The back cover of this book states that research into Catholic sermon culture between the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the Enlightenment stands as a great lacuna. Florian Bock redresses this by examining sermons preached by Capuchins in late seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Bavaria. The book, a lightly revised version of Bock's Habilitationsschrift completed at the university of Tübingen, treats sermons as pastoral strategies which were designed with an implied and imagined listening and reading audience in mind. That is, sermons were ‘praxeologies of religious knowledge’ (p. 19) and a ‘medium of participation’ (p. 30) which can lead to an understanding of exchange in a largely rural world. Tridentine Catholicism in the German-speaking world, writes Bock, remained an abstract measure that left preachers a lot of room to manoeuvre (p. 44), and therefore instead of finding things streamlined in the sermons one sees various forms of piety intersecting in them. Bock argues that the sources evidence not a sudden, abrupt break between the times of confessionalisation and the enlightened age but rather a steady transformation of pieties in the transition to modernity. Further, the sermons reveal not an early modern Catholicism but rather a plural Catholicity or Catholicisms (p. 43) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The ‘“old”, confessionalised knowledge’ was taken up into the ‘‘‘new”, enlightened-Catholic’ knowledge (p. 43). The transition was not abrupt. It proceeded little by little, and it did not cause the dissolution of one culture of piety in favour of another.

The comparatively brief chapters iii, iv and v (pp. 85–143) address, respectively, the topics of the setting, the pastoral guidelines and the preacher. The Bavarian Capuchin of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not merely compose sermons; rather he read a lot from the library that could be found in each convent. The Capuchin demonstrated a ‘pastoral flexibility’ (p. 86) by serving as an agent of confessionalisation, fulfilling the mendicant ideal of poverty, utilising his training to direct the faithful and promoting his order's prestige. This kind of ‘accommodation’ (p. 87) proved useful for the Capuchins, who had to juggle macro ambitions coming from Rome and from territorial courts as well as the micro realities of local urban and rural life. The Capuchin was to take seriously the Council of Trent's decree that the minister know his community and, with sermons from the pulpit, guide their souls as a good shepherd does the flock. Ideally, that sermon would be constructed according to what Milan archbishop Carlo Borromeo indicated (p. 96), namely one oriented toward classical rhetoric and the Church Fathers. That the pulpit was situated in the lay section of a sanctuary and often in a central location, where parishioners could see him well, highlighted its importance. Indeed, the pastoral sermon marked the point of greatest communicative transit between clerics and laity. In one of many instances where Bock uses an English expression, he refers to the priest as the ‘middle ground’ (p. 110) between the community and the ecclesiastical authorities. To ensure that the sheep do not stray from the right path (p. 121), the preacher in his sermon was to meditate on the holy Scripture (p. 112), preach practically (p. 114) and be both learned and one who speaks the common man's language (p. 133). Part of that meant using biblical examples and images (p. 135).

The lengthy (pp. 145–337) chapter vi organises the content of what was preached into seven sections. Sermon texts served to implement abstract, theological notions such as the gospel and faith into the world of everyday society. Stylistically, a preacher had many tools at his disposal to fashion a good sermon (pp. 146–55): commentary that utilised imagery from the holy Scriptures, catechisms and letters; allegories; a psychologising-moralising approach imported from France; and pastoral theology. A preacher was to utilise current matters and things gathered from everyday conversations. Sermons also contained material related to farm fields, storms and crop failures as well as biblical accounts pertaining to gardens and herds because the sermons were so often delivered to a community steeped in the agricultural economy (p. 166). Indeed, Bock notes that the town played much less of a role in Catholic sermons compared to that played by the rural countryside (p. 170). The discrepancy complements his earlier point that when Catholic and evangelical sermons of the period are compared, the denominational distinctions fade – especially as one's focus moves to the village – because the sermons were ‘not dissimilar’ in how they aimed to make ‘the basic truths of Christianity . . . plausible to the listener so that he could apply them to his life's situation’ (p. 153). Capuchins in Bavaria also preached on other subjects that they deemed crucial to the caretaking of souls: prayer and its end goal of union with God; the suffering and resurrection of Christ; the eucharist and the penance prior to receiving it; the veneration of Mary; and heaven, hell and purgatory. At the same time, Capuchins moulded their messages to the everyday lives of their parishioners by praising the married couple; emphasising the role of the housefather; acknowledging the divinely purposed tasks of work and service; discouraging miserliness; and encouraging caritas and charity. Capuchins also, not unexpectedly, contrasted things Catholic to those of the Lutherans, Calvinists and others. In post-Westphalian Augsburg, an imperial city of official religious parity, the Capuchins’ polemic served less as an attack on the others and more to stabilise the Catholics’ own confession (p. 330). Finally, in a wider world populated by many ‘primitive’ peoples such as Africans, Mexicans, Muslims and Tartars, who were marked by ‘false’, ‘immoral’, ‘wicked behavior’ (p. 332), the Catholic Church needed to be aware of its God-given privileges and live accordingly.

Though not the first to do so, Bock is right to warn against ‘the research which sees the early modern period only’ in terms of ‘a one-sided dominating-disciplining gradation. More attention should be paid instead to the self-assurance and wilfulness of the object of disciplining, i.e. the rural dweller’ (p. 167). However, the reader does not hear from the peasants directly – the primary sources used in the book are printed sermons written by the learned – and thus the reader still only sees the words of clerics, who, it so happens, often expressed a sharp, condescending bias against the villager (p. 168). Similar criticisms apply to other assertions in the book. One assertion is that the preacher stood as the midpoint between (top-down) confessionalisation and (from below) ‘self-confessionalisation’ (p. 111). Yet this self-confessionalisation is not defined or explained, and without examination of local records, a reader can well question Bock's assumption that any confessionalisation in fact took place. A second assertion is that examining the sermons and making the pastoral strategies visible reveals ‘how religious identities in pre-modern societies were configured’ (p. 146). Yet to determine these without documenting local initiatives – application of communal norms, values and notions of custom and novelty; spiritual assessments based on discourses derived from the peasant world, such as the agricultural one of Bau und Besserung; desires to improve a community's status and relations within its parish – leads to an incomplete and misrepresentative picture. A third is Bock's assumption that shrines, images and processions (pp. 241ff) played a role in forming a Catholic religious identity. Yet Bock leaves undiscussed where these were located locally. Near Bavaria in rural Fulda and parishes around Amöneburg in rural Upper Hesse, for example, communities conducted processions and located images along the framework forged by farming and settlement patterns. That is, their communal activity suggests less a confessionalised culture and more an appropriation of available Christian means to procure God's blessing and protection on their agricultural and pastoral life. This point resonates with one relayed in Bock's citation of an author named Neuville, who wrote in 1787 that a community felt good when a church had an appearance similar to a peasant hut and also had simple and humble altars, no melodious music and no glorious, magnificent ceremonies. The community's ‘living faith’, wrote Neuville, ‘has no need for such help’ (p. 248). In village churches, then, at least, it would seem that a community's own Christian moorings, anchored as they were to animating forces which rural-based developments had formed across centuries, held principal sway for those listening to the Capuchins’ sermons.