In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany
  • Charles G. Nauert
The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany. By Susan C. Karant-Nunn. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2010. Pp. x, 342. $74.00. ISBN 978-0-195-39973-8.)

Susan Karant-Nunn has undertaken a comparative study of the role of emotion or feeling in the religious experience of Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists in early-modern Germany. She relies mostly on sermons preached [End Page 135] at times when religious emotions were most likely to be aroused: observances of Holy Week and pastoral care of the dying. She defines her subject simply: It is about the use of preaching to shape the religious experience of people through rhetorical appeals to their emotions. The great Catholic preachers exploited the emotions surrounding the Passion of Christ, describing his suffering in great detail. The goal was to inspire hearers not just to meditate on the Crucifixion but also to experience vivid religious emotion—to shed tears. Such preaching went back to late-medieval sermons; it continued in the sermons of later figures, especially Jesuits and Capuchins; and it made a major contribution to the restoration of Catholic religious life in Germany. In addition to their stress on the gruesome details of Jesus' Crucifixion, Catholic preachers exploited traditional veneration of the Virgin Mary to arouse their hearers' feelings. Karant-Nunn notes many ways in which Protestant religious practice turned away from these traditions. Yet her Protestant preachers also strove to stir the emotions. Elements of continuity with medieval religion are most obvious in Lutheranism. Although Martin Luther criticized efforts to arouse weeping, he approved use of sermons to stir up feelings of religious commitment. Lutheran sermons avoided detailed description of the suffering of Christ; they shifted attention from the Passion to the redemptive power of Christ's death and resurrection. References to Mary's sorrows were much diminished. But Lutherans did not mount a radical attack on tradition. Emphasis shifted from the events of Holy Week to the salvific death and resurrection of the Savior. When Karant-Nunn turns to Calvinist preaching, she faces greater difficulty. Calvinists broke far more sharply with traditional religious practice. This is no new discovery, as she admits. But she demonstrates that beginning with Calvin himself, Reformed preachers turned away from the details of Christ's Passion and emphasized the decisive effect of Christ's self-sacrifice for the redemption of the elect. The Virgin Mary almost disappears from Calvinist sermons. The Calvinist preacher still seeks to stir the hearers' emotions, but the main goal is to arouse shame for the human sins that render all individuals incapable of salvation except through God's eternal election.

Several chapters pursue the use of emotions in particular situations: attacks on the Jews as perpetrators of the Crucifixion, use of traditional devotion to the Virgin Mary to stir the emotions, and pastoral care for the dying. Chapter 7 raises the difficult question of how to gauge the success or failure of clerical efforts to touch the emotional core of religious experience. This is the most speculative section, since Karant-Nunn has no broad body of quantifiable sources and must resort to a handful of case studies based on writings that may be sincere but inevitably are the work of members of the privileged and articulate classes. Her analysis of these spiritual writings is thoughtful and sensitive, but at best, her conclusions from them can be only tentative. This book does not claim to present a full treatment of its vast topic, but Karant-Nunn is a hard worker and a shrewd analyst of her sources. Her book is a valiant, even daring, expedition into the spiritual world underneath the theological [End Page 136] debates, colloquies, political schemes, wars, and treaties that in the past have filled the pages of most histories of the German Reformation.

Charles G. Nauert
University of Missouri (Emeritus)
...

pdf

Share