The Hybrid Reformation
A Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History of Contending Forces

Studies the thought and actions of the Reformation's central figures - reformers, counter-reformers, and their supporters - in the light of ordinary people.

Christopher Ocker (Author)

9781108477970, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 22 September 2022

350 pages
26.5 x 18.3 x 2.2 cm, 0.8 kg

Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.

Part I. Indifference and Ambiguity: 1. After the Peasants War: an anabaptist fights for her property
2. Living between the old faith and the new
3. 'A middle man'
Part II. Medieval Protestants: 4. A reformation stake in medieval thinking
5. The trouble with Ockham: nominalism
6. Wegestreit: Via Moderna, Via Antiqua, Wycliffites
Part III. Interpretation Beyond Borders: 7. Erasmus and biblical scholasticism
8. A literal incident, a spiritual menace: Calvin versus Castellio and Libertines
9. The trouble with allegory
10. Third forces in a hybrid reformation.

Subject Areas: History of religion [HRAX], Early modern history: c 1450/1500 to c 1700 [HBLH], European history [HBJD]