DESERT HARVEST—Spring 1998
Vol. 6, No. 1

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

   This may well be our last annual newsletter . . . For most other institutions, such an announcement would portend doom and translate into dissolution: for the Division, it spells invigorating growth. Our readers' response has encouraged us to consider expanding first to a biannual and then to a quarterly publication.
    Indeed, growth is the theme of my report to you this year. The new age and rage of 'academic accountability' hardens the arteries of university administrations across the country, clogging the system, and has widely led to a steep increase in the number of vice-presidents. Less well advertised is the other side of the same trend: at The University of Arizona, insight matches oversight by translating accountability into academic competitiveness. The high national ranking the Division achieved through its 100% record in placing new graduates and its unforesoon success in winning international fellowships were important factors that led to the decision by Provost Paul Sypherd and Dean Holly Smith to go a significant step further than simply securing the future of the Division. From 1 July I will concentrate full time on the recruitment and training of graduate students. At the same time, an Assistant Director will be appointed who will serve the Department of History simultaneously as Associate Professor with tenure.
    An international search is now underway for an established scholar, preferably in the field of German Reformation Studies in order to complement my specialization in the later Middle Ages and Early Modern French history. As I write, an unexpectedly large number of applications has been received from this country and abroad less than one week after opening the search. The Chair of the History Department, Helen Nader, has appointed a Committee of Five to prepare a shortlist of the three top candidates who will be invited to our campus for interviews and lectures: we are on the move—and exhilerated!
    Equally important, the Dean has authorized the hiring of a support staff member to assist with the overflow of demands on the office resulting principally from the quarterly publication of our new Journal of Early Modern History and the increasing editorial responsibilities for the three leading scholarly monograph series in the field, steered from the helm of our Division.
    There can be no question: the single most crucial factor in putting—and keeping!—the Division on the map of international scholarship is the quality of our 'product,' the former graduates now serving universities across the country. There can be no doubt that the generosity of our friends and supporters enabled our students to investigate the riches of Europe's archives and afforded them time to write the books that now shape the course of future scholarship . . . and will inspire generations of students to come.
    These are exciting times for the Division. We will keep you posted.

The Division's first Combibium

    Each year scholars of early modern European history meet to exchange ideas at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference. The Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies is always well represented there by current and former members. This year's conference, held last October in Atlanta, Georgia, was no exception.
    The conference, however, is not just about sixteenth-century history. It also provides an opportunity for former members of the Division to meet informally and relive more recent history. This year the Division made the reunion official by sponsoring a reception for former members and friends of the Division from the world of scholarship.
    The ' combibium ,' as it was named (Professor Oberman coined the Latin term which translates 'to drink together') was a smashing success. Ten former students and forty honored guests were on hand to celebrate the achievements of the Division.
    The following piece is a slightly revised version of a speech presented at the combibium by Andrew Gow, a former member of the Division, now an Assistant Professor of History at the University of Alberta.

Pro doctoribus, fratribus soroibusque Or, In Praise of Folly
by Dr. Andrew Gow

   Life after Arizona does not always afford us the luxury of a well-crafted presentation, solid and polished enough to withstand the intense scrutiny of a Thursday night seminar at Camino Antonio. Between hasty lecture preps, endless committee meetings to manage the institutional "church" and the siren call of one's own research, there is little time to think up and write out personal and academic "dissertations" of the kind on which we cut our professional teeth. The inevitable nostalgia I felt saying this—and which I now feel writing it up for the Desert Harvest —is for a community of scholars and of scholarship that has few parallels, if any, in the modern world. But nostalgia cuts two ways, and not all its pain is pleasant. There is also nostalgia for an ideal future, one which scholarship may never realize.
    In my own university, a massive degree-factory like The University of Arizona, I see many graduate students adrift on the sea of their supervisors' indifference, fatalism, or inability to cope with all the demands placed on them. I struggle to provide enough time to my own few Master's students. I still cannot imagine how Professor Oberman finds the time to see so many students so frequently. The undergraduates appear, week by week, meek or brash, with more or less the same questions and problems; but graduate students pose more fundamental quandaries, openly or implicitly: why am I here? Do I have the right stuff? I am not at all sure of the answers, and I find myself looking back to Tucson again and again for clues.
    In my department, with nearly 100 graduate students, of whom fifty or sixty are really active, we have been told by the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research to focus, strengthen, and build our graduate program—all at a time of shrinking resources and few jobs. Our graduate chair has decided against the wishes and urgings of the Dean of Graduate Studies to limit enrollment in our graduate programs in as strict a manner as possible. We will eventually pay for this waywardness with the loss of some funding for teaching assistants (which is based largely on graduate enrollment, not on undergraduate need). So be it: this is a smallish price to pay for making a responsible and unpopular decision. My sense of things in the academy—relating to the job market and opportunities for advancement and research funding—is that of a traditional rabbi, suspicious of prospective converts because they probably do not know what they are letting themselves in for. But as some people will not be persuaded, neither by a strict taskmaster nor by the prospect of forty years' wandering in the desert, some must eventually gain entrance.
    I am very strongly opposed to exposing young men and women with insufficient graduate training in our field to the vagaries of the market and to the prospect of growing alienation, economic, social and intellectual, from their contemporaries. One of my closest childhood friends, who was handling baggage at the Ottawa airport when I began graduate studies, has in the meanwhile finished engineering degrees, started a career, and worked his way up to vice-president of a major software company. My word processor is a super-pen that Derek's employees maintain and whch they are constantly improving. He and I used to joke about the conformity and success-anxiety of "junior executroids" who aspired to corporate success. He is now a senior executive—and I am still an untenured assistant professor. He earns five times my salary. On the other hand, I know that he had buck teeth and a geeky laugh in grade school. And I would not trade my job for his under any circumstances! But only idiots like us should be allowed to spend our lives as scholars, to put in Derek's hours for our salary. This is an expensive folly, for ourselves and our families. Those of us who enjoy it (despite the occasional twinge of envy) have a moral obligation to make the costs clear to our students, to supervise only those who have a reasonable chance of getting a job, and to send them off to first-class Ph.D. programs where they can get the sort of training that young idiots deserve.

The Division launches a new scholarly journal
Michael Bruening

   Last year, Professor Oberman launched the Journal of Early Modern History together with Professors James Tracy (University of Minnesota) and Antony Black (University of Dundee). The quarterly publication has met with immediate success. Those of you who have strolled through the current periodicals room in the university's library may be asking yourselves, "Why do we need another academic journal?" The plethora of journals being published today received by universities can seem overwhelming and makes an easy target for budget-crunchers and critics who wonder why we need to stock volumes upon volumes of the Wyoming History Journal , or all those ghastly foreign language journals, like the Tijdschrift voor economishe en sociale geographie (what kind of bastardized version of German is that anyway?). There will not be many, however, who will second-guess the validity of the Journal of Early Modern History.
    As the subtitle indicates, the journal focuses on "Contacts, Comparisons, and Contrasts." The only real limitation is the time period, roughly 1300-1800. The scope brings a wider horizon into view for the period. Especially as we students begin writing our dissertations, our energies necessarily become more and more focused on a single country, region, city, or even person. We must keep the broader picture in mind to make our work relevant, but even this broad picture is generally limited to a few countries in Western Europe.
    The JEMH pushes us to view the broader picture on a global scale. For example, a recent article by Andrian Gerber compared the German communes that were so important during the Reformation to the commune in Japan at the same time. Such comparisons widen our own viewpoints, and force us to ask new questions of our texts. They also provide a corrective to an unfortunate tendency among many historians of trying to find single, long-term processes to explain history. When subjected to close, comparative scrutiny, these monolithic 'processes' often fall apart.
    The real meat of the journal comes in book reviews. As Professor Oberman is fond of saying, "We are getting dumber all the time." New books are being published every day, and we cannot possibly read them all. We must rely on good book reviews to learn the arguments presented in new books and decide which ones are worth reading. The journal's substantial number of review articles reflects its interest in comparisons. The reviewer examines a number of different books on the same topic, evaluating each of them individually and in relation to one another. These review articles are invaluable to students of history. Rather than reading 1,000 pages of material, we can learn the major new theses being published on a particular topic in the space of three or four pages.
    The Journal of Early Modern History is sure to find a place on the shelves of research universities all over the country and around the world. Its success furthermore brings greater visibility to the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies. With Professor Oberman as Editor-in-Chief, early modern scholars specializing in fields outside of late medieval and Reformation studies may begin to recognize The University of Arizona as much more than just the home of Lute Olsen and last year's (but sadly not this year's) NCAA basketball champions.

Steady stream of scholars descends on Tucson

   On March 10, Notre Dame Professor and Theologian Thomas F. O'Meara, O.P., delivered this year's Town and Gown Lecture. Entitled "Religion Looks Beyond the Year 2000," Professor O'Meara focused on issues confronting religion in general and the Catholic Church in particular.
    O'Meara noted that interest and apprehension concerning the approaching millennium have already begun to grow, causing the future to be a source of great concern for some. Rejecting this position, O'Meara pointed to the arbitrary nature of the Julian calendar and provided numerous examples from history where apocalyptic scares came to naught. The future need not be feared.
    In the future, suggested O'Meara, the Catholic Church must rededicate itself to the goals of Vatican II and address tough, practical issues such as medical ethics, divorce, and the public ministry of women. Chrisitianity in general must recognize that God has revealed himself to members of other world religions, and seek to understand all people's encounters with an active God. Finally, humankind need not fear the possibility of extraterrestrial life. If it exists, the Omnipotent God created and governs it.
    The future, concluded O'Meara, will be a time of beginning and expansion, not finality and destruction.
    Professor O'Meara had not yet boarded his airplane back to South Bend, when the Division had the pleasure of welcoming James M. Estes, Professor Emeritus of history at the Reformation Studies Institute of the University of Toronto. Professor Estes is currently a member of the Editorial Board and Executive Committee for the English language edition of Erasmus' Collected Works. Casting a wide net, Estes' other research interests include a careful study of various reformers' views toward the proper role of the civil magistrate in a Christian society.
    On Thursday, March 12, Estes shared his most recent findings with the seminar, in which he traced the political thought of Philip Melanchthon through three distinct stages as he responded to the changing pressures and historical circumstances of the Reformation.
    The seminar was greatly enriched by his visit, and we especially thank him for his frank and candid answers to our questions.
    Professor Estes' departure left us two weeks to prepare for the arrival of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Professor of European history at the University of California, Berkeley. Brady's presence in our midst always brings with it the expectation of stimulating discussion and revealing insights. As usual, on this occasion we were not disappointed.
    Our discussion focused on that important, but often maligned 19th century German historian Leopold von Ranke. Ranke, one of the founders of the modern discipline of history, has commonly been caricatured as a man interested in presenting only dry, tedious facts and unconcerned with meaning and interpretation. Brady, however, uncovered for us a scholar distinguished by his subtlety and vision, a consummate stylist, and a man lucky enough not to see the day when his unitary vision of history crumbled in the face of historical reality.
    Thanks again to Professor Brady for yet another fruitful evening.

In the shadow of the Grand Inquisitor
John Frymire

   During this past year, we found ourselves 'between grants', which in academic circles is a polite way to connote something between short on cash and desperately down and out. With the support of the Division in Tucson and my work as an assistant in the Department of Medieval Latin Philology in Tübingen, we managed to feed the family and pursue our studies. With the exception of our two-year-old son, everyone welcomed the arrival of our daughter, Kay, on February 18. My wife Christina, in addition to that bit of labor, will complete her thesis in a few weeks and thus obtain her degree. The entire family will be moving to Mainz, where following in the footsteps of former Division members Pete Dykema and Michael Milway, I'll be a (funded!) research fellow at the Institut für Europäische Geschichte during the upcoming  during the upcoming academic year.
    My work took an unexpected turn last spring when I stumbled upon a group of Reformation authors who stood between Luther and Rome, maintaining their loyalty to the 'old' religion while integrating some of the fruits of Protestant theology and critique into their vision of a renewed Catholic Church. Thus I have begun writing what amounts to a history of a failure. In its day, however, their movement made a tremendous impact. One of their representatives, the Franciscan preacher Johannes Wild (the protagonist of my dissertation), enjoyed popularity reflected by the publication of over 200 editions of his works between 1550 and 1600. From his pulpit in Mainz, Wild poured scorn on Roman Catholics for their abuses and on evangelicals for their excesses, sparing no one his venom. In what amounts to a piquant irony, just as those loyal to Rome were recommending Wild's works to counter Lutheran heresy, others no less orthodox were condemning them as heretically Lutheran.
    Heresy, of course, is a matter of perspective. And from the heights of perceived doctrina pura at Rome, that step-child of the Inquisition, the Congregation for the Index of Prohibited Books, eventually forbade the fold to read the works of Johannes Wild. Shrouded in secrecy and safe from scholarly scrutiny in the basement of the Palace of the Roman Inquisition for the last 400 years, one could only speculate on the documents that would reveal just what led Roman prelates to condemn to Franciscan from Mainz, along with a host of other 'catholic' authors who campaigned against the reformation movement.
    A few months ago, however, speculation began to yield to scientific inquiry when Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger opened the secret archives in Rome. Thanks to a line of contacts extending from Tucson to Tübingen to the heart of the curia, I had the supreme luck to be admitted to the archives, along with a handful of others, one year before their official opening. With the honor of being the first American to work there came the dubious distinction of being not only the youngest, but also the sole non-professor (a point especially relevant here, since European academics tend toward tyrannical hierarchy). Assisted by a few German and Italian scholars, I uncovered and read the manuscripts that narrate the history of the censorship and condemnation of those German authors who stood between Luther and Rome.
    The opportunities and challenges of the last year have led me time and again to appreciate the training and support of the Division for Late Medieval and Reformation Studies. For without both, my work here and in the eternal city would not have been possible. Indeed, I see my travels as a testament to the exceedingly scholarly—and thoroughly Dutch—backing of Professor Oberman: while providing the means for several research trips, he offered me not so much as a farthing to join in the three days of Roman revelry that accompanied the official opening of the archives. Who knows—perhaps next time I'm in Rome, I'll discover the censures of his works!

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