Protestants and the Cult of the Saints in German-Speaking Europe, 1517-1531 (review)

The rejection of the cult of the saints was one of the distinguishing features of the Protestant Reformation; yet, to this day, relatively little attention has been paid to the subject. Although Catholic and Protestant polemicists were all too aware of the significance of the topic up until the nineteenth century, modern historians have tended to skirt the issue, or to consider it a superficial symptom of sorts, or a mere side-effect of greater social, economic, and political changes. In many ways, the modern historiography of the Reformation has followed closely the judgment of the Protestant Reformers themselves, who tended to look upon the cult of the saints as nothing more than superstition and an unsightly sign of the errors of Catholicism. However, as historians turn their attention increasingly to the way religion was lived in early modern times, and at the way in which symbols and rituals were inextricably woven into the social, economic, and political fabric of early modern communities, the once-neglected subject has begun to gain prominence.

Carol Piper Heming's Protestants and the Cult of the Saints is proof of this change in interest, not just because it happens to be the first broad survey in English of the subject, but also because, as a survey, it brings together much of what has been said about the topic in the past two decades, and engages with it. This book poses two questions. The first question takes up the bulk of the text: why did the early Protestant Reformers unanimously reject the cult of the saints? The answer to this question is largely a theological one, and not at all complex: First and foremost, the veneration of saints and their images and relics was rejected on biblical grounds, as contrary to the Christocentrism of the New Testament. The second question is one that involves social rather than intellectual history: did the cult of the saints disappear from Protestant communities? The author herself admits that this question has no simple answer, but does offer evidence that the veneration of the saints did not simply vanish overnight in German-speaking Protestant lands. Zwingli's Zurich, for instance, retained many of the traditional holidays that had once honored the saints—as days off from work, not as feasts for the saints. Lutherans retained images of the Virgin Mary and the Apostles. Church court records and visitation transcripts also show that secret veneration of the saints continued to be a problem for Protestant pastors into the late sixteenth century. In the end, however, what remained of the cult of the saints was quite different, and perhaps summed up best by Luther: "real saints," he said, "must be good, stout sinners. . . . They are saints not because they are without sin or have become saintly through works . . . but . . . through the Lord Christ" (p. 49).

This excellent survey is more of a synthesis than a revisionist thesis, and it focuses most intensely on the early years of the Protestant Reformation, and on the theological questions raised in the texts of major Reformers, in public disputations, and in popular pamphlet literature. Its command of the printed texts and of the scholarship is excellent, making the book a wonderfully thorough introduction to the subject. The second question posed by the author concerning the endurance of the cult of the saints cannot be fully answered by such a survey, not just because of the sources tapped and the approach taken, but also because of the chronology. In order to address that question fully the study would have to stretch into the seventeenth century and delve into stacks and stacks of archival material. But this limitation does not really matter much: simply raising the question and teasing out some conclusions from partial evidence is a great step forward, and a road sign of sorts for future research, pointing in...