Taking inspiration from both the traditional history of theology and the newer cultural history, the author looks into the late medieval Catholic and the sixteenth-century Lutheran prescriptions to clergymen and the laity for assuaging their suffering. Suffering is a much neglected topic, and yet in this realm, too, Rittgers asserts, the ‘Wittenbergers’ departed noticeably from the Mother Church's assumption that pain endured in this life was not only punishment for sin but, if undergone successfully, without acceding to diabolical temptations such as falling into despair, could help the perseverant, aided by holy intermediaries, toward salvation. He provides the broad outlines of the Church Fathers’ advice on through the less doctrinal model of late medieval mysticism, implicitly showing the range of approaches to helping Christians to mitigate the ubiquitous ordeals, inner and outer, to which nearly everyone was subject.

With the Reformation, suffering was no longer salvific. Proceeding roughly chronologically, Rittgers devotes chapters to the early and the mature Luther; the varied assimilation of the Reformer's followers as reflected in the comforting advice that they put down in prose as a way of carrying their pastoral role to a broader audience than that in their own parishes; the instructions for ministers of the Word contained in the ecclesiastical ordinances; the emerging genre, after 1550, of consolation literature per se; and, finally, the elite laity's absorption of evangelical models as demonstrated in their own compositions on this theme and in book ownership (women writers and collectors appear in this last category). A recurrent topic is what suffering now meant within the non-Catholic context of justification by faith, when cultivated endurance as an exercise of will and a deed, strictly speaking, could avail the Christian neither of relief nor of heaven. Martin Luther's influence was decisive. Beginning visibly with his Dictata super Psalterium (1513–15), the Reformer formulates a conviction that God visits suffering on Christians in order to bring them to complete reliance on divine grace. Unable to assist themselves, they must cling to the cross, on which Jesus agonised with his whole humanity.

Rittgers's reading has ranged very widely. He takes under advisement more writers and subtleties of interpretation than a review this brief can encompass. This depth of investigation makes his conclusions convincing. He finds, for instance, that Lutheranism retains a limited debt to mysticism (Zwinglianism did not), and he asserts a resurgence of such strains squarely within the evangelical creed, not as harbingers of Pietism, after 1550. He is right. Elsewhere, he explores burgher resourcefulness in contending with pain.

Following Scott Hendrix, Rittgers adopts the concept of re-Christianisation as an umbrella term under which the entire evangelical movement can travel.Footnote ¹ Anthropologically- oriented historians of the Reform do not generally appropriate it – and they have even less sympathy for Jean Delumeau's ‘Christianisation’.Footnote ² Rittgers finds that anthropology with its non-confessional theories leads his colleagues astray. He takes exception to Robert Scribner and his followers who have alleged an ongoing lay resistance to the ‘imposed’ religion of the divines. He brings forward a number of elite lay authors in support of his preference for widespread enthusiastic reception of Luther's teachings. This book deserves our respectful consideration. No one will come away from reading it without a deeper understanding of early Lutheranism and without an admiration of the author's accomplishment. I hope that Rittgers moves on to a similar study of Calvinism, for as a predestinarian John Calvin assumed a different stance toward suffering than Luther.