Reformation in der bauerlichen Gesellschaft. Zur Rezeption reformatorischer Theologie imElsass. by Franziska ConradReview by: Thomas A. Brady, JrThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 17, No. 3 (Autumn, 1986), pp. 386-387Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2540343 .

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386 The Sixteenth Century Journal

Brisson's death. Accused on scanty evidence of plotting to yield up the capital to Henri IV, Brisson was subjected to a "parody of a trial" (p. 20) and promptly executed. The next day, his corpse and those of two other magistrates were carried out and displayed on the Place de Greve with signs around their necks denouncing them as traitors. The Seize hoped in this way to stir up a "St. Barthelemy des politiques"-a massacre of the moderates. The si- lence of the crowd, which regarded the bodies with pity instead of hate, was a sign of the radicals' misjudgment (p. 25). Within two weeks, the duc de Mayenne, the nominal head of the League since the assassination of Guise, arrived in Paris to effect a purge of the Seize. The radical phase of the League was over.

The events recounted here are familiar. What is novel is the new perspective that emerges when they are given pride of place by historians sensitive to their social context. Barnavi and Descimon examine Brisson's background, family life, and career for evidence of personal and professional motives that might have led first to his League allegiance and then to his unhappy fate. They compare the wealth and honors he accumulated with those of other presidents of Parlement and explore the social tensions that arose from the separa- tion of the higher magistrates from the lower officers or "second bourgeoisie." Consistent with their earlier explanations of the League, they find evidence in Brisson's persecution of serious strains within the Parisian bourgeoisie. Brisson was envied and perhaps resented as a member of an elite that not only had profited enormously from its dominance of the magistracy but also had effectively sealed off paths of mobility previously open to the mid- dle bourgeoisie. Barnavi and Descimon do not give these motives a direct causal role in the judicial murder of Brisson. They suggest, rather, that envy and resentment made the Seize more willing to believe in Brisson's alleged misdeeds and more willing to act against him. In this way, social context and political narrative are brought together; a single event is brought into focus without distorting the broader field of vision.

Barbara B. Diefendorf Boston University

'Elie Barnavi, Le Parti de Dieu: Etude sociale et politique des chefs de la Lique parisienne, 1585-1594 (Brussels and Louvain, 1980); idem, "Reponse a Robert Descimon," Annales: economies, societe's, civilisations 37 (1982): 112-121. Robert Descimon, "La Ligue a Paris (1585-1594): Une Revision," ibid.: 72-111; idem, "La Ligue: Des Divergences fondamen- tales," ibid.: 122-128; idem, Qui 6taient les Seize? Mythes et realite's de la Ligue parisienne (1585- 1594) (Paris, 1983).

Reformation in der bauerlichen Gesellschaft. Zur Rezeption reforma- torischer Theologie im Elsass. Franziska Conrad. Verdffentlichun- gen des Instituts furs europdische Geschichte Mainz, vol. 116. Wies- baden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1984. 190 pp. DM 54.00.

It is now the peasants' turn. After decades of concentration on the Reformation in the cities, the rural folk are now to appear capable not only of action, as in 1525, but also of thought and will. No more will they be distinguished chiefly for their complaints, looting, and an alleged inability to understand Luther. Franziska Conrad's interesting and highly original book argues that the rural folk knew quite well what sort of Reformation they wanted: they adopted the Evangelical reformers' biblicism as the path not to individual salvation through grace but to communal godliness and mutual love through "works- righteousness" in the traditional Catholic sense. Though they received the Reformation

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Book Reviews 387

movement from the free cities, the peasants shaped its ideas to their own experience of mutuality.

Reformation scholarship, as Conrad notes, is agreed about the intensity of pre-Refor- mation piety but not about its connections with the Reformation in the cities or on the land. She studies the subject the years 1450-1548 in Alsace, a region with good sources and a rich literature. She finds that before the Reformation the peasants understood and accepted the Church's claim to mediate grace both individual and to collective life, and they sought no new theology. Rural Alsace gave birth not to religious reform but to an in- surrectionary tradition (the Bundschuh) without equal, through which the peasants de- fended their deteriorating economic and political positions, and which they justified through the idea, born of their innate sense of justice, of the "godly law."

Then, at the beginning of the 1520s, urban Evangelical ideas streamed into the coun- tryside, where they formed the "Fundament" (56) of the "communal Reformation." From urban preachers the village folk received the idea of faith as issuing in the love of neighbor and the godly life, and the apparent success of urban agitation and violence, especially at Strasbourg, emboldened villagers to insist on their right to elect their own pastors. The lords, for their part, could approve the movement on the land or not, but before 1525 they could not stop it.

The rural folk received the urban Reformation's message and adapted it to their own experience. They held that the Bible was necessary to salvation, but as lex to govern life on this earth, not as a message of grace for the next. They accepted the biblicism as an instru- ment of legitimation against the old Church's authority, but they held stubbornly to the Catholic sense of "works-righteousness" and rejected the Evangelical doctrine of salvation. Once the mediating structures of the old Church melted away, this biblicist insistence on the mutuality of obligations between God and man, which mirrored the realities of their own communal life, issued in a revolutionary doctrine of reformation. This "communal reformation" - the term is Peter Blickle's -became a chief goal of the insurrectionary move- ment of the mid-1520s. "In the end, therefore," Conrad concludes, "the peasants' defeat of 1525 brought the end of the communal reformation in Alsace" (175). Anabaptism's appeal lay in its continuation of the ideals, but not the means, of this defeated communal Refor- mation, which was politically Protestant and theologically Catholic.

This imaginative, well-documented, and well-written book - its only real flaw is the in- tolerable absence of an index -will cause a good deal of controversy. What Franziska Con- rad has done, as she freely acknowledges, is to extend to the land and its people Bernd Moeller's pioneering thesis about how Luther's message was transformed through the burghers' social understanding. The peasants, too, it seems, were able to judge how the Bible illuminated their faith and their social experience, and they followed Luther's exam- ple but not his theology.

My only reservation about Conrad's analysis concerns not its framework-the Blickle thesis has its opponents, but I am not one of them-but the lag of her treatment of popular religion behind current standards. In particular, she emphasizes too much the extraor- dinary practices of popular religion, such as pilgrimages and shrines, and too little the reli- gious rhythms of everyday village life. In her defense it must be said that this topic is mostly terra incognita, to which access continues to be hindered partly by the paucity and recalcitrance of the known sources and partly by the stubborn bias in Reformation studies for theology over religious praxis. We are nevertheless at last coming free of the mentality that noticed the land only as the backdrop for superstition, witchcraft, magic, and the odd heresy, and we must now find the ways and means to force the sources to tell us how the common folk linked the hidden to the visible world.

Thomas A. Brady, Jr. University of Oregon

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