CHAPTER 18

Reformations and Counter Reformations

MUSIC OF THE LUTHERAN CHURCH; VENETIAN CATHEDRAL MUSIC

THE CHALLENGE

What we now call the Protestant Reformation was in fact a series of revolts against Roman Catholic

orthodoxy and the authority of the hierarchical church with roots going back to the fourteenth century (John
Wyclif in England, Jan Hus in Bohemia, both successfully suppressed). They took radically different
forms in different places. (The one sixteenth-century Reformation movement with which we are already
familiar, the English, was the most “radically different” of all, since it was, uniquely, led by the Crown.)
They did, however, reach a joint peak in the first half of the sixteenth century and achieved a lasting
rupture in the history of European Christendom, for which reason they now appear in retrospect to have
been a concerted movement, which they were not.

What the continental reform movements had in common was an antifeudal, antihierarchical
individualism; a zeal to return to the original revealed word of scripture (a by-product of humanism,
which encouraged the learning of Greek and Hebrew, the original scriptural languages); and confidence
that every believer could find a personal path to truth based on scripture. They shared a disdain for
formulaic liturgical ritual or the “caking up” of scripture with scholastic commentary; they reviled the
worldliness of the professionalized Catholic clergy and its collusion with temporal authority, especially
that of the supranational Holy Roman Empire, the very existence of which testified to that collusion.

What is now thought of as the first overt act of the sixteenth-century religious revolution took place in
Germany in 1517, when an Augustinian monk named Martin Luther (1483–1546) nailed 95 “theses” or
points of difference with Roman Catholic authority to the door of the castle church in the town of
Wittenberg, as a challenge for debate. The precipitating cause of this bold act was Luther’s horror at what
he considered the venal abuse by the local church authorities of what were known as indulgences: the
buying of “time off” from purgatory for one’s ancestors or oneself by making contributions to the church
coffers.

Among underlying factors that brought things to a head in the sixteenth century was the steady growth
of mercantilism—that is, of economic enterprise and money-based trade. Protestantism, capitalism, and
nationalism went hand in hand, it has often been observed, and renewed Europe in ways that ultimately
went far beyond religion. Their mutual interactions were extremely various. One manifestation of
mercantilism, as we know from the previous chapter, was the growth of the printing industry. This not
only facilitated the dissemination of humanistic learning and secular music; it also allowed the rapid
spread of Protestant ideas. In return, the Reformation provided a big new market for printers (and, as we
shall see, for music printers).