During the past two decades Jürgen Beyer has published an impressive number of detailed studies of early modern religion, folklore and social history. His work has explored an incredible range of topics, from demonic possession to misbirth, prodigies and normative and non-normative forms of piety. Evangelical prophecy has been a particular interest of Beyer's throughout his career, and he has produced a number of studies of individual lay prophets, mostly, though not exclusively in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century German-speaking Europe. Until now, however, the insights of his Cambridge University dissertation, begun under Bob Scribner (d. 1998), but completed in 2001 under the direction of Willem Frijhoff (Amsterdam now Rotterdam), has been largely unknown, except to specialists interested in piety and prophecy.

This volume rectifies that deficit and for specialists the book is most welcome since, besides its thorough exploration of the themes that some 350 early modern Lutheran prophets treated in their works, it also includes a complete catalogue and bibliography of these figures and the printed texts that the messages of each one generated. The book is obviously a treasure trove for those who want to explore further the long afterlife of medieval prophecy in early modern Europe.

As Beyer shows, the revelations of Lutheran prophets most often came to a solitary individual in the form of an apparition; the messengers who proffered these communications were usually angels or some other ‘vaguely described spirits’ (p. 7). In some cases, though, Christ himself, or one of the Apostles appeared to someone. The communications that all these figures offered were almost always calls to repentance, usually warning of some cataclysmic circumstance to come if people failed to heed this warning. Most often, and here Beyer's conclusions are most suggestive, the prophets envisioned themselves as devout Lutherans, though some were critical of the status quo, particularly the standards of piety and devotion that their fellow parishioners displayed.

The world of the early modern Lutheran prophet, as demonstrated here, was consequently not a world of the outcast crying in the wilderness. Nor did the messages that these figures broadcast represent the dispossessed voice of society's downtrodden, the argument that Norman Cohn once made in the 1950s, and which has been roundly criticised and abandoned by most pre-modern scholars since then. As Beyer demonstrates, both the Lutheran prophets’ messages and their consumption in society was routinised. The sermons, broadsides and pamphlets that flowed from these figures were like a constantly recurring mnemonic device, a call to penance, intended for the faithful. Such constant reminders must have appeared to many as an imperative in a religion that had cut off any relationship between Church, the sacraments and individual salvation, and which had also rejected any notion of human betterment or social improvement. As solutions to these dilemmas, the Lutheran prophets offered a steady stream of guilt-inducing messages. Beyer's work thus helps to unlock some of the mysteries surrounding early modern Lutheranism's fascination with the Apocalypse. For those who consumed such messages rarely sold up and abandoned society in an effort to create a more perfect community. The consumers of these messages were in search of techniques that might give expression to their own feelings of unworthiness and as a consequence assure them of divine forgiveness.