Miracles and the Protestant Imagination: The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany by Philip M. Soergel (review)

From the eve of the Reformation to the eve of its centenary, a genre was prominent in the German-language book market of the Holy Roman Empire: the wonder-book. These were collections of stories and reports, often with ample illustrations, of the strange, bizarre, and frequently horrifying occurrences in nature: tales of comets and natural disorders, floods and earthquakes, monstrous births and strange beasts, gruesome murders and heinous crimes. In addition to satisfying morbid and natural curiosities, many of these wonder-books, compiled and written by Lutheran ministers in the sixty-odd years after the death of Martin Luther, carried a distinct theological message. These natural wonders—and the books that record them—testify to God’s continued presence in the natural world, and his clear and unambiguous anger over the sinfulness and depravity of mankind. Wonder-books, in their Lutheran representations, were doomsday books, reflecting an almost unmitigated sense of pessimism and awareness of the apocalypse. Philip M. Soergel’s careful reading of these sources begins with a quick review of these works on the eve of Reformation. He next guides the reader through Luther’s sophisticated and complicated readings of the “Book of Nature,” giving many examples of Luther’s careful and ambivalent attitude toward reports of monstrous births and prodigious signs. The next three chapters (2–5) are devoted each to the three major wonder-book writers of the second half of the sixteenth century: Job Fincel, Caspar Goltwurm, and Christoph Irenaeus. After introducing the three Lutheran divines, Soergel situates their work in the theological and ecclesiastical controversies of their time—the Interim, the conflict between Philippists and Gnesio-Lutherans, and the dispute over the Book of Concord—and gives the reader a concise and insightful summary of these voluminous publications. It does not surprise that all three authors/compilers stood close to the Gneiso-Lutheran position and espoused a strong sense of the imminent apocalypse and the pessimistic human condition. Irenaeus, a faithful follower of Flaccius, was especially known for his extreme views of the utter depravity of human nature after the fall, which were amply reflected in his selection and commentary of material for his wonder-books. The reading of natural wonders as prodigies was not limited to Gnesio-Lutherans, Soergel reminds us; writers sympathetic to the theological position of Philipp Melanchthon also interpreted these portents as signs of the transgression of God’s law by sinful mankind. In the final chapter, Soergel addresses enduring models and changing tastes around 1600 and discusses the works of Andreas Hondorff, Wolfgang Büttner, and Zacharias Rivander, the three major compilers of wonder-books in this generation. Using the example of the 1613 flood in Thuringia, Soergel advances an argument that a new mentality might be discernible in reading the book of nature, one guided more by curiosity and inquisitiveness than by theological prerogatives. His suggestions for a sea-change in the seventeenth century are intriguing, but the book ends more on a note of question than certainty. Perhaps this is itself a portent of the author’s next research project.