A Response to Philip Benedict’s ‘Of Church Orders and Postmodernism’

In this discussion of bmgn – Low Countries Historical Review Philip Benedict reviewed Jesse Spohnholz’s book, The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge 2017). While Benedict praises Spohnholz’s research and contributions as they pertain to the religious history of sixteenthcentury Europe, he criticizes Spohnholz for borrowing from scholarship associated with the ‘archival turn’ and postmodernist critiques of constructivist empiricism. In this response, Spohnholz defends his approach and its relevance for questions about writing the history of the Reformation in the twenty-first century. Spohnholz stresses the shared historical and methodological perspectives between himself and Benedict (and others), comments on the historical significance of his study, and clarifies the book’s intended audiences.

Researching and writing The Convent of Wesel was exhilarating. It felt like my own Sherlockian adventure. Solving this puzzle required hunting down evidence in archival and print materials in multiple countries and languages, which were often organized in ways that confounded my efforts. One key moment for me came when I first learned that Abraham Kuyper, an editor of a collection of sixteenth-century sources I had long relied upon, had also been one of the most polarizing political figures in late-nineteenthcentury Dutch history, and that his scholarly interest in sixteenth-century Protestant refugees had been connected to his controversial political and religious objectives. To avoid aligning myself with protagonists of the past with different goals than my own, I began reading Neo-Calvinist theology, archival and memory studies, nineteenth-century historical manuals and, yes, scholarship that was influenced by postmodernism and postcolonialism -all subjects I had never studied before. These readings helped me find a solution by learning first to recognize hurdles to solving the mystery that I had not previously seen. in the first place, the focus of Part ii. They also helped me to think about how this example might offer useful perspectives for newer students of the sixteenth century seeking to develop histories suitable for the twenty-first century.
While the idea of reformatio existed in the sixteenth century -and predated Martin Luther -the idea of the Reformation, in an epochal sense, emerged out of a nineteenth-century Hegelian conception of historical progress. 2 Among professional historians, Leopold von Ranke played a key role in connecting the Reformation (as epoch) to nineteenth-century values such as nationalism and individualism. 3 Following him, many nineteenthand early-twentieth-century European and Euro-American scholars often similarly measured the Reformation -and all of world history -relative to modern Western standards. I found Dipesh Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe helpful in seeing alternatives. 4 Chakrabarty pointed to the problem that intellectuals in former European colonies treated modern Western ideaswhich were historically produced -as ahistorical and universal. I came to see this perspective as useful for pre-modern European histories too. When we actively try to see subjects outside pre-existing historical narratives, sometimes we can develop previously unseen perspectives or alternative interpretations.
Appreciating the value of such views does not entail dismissing earlier historicist scholarship. As has been the case with so many historians before me, my effort has been to expand upon questions of contextualization, causality, source criticism and scholarly bias that Ranke placed squarely within the realm of historical inquiry. Many critiques of historicism that I was 'out-Ranke-ing Ranke'. None, including Ranke, claimed to offer a method guaranteeing epistemological certainty or absolute objectivity. But many have challenged the assumptions of scholarship that preceded them, encouraged new forms of source criticism, urged an appreciation of new contexts, widened the array of sources worthy of study and embraced new understandings of causality. The Convent of Wesel draws on this long tradition of scholarship in applying historians' tools to this mystery.
What is novel about The Convent of Wesel is not that it uses any new tools of historical inquiry, but that it does this so intensively and expansively around just one piece of evidence across space and time. As a result, as many elements that shape historical interpretation as I could manage became visible for the reader. I hope that the end product is both accessible to non-specialists and capable of reaching across subfields (chronologically and geographically designated) that could benefit from more dialogue with one another. I also found that I needed to expose all those elements to explain the surprising appearance and endurance of this mystery, and to explain my solution. In the process, I found it effective to use concepts from authors whose work   how hard it can be to systematically and exhaustively apply the tools of historicism. I came to see The Convent of Wesel as an opportunity to offer nonspecialist readers (especially advanced undergraduate and graduate students) with a perspective that might help them pursue new questions and adopt new frames of reference, by suggesting that we can be better prepared to see what lies hidden behind old paradigms by explicitly looking directly at, and then around, through, over and under them.
To demonstrate this, after presenting my solution in Part i, I raised a question: how did modern historians and record-keepers come to perpetuate ideas that lacked evidence to support them? The problem is a challenge for all historians seeking to understand events that happened over 400 years ago, as Benedict has astutely pointed out elsewhere. 8 How do we prepare ourselves and our students to meet these challenges? This problem hangs over many concepts we use to understand the religious history of sixteenthcentury Europe. That is true for the difference between modern terms such as Reformation and confession, which do not have the same meaning as the sixteenth-century words reformatio or confessio, whose connotations were changing during the sixteenth century as well. 9 A similar problem hangs over sixteenth-century epithets such as 'Lutheran' and 'Calvinist'. Initially, these words were condescending, because they insinuated that another's  During the nineteenth century, when supporters of Reformed orthodoxy warmly embraced the moniker 'Calvinist', another process of retrospective crystallization happened. 12 It is perfectly acceptable to use these terms in their modern scholarly meanings. But when historians label sixteenthcentury Reformed Protestants as 'Calvinists' and supporters of the invariata as 'Lutherans', we need to take care not to inadvertently weigh in on debates that remained unresolved in the later 1560s. 13 Benedict and I fully agree that early modern producers and keepers of records collected and arranged sources to promote doctrinal, ecclesiastical and liturgical unity. I sought to convey their energy and enthusiasm to do so in my book. I also found it instructive to ask: unity on whose terms? 'Unity', like 'order', is both aspirational (and almost never fully achieved) and subjective, as one person's unity is another's schism. Within the Netherlandish Reformed movement, there remained considerable disunity in the 1560s. Benedict and I also agree that records of Reformed churches offer some of the best evidence about nonconforming individuals and women that we have from the sixteenth century. 14 Our work and that of others has also demonstrated that those records reveal values of the church officers who produced them.
But views expressed at ecclesiastical organizational meetings such as Reformed synods might not sufficiently demonstrate the agreement of those churches' officers. Take, for instance, the synod held in Emden in October 1571. This meeting happened, and proved influential in later decades. But it was only attended by a small group of delegates, since some of the most important Netherlandish Reformed churches could not send delegates, and its preparations and proceedings were marked by disagreements. Plus, its provisions were not universally accepted or applied in the years that followed. 15 The example of the Convent of Wesel is more extreme, of course, but the problem is similar. Historians studying such organizational meetings a response to philip benedict should be cautious before accepting professions of agreement at face value, lest we miss other germane historical developments.
These lessons also apply to how historians relate to archives, a point brought home to me after an archivist first denied me access to the original 1568 articles because they were too important to Dutch church history. I respect the need to preserve precious evidence from the past and appreciate that archivists later welcomed me back. But that day is when I started thinking with greater focus about archives. Looking beyond implicit narratives of archives does not mean treating archives as abstract agents of history or simply acknowledging the reasons why people built that archive in the first place. Rather, it means (as before Quintinus Noortbergh produced his inventory (pages 140-143). All the while, of course, office holders in Reformed churches were collecting and distributing other church records, as Benedict points out. But it was not until the 'National Synod of Wesel' found its way into dominant historical narratives of the Dutch Reformation -a process that took place through a back-and-forth between record-keeping and history-writing over two centuries -that such kinds of record-keeping became critical to spreading forms of knowledge about the articles that my book traces.
All this said, Benedict asks how this book encourages us to rethink sixteenth-century church-building. He is absolutely right that it points to Genevan and French influence on early Netherlandish Reformed church-building. 18  But, as I argue in Chapter 3, not even all the signatories to these articles seem to have understood their signing in the same ways that Dathenus and Moded did. At this moment, many possible futures still existed. My approach also casts light on the ways in which the Electoral Palatinate first began influencing the shape of Netherlandish Reformed Protestantism in the 1560s. Taken together, the book highlights the diverse and international influences on Netherlandish religious cultures, some features of which get lost when historians adopt only local, regional or nationals frameworksanother point upon which Benedict and I agree. 25 I endeavored to weave discussion -discussiedossier such historiographical interventions quietly into the chapters for specialists, leaving the conclusion to consider the book's message for non-specialists. Onderzoek).