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Religious upheaval – The Reformation in
Hamburg
Before the Reformation, Hamburg’s twelve churches (cathedral,
four city churches, two monastery churches, two hospital churches, St.
Gertrude’s Chapel, St. Clement’s Chapel, St. George’s
Hospital) comprised some 170 altars. They were dedicated to a wide range
of saints and offered opportunities for prayer. Their sumptuous interiors
reflected the central position of the Church in the life of the city
and the piety of its citizens.
Nevertheless, popular religious feeling was open to ideas from outside
the Church, since both the Church and its representatives often failed
to match their own standards. By around 1500, the clergy was a subject
of widespread scorn and animosity because it selfishly exploited privileges,
while neglecting its spiritual duties. The ideas of reformation put
forward by Martin Luther, who nailed his theses against the Pope and
the sale of indulgences to the door of the Cathedral at Wittenberg on
13 October 1517, took their time to reach Hamburg. The Franciscan monk
Stephan Kempe was the first to cause a stir at Easter 1523 in the Monastery
of Mary Magdalene by declaring the Bible (i.e. the word of God) the
sole standard of faith and the Church. Though violent disputes between
Papists and Lutherans followed, the new doctrine soon had a steadily
growing group of adherents. To give the Reformation administrative substance,
Hamburg summoned Dr. Johannes Bugenhagen, who had previously made a
name for himself by reorganizing the Church in Braunschweig. Bugenhagen
gave Hamburg a new Church Code in 1529.
Between 1528 and 1530, Hamburg’s monasteries and convents were
expropriated and/or destroyed, or passed to new use. Due to the exclusion
of non-Lutherans, Mary (previously venerated above all other saints
as the patron saint of the Cathedral, and hence the city as a whole)
came to be viewed as Catholic, in turn causing an abrupt end to the
traditional festivities of Assumption.
In historiographical terms, the Reformation marks the end of the Middle
Ages and the beginning of the Modern Age.
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