To appreciate the contribution this book makes to the study of the development of religious culture in early modern Germany, one must begin with the footnotes. In a style not often executed with such detail even in German scholarly literature these days, Thomas Kaufmann fills his latest book with long (some stretching over a page), erudite footnotes, some of which contain synopses of his position in a particular scholarly debate (for example, on the degree to which Luther's later position on the Jews stemmed from theological or social causes [Kaufmann credits the latter]) and others of which give remarkably thorough bibliographies – but all of which threaten to take over the narrative altogether. From the perspective of these notes this book provides the reader with a wealth of information on Lutheran confessional culture in the last half of the sixteenth century in essays grouped alliteratively into crises (apocalyptic and political thought; reading Luther; the role of Judaism for later Lutherans), controversies (iconoclasm and Reformed theologians; anti-Jesuit polemics), consolidation (vocational and cultural influences on Lutheran Protestant estates; theological opinions of the University of Rostock; Protestant reactions to the 1555 Peace of Augsburg) and kairos (the significance of 1600 for Lutheran theologians).

The footnotes, however, also reveal the book's most exasperating quality: the author, for all of his obvious erudition, does not consistently keep track of where he or his arguments are going. The nidulae, to use Erasmus's term for such rhetorical loci communes, do not always serve the text but often introduce interesting (although sometimes unproven and improbable) arguments only tangentially related to the main points. Part of this deluge of information is understandable: Kaufmann presents incidents and literature so far from common knowledge that he wants to provide the broadest possible background for the reader. But part supports a nagging suspicion on the part of this reviewer that the author has lost sight of the overall theological landscape among the individual trees.

For example, Kaufmann explores Joachim Mörlin's tract from 1565 on how to read Luther and rightly notes the connection to the use of Luther in an earlier controversy in Prussia between this same gnesio-Lutheran divine and Andreas Osiander over justification by faith. Yet he fails to connect Mörlin's work to the Luther tracts, letters and comments published during that controversy by others. Thus the reader receives at best an impoverished view of Mörlin's theological (and cultural) context. As in several other chapters, Philip Melanchthon is a no show (or, perhaps, a persona non grata?; how one could talk about Martin Chemnitz's position on iconoclasm without mentioning Melanchthon is puzzling to say the least).

Similarly, Kaufmann summarily dismisses, or at least ignores, the theological arguments in Luther's and later Lutheran tracts against the Jews and thus leaves the reader with a purely cultural explanation for these vicious tracts. Despite the fact that, as Johannes Wallmann has shown, an early seventeenth-century thinker like Johann Gerhard knows of several different sixteenth-century Lutheran theological positions vis-à-vis the Jews, Kaufmann also leaves the impression that he found only wholly anti-Jewish (and, frankly, antisemitic) positions among Lutherans around 1600.

In comparison with the late Bodo Nischan's brilliant work (Prince, people and confession: the second Reformation in Brandenburg [Philadelphia 1994]), which covers many similar themes, this collection of essays casts a weaker shadow. Nevertheless, its stated theme – the relation of culture and confession in the late Reformation – and the individual topics of each chapter provide important areas for further research. Yet problems lurk here, too. In his chapter on the Lutheran view of iconoclasm, for example, Kaufmann criticises earlier descriptions of the Lutheran mediating position for not showing how Lutherans argue their case. Yet, not only does he not investigate the roots of the Lutheran position in Luther's understanding of adiaphora over against Andreas Karlstadt (the later iconoclasts in the principality of Anhalt are almost always called Carlstadtians), but he also does not recognise the important connection between iconoclasm and the Christological divide between Lutheran and Reformed theologians. The ‘finitum non capax infiniti’ made some Reformed theologians allergic to all kinds of material means (bread, musical instruments, pictures). Lutheran criticisms were not simply echoes of overripe apocalypticism, vague views of freedom and respect for Luther but, as Nischan has shown for Brandenburg, they were near the heart of Lutheran theology and practice.

There is a further problem with this collection of essays. The book's title promises the reader a glimpse into the development of a peculiarly Lutheran culture in the last half of the sixteenth century, indeed a worthy theme in the face of the growing interest in confessionalisation (Konfessionsbildung) among historians of the period. But the author fails to define either half of the title. Neither Konfession, a peculiarly German word that includes both denomination and creed in one breath, nor Kultur, a word that has found plenty of interesting use by cultural historians the world over, is properly explained. What does it mean to bring together essays on various themes without ever defining what ‘Lutheran Protestantism’ is – without even mentioning, for example, justification by grace through faith alone? Moreover, what does Kaufmann mean by culture, a word sprinkled throughout the book? If, to use a common-sense definition, culture is that weaving together of the ideas and social acts, the art and music, and the language and literature of a specific group of people who are bound together by specific expectations and expressions, then to write on confession and culture one must be more specific about the group being studied and more general about its common ethos. In this case, how can one write on such a topic without including any mention of hymnody, preaching (one thinks especially of the work on funeral sermons) or the care of souls? No wonder Kaufmann discovers a group permeated by a unique form of apocalyptic thought, by the overpowering image of Luther and by threats from Roman and Reformed enemies – and thus uninterested in experiments but rather ‘defensive, depressed … under attack’ (p. 25), which is perhaps what happens when Lutherans cannot sing or preach.