This paper discusses how historians have sought to understand and explain the causes of Protestant-Catholic conflict since the Reformation.
Written in 2007; 1,458 words; 5 sources; MLA; $ 48.95
Paper Summary:
In this article, the writer notes that before professional historians seriously turned their attention to the Reformation as an all-encompassing historical phenomenon during the 1960s, church historians, who held partisan views of the religious conflict from their respective denominational positions, believed that conflict between Protestants and Catholics boiled down simply to one of difference in theological doctrine. The writer discusses that what was highly ironical was that Catholic theologians, who couched the conflict in rather negative terms, peacefully agreed with their protestant counterparts that it was about individualism. The writer maintains that a complicated picture of conflict, in which a variety of different historical actors brought with them their own agendas, has contributed to the richness of how the Reformation unfolded. The writer concludes that even though the Protestant-Catholic divide had its narrowly religious aspects, it would be foolish to think that people caught up within the forces of Reformation operated merely out of a stern belief in their own faiths.
From the Paper:
"By contrast to church and traditional historians, these up-and-coming scholars came to the understanding that conflict was far more complex than the top-down accounts that had informed the writings of scholars in the past: conflict in fact involved a multitude of messy motivations that took place within equally disparate social, economic, regional as well as national backgrounds. Most crudely, Marxist historians, whose influence on social historians should not be discounted, brought about this change of perspective first. By seeking the cause of conflict not in the doctrine of individual spiritual renewal, but in the inherent social and economic inequalities that persisted within both pre- and post-Reformation Europe, they radically endeavoured to shift the emphasis away completely from the purely religious aspects of the Reformation. What these left-wing historians saw, as they looked at the state of early modern Europe, was not a landscape that was tectonically divided between Protestants and Catholics, but one that was classified between the rich and the poor. Reacting to the aristocracy of feudal nobles, who had for so long controlled land and labour, it was the bourgeois, living within the towns, whose sense of injustice led to them to rise up against their social superiors. More specifically, within the towns, it was the patricians who took the side of Catholicism, while tradesmen and merchants, who were cold-shouldered by the establishment, came to support Protestantism in an attempt to overturn this hierarchy."
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