Saturday, June 15, 2013

Bar Trivia Historian ++?

     So I was thinking about bar trivia, and how, for a non-historian, I am an awesome historian, and I was thinking that even for a historian, I'm not too bad a historian, because, apparently, I have done original work, and published it on the internet.  I'm referring to the way the divide, Catholic|Protestant, during the Reformation, followed the linguistic boundary.  Romance language governments sided with the Pope, Germanic language governments ( except a critical subsection of Germans princes, mostly ones with strong ties to Spain) sided with Luther, and Slavic Poland and Hungarian Transylvania were the only tolerant areas until the French Revolution, nearly 300 years later.

     I never mentioned before that in addition to having read Diarmaid MacCullough's award-winning book on the topic, which only took stabs at the reason the divide mapped out the way it did, I went to the New York Public Library and went through every book that mentioned "Protestant Reformation" and "language." All of it was irrelevant.  Luckily, to make it interesting for me, I found a nearly contemporary slanderous attack on Martin Luther, where he was portrayed as a drunk, who hung out in ale houses, with his other drunk friends, doing the devil's business, and he knows he is doing it.

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