Ideas and Cultural Margins is a fabulous collection of essays assembled to honor one of the most influential scholars of early modern Germany in North America, Erik Midelfort. The contributors to this anthology include Midelfort's former students, a successful cohort of scholars in their own right, and a group of his closest colleagues in the United States and Europe. The problem with many Festschrifte is the scattered nature of their content. Reviewers often probe in vain to find a common theme or motif that unifies such volumes. Apart from chronology and geography, this collection, in contrast, highlights two major themes that are also important hallmarks of Midelfort's own scholarly work. Nearly all of the essays are interdisciplinary in nature, and most owe a methodological debt to the social history of ideas. Collectively, they explore the intriguing connections between science, law, sexuality, literacy, and religion. Secondly, these essays share a predilection for subject matter that has been traditionally seen as “marginal, weird, or properly forgotten” (p. xx). In this collection we encounter levitating priests, polygamous pastors, enterprising pornographers, and suicidal murderers. The authors of these contributions share the conviction that it is often through the study of what we see today as strange and bizarre that we frequently make the most important discoveries.

Thomas Brady sets the tone of the entire volume with a helpful article surveying the broad sweep of Midelfort's scholarship. He offers a useful overview of his work on witch hunting and madness, but more importantly, he points to a critical set of presuppositions that have informed his scholarship. Midelfort, as Brady rightly observes, has explored a world of ideas that “seethed with variety and contradictions” (p. 7). In his early work on the witch hunt in southwest Germany, Midelfort stubbornly refused to formulate a universal model or general pattern that explained the rise and fall of this phenomenon. Instead, he reflected on perplexing variations that would not yield to uniform and unambiguous conclusions. His most recent work on exorcism in the eighteenth century continues to complicate our vision of the past, this time in the Enlightenment through the career of a wonder-working priest in the age of reason.

This same spirit of critical inquiry as described by Brady animates the essays of this collection. The strongest articles in the volume are those that take a special interest in the aberrant and abnormal. Kathy Stuart considers the story of a servant girl, Sophia Charlotte Krügerin. Deeply depressed for being called a thief, the distressed teenager unsuccessfully attempted to kill herself. Realizing afterward that suicide was a mortal sin, she conceived a plan to have the state do what she could not. She promptly murdered her neighbor's son, proclaimed her guilt, found absolution from the church, and then, as planned, lost her head on the executioner's block. Stuart has found more than one hundred of these types of cases and uses them as a way to examine changes in both legal and religious discourse concerning insanity in eighteenth-century Europe. Lyndal Roper considers the artist Lukas Cranach who is best known as the stolid painter of the Lutheran Reformation. Roper, in contrast, focuses on Cranach's efforts as a high-class pornographer. She effectively uses Cranach's fascination with the female nude as an entry point to discuss Luther's view of women and human sexuality. Carlos Eire, in the only article set outside central Europe, investigates the case of the levitating priest, Joseph of Cupertino. Eire reaches two important conclusions that have broader repercussions for our understanding of early modern religion. From the peasant to the pope, Joseph's aerial acrobatics were witnessed by a broad cross section of his society, thus calling into question the division between low and high, popular and elite religion. In good Midelfortian fashion, Eire also illustrates how accounts of flying clerics destabilize our grand narratives and force us to view the transition to modernity as a complicated process fraught with paradox.

The volume's editors had a difficult task organizing the Festschrift's nineteen essays. Though they grouped them into four major sections (laity; clergy; humanists, doctors, and professors; jurists and magistrates), most of these articles work across the disciplines and resist easy categorization. Marjorie Plummer considers theological views on bigamy in connection with juridical developments in Ernestine Saxony. Robin Barnes examines the medical thought of the wandering German physician, Alexander Seitz, and its contribution to religious reform, while David Lederer hammers at the links between the Reformation, Renaissance, and the voyages of discovery through the work of the German humanist Johannes Eberlin von Günzburg. Like all edited collections, the articles vary in quality, but though some are more significant than others, as a group this is a solid collection. From an investigation of judicial torture to a study of penance, from witchcraft to leprosy, Ideas and Cultural Margins ranges over significant ground. More important, though, than the actual material covered are the ways in which these scholars conceptualize their problems and frame their questions as they examine the society and culture of early modern Germany. Ideas and Cultural Margins highlights the methodological vibrancy and sophistication of the field today, a fitting tribute to Erik Midelfort indeed!