
The Hybrid Reformation
A Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History of Contending Forces
Christopher Ocker(Author)
Cambridge University Press
Published on 22. September 2022
Book
Hardback
326 pages
978-1-108-47797-0 (ISBN)
Description
Three basic forces dominated sixteenth-century religious life. Two polarized groups, Protestant and Catholic reformers, were shaped by theological debates, over the nature of the church, salvation, prayer, and other issues. These debates articulated critical, group-defining oppositions. Bystanders to the Catholic-Protestant competition were a third force. Their reactions to reformers were violent, opportunistic, hesitant, ambiguous, or serendipitous, much the way social historians have described common people in the Reformation for the last fifty years. But in an ecology of three forces, hesitations and compromises were natural, not just among ordinary people, but also, if more subtly, among reformers and theologians. In this volume, Christopher Ocker offers a constructive and nuanced alternative to the received understanding of the Reformation. Combining the methods of intellectual, cultural, and social history, his book demonstrates how the Reformation became a hybrid movement produced by a binary of Catholic and Protestant self-definitions, by bystanders to religious debate, and by the hesitations and compromises made by all three groups during the religious controversy.
Reviews / Votes
'The nine chapters that form the body of this book should not be read as a comprehensive guide to the hybrid Reformation, but as a series of forays intended to help historians discern third forces amid the noise and tumult of confrontational polemics ... Ocker's concluding essay offers a splendid guide to the conceptual underpinnings of hybridity, the historiography of ambiguity and precarity, and the poverty of interpretive paradigms, such as confessionalization theory, that fail to account for it.' David M. Luebke, Journal of Modern HistoryMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Cambridge
United Kingdom
Edition type
New edition
Product notice
sewn/stitched
Cloth over boards
Illustrations
Worked examples or Exercises
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 19 mm
Weight
780 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-108-47797-0 (9781108477970)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Christopher Ocker
Hybrid Reformation
A Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History of Contending Forces
E-Book
09/2022
Cambridge University Press
€79.49
Available for download

Christopher Ocker
The Hybrid Reformation
A Social, Cultural, and Intellectual History of Contending Forces
E-Book
09/2022
Cambridge University Press
€92.49
Available for download
Person
Christopher Ocker is Assistant Provost and Professor of History at The Graduate School of Theology, University of Redlands, and member of the Core Doctoral faculty of the Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley. He is the author of Biblical Poetics before Humanism and Reformation, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525-1547 (2006) and Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (2018).
Content
Part I. Indifference and Ambiguity: 1. After the Peasants War: an anabaptist fights for her property; 2. Living between the old faith and the new; 3. 'A middle man'; Part II. Medieval Protestants: 4. A reformation stake in medieval thinking; 5. The trouble with Ockham: nominalism; 6. Wegestreit: Via Moderna, Via Antiqua, Wycliffites; Part III. Interpretation Beyond Borders: 7. Erasmus and biblical scholasticism; 8. A literal incident, a spiritual menace: Calvin versus Castellio and Libertines; 9. The trouble with allegory; 10. Third forces in a hybrid reformation.