DESERT HARVEST—Spring 1996
Vol. 4, No. 1

From the desk of the Director
Prof. Dr. Heiko A. Oberman

   As you turn the pages of the newsletter, you will see that 1995/96 was a good year for the Division, a very good year indeed. In a way this is surprising. We live in a time of increasing complaints about the state of academia—from without, accused of a bloated organization; from within, suffering the setbacks of budget restrictions. An obvious target is the overload of administrators, the fast growing number of vice presidents and their ample staff, all too often management technicians without academic experience. It is not always recognized that the one feeds off the other: the continual reduction in allocations demands an ever more detailed accounting system, committee meetings, reports, and evaluations—as likely as not tinged with a religious-ideological vocabulary, of which the work 'mission' is merely one of the more striking . . . and overused.
    In previous years I have highlighted the crucial support of our unstinting donors—and once again there is ample reason to be grateful for their growing numbers and increasing generosity. This year I want to point out that there is an effective three-tiered administrative hierarchy that allows the Division, as a small but precious flower, to bloom on the campus of the University of Arizona: the Chair of the History Department, the Dean of the College of Social and Behavioral Sciences, and the Provost, the highest academic officer. If these administrators were shortsighted number crunchers and not convinced of the importance of training highly qualified teachers for the next generation, our—indeed impressive—track record would not have sufficed to give us the 'space' we need.
    It is a good thing that in this country all praise for hierarchy is suspect—all the more reason to use this opportunity to go against the stream. We in the Division are used to this; in fact, this very element is essential to the historian's 'mission.'

 Oberman wins prestigious history prize  

   Congratulations to Professor Oberman for winning the Dr. A. H. Heineken Prize for Historical Scholarship, the largest and most prestigious European award in the field of history. On April 9, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences announced the winners of the 1996 Heineken Prizes in fields from biochemistry to ecology. The history prize carries with it an award of 250,000 Dutch guilders, or approximately $160,000. Former recipients of the prize have included such noted historians as Peter Brown (Princeton) and Peter Gay (Yale). In September, Prince Claus von Amsberg, Royal Consort to Queen Beatrix, will present the prize to Oberman in Amsterdam.
    The Academy praised Oberman for his "farsighted research in the field of late medieval and early modern history," noting that he "has moved beyond traditional boundaries by linking eras, subdisciplines, and national research methods." When the call came informing him of the award, Oberman thought at first that it was one of his students playing a prank, but when he realized it was legitimate, he was, in his own words, "speechless, surprised, and grateful." Oberman plans to contribute part of the prize money to the endowment campaign of the Division.

Spanning the globe: Geneva, Switzerland
Scott Manetsch

   I am writing this evening aboard a TGV train, racing back to Geneva after a five day working vacation in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris. The speed of the train seems to symbolize the rapid pace of our lives in recent weeks, as my wife Cathy and I prepare to return to the United States after twenty months in Europe.
    A year ago when I wrote a similar article for the Desert Harvest, I was immersed in reading an intriguing sixteenth-century correspondence collection, buoyed by the aura of the archives, even while bemoaning the gloom of a gray Genevan winter. Four seasons have elapsed since that time, full of cherished memories which continue to enrich our lives and punctuate the daily routine of our work: exploring the Wartburg (Eisenach, Germany) on a foggy morning in April, enjoying the magnificence of summer on Lake Léman, taking a long stroll down the Champs-Elysée on a crisp autumn evening, and wandering the torch-lit streets of Geneva during the Escalade festival in December. Professionally, this second year of research at the Institut d'Histoire de la Réformation in Geneva has been equally rich and memorable. My focus has shifted from the Latin correspondence of the Genevan reformer Théodore de Bèze for dozens of French pamphlets and books depicting the fortunes and factions of Reformed Protestantism at the end of the sixteenth century. At the same time, acquaintances made during coffee breaks have become friends. Preliminary research findings have been critiqued by internationally known scholars. My research trail has taken me to archives in Basle, Paris, and Gotha (former East Germany), and has required a mastery of the difficult handwriting of the registers of the Genevan city council.
    As Cathy and I prepare to return to the United States this spring, we leave Europe profoundly thankful for the relationships, the challenges, and the adventures of the past months. We are eager to see how they bear fruit in the deserts of Tucson, both in a dissertation, and in our personal lives. 

Spanning the globe: Salzburg, Austria
Mike Milway

   "If Cleopatra had been snub-nosed," wrote Blaise Pascal, "the whole face of the world would look different." What he meant was that small miscellaneous details in history have made grand differences. Had Anthony not been attracted to Cleopatra, the history of Rome would have steered quite a different course, likewise the history of Western civilization.
    This year, on a Fulbright Scholarship to Austria, I have discovered that modest details, on two occasions at least, made all the difference in the world for Reformation Salzburg: the first because an invitation was accepted; the second because an invitation was declined.  Let me explain—but only after a note on Salzburg.
    The name "Salzburg" was ambiguous in the sixteenth century. It referred to four different, overlapping, roughly concentric geographical areas: the ecclesiastical province (with nine bishoprics), the archdiocese (third largest in Europe), the principality (fourth largest belonging to the church), and the city. All four, like the neighboring territories of Austria and Bavaria, remained Catholic. On two occasions, however, Protestantism was just a snub-nose away.
    Prince-archbishop Keutschach discovered a plot in 1511, organized by city magistrates who wanted to oust him from power and make Salzburg a free imperial city. He invited the alleged conspirators to dinner at his fortress on the hill. Not knowing of their betrayal, the men accepted. When inside the fortress, having been escorted to a formal dining room, they found a table set with elegant appointments, yet only one piece of stale bread per plate—a rude awakening. The archbishop entered, flanked on both sides by armed guards, and ordered the fortress barred shut. Instead of dinner, he read his would-be dinner guests the riot act, convicted them of conspiracy, and sentenced them to death. Tied back to back on sleighs (for it was mid-winter), the prisoners went to Mautendorf, escorted by their executioner. In the end, all the men were set free, but only after signing away precious rights and liberties. Had the men suspected a trap and refused the archbishop's invitation, and had they been successful at instigating their coup, Salzburg, like other cities that expelled their bishops (the subject of a recent dissertation finished in the Division), would have been a prime candidate for the Protestant Reformation.
    During that same year, Johann von Staupitz started visiting Salzburg regularly. He was Martin Luther's father-confessor and close friend. "I would love it if you left Wittenberg and joined me here," he wrote to Luther from Salzburg in 1518, "so that we could live and die together." As it turned out, Luther declined the invitation. Within two years, the Church would declare him a heretic, and the Reichstag would place him under imperial ban. Had Luther accepted the invitation, and had archbishop Keutschach become his protector in Salzburg, the whole face of Reformation Europe would look different today. It was a distinct possibility too. The archbishop was on terrible terms with Rome and trusting terms with Luther, for Luther requested him as one of his judges at the upcoming Leipzig debate. As it happened, Keutschach died before the debate, and Luther never set foot in Salzburg. How close did he come? How close did the magistrates come to expelling the archbishop? And how different would Salzburg look today in either scenario? These are questions whose answers belong to imagination, not history. Without asking them, however, and without posing similar questions, we historians are bound to overlook the snub-noses in history that have changed the face of a romance, a revolution, a century—and a good dissertation.

Spanning the globe: Paris
Jonathan Reid

   Friends, majestic Paris is a dangerous place to do historical research. You may remember that last summer, Algerian integrists were bombing the city's metros. The day we arrived in September, Laura and I were jolted out of our jet-lag naps by an explosion outside. From our window, we saw a remote-controlled robot-car cruising confidently away from the nearby Institut du Monde Arabe. Leaving the scene of its smoke-enshrouded deed on the sidewalk behind, it crawled up the emptied street to the police barricade. The morning paper explained that the skittish city now saw misplaced (seemingly strategically placed) parcels as threats needing to be destroyed.
    Then one night in December, during the general strike, we went out to do our grocery shopping. When we were a few steps from the door, the sound of muffled sirens broke into roaring confusion as a dozen gray vans of the National Police slapped to a halt in precise formation to the crossroads ahead. The black-clad troops jumped out, sprinting to form a wall of overlapping plastic shields facing up the road. Our curiosity was answered when we reached to crosswalk: students and sundry other folk in the thousands were marching down the road, chanting taunts at the police and demands at Chirac's government. As we crossed in front of them, a protestor looked at my net-sack full of to-be-recycled bottles and gave me a knowing smile that puzzled me.
    I understood better when we returned from shopping to a scene of overturned cars, smashed kiosks, defenestrated metal cabinets, and spewing water pipes; the street was littered with Molitov cocktails and rocks, and a bonfire blazed in the courtyard of the university buildings across the street from our flat. Apparently, the protestors had become provocative, the police had charged the crowd, and a battle had taken place. Oddly, it was very quiet as we passed through what was now a demilitarized zone between the police, who had retreated up the road with their six wounded, and the protestors, who had barricaded themselves in the university grounds. Most bizarre of all, a lone Pizza Hut delivery guy zipped through the rubble on his red Vespa—on his way, no doubt, to deliver sustenance to some hungry, cobble-stone heaver.
    These were two memorable events, but they are mere signs of the 'danger' of which I half-jokingly speak. What really impresses me are the passions that inspired these bombings and riots. Whence the rage? Commentators rightly point to political and economic discontent: France's perceived interference against the Islamic party in the free Algerian elections and the overcrowded universities and miserable job prospects. But why the violence? Pundits and participants alike invoke the legacies of other conflicts: France's sometimes sordid century-and-a-half rule and wars in Algeria and, in the other case, the people's right to revolt, hallowed in the memories of 1968, the popular front of the thirties, the commune of 1871, 1848 (Marx was there), and 1789.
    I am conducting my research amidst a people who live in the present—to a surprising and mostly peaceful extent—through their history and tradition. Paris is a living monument and archive to all. It is precisely their enthusiasm for the past and the documentary richness that seduce and pose the real 'danger' to me.
    Each day in the libraries and archives, I am trying to follow a well defined documentary path: to read the correspondence of Marguerite of Narvarre (1492-1549), the sister of King Francis I (r. 1515-1547). Marguerite and her network were major players in the political and religious conflicts of the day. Her correspondence is a thread leading through a web of events that shaped early modern France. This web is no symmetrical spider's web, however; it is more like one of those tent-caterpillar monstrosities that have all the order and elegance of a thousand bachelors living heaped on  top of one another.
    Each one of the 1300 letters in her correspondence—each knot, if you will—ties into other people, other texts, and other events. I am making steady progress towards collecting most of the extant letters in her dossier, but if I am going to make good sense of it all, I have to follow some of those other documentary paths that scholars have trodden through the centuries. However, important ones remain by the dozens in the archives here, more than I can hope to travel in my remaining time. A real danger for me is not to diffuse my efforts. That would be a shame since I think I am within range of being able to tell the history of a powerful woman and her allies as they tried but failed to hold a middle way during an age of theological, social, and political conflicts that led to the Wars of Religion which rocked France for forty years.
    The goal of all this, naturally, is to communicate my findings in a dissertation: What will the value of it be to others: a mark of professional competence as a potential teacher, a contribution to the fund of historical knowledge, or an interesting book?  I know why I am working on this project, but this question looms larger here than it ever did in Tucson. I can easily imagine why my project will be of interest to some scholars and a certain segment of the French population, but I am wondering what the value of their history will be in the States. In my experience, many of my American friends find the French to be the Howard Cossel of peoples: they love to hate them. The sentiment is sometimes returned. This is the 50th anniversary of the Senator William Fulbright Scholarship Program, one of whose goals is to build non-diplomatic ties between the U.S. and other nations. It will be cut back next year to combat the budget deficit (economics and politics do drive events). Having been fortunate enough to receive one of these grants, I realize more strongly than ever that I will have to answer the question of its value repeatedly over the coming years for my family, friends, and all those who support my studies. First, I need to show that my research has scholarly promise. I will have a chance to measure this at two conferences: one in St. Andrews, Scotland, in April, and the other in St. Louis in October. As for its value, I look forward to future opportunities to demonstrate it in the classroom and beyond. The danger for me being in a city wallowing in (and sometimes gagging on) its history and being helped by a program set up in response to WWII is that I could be seduced into thinking that the answer is obvious.  It is not.

Where are they now?
Dr. Jeff Tyler, Hope College

   On August 30, 1995, Beth and I could finally visualize the end of our long journey. Ahead on the highway we saw the marker for the Michigan state line and knew that our 2,000 mile drive had less than two hours to go. Since Beth and I had grown up in Michigan and met at college there, we had always hoped for the day when we might again be close to home, family, and in my case, great fishing. But a strange impulse passed through me especially as we crossed into Michigan. Instead of only looking forward, I found myself staring in the rearview mirror with some deep and unexpected sadness. Behind us lay our two-year Fulbright in Germany, our home and friends in Tucson, and my years of hard work and great joy with Professor Oberman in the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies. This surprising wave of 'homesickness' for my doctoral program and Doctor-father remains to me the most profound expression of how deeply I have been shaped by the rigorous yet joyful experience in Tucson.
    As you might imagine, this momentary hankering for my quickly receding past was soon replaced by happy reunions with family and old friends, and by all the responsibilities of my new academic position. I am now an assistant professor in the Religion Department at Hope College in Holland, Michigan, lecturing on the History of Christianity. Hope College is a liberal arts college of about 3,000 students in southwestern Michigan, some eight miles from the beaches of Lake Michigan. I was very fortunate to come back to my alma mater at precisely the time when the Religion Department had developed a new description of my position. Formerly I would have only taught the history of Christian doctrine and the institutions of the church. While I certainly must being these dimenstions into my lectures, I am in reality free to explore the Western religious experience, drawing not only on my training in late medieval and Reformation history, but also on my own research in anthropology, political history, and social history.
    In addition to all the discoveries from my teaching responsibilities and faculty duties, we are learning a great deal from Beth's new position as an RN in Hospice. In many ways we live in the presence of death as Beth returns home after caring for the dying or assisting a patient and family in the final moments of life. We are both aware of the tenuous membrane that separates life and death. Surprisingly, Beth's grasp of her own life has been enhanced by the dignity and insight of her patients.
    Although I see a receding Arizona in my rearview mirror less frequently than before, my Tucson experience was extremely vivid to me during our first four months in Michigan. In fact, from the moment we departed from our Tucson driveway to our arrival in Holland in August, and even beyond to the first days of September, we endured an oppressive heat that reminded me of how much I detested the blistering Arizona summer. To this external warmth was added the pressure of finishing my dissertation during my first semester of full-time teaching. Frequent and supportive phone calls from Professor Oberman gave me the encouragement to press on through exhaustion. And I enjoyed that rare experience of breathing the ether of true scholarship, when on several occasions, I lost track of the clock in the deep night while poring over my notes and manuscript. Last October I flew back to Tucson to defend my dissertation and to celebrate with faculty and friends. I am now in the process of rewriting and revising my dissertation for publication. In May I will expand my horizons again by returning to Germany for further research.
    During my first month of teaching, my Arizona experience has been an invaluable resource. I am confident about my teaching skills, oral competence, and research capabilities. I move comfortably in the academic context due precisely to the intensive and fervent training I received under Heiko A. Oberman. Only in this first year of teaching am I fully able to appreciate how the Division shapes us for the many challenges of an exciting academic career.

Where are they now?
Dr. Brad Gregory, Stanford University

   Unlike most of the students of the Division, my association with Professor Oberman began in the fall of 1987 by chance—or providence, depending on one's world-view. Fresh from a licentiate in philosophy at Louvain in Belgium and work in Tucson (at that local landmark, Bookman's) as my wife continued her studies, I sat in on an undergraduate lecture and afterwards addressed Professor Oberman in Dutch. Undoubtedly that linguistic decision is responsible for everything that followed: an invitation to his office and then to his Thursday night seminar, where a budding seventeenth-century intellectual historian first began to learn something about the Reformation. By the fall of 1988, I found myself a full-time M.A. student, completing an entirely unanticipated degree the following year.
    Tremendously enriched by my two years in the Division, I absconded with my knowledge and, partim haeretice , entered the Ph.D. program in history at Princeton. Ironically, differences between the two programs lured me from the seventeenth century to the sixteenth century and from high intellectual history to the history of religion. I embarked on a dissertation that explores the significance of martyrdom for Protestants, Anabaptists, and Roman Catholics and its inextricability from religious controversy in early modern Christianity. With my Flemish-accented Dutch from that first encounter fondly imprinted in Professor Oberman's memory, he nominated me for the Harvard Society of Fellows in 1993. I was chosen to be a junior fellow and have spent the past two years developing and writing a lengthy thesis under ideal conditions in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I have accepted a position as an assistant professor in the History Department at Stanford University that will commence this fall. All of which goes to show that Dutch can be anything but a 'minor' language, depending on the context.
    My two years in Tucson were crucial to my intellectual formation and continue to shape the way I approach early modern Christianity. Without learning how to listen to the Protestant voices of the sixteenth century and without seeing that non-reductionist history of religion did not necessarily imply confessional history, I never would have been able to envision the cross-confessional, comparative perspective that underlies my research.  For their organization, sustained energy, and intellectual engagement, Thursday nights with Professor Oberman and his graduate students remain the best seminars in which I have ever participated: they provide a model I will inevitably seek to emulate but will be hard-pressed to match in my own future graduate seminars. My years in the Division, though they lie now some years in the past, remain with me; I have every reason to think that they always will.

Where are they now?
Dr. Curt Bostick, Southern Utah University

   Hello from Deseret, otherwise known as Utah. Gwen and I moved to Cedar City in late 1995. Upon arrival I finished a book review for The Sixteenth Century Journal and began preparing lectures for pre-1917 Russian history, a topic in which I have never taken a course. Pre-revolutionary Russion history was one of three courses I taught during the fall quarter at Southern Utah University. I began as a replacement assistant professor, but I am happy to say I have been offered the position tenure-track. This winter quarter I taught modern Russian and Soviet history, in addition to an upper-level division class on the Renaissance and Reformation and an introductory Western Civilization course. The emphasis here is on teaching; hence, I have become a lecturing master, discussing the Mongol invasion of the Russian steppes one hour, Constantine's policy towards Roman clergy the next, and finishing the afternoon with an examination of the Greek polis. The rigors of Thursday night seminar prepared me well for my current duties, and I miss those evenings. I yearn for an in-depth discussion of scholastic terminology, for an exposition of an exquisite late medieval text. It will take some time to prepare my students to discuss, for example, the tertius usus legis; nonetheless, that remains my goal.
    Gwen and I have adapted well to the milieu. The countryside is spectacular  Zion National Park is less than an hour away by car, and other scenic vistas are not much further. Four major snows have fallen on Cedar City; we have savored the snowflakes from them all. In spite of all the hours spent preparing lectures, I have a great job. I am paid well to continue learning, studying and thinking, while sharing with others. I cannot think of anyone I would trade places with, except maybe for another Arizona alumnus, Steve Kerr, who plays for the Chicago Bulls.

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