The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany by Susan C. Karant-Nunn (review)

Near the end of an earlier work, The Reformation of Ritual (London, 1997), Karant-Nunn suggested, "Somebody ought to have a doctoral student examine the demeanour of Christ on the cross in Lutheran Passion sermons. . . . I suspect that in them Jesus is shown to be less agonized . . . than in Catholic versions" (270 n. 123). If you want something done right, do it yourself. This exact research program—mastering hundreds of pre- and post-Reformation German sermons that mention Christ's Passion—shapes the work under review. Although more explicitly cross-confessional than her Reformation of Ritual, Karant-Nunn's Reformation of Feeling similarly organizes its information around selected themes and uses sources scattered across contemporary Germany. Given that the announced collaborative Anglo-German bibliography of all surviving sermons printed in the Holy Roman Empire is far from complete (259 n. 21), she draws her information primarily from early books in thirteen German libraries, led by Wolfenbüttel's famous Herzog August Bibliothek.

The Reformation of Feeling emphasizes the relative radicalism of the sixteenth-century Reformed Protestant tradition, glimpsing some of the reasons for its limited success in Germany. "If I had initially expected that the differences between Lutheran and Reformed programs for the spiritual emotions would not be great," Karant-Nunn admits with admirable candor, "further reading disabused me" (6; similar comments on 251). Again and again, Calvinists take more extreme positions than Lutherans. For one thing, whereas Luther greatly reduced the role of Christ's mother in the story of the Passion, Calvin seems to have removed her from it altogether. However, Calvinism had relatively shallow roots in the German heartlands, as opposed to Switzerland or the Netherlands. Karant-Nunn had to add two foreign collections in order to provide adequate samples of Reformed preaching (see 293 n. 38 for the rarity of Calvin's sermons in Germany), and her chapter about reception expresses the hope that "a future reader will inevitably make me aware of a German Calvinist testimony that I could have adopted had I found it" (239).

Karant-Nunn begins with the observation that Luther's Reformation significantly "lowered the emotional tone of [religious] sanctuaries" by removing from them nearly all depictions of women—by far the more "emotional" sex—along with scenes of grisly martyrdom (5). Working within the "confessionalizing" paradigm of early modern German religious history (see 260 n. 24), she first surveys Passion sermons in each major tradition—Catholic (both pre- and post-Luther), Lutheran, and Reformed—before examining two specific aspects of pastoral discourse about Christ's Passion, the role of the Jews and the place of the Virgin Mary, followed by a cross-confessional chapter about funeral sermons. Karant-Nunn then offers a chapter illustrating the reception of doctrines about Christ's Passion by articulate laypeople, using printed testimony from a self-publishing physician of the pre-Luther era (219-225), followed by four Lutheran women, the last being Nicolaus von Zinzendorf's grandmother (225-239).

The great merit of this work lies in its numerous close readings of lengthy passages from printed sermons dealing with Christ's Passion. Nearly half of the text consists of carefully selected extracts from hundreds of published sermons that have been meticulously translated to suggest their emotional effect. Although Karant-Nunn's footnotes reveal her many relevant publications (for example, 264 n. 8, 275, 280 n. 36, 281 n. 45, 282 n. 49, 285 n. 76, 290 n. 8, 291-292 n. 28, 292 n. 30, 313 n. 163, 314 n. 172, 327 n. 127), this book avoids scholarly shortcuts; Karant-Nunn invariably "cooks from scratch." She has even thoroughly reworked an article previously published in German (305 n. 1) and retouched someone else's translation of a Lutheran hymn to tease out Luther's "shades of meaning" (286 n. 92).

Despite its chapter about reception, this study remains an...