Cultures of Communication: Theologies of Media in Early Modern Europe and Beyond ed. by Helmut Puff, Ulrike Strasser, and Christopher Wild (review)

This thought-provoking collection traces the theme of media through ten fascinating essays on various early modern topics—from Nicholas of Cusa's mystical theology to seventeenth-century Dutch maps of the Straits of Magellan—and in so doing achieves something remarkable: it inverts the adage "no Reformation without print" and proves the obverse, namely "no print without the Reformation." The authors here represent some of the most influential scholars of early modern history and German studies. Each one contributes an illuminating case, drawn from the author's area of expertise, in which early modern thinkers began to reimagine media and the roles media play in the religious designs of the era. Taken together, the ten essays convince the reader that the Reformation (examined in part 1) and the global expansion of Christianity (part 2) were quests for pure forms of communication, both with God and with other human beings. These quests transformed media culture and necessitated new technologies, effects overlooked by media theorists and historians of the printing press.

The essays in Cultures of Communication span an ambitious chronological and geographic field, beginning in fifteenth-century Germany and ending in early eighteenth-century Latin America. The reader travels from Transylvania to the Straits of Magellan with brief excursions to Jesuit outposts in Asia. To prevent the reader from suffering whiplash, the editors organize the essays around two questions. The six essays in part 1 address the question: How did the Reformation reimagine and reinvent the media necessary for communication with God? The four essays in part 2 address the question: How did global evangelization transform the media necessary for communication between people? These two questions help guide the reader, but what ultimately holds the book together are the frequent references by individual authors to their fellow contributors. The ten authors also use similar language and employ the conceptions of media developed by economic historian Harold Innis and, more recently, German philosopher Joseph Vogl. As a result, Cultures of Communication reads like a vibrant exchange of ideas centered around a shared interest in religion's impact on early modern media, especially in Germany and Latin America.

Christian Kiening begins the volume by exploring Cusa's theological advice regarding images. Cusa's late medieval contemporaries fixated on the role of images as media, and, as Kiening aptly shows, Cusa encouraged this focus as a way to see Christ, the absolute medium and mediator. Lee Palmer Wandel stresses another aspect of divine mediation in medieval Europe: the presence of God during the Eucharist. The Reformation unraveled previously intertwined understandings of Eucharistic presence, and Wandel maintains that this unravelling explains emerging confessional differences. Tracing confessional distinctions back to disparate understandings of presence, Wandel offers a bold new account of the Reformation. The next essay by Marcus Sandl shows how Martin Luther restaged the earliest, face-to-face Reformation debates in print, thus ensuring that print became paramount, and in some cases synonymous with the Reformation. Helmut Puff then offers a reappraisal of the oft misunderstood Thomas Müntzer, uncovering Münzter's profound desire, expressed in his German liturgy, to reduce the levels of mediation separating human beings from God. Puff presents a refreshing image of Müntzer, while also suggesting a new paradigm of religious reform during the Reformation. Susan Karant-Nunn tackles the medium of singing and asks why some sixteenth-century Lutherans refused to sing in church, at least according to visitation records. Sensitive to cultural context, Karant-Nunn posits that refusal to sing constituted an avenue of resistance to the social disciplining brought on by the Reformation. Daniel Weidner demonstrates, through an analysis of the seventeenth-century printed opera Seelewig by Georg Philip Harsdörffer...