Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Andrew Spicer. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2012. xxiv + 512 pp. $134.95 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe . Edited by Andrew Spicer . Aldershot : Ashgate , 2012. xxiv + 512 pp. $134.95 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesLutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe is a collection of sixteen articles from historians and art historians addressing topics ranging from theological understandings of church space to church architecture and every aspect of interior space (such as decorations, epitaphs, altars and pulpits, vestments, organs and music-related objects, and so forth). The chronological scope of the articles runs from the early sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth century in many cases. Most exceptional, however, is the volume's geographic coverage, which not only includes the Lutheran heartlands in Germany and Scandinavia, but also places were Lutherans were minority communities such as Transylvania, Poland, Estonia, and the Netherlands. The volume contains 130 helpful black-and-white images that enable the reader to visualize the authors' descriptions. As numerous contributors remark, this array is made even more complex by a key tenet of early modern Lutheranism: that compared with other confessions of the time, Lutherans defined the category of adiaphora especially broadly, particularly with regard to material church culture. As a result, Lutheran churches and their interior furnishings exhibit bewildering variety over time and space. Despite this diversity, however, four broad themes emerge in the course of the volume.First, multiple authors emphasize the preserving or conserving power of Lutheranism (12), a phenomenon seen particularly in the German lands where, without confessional competition in close proximity, churches were free to retain their medieval material presence. In other places, such as Norway, as Oystein Ekroll has discovered, and the Swedish provincial Cathedral in Turku (Finland), as Riitta Laitinen finds, the broad continuity of church material culture was due to the comparatively slow implementation of the Reformation.Sometimes, however, the story was more complicated than simple continuity as, for example, when challenges from other confessions inspired Lutherans to re-embrace aspects of medieval material church culture and practice what they had earlier viewed with a critical eye. Vera Isaiasz argues that church consecrations, once ridiculed by Lutherans as superstition, reemerged in the late sixteenth century as part of an effort by Lutherans to differentiate their own understanding of church space from that of the Calvinists. Evelin Wetter demonstrates that the rise of Calvinism in late sixteenth-century Transylvania resulted in the use of pre-Reformation ecclesiastical vestments by Lutherans to distinguish themselves from the starker Reformed. And in late sixteenth century Denmark and Northern Germany, Sven Rune Havsteen has discovered a renewed acceptance of images among Lutherans reacting against the Calvinist-inspired criticism thereof.Competition from Catholics also impacted the material culture of Lutheran churches, sometimes in unexpected ways. Emily Fisher Gray has discovered that in the bi-confessional city of Augsburg, Lutheran churches became increasingly filled with ornamentation, giving them a rather Catholic feel. In the paintings on epitaphs, and in their placement within Lutheran churches, Maria Deiters observes a continuation of the medieval notion of the communio sanctorum in two of Berlin's churches. Clearly the story is not always one of strict continuity.A second phenomenon evident throughout the volume is the way in which Lutherans adapted and reinterpreted medieval material church culture to fit their own theological notions. …