This forum contribution voices its appreciation for the journal's original inspiration as a platform for the social history of religions. It suggests that theology, rather than standing opposite to JBR's project, should be a part of it, under specific terms and conditions.

Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.

Calvin’s experience of Germany was limited and partial, but his theology played an important role there. It came to be associated with a kind of Protestant internationalism, while specific points of his doctrine formed a polemical cypher used by some German Lutherans, many in the service of imperial princes, against Philip Melanchthon in the last decade of his life and against Melanchthon’s students in the next generation. In the second half of the sixteenth century, the effort to build a Lutheran identity at peace with the Holy Roman Empire’s complex political and religious subsidiarity made ‘Calvinism’ its contrary and reified German ‘Calvinism’ as a polemical glyph. Out of political and doctrinal turmoil, the ‘Reformed’ territorial churches of Germany emerged. These churches were finally recognized in the Peace of Westphalia (1648), but eventually they yielded to a national Protestant church in the nineteenth century. In short, the history of Calvinism in Germany was marked by a complex, evolving fusion of doctrinal differentiations and imperial politics.

In medieval and early modern Europe, 'sodomy' could refer to any sexual contact that intentionally resulted in non-procreative ejaculation, including but not limited to contact between men. Although sodomy had been progressively criminalized as a capital offense since the twelfth century, the prosecution of homosexuals as sodomites was rare. Homosexuality was sometimes quite public, in bath houses, for example, and there is little evidence that gay people formed a hidden social group. Gay sex could be routinely indulged, and when sexual persecution did occur, its context was broadly political, as illustrated by the execution of Richard Puller of Hohenburg, an Alsatian nobleman. Richard lost his most important fiefs in 1457. In 1463, he was first accused of homosexuality in a dispute that resulted in exile and the loss of many more of his fiefs, including some from the Prince Bishop of Strasbourg.

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Historians are only beginning to appreciate fully the political and social impact of the aftermath of the German Peasants’ War. The case of Barbara (Schweikart) von Fuchstein, widow of Sebastian von Fuchstein, a Kaufbeuren lawyer suspected of Anabaptism and exiled at the end of the war, sheds light on the role of middle-rank nobility in the process of post-war reordering. Her eventual success in a conflict with her violent cousin, Ulrich Schweikert, a knight in the service of the Abbot of Kempten, draws attention to middle-rank competition in the Upper Allgäu, where historians have emphasized the tenacity of peasants and the long-term winnings of princes. Her case also illustrates the flux of religious identities at ground level in the early Reformation, among lay people whose interest in the religious controversy was secondary to, perhaps inseparable from, family business. Les historiens commencent à peine à mieux comprendre l’impact politique et social des suites de la Guerre des Paysans en Allemagne. Le cas de Barbara (Schweikart) von Fuchstein, veuve de Sebastian von Fuchstein, un avocat de Kaufbeuren suspecté d’être anabaptiste et exilé à la fin de la guerre, met en lumière le rôle de la petite noblesse dans la réorganisation d’après-guerre. En effet, le succès remporté par Barbara (Schweikart) von Fuchstein contre son agressif cousin, Ulrich Schweikart, chevalier au service de l’abbé de Kempten, attire notre attention sur la compétition se déroulant au sein de cette noblesse dans la région de l’Oberallgaü, tandis que les historiens ont par ailleurs souligné la ténacité des paysans et les gains à long terme des princes. Ce cas illustre également le caractère changeant des identités religieuses dans les populations des débuts de la Réforme, tels les laïcs ayant moins d’intérêt pour les controverses religieuses que pour leurs affaires familiales, voire subordonnant les premières aux secondes.

Abstract The uncomfortable question of Martin Luther’s place in the development of modern anti-Semitism is raised by Luther’s status as a national cultural icon after German unification (1871) and by the fact that the Third Reich (1933–1945) perpetrated what is arguably the most violently racist state policy known to human history thus far. Luther contributed to the symbiosis of religious and secular prejudices. The reception of Luther’s anti-Jewish discourse illustrates the gradual diffusion of religious hostility into a society where churches slid from a central position to the margins of social influence. This can only be understood against the backdrop of a long chronology of religious thinking. The long chronology shows that Luther was more a conduit than a catalyst of European anti-Jewish polemic and feeling.

This article summarizes late medieval theological approaches to evil and grace and introduces Martin Luther’s distinctive theology. It also explains how Protestant theologians found themselves compromising the sharp dichotomies between nature and grace that Luther’s theology implied. It describes how, in the religious controversy, Catholic theologians experimented with elements of Luther’s concept of justification by faith and faith as a divine gift of grace, and it notes how those experiments ended. Finally, the article suggests that in the long view, although Protestant reforms massively disrupted traditional religious life and replaced it with simplified structures and practices, the effect of the religious controversy was to intensify and expand religious debate over the conventional western–Christian moral binary.