Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany by Jacob M. Baum

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany by Jacob M. Baum Mary Jane Haemig Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany. By Jacob M. Baum. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 296 pp. This work re-examines the familiar assertion that the Protestant Reformation significantly changed the sensory impact of worship. Its nuanced analysis offers an interesting window into the impact of the Reformation. Chapter one reevaluates the claim that late medieval worship was a rich sensory experience, appealing to all five senses, and finds this claim overstated. "The ritual edifice of Christianity looked, sounded, smelled, felt, and tasted rather different from one location to the next" (45). Examining parish inventories, Baum concludes that many parishes, particularly rural ones, lacked the resources to produce the sensory show often assumed for medieval worship. Chapter two reviews late medieval intellectual understandings of sense perception. In these, the perceiving subject was passive while objects projected their qualities into the environment, striking and moving sense organs and thereby affecting internal processes. Baum examines, in turn, the senses of hearing, sight, smell, touch, and taste, concluding that "thinking with the senses was an essential means of explicating the power of ritual practice to affect and transform the bodies and souls of churchgoers" (74). Chapter three considers how late medieval laypeople understood the roles of the senses in their religious experience and argues that they "made playful use" (104) of the intellectual understandings previously described. Particularly interesting is his examination of how personal prayer books, collected and annotated by both religious and lay, used sensory language to describe the reception of the Lord's Supper. [End Page 465] Chapter four examines the rise of the narrative of "the reformation of the senses." This narrative "did not provide an empirical description of reality, but it did provide a lens through which people viewed, experienced, and understood that reality" (106). The narrative portrayed late-medieval religion as superficial, consumed with producing a sensory spectacle. Reformers saw themselves as rejecting such worship, with its incense, pompous processions, ringing bells, and burning candles, and instead offering a purified form of Christianity, focused on the audible and visible Word. This narrative emerged before various reforming groups differentiated themselves. It also had a gendered aspect, associating sensuous worship with femininity and non-Christian cultures. "Over time, the idea that late medieval Christianity was fundamentally sensual and that evangelical Christianity represented its antithesis became a widespread assumption—a backdrop to the cultural scene that didn't necessarily require explicit argumentation to survive" (131). Using ecclesiastical ordinances, visitation reports, church inventories, and contemporary reports, the author asserts in chapter five that while the narrative of the reformation of the senses continued to dominate, actual practice demonstrated "important continuities with the sensory culture of the late medieval past, alongside some surprising, often overlooked ruptures" (136). Lutherans identified much of liturgy and material culture as adiaphora and emphasized flexibility in practice. In Lutheran areas, much of late-medieval material culture (art and chalices, for example) continued in use. But the Lutheran emphasis on the sermon changed worship's soundscape, as did the transition to vernacular worship and congregational singing. So too the widespread elimination of incense changed the olfactory experience. The final chapter, on the second Reformation, adds Calvinism into the narrative. Focusing on ritual controversies, the chapter claims "both Lutherans and Calvinists actively and positively thought with the senses in fundamentally the same way" (171). Aristotelian thought, mediated through Melanchthon, continued to dominate reflection on how the senses functioned. Baum's conclusion reviews the paradox and contradictions that his study reveals. Both in the fifteenth and sixteenth century the sensuous structure of religious practice varied widely, often determined [End Page 466] as much by the availability of material elements as by theology. The impact of Lutheran liturgical reforms was "erratic" (200), allowing the retention of many medieval elements but also producing significant ruptures, leading to a drift to simplification. Baum rejects Ernst Walter Zeeden's conclusion that"Lutheranism ultimately amounted to a veneer of new doctrinal ideas laid over the same old material substrate of worship" (202). This work offers a...