The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety: Essays by Berndt Hamm (review)

Berndt Hamm, though a prolific scholar, is not very well-known outside the narrow confines of his specialty, namely scholars of the era of the German Reformation. This is unfortunate, since his scholarship has a theoretical and historiographical breadth that should recommend it to a broader academic audience. The volume in question remedies this situation by making available in English some of his most important articles. The articles represent a sustained project and provide a powerful argument on how to situate and value the reformation of religion in the sixteenth century within the broader development of religion and society between 1400 and 1600 and beyond.

One thread that runs through Hamm's work involves how to conceptualize productively the changes that took place during the period in question. He suggests the heuristic category of "normative centering" (normative Zentierung) as his contribution to such conceptualizing. The term refers to the broad phenomenon of consolidation that took place in the late medieval and early modern eras, as Hamm states it, "the alignment of both religion and society towards a standardizing, authoritative, regulating and legitimizing focal point" (3). For Hamm, the virtue of this category over and against other general categories that describe the changes of this era (rationalization, social discipline, Christianization, civilizing process) is its more open-ended character, allowing it to encompass divergent tendencies of the era, and its lack of any implied necessity in terms of the direction of development. Using this conceptual model Hamm is able to make sense of the seemingly contradictory qualities of the era, an era that exhibits strong patterns of continuity in its general trends, yet one that is associated with the vast disruption of religious culture that was the Reformation. This, above all, is the issue that Hamm seeks to address in his scholarship.

The articles in the volume pursue this project in a number of ways. Much of his work centers on the theology of piety (Frömmigkeitstheologie), which he looks at in terms of ideas, images, rhetoric, and practice. This allows him a window through which he can view comparatively the late medieval and Reformation eras and trace both continuities and upheavals in religious culture. For instance, in the first article of the volume, "Normative Centering in the 15^th and 16^th Centuries: Observations on Religiosity, Theology, and Iconology," Hamm investigates three artistic works — the Ghent altar of the van Eyck brothers (1442), a votive painting of Hans Holbein the Elder (1508), and a woodcut attributed to Hans Suess von Kulmbach from the first quarter of the sixteenth century. Within these images he identifies the centering of piety around the themes of passion, mercy, and trust, an emphasis he sees flowing from a shift in piety dating from the era of Bernard of Clairvaux and finding broad expression in the piety of the late Middle Ages. He notes the interplay between dread and solace that forms a matrix for this centering of piety and which flows into the era of reform in the first half of the sixteenth century. The reformers took up both the themes and the tendency to reduce and focus their theology around a Christocentric centering on trust in God's promises and grace. But within this continuity he identifies also the break that such centering represents, as well, with its focal point on the solae — Solus Christus, sola gratia, sola scriptura — and the attendant diminution of the plurality that also marked the late medieval theological context.

Subsequent essays extend this sort of analysis. The second chapter looks at three models of late medieval civic preaching by Savonarola, Staupitz, and Geiler von Kaysersberg in terms of their emphasis on judgment and mercy. Chapter 3 looks at the care of penitents in late-medieval thought...