This collection of essays resulted from a conference sponsored by the Coram Deo Program of Refo500 which explored some of the historical meanings of wellbeing for Christians. Published in the Refo500 Academic Series (R5AS), Wellbeing in Early Modern Christianity reflects the interdisciplinary and international approach of the Reformation Research Consortium (REFORC) which is behind this series. Its great strength lies in its breadth, with contributions from historians, philosophers, theologians, legal experts and musicologists. The volume has an impressive geographical reach too, with chapters exploring aspects of early modern Christianity in the British Isles, Bohemia, Italy and the northern Low Countries.

A particular highlight of this book is the extent to which original texts are reprinted alongside an English translation in many of the chapters, making extracts in Czech, French, Italian, German and Latin available to a wide audience. This practice is in evidence throughout, starting with Mathijs Lamberigts’s, article on the idea of ‘omnes esse beati volunt’ in Augustine’s work. Jan Červenka’s chapter, ‘Wellbeing in Bohemian Dialogues of the sixteenth century’, provides fascinating extracts from consolation dialogues in Czech (with English translations), showing some of the different approaches to wellbeing and happiness in the multiconfessional environment of the Bohemian reformation. Perhaps the most notable example of this may be seen at the end of Marta Quatrale’s chapter on ‘Philipp Melanthon’s Ethic’ [sic]. Lengthy extracts from several different works by Melanchthon are reproduced along with an English translation, allowing Quatrale to demonstrate the centrality of ‘wellbeing’ and the influence of gnoseology and ethics in Melanchthon’s later works.

This volume asks how early modern Christians understood ‘wellbeing’, and how they used this concept in their lives, focusing on the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries. The volume opens with a discussion of Augustine’s writings, exploring his concepts of bene vivere and beate vivere, and his eventual conclusion that ‘true happiness is a gift of God, not the work of human beings’ (p. 27). Lamberigts shows that Augustine drew on biblical texts and philosophical writings (including Cicero and Seneca) as he explored whether happiness should be an aim of human life. These are themes which are repeated throughout the book, as authors explore how early modern writers struggled with the same ideas, many using Augustine as their starting point. In the chapter, ‘Advice on how to live a good life in fifteenth-century Dutch miscellaneous manuscripts’, Catrien Santing demonstrates the continuing influence of Augustine’s work in the booklet written by monk and humanist Baptista Mantuanus, De beata vita oposculum (1502). Andreas J. Beck similarly shows how the Dutch theologian, Gisbertus Voetius (or Gijsbert Voet), drew repeatedly on Augustine in his own exploration of happiness and spiritual growth (pp. 39–40). However, like all other elements of Christian thought and practice, ideas about wellbeing and spiritual growth could become tangled up with confessional disputes. Anna Szyrwińska-Hörig, for example, demonstrates how two different Protestant traditions made the connection between renewal, spiritual wellbeing and the possibility of free-will. Drawing on writings by Lutheran Pietists and Remonstrants during the seventeenth century, Szyrwińska-Hörig demonstrates how an emphasis on spiritual wellbeing was a distinguishing feature of both movements which often found themselves at odds with the Lutheran or Calvinist Church.

Almost all authors show that ‘wellbeing’ covered a wide range of experiences and prompted numerous discussions by Christian writers in this period about what ‘wellbeing’ looked like. This was interpreted literally by seventeenth-century French aristocrats attending the royal court. Didier Course explores the potential friction between the admonition in the Book of Ecclesiastes that ‘vanitas vanitatum, omnia vanitas’ and the demands of courtly display. Drawing on the work of three influential Jesuits, Caussin, Binet and Le Moyne, Course demonstrates how even the most devout courtier came to embrace the excessive displays of the French court, concluding that ‘the outward signs of extravagant adornment will not be seen as a mark of a fallen humanity or deliberate intention to sin any longer’ (p. 90). Balázas Rigó also examines the implications of ideas of ‘wellbeing’ in the political sphere. Rigó explores how successive political theorists including Erasmus, Thomas More, Montaigne and Bodin handle this concept. Using Maslow’s ‘Pyramid of Needs’, Rigó suggests that the ‘need for security, order, material goods, spiritual refreshment, culture and emotional security’ may be tied directly to the legitimacy of state power. Brigitta Schvéd explores how ‘wellbeing’ was used in political discourse, by focusing on two sermons preached by John Adams in 1709 and 1710. Both were thanksgiving sermons, and both addressed the balance of power as a way of realising the wellbeing of all Christian citizens. Adams – who was one of Queen Anne’s chaplains – was preaching against the backdrop of the War of Spanish Succession and so wellbeing in this instance extended beyond the individual Christian to include the general Christian good, imagined as a Protestant succession.

One of the most enjoyable themes throughout this collection is that of wellbeing and music. Dávid Molnár’s chapter on Marsilio Ficino’s fables about voluptas (pleasure) shows that Ficino believed that pleasure was part of the universal search for wellbeing, and argued for a hierarchy of pleasures, with hearing and musical pleasures far superior to the sensual pleasures of touch and taste. It is an idea explored in Donatella Melin’s enjoyable chapter on ‘The sound of happiness: life in the Renaissance musical’. Melin argues that music was ‘a source of moral and spiritual wellbeing’, and so musical iconography frequently featured in early modern images. Gioia Filocamo makes a similar point in a chapter which parallels the evolution of opera with public anatomical dissections, often accompanied by music. Filocamo suggests that musical accompaniments were sometimes to ‘soothe the emotional disturbance caused in the onlookers’ (p. 101), demonstrating the healing effect of music. It is an idea explored in Francesco Rocco Rossi’s chapter on ‘Music as a source of wellbeing in Milan’. Rossi draws on a Tacuinum Sanitatis (a medieval book of medicine) commissioned by Bernarbó Visconti, lord of Milan, for his daughter, Verde Visconti in 1356 to show how singing and playing music were prescribed as tools for healing.

Wellbeing in early modern Christianity shows that the concept of ‘wellbeing’ was central to Christian thought and practices in the period, and that this continued to be true in the confessional fragmentation during the reformations. This is a wide-reaching collection of essays, exploring the many different meanings of ‘wellbeing’ in early modern Christianity.