Every town its own translator

"I wish every town would have its interpreter. . . ."

"Utinam oppida singula interpretem suum haberent. . . ."

     Martin Luther to John Lang, 18 December 1521, LW 48, 356 =WA Br 2, 413 ll. 7-8.

"that most precarious of historical endeavors"

"Though Cherokee gender identities and social roles came with a degree of malleability, there exists no documentary evidence to support insinuations that Cherokees like [Nancy] Ward assumed a [late-twentieth-century] two-spirit identity.  Such people may have been asegi, or 'extraordinary,' but historians reject the connection that some gender theories and LGBT scholars make when they posit that extraordinary Cherokees like Ward were two spirits.
     "Historians have good reasons for rejecting such assertions.  The disciplinary boundaries of historical analysis demand that the historian present a body of evidence in which patterns can be discerned and conclusions made (tentative and contested as they usually are).  Given this, historians generally agree that Ward’s diplomacy was in keeping with her role as a Beloved Woman and was not evidence of her two-spirit identity.  Though there exists no debate among historians over whether Cherokees like Ward were two spirits, however, scholarly debate does go on in other humanities and social science disciplines.  For example, gender theorists and LBGT scholars, not bound by the same evidentiary burdens as historians, remain open to speculation that prominent Cherokees like Ward were two spirits.
     "For historians, though, the written sources used to reconstruct Cherokee life during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are virtually silent on the existence of two-spirit people.  Indeed, specific references to berdaches or two spirits are absent from the settler colonial archive of the eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Woodland South.  To historians, then, the assertion that Ward was a two spirit remains unsupported by [documentary] evidence and is generally dismissed as speculation."

     Gregory D. Smithers, "'Two spirits':  gender, ritual, and spirituality in the Native south," Early American studies 12, no. 3 (Fall 2014) =Beyond the binaries:  critical approaches to sex and gender in early America:  635-636 (626-651), italics mine.  What Smithers says here about the documentary evidence for Cherokee two-spiritism he would (I think) say also about early "two-spiritism" in general, all of the relevant differences considered.
     But this is, for him, only so much throat-clearing (and my selection only, therefore, so much special pleading), given that Smithers proceeds to appeal to (ancient and) contemporary Native American epistemologies other than those of professional Western historiography, to contemporary instantiations of oral tradition, to "critical" techniques of up- and sidestreaming (637), to "interdisciplinarity," to the importance of "a critical imagination (what we might also call a critical historical consciousness)," and so forth.  (As another way of stressing that I've taken these comments out of context, I've illustrated this post with the cover of his latest book (Boston:  Beacon Press, 2022), which, by the way, I can't claim to have read.)
     Though he doesn't seem to be as "critical" here about the extent to which the very oral traditions in question may have come to reflect the preoccupations of an ambient Western culture as he is about the extent to which the documentary evidence does, he is quite honest about how very little of the latter there is (however compromised) to work with, and the degree to which traditional historians have been either skeptical or at least cautious in the face of the lack of Western-style evidence.
     (The heading comes from p. 637, and refers to the technique of upstreaming.)

Burn those books, but not my Scotus!

Luther's "original intention had been to include in the pyrotechnics a copy of Duns Scotus, as representative of the despised Scholastics, but none of the Wittenberg professors had been willing to sacrifice their copy of such a valuable book."

     Andrew Pettegree on the book-and-bull burning of 10 December 1520, Brand Luther:  1517, printing, and the making of the Reformation (New York:  Penguin Press, 2015),  131, citing pp. 203 and 205 of his own The book in the Renaissance (New Haven:  Yale University Press, 2010), and p. 251 of Richard Friedenthal's Luther (London:  Weidenfeld, 1967).
 

Luther lenis

"If we are seeking an explanation of why so many Germans were drawn to Luther, despite the wild, extravagant denunciations of the established church and the bitter, angry polemic against his critics, we have to recognize that this was not the Luther that many readers saw.  Rather they embraced the patient, gentle expositor whose explorations of the Christian life offered them comfort and peace."

     Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther:  1517, printing, and the making of the Reformation (New York:  Penguin Press, 2015),  120.

nunquam reformanda

CNA / Daniel Ibanez

"After all, the Church is not the object of our reform. The Church is founded by Christ, cannot be reformed, is unsurpassable; only we can go the way and must go the way of repentance and renewal. . . .  We must reform and renew ourselves in Jesus Christ and thus give the answer to the challenges of today."

"Die Kirche ist ja nicht Objekt unserer Reform. Die Kirche ist von Christus begründet, kann nicht reformiert werden, ist unüberbietbar; nur wir können den Weg und müssen den Weg der Buße und der Erneuerung gehen. Wir müssen uns reformieren und uns erneuern in Jesus Christus und so die Antwort geben auf die Herausforderungen der heutigen Zeit."

     Gerhard Ludwig Cardinal Müller, as quoted by the Catholic News Agency and CNA Deutch, 2 August 2022.
     Yeah, but surely what Müller is calling "the Church" here is only what Congar would have called its structure (le donné), not its human life (l'agi) (Joseph Famerée, "True or false reform: what are the criteria?  The reflections of Y. Congar," The Jurist 71, no. 1 (2011): 8-9 (7–19)).  So his critique would apply to the Synodal Way only insofar as it has been imagining that it has jurisdiction over what the Church is by divine right, right?

"the first book-burning of the Reformation era"

"in the violent and destructive culture wars set off by the Reformation, it was the evangelicals who were the first to commit their opponents' works to the fire."

     Andrew Pettegree on the burning of the Koch/Tetzel countertheses by the students of Wittenberg University in March of 1518, Brand Luther:  1517, printing, and the making of the Reformation (New York:  Penguin Press, 2015), 79.  Heading from p. 50 of 1517:  Martin Luther and the invention of the Reformation (Oxford:  Oxford University Press, 2017), by Peter Marshall.

"and this, they say, and this, and this"

St. John's College

      "Our imaginations decay.  We decay.  Even books decay.  And we are all, finally, forgotten.  Yet at some point in the future, some other reader will wrestle with this passage in this very [1651] copy of Leviathan.  And I will be embedded within its memory, a spectral visitor, a transitory spirit.  I am a volume in its library. . . .
     "Our stacks of books are not individuated, atomic souls.  They are, rather, the whisperings of life lived reflectively.  Their story is not one of erasure, but of accretion—and this, they say, and this, and this. . . ."

     Pano Kanelos, "The book’s the thing," The Hedgehog review:  critical reflections on contemporary culture 22, no. 1 (Spring 2020):  10 (8-10), underscoring mine.