For the last decade or so Reformation historians have been seeking to revise and refute the Weberian view of Protestantism as a movement of disenchantment in early modern Europe. The University of Maryland historian Philip Soergel has recently contributed to this effort by examining early modern Lutheran Wonder Books (Wunderzeichenbücher). Taking his cue from the late D. P. Walker, who urged historians to study the myriad ways in which Protestants continued to hold an enchanted view of the world (p. 31), Soergel analyzes the deep fascination that many Lutherans had with signs and wonders in the natural world, everything from deformed humans beings and animals to comets and asteroids to floods, earthquakes, and fires. These are the miracles or Wunderzeichen that fill the pages of the Lutheran Wonder Books.

Soergel argues that an important change took place in the Christian attitude toward natural wonders from the Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, especially among Lutherans. Natural wonders were no longer inexplicable marvels that were inferior to divinely wrought miracles; now they were direct messages from God, especially about the dire consequences of human sin. University-trained Lutheran moralists were greatly influenced by this change, which owed much to the work of northern humanists such as Sebastian Brant, and subsequently produced Wonder Books that saw in natural disasters and oddities a divine summons to repentance. Soergel insists that Lutheran moralists were not reflecting in their works a larger guilt complex that afflicted their age, as Jean Delumeau once argued; rather, they were reflecting their own increasing anxiety about the inability of Lutheran Christianity to combat antinomianism as the sixteenth century wore on. Soergel argues, “a close analysis of these texts reveals a deep uneasiness at the heart of a maturing Reformation, an uneasiness prompted by the growing realization that the teachings of faith alone were insufficient to ensure social discipline” (p. 30). It therefore became necessary in the eyes of evangelical moralists to preach sin and judgment all the more vigilantly. The new Lutheran Wonder Books were thus characterized by an “unrelieved bleakness” of tone and outlook that only grew darker over time (pp. 34, 128).

Soergel examines the Wonder Books of the medical doctor and natural philosopher Job Fincel (d. 1582), the Nassau-Weilburg pastor Caspar Goltwurm (d. 1559), and the Eisleben and Weimar pastor—and eventual exile—Christoph Irenaeus (1522-1595). This analysis is preceded by a chapter on Martin Luther in which the Wittenberg reformer's understanding of the saints, natural wonders, and nature are discussed. Soergel argues in this chapter that the authors of the Wonder Books failed to follow Luther's lead in three important respects: they saw natural wonders as a reliable source of divine revelation, which conflicted with Luther's tentativeness about prognostication and stress on the Word; they lacked the Wittenberg reformer's genuine appreciation for the goodness of nature; and they missed his “fundamental optimism” (p. 57), born of the conviction that the Gospel would finally triumph over the forces of evil.

While the authors of the Wonder Books had different emphases and approaches in their treatments of natural miracles, Soergel maintains that they all interpreted strange and threatening occurrences in the natural world according to a model of retributive justice that had a wrathful God punishing evangelical Christians for their every sin. He concedes that the authors could relent from their bleak message now and again, but the overall tone of the Wonder Books remained dark and ominous. Only in the seventeenth century did a God of mercy begin to replace the God of wrath in such Lutheran works, as evangelical doctrinal battles subsided (and with them the need to look for confirmation of theological positions in the book of nature), as the Lutheran machinery of social discipline became more effective (and thus reduced the pressure that clergymen felt to preach Law over Gospel), and as Lutheran Christians became more confident of the human ability to observe and control the natural world. Soergel maintains that the early seventeenth century saw the emergence of “new works of consolation” (p. 168) such as funeral sermons that “reveal a new willingness on the part of the Lutheran clergy to engage with the psychological effects of great tragedies rather than to merely warn about their moral and eschatological significance” (p. 174). Pastors and theologians could now offer multiple explanations for misfortune instead of relying solely on the sin explanation (p. 175).

The great strength of this book is the way it clearly shows just how enchanted the Lutheran worldview was in the early modern period—no one could read Soergel's analysis of the Wonder Books and conclude otherwise. On this front, the book is a success. Less persuasive, though, is the argument about the bleak and anxious outlook of the Lutheran clergymen of the late Reformation, coupled with the alleged slow reversal of this mentality in the opening decades of the seventeenth century. The Wonder Books may well have preached Law, as Soergel maintains, but there were plenty of other sources that preached Gospel. Soergel's argument about the late appearance of evangelical consolation and thus of its relative unimportance in the late Reformation is problematic. Lutheran clergymen published works of consolation steadily throughout the sixteenth century; these works appeared at the same time as the Wonder Books and in far greater numbers. Soergel places the Wonder Books in the general category of Lutheran devotional literature (p. 78) but does not take adequate stock of what this larger genre reflects about the late Reformation Protestant imagination, namely, that it was deeply interested in consolation, not just in sin and divine punishment: emphasis on the latter was in the ascendant, as a number of scholars have shown, but concern for the former remained constant. Even a prominent scholar such as Susan Karant-Nunn, who has stressed the misanthropic and oppressive nature of early modern Lutheranism, now acknowledges that consolation was a defining theme in late Reformation pastoral and devotional literature. (See her The Reformation of Feeling [Oxford University Press, 2010]). Soergel would have done well to limit his assertions about the bleakness of the late Reformation clerical outlook to the subgenre of Wonder Books and similar works; instead, he argues for a much broader applicability of his conclusions. The result is an incomplete picture of the late Reformation Lutheran clergy. For example, the tradition of offering multiple explanations for misfortune actually has quite a long history in the Christian tradition, and Protestants such as Luther adopted and adapted this practice from the earliest days of the Reformation forward. There was nothing new about it in the seventeenth century, as Soergel suggests; it was a commonplace in sixteenth-century Lutheran consolation literature and may be found in works by figures such as Andreas Musculus, who allegedly contributed to the darkness of tone in the late Reformation (p. 19). The consolation literature also includes an emphasis on growth in grace that directly contradicts Soergel's assertion about “Lutheranism's thorough dismissal of all notions of sanctification” (p. 91). To gain an accurate understanding of late Reformation Lutheran clergymen and their outlook, we must take due account of the whole of their extant writings, including both the pessimism and the optimism, the fear and the hope that they contain. We have much work to do to reach this goal.