This is a weighty volume, both literally – twenty-eight chapters plus three appendices, beautifully published with coloured illustrations of manuscript and printed sources – and figuratively in terms of its contribution to scholarship. Francisca Loetz, professor at the University of Zurich and distinguished researcher of daily life in early modern Switzerland, was the moving force behind the collection: she serves as editor, author or co-author of the foreword and five of the chapters, and several of her postgraduate students are also authors. The book showcases the work of a team of diverse scholars, historians and non-historians, mostly Swiss but with a few outsiders, whose research both broadens and deepens our understanding of the Zurich Reformation as a long-term process that affected many aspects of daily life, rather than just a theological event of the 1520s and ’30s. Hence the title, which translates as ‘Lived Reformation’. This approach is not new; scholars of the wider European Reformation have been examining religious change from the standpoint of social history through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries since at least the 1980s. (Many of the contributions in this volume remind this reviewer of local studies of religious change in early modern England that she read as a postgraduate in the 1990s.) It is possible to argue, however, that the history of the Swiss Reformation has lagged behind in this effort and continued to be too narrowly focused on the reformed leaders of the mid-sixteenth century. This volume – and progress in research of approximately the last twenty years that it showcases – provide important new contributions to the field.
The book is entirely in German, but there are English abstracts at the beginning of most chapters. Loetz notes that it is intended for both academic experts and more general readers, so there are endnotes with documentary references, but also many of the chapters start with general background information for non-experts. It is divided into seven thematic sections, each with a title that consists of two verbs – for example, ‘Reading and Learning’ or ‘Seeing and Hearing’ (though not all of them are as easily translatable into English as these two). Following the twenty-two essay chapters in these seven sections are six more in a section entitled ‘Sources’, in which different authors highlight and describe various groups of primary sources used in the research, and then there are several appendices. Topics of chapters include, but are not limited to, changing roles for rural clergy; sixteenth-century theatre productions in the city of Zurich; how the pictorial and urban landscape of the city changed and did not change; confessional disputes between members of the laity in public houses; prosecutions of prostitutes, homosexuals, blasphemers and Anabaptists; and belief in ghosts.
The most significant argument – conveyed by a majority of the chapters – is that in many areas of life, the Zurich Reformation did not bring about change as quickly or dramatically as many people believe. A few examples will suffice. In a chapter on images, art historian Carola Jäggi argues that the Reformation did not usher in an era that was completely devoid of all pictorial imagery. Zwingli distinguished between ‘idols’ (Gotzen) and ‘pictures’ (Bilder), and so iconoclasm focused mainly on three-dimensional artwork. Some pictures on tapestries and walls, on the other hand, survived for centuries, even some in ecclesiastical buildings. Francisca Loetz, in ‘Godliness and sin: heterosexual couples before the court’, demonstrates that while the reformers famously argued for the legality of divorce, divorces were extremely rare in post-Reformation Zurich. Several chapters show that changes normally associated with the Reformation actually happened in the seventeenth century, often in response to the confessional tensions brought on by the Thirty Years’ War. One example is prostitution. Adrina Schulz reveals that despite the reformers’ condemnation of prostitution and desire to close the public brothels, they shut down only gradually – finally disappearing around 1570 – and were replaced by private bordellos. Legal prosecutions for prostitution increased in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but the industry never went away entirely. Similarly, other chapters demonstrate that the death penalty was rarely used in cases of adultery in the sixteenth century but became more common in the seventeenth, and healing spells – known in the region as Lachsnen – though outlawed and considered superstitious by the sixteenth-century reformers, were rarely prosecuted until the seventeenth century. Another fascinating study by Michael Egger uses ‘Registers of souls’ (Seelenbeschreibungen), a kind of congregational census taken regularly by rural pastors, to show that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, literacy among the people rose steadily but knowledge of the catechism declined.
Reference to the Seelenbeschreibungen leads to an important point about primary sources. Although there are exceptions, most of the research in this volume is based on court records, and readers will be impressed by the vast array of legal sources available for social and cultural historians in Zurich. One of the themes of Loetz's research in the past twenty years has been that historians need to pay more attention to the rich record of court cases that came in front of the various courts established and run by the city council. The conclusions outlined above about divorce, prostitution and healing spells, are all based on meticulous research into these sources. In addition there are the disciplinary records kept by pastors in rural parishes, known as the Stillstandsprotokolle, and records like the Seelenbeschreibungen. All of these source groups and other, more traditional Reformation resources are outlined and described in the final section of the volume. The hope is that more scholars will be drawn to the richness of Zurich's archival legacy and be inspired by this volume to pursue more research into the lives of early modern people.
