Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of the Lutherjahr of 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biography Martin Luther: renegade and prophet – there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images,Footnote 1 recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture.Footnote 2 The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogue Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people – contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship,Footnote 3 and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories.
The catalogue for the German exhibition Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people was one of three nationally-organised exhibitions in Germany in 2017, and curated by Mirko Gutjahr, Benjamin Hasselhorn, Catherine Nichols and Katja Schneider for the Augusteum of Lutherstadt Wittenberg. It drew upon recent developments in the material and archaeological focus on Luther to expand the tangible, affective ways in which we encounter the Lutheran Reformation and its aftermath. The full-colour, 600+ page catalogue is stimulating but at times overly fragmented, marching relentlessly through 190 entries interspersed by many short essays.
The first half, with its ninety-five objects, is the most satisfying and intellectually engaging, with a focus on material culture rooted in recent scholarship. The collections-based and archaeological findings of excavations done over a decade ago provide new insights into the world of Luther.Footnote 4 Objects from the late fifteenth century – a statue of Death in monastic robes, a processional lantern, a roughly-hewn wooden sculpture of the Throne of Mercy – vividly evoke the world of Luther as a young man. Structured around the concept of fear, this section brilliantly shows how the material turn in historical scholarship, in tandem with the history of emotions, can offer fresh perspectives on Luther. There are surprisingly few depictions of Luther here, but many opportunities to connect with him on a personal, haptic level. Two small animal bones open up the household of Luther's childhood. A rare and simply-hewn wooden toilet seat irresistibly leads into a recapping of Luther's so-called ‘turret moment’ of inspiration on the toilet, and a concise but rich assessment of his famously scatological language, long identified by scholars but here posed in a new way that invites modern-day audiences to think more deeply about Luther's body and his environment. Each object opens up themes about religion, daily life and triggers for change. From gilded statues of Mary and the Christ child to cheaply-made, often now headless, earthenware dolls also standing in for the infant Christ, the physical texture of the world is brought to life. Indulgences, guides to Rome and Luther's copy of a Hebrew Bible show his hatreds and intolerances, although the latter entry focuses on Luther's bible scholarship and only briefly – if forcefully – brings in the intolerance and hatred of Jews that characterised his attitude in later life.
The second half of the catalogue connects ninety-five individuals to Luther – from Albrecht Dürer to Martin Luther King – in an almost entirely positively-framed way. Children's book author Dr Seuss, whose mother Nettie, ‘the daughter of German immigrants, who gave him not only the name but also his moral standards’ (p. 412), and who sometimes read him the Bible, stretches for relevance. Whistleblower Edward Snowden is presented as a modern-day Luther, in a more thought-provoking way that acknowledges the problematic nature of the parallel but asks whether we can read Snowden's conscience-driven decision to put himself in danger as an echo of Luther's actions at the Diet of Worms in 1521. The reflective approach to material history in the first half of the project drops away, the project more often drawing on texts in its presentation of Luther's longer-term legacy (or ubiquity) in an approach that descriptively stresses his cultural and social reach.
Bridget Heal's A magnificent faith: art and identity in Lutheran Germany crosses centuries and persuasively argues that we need to understand not just the utilisation but the celebration of visual culture within Lutheran identity and religious practice. Heal's interdisciplinary study of the visual culture of Lutheranism is undoubtedly one of the most significant books on Lutheranism to have appeared in 2017. Luther himself makes a notable appearance in only one chapter which surveys his well-known conservative approach to iconoclasm and pragmatic use of images, and stresses more than much previous scholarship the importance of sensation and feeling to Luther's faith.
Heal's primary objective is, however, to examine the visual culture of Lutheranism in the following generations. She develops a sustained argument encompassing Saxony and Brandenburg and adeptly examining a variety of visual media, and is attentive to material culture more broadly understood. The book is divided into three categories: the confessional image, the devotional image and the magnificent image. The first section revisits the image and iconoclasm debates of Lutheranism in its first generations, before turning to the period after Luther's death in 1546. Heal unpacks differing approaches in Ernestine and Albertine Saxony to reveal contested processes of the use and replacement of images. Lutheran acceptance of images in church settings was forged, she suggests, against the backdrop of fears of ‘crypto-Calvinism’ as well as heated confessional polemics within later sixteenth-century Lutheranism. The years around 1600 are often characterised as a crisis point for German Lutheran identity, and part ii explores the didactic and emotional value of images at this time. A new, close reading of texts on images by the Lutheran pastor Johann Arndt anchors this section. Chapter v offers a particularly impressive analysis of why and how the suffering Christ and Passion iconography became newly important, arguing that this was not – as it is sometimes presented – a niche development amongst a Lutheran elite.
The ‘magnificent’ imagery of the book's title is tackled in part iii, providing a new perspective on Lutheranism as a religion of the image in ways that in some settings would parallel the much better-known visual high-points of Catholic religious art and architecture. From the picture Bible of Matthäus Merian to patronage at the Dresden court, the ‘merging of piety and aestheticism’ (p. 198) is tackled through a range of visual media. Heal moves adeptly across a wide range of cultural and historical settings, from church interiors in Saxony to the pluralist religious environment of Lusatia, and reveals the interplay of Lutheranism, Calvinism and Pietism. This is a chronologically ambitious book that begins with the debates about images from the earliest years of the Lutheran Reformation, probes the affective power of religious images for ensuing generations, examines in new depth the elaboration of a Lutheran baroque and concludes with the visual magnificence of the Dresden Frauenkirche, only recently rebuilt after the Second World War bombing. While artists play a relatively small role as individual agents for change in the book, Heal's analysis of theologians – who are so central to her argument – is particularly satisfying, as is her analysis of patronage. Her innovative focus on magnificence directly challenges the persistent tendency to think of Protestant religions as fundamentally plain in visual terms, and thereby opens up new sensory and affective ways to understand Lutheran religious identity across generations.
An assessment of the material culture of the Reformation across centuries – and reaching back into the pre-Reformation era – underpins the online exhibition Remembering the Reformation. It explores the embodied nature of religious experiences across generations and across regions, moving out from the English Reformation to a pan-European understanding of how faith, identity and memory took on new and cumulative forms of expression. Undertaken by an interdisciplinary team, it presents 130 objects from collections including Cambridge University Library, Lambeth Palace Library and York Minster Library. The accompanying texts are lively, impeccably crafted and as thought-provoking for Reformation scholars as for a larger public.
The physical life of books – bound in hand-embroidered covers, annotated with warnings, re-used, filled with family records, given as gifts – forms one of the most satisfying aspects of the exhibition. One fifteenth-century manuscript of the Golden Legend, with its stories of saints, was annotated on its first page by a later Protestant: ‘Read this no further.’ In another rich layering of associations and geographies, one sixteenth-century Nuremberg-printed book with a depiction of the death by burning of Jan Hus at the Council of Constance in 1415 was owned by John Whitgift, who would become archbishop of Canterbury.
The section ‘Casualties, relics and survivals’ most explicitly addresses material culture and its transmission from a pre- to a post-Reformation world. Iconoclasm, relics and shrines are recorded in print, with commentaries ranging from the satirical to the warning. A liturgical salver is repurposed as a luxury salt cellar, and later again as a reliquary by English Jesuits. The bible translator Mile Coverdale's fingerbone is a ‘reformed relic’, as ironic but also earnest as the Luther ‘relics’ to which scholars now pay attention.Footnote 5 More broadly, visual and material culture, and haptic ways of engaging with the Reformation both then and now, underpin most sections of the exhibition. In ‘Monuments and memorials’ a seventeenth-century ceramic charger depicts famous reformers seated at a table with the pope and other opponents. Graphically defaced books testify to a complex and not always linear process of change in church practices. ‘Bodily memory’ explores the body's role in ritual and in religious practice, and stresses memories carried in bodily actions as well as conveying the physicality of iconoclastic acts. One marginal note in a Book of Common Prayer addresses the complexities of kneeling, taking us through book culture into an embodied way of understanding religious change.
Stunning photographic close-ups and an attentive approach to materiality in selection and analysis demonstrates the possibilities offered by online exhibitions: while we are not in the presence of an actual object, we feel closer than we might when seeing it at a distance behind glass in a display cabinet. In the new tradition forged by projects like the British Museum's A history of the world in 100 objects, this exhibition demonstrates how arguments can effectively be developed through objects, even if those arguments do not proceed in familiar linear ways, but instead through rich juxtapositions.
Material culture, the visual turn and the way that religious identity develops across generations and communities form important strands in recent scholarship on the Reformation. These works show how Luther and the events of 1517 have in many cases formed a starting point for work that reaches out across decades and which increasingly engages with collections, with heritage sites and with the interplay of different types of sources. Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people and Remembering the Reformation are impressive in scope, informed by the most recent scholarship, with an astonishingly rich accumulation of objects. These publications – traditional and online – are stimulating, but necessarily fragmented, with multiple pathways and relatively short accompanying texts. They offer a compelling case for pursuing links across different eras of reform. Bridget Heal's A magnificent faith and its sustained argument brilliantly shows how far the visual and material turn in Reformation history has led scholarship. Heal makes us understand in new ways how a ‘religion of the word’ did not merely tolerate images and visual environments, but celebrated them in dazzling, multi-sensory ways that at key moments became central to the expression of Lutheran identity.
