1 - Nailing the Reformation

Summary

This chapter examines the place in English history memory of what is generally considered the original ‘event’ of the Reformation: Martin Luther’s posting of the Ninety-five Theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on 31 October 1517. Despite its uncertain historical veracity, the episode was prioritised by the ideological demands of the first Reformation centenary celebrated in Germany in 1617, and thereafter (particularly in the nineteenth century) it became a magnet of Protestant artistic expression and cultural identity. In England, however, interest in Luther’s ‘Thesenanschlag’ remained remarkably muted through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Even in 1817, when a commemorative impulse fired by imaginative remembering of the episode swept through Lutheran Germany, Scandinavia and the United States, English interest remained muted. Across the nineteenth century as a whole, non-conformists were much more likely than Anglicans to celebrate the valour and significance of Luther’s ‘deed’. The reticence points to a long-standing reluctance among Anglicans to acknowledge Luther, even at a remove, as a founder of the Church of England. Yet a long-standing failure to advance consensually any alternative date or event as the foundational moment of the English Reformation is striking, underlining the unresolved tension over continuity versus rupture which lies at the heart of Anglican historical identity.