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BRUCE GORDON, The Swiss Reformation. Manchester, U.K.: Manchester University Press, 2002. PD. xxiv + 368. $74.95/$29.95.
Bruce Gordon of St. Andrews University's Reformation Studies Institute has written a survey of the Swiss Reformation that is likely to become the standard work in English for years to come. Novices and seasoned scholars in Reformation studies can find no better introduction to the topic, since Gordon ties together the disparate strands of a movement as disunited as the cantons and territories of the sixteenth-century Confederation. In a recap of his work, the Canadian scholar says that he has "attempted to map the development and dissemination of evangelical ideas against the historical context of the Swiss Confederation." (349) Doubtless, Gordon has accomplished this undertaking, but more than this, he has succeeded in piecing together the puzzle of personalities, movements, and ideas that we call the Swiss Reformation.
Gordon argues that the Zurich reformer Huldrych Zwingli is the "key" to the Swiss Reformation. The author has found nothing remarkable in Zurich, the birthplace of the Swiss Reformation that would have inclined it toward reformation. Instead, he contends that Zwingli's "charismatic" personality and preaching best explain the origins of the Zurich Reformation and its expansion into the Swiss Confederation. Gordon also highlights other factors such as networks, preaching, and clerical relations with the ruling authorities to explain the successes of the reformation in Switzerland. Such strategies were critical to the triumph of evangelical reform, since according to Gordon, the Swiss Reformation never became a mass movement.
Gordon uses the research of Helmut Meyer to shed light on the situation in Zurich after the Protestant defeat in the second Kappel War of 1531. From the perspective...