terms of my personal research interest, I have a focus on local communities,

parishes, towns and villages.

So I study how these little units are affected by religious and political change.

I guess it's generally history from below that I'm interested in.

You may see this unfolding in the course of this short lecture series.

What are the aims of this course on the German Reformation?

I would like to provide you with an impression of the richness of the sources,

the complexity of these changes.

And I would like you to have an idea about

one of the most fundamental transformation processes in European history.

I'm structuring the course in five parts will

start here with the causes of the Reformation,

Then look at the protagonist Martin Luther.

The next section will deal with why the

social and cultural changes affected by the Reformation,

then an examination of the position of the Catholic Church in the 16th century.

And finally the question

is the Reformation still

of any concern

to us today?

So why was there a Reformation in the 16th century? Well, that's a very big question.

It's a complex and multidimensional conglomerate

of factors.

And to be honest,

historians are still debating which ones are the really crucial ones.

So I thought maybe a good way of telling you

about this is to structure it into the religious,

the political, social

and the cultural factors

starting obviously with the religious field.

It was long thought that there had to be something fundamentally

wrong with the church on the eve of the Reformation,

for there to be such a significant change.

And indeed,

there are issues and problems at all levels of the

hierarchy at the very top with the pope in Rome,

we see them getting distracted

by all sorts of secular and political preoccupations.

They were trying to advance their own family's.

There were big patrons of the art,

and somehow they tend to forget about

the spiritual heart of their responsibilities.

Further down the hierarchy, the bishops, who are often badly qualified,

they were just chosen for some personal

or some political reasons rather than for their

spiritual qualification.

At the parish level, clergymen were seen to be immoral,

not behaving according to the

rules of the church. Some of them had concubines.

Some of them were absent from their cures. And imagine you are,

um,

an early modern parent who wants the child

baptised and the priest is not in residence.

That obviously is a very big concern for you.

However, over the last few decades,

historians have actually also discovered a lot of other

evidence for quite vibrant,

quite feverish support for the doctrines of the church, particularly

the idea of purgatory,

this place between heaven and earth where you can have your

soul cleansed of any remaining blemishes of sin after your death.

This was a doctrine that evolved over the

later Middle Ages in the lay of the enthusiastically

jumped on. This as a possibility to prepare for death and to help.

The people are already in purgatory,

and the key means of helping yourself and your ancestors is to perform good works.

So, for instance, attending Mass is saying prayers going on pilgrimage,

relieving the poor and contributing to the fabric of your parish churches.

So an enormous investment campaign can be seen all across Germany,

Small Hanseatic City like Greifswald,

had three enormous parish churches built in just about a square mile.

So Ben Mueller, for instance,

for the city context peter publicly for the country context.

They emphasise that hardly ever in any period of church history

had the lady been so responsive to these key doctrines.

So it can't just be discontent with the church.

A personal reason for Luther was his own despair.

He tried as hard as he could

living

the Catholic where he was a monk.

After all, he fasted, he said his prayers, and nevertheless, he could never find

reassurance that he would be among the people who would be elected by God.

He then as a pastor in the Wittenberg City church,

came into contact with some of the abuses

of the Catholic Church, particularly

the increasing tendency to sell spiritual

services rather than to encourage people to

really be contrived and to do their good works out of conviction.

Very famous. And I've got a little

wood cart, ear contemporary woodcut exemplifying.

This issue is the sale of indulgences and indulgence gives you a

reduction of your time that you have to spend in purgatory.

And instead of doing this for a good work, you could now simply purchase this.

And Luther and many of his contemporaries were scandalised.

And we see here the pope with his tiara,

handing out these indulgences,

and clearly he does it solely for the purpose of money.

So some strands of the population started to turn away from that activism,

and they were looking for a more contemplative and

more personal relationship with Christ in particular in mysticism.

They were contemplating the passion of Christ.

They were looking at images of Christ suffering on the cross,

and they were trying to enter into a personal

dialogue with this core personality of the Christian faith.

I've got a little picture or illustration here showing you just how cleverly the

church instrumentalist the visual culture of the

period to tell people about key doctrines.

We have Christ standing here on an altar

in the north German city of Lubeck,

and you can see that from the wounds that he suffered at his crucifixion.

The blood is flowing directly into the chalice,

illustrating the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.

So that shows you some of the ways in which messages could be communicated some of the

ways in which the figure of Christ became more central in the art of the period,

and also how much the laity invested in the religious art of the period.

Bantam, a German historian,

has argued that people were looking increasingly for some form of

core message,

something that they could really rely on rather than having

the multiplicity of these late mediaeval cults and all the

spectrum of saints. They wanted to come back to one key

instrument of salvation, and Christ was at the heart of that change.

Politically speaking,

if we move from the religious to the political field

and the Holy Roman Empire was a very decentralised polity,

which meant there was no clear central control,

every individual unit and there were hundreds of them could run

their own system and their own political and religious life.

People were becoming restless.

They were thinking that the empire lacked leadership.

The emperor was becoming weak.

At the same time, the princes were increasing their power,

creating tensions within the Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire,

effectively what we would nowadays call Central Europe.

So there were manifestos published like the

river macho Sigismund in the 14 thirties,

calling again for strong leadership.

There were grievances put forward by the German estates at the Imperial Diet,

for instance, in 15 21

and just one are arbitrary choice of the complaints that they were having.

You find here on your screen,

they say,

in the presence of the emperor.

That Rome awards German benefits is to unqualified

unlearned an unfit person such as gunners,

bakers and donkey drivers,

most of whom no, not a word of German

and never assume that you disconnected with their benefits is

thus the German lady receives neither spiritual care

nor worldly counsel from the church.

So a frustration with Roman interventions with the weakness of Germany,

Germany being hijacked by the Roman church,

therefore a growth of anti Roman feeling.

Anti papal feeling.

The laity has cropped up several times already,

and I think they are an important factor in the causation of the Reformation.

They were becoming increasingly assertive,

some of them better educated,

and the laity organised itself in town

councils in village councils in parish organisations.

They had their own resources and increasingly used these

resources to mould the church to their liking.

So the rising shift in the balance between laity

and clergy is another factor we have to consider.

And last but not least, in the cultural sphere,

humanists were looking to reconstruct pure texts,

particularly texts to do with the Scriptures.

They were philologist, so they were trying to understand language properly.

Again. They were doing research,

none more so than the famous celebrated intellectual Erasmus,

who produced a Greek version of the New Testament in

15 16 that startled everybody in Europe with the purity

and the excitement of this language that everybody had almost forgotten about.

At the same time, print Europe's first uh,

technology of mass communication came into full swing,

and that could be instrumental ised by people who were calling for reform.

If you want a direct field and if you want to hear the period voices,

I would recommend you go to the great online resource

German history and documents and images of which the U.

R. L.

Is on your screen

and the collection of sources by Gerald Strauss

called manifestations of discontent in pre reformation Germany

by way of a short conclusion. Then,

perhaps at the time there was not too little but too much

undirected piety,

and people were looking again for a core message that could secure their salvation,

and how this was found will be the subject of our next little presentation.