DESERT HARVEST—Fall 2001
Vol. 9, No. 2

From the desk of the Director
by Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn

   Change is always intimidating. Sameness and routine are comforting, like being rocked in a cradle of days. When interviewing me, Heiko Oberman planned to remain at the helm of the Division for nine more years. Heiko’s untimely passing has thrust the Division students and me not only into a state of bereavement and sorrow but also prematurely into a condition of mental and organizational realignment. How shall we proceed? Dean Holly M. Smith gave the Division her wholehearted support and now she has moved on to Rutgers. How can I sustain the Division’s students with their diverse interests? With the help of sympathetic colleagues and staff, I am shaping the post-Heiko Division. I am particularly gratified by the willingness of Alan Bernstein and Helen Nader to reinforce the Division’s strengths.
    We will continue to express our gratitude to the public through our Annual Town and Gown Lecture, which on 21 March 2002 will feature the world renowned Professor Elaine Pagels.
    Asking people to give of their hard-won assets is similarly intimidating. So that the Division may continue to flourish, I have become acclimated to the habits of a part-time fundraiser and have been impressed by our friends’ warm receptivity. The successful endowment of the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History will secure our founder’s legacy for future generations. Oberman’s intellectual values and his pedagogical achievement demand furtherance by means of a named chair; additionally, only with its establishment will the rare Oberman Library come into University possession.
    Donations to the Division’s other, perennial needs may be made in one of two forms: either to the Ora De Concini Martin and Morris Martin General Endowment Fund, the interest yielded by which will provide, among others, scholarships and guest lectureships; or to the Reformation Studies Fund, which is not grounded in an interest-generating principal but can be used to help finance the students’ non-routine learning and research costs.
    I seek your generosity as you are able. Especially your ongoing friendship to the Division and its students will bring us through this time of loss to a future as luminous as the past.

In memoriam: Heiko Augustinus Oberman, 1930-2001
by Professor Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Peder Sather professor of history, University of California, Berkeley, friend and colleague

[This article originally appeared in The Sixteenth Century Journal 32, no. 2, 435-437.]

   In the morning of Sunday, 22 April, at the age of 70, Heiko A. Oberman died of melanoma at his home in Tucson, Arizona. Born on 15 October 1930 in Utrecht, Oberman received his doctorate in theology under Martin van Rijn from that city’s university, and, following a sojourn in Indonesia, he was ordained a minister in the Reformed Church of The Netherlands. Harvard Divinity School called him to an instructorship in 1957, in which faculty he rose to a professorship in 1963 and a named chair in 1964. In 1966 he accepted a professorial chair in church history in the Protestant Theological Faculty at Tübingen. He also assumed there the directorship of the Institute for Late Middle Ages and Reformation and supervised the preparation of the analytical index to the Weimar edition of Martin Luther’s works. Oberman was one of three organizing heads of an interdisciplinary Special Research Group (Sonderforschungsbereich ) on the Late Middle Ages and Reformation, which flourished in the 1970s and into the 1980s. In those years, when his team was preparing critical editions of the writings of the fourteenth-century Italian theologian Gregory of Rimini and the German theologian Johannes von Paltz, Tübingen attracted scholars in Reformation studies from many countries.
    During his Tübingen years Oberman’s Harvard students had begun to transform the field of Reformation studies. From his seminar at the University of Arizona, which called him in 1984, has issued a new generation—his third, including his Tübingen students—of scholars in late medieval and Reformation history. At Tucson he founded and directed the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies, which is now under the leadership of his chosen successor, Susan C. Karant-Nunn. The University of Arizona has begun raising funds to support an Oberman Chair.
    No one has done more than Heiko Oberman to encourage talent, especially young talent, in this field. Among the 170 or so volumes which have appeared under his editorship with E.J. Brill are first books by scholars from a wide range of countries.
    Among Oberman’s many honors were honorary degrees from many universities and memberships in learned academies. In 1989 he was named Regents’ Professor, the highest honor the Arizona university system can bestow. In 1996 the Royal Netherlands Academy honored him with the A.H. Heineken Prize for history.
    Heiko Oberman’s immense list of publications from 1957 to 2000 contains seventeen independent works (among which are five lectures and four collections of his articles), plus nineteen edited or co-edited volumes and 137 articles, prefaces, and ephemera. Most appeared first in English, German, or Dutch, and eleven of his books were translated into German, English, Italian, Dutch, or Spanish.
    The production of this huge oeuvre falls into three phases. The first, which beginning with his doctoral dissertation on Thomas Bradwardine, a fourteenth-century English non-Augustinian theologian, took as its central theme the relationship of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century theology and philosophy to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation. Though his thesis about a “new Augustinian school” of theology did not convince all readers, he nonetheless established the continuities between the late Middle Ages and the Reformation so firmly that today, as Alistair E. McGrath has written, “neither the events nor the ideas of the sixteenth century may be properly understood unless they are seen as the culmination of developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.”
    Oberman’s argument first came to a wider audience in The Harvest of Medieval Theology: Gabriel Biel and Late Medieval Theology (1963), the title announced his emulation of his great countryman, Johan Huizinga (1872-1945), whose The Harvest of the Middle Ages remained Oberman’s literary polestar. Yet there was nothing narrowly patriotic about Oberman’s vision, though he loved to make outrageous claims for Dutch priority in the invention of almost everything. He was, Peter Blickle has pointed out, a true cosmopolitan, who saw the Reformation as a European event which unfolded at many sites.
    Two turns marked the end of this first phase. First, Oberman displayed his discovery of social history in a notable article he published for the jubilee of the German Peasants’ War in 1975. At that time, as he was fond of saying, he stood with social historians “back to back,” perhaps because they had opened up space for his vision for plural streams of reformation. Eventually, as his latest writings suggest, he experienced some regret for allowing the camel’s nose of social history inside his tent.  Second, in the most unusual of his books, Masters of the Reformation (German 1977, English 1981, Italian 1982), he explored the consequences of scholasticism’s split into two traditions (viae). There he first broached the possibility of seeing in this split the origins of a 700-year-long struggle between “realism” and “nominalism” that is still alive today.
    Martin Luther stands at the commanding center of Oberman’s second phase. Yet before he could present his vision of Luther, Oberman had to confront the issue of Luther and the Jews. While not a leading theme of modern Luther studies, it had been made, Oberman believed, an urgent theme by World War II and the Holocaust. Though not the best known of his books, Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation (German 1981, Dutch 1983, English 1984) may have been the most painful to write. In it Oberman walked a fine line between the understandable desire to contextualize Luther’s anti-Semitism (hence the comparisons with Erasmus and Johannes Reuchlin) and the courage to acknowledge it as an authentic outgrowth of Luther’s theology.
    Luther: Man Between God and the Devil (German 1982, Italian 1987, Dutch 1988, English 1989, Spanish 1993) is doubtless Oberman’s best known book. It is also the most controversial study of Luther produced by an expert since the 1920s. Written mostly in Jerusalem, it appeared in German with typical Oberman timing in 1982, just before the Luther jubilee of 1983. In the opening, Luther’s death rather than his birth, Oberman signals his solution to the intellectual and historical problem Luther posed. He seeks to liberate Luther from two other solutions. On the one side, he tried to wrest Luther from the nationalist modernizers, who saw in the reformer a prophet of modern Germany. On the other hand, he aimed to shield Luther from the historicizers, who would send him back into his own time, just as the theologians, so Albert Schweitzer once wrote, had sent back the Jesus they had liberated from Christian faith. Oberman’s solution to this problem was to place the reformer above all ages as a transhistorical beacon of Christian engagement with life’s site “between God and the Devil.” His life and thought, Oberman argued, lived entirely in the Last Days, between God and the Devil.
    Oberman had strong reasons to historicize Luther—and Erasmus—but the experiences of the European Jews and his beloved Netherlands at German hands forbade him to do so. “The historian,” he once wrote, “is the last advocate of the dead.” The desire to do justice to the past, both deeper and more recent, absolutely ruled his quest for the point at which a fatal turn began that led to Nazism, World War II, and the Holocaust. Like many others, he believed this turn had come in the late medieval and Reformation era; unlike most others, he believed that it did not occur with Luther.
    How, then, could the spiritual bifurcation of Christian Europe have begun? Oberman found one central clue to this problem in his exposition of the two main scholastic traditions, the “via antiqua” and the “via moderna” or more simply, “realism” and “nominalism.” The conflicts between them, he came to believe, initiated a struggle that marked all of subsequent European thought and history: Thomas Aquinas, the German idealists, and modern German (Protestant) nationalist theology on one side; the neo-Augustinian forerunners, Luther, Copernicus, and Kierkegaard on the other. However odd it may seem, this configuration expressed Oberman’s conviction that a titanic struggle, which began in the fourteenth century and broke surface with Luther, had shaped all subsequent European history. Peter Blickle has written that Oberman “viewed the modern age from the standpoint of the Middle Ages.” That is not incorrect, though it would be more accurate to say that he saw in the late Middle Ages a battle of ideas—nominalism versus realism—which prefigured both the sixteenth-century struggle between the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation and the key conflicts of modern Europe.
    Although Oberman died before he could dramatize the entire scope of his solution to the riddle, the writings of his third phase reveal the contours of his master narrative of late Middle Ages and Reformation. His last major formulation was the concept of a “reformation of the refugees,” in which the sufferings of sixteenth-century (Protestant) exiles recapitulate the sufferings of the ancient Hebrews and anticipate those of the modern Jews and other victims of Nazism. The linkage on the other side, the foes of freedom, ran not to or through Luther—Oberman had striven mightily to block this line of interpretation—but ideally to medieval realist scholasticism and really to the papacy. He saw in the Reformation movement a grand alliance of Luther, the refugee Protestants, and the heads of the infant nations against the yoke of the Roman papacy and the power of its lieutenants, Charles V and Philip II. In the sixteenth century the cosmic struggle between God and the Devil broke history’s surface to take an enduring and unmistakable shape in the events and personalities.
    Oberman had attended the Second Vatican Council as a Protestant observer, and his view of Roman Catholicism, which he defined to a papalist sense, contributed importantly to his reformulation of the conundrum Leopold von Ranke had first defined: Why had the Roman papacy survived the Protestant Reformation? To Ranke the conundrum was obvious but inexplicable. “The course now taken by the moral and intellectual development of the [sixteenth] century,” Ranke once wrote, “was in a direction totally opposed to that which might have been expected from the characteristics of its commencement.”
   When Oberman addressed Ranke’s conundrum, the stakes had become very much higher, for the mid-twentieth century had swept away the progressive, evolutionary vision of history, which Ranke had helped to create. Oberman’s much darker vision reversed the teleology of progress to seek in the late Middle Ages and Reformation era the sources of contemporary disasters. His antihistoricism required a point of view at once more theological than Ranke’s and far more radical.
    In Heiko A. Oberman historical scholarship, academy, church, and world have lost an incomparable force. Only those who knew him were aware that his force did not depend on him alone, for everyone who ever enjoyed the company of Heiko and Toetie Oberman will remember how thoroughly the volcanic freedom of his spirit depended on the profound loyalty of hers. And no one who ever felt this remarkable scholar’s spell will ever forget him. “He could be very hard with his criticism,” said a Dutch church historian, “but he was also very generous with his praise.” That is precisely right. Heiko Oberman’s sovereign self-confidence, his vast learning, his linguistic exuberance, his wily humor, and his fearlessness in argument made him a scholar with whom one could both do honorable battle and stand either beside him or, as he loved to say, “back to back.” The noble legacy he has passed to us reminds me of what an old Galway woman once replied to a stranger’s question about an Irish regiment annihilated at the Somme. “Ah, sir,” she sighed, “thim’s no more.”

Nader and Bernstein lend their weight
by Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn

   For years Division students have studied with UA History Professors Helen Nader, a Hispanist, and Alan E. Bernstein, a specialist in the High Middle Ages—taking courses, consulting them, including them on their graduate committees. Their research specialties complement those within the Division. These colleagues have lent their sustenance in multiple ways to the Division. Both have now accepted my invitation to associate themselves with the Division. This affiliation in no way alters their status in the Department of History. It constitutes recognition and deep appreciation of their past support, and it encourages students to continue to avail themselves of their rich expertise.
    Helen Nader has agreed to offer the Division seminar during fall semester 2002. The subject will be charity in early modern Europe. We hope that Alan Bernstein will teach the seminar shortly thereafter. All History and extra-History graduate students will have the usual access to these seminars.
    Helen Nader joined the Department of History in 1994, coming to be department head from a distinguished professorship at Indiana University, Bloomington. She took the doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley, and has taught at the University of Hawaii. Her books include The Mendoza Family in the Spanish Renaissance, 1350 to 1550 (Rutgers University Press, 1979), Liberty in Absolutist Spain: The Habsburg Sale of Towns, 1516-1700 (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), and The Book of Privileges Issued to Christopher Columbus by King Fernando and Queen Isabel, 1492-1502 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1996). For Liberty in Absolutist Spain she won the Leo Gershoy Prize of the American Historical Association. She has been a Guggenheim Fellow and has served as president of, among others, the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference.
    Alan E. Bernstein received the Ph.D. at Columbia University. He has taught at Stanford University and has been a Guggenheim Fellow. His books include Pierre d'Ailly and the Blanchard Affair: University and Chancellor of Paris at the Beginning of the Great Schism (Brill, 1978), and The Formation of Hell: Death and Retribution in the Ancient and Early Christian Worlds (Cornell University Press, 1993), which is the first of a trilogy on the history of hell. This lead volume was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. This academic year, Bernstein is a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University.

"What makes you tick as an historian?"
Professor Tom Scott, University of Liverpool
by Joshua Rosenthal

   In early May, the Division hosted Tom Scott, Professor of Social and Economic History of Sixteenth Century Germany, University of Liverpool. Professor Scott has written a number of works on town-country relations in late medieval and early modern Europe, the German Peasants' War, and the social history of the Reformation in Germany. He has recently turned his attention to the question of regional identity.
    As guest speaker at the Division's Thursday night seminar on May 1, he spoke about the German Peasants’ War of 1524-6, one of the greatest popular uprisings in European history. In the nineteenth century, a renowned German historian declared that the Peasants' War was the "greatest natural event," a maxim that described the erratic nature of the rebellions.
    Professor Scott offered a different vision: the apparent unpredictability of the uprisings is the result of both the interactions between late medieval and early modern patterns of rebellion and the interplay between economic, socio-political, and theological motives. According to Professor Scott, the techniques and methodologies of modern social sciences will be requisite for future study on the topic.
    The seminar was not the only opportunity for students to imbibe Professor Scott's enlivening personality. He graciously met with students, offering his unique insights. The aid he provided to those students whose dissertation topics reside in German lands is even now proving invaluable.

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