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4 - Heresy executions in Reformation Europe, 1520–1565

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 December 2009

Ole Peter Grell
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
Bob Scribner
Affiliation:
Harvard Divinity School
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Summary

To the best of my knowledge, no general synthesis of trials and executions for heresy in Reformation Europe has ever been attempted. We are all aware that executions for heresy occurred throughout western Europe after Luther's successful defiance of papal authority in December 1520. We hear vague reports of massive executions of Anabaptists in the aftermath of the German Peasants' War, and again after the collapse of the New Jerusalem at Münster. And the dreary tale of religious persecution continues. In Mediterranean Europe, a nascent Protestant movement was snuffed out by organised repression from the Roman and Spanish Inquisitions. In France and the Low Countries, we hear many reports about executions of Huguenots and about the vast havoc wrought by Alva's ‘Council of Blood’. Englishmen remember the persecutions under Mary Tudor. But nobody has tried to measure overall religious persecution in Reformation Europe (not forgetting that early Protestant governments also put several people to death for heresy). Just how bad was it? Should Reformation Europe be considered as the zenith of R. I. Moore's ‘Persecuting Society’?

The obstacles standing in the way of a provisional census of heresy executions in Reformation Europe are considerable; but enough evidence remains to permit some fairly precise estimates of both the timing and the geography of heresy prosecutions after Luther defied papal authority, and to offer at least one major provisional hypothesis about the institutional dynamics of these executions. An investigator of heresy executions in sixteenth-century Europe possesses the unusual advantage of having documentation available from the persecuted as well as from the persecutors.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

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