The Early Reformation in Germany

Between Secular Impact and Radical Vision

Tom Scott

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317034865
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Over the last twenty years research on the Reformation in Germany has shifted both chronologically and thematically toward an interest in the 'long' or 'delayed' Reformations, and the structure and operation of the Holy Roman Empire. Whilst this focus has resulted in many fascinating new insights, it has also led to the relative neglect of the early Reformation movement. Put together with the explicit purpose of encouraging scholars to reengage with the early 'storm years' of the German Reformation, this collection of eleven essays by Tom Scott, explores several issues in the historiography of the early Reformation which have not been adequately addressed. The debate over the nature and function of anticlericalism remains unresolved; the mainsprings of iconoclasm are still imperfectly understood; the ideological role of evangelical doctrines in stimulating and legitimising popular rebellion - above all in the German Peasants' War - remains contentious, while the once uniform view of Anabaptism has given way to a recognition of the plurality and diversity of religious radicalism. Equally, there are questions which, initially broached, have then been sidelined with undue haste: the failure of Reforming movements in certain German cities, or the perception of what constituted heresy in the eyes of the Reformers themselves, and not least, the part played by women in the spread of evangelical doctrines. Consisting of seven essays previously published in scholarly journals and edited volumes, together with three new chapters and an historical afterword, Scott's volume serves as a timely reminder of the importance of the early decades of the sixteenth century. By reopening seemingly closed issues and by revisiting neglected topics the volume contributes to a more nuanced understanding of what the Reformation in Germany entailed.

PART B
Social and Political Aspects of the Early Reformation

CHAPTER 2
The Reformation and Modern Political Economy: Luther and Gaismair Compared*

In a fragment of the original notebooks for the Critique of Political Economy of 1858, known as the Grundrisse, Karl Marx referred in passing to Martin Luther as ‘the oldest German political economist’.1 His remark was based upon Luther’s observation in his Sermon on Trade and Usury (1524): ‘It cannot be denied that buying and selling are necessary. They cannot be dispensed with, and can be practiced in a Christian manner, especially when the commodities serve a necessary and honorable purpose.’2 Thereby Luther acknowledged that production for exchange alongside production purely for consumption was a necessary feature of human life. In uttering his bon môt, however, Marx was sacrificing accuracy to apophthegm. While his verdict may possibly hold true for the German lands themselves, it ignores the decisive contribution of late medieval scholastic writers, principally though not exclusively in Italy, to the development of economic thought.3 For the subsequent historiography of the German Reformation, however, Marx’s description of Luther has had particularly unfortunate consequences. First, it has subjected Marxist economists and historians to the compulsion to construct an unbroken and dialectically ineluctable tradition stretching from Luther’s initial attack on the feudal Catholic Church and his objective embodiment of the interests of an emerging bourgeoisie to modern free-market economies under capitalism. Secondly, it has encouraged non-Marxists either to ignore the contribution of the German Reformation in general and Luther in particular to modern political economy, or else to reaffirm Luther’s essentially theological concern with Social and economic issues which by definition precluded him from analyzing, let alone comprehending, the profound transformations of his own day in their own terms.4

Instead, the debate among non-Marxists over the links between Protestantism and capitalism has followed other well-trodden paths which led away from the issues of the early Reformation in the German-speaking lands to the later history of international Protestantism in the guise of Calvinism and the Puritans of England and North America. Apart from over-ingenious exegesis of Luther’s concept of calling or vocation (Beruf), the pioneers of this scholarly tradition – Max Weber and Ernst Troeltsch – marginalized the role of German Protestantism (by which they essentially meant Lutheranism) in the history of bourgeois liberty, or else regarded its contribution as reactionary on account of its alleged subservience to authority. Yet there are good reasons, I believe, to look afresh at the German Reformers’ treatment of Social and economic issues, both to see whether there are connections to be made between the Reformers’ own concerns and the policies adopted by the German princely territories before the age of classical economics, that is to say, the doctrines known as mercantilism, or, in its German variant, cameralism; and to examine whether the Reformers’ response to the economic dislocations of their day was purely conventional or displayed insight into the causes and trajectory of those transformations.

It is self-evident that the early Reformers, both clerical and lay, interpreted the world in the light of Scripture. The message of the Gospel – good neighbourliness, brotherly love, sharing one’s goods, caring for the poor – may be seen as the theological-ethical equivalent of the medieval maxims of auskömmliche, bürgerliche, or ziemliche Nahrung – terms which do not translate precisely into English, but see man’s ends in the satisfaction of immediate needs, production for consumption, and the principle of self-sufficiency, rather than in exchange, accumulation, or the search for profit.5 Those Reformers who gave concrete expression to their vision of the commonweal looked back, almost without exception, to a primarily agrarian world of small communities living by the sweat of their brow and tilling the soil in communion with nature. In such a society handicrafts played a subordinate role, commerce or exchange was restricted to necessities, money was sterile, as Aristotle and the Church fathers had taught, and the profit motive was unknown. Allied to a strong undercurrent of autarky was frequently a streak of moral rigorism, the whole informed by strains of administrative rationalism characteristic of the Renaissance.

The contradictions in such a harmonizing picture need hardly be spelled out. The lessons to be drawn from the Gospel were not clear-cut. Only a minority, the Anabaptists (and not even all of them) fully embraced the common ownership of goods, although the principle of brotherly love might seem to enjoin it. This question became acute during the Peasants’ War, during which the vocal and unmistakable protests of tenants with term or revocable leases at the rapacity of their feudal lords must be set against the threat to their livelihood as family households which demands to expropriate farms and collectivize agriculture, or at the least to parcel out the commons to the cottars and landless, voiced by certain radicals, ostensibly posed.6 How social relations in the Reformers’ rural arcadia were to be configured – in short, where the proper balance was to be struck between individual property rights and collective-communal obligations – was left unanswered.

I propose to investigate these issues by comparing the economic thought of Martin Luther and Michael Gaismair. The comparison is less outré than it might appear. It may reveal significant congruences as well as contrasts between the vision of the supreme clerical Reformer of Evangelical Protestantism and that of the exponent of a radical Christian Utopia directly influenced by the Reformed Protestant tradition of Zwingli and his followers in southern Germany and Switzerland. The comparison gains piquancy, moreover, because Luther and Gaismair came from remarkably similar backgrounds, and lived and worked in landscapes undergoing a substantial reorientation of economy and society in the early sixteenth century, namely areas stamped by the rise of large-scale mining enterprises. Both men were acutely alive to these changes, even if they viewed them with apprehension, but each sought to work out his response to the changes rather than simply ignore them.

My argument therefore attempts to go beyond both the outworn distinction between the subjective intentions and objective consequences of their thinking, once so beloved of East German Marxists, and the banal recognition that Luther and Gaismair, in common with all other Reformers and evangelical adherents, were hostile to the manifestations of early capitalism. Rather, I am concerned to discover how far Luther and Gaismair understood the underlying mechanisms of the market and of capital accumulation. My procedure is to begin by exploring the remarkable similarities in their backgrounds, before analyzing certain important strands in their thought, and finally setting their thought within a broader conceptual framework.

I

Both men were natives of regions which were experiencing the impact of major capital investment in mining and smelting precious and base metal ores by large business enterprises who used their financial clout to monopolize both production and distribution: Luther in Saxony, which on its southern border with Bohemia had extensive reserves of silver, together with the copper and lead commonly found in argentiferous rock, as well as copper ore from the copper-shale fields of the county of Mansfeld in northern Thuringia; Gaismair in Tirol, where northern Tirol contained the richest silver mines in western Europe with their centre in Schwaz, alongside considerable deposits of salt in saliferous rock around Hall, Hallein, and Reichenhall, while South Tirol, over the Brenner, held resources of silver but more particularly of lead glance (galena), used in the smelting of silver ore.

Tom Brady has spoken of Luther as the child of a ‘transition zone between the older, more rooted societies of western and southern Germany and the classic colonial lands of the German East’, who grew up in a ‘relatively fluid society, a Saxony poised between its colonial past and its future plunge into the “New Serfdom” and absolutism’, with the assumption that these circumstances coloured his thinking on politics and society.7 But Gaismair, too, was the child of a frontier area, with Tirol as the main landborne artery of trade from Italy and the Mediterranean to the lands north of the Alps, its ethnically German population marching with Italian-speakers to the south, but intermingled under the jurisdiction of the Austrian Habsburgs, and the bishops of Bressanone/Brixen and Trent, and abutting the Venetian terraferma, where Gaismair sought refuge in exile.

Tirol may seem a more obvious commercial crossroads than Saxony, but Thuringia lay at the intersection of important trade routes: the Hellweg, the High Road running from west to east linking Cologne and Kassel to Erfurt, Leipzig, and Wrocław/Breslau; and Hanseatic routes from Hannover, Hildesheim, and Braunschweig to Erfurt, or from the ports of Hamburg and Lübeck. Erfurt, the Thuringian capital, was also a staging-post on roads running south to Frankfurt and Nuremberg.8 Both regions had fully commercialized economies quite apart from their mining industries. By the sixteenth century Saxony, and especially Thuringia, was a major cultivator of the dye plant woad, grown in the district around Erfurt, which throve in symbiosis with a burgeoning textile sector, producing mostly linen, but also woollen cloth on its eastern border with Lusatia.9 Its rural economy was penetrated by the putting-out system, the principal manifestations of early capitalism in Germany; country crafts and manufactures flourished. And despite their northern latitude Saxony (along the Elbe) and Thuringia (south of Erfurt) were areas of viticulture of more than local significance: there was a lively interregional trade.10

Tirol’s economy, not least on account of its topography, was less exposed to the putting-out system. It was a land of commerce rather than manufactures. Yet in South Tirol on the slopes of the Adige/Etsch valley...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Places of Original Publication
• Introduction
• Part A: Historiography
• Part B: Social and Political Aspects of the Early Reformation
• Part C: Radicals in the Reformation
• Afterword
• Index of Names and Places
• Index of Subjects