The First Centennial: Local Memory Cultures and the 1617 Reformation Jubilee in Southern Germany

In November 1617, Protestant communities across the Holy Roman Empire organized a special festival to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses. The first official centennial celebration in modern Western history, the 1617 Reformation Jubilee offers an opportunity to reevaluate how Protestant authorities constructed local religious memory cultures on the eve of the Thirty Years War. Past studies of the Jubilee have focused primarily on identifying common themes that marked the commemoration wherever it occurred. An examination of the differences among local versions of the Jubilee, however, reveals the strategic way in which authorities constructed their commemorations to address issues of local concern. In the imperial cities of Strasbourg and Ulm, the Reformation Jubilee projected different themes and occurred according to divergent models. In Strasbourg, the city’s clerical and political authorities organized a festival dominated by anti-Catholic polemics that responded to the spread of Tridentine reform in surrounding territories. The Jubilee’s message emphasized the citizenry’s need to continue resisting Catholicism, and the festival’s sermons and accompanying hymns engaged the citizenry in an active repudiation of Catholic doctrines. Ulm’s clerical and political authorities, by contrast, structured their Jubilee celebration to portray Ulm as God’s chosen city, a second Wittenberg that served as a guiding light for all Lutherans. The Jubilee encouraged the city’s population to devote themselves to maintaining their current “golden age” and propagating the divine mission God had bestowed upon the city. These divergent approaches to the Jubilee reveal how local conditions shaped the memory cultures authorities in the two cities sought to instill through commemoration of the sixteenth-century Reformation. This analysis of local variations in the 1617 Jubilee calls into questions modernist narratives that draw clear divisions between the nature of memory politics before and after the Enlightenment.