Book Review

Methods/Theory

This excellent book reminds us that one of the reasons we have trouble naming periods is because the ghosts of G. F. W. Hegel and Johann Gottfried von Herder still lurk. Naming is seldom simply a matter of convenience or historical shorthand, particularly when philosophical and religious issues are at play. Naming is about setting chronological boundaries, giving a qualitative character to a period, and possibly inserting it into some grand narrative of national character or historical development. It is still, at bottom, about praise and blame.

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This volume began as a set of public lectures at Oxford, and John W. O'Malley has retained their engaging and accessible style while adding considerable background scholarship in the notes. He reviews the various efforts, both apologetic and hostile, to find a workable term to describe the institution's history from the mid-fifteenth through the mid-eighteenth centuries. Generally, Protestant historians saw the church as corrupt and reactionary and so used the term "Counter-Reformation." Some Catholic historians preferred "Catholic Reformation," but others were ambivalent, thinking that to accept reformation was to admit prior deformation. Hubert Jedin, author of the definitive History of the Council of Trent (1949–1975), came up with what O'Malley describes as the "Classic Position" by bringing both elements together. Catholic Reform's emphasis on charity, spirituality, and pastoral reform predated Martin Luther, took shape in devotional movements, missions, new religious orders, and a renewed papacy, and lasted to the French Revolution. Counter-Reformation emerged later in reaction to the German Protestants, took shape in the Inquisition and Index, and existed alongside Catholic Reform until the need for it declined in the mid-seventeenth century.

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