• 1 For an overview, see https://www.luther2017.de/en/.
• 2 Biographies of Luther in French and English published in 2016 and 2017 include: Mathieu Arnold, Lut (...)
• 3 For instance, Martin Luther, Une anthologie : 1517-1521, ed. Frédéric Chavel and Pierre-Oliver Léch (...)
• 4 A few examples would include: Michael DeJonge, Bonhoeffer’s reception of Luther, Oxford, Oxford Uni (...)
• 5 Perhaps the most notable English language publication on the memory and history of the year 1517 is (...)
• 6 A quick google search yields a profusion of results but for a scholarly example of how the annivers (...)

1As the quincentenary of the posting of the Ninety-five Theses by Martin Luther, 2017 has been a year of commemorations, ending and crowning the Luther Decade in Germany.1 31 October 1517 has come to represent much more than Luther’s public protest against indulgences, having long been hailed as the starting point of the Reformation. The anniversary spurred the publication of countless books on Martin Luther’s life,2 editions of his works,3 theological treatises,4 as well as a flurry of publications on memory and commemoration.5 It has excited interest in the beginnings of the Reformation in academia, popular culture and even businesses – witness the sheer amount and versatility of Luther memorabilia available for sale.6

• 7 Gwenaëlle Deboutte, “L’énorme succès du Playmobil Martin Luther”, La Croix, 12 April 2017, accessed (...)

2A case in point is the German toymaker’s production of a Luther Playmobil™ figure for the occasion (by April 2017, 750,000 Martin Luther box sets had been produced, the initial run of 34,000 having sold out in three days).7 Although the playset displays the official 1517 commemoration logo, the figurine is not represented with a hammer and the Theses; instead, it celebrates Luther’s translation of the New Testament into German (1522), thus rather unwittingly raising the vexed question of what really started the process of the Reformation.

• 8 For a very brief exposition of the controversy surrounding the reality of the posting of theses, se (...)

3Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses on a Wittenberg church door on 31 October 1517 could have been a non-event, an academic squabble in a small university town. Although it is unlikely that the posting itself ever took place, Martin Luther’s decision to share his doubts about the operation of indulgences with religious authorities on that date came to be seen as the beginning of the Reformation.8

• 9 Lindal Roper, “Martin Luther”, in Peter Marsall (ed.) The Oxford Illustrated History of the Reforma (...)
• 10 Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard, “Les jubilés de la Réforme: des constructions protestantes (XVIIe-XXe (...)
• 11 P. Marshall, 1517, op.cit. p. 54 and 80.

4In Germany and in Lutheran circles, the commemorative agenda was set early: the very first act of memorialization was a toast by Luther himself in 1527, on the tenth anniversary of the start of his journey towards the truth.9 The year 1517 at this point was not connected to the posting of the Theses, which was only first mentioned in the 1540s by Philip Melanchton. And in the 1550s, when Lutheran cities started to memorialize Luther, the dates of his birth and death were the focus of these early celebrations.10 Actually, other moments in Luther’s life could have just as easily been chosen to epitomize the start of the Reformation. The 1519 Leipzig disputation with Johann Eck, the burning of the papal bull in 1520 or the 1521 Diet of Worms, when Luther made his stand with the oft quoted statement of principle in German “I can do no other, here I stand, God help me”, for instance, would also have been suitable options. Yet it is the nailing of the Theses on the door of the Schlosskirche that stuck; in Peter Marshall’s words, the “non-occurrence of a non-event gradually transformed itself into a verifiable historical fact” and one imbued with “weighty symbolic significance”.11

• 12 P. Marshall discredits the widely circulated false assumption that Johannes Sleidanus was the first (...)

5So how did the imagined event of the Thesenanschlag become the seminal event that started the Reformation? Nothing contributed more to its elevation than the passing of time. As the sixteenth century wore on and a specifically Lutheran confessional identity emerged, the date and event gained credibility as a turning point but it took two more centuries for the event’s iconic status to be fully established.12

• 13 Ibid. p. 82-85.
• 14 M. Carbonnier-Burkard, art.cit. p. 219 and P. Marshall, op.cit., p. 86-90.
• 15 Ibid., “un contre-jubilé, à la fois polémique et ironique”.
• 16 P. Marshall, 1517, op.cit. p. 13
• 17 Ibid. p. 1
• 18 Ibid. p. 6-12, especially, p. 6
• 19 Ibid. p. 2-5

6The 1617 commemorations in Germany were an important milestone in the process. The celebration of the first centenary of the start of the Reformation (and the first ever celebration of a centenary) truly established the date’s credentials as one of the more dramatic turning points in history. The broadsheet chosen to illustrate this volume dates back to 1617 and is the earliest depiction of Martin Luther writing the Theses on a church door and an allegorical depiction of the far-reaching effects of the act: the quill pierces a lion (Leo X) and knocks the tiara off the pope’s head. Meant to represent “The Dream of Frederick the Wise”, it is probably an early seventeenth century fabrication.13 Two recent publications have shown how institutionalizing the remembrance of 1517 contributed to the event’s creation into one of the most momentous shifts in the history of early modern Europe. Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard traces the successive jubilees of 1517, noting how the term jubilee was reclaimed from its Catholic usage through Scriptural reference (Leviticus) and as an ironic debunking of the Catholic practice that gave rise to the Reformation in the first place.14 The 1617 commemoration was an “anti-jubilee” which was “both polemical and ironical”.15 Peter Marshall’s recent book on 1517 focuses mainly on the event’s afterlives and foregrounds the role of the Thesenanschlag as foundational myth for German and Protestant identities. He traces the emergence of the Thesenanschlag narrative, setting about to write “the cultural history of an imagined event.”16 For although the posting itself probably did not occur, it is “one of the greatest remembered moments in history.”17 It has inspired numerous reenactments, the one performed by the reformer’s twentieth century namesake, Martin Luther King, on the closed door of City Hall in Chicago being perhaps the most memorable.18 As a trope the Ninety-five Theses has also been very successful, spawning hundreds of lists of 95 items.19

• 20 Ibid, p. 188-195 (Iserloh’s thesis and subsequent debate) and p. 196-200 (the resilience of Thesena (...)

7Clearly an invented tradition, and yet one whose resilience in popular culture has been only marginally affected by its debunking in the 1960s,20 1517 and the Thesenanschlag raise questions about the very concept of historical event and its uses.

• 21 See in particular, Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1 (...)
• 22 The most striking examples are in Denis Crouzet, Les Origines de la Réforme,1520-1560, Genève, Sede (...)
• 23 William H. Sewell, “Historical events as transformation of structures: inventing Revolution at the (...)

11For all our emphasis on the Long Reformation and the slow and muted progress of reformed ideas in early modern hearts and minds,21 we remain wedded to the idea that there are “key events”, moments that epitomize epochal turning points. This is especially true when speaking to and writing for students and the general public:22 “momentous events are the bread and butter of narrative history”.23

• 24 An entire Gallimard collection centres on “les journées qui ont fait la France”, best sellers inclu (...)

12And more generally, over the course of the last few decades, the significance of events and their usefulness in historical analysis has been reasserted after being somewhat neglected. Events, once considered as the mere building blocks of “eventual history” (histoire événementielle), have been rehabilitated. This is particularly true in France, where historians had privileged structural approaches, continuity and change across the longue durée, in the tradition of the Annales school but where the “event” has made a noted comeback.24

• 25 W. Sewell, art. cit. p. 844.
• 26 “Il n’est pas simplement ce qui advient mais ce qui advient à ce qui est advenu”, quoted in Pascale (...)
• 27 For instance, see Georges Duby, Le dimanche de Bouvines, Paris, Gallimard, 1973 but also P. Marshal (...)
• 28 See the publications cited above in note 5 and L’identité huguenote, faire mémoire et écrire l’hist (...)

13By William Sewell’s reckoning a “historical event, then, is (1) a ramified sequence of occurrences that (2) is recognized as notable by contemporaries, and that (3) results in a durable transformation of structures”.25 The Reformation would thus neatly fit into this framework. However, this definition overlooks a key feature and one which made 1517 an event, i.e. its echo in time and memory, which in fact established its status. In the words of Pierre Laborie, a French historian of the Vichy regime, an event “is not just what happened, it is what happens to what happened”.26 By acknowledging the echo of the event through time, analyses of events can thus reconcile “evental history” with the “longue durée” and provide a thoughtful reconstruction of a singular occurrence against its broad backdrop and follow its avatars through time.27 For memory is central to understanding Reformation history. The celebration of 1517 showcases how history and memory are co-dependent, particularly so in our modern culture which thrives on anniversaries and commemorations of the past.28

• 29 Edward H. Carr, What is history, London, Penguin, 1976 (1961), p.12-13.
• 30 S. Dixon, op. cit., p. 15.

15Almost sixty years ago, delivering the G.M. Trevelyan lectures at the University of Cambridge, Edward H. Carr described “the process by which a mere fact about the past is transformed into a fact of history”. In this process, the professional historian’s role is instrumental: “the belief in a hard core of historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy.” 29 Because the Reformation in France and in England was a halting process, progressing in fits and starts over decades, the role of the historian is even more obviously foregrounded in the present case. Discussing Reformation history, Scott Dixon recently remarked that “chronology is an inexact science, (…) it takes its meaning from a particular reading of the past” hence “periodization follows from interpretation.”30

• 31 Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation, 1378-1615, (...)

18Well-defined starting points and neat turns were also convenient for contemporaries making sense of the recent past and pushing an agenda for the future. In the present case, the narrative depended deeply on the confessional identity of the protagonists. Several contributions showcase the “creative role of history in the Reformation era as a decisive factor in the affirmation of confessional identity”.31 For instance, the articles by Susan Royal and Katy Gibbons examine the mirror images of Protestant and Catholic thought on the start of the English Reformation.

• 32 Ibid. p. 3-4.

21Similar evidence is on display in Tony Claydon’s “The Reformation of the Future: Dating English Protestantism in the Late Stuart Era” which begins with an in-depth examination of how sixteenth and seventeenth century Englishmen viewed the origins of the Reformation. By picking a starting date for an on-going process one inevitably revealed one’s preferred stance on the theological, liturgical and ecclesiological controversies which divided the Church of England throughout the period. Seventeenth century Anglicans looked back to Henry and Elizabeth’s reigns as seminal moments in the creation of the via media they cherished, while Dissenters and radical Protestants focused on the Edwardian reforms and the rise of the Puritan critique of the Elizabethan settlement. Dating the start of the Reformation was as clear a dividing line as liturgical practices and theological beliefs in the religious conflict that pitted English Protestants against each other in the Stuart era. So, Irena Backus’s seminal insight that historical exploration was not just a tool in theological polemic but a means of constructing confessional identities and that “appeal to history need not contradict the sola Scriptura principle” are broadly shown to apply not just to German and Swiss theologians but also to English Protestants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.32

• 33 As regards the French context, it is only lightly touched upon by Yves Krumenacker in this volume; (...)

24Another common thread running through several contributions is the emphasis on continuous Reformation. This idea pervades the texts produced by Reformers. On the one hand, Susan Royal and Yves Krumenacker demonstrate that responding to accusations of novelty from Catholics, English evangelicals and French Reformers alike argued that the true Church had an uninterrupted lineage through the centuries; even if the Catholic Church had strayed for hundreds of years, the true faith had been kept by dissidents, principally the Lollards in England, and the Vaudois/Waldensians and the Albigeois in France.33 Both English evangelicals and French Protestants claimed that their Church existed well before Luther came along and hence that their Reformation was merely a continuation of the past.

• 34 For a brief list of examples see P. Marshall, “Redefining”, art. cit. p. 669-670 and T. Claydon, in (...)

25On the other hand, people living in the late-sixteenth and seventeenth centuries clearly believed that the Reformation was or should be an ongoing process.34 This theme is illustrated in the contributions which examine the evolution of the two brands of Protestantism found in the British isles.