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What were the causes of the German Reformation?
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Germany – The Reformation, 1517-63
In this course, Professor Beat Kümin (University of Warwick) explores the German Reformation. He begins by looking at the causes of the Reformation, before thinking about the role of Martin Luther himself, wider socio-cultural consequences, the reaction of the Catholic Church in response to the Protestant movement, and finally the impact of the Reformation on Europe today.
What were the causes of the German Reformation?
In this module, we explore the causes of the German Reformation, thinking in particular about the religious, political and social reasons for change. As we move through the module, we consider the shortcomings of many members of the clergy, the emerging anti-Roman sentiment within several regions of the Holy Roman Empire, and the importance of contemporary movements such as Humanism and of new technologies such as the printing press.
References:
- Th. Brady et. al. (eds.), German History in Documents and Images: 1500-1648 (2009)
- G. Strauss (ed.), Manifestations of Discontent … on the Eve of the Reformation (1971)
- Peter Blickle, ‘Communal Reformation and peasant piety: The Peasant Reformation and its late medieval origins’, in Central European History 20 (1987)
- Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation: Three Essays (1972)
- Berndt Hamm, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety (2004)
Hello. My name is Bert. Come in.
00:00:03I'm a social and cultural historian at the
00:00:05University of Warwick in the English Midlands.
00:00:08And I teach, among other things, a second year option on the German Reformation.
00:00:10In terms of my personal research interest, I have a focus on local communities,
00:00:15parishes, towns and villages.
00:00:22So I study how these little units are affected by religious and political change.
00:00:24I guess it's generally history from below that I'm interested in.
00:00:31You may see this unfolding in the course of this short lecture series.
00:00:34What are the aims of this course on the German Reformation?
00:00:40I would like to provide you with an impression of the richness of the sources,
00:00:45the complexity of these changes.
00:00:50And I would like you to have an idea about
00:00:52one of the most fundamental transformation processes in European history.
00:00:56I'm structuring the course in five parts will
00:01:01start here with the causes of the Reformation,
00:01:05Then look at the protagonist Martin Luther.
00:01:09The next section will deal with why the
00:01:13social and cultural changes affected by the Reformation,
00:01:16then an examination of the position of the Catholic Church in the 16th century.
00:01:20And finally the question
00:01:24is the Reformation still
00:01:26of any concern
00:01:28to us today?
00:01:30So why was there a Reformation in the 16th century? Well, that's a very big question.
00:01:33It's a complex and multidimensional conglomerate
00:01:38of factors.
00:01:42And to be honest,
00:01:43historians are still debating which ones are the really crucial ones.
00:01:44So I thought maybe a good way of telling you
00:01:48about this is to structure it into the religious,
00:01:51the political, social
00:01:54and the cultural factors
00:01:56starting obviously with the religious field.
00:01:59It was long thought that there had to be something fundamentally
00:02:02wrong with the church on the eve of the Reformation,
00:02:05for there to be such a significant change.
00:02:08And indeed,
00:02:11there are issues and problems at all levels of the
00:02:12hierarchy at the very top with the pope in Rome,
00:02:15we see them getting distracted
00:02:19by all sorts of secular and political preoccupations.
00:02:20They were trying to advance their own family's.
00:02:24There were big patrons of the art,
00:02:27and somehow they tend to forget about
00:02:29the spiritual heart of their responsibilities.
00:02:32Further down the hierarchy, the bishops, who are often badly qualified,
00:02:36they were just chosen for some personal
00:02:40or some political reasons rather than for their
00:02:42spiritual qualification.
00:02:45At the parish level, clergymen were seen to be immoral,
00:02:47not behaving according to the
00:02:51rules of the church. Some of them had concubines.
00:02:53Some of them were absent from their cures. And imagine you are,
00:02:56um,
00:02:59an early modern parent who wants the child
00:03:00baptised and the priest is not in residence.
00:03:03That obviously is a very big concern for you.
00:03:06However, over the last few decades,
00:03:11historians have actually also discovered a lot of other
00:03:13evidence for quite vibrant,
00:03:17quite feverish support for the doctrines of the church, particularly
00:03:19the idea of purgatory,
00:03:24this place between heaven and earth where you can have your
00:03:26soul cleansed of any remaining blemishes of sin after your death.
00:03:29This was a doctrine that evolved over the
00:03:34later Middle Ages in the lay of the enthusiastically
00:03:36jumped on. This as a possibility to prepare for death and to help.
00:03:39The people are already in purgatory,
00:03:44and the key means of helping yourself and your ancestors is to perform good works.
00:03:46So, for instance, attending Mass is saying prayers going on pilgrimage,
00:03:52relieving the poor and contributing to the fabric of your parish churches.
00:03:56So an enormous investment campaign can be seen all across Germany,
00:04:01Small Hanseatic City like Greifswald,
00:04:06had three enormous parish churches built in just about a square mile.
00:04:08So Ben Mueller, for instance,
00:04:15for the city context peter publicly for the country context.
00:04:17They emphasise that hardly ever in any period of church history
00:04:21had the lady been so responsive to these key doctrines.
00:04:24So it can't just be discontent with the church.
00:04:28A personal reason for Luther was his own despair.
00:04:33He tried as hard as he could
00:04:36living
00:04:39the Catholic where he was a monk.
00:04:39After all, he fasted, he said his prayers, and nevertheless, he could never find
00:04:41reassurance that he would be among the people who would be elected by God.
00:04:46He then as a pastor in the Wittenberg City church,
00:04:53came into contact with some of the abuses
00:04:57of the Catholic Church, particularly
00:05:00the increasing tendency to sell spiritual
00:05:02services rather than to encourage people to
00:05:05really be contrived and to do their good works out of conviction.
00:05:08Very famous. And I've got a little
00:05:13wood cart, ear contemporary woodcut exemplifying.
00:05:15This issue is the sale of indulgences and indulgence gives you a
00:05:19reduction of your time that you have to spend in purgatory.
00:05:24And instead of doing this for a good work, you could now simply purchase this.
00:05:27And Luther and many of his contemporaries were scandalised.
00:05:32And we see here the pope with his tiara,
00:05:35handing out these indulgences,
00:05:38and clearly he does it solely for the purpose of money.
00:05:40So some strands of the population started to turn away from that activism,
00:05:45and they were looking for a more contemplative and
00:05:50more personal relationship with Christ in particular in mysticism.
00:05:53They were contemplating the passion of Christ.
00:05:58They were looking at images of Christ suffering on the cross,
00:06:01and they were trying to enter into a personal
00:06:05dialogue with this core personality of the Christian faith.
00:06:07I've got a little picture or illustration here showing you just how cleverly the
00:06:12church instrumentalist the visual culture of the
00:06:17period to tell people about key doctrines.
00:06:21We have Christ standing here on an altar
00:06:25in the north German city of Lubeck,
00:06:28and you can see that from the wounds that he suffered at his crucifixion.
00:06:31The blood is flowing directly into the chalice,
00:06:35illustrating the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation.
00:06:38So that shows you some of the ways in which messages could be communicated some of the
00:06:42ways in which the figure of Christ became more central in the art of the period,
00:06:49and also how much the laity invested in the religious art of the period.
00:06:53Bantam, a German historian,
00:06:59has argued that people were looking increasingly for some form of
00:07:01core message,
00:07:05something that they could really rely on rather than having
00:07:07the multiplicity of these late mediaeval cults and all the
00:07:10spectrum of saints. They wanted to come back to one key
00:07:13instrument of salvation, and Christ was at the heart of that change.
00:07:17Politically speaking,
00:07:23if we move from the religious to the political field
00:07:24and the Holy Roman Empire was a very decentralised polity,
00:07:27which meant there was no clear central control,
00:07:30every individual unit and there were hundreds of them could run
00:07:34their own system and their own political and religious life.
00:07:37People were becoming restless.
00:07:42They were thinking that the empire lacked leadership.
00:07:44The emperor was becoming weak.
00:07:48At the same time, the princes were increasing their power,
00:07:50creating tensions within the Constitution of the Holy Roman Empire,
00:07:53effectively what we would nowadays call Central Europe.
00:07:57So there were manifestos published like the
00:08:02river macho Sigismund in the 14 thirties,
00:08:04calling again for strong leadership.
00:08:06There were grievances put forward by the German estates at the Imperial Diet,
00:08:09for instance, in 15 21
00:08:13and just one are arbitrary choice of the complaints that they were having.
00:08:16You find here on your screen,
00:08:21they say,
00:08:23in the presence of the emperor.
00:08:24That Rome awards German benefits is to unqualified
00:08:26unlearned an unfit person such as gunners,
00:08:29bakers and donkey drivers,
00:08:32most of whom no, not a word of German
00:08:34and never assume that you disconnected with their benefits is
00:08:36thus the German lady receives neither spiritual care
00:08:40nor worldly counsel from the church.
00:08:43So a frustration with Roman interventions with the weakness of Germany,
00:08:45Germany being hijacked by the Roman church,
00:08:49therefore a growth of anti Roman feeling.
00:08:52Anti papal feeling.
00:08:55The laity has cropped up several times already,
00:08:58and I think they are an important factor in the causation of the Reformation.
00:09:00They were becoming increasingly assertive,
00:09:05some of them better educated,
00:09:07and the laity organised itself in town
00:09:10councils in village councils in parish organisations.
00:09:12They had their own resources and increasingly used these
00:09:16resources to mould the church to their liking.
00:09:19So the rising shift in the balance between laity
00:09:24and clergy is another factor we have to consider.
00:09:27And last but not least, in the cultural sphere,
00:09:31humanists were looking to reconstruct pure texts,
00:09:33particularly texts to do with the Scriptures.
00:09:37They were philologist, so they were trying to understand language properly.
00:09:40Again. They were doing research,
00:09:45none more so than the famous celebrated intellectual Erasmus,
00:09:47who produced a Greek version of the New Testament in
00:09:5115 16 that startled everybody in Europe with the purity
00:09:54and the excitement of this language that everybody had almost forgotten about.
00:09:58At the same time, print Europe's first uh,
00:10:04technology of mass communication came into full swing,
00:10:08and that could be instrumental ised by people who were calling for reform.
00:10:11If you want a direct field and if you want to hear the period voices,
00:10:17I would recommend you go to the great online resource
00:10:21German history and documents and images of which the U.
00:10:24R. L.
00:10:28Is on your screen
00:10:29and the collection of sources by Gerald Strauss
00:10:31called manifestations of discontent in pre reformation Germany
00:10:34by way of a short conclusion. Then,
00:10:39perhaps at the time there was not too little but too much
00:10:41undirected piety,
00:10:45and people were looking again for a core message that could secure their salvation,
00:10:46and how this was found will be the subject of our next little presentation.
00:10:52
Cite this Lecture
APA style
Kümin, B. (2018, August 15). Germany – The Reformation, 1517-63 - What were the causes of the German Reformation? [Video]. MASSOLIT. https://massolit.io/courses/the-german-reformation-1517-63/what-were-the-causes-of-the-german-reformation
MLA style
Kümin, B. "Germany – The Reformation, 1517-63 – What were the causes of the German Reformation?." MASSOLIT, uploaded by MASSOLIT, 15 Aug 2018, https://massolit.io/courses/the-german-reformation-1517-63/what-were-the-causes-of-the-german-reformation