Thanks to Geoff Eley for a careful and useful deliberation on the
disjuncture between early modernists and modernists. Now John Holloran
has weighed in with a piece on the fatal legacy of Ritter and
conservative anti-modernism. Here are a few musings in reply.

1. In referring to the remarks of Nipperdey 'in his unguarded moments',
Eley cited, then passed over in silence, the hoariest of hoary myths of
Reformation historiography: not the silly one regarding 'intellectual
emancipation' (which has its own Kulturkampf and Cold War lineage), but
rather the deeply chauvinistic one regarding the 'civilizational
impetus' of the *German* Reformation. Eley seems content to let it go
almost uncommented. Added to Nipperdey's nostalgia for 'normalcy' and
the general trend on the conservative side of the Historikerstreit to
reinscribe German history into the great military and diplomatic
pragmatist narratives as well as conservative political narratives of
Adenauerian vintage ('the ancient occidental Rhineland', 'occidental
civilization', etc.), Nipperdey's position begs for further analysis.
I'm just not the one to do it. Perhaps my colleague Karyn Ball (Dept. of
English, Alberta) is.

2. The Enlightenment/French Revolution divide has indeed replaced the
'Reformation' as the watershed of European history between the
pre-modern and modern periods. Although Eley did cite Scribner, he left
out the substantial religious and cultural historical work that has
demonstrated the continuities in religion and culture running from
'medieval' through 17th-century Europe. This corpus includes a good deal
of Scribner's own work, but also some of the work of Zeeden himself and
his collaborator/successor at Tuebingen, the social democrat (and
sometime germanophobe) Heiko Oberman and his students (such as Berndt
Hamm)--_pace_ Holloran! In British historiography, A.G. Dickens,
Christopher Haigh, Eamon Dufffy and Diarmaid MacCulloch provide a long
tradition of dissent from Eltonesque political narratives regarding the
English Reformation, and constitute a strong school of thought
emphasizing the underlying and social continuities between
pre-Reformation and subsequent 'Protestant' popular religiosity and
piety. In fact, so much of this sort of work has been published that one
would be hard pressed to find an early modernist outside of the
confessional (Lutheran) colleges or chairs for Church History in
(German) Faculties of Theology who would defend the 'western civ'
textbook version of Luther as the 'first modern man' or of the
Reformation as the beginning of the modern age--never mind the
aforementioned 'silly' idea about the Reformers encouraging intellectual
emancipation. If they did throw off the authority of the church (the
'magisterium'), it was only to replace it, at least in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, with the authority of the Reformers themselves,
that of a selection of the Church Fathers, and the supervision of
superintendents and other officials appointed by the secular authorities
to 'police' religion. Here the merits of the confessionalization thesis
can be appreciated from another side: the demonstration of the influence
secular powers developed to police and channel organized religion for
their own ends has made an important contribution to the demystification
of the 'intellectual emancipation' story.

3. It seems to me that the Enlightenment/French Rev. 'historiographical
watershed' has appeared as the result largely of tacit agreements and
understandings, *perhaps* based on the sort of work that has shown how
much stayed the same from 1450 through 1550 to 1650 and beyond, despite
the Reformations, but then also tacitly. This new watershed fulfills
most of the same functions of the old Ren./Ref. paradigm. Most
importantly, however, the new consensus regarding the watershed nature
of this era has not been professionally theorized, at least not much
beyond the self-conscious claims of its promoters (Voltaire) and its
modernist (in the epistemological, not professional sense) devotees
amongst historians, political scientists and philosophers. We do avoid
crossing this territory--perhaps because Foucault's important
theorization of Enlightenment was so unflattering and so profoundly
unsettling?

4. Holloran's remarks about the legacy of Gerhard Ritter and
'anti-modern' tendencies in the German academy before and after WWII
strike a deep chord. Anyone who witnessed the rush to install
'anti-moderns' (from a post-modern perspective, one might call them high
modernist reactionaries) in the East German chairs and now the last
remaining German C-4 chairs for medieval and early modern history will
agree with much of what Holloran has to say. However, the editorship of
the Archive for Reformation History has now passed out of the hands of
the Ritterites and into the hands of a totally different lineage: no-one
could possibly accuse Susan Karant-Nunn (Arizona), a pioneering social
historian of the Reformation, of thinking or writing in the tradition of
Ritter.

5. Holloran rightly directs our attention toward the individual
self-understandings of Germans and other Europeans that might cut across
or negate confessional identities. However, it should be clear to anyone
who has made personal connections with non-academics in Germany how
important confessional and other religious identities can still be
today: marriage, memberships (in churches as well as other
organizations), the alternating Catholic and Protestant 'Besetzung' of
certain university chairs: all these are still present and play
important roles in constituting everyday experience.

Andrew Colin Gow
University of Alberta

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