Philip M. Soergel's Miracles and the Protestant Imagination is an express response to the invitation of the late D. P. Walker to unwind “the many threads of experience and discussion in which miracles continued to play a vital role in the early modern Protestant world” (31). By examining a select number of “wonder books”—collections of and commentaries on unusual natural events—Soergel charts the earliest phase in the development of a later conviction within much of Protestantism that in the post-Apostolic age miracles ceased to occur. The route to that theological position, Soergel demonstrates, was tortuous indeed, and of course much richer and more complex than a conventional sound-bite history of the Reformation would have us believe.

Soergel organizes his book in a clear and straightforward manner. The chapters are expositions of German evangelical thinkers that Soergel plots out as representative of key factions or moments in the developing Lutheran reflection on the possibility and significance signs and wonders, ranging from comets to conjoined twins. Soergel justifies his selections—beginning with an analysis of Martin Luther on miracles and concluding with the Promptuarium Exemplorum of Andreas Hondorff, an influential compendium of exempla for preachers by an otherwise unremarkable pastor—by meticulously drawing connections between even the most obscure authors and contexts of obvious theological and cultural significance. As prospective readers can easily gain a more complete sense of the book's structure by reviewing online its table of contents, I will turn here to three important themes that intersect in the work in thoughtful and stimulating ways.

First, Soergel's book testifies directly and indirectly to the significance of Saint Augustine's work on the Book of Genesis. The north African bishop's theology of miracles derives from his theology of creation, and the locus classicus for later learned theological reflection on miracles is to be found in his commentaries on Genesis. Not surprisingly, his inconsistencies are as much at the heart of his impact as his insight. When one finds in the medieval and early modern periods theological reflection on creation, nature's laws, and their violation—such as miracles were understood to be—reference to Augustine's Literal Meaning of Genesis, which is anything but a modern-day literalist's handbook, will not be far behind. Soergel draws our attention to Augustine's influence in his analysis of Luther's distinctions between miracles and wonders. The subsequent trends and debates Soergel identifies build on this seminal thought from Late Antiquity. Soergel thus reinforces the impression that one cannot understand the Western approach to miracles, even their rejection, without reference to the framework set out by Augustine.

Second, Soergel's book underlines the significance of the conflict not much discussed outside of expert circles, and then from other perspectives, between Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans. These factions divided, it will be recalled, over the Leipzig Interim, the latter faction finding it too great a concession to Catholicism. The debate became one of control over Luther's legacy until resolution in the Formula of Concord (1577). The conflicts pertain to the work under review on account of an association Soergel uncovers between these factions and conflicting tendencies in the German evangelical approaches to portents, colored by differing views of original sin and justification. Soergel furthermore identifies consolidating stances through the sixteenth century as the distance in time and memory between the two factions and Luther grew.

Third, Miracles and the Protestant Imagination reinforces the impression left by Soergel's earlier monograph Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkley: University of California Press, 1993) that the author is a perspicacious interpreter of texts whose production, reception, and content blur the lines separating social strata and cultural milieus that we might otherwise presume of early modern society. In this regard, Soergel is especially effective at identifying unanticipated links between elite ideas and popular sentiments. He thus advances the best traditions of the cultural history of early modern Christianity, now quite evidently on multiple sides of the confessional fissures.

A final word must be said to the book's layout and various frustrations it caused for this reviewer. There are ten illustrations and an especially striking jacket image. The illustrations, when they appear, do more than decorate the text: the evangelical authors themselves took full advantage of their era's most exciting, relatively new medium of communication, the printed book and broadsheet, and showed their readers in pictures the wonders on which they verbally expounded. The usefulness of illustrations is no less in the present context. They contribute materially to the author's points about what were in the first instance observable events and empirical claims. It is thus a shame that figures were not taken from all principal works and distributed evenly across the chapters. In addition, the front- and back-matter is quite thin. There are endnotes and an index, but no bibliography. At the very least there should have been a bibliography of primary materials and a list of figures to aid the reader in maneuvering through the author's analysis, which ultimately is so commendable.