Stadt, Kirche und Reformation. Das Beispiel der Landstadt Hannover. by Siegfried MullerReview by: Thomas A. Brady, Jr.The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Summer, 1989), p. 318Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2540682 .

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318 The Sixteenth CenturyJournal XX no. 2, 1989

Stadt, Kirche und Reformation. Das Beispiel der Landstadt Hanno- ver. Siegfried Muller. Hannover: Lutherhaus Verlag, 1987. 274 pp. n.p.

Hannover in 1500 was a middling town of 5,000 souls in the duchy of Calenberg-Gottingen, one of the Welf dynasties several principalities. This Hannover dissertation presents the first social history of the city's Lutheran reformation, which the burghers undertook in 1532-33 against solid opposition from the Catholic oli- garchy and the Catholic prince, Duke Eric I (1495-1540).

Pre-reformation Hannover was ruled by an extremely solid merchant-artisan oligarchy, the nature of which Muller establishes in great detail through a prosopo- graphy of the regime from 1448 to the mid-seventeenth century. The regime had good relations with the prince and near complete domination of the local church, and the town contained none of the elements - printers, intellectuals, humanists - which elsewhere provided the Reformation movement with a port of entry. Hence, although the movement entered the town in 1523, it smoldered for nine years before finding the one weak point in the hostile oligarchy's rule: the burghers' discontent with their exclusion from government. The agitation which began in August 1532 eventually drove most of the Catholic oligarchy into exile and culminated in a great ceremony in the town market on June 26, 1533, in which the burghers swore loyalty to the Lutheran faith. Most of the exiles returned, and though many of them even- tually sent sons into the civic administration, they never again got control of the town council, which passed into other, loyally Lutheran hands. In the church, by contrast, the story shows "astonishing continuities" [160].

Hannover's reformation differs from other northern civic reforms in the absence of pre-Reformation conflict between town and prince and, surely related to that absence, the solid loyalty of the oligarchy to the old faith. That loyalty made necessary their replacement by a new, Lutheran class of magistrates, who differed in wealth and prestige little from the exiles. This said, Hannover's story conforms to what Heinz Schilling has called "the Hanseatic type" of urban reformation: Lutheranism attached itself to the burghers' oppostion to the oligarchs, and its victory accompanied a perceptible, if not always permanent, widening of access to government. Northern urban Lutheranism thus often played the role - partner and ally of a movement for political devolution - which in the South was usually occupied by other Evangelical currents.

This very well researched, well presented study offers a wealth of information - seventy-six tables, eleven charts, and six maps (but, alas, no index), the centerpiece of which is the extremely detailed and long prosopography of the civic elite. Muller sets his information and analysis squarely within the current discussion on the urban reformation. His is altogether an admirable achievement.

Thomas A. Brady, Jr. University of Oregon

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