Matthieu Arnold, Rolf Decot, eds. FrÖ¶mmigkeit und SpiritualitÖ¤t: Auswirkungen der Reformation im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Piete et SpiritualitÖ©: L'impact de la RÖ©formation aux XVIe et XVIIe SiÖ¨cles. Mainz: Philipp von Zabern Verlag, 2002. Bibliography + index. (cloth), ISBN 978-3-8053-2939-2.
Reviewed by Mary Venables (Independent Scholar, Cork, Ireland)
Published on H-German (January, 2005)
Frömmigkeit und Spiritualität is a compilation of nine essays originally presented at a September 2000 colloquium on post-Reformation piety and spirituality. The colloquium participants, who were assembled by working groups from the theological faculty at Marc Bloch University (Strasbourg II) and the Institut für Europäische Geschichte at the University of Mainz, examined ways that leading Protestant Reformers and Catholic ecclesiastics shaped Christian practice and, to a lesser extent, the ways that early modern Christians adapted to religious change.
The collected essays turned out to be quite different from the book that the title would suggest. Heard on its own, Frömmigkeit und Spiritualität brings to mind the continental equivalent of Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars or the opening pages of Christopher Haigh's English Reformations.[1] The book under review, however, focuses more on prescriptions for piety than on experiences of it. An early indicative footnote references Berndt Hamm and Thomas Lentes's definition of the facets of piety, which includes "nicht nur die gelebte Frömmigkeitspraxis selbst, sondern auch Frömmigkeit als Intention." Frömmigkeit und Spiritualität focuses predominately on intentions for Christian life and rarely touches on the subject of lived piety. The inattention to actual religious practice is a disappointment. While the contributors ably probe how church leaders desired their charges to live, questions about the effect of the Reformation on communal voluntary religious practice remain unanswered.
The book contains nine substantive essays (six on Protestant piety, two on Catholic piety, one on a confessionally mixed topic), an introduction and a historiographical survey, as well as a bibliography and an index (something of a rarity in collections of conference proceedings). In the first essay, Marc Lienhard sketches a short historiographical survey in which he champions the multi-disciplinary study of piety as integral to understanding religion. Unfortunately, the essays themselves are not very interdisciplinary and only the presence of Peter Burschel's interpretation of Andreas Gryphius's "Catharina von Georgien" as an inroad into understanding reactions to suffering imparts an interdisciplinary character to the book. The remaining essays typify straightforward history of Christianity research.
Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, and ecclesiastical authorities play a starring role in five of the essays. Christoph Burger studies Luther's explication of the Magnificat and argues that Luther chose, based on new translations of the Gospels, to highlight Mary's low estate (Armut) over her humble estate (Demut), which reversed the typical medieval emphasis on her humility. In another essay, Markus Wriedt outlines Luther and Melanchthon's views on education and concludes that early Reformers saw no opposition between formal education and Christian piety. Marianne Carbonnier-Burkhard examines Justus Jonas and Michael Coelius's report of Luther's death, which she interprets as an attempt to protect Luther from heresy charges and to present a new type of Protestant saintliness. (Frank Muller's essay on iconoclasm also points to Protestant tendencies to appoint Luther, and later Gustavus Adolphus, as Protestant saints.) Rolf Decot reports on attempts by the electoral bishops of Mainz to enforce Sunday observance, regulate popular festivals, revive catechism instruction, and implement the Council of Trent's decrees.
The emphasis in the essays just mentioned rests on Luther, Melanchthon, and electoral bishops; little connects the essays to the social world of the sixteenth century or historiographic debates of our time. Rolf Decot's essay on electoral Mainz hints that social discipline may have preceded the confessionalized period (he argues that the example of Mainz shows that attempts at social discipline started earlier), but the other authors simply sum up the Reformers' views and do not integrate them into early modern social practice or current historical questions.
Matthieu Arnold's contribution on Luther and Melanchthon's views on suffering, however, demonstrates that studies of great reformers can do more than summarize theological treatises. In one of the best essays in the book, Arnold uses Luther and Melanchthon's advice to bereaved correspondents to illustrate divergent views on grief within the young Protestant community. Arnold points out that while Luther almost unconditionally approved of mourning, Melanchthon only sometimes encouraged open expressions of grief (using Luther's sorrows over his children's death as a model). More often Melanchthon urged mourners to control their emotions and console themselves with hopes of heaven, which included being reunited with deceased family members, friends, and heroes of the faith. According to Arnold, the contrast between Luther and Melanchthon demonstrates a "pietas multiformes" within the Lutheran camp.
Philippe Martin adds a similarly intriguing essay on French devotional literature, which likewise suggests that a great variety of pious expression existed within a single religious confession, in this case seventeenth-century French Catholicism. Martin demonstrates that even though learned French Catholics sometimes stressed the need to deny the world, authors of advice manuals for common people often encouraged their readers to hallow all aspects of life. In devotional literature "la vie quotidienne" played a much greater role than in academic theology. Taken together, Arnold's and Martin's contributions illustrate that talking about a "Lutheran" piety or "Catholic" piety is insufficient: scholars must come to distinguish subtle differences that existed within the confessions.
While Arnold and Martin highlight variety within confessions, Kaspar von Greyerz offers Lazarus von Schwendi (1522-1583) as an example of how to transcend the confessional divide. An imperial knight, von Schwendi tried to reform the emperor's army and overcome religious divisions in the empire. Von Greyerz is intrigued by an apparent religious dualism in von Schwendi's biography: von Schwendi died a Catholic--he had established a fund for anniversary masses and received full Catholic funeral rites--but before his death he had written a private Calvinist confession of faith. Von Greyerz uses this dualism to suggest that, at least for von Schwendi, it was possible to subjugate personal faith to political necessity.
This disparate collection of essays, which ranges from Protestant clerics to imperial knights, is unified by its emphasis on intended piety. In most of the essays, information on "gelebte Frömmigkeitspraxis" is missing. The articles present some intriguing insights into what people were supposed to do, yet fill in few details on the piety of an individual Christian (whether Catholic or Protestant). Pictures of personal piety are admittedly hard to transmit, but it seems that lived, personal piety makes up a large part of the "impact" and Auswirkungen of the Reformation. Not to include personal practice in a study of the effect of the Reformation omits an important part of early modern history. While Frömmigkeit und Spiritualität does a very good job of telling the reader what church authorities intended religious life in early modern Europe to look like, the lives of those who were counseled to grieve like Luther, to send their children to school, to remove statues from their churches, or to attend catechism class still need further illumination.
Note
[1]. Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993); and Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c. 1400-c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992).
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Citation:
Mary Venables. Review of Arnold, Matthieu; Decot, Rolf, eds., FrÖ¶mmigkeit und SpiritualitÖ¤t: Auswirkungen der Reformation im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Piete et SpiritualitÖ©: L'impact de la RÖ©formation aux XVIe et XVIIe SiÖ¨cles.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
January, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10134
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