The Reformation and ‘The Disenchantment of the World’ Reassessed

Abstract

A B S T R A C T. This essay is a critical historiographical overview of the ongoing debate about the role of the Protestant Reformation in the process of 'the disenchantment of the world '. It considers the development of this thesis in the work of Max Weber and subsequent scholars, its links with wider claims about the origins of modernity, and the challenges to this influential paradigm that have emerged in the last twenty-five years. Setting the literature on England within its wider European context, it explores the links between Protestantism and the transformation of assumptions about the sacred and the supernatural, and places renewed emphasis on the equivocal and ambiguous legacy left by the upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Attention is also paid to the ways in which the Reformation converged with other intellectual, cultural, political, and social developments which cumulatively brought about subtle, but decisive, transformations in individual and collective mentalities. It is suggested that thinking in terms of cycles of desacralization and resacralization may help to counteract the potential distortions of a narrative that emphasizes a linear path of development.The tendency to herald the Protestant Reformation as a milestone on the road towards modernity and secularization, a landmark in the narrative of progress that traces the eventual triumph of rationalism over ' superstition ' in the age of the Enlightenment, has deep roots in Western European and Anglo-American culture and scholarship and continues to exert considerable influence. In particular, the idea that the religious revolution launched by Luther, Calvin, and other reformers played a critical role in eliminating assumptions about the intervention of magical and supernatural forces in the world has proved remarkably resilient. If it has stimulated and shaped many seminal contributions to the historiography of the early modern period over the last century, it has also served, in some ways, to constrain and distort our understanding of this era. This review offers a series of critical reflections and observations on the evolution and fortunes of this thesis against the backdrop of a body of recent research which has seriously complicated, challenged, and undercut it. Focusing especially on England, but set within a wider Continental context, its aim is to review the current state of the debate and to provide an interim report on

The Spectral Arctic

“…Rather, consumers of spectacles, just like Arctic explorers in the field, displayed a range of responses, many incommensurable and self-consciously enchanting. Oppositional scholarly notions like the spectral, the uncanny, or 'cycles of re-enchantment' (Walsham, 2008), suggest that modernity can be seen as 'haunted': they challenge the idea of the rational western savant as somehow above the spectrum of spiritual, spectral and anomalous beliefs we encounter in everyday life.…”

The Modern Invention of “Science‐and‐religion”: What Follows?

“…I am happy to dispense with “disenchantment” (with some qualifications), and note that this term is not used anywhere in Territories . There is too much evidence of the persistence of belief in contemporary miracles, prodigies, witches and astrology in the seventeenth century (see Greyerz ; Clark ; Walsham ; but cf. Eire ) for us to claim a direct line between a Protestant this‐worldly orientation and a dramatic contraction of belief in supernatural or preternatural events in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.…”

In the Borderlands of Periodization with “The blythnes that hes bein”: The medieval / early modern boundary in Scottish history

“…Or so a dominant narrative would convey, in spite of a growing weight of scholarship for Europe more broadly downplaying the Reformation, if narrowly construed and isolated to an intellectual movement, as primarily or solely responsible for social change in early modern Europe. 51 Historians have already pointed out older religious practices and social patterns persisting for years, even gen- erations, beyond the official date of the Protestant Reformation in Scotland, thus challenging the notion that the Protestant Reformation had an immediate and profound impact on popular religious customs or social control. 52 In reviewing periodization, it is also worth considering the possibility that the Catholic reform developments discussed earlier were part of a still larger current of change in society, that these reforms, coming as they did before the Protestant Reformation, were not a result of Protestantization so much as they were a contributing factor in shaping confessional change.…”