As anybody who has written or edited a book will know, settling on a title can be a cause of some anxiety. Choose something too narrow and even readers for whom your research might be extremely relevant could overlook it, wary of committing their time or money to something too niche. Choose something too broad, and readers might well end up frustrated after picking up your book and finding out that it does not really speak to their interests in the way they had hoped that it might. Of course, very few scholars will buy or read a book purely on the basis of the title alone. But in some respects, Reformation and Everyday Life is in danger of falling into the latter of the two scenarios outlined above, promising something all-encompassing and of substantial interest to a great many readers but, in reality, speaking to quite a narrow range of concerns. That is not to gainsay the erudition and ambition contained within the pages of this substantial volume, merely to suggest that it might have been packaged more clearly.

The genesis of the volume, as the editors explain, is twofold: papers presented at a REFORC conference in 2021, which was itself the culmination of a multiyear research project on Lutheranism and Social Development in Denmark, focusing on confessional culture (and in particular Lutheran understandings of the Fourth Commandment, to honor father and mother). Thus, the majority of the papers reflect research on early modern Denmark–Norway, with individual essays on other Lutheran polities and communities – Sweden, Silesia, Schleswig – as well as some addressing Luther’s own views and Lutheran culture more broadly.

Partly (one presumes) because of their genesis as conference papers, the thirteen contributions to the volume following the introduction are all quite short: around twenty pages apiece, including generous footnotes, three to four pages of bibliographical references at the end of each essay, and (in some cases, in a move to be highly commended) a smattering of high-quality full-color in-text illustrations. As a result, the essays offer a series of insightful but inevitably partial perspectives that tend to leave the reader wanting more. Part one (of three) contains five essays and focuses on “Religious Formation of Everyday Life”. Lee Palmer Wandel offers some interesting reflections on the extent to which the reformation, and in particular the reformation of liturgy, changed ordinary people’s relationships with time. Jette Bendixen Rønkilde discusses the ways in which Erik Pontoppidan’s 1737 catechism shaped lived religion in line with the principles of Danish–Norwegian Lutheran Pietism, while Päivi Räisänen-Shröder considers the value of the concept of lived religion, usually deployed in relation to hegemonic groups, when applied to a minority sect, in this case anabaptists. Jakub Koryl advocates for an aural history of the reformation which pays attention to the sensescape rather than the soundscape, putting different media and senses into dialogue with one another, and Bonnie Noble rounds out the section by arguing that Dürer’s Melancholia I was emblematic of a move in visual art away from Renaissance trust and realistic representation toward early modern criticism and doubt, concepts nurtured by or reflected in shifts such as the questioning of miracles and emphases on the deceptions of witches and devil. Taken as a whole, these part one essays raise some tantalizing possibilities, but do not always have the space to fully flesh out (let alone convincingly demonstrate) their broader arguments.

Part two shifts the focus to “Reformation and the household.” Kirsi Stjerna’s essay gives a broad-brush overview of some of the problems and advantages of writing about women and the reformation, while Per Seesko-Tønnesen provides a more focused discussion of the ways in which commentaries on the Lutheran Fourth Commandment in Denmark continued to shape relations between parents and children while elite adolescent boys were away from the physical household, traveling for education or experiencing the grand tour. Paolo Astorri and Lars Cyril Nørgaard discuss the philosophy of the household espoused by the seventeenth-century Danish Lutheran intellectual Henning Arnisaeus, a key figure in the development of Protestant Aristotelianism who argued for important differences in the nature of power and authority within res publica and civitas. And Mette M. Ahlefeld-Laurvig contributes an intriguing analysis of churching in Denmark–Norway, suggesting that despite the attempts of Lutheran reformers to control and shape the rite it survived in rural communities largely because of the meanings which ordinary women ascribed to it, as offering protection at a time of particular spiritual and physical vulnerability from the threating creatures who inhabited traditional folklore.

The third and final part of the volume, “Negotiating Religion in Everyday Life,” begins with a piece by Martin Berntson on the ways in which both the threat and the reality of popular peaceful and violent protest were used as a means of negotiating the process of reformation in Lutheran Sweden, eliciting limited concessions such as the Latinisation of the Swedish liturgy. Aleksandra Matczyńska offers an interesting reflection on the ways in which two elite women commissioned funerary monuments in Silesia for deceased male relatives in ways which reflected their own religions and dynastic concerns, while Mattias Sommer Bostrup argues for the importance of studying religious coexistence at the local level through the case study of the Lutheran preacher Otto Lorentzen Strandiger’s conflict with his Catholic paymasters on the island of Nordstrand in Schleswig. In the final contribution to the volume, Sini Mikkola offers a thoughtful discussion of Luther’s nuanced attitude toward religious communities, showing that while the reformer rejected perpetual vows, he was quite happy for both men and women to live in religious communities so long as they did so by choice rather than by compulsion, and indeed defended women’s rights to do so in several notable instances.

Overall, this is a wide-ranging volume, offering a fascinating snapshot of recent and ongoing scholarship, particularly in the field of Danish–Norwegian Lutheran studies. This is both a strength and a weakness, as scholars of the reformation in other geographical areas and traditions are likely to be aware of significant bodies of scholarship on many of this volume’s themes, including women and the reformation, funerary monuments, catechisms, popular protest, toleration, music, the visual arts, time and the household, which mirror many of the conclusions presented here. At the same time, this volume and its essays contain plenty of timely reminders of the importance of taking seriously the impact of specific contexts – national, political, linguistic, cultural, social, geographical, individual, communal – for the historian who seeks to understand the ways in which reformation shaped, and was shaped by, everyday life.