Both Delumeau and Bossy feature in Eire\u2019s bibliography, but he has little sympathy with these attempts at an overarching morphology of \u201cReformation.\u201d\u009d For him, what characterizes the religious transformations of the sixteenth century, and their out-workings in the seventeenth, is not a single unifying energy, good or bad, but their variety and multiple incompatibilities. The occasion of his book is the upcoming Luther anniversary, and he does justice to Luther\u2019s unique role in triggering the collapse of the medieval religious synthesis. But he is keen to emphasize that Luther was just one, if the first, of the agents of the dramatic upheavals of the period, and in the long term, by no means the most important. Zwingli, a former humanist whose abandonment of medieval Catholic orthodoxy predated Luther\u2019s, gets extended treatment, as does Calvin, who built on Zwingli\u2019s initiatives to create the disciplined structures and alliances with civic society which would become the normative form of Protestantism. So, too, do the leaders of the more radical, apocalyptic, or rationalizing alternatives to Catholicism and to what became \u201cmainstream\u201d\u009d Protestantism. Eire does not give much away in his personal assessment of Luther, though alongside a meticulous analysis of the theology we get ample quotation illustrating Luther\u2019s disconcerting penchant for scatological insult and a preoccupation with excreta aimed indiscriminately at Catholics and the devil.<\/p>\n
Eire\u2019s final chapter on the great Reformer is headed \u201cLuther the reactionary\u201d\u009d and deals with Luther\u2019s violent repudiation of the apocalyptic radicalism of former disciples like Andreas Karlstadt and Thomas M\u00c3\u00bcntzer, and especially with the Wittenbergers\u2019 savage reaction to the Peasants\u2019 Revolt of 1525….<\/p>\n