This pioneering study traces the emotional “tenor” of the three main confessions in early modern Germany as they developed their value systems and cosmologies in dialogue with a complex heritage ranging from Aristotle to mysticism. Key sources are printed sermons from a wide group of clergymen, principally on the Passion and death; the methodology is to “listen” to their “vocabulary of sentiment” (11). Karant-Nunn compares these vocabularies to those she finds expressed in contemporary examples of liturgy, lyric and religious art as well as in the spiritual writings of female Lutheran authors.
Karant-Nunn first outlines changes in preaching up to the sixteenth century as characterised by “intensification rather than innovation” (18). Sermons and plays intensely focused on the Passion to stimulate repentance and weeping in their audience, as when Paul Wann in 1460 during Holy Week in Passau dwelt on the nail crushing Jesus' skin, flesh and bones, grimly imagining how this “frightened the blood back into the chamber of the heart and shocked all the nerves in his body” (24). The heart was regarded as the central location of feeling, so that human nature in its sinful state tended toward a lazy, dark and cold heart. Affective piety cultivated empathy, love and liveliness, as well as arithmetic skill: Christ was to have shed 97,035 drops of blood, while saints rarely received strokes in rounded numbers. Yet grief, promised Peter Canisius, would finally turn into joy, as preachers never failed to console their listeners by impressing on them Jesus' deepest love for them.
One of the excellent features of this book are its carefully selected, but ample longer quotations from the sermons, which allow the reader to fully engage with preachers' and different orders' generally admirable rhetorical efforts to get clergy and people to emote together in prescribed ways. The Easter “reinfusion” with emotion and belonging to the Mother Church ideally was made to last a whole year. Catholic piety in its emotional core, Karant-Nunn argues, remained focused on the Passion throughout the early modern period, enforcing “calm obedience” in the secular sphere (60).
Pitted against affective piety of this kind were reformed ideas about outer demonstrations of belief which readjusted notions of what could truly be sincere expressions of faith. This generally implied a masculinisation of faith in the idealisation of composure, tranquillity and a corresponding fear of loss of control over emotions, embodied in the feminine and feeble. Decorative programmes in churches nearly eliminated female figures. Karant-Nunńs comparative approach proves useful in many of her more detailed analysis, as when she comments on the contrast between the calm, obedient facial features of Jesus in the Wittenberg altarpiece and the consistent agony displayed in Catholic sculptural work of the period. She carefully outlines changes within Lutheranism toward a greater stress on divine punishment, the necessity of atonement and diabolization of feminine sinfulness.
Congregational hymn-singing, however, was extremely significant in the Protestant economy of the emotions, so that historians examining Protestant art as an expression of affective emotionality simply fail to look in the best place. Luther and Calvin both regarded music as key to open the heart of believers, and hymns or Psalms furnished words to move the pious with appropriate sincerity and understanding. The sung word, I would argue, was no longer “verbal abstraction” and complicates notions of Protestantism as an “inward” religion. As recent studies have shown, music therefore needs to be central to a new cultural history of Protestantism. Karant-Nunn occasionally discusses singing, but her focus remains on sermons and she displays greater interest in the visual rather than the musical. It would have been fascinating to know in the Conclusions how she evaluates the significance of Bach's Passions. She clearly points to the development of greater affective devotion to the Passion in the seventeenth century, which lay writers, rooted in what she calls a “Baroque culture,” evince.
Turning to key reformers, Karant-Nunn rightly underlines Calvin's emphasis that Christians were embedded in collective understandings of faith rather than individuality and reason. She correctly detects Calvin's often vindictive emphasis on human unworthiness, to diminish rather than console, which gained in fervour as he spoke about women. This nonetheless would have contrasted with the clear assurances extended in Genevan liturgy, and here Karant-Nunn might profitably have compared different elements of church life, in ways indicated in the introduction. But her interest lies in how sermons influenced Calvinist Germany through a group of important preachers, whom she gradually sees moving to an emphasis on reading rather than just hearing as prime vehicle of piety. Karant-Nunn makes out a difference between a greater Calvinist emphasis on the heartfelt struggle of Christians as well as a judgemental, anguishing God and a Lutheran allowance for intimacy with God and spiritual peace. I would contend that the Lutheran literature of consolation, however, suggests a similar insistence that only those experiencing spiritual anxiety will be granted divine comfort. Karant-Nunn later comments on this theology of helplessness and complete dependence on grace (156).
She finds that both Lutheran and reformed sermons on death, on the other hand, were surprisingly reassuring of grace. Clearly then, different genres performed different aspects of a theology to which audiences must have adjusted their expectations. Her focus on just one genre, the sermon, therefore needs to be matched by further research on the theme of the Passion in other types of spiritual exercise.
As the book moves on, three initial chapters on Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist sermons on the Passion are followed by four thematic chapters on the condemnation of Jews, the image of Mary, theologies of death and recommendations for “proper feeling.” This provides an excellent structure to orient as well as stimulate readers to probe emotional configurations, which have already been oft-alluded to in previous chapters, in particular with regard to the treatment of Jews.
Protestant writers generally dwelt less on the physical torment of Christ during the Crucifixion than Catholic clergymen, while indulging a similarly anti-Semitic theology. Yet Lutherans incited less to hatred and blame, while Calvinists decidedly sought to inspire self-recrimination for sin rather than using Jews as convenient scapegoats of the pious multitude. “You, you are the Jews,” Calvin exclaimed. Here there is an interesting analogy to why witchcraft featured so little in sermons in a large Lutheran territory like Württemberg for instance, as Eric Midelfort pointed out long ago and Sabine Holtz has confirmed. Witchcraft tellingly does not feature as a subject of sermons in this book, and this in itself would be a significant finding, as some of the best writers on witchcraft, Brian Levack and William Monter, both argue that sermons were crucial to disseminate condemnations and fears of witchcraft.
Mary certainly was a role model of intense feeling and a mediator between Christians and the divine for Catholics. Yet, she was always an elevated Mary rather than a fleshly woman, and this left nobody in doubt about the limits of emulation. Protestants, by contrast, often neglected her in sermons and regarded any idea that she could have sinned on behalf of humans as blasphemous. Karant-Nunn argues that Protestant marginalisation of Mary and other biblical women further supports that this was a more masculinised belief than Catholicism, in which an idealised image of male self-control came to define proper behaviour and male figures provided the central experience of faith. This connected to the insistence on a proper understanding of what true belief was about: recognising one's own sins as cause of Jesus' death and bewailing these, rather than the torment he had endured from enemies. Not least, however, Protestants endlessly and polemically stereotyped Catholic ways of vague, sweeping, and ultimately overwhelming feeling. Thus, it would appear that Catholicism itself was feminized. This provides an original analysis of the gendering of religious language up to the advent of Pietism.
Karant-Nunn convincingly shows throughout the book why emotional cultures were at the core of Reformation arguments about how to be Christian. She opens up a rich field of further investigations, in which a comparative approach will always be challenging. Karant-Nunn offers an immensely valuable model of how to reflect on spectrums of attitude within each faith and change as much as continuities over time.
