This beautifully produced and richly illustrated volume offers an introduction to Lutheran church buildings – and with them Lutheran churches – across early modern Europe. Sixteen essays and an afterword carry the reader through the German lands, into Transylvania, to Scandinavia, Poland, the Netherlands, and thence to South Africa, Indonesia and the New World. The essays trace a plethora of styles of church architecture and patterns of worship, demonstrating the widely varying aesthetic styles that emerged in early modern Lutheranism.

In an introductory essay, Andrew Spicer considers Lutheran churches and confessional identity, sketching British perceptions of Lutheranism at the time of the Hanoverian succession, and presenting Lutheran churches in London as one example of the diverse range of Lutheran church buildings. The first group of essays considers the situation in the German lands. Vera Isaiasz discusses the development of consecration rites, observing that ‘from the mid-sixteenth century onwards, the ritual consecration and dedication of churches, church foundation stones, altars, church bells and pulpits became increasingly established’ (p. 23), and concluding that, in practice, Luther's attitude that church buildings were ‘adiaphora’ was untypical for Lutheranism, and that church buildings were significant both theologically and politically. Emily Fisher Gray examines Lutheran churches in Augsburg, which ‘reflected the complex history and multi-confessional nature of the city's social and political life’ (p. 41). During the Reformation, Catholic and Lutheran worship spaces came to exist alongside – and sometimes interlocking with – one other. In contrast to the findings of, for instance, Heinz Schilling, Gray notes the extensive building programme which followed the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, and its use of baroque and rococo styles in marked contrast to the gothic of Augsburg's Catholic churches. Maria Deiters shows how epitaphs were used in the medieval churches of St Nikolai and St Marien in Berlin to assert civic interest and status. Leading families paid for altars and church furnishings, and medieval chantry chapels became family memorials, elaborately decorated. It would be interesting to discover how these ostentatious marks of church involvement were interpreted theologically. Margit Thofner's exploration of the ways in which church furnishings served to ‘stage’ and ‘frame’ Lutheran worship and faith offers a counter to accounts such as that by Joseph Leo Koerner, which tend to see Protestantism as ‘essentially iconophobic’ (p. 99). Thofner offers a good deal of evidence for elaborate Lutheran imagery: in church decoration and on fonts, pulpits and altars. The material expression of Lutheran theology in the German lands was demonstrated not only through buildings, but in the trappings of worship. Maria Cräciun compares shifting attitudes to Mary as indicated by Marian imagery in churches in Saxony and Transylvania, indicating Mary's continuing role as a model of piety and witness to Christ's life. Evelin Wetter explores the continuing use of pre-Reformation vestments in Lutheran worship, offering examples from Gdańsk, Stralsund, Brandenburg and Transylvania. Organs and other material trappings of music – including hymn-boards, indicating that the use of a standardised hymnbook had become widespread – are considered in Matthias Range's essay, which focuses on Lübeck. In a more theoretical contribution, Sven Rune Havsteen considers the Lutheran discourse around imagery in Denmark and North Germany. Here the South German situation, where Swiss theology was much more influential, might usefully also have been discussed. I also missed an exploration of the different types of shared space which emerged in the many cities where Lutherans and Catholics existed alongside one another (after 1555 every imperial city was obliged by the Peace of Augsburg to ensure an on-going provision for both confessions), including Heidelberg's Heiliggeistkirche, divided by a wall to form separate worship spaces for the two confessions, and the Hochstift Osnabrück, which seems to have been used simultaneously for Lutheran and Catholic services. The co-existence of different confessions in the same territory was far more common than these essays seem to suggest.

Shifting the focus to the Nordic and Baltic churches, Birgitte Bøggild Johannsen and Hugo Johannsen present Lutheran churches in Denmark, exploring both the re-ordering of existing buildings and the building of new churches; they conclude that the ‘prevailing narrative’ was one of ‘continuity through revision or redefinition’ (p. 275). Similarly, considering Norway, Øystein Ekroll points to the ‘remarkable continuities with the medieval Catholic past’ despite changes to church interiors designed to make the worship more visible to the congregation (p. 308). Discussing the furnishings and liturgy at Turku cathedral, situated in Finland, but at this stage rightly considered ‘a Swedish provincial cathedral’, Rütta Laitinen concludes that change happened only very slowly: ‘the transformation of Turku from a Catholic cathedral to a Lutheran cathedral took over a hundred years’ (p. 331). Similarly, Krista Kodres demonstrates that the establishment of Lutheranism in Estonia ‘was a protracted process’ (p. 333) not least because, although it was the official religion, it was imposed by the German-speaking elite on a largely Estonian-speaking population who ‘could not grasp the essence of the change of confession’ and continued many of their earlier practices (pp. 374–5).

In Poland the status of Lutheranism was always disputed. Agnieszka Madej-Anderson explores the (often clandestine) spaces in Cracow in which Lutherans were able to worship as they struggled to define themselves against Catholics on the one hand and Calvinists on the other. Jan Harasimovicz investigates the Lutheran churches that were built or established in Poland: concentrated in areas with strong German-speaking influences, these sometimes took the form of a room in a secular building, such as a town hall, which was dedicated to Lutheran worship. Similarly, as Andrew Spicer shows, in the Netherlands, where Lutheranism was also never the official religion, Lutheran churches often took the form of schuilkerken – ‘hidden or concealed churches’ (p. 454), which from the outside were indistinguishable from the street front. Only in the principal towns of Holland province, such as Amsterdam and Groningen, were Lutherans permitted to build more obviously ecclesiastical buildings, which might look very like their Reformed counterparts but were differently regarded. Spicer's study extends also to ‘the Dutch world’: he considers the requests to build Lutheran churches in Batavia (now Jakarta), New Amsterdam and Cape Town, all of which were initially rejected, leaving Lutheran congregations worshipping in a clandestine manner or forcibly united with Reformed congregations. He concludes that Lutheran churches ‘provide physical evidence of the gradual spread of religious toleration in the Dutch Republic and its colonies’ (p. 481).

As Susan Karant-Nunn's ‘Afterword’ observes, these essays demonstrate conclusively that ‘no coherent Lutheran aesthetic may be obtained across Europe despite much theological agreement’ (p. 489). Social hierarchy emerges as an important theme, with seating plans almost universally separating men and women and placing the higher social classes closer to the pulpit and altar. Many of these essays offer not only a discussion of the church buildings, but also an introduction to the ecclesiastical history of often overlooked geographical areas of Europe. Altogether this is a fascinating volume, which sheds real light on the myriad ways in which Lutheranism took shape in the early modern period.