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  • A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany by Bridget Heal
  • Maria Crăciun
A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany. By Bridget Heal. (New York: Oxford University Press. 2017. Pp. xviii, 305. $105.00. ISBN 978-0-19-873757-5.)

Dealing with the relation between Lutheran visual culture and confessional identity in the Holy Roman Empire, this book aims to explain the significance of the image in Lutheran confessional culture and to incorporate visual evidence into the broader framework of Reformation history. Without attempting to be a history of Lutheran Art, the book seeks to analyze images—and textual accounts of their creation and use—to enrich current debates concerning confessional culture and identity, which were profoundly shaped by the Empire's fragmented political structures and remarkable regional diversity. Within a broad chronological span, ranging from the 1520s to the early eighteenth century, the book examines comparatively two case studies with very different confessional and political histories, Electoral Saxony and Brandenburg. Demonstrating subtlety in its analysis, the book does not ask whether there was a Lutheran confessional culture and identity but rather "why it was expressed in particular ways, at particular times and in particular places, why it was felt and articulated more intensely by some individuals and groups than others and how far it extended beyond the sphere of doctrine and devotion." In order to answer such questions, this book deploys a wide variety of sources and approaches. As the core of the analysis demonstrates, the book uses images and attitudes toward the visual as a lens though which to examine Lutheran self-awareness/self-understanding and as a yardstick to measure the development of Lutheran confessional culture. The book manages to sidestep the hegemonic presence of the confessionalization paradigm, sometimes overwhelming in German historiography, by refining its understanding and by not reducing it to the role played by religious confessions in state-building. Confessionalization is thus seen throughout this book, not simply as a religious or political policy but rather as a cultural process of identification and self-fashioning. Although aware of the possible dangers, such as the implication that culture and identity exist as abstract concepts outside of the individuals or groups that articulated them, bestowing a uniform confessional consciousness upon passive recipients, the book privileges these terms because they have the potential to bridge the conceptual gap between church history and social and cultural history. As a consequence, the book takes into account the thoughts, feelings, and actions not only of the educated elite but also of the 'common' man and woman. The book moves between the elite cultures of the princes, nobles, and educated theologians and the 'popular' cultures of the simple folk, examining the fate of images within a broader Lutheran confessional identity. Structured in three parts, dedicated to the confessional image, the devotional image, and the magnificent image—in a manner suggesting that images truly reflected the Zeitgeist—the book has the merit of emphasizing the complexity and contingent nature of confessional and identity constructs. The comparison between the two territories highlights the extent to which the development of a rich Lutheran visual culture was not predetermined by the events and ideas of the Reformation itself, but was instead the result of long-term changes and particular local circumstances. The book persuasively argues that Lutheran identity was heavily [End Page 549] dependent upon immediate socio-political contexts, locating religious belonging within complex patterns of allegiance and identification, developed within a broad chronological span. The book privileges methods and approaches that are reminiscent of the French school of the Annales, the comparative method heralded by Marc Bloch and the longue durée pioneered by Fernand Braudel. Carefully researched, cleverly crafted, and clearly written, the book is a magnificent read to be enjoyed by both scholarly and broader readerships.

Maria Crăciun
Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj, Romania
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