The Franciscan author Marquard von Lindau (d. 1392) has a secure place in German scholarship. The entry for him in the Verfasserlexikon runs to forty-six columns, far longer than the entries for Meister Eckhart, Suso or Jean Gerson. Moreover, German scholarship, above all the work of Berndt Hamm, has given us over the past twenty years a picture of the Frömmigkeitstheologie of the later Middle Ages (theology and devotional writing that sought to guide lay persons in how to shape their lives) as a distinctive development in the history of Christianity. But Marquard and the important intellectual trends of which he is a major (in some cases the major) example have received almost no attention outside Germany. Except for the study of dissidents, especially the Lollards, the long fifteenth century – of which Marquard may be seen to be the beginning – has been neglected in Anglophone scholarship, so much so that John van Engen's recent presidential address to the American Society of Church History seemed almost revolutionary in its call to consider the period in its own right. Stephen Mossman's remarkable first book is a major step towards providing medievalists outside Germany with not just an entrée into one of the most significant figures of the later Middle Ages but also a nuanced, erudite and beautifully written overview of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century theological and devotional developments. Mossman treats only three aspects of Marquard's work, leaving aside his extensive exegesis. None the less this study is a must-read for all scholars of late medieval religious history and of the sixteenth-century Reformations as well.

Marquard, who was active for little over twenty years (1370–92), produced a large volume of works in both German and Latin. They can be divided into five categories: theological treatises in Latin, allegorical treatises (three of the four in German) on contemplative ascent to God, vernacular treatises on pragmatic issues of the Christian life, a philosophical commentary on John i.1–14, and forty-one vernacular sermons, probably composed for religious women. Two of the German treatises on the practice of a Christian life, the Dekalogerklärung and the Eucharistietraktat, were medieval bestsellers, with about 140 and seventy-five surviving manuscripts respectively. The De anima Christi and De fide were extremely influential as well. On each of the topics that Mossman treats, Marquard provided new devotional directions, and Mossman's detailed treatment of these sheds light not only on Marquard himself but also on the nature of the fourteenth-century piety to which he responded. Addressed to a primarily lay audience, Marquard's works were not mere catechesis; rather they were the beginning of what Hamm has called the ‘normative Zentrierung’ of the fifteenth century – an effort to create a guiding normative centre for Christians.

On the passion, Marquard's German works are innovative in two ways that point forward to the fifteenth century and deliberately move away from earlier emphases. First, Marquard rejects the focus on Christ's gruesome physical suffering, especially the quantitative valuing of such suffering involved in counting drops of blood, lashes of the whip, and so forth, as a way of accumulating merit and measuring religious effort numerically. To Marquard, Christ's pain is primarily the mental and spiritual pain of a God who sees his beloved creation mired in sin. Second, Marquard moves significantly beyond the Anselmian notion of soteriology prominent since the twelfth century. Christ is no longer simply the sacrifice that God is owed because of humankind's disobedience; Christ's suffering is itself redemptive because suffering is the human condition. The devout should not so much imitate Christ's pain, especially his physical experience, as understand that he suffers throughout his life because of his awareness of human sin. To Marquard, it is not so much Romans and Jews who crucify Christ as ordinary Christians. There is thus, in Marquard, a sense that our mental suffering, a crucial step in our rise to God, involves the profound acceptance of personal unworthiness that Martin Luther would later emphasise.

The new interiority of Marquard's soteriology is echoed in his sense of Mary, elaborated in the Dekalogerklärung . Mossman argues convincingly that Marquard was aware of countering the lachrymose Marian devotion of the fourteenth century by presenting for imitation by the ‘friends of God’ a new model of Mary as quiet contemplative. Breaking with traditional iconography as well as earlier piety, Marquard's Mary is no longer the weeping and fainting mother under the cross but rather a calm image of acceptance of the love poured out by her son. The same move beyond the climate of scrupulosity and fear induced by much fourteenth-century preaching is found in Marquard's eucharistic devotion. Here Mossman argues that the change that Miri Rubin has seen as coming in the mid-fifteenth century actually appears much earlier, and Marquard is its vanguard. Advising actual reception of the elements instead of Augenkommunion, Marquard urges the devout to love encounter with Christ rather than fear impure reception. Connected with this interior emphasis is a suspicion of paramystical experiences. Marquard argues that Christ's physical body and blood cannot be encountered in the sacrament. Eucharistic visions, of which he is deeply suspicious, are at best similitudes, at worst demonic temptations.

It is possible to think of a few avenues that Mossman might have explored further: for example, the connection between Marquard's suspicion of eucharistic visions and the contemporary discourse on the discerning of spirits, and the striking intrusion of physiological evidence into his discussion of moments, such as the bloody sweat of Gethsemane, where psychology meets physiology. None the less it is hard to think of much that Mossman has missed. And students of other late medieval figures, such as Engelbert von Admont and Matthaeus of Cracow, will find much that is new on their subjects as well. This is a splendid book. If a picture of the long fifteenth century as important in its own right is at last to emerge, it will be owing not only to new attention to key figures such as Marquard von Lindau but also to such learned and original studies as Mossman's.