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20 MacCulloch, Diarmaid. Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700. London: Allen Lane, 2003.
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2 A Changing World The Cultural Backdrop to the Reformation
To understand the origins of the Reformation and its religious and intellectual agendas, it is necessary to reflect on the culture of western Europe in the fifteenth century. Recent scholarship has placed an emphasis upon the need to place the Reformation movement in its historical context and to try to integrate the insights of late medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation studies into a larger vision of this “Age of Reformation.” The separation of these fields – for example, through each having their own university chairs, journals, and learned societies – has done little to help this process of synthesis and consolidation, which is essential if we are to understand both the intellectual context within which the ideas of the Reformation emerged, and the reasons why they proved to have such appeal.
During the fifteenth century, as we noted in the previous chapter, many protest movements emerged, urging reform of the church at multiple levels. Some of these movements – echoing themes from Jan Huss’ fourteenth-century campaign for reform in Bohemia – were entangled with local demands for regional autonomy; others expressed concern at the excessive wealth and social influence of the church. Some are best seen as processes of reform and renewal, initiated by influential figures within the church, such as the reforms introduced in Spain during 1480s by Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros, which laid the foundations for the church playing a major role in the Spanish “Golden Age” of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
Yet it is important to look beyond these demands for reform and consider some deeper changes in outlooks and expectations on the eve of the Reformation in western Europe, which help us understand the emergence of reforming movements, the agendas they pursued, and their popular appeal. The present chapter offers a sketch-map of some relevant aspects of late medieval European culture which will help contextualize the developments of the sixteenth century. The two chapters which follow examine in some detail the two most important intellectual forces in late medieval Europe: Renaissance humanism and scholastic theology.
The Rise of the Individual: The Demand for Personal Relevance
One of the most interesting phenomena on the eve of the Reformation is the surge of interest in the development of a personal spirituality on the part of many educated laity. This phenomenon is well documented for the period 1490–1520 in Spain, northern Italy, and parts of France. This quest for a deeper vision of the Christian life was not necessarily linked with any demands for institutional reform of the church, or a review of its theological commitments. It was primarily concerned with searching for personal fulfilment and authenticity, often linked with a new interest in reading the New Testament at a deeper and more satisfying level.
During the Renaissance, lay Christians appear to have become increasingly dissatisfied with approaches to their faith which stressed its purely external and institutional aspects – such as merely attending church. As the rise of the movement sometimes known as “Evangelism” in northern Italy in the late Renaissance makes clear, there was growing lay interest in achieving spiritual authenticity, often through a close reading of the Pauline epistles. A group of spirituali – as such individuals came to style themselves – gathered around charismatic individuals such as Gasparo Contarini in Venice, Vittorio Colonna and Reginald Pole in Viterbo, and the Spanish exile Juan de Valdés in Naples. This movement, notable for its emphasis upon a personally
