In many ways, this book is both rooted in and an extension of Bridget Heal's important first book, The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500–1648 (Cambridge, 2007). It shares the earlier book's commitment to arguing for a Lutheran visual culture, in part through articulating a more nuanced relationship between Catholic and Lutheran piety and in part through documenting Lutheran objects in their sites and tracing some of the devotional life that was attached to them. It also shares core analytic decisions, such as dividing sources between learned elites, on the one hand, and on the other, what in the earlier book was called “popular culture,” and in this book is differentiated between princes and wealthy secular elites.

As an expansion of The Cult of the Virgin Mary, this book will be welcome. There has been markedly less study of Lutheran visual culture than of either Catholic visual culture or, at the other end of the spectrum that Heal constructs, iconoclasm. This book is the first study in English to bring together printed images and architecture in an argument for a particular “Lutheran” understanding of “images” and their roles in devotional life.

Heal divides her study into three parts: “The Confessional Image;” “The Devotional Image;” and “The Magnificent Image.” These three sections are not, as Heal acknowledges, clearly chronological, though they move roughly from Luther's own life to the end of the seventeenth century. In the first section, Heal sets up what will be one of the organizing bipolarities of this study, between “Catholic Idolatry” and “Calvinist Iconoclasm.” Working from almost exclusively Lutheran sources and historiography, Heal recognizes the polemical construction of “idolatry,” but not “iconoclasm,” which Luther held to be wrong for reasons of order and obedience, rather than for theological reasons. In this first section, Heal also offers a reading of Luther's writing on “images” that argues that he held images to be important to devotional life. While I suspect this, too, will be welcome, identifying as it does a number of texts for closer study of Luther's position on art, Heal's decisions, first and foremost, to provide no definition of what she understands “image” to be—let alone what Luther might have understood image to be—and second, to sever the discussion of printed images and architecture throughout the book from Luther's understanding of the Eucharist and of the place of all matter, other than the bread and wine, in devotion undercuts deeply not only her treatment of Luther but her larger argument for the place of images in Lutheran devotion. How are we to understand that place if all images in the study are severed from any discussion of “presence?” Do not “images” work cognitively as well as devotionally fundamentally differently Luther, and Lutherans, from how they do for Catholics?

The second and third parts of the book work in tandem. The second part offers largely a discussion of two-dimensional images and the roles that Lutheran pastors in the century after Luther articulated for images: as aids to memory, in keeping with Luther; as a means of instruction for the illiterate, again, following Luther; but later, as means of engaging the heart. The work of Richard Viladesau does not appear, but Heal also calls attention to the growing importance of images of the suffering Christ in Lutheran devotion over the course of the seventeenth century. The third part largely treats architecture. “Magnificence,” another term that Heal neither defines nor explains, seems to be an attribute preeminently of buildings, foremost churches, as well as court chapels. Throughout the third part, Heal seems to be using “splendour,” “magnificence,” and “baroque” interchangeably. Heal asserts that the Baroque is an Italian idiom, quite possibly because she associates “Baroque” primarily with Bernini and sculpture. By not making more explicit what she understands “Baroque” to be, by the final chapter in part 3, it is not clear what distinguishes “Lutheran Baroque” from its Catholic counterparts, or whether Lutheran Baroque might not be equally as sonic as visual. In part 2, Heal attends to iconography, but in part 3, her focus on what she calls “aesthetics” means, inter alia, that she does not articulate what Lutheran style might encompass.

Geographically, the book begins in Wittenberg, expands to Electoral Saxony and, especially in part 3, attends to Brandenburg. In both Saxony and Brandenburg, Heal attends to the changing confessional identity of rulers and invokes, but does not pursue, the “trauma” of the Thirty Years’ War. That geographic focus allows her to offer a number of details of devotional life in specific places. There is no discussion, however, of how the visual culture in these places might compare with that in the Lutheran kingdoms of Denmark and Sweden.

In the end, this will not be the book to make the case for Lutheran visual culture. Heal has gathered a rich selection of examples of woodcuts, engravings, altarpieces, pulpits (which are also “images,” but unexplored as to what they visualize), chapels, and domes. The failure to define terms that were so contested in this period—“image,” “aesthetics,” “baroque,” and “piety,” the decision not to address the radical change in optic theory, the caricature of the relationship between the Reformed tradition and images, and the absence of a discussion of either medieval or Catholic image theories (plural)—all mean that her evidence is less eloquent than it might have been.