Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation 1378-1615

by Irena Dorota Backus

This volume deals with the basic problem of how theologians of all confessions handled ancient, mainly Christian, history in the Reformation era. The author argues that far from being a mere tool of religious controversy, history was used throughout the 16th century to express profound religious and theological convictions and that historians and theologians of different confessions sought to define their religious identity by recourse to a particular historical method. By carefully comparing the types of historical documents produced by Calvinist, Lutheran and Roman Catholic circles, she throws a new light on patristic editions and manuals, the Centuries of Magdeburg , the Ecclesiastical Annals of Caesar Baronius and various collections of New Testament Apocrypha. Much of this material is examined here for the first time. The book substantially revises existing preconceptions about Reformation historiography and view of the past.

445 pages, Hardcover

First published March 1, 2003

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

For exceedingly minute, original analyses of Reformation topics, no one delivers like Irena Backus.

[Mmetevelis · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a survey of several works of Reformation historiography from various confessions. Backus presents this material in ways that are extensive both chronologically and in terms of different confessions. She begins with an evaluation of how various figures before the reformation interpreted Augustine, details how different theologians published the works of the church father and various apocryphal texts and for what reasons they recommended reading them during the reformation era, and closes with a detailed examination of reformation historiography from Melancthon to Caesar Baronius's answer to the Centuries of Magdeberg. She is clear about her conclusions at the end of each section making her work easy to reference.

This is a very rewarding book. Backus seeks to disprove that the reformation only sought to use the church fathers and church history in a "polemical" way and demonstrates a deep appreciation in each of the authors she analyzes for the past of the church with interesting strategies to appropriate it due to their unique confessional and pedagogical commitments. Backus has done the work to uncover the variety and structure of thinking in various figures underneath the gross historical generalizations of the period. If you can wade through the vast amount of detail the conclusions about how the reformation changed the ways history was understood and appropriated by the different confessions. Most interesting to me was the discussion about how different strategies for understanding the history of the church dealt with "locating" the church (e.g. - the institution of the Roman church, doctrine, faith of believers). The bibliography is helpful too.