Singing the Resurrection: Body, Community, and Belief in Reformation Europe by Erin Lambert (review)

The Reformation shattered the widely held expectation of a single community of resurrected followers of Christ sharing eternal life: vanished was the hope of a heavenly choir of the redeemed singing with one voice. The single liturgy, forged over centuries of struggle to unify the Roman Catholic Church, became one of many; reformers replaced the liturgy's Latin language—perhaps understood by few, but at least shared by all—with vernacular texts in whatever place adherents congregated, whether openly or in secret. The Reformation vanquished the traditional geography of faith, in which members of a community shared a parish, a church building and its uplifting didactic decoration, and a churchyard and ossuary where ancestors remained close by. Faith in an outlaw confession might force believers into exile—both social and geographical—where their anticipated heavenly home formed their geography, their community encompassed fellow adherents near and far, and their home was in Christ. Undergoing a sea change were not only institutions, rituals, and communities, but also individual expectations and understanding of life's meaning and purpose. Members of different confessions disagreed on the nature of the Eucharist, the manner and time of baptism, the use and interpretation of scripture, the role and importance of sacraments, the nature of Christ's body and of resurrected bodies, and on and on.

A few common ties remained. Rather than assuming that belief sprang compliantly from doctrine or confessional affiliations, Erin Lambert seeks to understand it through actions that communicate individual conviction. She adopts the Resurrection as the lens for her study. Shared as an essential touch-stone by all Christians, it serves as a matrix for specific differences articulated by sixteenth-century writers. Primary sources that inform scholarly insight into death and dying often shed light on "resurrection as the ultimate end of human life and as a cornerstone of what it meant to be a Christian" (p. 12). How can we, from so great a distance, discern the personal concerns, beliefs, and behaviors that stemmed from this shared tenet? Lambert observes, "the nature of the resurrection was at the center of questions about who constituted that true Christian fellowship and how that community's members were to live faithfully on earth" (p. 46), but she also recognizes that in a time of religious persecution, "belief was to be inscribed within Christians themselves" as it was "no longer implied in the world in which Christians lived" (p. 51). New rituals and actions grew up around this fundamental Christian doctrine, expressing diverging views of resurrection and its place in shaping mortal life. But if the hearts of believers, where belief was transcribed, could be concealed from neighbors and close family members, they are even more difficult to discern centuries later.

Singing the Resurrection draws on two enduring media—surviving printed materials and music, both written and unwritten—to tease out these secrets. The new sixteenth-century technology of the printing press encouraged literacy by enabling the widespread sharing of texts and ideas in cheap, portable forms. Small format books and pamphlets could be concealed, consulted privately, or shared among trusted friends. This powerful tool enabled individuals and groups to magnify and disseminate new beliefs and to unite, divide, and educate believers.

Music transcended time, place, materiality, and law; it could be both communal and individual. Music preserves a record of belief, faith, and commitment, and it could function as an ever-present spiritual anchor, both audibly and inwardly. Concepts of resurrection in a newly multiconfessional Europe survive in musical settings of inspirational texts. Printed pamphlets often linked these texts and tunes with familiar didactic images. Together, they transmitted a complex, often intertextual, record of belief preserved and shared hand-to-hand in written form or heart-to-heart in nonmaterial form, relived, reheard, and rehearsed at will in the quiet...