Carol Piper Heming. Protestants and the Cult of the Saints in German-Speaking Europe, 1517-1531. Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2003. xiii + 170 pp. $48.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-931112-23-9; $36.95 (paper), ISBN 978-1-931112-24-6.
Reviewed by David M. Whitford (Department of Philosophy and Religion, Claflin University)
Published on H-German (July, 2004)
I still remember my first encounter with the piety surrounding the cult of the saints. I was around thirteen and on my first family trip to Europe. My father brought us to nearly every cathedral he could find on a map. I remember lying on the floor of Yorkminster to get a sense of how big it was. I also remember entering a Roman Catholic cathedral on the continent and running into a glass box with fading velvet and a femur. This was not something one ran into often in Protestant churches in New England. The experience was fascinating and morbid all at the same time, but most of all it was foreign. That such experiences were not typical in the sixteenth century points to one of the significant changes in Christian piety wrought by the Reformation and the one that this book focuses upon.
Carol Piper Heming, assistant professor of history at Central Missouri State University, has written a fascinating study of why the cult of saints was rejected by the Reformers. The book also assesses the degree to which the attack succeeded. The cult of saints offers the historian a view into the intersection of Reformation theology and popular piety. By looking closely at the ways in which people both clung to and rejected this tradition, we can assess the progression of confessionalization during the Reformation.
The book begins with a brief introduction to Reformation understandings of the cult of saints and an assessment of the historical literature on the subject. What becomes apparent in this chapter is that the subject, as central as it was to life in at the dawn of the Reformation, has been largely ignored. This is especially interesting given that iconoclasm has been widely studied and the two share much in common. Chapter 2 examines the theological and religious critique of the cult by the Reformers. Here she notes the Reformers had two major criticisms; first, the saints' proper role was misunderstood and abused by religious orders who sought to make money from popular piety and fear. Second, they argued that the adoration of saints could not be supported by an appeal to Scripture and therefore violated the ideal of sola scriptura. Chapter 3 outlines the social and political critique of the cult focusing on the argument by the Reformers that the cult contributed to superstition, disorder, and economic drain. This chapter outlines a connection between the rejection of saints, many of whom were women, and the invigorated patriarchy of the era. This fascinating theme was treated too briefly here, and it is to be hoped that the author will return to this theme in future work. In this chapter the degree to which pastoral care concerns of the Reformers drove their rejection of the cult becomes apparent.
This was not a top-down decision as much as it was a bottom-up rejection of practices that played on the weakness, poverty, and insecurities of the common people. Chapter 4 looks in detail at how different Reformers viewed the cult. Here the common denominator, Reformers, becomes more nuanced as the similarities and differences among the leading figures are explored. Chapter 5 surveys the special place and role the Virgin Mary played in popular piety. Chapters 6 and 7 then examine the ubiquity and persistence of veneration of the saints. My only concern as it regards the persistence of the saints is the narrow time frame used to assess this persistence. It is unrealistic, I would argue, to look at the persistence only until 1531 or for that matter 1578. People, all of us, are inherently conservative and traditions persist even when the philosophical or theological traditions used to undergird them are stripped away. Look, for example, at the persistence of saying bless you, when someone sneezes. My fear here is that, as in Gerald Strauss's Luther's House of Learning (1990), the success or failure of the rejection of the cult of the saints is too narrowly defined. She ends with a note of irony. Luther, though not the strongest voice condemning the cult, but certainly one of the longest lasting, quickly became an icon or saint of a sort himself.
On the whole, this is a very good book that effectively mixes intellectual and social history. It is well-written and largely jargon free. Helpful appendices and the woodcuts nicely complement the text. This book could be used in a course on the Reformation or Early Modern Europe. It might also work particularly well in a historiography class. My only quibbles with the book (and they are really quibbles) concern the apparatus. The lack of a bibliography for current scholarship points readers to the notes--which is a bit frustrating. Also, if a book like this is to be of use to the non-specialist, works that are widely available in English ought to be cross-referenced to the standard scholarly English version. For example, throughout the book Heming refers to and cites Martin Luther primarily via the German/Latin D. Martin Luthers Werke, often without citing the far more common (at least in American college libraries) Luther's Works. While I generally liked her translations better than the American Edition, notes written in this way leave anyone but a Luther scholar in the lurch.
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Citation:
David M. Whitford. Review of Heming, Carol Piper, Protestants and the Cult of the Saints in German-Speaking Europe, 1517-1531.
H-German, H-Net Reviews.
July, 2004.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=9614
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