Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen by Volker Leppin

Abstract

Reviewed by: Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen by Volker Leppin Robert Kolb Repräsentation und Reenactment. Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit verstehen. By Volker Leppin. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2021. x + 272 pp. Volker Leppin recently moved from the University of Tübingen to Yale Divinity School and is shifting his research focus from Reformation studies to the Middle Ages, reversing both the [End Page 196] geographical and thematic journeys of Heiko Oberman (who, of course, left Harvard for Tübingen, then later returned to the U.S.) a generation ago. Leppin has been one of the most sensitive advocates for accenting the continuities of medieval church life and thought with the Reformation while at the same time identifying what made Luther Luther and not just one more late medieval professor. In this volume he lays the groundwork for further assessment of an oft-neglected aspect integral to Luther's understanding of history and time although this study analyzes only late medieval ecclesiastical life. This book focuses on late medieval thought at both the theological and the popular levels. It examines thinking on the relationship of the past and the present within the framework of the presence of the Transcendent in the midst of life on earth. Recent discussions of representation and reenactment provide a fresh angle for the interpretation that Leppin and Berndt Hamm have pursued concerning attempts to bring the distant God of heaven nearer to the daily life of fifteenth-century German believers struggling with the challenges of their world. Various modes of representation of God's past actions transmitted his presence into the lives of the faithful, and reenactment of key elements in the story of salvation drew these believers into God's past actions as those actions affected them in their own day. The relationship between heaven and earth in ancient and in present contexts was mediated and actualized through the dramatic reenactment of Christ's suffering and death in passion plays and through altar pieces and their relics that sought to cross the divide between the historical then of the lives of Christ or the saints and the contemporary now. Pious exercises of many kinds also heightened the sense that the suffering Christ shared the miseries of medieval believers and provided relief. Pilgrimages ushered the faithful into spaces distinct from everyday life and into a variety of sacred realms. Such holy spaces provided ways of remembering the past and appropriating the benefits of holy people gone before. Especially the signs of the sacraments provided liturgical reenactment that aimed to re-present events of the past and abolish the distance between the original event and the contemporary participants who were drawn [End Page 197] into it through this re-presentation. For example, the sacrament of penance associated penitents with the sinners, Adam and Eve, just as these primeval parents embodied the penance performed by the pious of the fifteenth century. Its practice featured ever-increasing use of indulgences; the church responded to its crisis of pastoral care with ever more imaginative presentation and pricing of the satisfactions that delivered relief from purgatory. Above all, the Mass functioned as a reenactment of the crucifixion of Jesus. The allegorical method of biblical interpretation facilitated this bridging of past and present (17–19). Leppin demonstrates that concepts of God's presence in daily life played an essential role in the piety of the period, and he shows how artistic and liturgical vehicles (from altarpieces, relics, and shrines, to sacramental actions) transported believers back to events fifteen hundred years earlier. Such objects and activities conveyed those events into the village church, into the interactions of Christian folk with the sacred places and practices of their own environment and way of life. With incense for the nose, bread for the tongue, liturgical garments and drama for the eye, and the chanting of the liturgy as well as the reading of texts from Scripture and the lives of the saints for the ear, the presence of God invaded the individual believer's consciousness and suspended the actual historical gap of a millennium and a half, drawing Christians into participation in the sacred activities of the Savior and the...