Map Of The Protestant Reformation

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By Graeme Murdock
Oct 3^rd 2017

Maps convey simple historical narratives very conspicuously–but how useful are simple stories nearly the by? Many history textbooks and studies of the Reformation include some sort of map that claims to draw Europe's religious divisions in the sixteenth century. Some of these maps show Cosmic equally opposed to Protestant states marked out in singled-out colours. Other maps distinguish between varieties of Protestantism and show rival colours for Lutheran and Calvinist (and sometimes also Anglican) territories. Other maps try to present a more complex image of Europe'southward religious demography with blobs of different colours showing the presence of minority groups inside states. Some maps also provide a range of different colours to draw where Anabaptist, Antitrinitarian, Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Hussite, Muslim and Jewish Europeans lived. Some maps show states that offered legal rights to more than one religion and regions with a mixed religious demography using multi-coloured stripes or overlapping blotches of different colours. The viewer might well be fatigued to worry that such places would be unlikely to enjoy peace and stability until they could friction match the comforting monochrome of their neighbours.

How helpful are these maps in depicting the reality of lived religion after the Reformation? Comparing maps in unlike books quickly reveals startling inconsistences and inaccuracies. Placing these maps alongside i another simply leads to confusion as religious communities announced in different locations for no apparent reason. Even the more accurate maps struggle to stand for in any meaningful way the dynamic and fluid character of religious life in Reformation Europe. How could whatsoever map precisely chart the place of different religious communities in France or the Netherlands across the centre decades of the sixteenth century? Or what colour scheme could be deployed to show exactly where Utraquists, Maverick Brethren, Lutherans and Catholics lived in the Czech lands?

The religious situation in Europe almost 1560, The Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd, 1923. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.

These maps also tend to present a number of entirely misleading impressions to viewers. For case, maps convey the notion that all Protestants (or Lutherans or Calvinists) belonged to a single European community marked in the same colour while ignoring divisions both betwixt and within these traditions. Maps tin can also bolster the notion that the religious frontiers of Europe were determined by land borders and the legal powers of monarchs. The Reformation was never a procedure adamant only by those who held political power. The presence of minority communities is ofttimes overlooked or nether-represented. Many people worshipped in churches or in homes despite the lack of any legal right to do and so. Even where communities outwardly conformed to a land church, turning "Catholics" into "Lutherans" was for example a very slow and individualised process of spiritual and cultural persuasion.

Religious balance of Europe at the end of the 16th century. CortoFrancese, CC Past-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Eatables.

State borders likewise offering entirely unreliable markers in many contexts of where a Protestant world ended and a Catholic world began. Local people in borderlands proved good at turning circumstances to their advantage- travelling across borders to attend their church of choice, or using liminal spaces to ignore the demands of all priests and ministers. Religious identities were framed by royal decrees and state borders, by linguistic communities, and also past individual decisions taken inside neighbourhoods and families. Over time, the combined and consistent efforts of country authorities and clergy hierarchies could enforce uniform religious practice and instil a articulate sense of collective religious identity in communities living inside stable boundaries. Nevertheless, the notion that people of dissimilar religions mostly lived apart from one another but never came into existence in many areas across Europe. We should non be fooled past maps into underestimating the degree to which Protestant and Catholic societies remained intertwined sometimes in relative peace and sometimes leading to outbreaks of communal violence.

As we arroyo the 500th ceremony of the Reformation, nosotros might do well to dubiousness the chapters of maps to offer any sort of reliable depiction of Europe'south religious life. Or, at least, viewers might exist drawn by such maps into thinking about the porosity and rigidity of borders, the item nature of borderlands, about shared spaces and contested spaces, about overlapping identities and rival identities, and about the circuitous means in which individuals, families and communities related to churches and states, and about the office of ordinary European women and men as well as kings, princes, bishops and reformers in shaping the graphic symbol of being a "Catholic" or a "Lutheran" or a "Calvinist" or a "Protestant" after the Reformation.

Featured Image credit: Europe around 1560, The Historical Atlas by William R. Shepherd, 1923. Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons .

Graeme Murdock is Manager of the Eye for European Studies at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of the chapter "Geographies of the Protestant Reformation" in The Oxford Handbook of the Protestant Reformations.