Historical Dictionary of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation

Hans J. Hillerbrand

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136596773
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Reformation of the 16th century has always been seen as one of the pivotal events in European history. Lord Acton, the famous 19th-century British historian, compared the importance of Martin Luther's speech at the diet at Worms in 1521 with Napoleon's defeat at the Battle of Waterloo in 1813. Lord Acton's may or may not be an extravagant claim, but it is certainly true that the events of the 16th and 17th centuries, now called the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, changed forever the religious and political history of the West.The Historical Dictionary of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation provides a one-volume, balanced, alternative to the overwhelming amounts of literature on the events of the time and the theological and political debates that spawned those events.

The Dictionary

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ACONTIUS, JACOBUS (c. 1520–1567). Humanist and reformer. Virtually nothing is known about Acontius's early life. In 1557 he turned Protestant and left his native Italy, going to Basel, then to Zurich. In 1559, after the succession of Elizabeth I (q.v.), he moved to England, where he found employment as a military engineer. Aside from an important book on knowledge, De methodo, his major work was Satanae stratagamata (The Stratagems of Satan), which was published in Basel two years before his death. Frequently reprinted, the book was the most eloquent and formidable plea for religious freedom and toleration in the 16th century.

ACT OF SUPREMACY OF 1534 (26 Henry VIII, c. 1), together with the corollary act of supremacy promulgated by Elizabeth I in 1559 (1 Elizabeth I, c. 1), established the independence of the church in England from the Catholic Church. The act established the king's authority as supreme head of the church in England with the authority to attend to all matters pertaining to the church. Together with further parliamentary statutes, beginning with the Submission of the Clergy in 1532, the act was meant to buttress Henry VIII's (q.v.) case for the annulment of his marriage to Catherine of Aragon.

ADIAPHORISTIC CONTROVERSY. The term comes from the Greek and means “middle things,” that is, matters that are in themselves morally neither right or wrong. The adiaphoristic controversy took place within Lutheran (q.v.) ranks in Germany and was triggered by Matthias Flacius (q.v.), since 1544 professor of Hebrew at the University of Wittenberg. For Flacius the two interim solutions to the religious controversy in Germany, the Interims (q.v.) of Augsburg and Leipzig imposed by Emperor Charles V (q.v.) in 1548, were despicable distortions of the gospel rather than adiaphora. Flacius declared that the Lutheran theologians, including Philip Melanchthon (q.v.), who agreed to the Leipzig Interim, had been terrified by cowardly fear. The controversy was not resolved since Flacius and his supporters demanded public penance on the part of the Wittenberg theologians who had agreed to the Interim, which did not occur.

ADMONITION CONTROVERSY. This controversy in the Church of England took its name from a publication by John Field and Thomas Wilcox entitled An Admonition to the Parliament, of 1572, in which the two authors argued that the presbyterian form of church government was ordained in the Bible (q.v.). The book made the structure of church government the core of the Puritan opposition to the Elizabethan settlement of religion. The controversy ended in 1577 with the publication of Thomas Cartwright's The Rest of the Second Replie. The contention between the two sides was clear: was there in the Bible, specifically the New Testament, a distinct form of church government by which the church had to be ruled? This question was affirmed by the Puritans (q.v.), who argued that according to the Book of Acts the apostolic church in Jerusalem was characterized by a definite governance (by elders or presbyters) which needed to be continued, while the conformists argued that the Bible prescribed no specific form of church government and thus allowed a variety of structures and practices.

ADRIAN VI (1454–1523). Pope. Born in Utrecht and educated by the Brethren of the Common Life, Adriaan Floriszoon Dedel studied at the University of Louvain, where he received his doctorate in theology and both taught and served in administrative positions until 1515. That same year he went to Spain, having been tutor of the future King Charles I (and subsequent Emperor Charles V [q.v.]) since 1507. In Spain Adrian's ecclesiastical career advanced dramatically. He was elevated to Bishop of Tortosa in 1516 and became cardinal the following year. In 1517 he was also appointed co-regent, with Cardinal Jimenez de Cisneros, of Spain and, in 1520, viceroy of Spain. In January 1522, a year after the death of Pope Leo X (q.v.), Adrian was unanimously elected pope in a conclave that had been deadlocked. His personal piety made him sensitive to issues of church reform. This found expression in a comprehensive acknowledgment of the church's guilt with respect to the tardiness of necessary church reform which Adrian issued soon after his election. His opposition to Martin Luther (q.v.) was unequivocal. Adrian emphatically sought to address a variety of reform measures to curtail abuses in the church but the brevity of his papal rule—he was in Rome for just about a year—meant that his efforts were not graced by lasting and meaningful success.

AMBOISE, CONSPIRACY OF. The death, by accident, of King Henry II (q.v.) in 1559 threw France into what seemed to many a constitutional crisis. The new king was a minor, and the Guise family had promptly seized control of government despite the fact that Antoine of Navarre, as the first prince of blood, could claim some prescriptive rights for a major role in a council of regency which, some argued, should have been constituted for the minor king. Supporters of Navarre came from the provincial gentry whose leader was Jean du Barry, the seigneur of La Renaudie. In February 1560 Renaudie convened a meeting of opponents of the Guise in Nantes in order to plan the removal of the family from power, despite the fact that the lack of constitutionality of the Guise action was not altogether certain. Renaudie's supporters gathered in small groups near Amboise, where the royal court was in residence. Their plan was betrayed, however, and Renaudie and many others lost their lives. The significance of the conspiracy lay in the fact that the French Reformation, which theretofore had been a religious phenomenon, began to combine religion and politics. Moreover, an armed confrontation between the two political factions, which would combine religion and politics, had become a real possibility.

AMSDORF, NIKOLAUS VON (1483–1565). Reformer. Born in Torgau of a noble family, Amsdorf studied at both Leipzig and Wittenberg and became a member of the Wittenberg faculty. He was one of the first of that faculty to embrace Martin Luther's new theology and quickly turned into one of Luther's most ardent supporters. In 1524 he was appointed chief pastor in Magdeburg, where he promptly introduced the Reformation. Amsdorf was among the earliest supporters of the notion that the adherents of the new faith might defend themselves by military means. He advocated the theological legitimacy of armed resistance by the territorial rulers against the emperor and forcefully echoed Luther's notion that the pope was the Antichrist (q.v.). In 1542 the Saxon elector effected Amsdorf's election as bishop of Naumburg-Zeitz, a position in which he encountered considerable conservative opposition.

In 1547, upon the defeat of the League of Schmalkald (q.v.), Amsdorf went into exile and became, after the Augsburg Interim had been promulgated, one of its most adamant critics. This entailed fierce criticism of the accommodating role of Philip Melanchthon (q.v.) and his followers. Amsdorf had engaged in stinging polemics against Lutheran theologians who, in his judgment, were not faithful interpreters of Luther. In continuing this polemic in the early 1550s, Amsdorf became a major representative of the Gnesio-Lutheran (q.v.) faction and a force in Lutheran theology until his death. He moved to Eisenach in 1552, where he helped to publish the first edition of Luther's works.

ANABAPTISM. The term literally means “rebaptism” and thus denotes the fact that the opponents of the Anabaptists saw them as those who had been rebaptized themselves and who generally advocated rebaptism. The Anabaptists, in turn, rejected this characterization, arguing that the baptism received in infancy had not been an authentic biblical baptism. In German, the term “Wiedertäufer” denotes the same element of rebaptism which in English usage gets lost on account of the evasiveness of the suffix “ana”. Attempts in scholarship to refer to the 16th-century Anabaptists as “Baptists” or “Baptizers” have generally been unsuccessful because of the evident confusion with the 17th-century English Baptists and the fact that the admittedly scarce English literature from the 16th century does also speak of Anabaptists and Anabaptism. For centuries these Anabaptists had a bad press, so to speak, since history was mainly written by their opponents. They were labeled as “radical,” as enthusiasts, and they were neither esteemed personally nor taken seriously in their theology.

There are two opinions with respect to the Anabaptist origins in the 16th century—one that associated the origins of the movement with the activities of Thomas Müntzer (q.v.) with the result that a kinship could easily be posited between the radical and revolutionary activities of Müntzer and the subsequent Anabaptist movement. The other explanation of their origins sees them as having been formed among a group of followers of the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli (q.v.). While the role of Müntzer in the emergence of the Anabaptist movement cannot be underestimated, the movement had its origin in Zurich (though there clearly were other points of Anabaptist sentiment elsewhere). Although never a popular movement, Anabaptism spread, clandestinely and as an underground phenomenon, to South Germany and Austria. Anabaptist congregations and conventicles sprang up throughout these areas. Nowhere, however, did the Anabaptists succeed in enlisting governmental support for their re-interpretation of the Christian religion, with the exception of the northwest German city of Münster (q.v.). There for a brief period of time (1533–35) Anabaptism was the official religion of the community.

The Anabaptist movement never was a homogenous phenomenon, though it remains a matter of scholarly disagreement how extensive this division was and if, accordingly, it is not possible to speak of a “normative” strand of Anabaptism in the 16th century. Clearly, however, there were three major factions within the movement—the Swiss-South German Anabaptists, the Moravian Hutterites (q.v.), and the Dutch-Northwest German Mennonites (q.v.). In a way, this distinction is also a chronological one, with the Swiss-South German Anabaptists constituting the origin of the movement, the Hutterites constituting in the 1530s a major variation thereof, and the North German-Dutch Anabaptists-Mennonites describing, first of all, the consolidation of North German Anabaptism after the debacle at Münster under the leadership of Menno Simons (q.v.). By the time the 16th century ended, a rough organizational consolidation had taken place which subsumed all Anabaptists, with the exception of the Hutterites, under the aegis of the norms enunciated by the followers of Menno Simons.

The absence of a strong organizational entity, however, meant that theological and organizational consolidation were long in coming. As regards Anabaptist belief, the foremost distinction was belief in the administration of baptism (q.v.) to adults who had made a prior confession of their personal faith. Clearly, however, that affirmation had its prior ground in the notion of the church comprised only of those who had made a personal commitment and had attested to their faith by their desire to be baptized. It followed that such belief in Jesus had to manifest itself in a new way of life, in sanctification. In the Mennonite tradition this affirmation found expression late in the 16th century in the notion that a believing spouse had to separate from “bread and board” of the unbelieving spouse. Most Anabaptists were non-resistant, that is, they refused to occupy governmental offices and participate in war.

ANGLICANISM. The Church of England, also known as the Anglican tradition, was one of the four major new ecclesiastical bodies to emerge in the 16th century. While its antecedents and major stimuli reach back to the ecclesiastical changes undertaken during the rules of Henry VIII and Edward VI (qq.v.), the Anglican tradition did not find its definitive embodiment until the religious settlement promulgated by Queen Elizabeth I (q.v.) in 1559.

The essence of the Anglican tradition was its insistence on its catholicity, that is, its ties to the authentic and unperverted Catholic tradition through the centuries prior to the Reformation of the 16th century. This sentiment was already discernible during the rule of Henry VIII. The main efforts at ecclesiastical change under Henry VIII were to remove abuses (the dissolution of the monasteries came under this heading) and to repudiate the authority of the pope but to leave the theological affirmations of the Catholic Church in place. Quite appropriately, the Six Articles Act (q.v.) of 1539 enjoined traditional Catholic doctrine, including clerical celibacy. The religious changes undertaken during Edward VI's reign meant a theological reorientation in the direction of Protestantism, notably the reduction of the sacraments to two, baptism and the Lord's Supper (qq.v.), and the minimizing of the sacrificial element in the Mass. In the edition of the Book of Common Prayer (q.v.), of 1552, there was no longer a clear expression of Christ's real presence in the elements of bread and wine in the Lord's Supper.

Thomas Cranmer (q.v.) drafted a confession of faith for the new church, the Forty-two Articles (q.v.), of 1549. In 1563, upon the Elizabethan Settlement, these Forty-two Articles were revised and turned into the Thirty-nine Articles (q.v.) which have been the doctrinal statement of the Anglican Communion ever since. John Jewel (q.v.) published a systematic theology of Anglicanism in 1562 (Apologia ecclesiae Anglicanae), and later in the century Richard Hooker's (q.v.) magisterial Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (1593ff) summarized doctrine and order of the Anglican Church. The theological essence of Anglicanism is its amenability to both Catholic and Protestant theology, what has been called the “middle way,” via media; its insistence on the historical episcopacy; as well as its commitment to three ecclesiastical offices of bishop, priest, and deacon.

ANTICHRIST. The notion of the Antichrist has a history that goes back to early Christianity. Its scriptural basis is found in various places in the New Testament, in each instance denoting, albeit for most interpreters somewhat vaguely, that preceding the return of Christ an “Antichrist” would appear and subject the church and the faithful to formidable and ruthless persecution. Through the centuries, different specific historical figures were identified as the Antichrist. Preoccupation with the topic of the Antichrist was particularly pronounced at times when eschatological fever ran high. The important contribution of the Protestant Reformation in the story of the Antichrist lies in two areas. For one, the Protestant reformers argued in the forceful identification of the pope as the Antichrist. Martin Luther (q.v.) did so blatantly in his 1520 treatises. He argued cogently that it was generally assumed that the return of Christ, and the concomitant appearance of the Antichrist, would be ushered in by a glorious restoration of the gospel. Inasmuch as such a restoration of the gospel was occurring—in the eyes of Martin Luther and the other reformers— it stood to reason that the Antichrist had to make his appearance as well.

A second contribution of the Protestant reformers was their argument that the Antichrist would not appear as an overt enemy of the Christian church but rather would himself pretend to be the representative of it. In the course of the 16th century the Turks were also identified as the Antichrist, especially by Catholic writers, even though the notion that the Antichrist pretended to be Christian mitigated against this identification. Interest in the topic began to wane—other than for perfunctory pronouncements—in the 1530s, to be revived in England toward the end of the century and especially in the 17th century.

ANTICLERICALISM. Recent scholarship has argued the existence of a pervasive anticlericalism in Europe on the eve of the Reformation and has identified this anticlericalism as a major cause of the Protestant Reformation. Anticlericalism in the context of the Reformation meant not so much criticism of the church as such, or even the specific criticism of the demeanor of the clergy but criticism of the role and place of the clergy in society and the church. This anticlericalism meant opposition against the sundry legal, political, and economic privileges of the clergy in society, such as legal immunity or the exemption of the clergy from ordinary taxation. It also meant criticism of the role of the church in such areas of society as education and the care of the poor. One must be careful not to interpret this anticlericalism as indicative of judgments about ecclesiastical abuse and perversion. Rather, early 16th-century anticlericalism was unhappiness with the place of the church and its representatives in society. Concomitantly, the role of the priest in the economy of salvation history, the distinction between clergy and laity, with the former the sole vehicles of divine grace, also were part and parcel of this anticlericalism. The phenomenon of anticlericalism helped explain the attraction, once the Reformation controversy had erupted, of the reformers' notion of the priesthood of all believers.

ANTI-SEMITISM. Rejection and hatred of Jews (q.v.) was an important element of early modern European society, even though the term “Anti-Judaism” rather than Anti-Semitism is more appropriately used: the term “Anti-Semitism” denotes the rejection of Semitic people, when in fact the religion of the Jews was the object of adverse and hostile Christian reaction. Jews had lived a precarious existence in Europe ever since Christianity had become the official religion of the Roman Empire in the fifth century and the compulsory baptism (q.v.) of all citizens, and their children, quickly had become the norm. Through the centuries the Jews, not being baptized, indeed refusing to be baptized, proved to be the quintessential “other” of Christian Europe, and the centuries following the crusades and preceding the Reformation of the 16th century are marked by increasing and chronic anti-Jewish diatribes and pogroms.

Until the time of the crusades, however, relations between Christians and Jews, while strained, were relatively amicable. An analysis of the Christian Anti-Judaic polemic suggests two separable elements: the theological repudiation of Judaism on the grounds that Jews refused to accept Jesus as the promised Messiah of Israel and rejected the other distinctive dogmatic affirmations of Christianity, such as the doctrine of the Trinity. A second element of Anti-Judaism entailed a whole congery of charges of moral and personal wrongdoings raised against Jews, which, so the argument ran, characterized all Jews. Jews were said to kill Christian children in ritual murders, to poison wells, to be responsible for a debased coinage, and to be untrustworthy and dishonest. Obviously, the Anti-Judaic polemic presumed a connection between these two charges but it is important to take note of their distinctive difference. By the early 16th century Jews had been expelled from most European countries, notably, of course, Spain and England. In Germany, virtually all territories had expelled the Jews by the end of the 15th century (this included, for example, Electoral Saxony). Early in the 16th century, Johannes Pfefferkorn, a converted Jew now a Dominican, advocated the burning of the Talmud and other important Jewish books (even though he noted that harsh treatment of Jews would make their conversion to Christianity more difficult). This pronouncement triggered the famous Pfefferkorn-Reuchlin contro-versy, in which Johannes Reuchlin (q.v.), celebrated Humanist and Judaic scholar, took the position that Pfefferkorn's notion was abominable since Jewish books were valuable even to Christians.

ANTI-TRIN...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Editor's Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction
• Chronology
• The Dictionary
• Bibliography
• About the Author