SOURCE: "Zwingli's Reformation Between Sucess and Failure," in The Reformation: Roots and Ramifications, translated by Andrew Colin Gow, T & T Clark, 1994, pp. 183–99.

In this essay, originally delivered as a lecture in 1984, Oberman discusses Zwingli's contributions to the Reformation in the political and social context of sixteenth-century Switzerland.

cantonization and Parochialism

Is Zwingli's Reformation anything more than an episode between Luther and Calvin? To claim that it had a world-wide or even a European influence seems presumptuous in the light of recent Reformation history, which assigns Zwingli's Zurich to the 'city Reformation' and characterizes this phenomenon in sociological terms as a process of 'communalization'.

If communalization means the emancipation of the city, which dates back to the late Middle Ages, and in conjunction with this, the 'localization' of the Reformation—as compared to the territorial Reformation of the princes—then the events at Zurich in the years 1519–31 are reduced...