Lutheran Churches in Early Modern Europe is a collection of sixteen articles from historians and art historians addressing topics ranging from theological understandings of church space to church architecture and every aspect of interior space (such as decorations, epitaphs, altars and pulpits, vestments, organs and music-related objects, and so forth). The chronological scope of the articles runs from the early sixteenth through the mid-eighteenth century in many cases. Most exceptional, however, is the volume's geographic coverage, which not only includes the Lutheran heartlands in Germany and Scandinavia, but also places were Lutherans were minority communities such as Transylvania, Poland, Estonia, and the Netherlands. The volume contains 130 helpful black-and-white images that enable the reader to visualize the authors' descriptions. As numerous contributors remark, this array is made even more complex by a key tenet of early modern Lutheranism: that compared with other confessions of the time, Lutherans defined the category of adiaphora especially broadly, particularly with regard to material church culture. As a result, Lutheran churches and their interior furnishings exhibit bewildering variety over time and space. Despite this diversity, however, four broad themes emerge in the course of the volume.

First, multiple authors emphasize the “preserving or conserving power of Lutheranism (12),” a phenomenon seen particularly in the German lands where, without confessional competition in close proximity, churches were free to retain their medieval material presence. In other places, such as Norway, as Øystein Ekroll has discovered, and the Swedish provincial Cathedral in Turku (Finland), as Riitta Laitinen finds, the broad continuity of church material culture was due to the comparatively slow implementation of the Reformation.

Sometimes, however, the story was more complicated than simple continuity as, for example, when challenges from other confessions inspired Lutherans to re-embrace aspects of medieval material church culture and practice what they had earlier viewed with a critical eye. Vera Isaiasz argues that church consecrations, once ridiculed by Lutherans as Catholic superstition, reemerged in the late sixteenth century as part of an effort by Lutherans to differentiate their own understanding of church space from that of the Calvinists. Evelin Wetter demonstrates that the rise of Calvinism in late sixteenth-century Transylvania resulted in the use of pre-Reformation ecclesiastical vestments by Lutherans to distinguish themselves from the starker Reformed. And in late sixteenth century Denmark and Northern Germany, Sven Rune Havsteen has discovered a renewed acceptance of images among Lutherans reacting against the Calvinist-inspired criticism thereof.

Competition from Catholics also impacted the material culture of Lutheran churches, sometimes in unexpected ways. Emily Fisher Gray has discovered that in the bi-confessional city of Augsburg, Lutheran churches became increasingly filled with ornamentation, giving them a rather “Catholic” feel. In the paintings on epitaphs, and in their placement within Lutheran churches, Maria Deiters observes a continuation of the medieval notion of the communio sanctorum in two of Berlin's churches. Clearly the story is not always one of strict continuity.

A second phenomenon evident throughout the volume is the way in which Lutherans adapted and reinterpreted medieval material church culture to fit their own theological notions. In early modern Transylvania, where Marian imagery had an especially deep history, Maria Crăciun has found evidence that much was left intact. The introduction of new inscriptions onto older art works, however, changed their meaning so that key events in the life of Mary were refocused on Jesus, and Mary “was increasingly regarded primarily as a witness to the life of Christ” (157). In the North German city of Lübeck, the tradition of music, and therefore the material presence of exceptional organs in the city's main churches, was well established before the Reformation. However, as Matthias Range reveals, Lutherans added decorations to the organs and introduced musicians' galleries into the churches, thereby adapting and developing what was already there. And Margit Thøfner argues that how works of art were “staged and framed,” how they were employed in ritual, gave them meaning. The object itself might remain constant, but its significance changed depending on what was happening around it.

A third theme manifest in the volume is the “porousness,” of Lutheranism. Andrew Spicer sees this phenomenon in the Dutch Republic where Lutheran church interiors were characterized by few pictures, no altarpieces, and little art, so that although religious toleration existed, and although most worshipers in these churches were of foreign extraction (that is, Lutherans from Germany and Scandinavia), “the character of Lutheran churches in the Dutch Republic seems to have accorded more with those of the Reformed Church” (481). With regard to the newly rebuilt Frauenkirche in Dresden, Susan Karant-Nunn sees the broader cultures' prevailing baroque style as the most important influence, a phenomenon Emily Fisher Gray also finds in Augsburg.

A fourth theme, and one seemingly constant across time and space as Susan Karant-Nunn points out, is the notion that church interiors display social hierarchies via the placement of graves, seating arrangements, and family monuments. This tendency is well known in the Lutheran heartlands, where Emily Fisher Gray finds it in Augsburg, and Maria Dieters in Berlin. But Krista Kodres notes its presence in Estonia, and Øystein Ekroll in Norway, as well.

All of the articles in this volume are of high scholarly quality, but they vary considerably in their nature. A few are highly theoretical, calling for new approaches to understanding material church culture. Most argue a distinctive thesis. But some, particularly those devoted to geographic regions were the initial groundwork on Lutheran Churches is just now taking place, are rather general and descriptive. And despite sporadic references to the negotiation of meaning, few authors pay much attention to the issue of reception. The focus is, by-and-large, on cultural elites and the significance they assigned to the material attributes of Lutheran churches.

The examination of so many aspects of material church culture across time and space demonstrates overwhelmingly that context (theological, social, cultural, economic, and political) matters when attempting understand Lutheran churches for, as Susan Karant-Nunn remarks in her afterword, “no coherent Lutheran aesthetic may be obtained across Europe, despite much theological agreement” (489). The book's great strength, then, is that although each article focuses on one particular feature of Lutheran material church culture, that aspect opens a window to the broader Lutheran experience in that particular time and place. Taken together, the volume offers a nice overview of European Lutheranism during this period.