Piety and Modernity: The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe, 1780–1920. Edited by Anders Jarlert. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2012. 335 pp. $89.50 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Piety and Modernity: The Dynamics of Religious Reform in Northern Europe, 1780-1920 . Edited by Anders Jarlert . Leuven : Leuven University Press , 2012. 335 pp. $89.50 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesThis collection of eleven essays by international team of scholars is the third volume in a series devoted to charting the changing shape and status of organized religion in northern Europe over the course of the long nineteenth century. It inevitably overlaps in focus to some extent with its two predecessors, which dealt with church-state relations and ecclesiastical reform. (A forthcoming volume will address material culture.) In general, however, contributors are concerned with in the broad sense of lived religious experience: the concrete practices and attitudes of ordinary folk in a world of increasing mobility, expanding mass communications, and growing individualism--religious reform in the extended sense of cultural transformations as well as the more obvious sense of programmatic renewal. Except for Hugh McLeod's brief discussion of religion and the regulation of sport in England, contributions all take a national and/or confessional rather than topical or comparative approach. There are separate chapters devoted to Catholics and Protestants in both Germany and the Netherlands; other contributions deal with Britain, Ireland, Belgium, and each of the three Scandinavian states. Editor Anders Jarlert (Lund University) contributes a useful introductory overview as well as chapters on Sweden and Protestant Germany.The protean nature of relationships between and modernity, broadly construed, militates against any easy summary of authors' findings. As Jarlert notes in his introduction (23), the map of piety in Europe during the period in question became both more differentiated and more complex, and this complexity certainly receives its due throughout the book. Not surprisingly, all contributors either explicitly or implicitly reject reductionist accounts of secularization as a necessary default narrative of modernity. The tides of Matthew Arnold's Sea of Faith manifestly flowed in more than one direction, often at the same time. Modernity could exert constructive as well as corrosive influences on religious practice; secularization and rechristianization were frequently simultaneous and sometimes complementary processes. The apparent extrusion of the churches from the mental universes of urban proletariats and bourgeois elites notwithstanding, grassroots religious vitality remained a force to be reckoned with throughout northern Europe as late as World War I. Factors generally associated with secularization, such as de facto or de jure disestablishment or the erosion of pre-industrial social structures and traditional community relationships, often had the unexpected side effect of fostering more personal and self-conscious religious commitments, in the process fueling new expressions of and often opening up new fault lines both within and between existing confessional communities. What Mary Heimann, in her chapter on Britain, aptly describes as an expressive and essentially demotic form of spirituality (54), often colored by residues of Romanticism and the multiple socio-economic and political upheavals of mid-century, manifested itself in one form or another, from prayer meetings and organized pilgrimages to soup kitchens and Sunday schools, in most of the countries discussed here. …