Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to NineteenthCenturies. by Heinz SchillingReview by: Bodo NischanThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 23, No. 4 (Winter, 1992), pp. 850-851Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2541769 .

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850 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXIII no. 4 (1992)

Equally insightful are the details from the "history of private life" included in her text. Rather than dragging the reader through tedious historical fact, Duncan- Jones offers an engaging account of daily life in the Elizabethan era. Her descriptions of such things as the Shrewsbury school menu and of contemporary table manners arise out of the author's assumption that "the physical characteristics of Sidney's world may be quite as interesting as its moral ones" (xii). Her mindful attention to cultural detail, and the humor with which it is often presented, should make the book appealing to a large and inclusive audience.

Readers will find Sidney portrayed and defined in several dimensions: Sidney the "serious" child; the "stuck-up" young man; the enthusiastic learner; the stifled and dissatisfied courtier; the literary genius; and the list goes on. Duncan-Jones's treatment of Sidney as a complex and often controversial individual is one of the biography's strongest virtues. Although some readers will question some of her assertions, even her most debatable claims should generate thoughtful response. Kurt R. Niland .............. Auburn University at Montgomery

Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Heinz Schilling. Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, vol. 17. Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1991. 167 pp. $35.00. This volume is "concerned with the influence of Calvinism, in northwestern

Germany and the neighboring regions of the Netherlands during the early modern period" (1). The study focuses on the towns of Emden and Groningen whose "political culture," Schilling argues, was shaped by "civic Calvinism." Unlike the more authoritarian "court Calvinism," which dominated the rest of Reformed Germany, "civic Calvinism" identified with local libertarian, civic, and communal ideas, but opposed princely absolutism. Three of the book's four chapters are translations of articles that were originally published in German; one (ch. 2) is an enlarged version of Schilling's 1989 address to the SCSC in Minneapolis.

Chapter 1, "Calvinism and Urban Republicanism," describes the non-Lutheran origins of the East Frisian Reformation in the town of Emden and the consolidation of the Reformed tradition there in the late sixteenth century. Chapter 2, "Calvinism and the Making of the Modern Mind," provides a quantitative analysis of ecclesiastical discipline as practiced by the Emden presbytery from the 1550s to the 1820s. "Only if we understand early modern ecclesiastical discipline as religious sin discipline, which was taken seriously by the presbyters as well as by most of the church members concerned, do we have a chance to trace the full breadth and depth of its [Calvinism's] impact on the making of modern society and mentality" (68), Schilling maintains. Chapter 3, "Calvinism and Civic Liberties," treats the political culture of the Emden and Groningen Calvinists as expressed in a number of confessional and political pamphlets. The final chapter, "Calvinism and the Urban Elites," is a prosopographic analysis of the elders and deacons who served the Groningen church and reveals a strong continuity in the town's governing elite from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century.

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Book Reviews 851

The four chapters, while written as separate papers, fit well together and do provide a coherent picture of "civic Calvinism." Readers familiar with Schilling's work will recognize themes he has expounded earlier. The "political culture" of the Dutch and Friesland Calvinist, he reminds us again, was anti-absolutist, not because of any particular Calvinist "pathos of liberty," as Max Weber claimed, but because of the confessional and sociopolitical conditions under which they had to assert themselves. The book contains a number of themes that should prove fruitful for future research, notably the author's emphasis on the eschatological character of Calvinist political thought (80-82) which in the past has been neglected in favor of modern, more secular interpretations. Schilling stresses the importance of the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as a period of accelerated social change when the center of gravity in European history increasingly shifted to the northern and western fringes of the Atlantic. The continued predominance of the southern German perspective, he rightly argues, "already [is] misleading for an adequate interpretation of the Reformation" and "totally eccentric and distorting for later periods of German history" (10). Bodo Nischan ..................... East Carolina University

Society and Institutions in Early Modern France. Edited by Mack P. Holt. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1991. xxiii + 242 pp. $35.00 cloth; $15.00 paper. These eleven essays honoring J. Russell Major are outstanding examples of

Professor Major's profound influence on the research and writing of early modern French history. Mack P. Holt's introduction briefly summarizes Major's own ground- breaking work on the persistence of aristocratic power in the Renaissance, the continued importance of representative bodies, and the consultative nature of the Renaissance monarchy. Holt has arranged this diverse group of essays by topic and approach, but they are replete with themes which connect them and defy efforts to group them too rigidly.

The monarchy in James B. Wood's essay "The Royal Army during the Early Wars of Religion, 1559-1576" is politically and economically weak and belies claims of Renaissance absolutism. Wood convincingly illustrates the continuing importance of the monarchy's consultative and negotiating capacity in raising and maintaining an army in the field, although his references to the Huguenot army as "royal-like" leave the reader wanting a companion article on the Huguenot army. Sarah Hanley's essay "The French Constitution Revised: Representative Assemblies and Resistance Right in the Sixteenth Century" analyzes the 1574 pamphlet Discours politiques des diverses puissances and emphasizes the importance of representative bodies in the late sixteenth century. William Beik's "The Parlement of Toulouse and the Fronde" argues that these parlementaires were motivated by a desire to expand their influence, and he speculates that the importance of the Fronde may be that it forced the king to pay more attention to the aristocratic forces neglected by his cardinal predecessors. In "Parlements and Litigants at the King's Councils during the Personal Rule of Louis XIV: The Example of Cassation" Albert N.

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