Singing the Resurrection: Body, Community and Belief in Reformation Europe

Abstract

For many years now, the study of belief in Reformation history has continued to involve engagement with confessional histories, which, as Erin Lambert explains in her valuable study, often focus on doctrine and even ‘separate the content of belief from the circumstances in which it took shape’ (p. 5). Studies of the so called ‘confessionalization process’, a phrase associated with the work of historians Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, are no exception and these continue to dominate efforts to understand belief during the Reformation. What is more, approaches that make use of the confessionalization paradigm tend to take the emergence of the three major confessions as an inevitable and normative outcome, framing their creation as the most important result of the Reformation. ‘Implicitly’, Lambert notes, ‘belief has thus become equated with confession’ (p. 7). In response to these tendencies, Lambert has crafted a study that is primarily concerned with the concerns, practices and expressions of belief of sixteenth-century Christians, who ‘oriented themselves not to an earthly future but toward death, the Last Judgment and the eternal life that was to follow’ (p. 7). Her book looks closely at how sixteenth-century writers from a variety of backgrounds and contexts—across still unformed confessional divides and identities—understood resurrection of the dead and why it was so important to them. Additionally, Lambert focuses on song as ‘a primary means of creation and expression of belief among ordinary Europeans’ (p. 12).