David M. Whitford - Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research

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SIXTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYS & STUDIES SERIES

GENERAL EDITOR

MICHAEL WOLFE

ST. JOHNS UNIVERSITY

EDITORIAL BOARD OF SIXTEENTH CENTURY ESSAYS & STUDIES

Copyright 2008 Truman State University Press, Kirksville, Missouri USA

All rights reserved

tsup.truman.edu

Cover art: Hans Holbein the Younger, The Ambassadors, 1533. Oil on canvas, National Gallery, London. Photo reproduced by permission of Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Cover design: Shaun Hoffeditz

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Reformation and early modern Europe : a guide to research / edited by David M. Whitford.

p. cm. (Sixteenth century essays & studies ; v. 79.)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-931112-72-7 (cloth bound : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-935503-64-4 (e-book) 1. ReformationEurope. 2. EuropeChurch history16th century. 3. EuropeChurch history17th century. I. Whitford, David M. (David Mark)

BR305.3.R42 2007

274.06072dc22

2007046362

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means without written permission from the publisher.

In 1982, Steven Ozment began his preface to Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research by stating, There is no field of historical study today that is more alive with change and fresh ideas than that of Reformation Europe. This remains very true today, but for very different reasons than when Ozment edited that first guide to research, or even in 1992 when William Maltby edited the second. These reasons are new schools, new tools, and new texts. I have used the phrase new schools, new tools, and new texts for some time in my first lecture on the European Reformations; it is catchy enough for students to remember easily and encompassing enough to be useful. Many students already know that the Reformation was born out of a newly established school, the University of Wittenberg, and they also know that new tools such as the printing press spread the message of the Reformers and their opponents far and wide, pouring out new texts at great speeds. But there are other new schools, tools, and texts of which they might never have heard: new schools of thought in areas as diverse as painting, or music, or philosophy; new tools that made possible advances in mapmaking, navigation, philology, and painting; and new texts that were born to new audiences and presented in new and exciting ways.

The explosion of these new texts and new tools enabled fifteenth- and sixteenth-century humanists and scholars to look at themselves and theirworld differently. Similarly, twentieth- and twenty-first-century developments in information technology have given scholars of early modern Europe access to methods and approaches to practicing history, a sort of contemporary version of new schools, new tools, and new texts. When Ozments Reformation research guide went to press, IBM was rolling out the first IBM PC, which ran an 8088 processor at 4.77 megahertz and had 16 kilobytes of memory. When Maltby edited the second Reformation research guide in 1992, the Internet did not exist. I managed to make it through my entire higher education journey without ever emailing a professor, and when I went to Germany to do dissertation research, I handwrote letters and licked stamps to mail them home. I did use disk-based databases for bibliographic research and as a work-study student even helped transfer a card catalog to a computer catalog, but throughout my educational experience one still had to double-check the card catalog and the paper indexes. Today card catalogs are gone from nearly all libraries and most indexes are not even put on disk anymore, let alone paper.

As I write this preface, I am sitting in my home office, which is linked to my office at the university. A four-gigabyte thumb drive on my key chain automatically syncs to my hard drive; it is roughly 62,000 times the size of the 8088 PC on which I wrote my senior thesis, my masters thesis, and at least half of my dissertation. Advances in information technology have transformed early modern historiography in dramatic and exciting ways. Traveling for archival research is becoming less and less essential, because often primary documents can come to you. It is now possible to sit in an office in the United States, and access the British Archives, search for a sea captain, and download a PDF copy of his last will and testament executed in March 1584. These texts also become part of a personal digital library of hundreds of thousands of pages of early modern texts. The ability to search full-text editions of sixteenth-century texts, such as Early English Books Online or the online edition of Luthers Werke, has only become available since 2000, and the implications of research that uses this technology to its fullest extent have barely been felt. These new tools have radically democratized the availability of scholarship.