The Hybrid Reformation: A Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History of Contending Forces by Christopher Ocker (review)

Reviewed by: The Hybrid Reformation: A Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History of Contending Forces by Christopher Ocker Andrew L. Wilson The Hybrid Reformation: A Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History of Contending Forces. By Christopher Ocker. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2022. 310 pp. + xiv. In a series of essays on secondary and tertiary figures of the Reformation, Christopher Ocker complicates the received narrative of abrupt rupture. Rather, drawing upon Peter Burke's similarly titled treatment of the Renaissance, Ocker demonstrates the mixing of old and new, using the otherwise murky post-colonial concept of "hybrid" to useful effect. On the ground, "The Reformation" was much more fluid and murky than later stories would have us believe. End Page 236 Take, for example, the case of Barbara von Fuchstein, a woman of the lower nobility from the Allgäu hills near Memmingen, described in chapter one. Caught up in the swirl of novel religiosity and peasant revolt, Barbara lost her husband, her rank, as well as her claims to various properties and their incomes. Renouncing her scandalous rebaptism, Barbara spent the rest of her life trying to regain her rights in various courts, including those of the abbot of Kempten and, eventually, Ferdinand of Austria. She won. The point Ocker makes is not that a woman won, but that through waves of upheaval existing institutions continued their slow grind. It took decades, even centuries for the dust to settle. Chapters two and three paint equally detailed portraits of ambiguous Anabaptists and hybrid reformers like Ruprecht of Mosheim. This well-connected priest and courtier of the Habsburgs rejected Luther while pushing a very popular and idiosyncratic set of proposals that eventually earned him censure. Most of the Reformation, as it happened in salons, in court, and over dinner conversations, was like Ruprecht's efforts. Reform was a messy, drawn-out process. Chapter four, "A Reformation Stake in Medieval Thinking," will be of particular interest to readers of Lutheran Quarterly. Ocker outlines how Matthias Flacius plumbed medieval authors, many of them untapped by Catholic opponents, to argue for the Evangelical cause against the papacy. A consequence of Flacius's medievally informed polemics was not only the gnesio-Lutheran victory under the patronage of Elector August but also an unexpected convivencia with the Catholic emperor: "Flacius's dual conviction, that a sharp boundary distinguished Lutheran and Catholic doctrine in the present and that Lutheran reform stood in continuity with an intellectually complex medieval past was mainstreamed" (79). Flacius's medievalism actually fit well with the renewed medievalism of the Holy Roman Empire. Philosophical theologians will be well served by chapters five and six. "The trouble with Ockham" untangles what Ocker calls the "playfulness" of method from the metaphysical claims strongly implied by the nominalist label. Scholasticism was less a set of beliefs or even a particular method and more a culture of inquiry—a claim continued in the essay on "Wegestreit: Via moderna and Wycliffites." The End Page 237 charged labels of realism and nominalism "emerged as organized concepts within a broader, longer, and much more complex debate over the place of logical experiment in the schools" (143). Replace "logical experiment" with "critical theory" and the debate's rancor and fluidity will be familiar to anyone in the vicinity of contemporary academia. The last set of essays, chapters 7–9, pick up on Ocker's earlier work in the history of biblical interpretation, treating in turn "Erasmus and Biblical Scholasticism," Calvin's opponent Sebastian Castellio, and libertines. "The Trouble with Allegory" adds to the growing scholarship on figural exegesis. As in all previous chapters, pat terms are deconstructed and reconstructed in a more historically informed fashion. This is an immensely learned work; the notes alone are worth the price of admission, and gather up much of the rich production of the past two decades of Reformation research. Under Ocker's gaze, formerly solid labels (Anabaptism, the Peasants' War, nominalism, realism, via moderna, humanism, allegory) shift underneath us. This book will delightfully confuse. As such, this work will be indispensable for ecumenical theologians, Reformation scholars, and historians of biblical interpretation. Highly recommended. Andrew L. Wilson Japan Lutheran College and Seminary Tokyo, Japan Copyright...