German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650. By Thomas A. Brady Jr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2009. Pp. xviii + 477. Cloth $72.00. ISBN 978-0-521-88989-4. Paper $29.99. ISBN 978-0-521-71778-6.

摘要

Over the past generation, historians’ approaches to the German lands from the fif-nteenth to seventeenth centuries—that is, during “The Reformation”—havenchanged radically, largely owing to a cohort of scholars including the author ofnthis book, Thomas A. Brady, Jr. The rich, older literature operated largelynwithin two incompatible tropes: confession and modernity. Confessional histo-nrians continued debating the events of Germany in the 1520s on the assumptionnthat salvation remained at stake and thus focused on the substance of thenReformers’ positions while producing lively polemics against the “other side”non theological issues that had crystallized by 1560. Meanwhile, a separate,nmore-or-less Protestant and progressive narrative of Luther’s modernity and thenProtestant contribution to secularism flourished in the Anglo-American world,nwhere it still shapes schoolboy narratives of the period. Scholars of earlynmodern Catholicism who went beyond confessional stances faced the dilemmanof either adopting the triumphalist teleology of the Protestant mainstream ornbecoming marginalized. Confessional and Whig historiography still continuesnto offer useful contributions, but around 1970, both schools lost their grip on aca-ndemic scholarship of the Reformation to the generation that included Brady andnhis peers.