Rare is the revised dissertation that dares express a sense of mission in purporting to surpass all histories of ritual change in the Reformation. Jacob M. Baum lumps his church historian colleagues and most of their secular partners together as subscribing to a whiggish search for the genesis of modernity in their assertion that Lutheran and Reformed churches purposefully introduced a reduction of sense engagement to services of worship. He decries “the myth of the reformation of the senses” (3) and the “ideological flavor” of existing accounts (104). He need not have attempted to elevate himself in this manner for his book by itself has many strengths and ultimately makes decided contributions to (as he calls it) the new field of the history of the senses. I might have called it, in the Reformation context, the experience of worship.

A notable strength is the attention to theologians’ intellectual orientation—to intromissionist and extramissionist theories, with both late-medieval Catholics and subsequent Protestants preferring the more Aristotelian former, the passive Christian receptor acted upon by ritual stimuli and responding emotionally to them. According to Baum: “Objects projected their sensible qualities into the environment; these qualities struck and moved the appropriate sense organs and affected the internal processes of cognition, emotion, and the formation of moral dispositions and habits” (47). More than one section of the book summarizes the thought of leading figures in the processes of ritual reform. In the Reformation itself, Philipp Melanchthon is a central thinker, one who, by expanding the category of adiaphora, was able, in the Leipzig Interim, to offer a significant accommodation of Catholic ritual practice. Differing concepts of adiaphora mark a steady theme in this study, with Lutherans more permissive and the Reformed much less so.

Be this as it might, Baum leads the reader to think that he had not meant what he said when he nearly dismissed existing “whiggish” scholarship on ritual change. He gathers many reformers’ own descriptions of the simplification they sought in order to be godly people and to demarcate themselves sharply from Catholic iconodules. In numerous sermons, tracts, and passages in longer works on other topics, evangelicals described popish ceremonies and condemned them lavishly. But in the end, neither these early Protestant men nor their present-day successors are to be believed. This is the heart of Baum's matter. It was, he declares, impossible to instruct and convert whole populations without engaging those very senses by means of which the Mother Church had bound her children to her—the sensuousness of the Mass and, collectively, all the accoutrements of that crucial sacrament; the rich decoration of urban sanctuaries, which enveloped every sense. The reformers may not, in their abstract ideals, have wished to appeal to the laity's faculties of taste and touch, sight, sound, and smell—to remain intersensorial—but they had no choice. In the main, not later than the advanced sixteenth century, they gave in, as indeed they had in practice already. Baum summarizes: “No one could dispute the superiority of immaterial, spiritual goods, but if the new religion was to survive and flourish, evangelicals would have to engage with the world of the flesh and senses” (133).

Lutheran and reformed rites were different from Catholic ones, nevertheless. Baum considers the altered acoustics of churches from which many hangings and statues had been removed—and he has examined ecclesiastical ordinances and inventories (but not sequestration records) in order to estimate the sort and extent of removal. He looks at Nuremberg most closely. The interior soundscapes were modified as preaching took up more of the divine service. Pax boards having been dispensed with, the exercise of touch was concentrated in the handling of the host or the common bread during the Eucharistic meal. The difficult question of which Catholic artifacts, having survived the rigors of Protestant simplification in the sixteenth century, were on display or were used throughout versus which were placed in storage is not answered here.

Baum makes the useful point that parish economics influenced the stimuli that bore upon the faithful. City churches had greater resources throughout the late Middle Ages; they were the beneficiaries of wealthy donors, religious orders, and conciliar largesse. These brought works of art, elaborate vestments, organs, and a costly equipage of the Mass into some sanctuaries. Humble rural congregations seldom possessed these, however, and the lay experience of worship in the countryside was accordingly simplified. For such as these, proper incense was too expensive, although they could use common herbs as a fragrant substitute. But could they afford a thurible?

It makes sense that Baum should concentrate upon the Mass, and particularly Communion throughout this study, for it had been central in the multisensory ritual world the evangelicals inherited from their Catholic forebears. Yet for Luther, the evoked “remembrance” of his baptism—the certain knowledge that he had been baptized—was what he desired to cling to, along with the atonement, when he died. A gesture toward the other retained sacrament, which underwent significant changes, would have augmented this portrayal. There are treasures here, nonetheless, such as the description of the fifteenth-century Nuremberg widow Katharina Tucher's ninety-four-entry spiritual diary, begun after 1417. Baum uses this rarity as a basis for exploring issues of femininity and affective sensuality. He has compiled a list of fifty-four fifteenth- and sixteenth-century owners of prayer books (89–91), the implications of which he may more fully expound to us in the future. Many of these texts used sensory language.

Jacob Baum's very creditable undertaking joins works on the perceptual experiences of worship by Matthew Milner, Philip Hahn, Bridget Heal, and others. All together, these scholars both carry out and stimulate research on the less-plumbed depths of early modern religious culture. I highly recommend them.