The year 2005 marked the 1200th anniversary of the founding of the city of MagdeburgFootnote ¹ on the Elbe River by Charlemagne. The two-volume Die Magdeburger Centurien was published as a result of a conference held at the historic city hall of Magdeburg on 10 and 11 November 2005, where historians, librarians, pastors and professors read papers. The Magdeburg centuries were an account of church history from a sixteenth-century Lutheran viewpoint, arranged by centuries from the time of Christ onward. The project was initiated by the Croatian-born gnesio-Lutheran Matthias Flacius Illyricus and was carried out by Johannes Wigand and a group of co-workers. Centuries i.xiii were published between 1559 and 1572.

The purpose of the books under review, as it is stated by Eckhart W. Peters, is to make the Magdeburg centuries accessible to the wider public through a popular (‘populärwissenschaftlich’) approach (p. 13). Maybe it is this approach that accounts for the seemingly eclectic collections of contributions in both volumes. One such article, of 135 pages, by the historian of architecture Ute Kraft only marginally relates to the topic, surveying trends in city planning and development and how they impacted Magdeburg. Furthermore, volume ii concludes with a sixty-page appendix, a collection of photographs and historical narrative about Anatolia, which is completely out of place.

Hans Seehase's two contributions provide useful historical background information on Magdeburg's economic and political standing in the sixteenth century, including ecclesiastical structures, political governance and the interaction of the two realms in Central Europe. He also examines the presence of Orthodox Lutheranism in the city.

Among the articles in volume i that focus on the Centuries is one by Hans-Joachim Krenzke, a historian of the city, in which he introduces the team of scholars working on the Magdeburg centuries and provides a brief history of how the project came about and how and when each volume was published. It is Martina Hartmann's piece that discusses the Centuries most substantively. Hartmann focuses on the preparations leading up to and the new methods employed by the massive undertaking of the Centuries. Flacius' previous work on church history, his Catalogus testium veritatis (1556), receives attention for acting as an important forerunner to the Centuries. The approach in the Catalogus was chronological and focused on personal histories, and through doing research for it Flacius had acquired a vast knowledge of medieval sources, which later proved to be the foundation upon which to begin constructing the Centuries. Arrangement by centuries, Hartmann claims, was a completely new way of dividing up history. The ‘Lokalmethode’ was another characteristic of the approach, which had been inspired by Melanchthon's Loci communes, arranging the material within each century around certain themes or basic concepts (pp. 62–3). Hartmann also describes the division of responsibilities within the team of authors (‘scriptor’, ‘collector’, ‘inspector’), along with how the work of researching and writing was done. The article concludes with a survey of Catholic criticism of the Centuries and a few remarks on the significance of the work for today.

A brief article by Christian Heintzmann, librarian at the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, focuses on Flacius' writings and on his large collection of books and manuscripts, now in the library. Special attention is paid to the vast number of important medieval manuscripts that Flacius had collected. Michael Bunners, a retired pastor from Wismar, writes about the time that Johann Wigand, whom he calls ‘homo universalis’, spent in this Mecklenburg town on the Baltic Sea between 1562 and 1568, while working on Centuries vii–xiii as the main author.

Volume ii, written in its entirety by orientalist Günther Korbel, aims to explore the reciprocal relationships between European, Byzantine, Jewish and Islamic peoples in their religious, spiritual and secular history. The goal is to provide a Weltchronik from the first to the fifteenth centuries for a wide audience, while following, in parallel, the history of Magdeburg. Although only loosely connected to the Centuries, this sizeable tome can serve as additional material for the historical context of the Centuries.

Both volumes are very nicely produced and contain a large number of illustrations (including facsimiles of pages from the original publications, maps and pictures). However, they lack indices of names, places or subjects.

Catalogus und Centurien is the result of a symposium held in Munich on 11 February 2006, sponsored by Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Apart from presenting interdisciplinary research done by historians, theologians and linguists, the purpose of the volume, as articulated by both editors (pp. 14–16, 178), is to correct previous scholarship that had, as a result of his name appearing on the title pages of volumes i–xii, attributed primary authorship of the Centuries to Flacius. Instead, Flacius is referred to as the ‘spiritus rector’ of the project (pp. 1, 67 and the book jacket).

Several authors focus on how sources were collected and used for the Centuries: Martina Hartmann writes about the beginnings of historical research based on primary documents, while Arno Mentzel-Reuters, using specific examples, explores how sources were selected and used. Both contributors also supply a brief chapter on the use of a particular text in the Centuries at the end of the book.

Other contributions in this volume examine specific sources and their relationship to the Centuries: two of them (by Ernst Hellgardt and Norbert Kössinger) deal with Otfried of Weissenburg's Evangelienbuch, the first substantial, rhyming literary work in German, dating from the ninth century, and one (by Peter Orth) examines an anthology of texts concerned with the moral corruption of the Church. Franz Fuchs provides information on the period (1562–6) that Flacius spent in Regensburg. In addition to the papers presented at the symposium, two further articles are included. One, by Matthias Pohlig, considers whether Flacius was a humanist, and another, by Ronald Ernst Diener, is a version, in German, of a chapter on the methodology used in the Centuries from his unpublished 1979 Harvard dissertation.

The Magdeburg centuries project was not completed: centuries xiv.xvi were never published, although they were partially prepared. The authors of the articles reviewed here agree that the Centuries were none the less a significant achievement, innovative in several areas, most notably in methodology and in their reliance on original sources. The books under review here are a fitting tribute to the monumental work of the centuriators that impacted upon theology and both Protestant and Catholic ecclesiastical historiography.