Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529-1629.

Gregory, Brad S.

Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529-1629. By Amy Nelson Burnett. Oxford Studies in Historical Theology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xii + 449 pp. $74.00 cloth.

This deeply researched social and institutional history of Basel's pastorate during the century after the city's adoption of the Reformation is an important local study that contributes to the historiography of confessionalization and the question of the Reformation's success or failure. Burnett sees pedagogically minded, increasingly professionalized parish ministers as "the crucial link in teaching the Reformation" (5), situated between the major reformers and the laity whose beliefs and behaviors they sought to shape. She encapsulates the logic of her study thus: "Only after we understand how these pastors were taught and what they were taught to communicate can we understand why they acted as they did as teachers and evaluate what impact they had on popular religious culture" (5). Accordingly, a thorough analysis of the social backgrounds, educational formation, and ministerial activities of the 254 men who served Basel's church in its urban and rural parishes from 1529 to 1629, rooted in a wide range of archival and printed sources, reveals four distinct generations of pastors who moved Baslers from struggles to stabilize a new church order in the 1520s and 1530s to a thoroughly transformed, Reformed Protestant city and its hinterland by the early seventeenth century.

Burnett structures her book in four parts. Part I considers the first generation of pastors, many of whom had been Catholic clergy before the Reformation, and who served under the leadership of Johannes Oecolampadius (d. 1531) and his successor, Oswald Myconius (d. 1552). Parts 2 to 4 of the book treat the education, homiletic training, and pastoral activities of the successive generations of ministers who were appointed beginning in the 1550s, 1580s, and 1610s, respectively. Officially eliminating Catholicism proved easier than instilling a new form of Christianity: through the 1540s the relationship between ministers and magistrates was frequently rocky, the new preaching and teaching was sometimes spotty, and plummeting matriculations prompted the closing of the city's university from 1529 to 1532. After mid-century, demographics and institutions laid the foundations for an effective, highly educated pastorate whose primary charge was to preach and teach God's Word as they understood it. Ministerial candidates from the second through fourth generations of pastors were almost exclusively native Baslers and had been born after the Reformation was adopted. They were schooled in the coordinated curriculum of the city's Latin schools and university, the integration of which permitted the absorption of multiple reforms, pedagogical trends, and curricular changes. Burnett's impressive, multi-generational reconstruction of future pastors' educational experience, from housing conditions and stipendiary funding to the place of Ramist dialectic in the arts curriculum and the writing of sermons, will interest historians of education and preaching. The book's story about Basel's pastors is carefully integrated with an account of the city's confessional emphases over time. Situated on the Swiss border with the Empire, Basel originally followed Oecolampadius's Reformed Protestant lead, but several years later became the only Swiss city to adopt the Wittenberg Concord (1536). Myconius's successor, Simon Sulzer (d. 1585), sought to keep the city free from polarizations between Reformed and Lutheran in its relationships with other territories, a goal that became increasingly difficult in the 1560s and impossible after the Lutheran Formula of Concord (1577). After Sulzer's death, Johann Jacob Grynaeus (d. 1617) guided the city's thoroughgoing adoption of Reformed Protestantism, an orientation reflected in the formation of and preaching by the city's pastors.

Throughout her study, Burnett carefully situates Basel in the comparative context of wider developments in Lutheran and Reformed Protestantism, especially in the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland. The historical reconstruction of discrete generations of pastors in one territory permits her to intervene persuasively in long-standing debates in the field. In contrast to Gerald Strauss and those who have followed his lead, Burnett shows that by the early seventeenth century, Basel's pastors in both urban and rural parishes were largely content with the general level of lay religious knowledge and participation in Reformed rituals, notwithstanding increasingly higher clerical expectations. While the reality of confessionalization hardly matched reformers' ideals, the transformation of lay beliefs and behaviors over the course of a century was dramatic and did not consist simply of a functionalist political domination "from above" by Basel's Senate over its pastors.

Burnett's study makes a thorough, systematic contribution to the formation and activities of the men principally responsible for effecting the religious changes sought by Reformed Protestant leaders in the Reformation. It is impressively researched, clearly organized, well-written, and helpfully augmented by a number of graphs and tables. A few more anecdotes and a greater leavening of direct quotations from more of the pastors might have further enlivened the text, and it seems problematic repeatedly to characterize as "nonconfessional" Basel's attempt to remain above Lutheran-Reformed antagonisms in the third quarter of the sixteenth century (by de-emphasizing doctrinal precision regarding the Lord's Supper, Sulzer and others were in effect articulating a third position). But these are minor points. This important book will have an enduring impact on German Reformation studies.

Brad S. Gregory

University of Notre Dame