This chapter explores popular and learned manifestations of an increasingly difficult neutral position at the height of the Reformation in Germany, in order to underscore and reassess the prevalence of third forces in sixteenth-century religion. The first two sections examine experiences of ambivalent change, at the scale of territorial Reformations and at the scale of personal and local histories. The remaining sections review sixteenth-century attempts to theorize a middle-ground position. Those attempts challenge the historian to integrate marginal, unconventional viewpoints into an otherwise “confessional” intellectual milieu.

This chapter examines the extraordinary case of Ruprecht von Mosheim, author of a neglected proposal to reject papal and Lutheran arguments in favor of the middle position of "a third German." Discussed and dismissed by Johannes Eck, the Archduke Ferdinand, Martin Bucer, John Calvin, and other reformers, Mosheim reflects uncertainties that also gripped so-called Erasmians, such as Nikolaus Ellenbog.

Barbara von Fuchstein struggled to recover property lost to her cousin Ulrich Schweikert during the Peasants’ War. Her tenacity in the sequel to armed conflict illustrates the responses of ordinary lay women to the challenges posed by Reformation events. She shows the capacity of a lay woman to navigate a system of property transfer that privileged men, after she was swept into the ferment of German lay spiritualities appearing in the mid-1520s. And she illustrates the flux of religious identities at ground level in the early Reformation, among people whose interest in religious debate was secondary to, perhaps inseparable from, family business. If we wish to understand the Reformation not only among its principal protagonists, who were in most instances clerical partisans in the debate over Luther and the papacy, the saints, and the Mass, but also among ordinary people, we must pay close attention to people like Barbara, who were deeply affected by the Luther affair without choosing to participate in it.

Sixteenth-century Reformers would not have understood Michel Foucault’s postmodern assault on polemic as the antithesis of truth because the defense of truth – divine truth, that is – was the guiding purpose of their endeavors. They would, however, have recognized Foucault’s description of their tactics as a no-holds-barred contest against an “enemy who is wrong, who is hurtful, and whose very existence constitutes a threat.”1 Across the confessional divide, early modern polemicists believed they were engaged in a war of words as deadly serious as the bloody confrontations taking place in the streets and on the battlefields of Europe. The new medium of print became a critical instrument in their efforts to win princely support; mobilize public opinion across broad geographical, linguistic, and confessional boundaries; and vanquish the heretic in their midst.