Die Reformation und ihre Aubenseiter: Gesammelte Aufsatze und Vortrage. by Irene Dingel;Christine KressReview by: Thomas A. Brady, Jr.The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Winter, 1998), pp. 1237-1238Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2543443 .

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Book Reviews 1237

positions. One English geographer, grumbling about all these geographical confusions, even complained "there are in the South-Sea many Islands, which may be called Wandering- Islands." Another marked a "Flying Island," a forerunner of Laputa, on the middle of his chart of the South Sea.

In the end, the predatory raiding of South American settlements and shipping resulted in little lasting success or profit. It was the other stream of the South Sea enterprise, as Williams demonstrates, the search for the great southern continent, mysterious islands, and the north- west passage, that was ultimately to prove more fruitful by inspiring the great achievements of the voyages of Captain Cook and his successors. Romuald Ian Lakowski ................................ University of British Columbia

Die Reformation und ihre AuBenseiter: Gesammelte Aufsatze und Vortrage. Ed. Irene Dingel with Christine Kress. Gbttingen:Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997. 383 pp. DM 98.00.

This volume contains sixteen previously published articles by and a bibliography of the writings of Gottfried Seebass, professor of church history at the University of Heidelberg. The two subject areas for which his scholarship is known-Lutheranism with special refer- ence to confessional statements and cities, and what is called "the left wing" of the Refor- mation-form the two main parts of the collection, which was assembled to mark his sixtieth birthday.

Part l's chapters treat the pre-1530 Evangelical confessions and the Confession ofAugs- burg and its "Apology"; Luther's concept of the Gospel in his writings on the Peasants'War; the Reformation in Nuremberg and Albrecht Direr and the Reformation movement; and Bucer and Augsburg and the Augsburg church ordinance of 1537. Part 2 comprises a pro- grammatic article on "the left wing": Miintzer's apocalyptic ideas; the Peasants'War and Anabaptism in Franconia; Hans Hut's teaching on baptism and his trial at Augsburg; Ana- baptism at Nuremberg; Luther and Johannes Brenz on persecuting the Anabaptists; and Caspar Schwenckfeld's views on the Old Testament.

The strongest impression made by this collection is Gottfried Seebass' strength as a tex- tual scholar, for some of his most important historical points arise from an examination, or reexamination, of (sometimes well-known) texts. An illustration of this characteristic comes in his study of the pre-1530 Lutheran confessions, where he shows that the origins of the Confession of Augsburg lie in earlier, chiefly Saxon documents, which already display both of the two chief functions of later confessions, their apologetic function as justifications for innovations in religious practice and belief and their programmatic function as definitions of doctrine.This same theme is neatly continued in the following study on "Apology and Con- fession."

Two selections from this collection may illustrate Seebass' manner of engaging some of the main developments in Reformation studies. Each was originally drafted in connection with a major Reformation jubilee. The first is "Diirer's Place in the Reformation Move- ment," first published for the Direr jubilee in 1971. Although Direr's reputation was sub- jected through the interwar era to competing confessional claims, Seebass believes that fundamental uncertainty about Direr and the Reformation lies in the disproportion between Diirer's large, complex artistic oeuvre and the meagerness of his writings. Here he follows the lead of a Catholic historian, the late Heinrich Lutz, who somewhat reluctantly adopted this principle (1961-68). On this ground, however, the interpreter meets the diffi-

culty that the category of"Reformation" is too easily understood as a fixed entity, "the chief mark of which was the splitting of Christendom into two great confessions," thus making

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1238 Sixteenth Century Journal XXIX / 4 (1998)

the question-was Diirer a Catholic or a Protestant?-into an anachronism. Not only do "Catholic" and "Protestant" require definition, but the historian must recognize that in this historical situation, it was very common for persons to begin from a kind of Erasmian bib- licism and pass to the influence of Luther, Zwingli, the Peasants'War movement, Anabap- tism, and/or Spiritualism.The boundaries created by official decisions are therefore, at least for this era, not very useful for explicating the religious positions of individuals. Having laid down these principles, Seebass develops his own interpretation of Diirer's religious evolu- tion: from a typically late medieval combination of mystical piety and humanist ideals, Diirer became more critical of the church and found his way via Staupitz to Luther, but his human- ism prompted him to be critical of the Reformation movement as well. The key to his peaceful accommodation to the Lutheran Reformation at Nuremberg was his friendship with Melanchthon. In this complex, interesting study, Seebass demonstrates that, contrary to what is still often asserted, the major change in Reformation studies has not come through a shift from "theology" (often a euphemism for confessionally colored judgments) to a secularly minded social history but through changes in conceptions of the Reformation itself. Mainly this means a historicization which separates the historical Reformation from its anachronistic equation with the German confessions of later times.

The second selection is Seebass' programmatic lecture on "The 'Left Wing' of the Ref- ormation," which he originally gave during the Luther jubilee of 1983. Whereas the piece on Diirer explores the Catholic-Protestant historiographical boundary, this one examines the comparable boundary between Lutheranism and the dissenters. It is debatable, Seebass writes, whether Luther was correct to see in the dissenters his theological contraries, but modern research offers little or no support for his lumping them all together as a single force. The modern literature not only emphasizes their variety; it has developed further Ernst Tro- eltsch's division of the dissenters into Anabaptists and Spiritualists, although no modern typology has been able to classify them in a completely satisfactory way. Indeed, the ten- dency of all such typologies is to read the final forms back into the early stages. Seebass, rec- ognizing the analytical cul-de-sac, into which the subfield of Anabaptist studies fell in the early 1970s, calls for a new general interpretation.The old typologies, he believes, no longer will serve, for what is needed is an approach that will bring forth both the common and dis- tinguishing traits of the various groups.What united them vis-a'-vis the Protestant Reforma- tion, he believes, was that "they were all interested in the restoration or renewal of true Christianity, which they could not identify with the major reformers," whom they believed guilty of a halfway reformation or even a lapse back into Catholicism. Seebass then com- ments on the meaning, preconditions, and methods for restoring what they held to be true Christianity.Their reform could not have succeeded, given the deep attachments of the gov- ernments and most of the people to the world.This, and not persecution, made the margin- alization of sixteenth-century dissent inevitable, though the dissenters themselves posed questions which have arisen again and again in the Protestant churches.

The balanced realism of these two studies is replicated through the collection. Seebass neither theorizes nor pushes his subjects in the directions of historical theology or social his- tory. He is pure and simple a church historian of the Protestant Reformation.

This volume documents Gottfried Seebass' versatile engagement of some of the leading themes of writing on the German Reformation during the 1970s and 1980s: urban refor- mation, Peasants'War, sectarian dissent, and the historical theology of the Lutheran confes- sions. Given the occasion for this volume, it is appropriate to mention as well his editorship of the works of Andreas Osiander the Elder, his coeditorship of the Theologische Realenzyk- lopddie, and his presidency of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences. Thomas A. Brady, Jr ............... University of California, Berkeley

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