The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany

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The Reformation of Feeling

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The Reformation of Feeling Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany

SUSAN C. KARANT-NUNN

2010

Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2010 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Karant-Nunn, Susan C. The Reformation of feeling : shaping the religious emotions in early modern Germany/Susan C. Karant-Nunn. p. cm. ISBN 978-0-19-539973-8 1. Reformation—Germany. 2. Church history—16th century. 3. Church history—17th century. 4. Emotions—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title. BR305.3.K37 2009 274.3ʹ06—dc22 2009019332

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

To Fred He Knows Why


Acknowledgments

In the past, when I have used archival materials as much as print in carrying out research, I have not featured the Herzog August Bibliothek in my acknowledgments. This time, however, when sixteenth- and seventeenth-century books have made up the bulk of my primary sources, I wish to place Dr. Gillian Bepler and the superb staff of that incomparable library front and center in my expressions of gratitude. This stellar collection and those who administer it set the standard by which I measure every other library. All who help to run the HAB are dedicated to meeting the needs of scholars. This attitude is not to be taken for granted. In addition, during the summer of 1998, I was the beneficiary of a research stipend given by the HAB and the Land of Lower Saxony. In bringing this project to completion, I am indebted to the following, among many others: Irena Backus, Maria Luisa Betterton, Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Katherine G. Brady, Elizabeth Cohen, Natalie Zemon Davis, Sandra Kimball, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Helmut Puff, Karin Maag, Andrew Pettegree, Lyndal Roper, Heinz Schilling, Anne Jacobson Schutte, Ulrike Strasser, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks. In 2000 and 2001, I enjoyed the support of the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte in Göttingen. A fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation during 2003–2004 enabled me to complete the research. Strictly intellectual debts are of course too many to enumerate.


Contents

Introduction, 3 1. The Emotions in Early-Modern Catholicism, 15 2. The Lutheran Churches, 63 3. The Reformed Churches, 101 4. Condemnation of the Jews, 133 5. The Mother Stood at the Foot of the Cross: Mary’s Suffering as Incentive to Feel, 159 6. Proper Feelings in and around the Death-Bed, 189 7. The Formation of Religious Sensibilities: The Reception of Recommendations for Proper Feeling, 215 8. The Religious Emotions: Conclusions, 245 Notes, 257 Index, 330


The Reformation of Feeling


Introduction

The Chronicle of Higher Education declared in February 2003 that scholars in many disciplines were currently carrying out research on the emotions.1 As in naming a child, one likes to think that one is somehow original, or at least distinctive, in one’s choices. Yet Emily and Jason turn out to be leading choices of all parents; and the emotions (along with memory) are an intellectual mode. In Germany, I noticed a glossy magazine called Emotion: Persönlichkeit, Partnerschaft, Psychologie for sale on an airport newsstand.2 Emotion sells to the public, as books and cinema also demonstrate. We academics, too, who pride ourselves on our independent thought and even cultivate idiosyncrasy, are embedded in our culture. As Bob Scribner used to say, light bulbs go off simultaneously in a number of heads.3 Having had to postpone writing, I note that others have published treatments of the Reformations and emotionality.4 Unapologetically, then, and aware of my context, this book is about the ways in which Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist ecclesiastical leaders in sixteenthand seventeenth-century Germany tried to shape the religious feelings of those in their charge. It is about clerical agendas. We are already well aware that governors tried to dampen people’s volatility in social settings—a current label for this attempt is, à la Gerhard Oestreich, “social disciplining.”5 This study, however, while in the end it will relate spirituality and society, concentrates on efforts to alter religious experience.6

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THE REFORMATION OF FEELING

The very popularity of the emotions as a focus of investigation ensured that this topic would impinge on my awareness, perhaps first by means of Barbara Rosenwein’s book on medieval anger.7 Rosenwein’s new book, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, serves as a vehicle of contribution to my conceptual framework of “communities of emotion.”8 Although she was working on a more remote and less documentable period than I, and thus occasionally having to dare in asserting the existence of a community of outlook, I am persuaded that Rosenwein is right in noting the modes of expression that take hold of and cement groups such as the high-ranking clergymen whose writings she has studied. She detects a rapid shift from one generation of Merovingian courtiers to the next, from verbally passionate epistolary exchanges to restraint as measured by the frequency and variability of the men’s sentimental vocabulary. It is highly probable that shared norms framed the commonalities to be found in the works I have used by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century preachers. Practically every historian takes notice of Norbert Elias’s assertions concerning the “civilizing process” in medieval Europe, and these have implications for feeling. In fact, Elias appears to have added remarks on the emotions to the English translation of one of his works that evidently do not appear in the German original.9 In order to be “civilized,” medieval people had at least to submit themselves to a moderating of the impulse-driven expression of their coarser, more violent feelings. Albert Hirschman’s The Passions and the Interests (1977) anticipated a wider discussion of Elias.10 Hirschman explores an alleged connection between the state’s effort to suppress effusion and the service of emerging capitalism. Did the new economic system require categorical selfdiscipline in the working class upon whose labors its success depended? In reality, not all emotions needed to be eliminated, only those that were destructive. These could be transformed (neutralized) into constructive inclinations. Hirschmann adduces the thought of early-modern thinkers, and these are the focus of his book. He finds that during the eighteenth century, the passions undergo rehabilitation as potentially creative forces.11 William Reddy, a historian likewise of Enlightenment and Revolutionary France, dares to go further than Hirschman in identifying astonishingly rapid transformations in the emotional styles of those participants who have left their textual traces. He finds that up till 1794, French citizens were expected to feel their commitment to the principles underlying radical governmental change. Thereafter, feeling became suspect, and political stances were to be the result of rational consideration; emotion and thought were, as predominately in the Middle Ages, antipodes again.12 Reddy’s quest for emotional liberty

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significantly shapes his work—and personal liberty was hardly a goal of early modern Christianity, as Martin Luther stressed in lambasting the German peasants for their revolt. Reddy attributes to the historical and the presently existing human being a high degree of awareness and of agency, and a common desire for liberty that hardly rings true for most settings. This historian does contribute to my thinking two important concepts: emotives and navigation. Emotives are not feelings as such so much as they are possibilities-throughprocess of changing self and others.13 Reddy, of course, has a very different setting in mind as he offers his definition. The idea of navigation informs us of the complexity and dynamism—as opposed to the purity and separateness—of emotions in practice. The human being receives cues from myriad sources as translator (translation is the principal activity of cognition, he says) and then, in relation to this ever-changing panoply of goals as well as personal needs, finds his integrative way among them.14 Reddy’s framework will assist me in assessing contextual and aspirational change over the roughly two centuries under discussion. I accept his precept that culture conditions emotions—although I would not declare this in absolutizing terms. Having encountered works such as these, I began to realize that the Reformation had implicit emotional dimensions. I concentrated first of all on Lutheranism. I perceived that the removal of nearly all depictions of women—whose association with feelings and, and as men insisted, the accompanying irrationality meant that they had to be kept under men’s control15—and the theretofore ubiquitous scenes of grisly martyrdom all by themselves lowered the emotive tone of sanctuaries.16 The chapter I wrote was but a beginning, a spur to further thought. I quickly realized that I had drawn two poles, emotion versus little or no emotion, and that such a scheme was inaccurate because it was grossly oversimplified. The task at hand involves depicting types and degrees of feeling, for indeed Protestants retained religious sentiment. I doubt whether the detachment that the early-modern admirers of ancient Stoicism (or Buddhists through the ages) strove for can exist. If German Lutheran worship during the sixteenth century both possessed and advocated an altered mood in comparison with the Catholic devotion that preceded and surrounded it within the Holy Roman Empire, then did not Catholic piety itself demand direct attention? The answer was yes, although the style of the revisions advocated by the Wittenberg Reformer was no mere counterpoise to Catholicism. As the Catholic Church in Germany assessed the challenges to its exclusive authority, it came, of course, to a number of explicit decisions, many of them embodied in the encompassing decrees of the Council of Trent. If we examine the arousing qualities of preaching and effervescent

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church decoration in the incipient baroque era, we may detect as well tacit features that bear messages concerning inner sensation to the devout. Will these be of my invention? Some may say so.17 At any rate, the ongoing contrast between Catholic and Lutheran style is laden with references to the feelings as well as to theological and ceremonial rectitude. Clearly, the ideal Christian in this age of dynamic creedal revision, no matter in which allegiance, is to experience spiritual movement of specified types. Specification came in every media form; it permeated the respective sacral spaces and ritual acts of both Catholic and evangelical persuasions. In preparing this study, I have included many modes of communication. My mind turned inevitably to Zwinglian and Calvinist interiors and services. The contrast between these and their forebears in the late-medieval Holy Mother Church was the starkest of all. If I had initially expected that the differences between Lutheran and Reformed programs for the spiritual emotions would not be great, further reading disabused me. Although we know about the thoroughgoing eradication of “idolatrous” images from the Reformed churches, the messages conveyed to congregations homiletically were less certain because less available in published form. Sixteenth-century Calvinist divines in particular were less ready than either Lutheran pastors or Catholic priests to see their sermons into print. Both Andrew Pettegree and Larissa Taylor, experts on religious books and preaching, have confirmed this.18 I shall speculate below on why this was the case. Other aspects of the Reformed agenda, however, render possible a defensible description of its emotional aspirations. Sermons are a major source of information on the new churches’ intentions toward their adherents. In the pulpit, clergymen, however learned they might be, were confronted with the faces of their lay charges, and in those faces their neighbors. It lay upon the clergy to communicate precisely, in simple yet unmistakable terms, what the godly person should believe and how he should behave. Preachers said what they most urgently wanted the common resident to hear.19 This was even so when, in some lands, a pericopal schedule was set for all pastors to follow. Individual excursus on the same scriptural text could be quite original. High-flown theological treatments were categorically out of place, except when the audience itself was made up of clerics. When it was, sermons were delivered in Latin. But before lay hearers, astute preachers sifted out the essence of otherwise complicated teachings, striving, in the early generations, to persuade, to sow the seeds of conviction deep, to mold behavior, and, as I am arguing, to generate those feelings that would undergird faith as well as sustain all aspects of the aspired-to Christian life-in-the-community. Apart from the Latin/vernacular question, the problem of correspondence between sermons-as-given and sermons-as-printed remains.20 It is in most cases insoluble.

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It would have been impossible to read tens of thousands of the extant sermons on all themes.21 I finally decided upon two core subgenres: Passion sermons and those about dying and death.22 Neither of these could overlook feeling—although surprises await in connection with Reformed expositions. In addition, I have used vernacular treatises containing material on the Passion or on death that were clearly intended to mold lay feelings. I found evidence, then, in those places where I judged that it could not be lacking.

Theoretical Literature I have been fascinated to become aware of the antiquity, frequency, and variety with which prominent thinkers through the ages have addressed the problem of human (and animal) emotion. Because of the sheer mass of such work, ranging from ancient Greek philosophy to modern North American and European physiological studies of cognition in the primate brain,23 I have specifically sought out theories that are relevant because they influenced the men who formed the late-medieval and early-modern churches; or because they provided useful stimuli in evaluating how early-modern feeling functioned in the larger confessionalizing framework.24 Among these, to select but a few examples, are works by John Corrigan, specialist on emotion and religion, and Nico H. Frijda, psychologist of emotion and its relation to belief.25 I have also found useful the experiential context and interpersonal nature of emotion that is put forward by Axel Hübler.26 But in the late Middle Ages, every educated man was familiar with the corpus of Aristotle. He was the paragon and epitome of brilliance. The numerous admonitory depictions of “Phyllis Riding Aristotle” wielded their persuasive power through the juxtaposition of the voluptuous beauty Phyllis, Alexander’s mythical mistress, and the world’s smartest man, the legendary philosopher Aristotle.27 Not even he was immune to her, and by extension to all feminine, wiles. These fictive portrayals, however, entertained as they warned. What the ancient Greek actually had to say on topics ranging from poetic theory to cosmology was deadly serious, even if, during the sixteenth and seventeenth century, its truths were undergoing challenge. The twentieth-century dismissal of Aristotle has meant that the value of his insights has evaded modern researchers.28 Mainly in Rhetoric but also in De Anima and Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle saw essential linkages rather than oppositions between mind and body. Here he drew apart from the Platonic principle of the emotions’ threat to human beings’ rationality.29 He believed that emotions could have positive effects, and that certain feelings should be cultivated as reinforcing virtuous behavior. In

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the Rhetoric, he found a relationship between the emotions and moral belief as borne out in behavior. Apart from these more principled dimensions of his thought, the Philosopher noted that the effective public speaker must engage his listeners’ affect in order to persuade. Sixteenth-century teachers of rhetoric, including Philipp Melanchthon, accepted this as a basic truism.30 Melanchthon writes of the orator’s “carrying hearts away with him.”31 Early-modern humanist students of rhetoric, whose favored Helenized Roman textbooks—Cicero’s On the Orator and Quintilian’s The Formation of the Orator—drew upon both Aristotle and Plato, did not doubt that in leading their audiences’ opinions whither they wished, they must appeal to their feelings as well as to their rational faculties.32 Thus, touching the hearts of congregations was a conscious goal of those preachers who had even an advanced grammar-school preparation. Surviving sermons will not be from the pens of the less well educated, however. Medieval thought concerning the emotions was mixed. If specialists in the trivial (pertaining to the trivium) component of rhetoric during the high and late Middle Ages propagated the need to play to their listeners’ sentiments, they nevertheless continued to regard emotion ambivalently. As far as pastoral advice was concerned, at least five of the seven deadly sins (sloth, gluttony, lust, anger, envy, covetousness, and pride) were essentially wrong feelings, upon which one might or might not act.33 Even without a consequent deed, the sensations themselves, like thoughts not acted upon, were sinful and had to be confessed.

Religious Feeling before the Reformation In a classic statement, Johan Huizinga characterized the late Middle Ages as smelling of blood and of roses. Either of these symbols connotes feeling—the one of anger and revenge; the other of pleasure, perhaps involving erotic love or spiritual devotion to the Virgin. He said that the era was “overripe,” its day of inventive energy past, and it now relied on the repetition and overembroidery of its core ideas.34 This could well apply to aspects of early-sixteenth-century religiosity. Leopold von Ranke regarded true Christianity in the fifteenth century to lie concealed beneath thick layers of superstition, doctrines, and regulations.35 More recently, Bernd Moeller has sounded a similarly critical note. I disagree with Moeller, Steven Ozment, and others who regard Catholicism as psychologically overburdensome at this time: I myself do not doubt the enthusiasm of many laity for the confraternities and an annual enumeration of their sins.36 We cannot see into the souls of the individuals who all together constituted

INTRODUCTION

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early-modern society, but the widespread founding of endowments, the manufacture and purchase of relics, the undertaking of pilgrimage (long or short depending on one’s means), the proliferation of shrines, the participation in processions, the conferral of patronage, seeking the priest’s blessing on candles and bread—these willing, socially reinforced activities and many more suggest a higher degree of consent than Protestant historians have sometimes been inclined to see. The societal binding power of confraternities and processions, intertwined with an imagined practice of “sheer” religion, cannot be separated out, weighed, and measured. Religious activities lent additional structure to communal existence, and their termination in the Reformation at the very least forced people to cast about for other abutments to their way of life. Inner and outer forms of culture cannot exist apart from one another. Feeling and expression are inseparable. Most directly relevant to my enterprise is Jean Delumeau’s controversial book, Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries.37 Guilt and fear are definitely emotions. As Delumeau delineates them over half a millennium, these sprang from the self-condemnatory, ascetic impulses of medieval monasticism, early spread into the secular cura animarum, and persisted in the spiritual ideals of both ongoing Catholicism and the emerging Protestant denominations. In sign language (art, ritual), sermon, and the expanding range of devotional literature of the early-modern period, clerics continued to enjoin upon their charges attitudes of fear of divine judgment and of selfabnegation as a deliberate, meritorious (Catholicism) or reactive (Protestantism) effort to palliate God’s righteous wrath over sin. My own response to this thesis has been generally positive if differentiated. I find Lutheranism and Calvinism to espouse monastic elements and to attempt to ingrain them in the populace. This book is about clerical mentalities and pastoral programs. Despite their rejection of monastic lives as literal withdrawal from the world and a strictly ordered, overseen regimen, not even Protestant preachers could bring themselves to eliminate conventual metaphors from their preaching, most especially in relation to domestic life and husbands’ and wives’ respective roles within it.38 Women and girls were ever to cultivate poverty, chastity, obedience, and stability; men as “abbots” were to enforce this lifestyle. Aspects of medieval religious culture persisted within Protestantism. I will nevertheless assert for Lutheranism a greater departure from Delumeau’s generalizations than that author realized in his own treatment. Further, the sensitive kernel of this departure itself derives from traditional Catholicism. Perhaps the main flaw in Sin and Fear is that it fails to appreciate the range of emotional tones within the inherited cult. Not all of them were deprecatory and apprehensive, even if these qualities as models were widespread.

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A fundamental feature of the Catholicism that in some regions would be cast aside was its flexibility. The lap of Holy Mother Church was commodious— provided that no dissenter attracted too much attention and potential emulation. In the realm of emotion, Christians could be nonchalant and inattentive without crippling penalty; or they could devote their very lives, as in certain monastic houses, to the adoration of the crucified Christ or the Virgin. The range of expression that the observer can encounter is immense. Probably every parish contained representatives of each end of the broad sentimental spectrum. Too, over the course of life, individuals might shift from one category to another, becoming more intensely solicitous of saintly favor in times of emergency. One crisis to which each person ultimately came was death itself. Handbook (ars moriendi), homily, and viaticum attempted to guide the faithful toward and through that vicissitude. The transactions of dying could not be devoid of feeling, for the decedent, attendants, and perhaps even for the jaded clergy. We ought not to generalize to all of society, then, the intense devotional condition of the saints whose fame for self-deprivation, even ecstasy, has come down to us. They were exceptional; they were the wonderment and puzzlement of their own houses. The Church itself regarded them mistrustfully and appointed confessors to keep track of their visions or emissaries to examine them. Across Europe, the Church looked askance at any—whether Angela of Foligno, Margery Kempe, or Ignatius of Loyola—who far surpassed its norms of piety, including its emotional norms.39 One of the qualities of the beguines that post-Reformation magistrates would object to was their religious “enthusiasm.” The sisters in Zwickau were allowed to continue living together and taking in mending for their mutual support, provided they gave up their habits and their exuberant household devotions (schwirmerij).40 But Catholic suspicion was not outright condemnation. The more tolerant late-medieval Church made its peace with those religious who were attracted to mystical forms of expression, who protested their obedience to the institution, and who did not object to ecclesiastical oversight. As a result, monks as well as nuns could continue to weep over the suffering Lord and his increasingly agonized mother.41 In its early years, their model of affective piety was not enjoined upon the laity.42 Gradually it became more available to society at large. One vehicle of its perpetration were the sweeps through Germany of penitential and anti-heresy preachers. The swath cut through German-speaking lands by John of Capistrano (1385–1456) in the fifteenth century aroused a sizeable populace to feel sorrow for sin as well as to murder numerous Jews. Earlier efforts in the north at such coalescence against the “outsider” had not been successful. Within John’s trajectory, the trigger of emotion was less the crucified Christ than the sense of

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threat posed by heretics, Jews, and, toward the end of Capistrano’s career as Constantinople fell, the Turks. Another exception was the treatment of the Passion, which was indeed meant to stimulate deep and if possible abiding feeling; and this was set off by images of the crucified Christ. The imprint of the Passion was to be retained throughout the year. Virtually every aspect of the programs for spiritual apprehension that were held out to the pious by the respective subdivisions within post-Reformation European Christianity could be found in late-medieval Catholicism. To repeat, neither Lutheranism, Calvinism, nor a newly fortified Catholicism invented ideals of religious feeling that had not existed earlier. Rather, each selected from among the elements already available “in Holy Mother’s lap” and elevated its choices to an unprecedented exclusivity. Indeed, this may be said concerning the entire Reformation movement, including the Catholic. Only emphases, combinations, and firm exclusions were novel.43

Vocabulary Social scientists since their inception as a group have generally modified the inherited categories of emotion: according to Aristotle, anger, fear, pleasure, grief, but with significant qualification.44 In fact, each culture wields its own conceptual cookie-cutters and lays them down upon a dough containing a range of sentiments, strong and weak, that are almost infinitely varied. A society’s cutting of the dough represents the formulation of vocabulary designating types of feeling. The major flaw in this baker’s metaphor is that it does not convey the evolutionary qualities of language—constantly changing in its nuances, continually responding to alterations in its existential milieu. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are a long period, one within which the late-medieval Gothic conceptual universe of the preachers gives way to the disorientation of Mannerism and rulers’ more concerted self-aggrandizement, which in turn yields, during the baroque age, to the celebration of the literate elites’ certainty of divine favor. Yet theologians and the priestly and pastoral castes, reliant upon their definitions, all exerted conservative influence, striving to hold onto an imagined doctrinal purity embodied in their respective designated founding fathers. How, then, can the historian of early-modern Germany even venture to name emotions?45 I have adhered to two principles in this study. The first is to listen to the labels of preachers themselves, as these have come down to us in printed form. Insofar as possible, their templates rather than ours must provide the vocabulary of sentiment. Their patterns of naming interior sensation became apparent

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as I read. The preachers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shared root metaphors, which, however, drew apart after the Reformation. Catholics’ meanings of heart will become different from those of Protestants, for example. These reveal not only contemporary esthetics of speech but may lead us deeper into an understanding of religious and moral culture in general. Although, as said earlier, one cannot assume that the clergymen’s outlook translates into that of their fellow citizens, this work presupposes that it is valuable to penetrate the divines’ social and ethical value systems and their “sensitive” cosmology. Second, I shall compare those names with the verbal messages of liturgy and lyric, and with the nonverbal signage of the decoration of sanctuaries.46 Jeffrey Chipps Smith has called the baroque interiors of Jesuit churches “sensuous.”47 I agree with his learned opinion; others might find the word sensuous to be laden with unsuitable erotic connotation. I do not, for I see the recombinant Catholic Church as aggressively enlisting the body and even its pleasant sensations in seeking to inform the spirit. For the present purpose, then, I am inevitably the interpreter of meaning and mood. Other experienced researchers must judge whether their interpretations would coincide with mine. I share the view of Alun Munslow that “history is not simply an observational and reconstructive activity, the function of which is to locate empirical (sometimes called synthetic) and/or analytical truth. Writing history is a mind- and discoursedependent performative literary act.”48

Methodological Problems The most obvious problem confronting the scholar who attempts to draw conclusions about patterns in both acts and moods of reformation from piecemeal evidence is whether this is possible. It might be better to “camp out” at one or two selected sites and exhaust the pertinent archives. At the beginning of a career, this would definitely be the better choice, for the person striving to enter a profession is strategically obliged to demonstrate detailed research skills along with an integrative capacity. The late stage of my own career and my fascination with materials located in various parts of the German-speaking lands led me to seize the liberty of a broader, shallower search. Visitation protocols, ecclesiastical ordinances, liturgical rubrics, catechisms, sermons, and devotional tracts revealed very similar patterns throughout Lutheranism, throughout Catholicism, and throughout Calvinism—I repeat the preposition to emphasize the resemblances within each creed but differences that set each tradition apart from its rivals. Their emotional goals are astonishingly distinct. This fact stands out when one examines three categories of expression: the

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adornment of sacred spaces, the central meanings of ritual life and the deliberate reflection of theology in ritual, and sermons delivered to and edifying treatises written for the public by the clergy. The question arises persistently of correspondence between published homilies and those that may have actually been given. For the most part, the inability to show that printed sermons were identical to those given must simply be endured. Authors did wish to ensure that a text fixed in print could withstand the cold stare of the touchstone theologians, or, in the Catholic instance, of inquisitors. Too, they may have wished to show themselves as the best possible orators. Further, texts written in Latin were almost certainly given in the vernacular to general lay audiences that included the artisan classes and women of any rank. Only when a respected preacher addressed his fellow clerics or another audience of learned men may we imagine that he actually used Latin. With regard to John Calvin, whose sermons I shall examine even though they were not in German because they provided a model for Reformed preachers in Germany, too, we are fortunate: For eleven years, from 1549 until he died in about 1560, Denis Raguenier or another of his corps of secretaries attended Calvin’s sermons and took down in shorthand what the Reformer said. Their author allegedly gave them extemporaneously without written notes (but with preparation), and he did not wish to have them printed. Through happenstance they survived in manuscript form into the twentieth century, when a number of them were rescued and edited. By means of the analysis of Passion sermons, which could hardly avoid touching on the feelings, it is possible to peer into the founding fathers’ mentalities and decipher the clues they left us to their ideals of religious sentiment.


1 The Emotions in Early-Modern Catholicism

Affective piety as an ideal was widely accepted, and widely characteristic of late-medieval and early-modern Catholic Christianity. Although it is by no means certain that a majority of Western Christians engaged in its forms, some did. Saint Bernard of Clairvaux concentrated and publicized this tradition, which doubtless preceded him, particularly within monastic orders. His example, however, gradually spread beyond the Cistercian movement, as the population expanded and the brothers were less able to maintain their soughtafter isolation from the general lay population. They did not as readily take up preaching to the laity or even assuming the cure of souls as their predecessors in the reforming of Benedictine monasticism, the Cluniacs, had. Yet crises such as the spread of the Catharist heresy in southern France called Cistercian abbots out of their preferred stability and onto the byways in an effort to stanch the flow of souls into latter-day Manichaeism. As de facto preachers, Saint Dominic and his bishop found heretics everywhere, and they recognized that the clerical orders as then defined, whether regular or secular, offered no ministerial remedy to the challenge at hand. The establishment of mendicant orders, by ascetic lifestyle and persuasive preaching, specifically served the purpose of preventing further conversions to heresy within the ranks of Holy Mother Church. This preaching, as carrot, along with the newly formed inquisition, as stick, was secondarily to convince Catharists (or Waldensians) of the error of their allegiance and win them back into the Catholic

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fold. This wave of innovation enabled the Cistercian abbots to return to their monasteries. Donna Trembinski has noted the role of the Dominican friars in focusing on the severity of Christ’s physical suffering, a theme they doubtless carried with them in their homilies to the faithful.1 Historians of the Reformation have tended to underestimate the extent and vigor of preaching within the high and late Middle Ages. The literature on the medieval sermon is vast, and it is astonishing how many homiletic texts themselves have survived for our perusal. The preachers fit in several categories. So-called hedge-preachers were a dynamic but elusive lot who, if they were not hermits who confined themselves to one place, spoke whenever they could gather an audience. Francis of Assisi began his preaching career in this way. Authorities before as after the Reformation lamented the ubiquity of such types and strove to eliminate them. Their preference was for duly appointed and overseen clergy, whose utterances and behavior they could keep track of. This was an ideal, and the practical supervision often fell to the orders of which they were members or to diocesan chapters. Such condoned preachers held forth mainly in population centers and were attached to friaries, cathedrals, universities, or other churches. In the late Middle Ages, Europe saw penitential preachers, sometimes self-appointed, sweep across its expanses or its locales, calling their avid hearers to sorrow for sin and reform of life, well before the End of Time. These were short-term events, and the preaching was ephemeral unless the preachers were figures of repute. Simultaneously, however, donors or larger cities saw to the creation of formal preacherships in order that the citizens could have dependable, ongoing access to the Word of God. The record of each of these types is sufficient, and the scholarly literature vast.2 The great diversity of personalities and spiritual strains within the Church makes it virtually impossible to characterize late-medieval Catholicism as a whole. Indeed, its very incorporative nature, recalling perhaps its earlier syncretic devices, sets it apart from the Protestant offshoots that were to follow in the sixteenth century. Each of these was more intent on uniformity than the Church had been. But in this quality, the Church of the Catholic Reform would imitate its disobedient offspring as well as reflect the disciplinary nature of the age. It, too, would struggle to impose conformity on all those remaining within its fold. The Council of Trent, and especially its decrees, is rightly thought of as a watershed event, even though many of those decrees, in the face of the Protestant apostasy, simply reiterated the doctrinal status quo. Others, together with ancillary legislation, insisted on adherence to nearly identical rules for all Catholic people and practices. This effort to provide a single theology, a single or at least uniform catechism as a means of teaching doctrine, a single liturgical rubric (the Roman missal), and virtually a single form of monastic life

THE EMOTIONS IN EARLY-MODERN CATHOLICISM

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(enclosed) for women marked off the early-modern Church from its medieval antecedents. In high- and late-medieval devotion, multiplicity prevailed. Mysticism was by no means anathema. Saint Brigitta of Sweden’s own visions of the Crucifixion and the details she provided in her record were a source of the elaboration that subsequent preachers would draw upon. A Latin version of her Revelationes was published in Lubeck in 1492.3 The Church had always shown its worry that direct, personal communication with the Divinity entailed at least the possibility of nonconformity, and certainly a bypassing of clerical and sacramental structures. Somehow Bernard of Clairvaux’s prominent engagement in the world, his avid defense of Catholic theology in the face of Abelard’s innovation, his promotion of exterior crusade, reassured the Church, if it cared, that his own visions fell within acceptable boundaries. Other visionaries met with close scrutiny, including the assignment of trustworthy confessors. The Rhenish mystics caused unease, not least because of their attractiveness to throngs of listeners who wished to imitate them. Ironically, a sign of Christianity’s triumph in the West was just this enthusiastic engagement with the faith. People’s allegiance was not of the compulsory sort of Clovis’s army or Charlemagne’s Saxons. Rather, from the twelfth century on, most of the populace, to judge by its engagement in orders, confraternities, processions, pilgrimages, and endowments, believed in the Christian faith as it was defined for them. Still, it was hardly defined in an orderly, evenly distributed way. Population centers naturally possessed the most sacred buildings—churches, chapels, shrines, convents, friaries—together with their inhabitants. The rural masses were likely to be neglected, unless they lived in proximity to a religious house that found it incumbent on itself to minister to society’s humblest. To this extent, Protestant scholars are correct about an increase of preaching: Within a century, rural Christians, too, felt the preachers’ breath in their faces. This was true, however, on every side of the newly drawn creedal lines. The Catholic Church took up the evangelical challenge of taking its own enunciation of the Word of God to even more of its humble masses. As it had earlier made use of the friars for similar purposes, now it promoted, once again even in the face of diocesan resistance, Jesuit and Capuchin fathers as assistants in the enterprise of better informing and securing the fidelity of the laity. In every Catholic venue, icons of the crucified Christ were likely to be on display, and in their affective aspects were likely to be a signal of traditional devotion. Every reader who has visited museums and historic churches will be aware of the change in the appearance of these crucifixes from the twelfth to the fourteenth centuries. Regions had their own stylistic features, but devotion to the crucifix was evidently universal.4 At first quite rigid and horizontal,

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Romanesque images seldom give a convincing impression of the suffering of Christ. Rather, his body is arranged on two planes: horizontal and vertical. His face is serious, but rather to be interpreted as regally judgmental rather than as painfully aggrieved. Needless to say, each artist’s rendering was different, and there are notable exceptions to this generalization.5 Devotion to the graphically crucified Christ along with his Virgin Mother was as much an affirmation of the Catholic faith as it was a boundary between Catholic orthodoxy and perceived apostasy. James H. Marrow, Thomas H. Bestul, and others have proved how central, if not the exclusive theme, the Passion was in high and late medieval religion.6 Bernard of Clairvaux’s and Bonaventura’s own early advocacy of meditation on the suffering Lord targeted chiefly other religious, but the trend after his time was to make it, first, a hallmark of the dedicated life, whether undertaken by men or women; and second, culminating in the fifteenth century, a sign of lay devotion, too. The medieval Church through its various organs promoted a widening of the contemplative net, calling more and more of its children to participation in the compelling experience of Jesus’ suffering.7 Beginning not later than the fifteenth century, the Reformation quite aside, Catholicism was marked by intensification rather than innovation.8 Indeed, one effect of the coming of Lutheranism and other forms of dissent was to heighten the resolve and the drive of the Mother Church to teach its members more effectively and to inform their doctrinal allegiance with feelings of identity. The subscription to doctrinal precepts, events had shown, was hardly enough to secure loyalty. In response to their teachers’ incitement in the pulpit or on a dais in the marketplace, the faithful had to respond with their hearts. Rhetorical description of the Passion in all its horror was a salient implement of persuasion.9 In retaining and developing outward demonstration as a feature of the faith, Catholicism did not invent a new form; rather, it selected emotionality from among several late-medieval alternatives of spirituality. In contrast to Marrow, who regards the Low Countries and the Rhineland as the center of Passion contemplation, I have gained a strong impression in preparing this study that Jesus’ ordeal moved into prominence virtually throughout Western Christendom. It is important to note, too, that drama was a salient medium for the presentation of Passion themes to the populace.10 All manner of mystery plays set these before viewers’ eyes, initially within sacred spaces, the sanctuaries, and later tending to expand outward.11 Although the preparation may have been more festive and physically flexible than that of a formal clerical disquisition, the plays’ ideological content was designed both to inform and to move. The clergy guided the shaping of the content of these pieces, and they often acted in them.


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The Fifteenth Century Numerous accounts of pre-Reformation Passion preaching in German-speaking lands have survived. I have selected not the familiar Geiler von Kaysersberg (1445–1510)12 but a lesser-known figure (although he was well reputed in his own day), Paul Wann (1420/25–1489), who left in manuscript form a series of Latin Holy Week sermons that he preached in 1460 in the cathedral in Passau.13 His sentiments strike me as representative of the intensifying clerical culture of that day; he is a suitable example. Wann was a member of a baker’s family in Wunsiedel, near the Bohemian border, who took the doctorate in canon law in Vienna, and evidently also the doctorate in theology, upon which he lectured. By 1475, he joined the diocesan chapter in Passau. He was a regular preacher there already, as his Passion sermons bear witness.14 Both other canons and a broad laity made up his audience. Most likely, then, these sermons were actually presented in German. Although the series was not published until 1928, others of Wann’s year-round homilies issued from the press during the pre-Reformation era. These fell within the category of aids to his less experienced clerical colleagues, as well as possibly also that of edifying literature for the literate citizen.15 They probably helped Wann’s less well-prepared fellows, too, in the formation of their homiletic style, which is to say in determining the content, the rhetorical style, and the emotional tone of their own sermons. The reading of such books constituted an important dimension of training for the priesthood in the late Middle Ages. It was also a reflection of the drive toward moral and ecclesiastical reform in which Wann took part. Wann’s Passionale is divided into nine segments, presumably for preaching between Palm Sunday and Easter Saturday. Nine sections do not fit the days, even if two were held on Good Friday. The Resurrection is omitted here, which hints at his cessation on the day before Easter. The author himself states in his first sermon that he has divided the remaining ones into eight parts in imitation of the canonical hours—of which, however, there were, by tradition, only seven. He will, he explains, repeat “compline” in order to make an eighth, which will be devoted to the agony of the Virgin Mary.16 His choice of this structure is surely evidence of the presence of the canons in his audience. Wann’s modern editor describes the sermons as permeated by warmth and “the fire of the mystical love of God.”17 In his introductory homily, Wann tries to break down his hearers’ emotional resistance to the effects of Christ’s experience:

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Saint Gregory the Great . . . begins a sermon on the repentance of Mary Magdalene with the words: “When I think about speaking on the repentance of the Magdalene, I would rather cry than speak. For who could have a heart so stone-hard that it did not soften at the sight of her tears?” These words are even more suited to a sermon on the bitter Passion and death of Christ. It would be better to weep about it than to speak at length. Oh, if only I had tears for my crucified Redeemer! We would have to be people of stone if we were not moved by the tears of Christ, who poured them not only from his eyes but also in the form of drops of blood out of the thousand wounds [that covered] his holy body.18 In this hortatory prologue, the preacher establishes the predominant tone of what is to follow. He incites his fellow Christians to feel Jesus’ suffering in all its specificity and to break down. He urges this “softening of the heart” upon men as well as women and laity as well as clergy. He continues that such softening is essential during Holy Week: For a Christian it cannot be enough simply to look upon the suffering Savior. . . . The Christian must, at least during Holy Week, be inwardly moved to sympathy [and] must sink himself in the torment of that most holy body and all its members. The prophet [Jeremiah 1: 12] . . . wants to say, “Do not look upon me only superficially but observe me closely; try to experience along with me the burning glow of my pain!”19 According to Wann, there would not be enough time to describe everything that Jesus went through. In his Passion, he sums up, lies the total of all perfection.20 He ends this sermon with further encouragement to grieve: Look with humble, contrite hearts into the countenance of the Redeemer . . . as though you watched him die before your eyes! . . . Then you would have to be moved to tears. But if you cannot cry because you have a frosty disposition, you can nonetheless fruitfully contemplate the Passion of Jesus—only in that case, you must commit yourself into the lenient [mild] hands of divine grace. Do not cease to demand, to knock, and to seek until you receive this grace! Those who do not come immediately to weeping should remember that not even nature is soft all year round. Eventually the melting of springtime arrives. With God’s grace, these souls too may overcome their spiritual desiccation.21 The following day, Wann takes up the biblical story, beginning with the Last Supper. Compared with some of his contemporaries, who prepared dozens


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if not hundreds of Passion sermons, the Bavarian must economize on detail. He combines description and moral lessons. He conveys the Lord’s discomfiture in facing the fact that Judas, his own disciple, will betray him. The atmosphere is heavy with suspense. Yet Christ, “the Savior, the Creator of the universe, the dreadful Judge of the human race,” bends his knee and washes the feet of his very betrayer. “The Redeemer had exhausted on Judas all of his shepherdly effort.”22 Wann attempts to move his hearers by conveying the immensity of Jesus’ concern for this lost sheep, along with the magnitude of Judas’s treachery. The foretelling of Peter’s denial adds to the tension.23 The other brethren are suspicious, incredulous over these predictions. The chosen three who accompany Jesus to Gethsemane can nevertheless not watch and pray with their Lord. With their lack of motivation, they betray him, too; they deny him the sustenance that he sought among his closest friends. Wann focuses on Christ’s inner ordeal, but this has its anticipated corporeal manifestation, bloody sweat: His human nature is horrified in the face of his suffering [to come] and the shameful death. As a result, his heart beats loudly, and his soul convulses. Such a powerful struggle rages within him that sweat mixed with blood presses out of every pore and runs in fat drops onto the ground. Saint Bernard [sermon on the Passion] says that this bloody sweat flowed so freely that not only the Savior’s clothing but even the ground was covered. The whole world should see that Christ, as though from his eyes, poured out tears from his whole body, in order to wash all members of the church.24 As earlier, Wann ends with a call to feeling. “If I were to chastise myself for a thousand years in the strictest monastery, I could not adequately compensate him for the smallest drop of blood that he shed for me. Oh, I, a wretched sinner! Where are my tears? . . . I beg you, sweetest Jesus, grant me that by your bloody sweat, I hold before my eyes with inner pain the many sins that I have committed!”25 The third sermon contains the fulfillment of Jesus’ prophecies. He is betrayed, captured, mistreated by the Jews, abandoned by the disciples but not his mother, led first to Annas and then before Caiaphas, severely abused in both places, and denied by Peter. Christ is bound, struck in the face with fists, thrown to the ground, kicked while he is down, and led on to Pilate. Wann interjects to his listeners, “Hear how they scream, insult, and mock!”26 “Let us observe with weeping eyes how the Savior is led from Annas to Caiaphas, what he did there, and what he endured!”27 Christ’s tormentors spat upon him. “Devout souls, you cannot think about this without feeling grief and pain. Watch, but also allow each shameful act to move your heart to ardent compassion

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toward your Redeemer!”28 “We should be shaken in our souls and, if we are not of [too] stiff a temperament, pour forth tears.”29 This is a lengthy, detailed excursus, and the incitement to imagine, to sympathize, and to break down forms an insistent refrain. As nearly always, the preacher remarks extensively on the Jews, a subject to which I shall return later. Their alleged blindness and brutality are ever the objects of excoriation. Attention to the Virgin, which I shall also take up in a later chapter, and to the Jews in the confrontation before Pilate takes up much of the fourth sermon. The Jews’ depicted joy at their opponent’s suffering contrasts with Jesus’ affliction. In their sensibilities, they are their “king’s” diametric opposite. Herod himself is here portrayed as “greatly pleased” (hocherfreut) to see the famous Jesus of Nazareth before him. He inquires whether he really can change water into wine and multiply loaves of bread. But when Jesus remains silent, which Herod takes as an expression of contempt, he becomes furious. For their part, Mary and John, who observe in the background, are disappointed by the Lord’s failure, as they see it, to defend himself.30 In his fifth sermon, Wann retells the scriptural tale of Pilate’s liberation of Barabbas, which was followed by the most severe beating of Jesus yet, “by the coarsest thugs,” “with rods and knotted cords and straps with spikes.” No part of his body remains uninjured. Pieces of his flesh stick to the column to which he has been tied. “Pilate, how could you permit and command such a gruesome act?” the preacher asks.31 Then the Lord is crowned with thorns, and the points penetrate his brain. His torturers have “bestial hearts.”32 In contrast to some of those present in the church, “the stones may mourn and weep over this shocking drama!”33 But what about us? “Does it not grip us in the heart? Do not our tears flow?” Here Jesus fulfills the Psalmist’s image of the creature who is a worm and no man.34 At this point, Wann brings up Judas’s suicide; his intestines gushed forth: “It must have been a horrific death. Perhaps at the last moment Judas wanted to free himself from the rope. He swung and strained on the cord. This broke, and his body fell as heavy as lead into the depths and— oh, horror!—burst apart so that his intestines pressed out. All this Satan had desired and brought about.”35 Catholic preaching will continue to feature this “dishonorable” death, whereas Protestants will gradually eliminate it. The suicide itself will absorb Lutheran attention.36 Reluctant as he was to credit a woman, whose sex had brought about the Fall, Wann noted that Pilate’s wife was indeed prescient. “A heavy pressure burdened her heart, and she perceived the uncanny threat”—her husband would lose his position if he allowed this “righteous and holy person” to be killed.37 Wann ends this sermon on a positive note, affirming Christ’s deep love for humanity:


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We should not dwell too long on the evil of the Jews and on the bloody wounds that they inflicted on the Lord; rather let us look at length deep into his heart, where an unending love for us burned! Let us consider attentively the outcome of his suffering, [which is] the inexhaustible wealth of our redemption! We must ever again be amazed by the boundless redemptive love of our Lord. In order to save us and to give us back the life of the soul, he wanted to die.38 Wann concludes each sermon in a major key. Moving forward, Wann describes Christ’s death sentence, his bearing of the cross, his confrontation with the women of Jerusalem, his exhaustion, the shame of his nakedness, his crucifixion and further mocking, and his mother’s state of mind. The preacher enjoins his listeners to use their imaginations as Jesus, who is drained of blood and strength, struggles to bear his cross. “Faithful souls, step closer to him and ask him in prayerful love, ‘Best Savior, where are you going?’” Ask him if you may accompany him. Help him to carry this burden. Let us follow him in spirit step by step, and let us observe with holy wonderment how he, as God who bears heaven and earth and the entire cosmos, is pressed to the ground by the cross! What will we do when we see how he, gasping under the heavy load, threatens to collapse at any moment; when we see how his wounds from the lashing and the crown of thorns bleed further, and each imprint of his feet is red with blood?39 Like his priestly forebears, he invents specific affronts to Christ in the process of his crucifixion. He repeatedly sounds the clarion call to identification. “Faithful souls, was that not an attack by all of hell upon the most innocent of all human beings? Can you not feel what is thereby experienced in the heart of this innocent one?”40 Yes, observe ever anew this inhuman, gruesome war game [Kriegsspiel] and speak to your Savior: “O my divine Redeemer! I am the cause of all your martyrdom; but I, the most impoverished of all sinners, have such a stone-hard heart that I cannot feel even a proper pity; so that I cannot cry. I beg you, Queen of Heaven, give me those tears that you poured out during the Passion of your Son.”41 Without warning, the preacher discusses the variability in people’s capacity for grief. Some very pious people cannot weep easily, and others who are not as devout shed copious tears, “each one according to his disposition.” Perhaps

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Wann wished to reassure those among his hearers who, despite their genuine devotion, could not provide the outer demonstration that he demands from them. God, he declares, is all good and merciful, and he turns away from no one who is faithful to him. To all those who make an honest effort, the heavenly Father gives his warming, cheering love.42 To these he will lend his consolation (Trost) whether they weep or not, and, the clergyman adds, we should not cry ourselves blind, an exaggerated piety.43 He then reverts to the customary embroidery of the spare scriptural account. The nail pounded into Christ’s hand was dull. “As a consequence, it crushed . . . his skin and flesh and some of the bones of his hand; it frightened the blood back into the chamber of his heart and shocked all the nerves in his body. The heart of the Redeemer is almost pulverized by the pain.”44 He describes in detail the torturous effects of Christ’s being stretched out upon the cross. One of the developments within the Passion devotion of the high and late Middle Ages is the assumption of separate status for Christ’s individual wounds. They become near-saints in their own right—and to them prayers will be directed. Even this, however, is not without precedent in Catholic devotion. Paul Wann cites Saint Augustine in a way that hints at this Church Father as one of the contributors to this pattern. Wann cites Augustine’s treatise on the Gospel of John: “When a bad thought oppresses me, I take refuge in the Passion of the Lord; when fatigue weighs upon me, I arouse in myself the memory of the wounds of my Savior; when the devil pursues me, I flee into the open heart of my divine Friend, and he grants me abatement; when the glow of passion flares up in my members, it is put out by a glance at the crucified One. In all my struggles and unpleasantness, I find no remedy as effective as contemplating the wounds of Christ.”45 When closely scrutinized, however, this passage does not indicate a separate devotion to the wounds. Instead, for Augustine wounds is a rhetorical device that comprehends all of Christ’s path to his death and all of his agony. Wann expatiates upon human sin as the cause of Christ’s execution. He has relatively neglected this topic until now. “How miserable and worthy of contempt am I, for not once, even in the face of his pain on the cross, did I stop sinning—as though his suffering had been a pleasure!” The preacher urges his listeners’ repentance by means of the consideration of Jesus’ agonized body: “See, his head is inclined in order to kiss you; his heart is ready to love you; his arms are spread out to embrace us; his entire body is stretched out and torn apart as a redeeming sacrifice for us.”46 Our physical as well as psychic sense of


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identity with this unique fellow mortal will lead us toward remorse. Bodily sensation contributes toward our ultimate spiritual salvation; it enables us to avail ourselves, through inner and outer reform, of Christ’s atoning grace. He turns his attention to the Mother under the cross.47 The clergyman then remarks upon the psychological dimensions of the Passion. Wann’s interpretation of Jesus’ despair as he cries out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” is different from that of later Protestant preachers. The fifteenth-century homiletician declares that the Son of God remained, as eternally, one with the Father. The power of divinity lay ever at his disposal, and he could have, had he wished, tapped it for purposes of diminishing or extinguishing his suffering. But Christ chose to deny himself this relief “so that his soul could dip into the entire ocean of suffering. A dark night filled with sinister horror dominated the Savior’s soul, and this spiritual pain was probably the greatest part of his ordeal.”48 The nobility of a person conditions his experience of pain. As the most noble human being, Jesus’ sensitivity was unrivaled; the degree of his torment was unequaled.49 Jesus wept upon the cross as he gave up his spirit.50 Some of us cannot cry, but he weeps for us! “O blind human souls! Let yourselves be moved at least by the tears of your dying Redeemer!” With his death, “the greatest work of the history of the world was completed.”51 He explains the atonement. Christ calls out to each person individually, “‘Soul, return to me! I am the one who made you so distinguished and who has so freely and richly prepared eternal blessedness for you. Reverse your course, dear soul! The saints await you with yearning in heaven.’”52 He urges those who are present to feel with the holy Mother at the foot of the cross.53 The last two sermons in this series deal extensively with Mary’s imagined torment. In addition, one describes Longinus’s spear-thrust, not just into the side of the Lord but deeper, into his heart. “So that every doubt [of Jesus’ death] is excluded, he swings his sharp lance and drives it deep into the side of the Redeemer and into his heart. Another crime against the best Savior! Not even in death did he avoid persecution!” Nothing is holier than the blood and water that issued from that wound! Mary could not stop crying.54 When his corpse is taken down, she bathes her Son’s wounds with her tears.55 Wann concludes hopefully: If in spirit we enter this circle of mourning, we will well not be able to keep from weeping, which is better suited to us sinners than to these holy women. . . . Christ suffered solely on account of us. Therefore, it is fitting that we suffer along with him and also mourn and cry. All those who were not among his enemies also wept at his Passion. His mother wept, as did her companions and many other

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women. The faithful John wept, as did the other Apostles in their place of concealment. Longinus wept after his healing. Those gallant men Joseph [of Arimathea] and Nicodemus wept. The sun and the curtain in the temple mourned and cried, and even the hard cliffs did, and finally the angels in heaven (Isaiah 33: 7). Do we wish to be alone in lacking pity and without tears as we observe the Passion of the Lord?56 He insists here that men can and must join the women in an expression of grief that is more characteristically theirs. Wann’s sermons are a fine example of the spirit of preaching at the end of the Middle Ages. Even though sermons for other seasons, on possibly more intellectual topics, may not implore their hearers or readers to abandon every emotional inhibition, yet Christians are to take the pre-Easter message with them through the entire year. The Crucifixion is at the very heart of the faith, and one’s manner of responding to it reveals—or so the preachers all imply— the sincerity with which one shares in the core beliefs of the Church. If Holy Week emotion is a ritual enjoined upon every Christian on the eve of the Reformation, that softness of heart is meant to alter the individual life and accompany it throughout the year. The ubiquity of crucifixes was meant to remind the faithful of this. Its symbolic instruction was to share Christ’s ignominy, to be brought thereby to repentance, and to refrain at least from egregious sin. Feeling was the path to this salvific self-restraint. At the same time, Wann was not the originator of his teaching or his technique. These date from at least the twelfth century. In the generation before Wann, the prominent University of Paris theologian, Jean Gerson, was reputed to possess the high skill of moving his audience when preaching on the Passion.57 This was of course Gerson’s intention, too.

The Sixteenth Century The historiographic question has challenged us during the 1990s, whether we ought to go on referring to movement toward reform within the Catholic Church as “Counter-Reformation,” or whether it was a quieter, literally nondivisive version of the idealism that catapulted Luther, Zwingli, Calvin, and their fellows into their revolutionary roles. There is much to be said for John O’Malley’s point of view as expressed in Trent and All That.58 The author argues that the Church at no time completely abandoned its foundational principles, and that it, too, gave multifaceted evidence, along with admitted signs of


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neglect, of conscious renewal. In the late Middle Ages, there were numerous signs of the Church’s animation. It did not revive from a near-moribund condition upon experiencing the shock of widespread, partly irrepressible Protestant critique. I would certainly concede to my good Jesuit colleague that the visible desire among the people to know the precepts of their faith and the Scriptures from which they were taken, and the simultaneous effort of conscientious churchmen to meet this need by preaching as often as possible were signs of the Catholic vitality of the times. I have already rejected for myself the position of colleagues who regard the “burden of late medieval Catholicism” to have been anxiety-producing if not unbearable.59 Although the papacy’s lack of support constituted a handicap for all those who desired to invigorate the practice of their faith, leaders, of whom the likes of Jean Gerson, Geiler von Kaysersberg, and Erasmus are some of the best known, were but the most famous of a large number of dedicated, highly informed individuals who made enduring contributions to the life of their Mother Church. Homiletics, then, was already an expansive field, although not yet part of a formal clerical training program. It would be incorrect to think that Catholic preaching was an adaptive response to Protestantism, which placed the Word of God, along with its articulation in the pulpit, at the center of its formal worship. But having asserted that, I do believe that the institutional church saw in Protestant practice the usefulness, perhaps the indispensability, of the sermon and the catechism as instruments to be wielded in every parish, and in a systematic way. The Catholic Church was certainly affected by its interlopers (as it saw them) and intensified its adoption of their best techniques. Nonetheless, this does not transform Catholic endeavors from intrinsically their own into a Counter-Reformation––mere reactions. After all, Protestants of every category were more or less reliant on preceding Catholicism for their own faiths and expressions of them. In the expanded Catholic preaching of the mid-sixteenth century and forward, then, there is overwhelming continuity of doctrine on the Passion and emotional approach with late-medieval sermonizing on that subject. To demonstrate this generalization, I have chosen two veteran preachers: Johannes Wild (Ferus; 1497–1554), a Franciscan who riveted audiences to their places over a twenty-six-year period in the diocese of Mainz—he was Domprediger from 1540 until his death—and saw prodigious quantities of postils to press;60 and Heinrich Helm (d. ca. 1560), an Observant Franciscan, who published sparsely and about whom far less is known. Neither of these men was a member of one of the new orders. The volumes of their Passion sermons are long— hinting already at the inclusion of minute detail.61 Both inculpate the Jews without restraint, to which I shall return later. Speaking to his fellow clerics

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(Audi frater! Charissimi fratres!) along with others who attended services in the cathedral (et amici Dei), but having preached perhaps annually to the broader laity of the diocese as well, Wild begins the Passion with Jesus at his friends’ dinner-table in Bethany. As he progresses, he lists one dire result of Judas’s betrayal for each piece of silver that he received.62 He declares that the preacher of the Gospel must neither add nor subtract from the strictly biblical account— and by his lights he does not do so.63 Catholic preachers were persuaded that they adhered to the sacred text, but Protestant divines disputed that. He stresses the atonement as the “fruit of his [Christ’s] death that opened and prepared our going over to the Father.”64 He repeats that God has loved his human creatures tremendously in order to provide for their salvation. Wild becomes most excited as he touches on discord within the Church. The rise of sects aggrieves him deeply.65 There is nothing good at all in us, no justice, life, salvation, or grace— only sin, death, hell, and accursedness, he harangues.66 We must believe in our hearts that Christ took our sins upon himself, sweated blood, and conquered hell in order to reconcile us with God.67 We must have faith in being cleansed by his blood. We cannot reason about this but must believe; we should have the Passion always before our eyes.68 Wild discusses Jesus’ own feelings. Because he was also human, he was moved. He expressed his grief when Lazarus died, but he did not fall into vice because of this affect. At the Last Supper, he was disturbed “because of the execration and obstinacy of Judas.” He says that Judas is the figure and type of the entire Jewish people.69 The clergyman admonishes his hearers to model themselves on Christ, who loved us more than himself. We must love our neighbors accordingly, not because the law obligates us to do so, but this charity must come from our hearts. Jesus, he notes, responded sweetly to Peter’s promise of loyalty.70 Wild seems to extend a model of Christian clerical behavior to his brothers of the cloth. But his admonitions pertain as well to those in the secular life. In opening the second large section of his published sermons, Wild urges his listeners to transfer their earthly affections to the heavens, their physical ones into spiritual, the temporal into eternal.71 Only here does he finally come to the agony of Gethsemane, which other preachers might have placed earlier in their account. The Lord’s suffering is fearsome and includes, he says, sadness, fear, and the gravest anguish.72 His bloody sweat reveals the extremity of his anxiety.73 When the throng arrives to take him captive, Wild explores the mentalities of the participants. He regards Judas’s betrayal with horror. He holds these soldiers up as a cautionary example to his brothers: “Let us behave and strive to be true and not feigned friends of God and Christ!”74 He depicts and analyzes Jesus’ arrest at great length and with personal passion. He laments the “Apostles’”


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abandonment of their master.75 Fear, he says, will prevail in humans, including the Apostles, unless the Holy Spirit allows love to rise over it.76 He describes Christ’s physical travail in elaborate detail. Wild admonishes his brethren: Compare his persecutors with the one who endures the persecution. Let it be to you as if it is done before your eyes, and perceive these things with your innermost heart! For your Savior is ridiculed, your Master is spat upon, your Lord is struck, your God is handled more vilely than any other man upon the earth has been treated. Hear these things, understand these things, consider these things, any of you who are ignorant of their sin. For it is our sins, brothers, that have brought the Son of God here.77 This experienced confessor even takes his colleagues to task in case they should handle the sacraments unworthily, even “with polluted hands.”78 He is referring here to masturbation. As Wild’s account moves forward, Judas hangs himself and spills his intestines. “O Christian,” he exclaims, “Do not be led astray by money!”79 He rages afresh at the Jews, who in his story are themselves raging. The crowd had been for Jesus such a short time before, but now, persuaded by impious ones, they seek his death!80 The devil is at work! As the Lord begins the route to Calvary, Wild exhorts, “God engraves upon your heart the memory of his Passion. Beg for mercy from the Lord and in a most ardent spirit pray for all Jews, pagans, heretics, and sinners [of both sexes], that God the Father and Creator of all things may extend his mercy and grace to those who are able to turn away from their infidelity and toward the faith, from impious lives to piety.”81 On the surface of things, this is a most generous sentiment. It is hardly one that Wild expected to see fulfilled. He returns to the theme of the just punishment of the Jews and all their children. Wild reaches the pinnacle rhetorically as an accompaniment to Christ’s attaining the crest of Golgotha. “Now we arrive at the height of the Passion. He did not dread to bare his heart to all, so that, naked, we might attain the presence of God.”82 “O heaven, earth, sea,” he wails, “You have nowhere seen a sadder spectacle!”83 He himself is shaken. His demonstration is both self-expression and attempt to move his audience. In deconstructing the seven last words of Christ, he dwells upon Mary’s love and pain. He sees in “Woman, behold your son!” an expression of Jesus’ own filial affection for his adoring, completely virtuous mother. Wild does not find the label “Woman” cold or detached; on the contrary. In analyzing “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” the preacher finds that the Son of God speaks entirely from his human nature. The Redeemer

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needed to take on even human despair in order to save humankind from that sin, too. Only in experiencing such extremity can he overcome it, just as he took on “cold, heat, hunger, thirst, fear, trembling, horror of death and hell, desperation, death, [and] hell itself.” He went through everything that the sinner deserves.84 In concluding this lengthy series, Wild urges his “dearest brothers” to have the entire Passion engraved upon their memories and ever before their eyes. They should meditate upon it incessantly. Our hearts, he insists, should melt as we recall those wounds, that blood, that suffering, that death.85 Johannes Wild’s and Heinrich Helm’s paths might have crossed in Cologne, where Helm, an Observant Franciscan, preached for a time. He transferred to Saxony, launched polemics against Luther and Martin Bucer, and ended up as a councilor of Duke Heinrich II of Braunschweig as this ruler attempted to return his lands to Catholicism. The archbishop of Cologne disseminated Heinrich’s sermons in printed form as a model of effective preaching to the clergy within his archdiocese. Helm had clearly preached the Passion sermons, for he refers to “his hearers.” He opens with a prayer for the illumination of people’s hearts and the inflammation of their feelings (affectus) through his labors.86 His first attentions are to rampant sin, in starkest contrast with God’s irrepressible love for his children. But the Jews have rejected God. Helm is outspoken in his contempt for members of that faith, and I shall return to his treatment in a separate chapter. Yet it is important to know that the theme recurs here, frequently and in violent tones. In the cross, he declares, are all the storehouses of wisdom and the knowledge of God. He lists the twelve fruits of contemplating the Passion.87 They are more plentiful—he refers to Albertus Magnus on this subject—than living for one year on bread and water, reading the entire Psalter, or flagellating oneself until bloody.88 Like others before and after, Helm inquires into Christ’s sweating blood. Blood itself is a substance tied to emotional subjects. Jesus was fully man as well as God, and he sweated in his human nature. “But the effusion [of blood] with sweat was a miracle performed by Christ above nature.” It demonstrates his inestimable and incomprehensible anxiety and the magnitude of his suffering and grief.89 Curiously, in light of the Reformation, with which Helm was all too acquainted, he does not hesitate to speak publicly about “the treasury of most blessed predestination and election, established before the world.” None of the predestined, he assures his hearers, will be lost.90 Judas’s treachery inspires Helm to torrents of invective, to which he returns throughout his sermons. Likewise, the disciples’ disappearance was outrageous. He drives it home with his accusing questions: “Where was Peter? Where was John? Where was James the Younger? Where was Thaddeus? Where was Thomas? Where was Bartholomew?”91 But he ever returns to the Jews.


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Pilate’s sin was less than that of the Jews. Helm vividly depicts their affronts to Christ’s body. He contrasts the Messiah’s saliva-covered face with the fact of who he was: “the splendor of the paternal glory, the mirror without flaw, the sun of justice, the emanation of divine brightness, the radiance of eternal light, the true light of the world.”92 In the end, when Christ is nailed to the cross, all of his countless wounds are renewed. “They reopen all his wounds, heaping pain upon pain and wound upon wound.” This produced, he says, much greater suffering than the initial flagellations.93 The general derision and blasphemy of the onlookers along with the executing soldiers does not cease. Yet this cross and its occupant are the “key to heaven” and the “throne of grace”;94 and Jesus could pray, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”95 It would hardly be practicable to provide enough quotations from Helm’s Passion sermons to indicate the density of this preacher’s vituperation. This feature, while present in every Passion homily, is most prominent here. It constitutes a central element in Helm’s verbal campaign to arouse a visceral response from his audience. He does not, however, devote the ardency to Mary that other preachers had and would. He states, in fact, that Mary is one with Christ in spirit, and that he lives in her; but that she is not coredemptrix. Jesus did not require the help of any mortal.96 Neither Wild nor Helm matches Wann in the explicit, urgent, repetitive call to weep. Nevertheless, their emotional involvement in the story they tell is evident. They follow an established pattern of reiteration and embroidery that targets the hearts of those who hear them or who later read their published sermons. No aspect of the Passion is indifferent, nor is it presented in a detached way. Personal involvement is virtually the duty of every pious Christian, and the preachers imply that by believers’ identification with their Lord’s suffering, they help to avail themselves of the benefits of his anguish. Further, through their ardor as by means of their rhetorical style, the preachers reveal their own commitment. Their fervent example makes, they seem to hope, their arguments all the more irresistible. If audiences stand or sit impassively, the clergymen occupying the pulpits have clearly failed. Those Protestant divines who, looking back and around, accused Catholic preachers of seeking above all else to move their listeners to paroxysms were in a technical way not wrong. Yet the tears were not an end in themselves.

Post-Tridentine Preachers and New Orders I have said already that late-medieval Catholicism was rich with choices. What divided sixteenth-century Protestants from Catholics (as well as Protestant

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groups among themselves) were their respective decisions in favor of different precedents. All were continuous with aspects of fifteenth-century beliefs and practices—but with different beliefs and practices. As far as Passion homiletics is concerned, Catholics confidently, enthusiastically carried on a rhetoric of condemnation—condemnation of oneself for inveterate sinning, and condemnation of Christ’s tormenters for what they put him through. These two went hand in hand and reinforced one another. Either one separately, but most assuredly both together, ought to produce a dramatic, outwardly evident breaking of the heart. The sorrow of repentance and the compassion borne of empathy could hardly avoid resulting in tears. Although these tears could be seen by the Protestant opposition as good works, effective by the principle ex opere operato, which most of them rejected, in reality the Church desired not just the melting of the heart but a rectification of the life-course, such that the penitent contemplator of the suffering Christ could reflect the love of God in her life as lived. Nonetheless, with these qualifications or not, Protestant theologians regarded this theology in the aggregate as one of justification by works. Although the Council of Trent spelled out principles to be adhered to and measures to be taken in reforming Holy Mother Church as it was structured, a new monastic idealism was abroad. As in the thirteenth century, when the triumph and the need of Catholicism precipitated the emergence of the mendicant orders, so now, in the face of new challenges, concerted idealists lent their energies to missionizing the masses. Those very masses regarded themselves as already Christian and if asked might have noted, based on news from newly explored corners of the earth, the need for actual conversion of aboriginals from their native religions to Christianity. The perspective of the age was, however, that nominal Christians, too, needed to be brought to proper understanding, upright moral life, and heartfelt identity. Europe’s residents themselves required conversion. The medieval Church had accommodated people’s sinfulness and lukewarm, culturally integrated faith. Now, a new utopian spirit reigned in princely, magisterial, and ecclesiastical hearts—whether also secretly motivated by hopes of political and economic gain—and it was not inclined to compromise. At least as far as Europe was concerned, the era of easy syncretism was past. Secular clergy, too, shared in this quest for order and conversion; in pursuit of these monastically oriented goals, they, too, served on the homiletic front lines. Bernd Moeller has written of the Lutheran Reformation as a “new monasticism,” but of course this insight pertains every bit as much to earlymodern Catholicism as to Protestantism.97 The Catholic priests whose sermons we possess, like those in every creed, are likely to have been extraordinary.98 Kaspar Franck (1543–1584) was a Saxon and Lutheran who early distinguished


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himself in the evangelical faith but then converted to Catholicism in Ingolstadt in 1568. He became rector of the University of Ingolstadt and took a Ph.D. in theology.99 It would appear that he presented his Passions sermons at or near the court of the Bavarian dukes in Munich, for the title page of one edition refers to him as court preacher there.100 He writes in the preface to the 1576 edition that he thinks new preachers may be able to use his printed collection as the basis of their own preaching.101 Once again, then, we encounter a clergyman who allowed his homilies to be published as a model and aid to his fellows. Franck begins his Passion, Das Leyden vnnd Sterben vnsers Herren Iesv Christi with five guidelines for contemplating the Passion. First, he advises, pay close attention to Christ Jesus, God and man, who suffers miserably. Second, in your mind, experience the inner and physical martyrdom of the Son of God. Third, consider the reasons why Christ suffered such gruesome pain. Fourth, bear in mind the fruit and usefulness of the Passion. Finally, with great diligence follow after Christ and make yourself a participant in his suffering and death.102 The fifth point surely includes making oneself, through latter-day discipleship and imitation, a beneficiary of the atonement; this admonition can be fulfilled on two levels. The former Lutheran specifically defends the Church’s practice of surrounding the worshiper with tangible, visible images of the agonized Lord. The Church, he says, promotes the memory of the Passion “at all times and every time by means of singing and ringing [bells], reading and preaching, painting and pictures, carvings [statuary or relief ] and [flat] renderings, inside and outside of churches, presented to us everywhere.”103 This is also done “to inflame and illuminate our feeble, idle, lazy, cold, and dark hearts with the fire of God’s love.”104 The devout must truly feel with their Redeemer, and they should recall that part of the Apostles’ creed that speaks of Christ’s having suffered: so that with devotion and fervor we consider, and with pain and weeping we weigh, how our Creator and Savior hung on the cross for our sake, with a wounded heart, with wretched appearance, with afflicted senses, with a mouth that called out in an ardent and pitiable voice, with a pale countenance, with sickened limbs, with bleeding wounds, with stretched-out arms, with strained blood vessels, with deathly color, with weeping eyes, and with bowed head.105 This preacher’s vocabulary is designed to arouse, as his description of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane bears witness. Here Franck draws on the venerable tradition of stressing Christ’s inner state. We must take on his frame of mind: “We too should save our happiness for another time and spend and pass the

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day when the Son of God suffered on account of our great and heavy sins, in [our own] mourning, suffering, and weeping.”106 If Adam grieved over Abel for one hundred years, how much more, Franck asks, should we weep over Christ, especially in view of the fact that we brought him to this end.107 By experiencing this sentiment, we may be led to drive out of our hearts “all sin, anger, arrogance, greed, hate and envy, lewdness, gluttony and drunkenness, laziness and other evil desires and longings.”108 The best outcome will be the opposite of those feelings that we have endured in contemplating the Lord’s agony: “consolation, joy, and peace.”109 Just as Lutheran and Reformed preachers directed harsh critique at Catholics, so Franck, as a representative of his papist contemporaries, advised his hearers to observe the differences between themselves and Protestants and to shun members of “sects.” Such rhetoric on any and all sides was designed to arouse antipathy and rejection. “How will then our new sects endure, which not only annoy good-hearted Christians with their gobbling of meat and above all their invented church reform, but which, beyond that, deal disobediently, stubbornly, and despitefully against Christ, the statutes of the Apostles, and the commands of all Christendom in general?”110 He attacks and distorts for purposes of attracting ridicule the Protestant doctrine of justification by faith, with, as he sees it, its gratification of individuals’ wish to be spared the difficult path of self-control and subjecting themselves to Church discipline: “Each person is [they say] created with his conscience as he [God] ever and eternally desires; whether he [the person] lives in sin or shame; nevertheless, he should firmly and without any doubt believe that he is already saved and in heaven, [ for] it cannot lack to him. Yes, just like a cow in a mouse-hole!”111 For his part, he asserts that the Holy Trinity decided that Christ, the eternal Son of God, should be born a man into the world in order to save humankind.112 We take it that this was after the Fall. He affirms God’s omnipotence, which includes his liberty not to damn anybody—his wish would be to save everyone.113 He opines later on that, as Saint Bernard says, every sin will be weighed and assessed “according to the counsel of [its committer’s] heart . . . and recompense meted out accordingly.”114 Clearly, Franck is attempting to lay out for his hearers a rational and convincing doctrine of atonement. He intends this as a message of consolation in the midst of condemnation. He comes back to the rectitude of the Church from time to time, reaffirming each time that “there is only one church, one heaven, one God, one way to salvation.”115 Franck places himself squarely within the ranks of those who find profound value in lingering on Christ’s inner torment as he prays in Gethsemane. “He stoops and bends himself like a poor little worm, and he enters into such anxiety and fear that his heart in his body melts, all his veins and nerves want


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to spring apart, [and] his bone-marrow dries up (verschmachtet).” He sweats “great bloody sweat that runs together,” and he looks “as though he had pressed out red wine.”116 We are, he proclaims, worms and stinking bags of maggots, and we should imitate the bodily positions of Christ in praying, by kneeling and falling on our faces.117 In his catechism, Peter Canisius, the Dutch Jesuit who played a prominent role in reconverting parts of southern Germany, also urged those who were learning the faith to adopt postures that expressed the worshiper’s sought-after attitude.118 Franck proceeds from Christ’s interior torment to depict every possible assault and wound. He goes intermittently over and over them. Peter denied the Master because a woman inveigled him to do so, just as a woman precipitated the entire human race into perdition.119 He heaps up the verbiage of extremity, as when he describes Golgotha as “a stinking, unclean, horrifying, and abominable place, to which he was led to his most extremely infamous death.”120 Not even the “Turks and Tartars” made their victims carry their own instrument of execution!121 On the cross, Jesus was “accursed and execrated before God as the most abominable abomination (grewlichste grewel) and object of derision (aβ ) that anyone could find.”122 His listing, Franck tells his audience, brings him himself to tears: “I howl from the mourning of my heart!”123 Jesus met every affront “with patience, gentleness, and silence—which we should imitate in driving hate, envy, contrariness, and other emotions out of our hearts.”124 The clergyman prays, “May the unclean spitting in your holy face drive fleshly desires out of all of us! May the contempt for your dignity extinguish in us all yearning for temporal honor!”125 Christians should feel with their Savior in order not to feel, which is to cast out the evil sentiments that they harbor within them. Empathy with Christ displaces sinful feelings. The preacher makes a connection between Judas’s abdomen bursting open and a similar story, drawn from the work of church historian Socrates Scholasticus, of this having happened to the fourth-century heretic Arius, who poured his intestines into the filth (Kott).126 In ending his series, Caspar Franck offers a résumé of his essential call to Christians to share Christ’s agony. We must give our hearts entirely to Christ, who asks only that of us. He calls on his listeners to imitate the Virgin, whose behavior he has repeatedly portrayed. With another parting attack on Protestants and their “impregnated nuns,” he intones to Christ, “Give us grace so that our unrepentant, hard, and cold hearts may . . . be moved, softened, and inflamed [ for purposes of ] considering and deeply imagining your healing death and suffering.” Only by this means, he says, may we be washed in the blood and water that flowed from your side.127 Franck’s convictions and modes of expression bear close resemblance to sermons across the spectrum of early-modern Catholic preaching, whether

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inside or outside of religious orders. As observed, this is the chief innovation of the sixteenth century: that a larger cohort of Church representatives now impressed these verbal images (in accompaniment with other media) on the whole of the body of believers. Conveying the ideals of contemplating the Passion became more than the cathartic ritual of a few at Easter time; it developed into a campaign to mold devotions during the entire year. One of Franck’s direct contemporaries—and a man who attempted to remain anonymous in the published versions of his postils—Jacob Feucht (d. ca. 1580), a member of the Bamberg chapter and a regular preacher— anticipated the creation of stations of the cross. That is, he tailors his Passion sermons in a way that invites his hearers even more directly than Franck and late-medieval preachers to accompany Christ physically on a fixed route to Calvary. Indeed, he names his sermon collection Christian Pilgrimage (Christliche Wallfahrt).128 Given the probable 1576 first edition of this work, Feucht’s introduction is somewhat surprising in that it hints at a physical harbinger of the widespread stations of the cross still to be built:129 As I prepared today . . . nine sermons on the story of the holy Passion of Jesus Christ, I was reminded of the Christian and wholly praiseworthy custom of years ago among Catholic Christians, still observed in our own times, that at the time of the holy suffering of Jesus Christ, on Maundy Thursday and Good Friday, or on holy Easter Saturday, with greatest devotion, either . . . they would visit nine churches or . . . nine altars, in remembrance that the Lord Christ in his ordeal was led by the Jews nine times back and forth. At each place, church, or altar, with particular sympathy and deepest thanksgiving, they would contemplate what Christ our Lord suffered on that path or course.130 His booklet is published in small format, “just like a little prayer book,” so that the devout may carry it with them in case they should walk from place to place and think on Christ’s agony.131 He urges the faithful to kneel down in nine different spots, even at home before a crucifix, and to do this all year long (not simply before Easter), remember the Passion, and say a number of Our Fathers, Hail Marys, and Credos, in order to receive Christ’s good recompense, here and in eternity.132 Feucht provides another example of the effort to move his listeners by any rhetorical means, including describing torments that were not biblically attested. In the Garden of Gethsemane, when Christ is taken captive, he is bound so tightly that blood runs out from underneath his fingernails. The soldiers drag him through the filthy brook of Cedron like a dog.133 He uses the technique of heaping up a list of the abuses that he sees the Jews as having


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afflicted on Jesus: “striking, hounding, kicking, ripping, plucking, scraping, pulling.”134 He adopts the first person singular and has Jesus give his own horrific account: If I were to tell you about even half the number of kicks, of blows with sticks and clubs, fists and open hands that I endured in this violence—yes, if I were only to tell you how often I fell down in the course of this hunting, ripping, grinding, and being knocked to the ground, with what great difficulty (because my hands were bound) I stood up again, and how I fell down again immediately—you would not be able to hear this without heartfelt pain and without howling and crying.135 Feucht urges the Christian to confess, “See, O Christ, my only consolation, how horrified I am, how deeply affected I am!”136 When the crown of thorns is applied to Jesus’ head, the cleric observes that it has huge thorns, which the lackeys pound into his brain with a stout pipe-like reed. Pieces of his brain come out and mingle with his blood. He tells his audience that he cannot depict this scene to them without great pain in his heart.137 Feucht points out to the women before him the stark contrast between them—with their jewelry, their silk, and their curled hair—and the Savior.138 As Jesus bears his cross up the path out of Jerusalem, Feucht has him say to those who hear the sermon, “If you would only believe one one-hundredth of my suffering and take it to heart! I think it is impossible for all of you to observe me so much and so long without feeling particular and severest pain, without falling unconscious, and without howling, weeping, and lamenting.”139 Feucht concludes his devotional handbook with separate prayers to each of Christ’s wounds: “I greet you, O healing wound of the left hand of my dear Lord Jesus Christ; I beg you to take from me everything in me that is wrong-side-out [links] and unright.”140 This tendency to separate and address wounds and body parts individually will become every more pronounced during the seventeenth century. It was not entirely absent during the late Middle Ages. Two of the orders whose devotion lent itself to the goal of internal conversion were the Society of Jesus and the Capuchin Friars Minor (1525), the latter an offshoot of the Franciscans. Beginning during the second half of the sixteenth century and on through the seventeenth century, both of them had representatives in German-speaking lands, and these clergymen saw merit in making preaching available to humble and great alike. No doubt, they encountered tensions with diocesan leaders as they moved through Europe, but the secular clergy could ultimately also regard the brothers as offering other shoulders on which to unload some of the burdens of the more rigorous requirements

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of the cure of souls. In any case, princes and bishops often gave them little choice.141 The Society of Jesus chronologically preceded the Capuchin fathers of St. Francis in their work within the Holy Roman Empire. Too, the Jesuit’s took a multipronged approach to the work of conversion; as we know, their methods extended well beyond preaching. Their grammar schools dotted the land, just as they did in Italy and Iberia.142 In those schools, as an aid and incentive to formal instruction, they enlisted the boys as actors in what grew into the veritable genre of Jesuit school-drama.143 Francis Xavier introduced the plays of Terence into his schools in Goa in 1545.144 At the same time, the new order was willing to draw on Jacob Sturm’s methods for success in Strasbourg.145 More than one scholar has concluded that Jesuit theater drew on sermons, and in particular the exempla or brief illustrative stories that popular preachers used to make their abstract moral points directly meaningful to the simple laity.146 Just as much, their enactments derived from the late-medieval miracle and morality plays. The adornment of Jesuit sanctuaries and the liturgy that was enacted within them were also designed to foster the devotions of the faithful. All media were to lift the eyes—and more to the point, the eyes of the mind—upward and facilitate meditation upon higher objects. Drama in all its forms was not lost on those who designed ritual and its concrete milieu during the incipient baroque era. It remains to be explored in detail just how and to what extent the instructions of the Milanese archbishop, Carlo Borromeo, for the churches in his own archdiocese may have seeped northward, into what was in any case esthetically and devotionally a receptive environment, and helped to mold the liturgical context of preaching in the Holy Roman Empire. John Headley has prepared the ground.147 If for no other reason, Borromeo was prominent because of being the nephew of Pope Pius IV and being raised to the purple at the noncanonical age of twenty-two. But the beneficiary of this instance of nepotism was also pious, clever, and hard-working. He seemed to embody the reinvigorating militancy of the Church. He exerted himself to win at least the Swiss northerners to obedience to the prelacy. By means of diplomacy, and particularly by spending nearly two years in Switzerland himself, he made a modicum of progress.148 But he did not succeed in having a priestly seminary established in Switzerland itself and had finally to be content with, first, the expansion of the Collegium Germanicum, and, second, the creation of a Collegium Helveticum in 1579 in Milan. Despite the limited nature of Borromeo’s success, his influence north of the Alps was probably greater than he realized. Certainly Italian styles were the mode of the day, and the successor of St. Ambrose laid down lavish standards for the decoration of sanctuaries within his administration,


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which the archbishop thought were only suitable backdrops for the sanctity of the Mass.149 Such improvements obviously included the great, raised baroque pulpits that spread throughout Catholic Germany. The Society of Jesus undertook very extensive beautification of its own churches, and its tastes, too, reflected the order’s ties to Italy.150 Peter Canisius (1520–1597), arguably the most influential Jesuit at work within the Holy Roman Empire in the second half of the sixteenth century, was inspired as a university student by the Jesuit pioneer Pierre LeFebvre.151 As a mature cleric, Canisius left postils for the clergy to use as guides when they preached. These, however, were but an infinitesimal part of the sermons he actually gave; he preached two to three times a day. With the “thunder of the Word,” he allegedly moved his hearers in Ingolstadt, Vienna, and elsewhere to floods of repentant tears.152 In looking back on his formative years, Canisius recalled the heat and tears of his own devotion.153 In discussing Holy Week and meditation on the Passion, he encourages venting one’s sadness. He jabs at the Lutheran emphasis upon deriving comfort from the Crucifixion: “Those people err who observe the suffering of the Lord for their own and others’ consolation, and not also as an example to inspire imitation.”154 We should, he says, mourn with the afflicted Mother of Christ under the cross and with the weeping and crying disciples. For our grief will ultimately be turned into joy, and we will rejoice fully in the cross of our Lord. In the meantime, the nails of his hands and feet should pierce our flesh, and our concupiscence should hang upon his cross.155 Likewise, in his treatise on the dormition of the Virgin, he insists that holy people, when they reflect on godly things or “along with St. Augustine hear singing and the speaking of holy praise,” like Mary under the cross, will not be able to keep from “weeping and shedding tears.”156 Canisius is representative of another late-medieval and early-modern Catholic devotional feature: the adoration of separate body parts of especially Christ, but to a lesser extent of Mary. This is, of course, also related to the perceived sanctity of relics, which were not just body parts but also objects, especially personal or tormenting objects that may have touched the saintly body itself.157 Canisius’s prayer to Jesus’ body seems to personify the physical remains, separate them even from the psychic aspects of the Redeemer’s human nature, and to accord them sacred potency of their own. He employs the device of anaphora to great effect: Be greeted, O Body, worthy of honor by angels and humans! In your most lively and blossoming age, you have been afflicted with the most gruesome punishments by Jews and heathens. Be greeted, O Body that has been mangled by whips, pierced by thorns, bruised by blows

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to the jaw, bored through with nails, pierced with the lance, raised up in the air on the cross, the juice pressed out like the noble grape in the winepress. Be greeted, O Body that was given as expiation for all people’s sins and sacrificed upon the altar of the cross, so that God might smell the sweet fragrance of the sacrifice. Be greeted, O Body, whose senses and members each underwent its own and particular torture—which accomplished that that sacrificed Lamb became as wisdom to us, and righteousness and healing and salvation. Be greeted, O Body, which, although it was most profoundly humiliated, pressed down, tormented, and consumed by death, also returned from death to life and reached the highest level of honor and glory; elevated over everything that lives in heaven and on and under the earth, where it remains and at the same time is prayed to.158 A Jesuit preacher and polemicist (also a promoter of witch persecution) of the following generation was Georg Scherer (1540–1605). In one homily that has been preserved, Scherer notes that Jesus suffered far more than the martyrs and far more than any other human being would. “For Christ was of a subtler, tenderer, and purer complexion, having been formed by the Holy Spirit out of the most extremely pure little drop of blood of the highly praised Virgin Mary. He is supposed to have been more sensitive than others.”159 Jesus was denied the mitigations that martyr-saints enjoyed. Scherer reviews the thoroughness with which Jesus was abused and wounded—and yet reviews is the proper word: Scherer’s sermons are not as packed with the detail of suffering as others’ were. He sums it up, including a number of nonscriptural embellishments such as the dragging through the brook of Cedron.160 His assumption that hearers’ hearts should break is, however, the same. “Why don’t our hearts want to let themselves soften, break, and split apart? Scindite corda vestra et non vestimenta vestra! Rip apart your hearts, says our Lord God in the [Book of ] Prophet Joel [Joel 2] and not your clothing!”161 In drawing conclusions from Jesus’ anxiety and sweating of blood on the Mount of Olives, Scherer insists, “Whoever will not here fruitfully weep and be anxious on account of his sins, that person will not be assisted by Christ’s fear and grief in the garden. Instead he must go to that place where one howls and gnashes his teeth in vain.”162 Scherer definitively rejects the Protestant position on displaying emotion on hearing the details of the Passion: Some fanatics (Schwermer; he means Protestants) of our day have suggested that it is improper and sinful to weep in contemplating the suffering and death of Christ and to bear him heartfelt sympathy. They infect [the faithful] and bandy it about that the Catholic preachers used


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to go there (hingehen, to this subject?) solely for the purpose of moving the people to weeping and wailing. And that one who arouses much crying in the church was held to be the best Passion preacher. In these swarmers’ [the cognate translation is evocative] opinion, this has to be a great mortal sin. By contrast, [they regard it] as proper and well done if on Fridays—yes, even on Good Friday during Holy Week, when one holds a commemoration of the Passion and the suffering of Christ— someone puts on the greatest banquet and party, plays music, jumps around and dances, [and] is completely drunk (voll vnd toll [sic]). To this I must reply and demonstrate with certain arguments, that believing Christians do not sin when they show pity for the crucified Son of God and lament and weep over his death.163 Those who are aware of the popularity of Neostoicism in early-modern intellectual circles may wonder whether such a philosophical program of impassivity was compatible with the ardor that preachers, among them highly educated intellectuals, enjoined upon the masses to whom they spoke. Indeed, it was not. The revivalist qualities of the day depended upon homileticians’ eliciting deep emotion from their audiences. Outer expressions were both to foster and to verify inner convictions; neither element in this reciprocity was dispensable. The German Jesuit Jacob Bidermann (1578–1627), in his play, Cenodoxus, sive Doctor Parisiensis, based upon a Faustian theme and first performed in Augsburg in 1602, specifically attacks the Stoicism of the Flemish humanist Justus Lipsius (1547–1606). Bidermann had absorbed Neostoicism from his own instructor and from reading Lipsius’s De Constantia.164 Ironically, as a young man, Lipsius had attended a Jesuit college, but his father removed him to ensure that he did not join the order. Although the outlook of the ancient Hispano-Roman Seneca appealed greatly to learned men, princes, and magistrates, and no doubt played a part in those groups’ attempts to impose tranquil and obedient behavioral norms upon the general population, Catholic preachers sought spiritual arousal.165 In Cenodoxus, Bidermann has the rationalist, puffed-up, self-serving protagonist seem to be good. This behavior is only for show. On his deathbed, he breaks down and weeps while making his final confession, which is designed to move those around him as well to tears.166 But Christ is not deceived and denies him pardon.167 The message from the stage and from the pulpit was that feelings must be genuine; they should also be transforming. These very preachers, however, certainly advocated docility in worldly relationships upon those very people whom they strove to bring to sobbing. They regarded transports of tears over the Passion as facilitating rather than destabilizing decorous behavior outside the church.

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The Seventeenth Century, Age of Homiletic Maturity The seventeenth century is an era of Catholic homiletic maturity. As during the late sixteenth century, the combined media of catechism, liturgy, decoration, drama, and sermon accosted the layperson on every side, through every sense. The differences in content between plays depicting the Passion and sermons devoted to that subject can be slight, and the dramatizations could occur in churches as the most suitable spaces.168 One of the great Jesuit pedagogical dramatists was Andreas Brunner (1589–1650), a native of Tirol. Brunner served as professor of moral theology and preacher in Dillingen and was then called to Munich to work on a history of Bavaria. He fell victim to Swedish occupation during the Thirty Years’ War and spent some years in prison in Augsburg. For twelve years, from 1637 to 1649, he preached in Innsbruck and put on the Passion plays that would appear in 1684, after Brunner’s death, as an anthology entitled Dramata Sacra (Sacred Dramas, Or a Heart-Moving Stage, upon Which, as a Special Comfort and Refreshment for All Christian Souls, in Part the Holy Suffering of Christ, in Part Also Other Memorable Stories Are Presented by Speaking Persons in German Verses).169 In the same pattern as Paul Wann, Brunner begins with the sorrow of Mary Magdalene, assumed to be the woman who anointed Christ’s feet at dinner in Bethany. The poet advises her:

Follow my advice and you will pass the test: Let your tears of penitence flow. Think of what Christ endured, Which came as though from your own workshop. .................... Weep for me, and weep for yourself— But more for yourself than for me: God suffers for you. Hear, sinner, hear! Let your tears flow because of that. More than that, you yourself cause God’s pain. Cry, cry, you must surely pay for this.170

This theme builds an intermittent chorus throughout the “lessons,” as Brunner labels the first seven plays. When Christ receives the crown of thorns, the poet combines physical elaboration beyond the scriptural account, with further incitement to break down:


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The thorns penetrate his skull; Should this unheard-of torment Not pierce my very soul? My bodily heart not break?171 Martha urges this “Soul,” the preceding speaker, to give in to its feeling: Weep, weep, my Soul, always weep and weep! I bid you to do nothing other than that Until a sufficiency of tears has softened your eyes. Say, does not your heart grow light? Do you not begin to fly? Have you tasted your tears properly? Do you not find comfort in that? Those who know this truth May well call them honey.172 The playwright adopts the mystical terminology of Christ as the soul’s bridegroom. As Jesus appears before Pilate, another Soul laments: Who can grasp this transformed image? Who can leave off sobbing? Flow, eyes, or tightly close! This scene steals my rest and peace; Who will open up and set in motion The fountain of my tears?173 In another scene, Christ’s mother informs a soul: If the sight of him doesn’t break your heart, Then when he speaks to you, Unless it’s stone, it will break apart.174 Mary Cleophas describes Christ’s nailing to the cross and utters lines that blend love and mystical devotion: The nails of his hands and feet Pierce you in the heart. Now they are sweet Because they dispense his blood. Lay the thorns too on your heart, And the burn of love will last that much longer. The fiery heart gives more pleasure; Spray it now and then with blood! That way you maintain the glow. No oil feeds the flames As well as the mingling of blood.175

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Seven “lessons” are followed by nine “secrets.” These lay out with even more minutiae the mishandling of Christ. The second of these refers to the atonement and why Christ had to suffer so.176 This central christological dogma never fades into nonexistence, but its presence is unobtrusive. Far more noticeable are the torments, such as those afflicted in the third “secret” by invented Jews with the names of Sedecias, Semei, Zambri, Semti, and Core.177 An executioner’s helper exclaims: Boy, bring me fresh rods and whips! This one is worn out and good for nothing. .................. Whoever doesn’t make two thousand wounds Can’t expect to stop for the night. .............. So make his body black and blue all over! Don’t give up! Spare no part of him!178 An angel laments: Today let all wail who are able! Even that person who has never wept, begin today! If today the world does not want to lament, It’s because it cannot bear any more suffering. Those who can moan, let them moan. Whoever doesn’t moan on this day can nevermore moan. Today tears from every source Should flow together. If all eyes overflowed, The water would create an ocean.179 Not surprisingly, then, Brunner’s younger fellow Jesuit, the preacher Philipp Kisel (1609–1681), calls the collection of his Passion sermons a drama (Schau-Spiel).180 The engraving at the front reveals the publisher’s, and likely also the prospective reader’s, awareness of the wider world: depicted, besides Christ with seven streams of blood (one per continent?) issuing from his side wound, are several apparent Europeans and also one Native American, one East Asian (possibly Chinese), and one Turk. The claim to universal validity for Christianity is itself not novel. We know relatively little about Kisel. He may have come from Fulda, for one of the title pages of his books includes the word fuldensi after his name. He may well have been a member of the Bamberg diocesan chapter and a preacher there. In one of his printed Passion sermons, he reminds his audience of what he had said the previous year on the same


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occasion.181 We see in his text that he, like his fellows, takes his cues on the Passion from the examples of his predecessors. He announces at the outset that he will labor assiduously to implant the image of the anxiety-ridden, bloodsweating Jesus in his listeners’ minds.182 He could, he notes, spend three or four hours preaching on each of the seven aspects of the Passion that he has selected, but time does not allow. He admonishes his audience for its horrific sinfulness: blasphemy, shameful adultery, thievery, arrogance, hate and envy, anger, “and all conceivable transgressions and misdeeds.”183 He rants at his hearers and lays claim upon his mediating function, “Oh, miserable, obdurate humanity! At this present moment, Jesus offers you his grace through me, an unworthy preacher!” But perhaps this chance will never come to you again! “Are you not afraid?” he asks.184 His listeners’ opportunity lies in feeling with Christ as he suffers on the Mount of Olives. “O, most troubled Jesus, we bear with you a painful sympathy; your difficult aversion [to what lies ahead for you] cuts through our hearts. With heaped-up, most humble, prostrate plea, we beg you most graciously to take up and accept the feeling and most humble inclination or affection of the souls that inwardly love you so much.”185 He describes Christ’s tormented appearance. We should be like children at their father’s deathbed and fall down before our Savior and press “countless kisses on his face, eyes, cheeks, lips, shoulder, heart, and feet.”186 Whereas Lutheran divines held up to their charges the consolation (Trost) of the atonement as they contemplated the Judgment of God, Kisel urges his hearers to comfort Christ. “Now we want to declare ourselves to be friends and comforters of Jesus Christ. With the most select flowers of our sweetness and virtue, we want to refresh and consolingly revive his anxious heart as it contends with death.”187 Kisel does not emphasize Christians’ comprehension of the marvel of the Redeemer’s atonement, but they must revise their lives as a help to this suffering Lord. They themselves must act. But simultaneously, the preacher stresses Christ’s intense love for sinners and his resolve to die for them, “even a thousand deaths if necessary.” The divine breast is inflamed for us.188 The Jesuit father takes up in turn each body part and considers its pores exuding blood: forehead, eyes, jaws, back, shoulders, arms and hands, chest, thighs, feet—“all his members flow with blood.”189 He lists forty reasons, mainly metaphorical, why Christ perspired blood, and his peroration takes twenty-two pages in print.190 Kisel tells his audience that preachers, too, are deeply affected by imagining the Passion for their congregations. He informs those before him that some preachers, ascending the chancel, are transformed into figurative torches. They burn with zeal. He wishes that he could fire people’s hearts as they do. Others weep as copious tears themselves as they arouse in those who hear them.

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Others are overcome, blood issues from their mouth and nose, and they die in the chancel. He yearns for such an end to his life. He sighs aloud, “If only such a death were conferred on and granted to me!”191 He has heard of “Spanish and foreign” preachers who set listeners’ hearts to beating and their eyes to weeping; with loud voices, those in attendance cry out their love to God and throw off their hatred and envy. They embrace their enemies right then and there and seal their peace with them: Although to be sure our Germany is not accustomed to such spectacles, and such have not come into observance up till now, I nevertheless demand from my hearers that they be sufficiently moved in their hearts and souls by the present sermon to beseech the suffering Jesus to [let them] be heated and enflamed with burning moans; and if not their eyes, that at least a flow of [inner] tears unlock their hearts.192 His hatred of the Jews is boundless. Jesus’ meekness and innocence contrasts, he thinks, radically with their nature.193 Inspired by the weeping women of Jerusalem and by the story of St. Veronica, Kisel addresses the women around him: “Oh, you daughters! Wipe away the blood and tears [of Christ] with the pure white linen cloth of your devoutly pure and unspotted heart[s]!” Wipe away the spittle that covers the Lord’s face, he urges them.194 Bodily liquids figure continuously in Kisel’s portrayal. Christ’s tormenters foam at the mouth. The cleric often refers to excrement and unspecified filth. The preacher’s attention to each blow, each welt seems inexhaustible. He interacts with his audience as they show some response to his invective: “I notice that you, my listeners, react against these audacious villains with displeasure and an angry mood. But oh, you godless people! You should more properly turn and bend your wrath and anger against yourselves and your own sin!”195 Kisel counts the blows to each of Christ’s body parts.196 He gives the total of strokes that were revealed to various saints: 5,465 or 5,466 to St. Brigitta; 5,000 to St. Bonaventure; 5,400 or 5,500 to St. Gertrude (probably of Helfta); 6,666 to St. Bernard (of Clairvaux); and 5,100 to the first-generation Jesuit Alfonso Salmerón.197 One soldier uses his iron glove to press the thorns on the crown deeper into Jesus’ brain. Again he turns to his predecessors for statistics: St. Bernard said that there were one thousand thorns in all, of which sixty-two penetrated his very brain-tissue. On injury to the brain, Kisel cites St. Laurentius, Justinianus, Peter Damian, Thomas à Kempis, and Bonaventure.198 Later, the preacher attributes to Petrus Calentinus the calculation that Christ shed 97,035 drops of blood overall.199 As Christ carries the cross up the hill on his back, Kisel is certain, he received yet further sores. The wood by its weight and motion ground the


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Savior’s flesh down to the shoulder-bone. Kisel agrees with an unidentified visionary that these wounds have been neglected and “should receive a specific devotion.”200 Father Kisel regards Good Friday as a time when committed enemies must be reconciled. In his fifth Passion sermon, he tells admiringly of a member of the Society of Jesus, Benedict Palmius, who preached in a foreign country (in Welschland), which appears later on to be Sicily and to involve French claims to that region. A clearly French nobleman, Sebastian Alenson (sic), was so moved by the vision of the agonized Christ that Palm conveyed to him that, deeply moved, he stood up and renounced his animosity. His turn of heart awed those who witnessed it.201 This hostility toward others is but one of the sins that beset society and that effective contemplation of the Passion will cause Christians to relinquish. Kisel wishes that he could preach so compellingly. The sermon must grasp and hold hearers’ imaginations, break their sinful wills, bring them to confess every trespass, and inspire them to live uprightly. Mary figures prominently in Kisel’s preaching. In this connection, I shall return to him in a later chapter. As a mid-seventeenth-century Catholic, Kisel does not devote the energy to excoriating Protestants that his sixteenth-century predecessors did. Yet demarcating language is sometimes audible. “The shameless Calvin,” he rants on one occasion, “was not ashamed to say that Christ, as he spoke the previously mentioned word [My God, my God] from the cross, was in despair—not to mention for now many other similar highly culpable blasphemies.”202 Philipp Kisel was every bit as focused on moving his hearers as his Capuchin confreres were. Although founded in 1525 (officially legitimated with a papal charter on 3 July 1528) and purporting to restore the pristine devotion exemplified by St. Francis of Assisi, the Order of the Capuchin Brothers of Saint Francis did not emerge into transalpine regions until 1574 (in Paris), when Gregory XIII lifted the prohibition on their working outside Italy.203 In contrast to the Society of Jesus, which virtually from its beginning displayed a willingness to fit into every niche that was available for consolidating and spreading Catholicism, the Capuchins were devoted to poverty, including poverty of appearance and relieving the misery of the impoverished, to continual prayer, and to preaching. Each brother wore the simplest of habits, carried a small (perhaps a foot- or foot-and-a-half-tall) crucifix in his hand, and walked from place to place. To distinguish themselves from the Observant Franciscans, they had more pointed hoods and wore full beards.204 They were to preach the Gospel and in particular the Passion of Christ with the utmost fervor, and they exhorted the people to take Communion frequently.205 They were not to cultivate eloquence but rather evangelical simplicity. Within the early order, tensions existed

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over whether contemplation or preaching should take priority. A Capuchin brother once preached before Archbishop Carlo Borromeo. Borromeo praised his ability but warned him to leave off controversy and abstraction and to present arguments that appealed to the heart and that nourished piety.206 Borromeo’s Council of Milan in 1579 laid down basic goals for preachers, whose readiness they judged to be in lamentable condition: to articulate the Word of God; to move people to seek pardon for sin; and to inspire them with an ardent desire to carry out in their daily lives what they had resolved, including in the household (famiglia).207 These standards affected the Capuchin brothers, too, who brought them with them into northern Europe. Their own Constitutions of Albacina (1535–1536) specified that the brothers must use simple, unadorned language, in accordance with the spirit of the Gospel. Perhaps reflecting St. Francis’s own ambivalence toward learning, the Capuchins looked askance at higher forms of learning. They favored the use of evangelical and other inspiring devotional texts. “The preachers are instructed not to carry numerous books with them.” Their textbook should be the cross, “without which all doctrine is empty and ineffectual.”208 “Sought-out [authorities], elaborate and affected words are not suited to the naked and humble Crucified One, but only bare, clear, simple, humble, and plain, but nevertheless godly speech that is inflamed and filled with love.”209 The structure of their sermons was elemental—mainly the statement of a theme, elaboration of it, and moral application.210 Reaching the emotions was paramount.211 The Passion and moral reform were thus at the center of the Capuchin plan. Nonetheless, those selected to preach did have to undertake essential theological training for a period of six (later seven) years. If they completed this course, they were then called preachers (predicatori).212 The very best of these were said “to turn their whole bodies into a tongue.” This ardor from the dais contrasted markedly with their outer appearance, which was to be starkly humble. On their feet, they wore only sandals, and they traveled exclusively on foot. Their pure and prayerful lives were to underscore the verities that they preached.213 Ideally, the predicatori confined their performance to half an hour, or on special occasions three-quarters of an hour. But brothers were known to extend their sermons to two or three hours.214 They so entranced their audiences, however, that in holding forth at length, the preachers may have responded to the expressed desires of the crowds in attendance. Although no course in homiletics existed, the preachers-in-training observed the examples of their seniors who were successful in moving the masses. Alfonso Lupo di Medina Sidonia (d. 1593), a prominent model, advised young preachers, when they ascended the pulpit, to commend themselves totally to God and to place themselves in


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the arms of the Lord “since he is the one who rules your spirit and your tongue.”215 The origin of the “forty-hour devotion” or “forty-hour prayer” is somehow connected to the early Capuchins. D’Ascoli thinks it began among the brothers in Milan between 1527 and 1537, and that the Barnabites, too, took part in it.216 It traveled with these missionary-preachers across the Alps and was firmly associated with them in the seventeenth century. Just what it was, however, remains uncertain. Except for dire emergencies and unusual events, its use was ordinarily confined to Holy Week as part of the spiritual exertion of that season. Whether it was one marathon service from Maundy Thursday through Good Friday, or whether it consisted of shorter but nevertheless quite long segments; whether it was made up of set prayers such as the rosary and/or involved intermittent preaching of “wake-up sermons” (Erweckungspredigten) by the Capuchins who led it; or whether there were regional or chronological variations—all these matters remain nebulous.217 Whatever form it took, both clerical presiders and participants had a sense of making a personal sacrifice in honor of the crucified Christ. It always concentrated on the Passion. In some settings, brief inspirational homilies must have focused attention on the torments of the Lord as he progressed from Gethsemane toward his death, rather in the way that longer sermons on successive days did and that stations of the cross would later on. A particular target of Capuchin preaching, whether in northern Italy or north of the Alps, was Protestantism—the brothers did not clearly distinguish between Lutheranism and Calvinism. It was thus a disaster for the order when Bernardino Ochino (1487–1565) apostasized. D’Ascoli, the Capuchin historian, tries to be fair to Ochino and to grasp his motivation. He speculates, “Ochino loved Geneva because it seemed to be a city of monks.”218 Ochino was an inspired preacher, and his desertion brought a cloud of suspicion upon this signal Capuchin enterprise. After several years’ abeyance, the order’s license to preach was restored in 1545.219 The Capuchins arrived in Switzerland in 1581; in Antwerp in 1585; in Innsbruck in 1593; in Salzburg in 1596; in Freiburg/Breisgau in 1599; and in Munich, Vienna, and Graz in 1600. On the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, there were 14,846 members in forty provinces worldwide.220 Their charisma lay in their studious imitation of Christ and of St. Francis, and in their single-minded efforts to effect Christian renewal or conversion in all whom they met. In Germany, those who preached were called concionatores and those who heard confessions confessarii; many who performed the one function also performed the other.221 These were also generally ordained as priests. At once rivals and fellows, they and the Jesuits most often acknowledged each other’s value in their

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common endeavor. In the Hildesheim cathedral after the restoration of Catholicism in 1643, the Jesuits preached in the mornings and the Capuchins in the afternoon.222 Lenten orators of either order strained themselves to make their listeners cry. Bruno von Freiburg (d. 1645) was himself overcome in the pulpit and “in a flood of tears had to interrupt [his sermon].”223 In truth, the order regarded the preacher’s being moved as an important ingredient in arousing an audience. The substance of his homily was to affect him, however. He was by no means to flail his arms about or display his vocal resourcefulness. This was showing off. But if such movement and intonation were the result of being overcome and were unavoidable, this was acceptable. Such sermonizing was described as modis mirabilis, pathetice, emphatice, or fervidis concionibus.224 Bruno of Freiburg (d. 1645) was said to have preached the Passion with his eyes closed and with intense fervor, until a flood of his own tears compelled him to interrupt his performance.225 The masses appear to have attended the sermons of both Jesuits and Capuchins in great numbers. Such attraction in an age of still-prevailing illiteracy and direct verbal exchange was nothing new: We recall the throngs, albeit exaggerated in their size, that traveled to hear Pope Urban II preach the First Crusade in 1095. We know from the unpredicted results that both nobles and commoners were present and deeply affected. Being moved was an entertainment of its own, for it lifted one out of the tedious mundane existence and lent heart to the weary in a threatening environment. Elites sometimes had motives of their own. The papal nuncio in the Cologne archdiocese, Antonio Albergati (1566–1634), wrote to Cardinal Scipione Borghese, nephew of Pope Paul V, in 1610 of his personal support for the forty-hour devotion, which, he regretted, the Teutonic Knights would not take part in.226 A year later, the nuncio writes of the advantages of bringing Capuchins who could preach in German in the Cologne cathedral as an aid to winning the populace.227 In this early period, there was a lack of German speakers in the order. They won converts “every day” from sin and from Lutheranism, nonetheless, by the ardor of their speaking.228 The brothers were reluctant to take on the sponsorship of the local fraternity of the Passion, however, presumably because they desired to stay unburdened by formal responsibilities in the world.229 For similar reasons, they tended to preach in the churches of others instead of founding their own.230 The Jesuits may have enjoyed greater success in this region by means of systematically teaching their catechism.231 Despite the Capuchin brothers’ self-effacement, an adequate sample of their sermons has come down to us in print. During the seventeenth century, they seized large audiences by the heart; this metaphorical organ was their target.


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Representative of his order is Donatus von Passau, about whom little is known except what is given on the title page of his published Passion sermons. According to it, Donatus was “a Capuchin of the Austrian province, cathedral and ordinary preacher, [and] superior at the [church of ] Mount Mary-Helper in Passau.”232 The introduction states that Donatus had preached in the cathedral for twenty-four years, under three successive prince-bishops. We may thus place the beginning of his career as a homiletician shortly after mid-century. He had actually preached each of the sermons collected here. He is atypical in having foregone itinerancy and having occupied an ongoing preaching position. The frontal engraving of Christ on the cross emerging from the heart of a rose complements the title image of the hundred-petaled rose blossom. Five streams flow outward from between the rows of depicted rose bushes, and these are labeled contemplation, compunction, union, compassion, and conformity. The introduction refers to Donatus as “a highly gifted master of plants,” meaning that his sermons caused spiritual roses to spring up in attendees’ souls. Donatus’s series, which must have been designed for the length of Lent, begins with encouragement to take the Passion seriously. The cleric quotes, and shares, a sentiment-laden utterance of St. Anselm: Ah, my God, I want no feet except those that seek Thee; I want no hands except those that serve Thee; I desire no knee except that which bends in prayer to Thee; I wish no tongue other than that which praises Thee; I desire absolutely no heart other than that which inwardly loves Thee, O dearest Jesus; I wish no life and existence other than for conforming myself entirely to Thee. Oh, Jesus! Jesus! Grant my desire through Thy bitter, painful suffering!233 He declares to his audience, “You must be moved by the suffering of this man, your Jesus!” He tells those in attendance that their tempers are hardened (verhartet). He offers them hope, nevertheless: “Oh, you sinful souls, because the best Jesus of all recognizes your insufficiency, he does not demand more of you than that you more often read this book of his most bitterly painful suffering with the most sympathetic feeling and [spiritual] pleasure; that you not forget his love and good deeds, but constantly preserve them in the thoughts of your heart.”234 He holds up as a model Saint Magdalena de Pazzi (1566–1607), a Florentine mystic nun, who, taking in her arms the image of the crucified Christ, “walked up and down in the cloister completely drunk with the wine of love, and called out in a loud voice, ‘O my Love! O my Love! O my Love! If I only had a voice like a clap of thunder that resounded not alone to the four ends of the earth, but also to the depths of hell and impressed upon every heart that you suffered out of love and that you are love alone!’” Donatus says that like her, he

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wishes that he, a poor sinner, possessed such a powerful voice that he could move everyone to pity for Christ in his Passion.235 The tongues of zealous preachers should be like fiery arrows of blood (feurige Bluts-Pfeil) discharged into listeners’ hearts by their godly words of might.236 The Capuchin draws on Gregory the Great in insisting on the poisonous nature of the brook of Cedron and Jesus, as he was dragged, having to drink from it. After describing the outrages inflicted on the Lord, he ends this homily with an emotive incitement of Christians to follow Christ in the midst of this ungodly horde: “On, on, follow closely, you Christian soldiers! Pursue him, for you are led by Leo of the tribe of Judah the Lion, of the tribe of Judah! Oh, you dear little fawn (liebe Hirschlein) . . . lay your heads, that is your thoughts, upon the divine little fawn. Let us follow Jesus, let us follow him, and you will not go astray, and you will get happily across the brook of all miseries, Amen.”237 This passage sounds spontaneous and unedited in the transition from voice to paper, and we can believe that these are close to Donatus’s words as he spoke from the pulpit. We perceive his fervent design to leave his hearers in a state of determination to orient their lives toward the tormented Christ. The clergyman repeats every assault upon Jesus. Each sermon represents a fresh attempt to break down his audience’s inhibitions. He contrasts Jesus’ tearful prayers in Gethsemane with the dry eyes of those to whom he speaks. “Who does not know that tears are the most eloquent orators, which are able to persuade the enraged God to grant pardon? Who does not know that tears are the loveliest little pearls . . . that bathe the eyes and are borne in the heat of love, regret, and pain; God holds these alone as worthy and valuable.”238 His technique is often to end his sermons with exhortation to feel. Having listed humans’ grossest sins, he concludes dramatically: Hurry! Hurry, you devout, penitent, and compassionate souls, to your troubled and moaning JESUS, lift him up from the ground with your own burning moans of love! Call out, each one of you, Ego, ego sum quae peccavi! I, I am the one who has sinned, not you, oh most innocent JESUS! Oh, my Redeemer, the burden of my sins, the weight of my offenses presses and weighs heavily upon you. . . . Lift from me this hellish load, and I promise you, O best, most mild, most merciful JESUS, that I shall henceforward carry no other weight and burden than your sweet yoke and light burden, namely the single, fiery, and constant love of you, O my dearest JESUS.” Amen.239 In describing Judas, Donatus employs another familiar method, that of heaping up the vocabulary of invective, which is simultaneously a language of heated feeling. “O dog! O beast! O rogue! O traitor! O villain!” he accuses.


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Picturing Judas as he exits the scene of betrayal, Donatus casts in his direction yet further opprobrium: “Farewell, O Judas, a man without humanity, a Christian without religion, O miserable and foolish tradesman. . . . Farewell, O false, accursed mouth, O insatiably greedy and furious eyes! O you viper-venomous arm! O diabolical heart!”240 This is but a sample; the preacher goes on at greater length. Blood figures even more prominently in this cleric’s rhetoric than in others’— although no preacher fails to exploit the topic in connection with the Passion. Blood is the essence of life; it signals intimate relatedness and utter commitment. Its shedding also represents torment and sacrifice. It persuades. Donatus calls Christ the Church’s “Blood-Bridegroom.” His purple robe is also a “marvelous battle-dress” in which the Lord goes out to meet the wild beasts of Pilate’s employ. These technical humans are “more wrathful than the unicorn, more bloodthirsty than the tiger, more furious than the lion, hungrier than the wolf, more intent on ripping apart than the bear, more immoveable than the elephant, more malicious than the basilisk. They were not content with mincing the flesh of the blessed Savior down to the bone, but they looked for new ways of wreaking their bloodthirstiness upon him.” They led him to a different location and stripped him again, thereby opening his wounds afresh, creating a new bloodbath and renewal of his deathly suffering.241 As Pilate agrees to free Barabbas and allow Jesus to be crucified, Donatus intones, “Spring apart in amazement, you thorn-proof hearts! Melt and flow apart out of love and pity, you devout and pious souls! Hear, hear the judgment!”242 As Jesus is led away to take up his cross, the preacher begs, “O you Christian souls, ascendite in montem domini, ascend the mountain of the Lord! Mourn, weep, and moan besides!”243 Donatus observes later on that weeping over our sins, which is so useful to our souls, comes from regret and pity, and from the gratitude that we owe Christ.244 As Jesus dies and darkness comes over the earth, the father harangues his hearers once again: Where are the compassionate Christian hearts? You have heard up till now of the heart-breaking torture-pains, the lethal sensitivity of the innocent Savior and Redeemer. Is your heart nonetheless still steel-firm and stone-hard and your mood still masked? So notice and perceive that reason, too, is a creature. All of nature is enraged and amazed out of sympathy for its Creator, out of bitterness and [a desire for vengeance] against those inimical creatures . . . yes, you stubborn, deluded, Egyptian bats, flying around in hellish darkness—you sinners, see and hear!245 The later sermons in this collection do not follow strictly in the scriptural order of events but deal with Mary’s grief or with miscellaneous episodes. Of interest

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is Donatus’s metaphor of Christ our Mother, who through his suffering bears us into eternal life. He likens Christ’s feelings of abandonment as he hangs on the cross to the pains of a woman in labor. His anguish in the Garden of Gethsemane was “pre-labor” (Vorwehe).246 A curiosity of the collective missionary endeavor of the Capuchins is the preaching of brothers who could not speak the language of their audiences. In the Rhineland, we hear of requests for specifically Germanophone preachers. In the early years of the order’s emergence north of the Alps, there was clearly a shortage of predicatori who spoke languages other than Italian. But even a century later, the charisma of Marco d’Aviano (1631–1699) was sufficient that he was allowed to undertake a preaching tour of the north. Indeed, he received credit in his own day for rousing the Viennese to beat back the Ottoman siege in the 1680s. Preachers orating in foreign tongues was not unheard of, either during the Middle Ages or in the early-modern period. Within learned circles, all men understood Latin. But the wider laity did not. Sermons directed at them may have been simultaneously translated. It appears, however, that d’Aviano’s rhetorical feats were successful simply because of the clearly comprehensible passion of his sermons.247 Bearing his miniature crucifix with him and holding it out to his audiences, calling out in a voice laden with emotion, gesturing his feelings in the manner of a mime, he left no doubt as to what he intended. He shouted out in his native language, “Io non so parlare Tedesco: confido peró nel Signore ch’egli toccherá i vostri cuori interiormente, gl’ammaestrerá gl’infiammerá e spezzeragli!”248 (I am not able to speak German. But I trust in the Lord that he will touch your hearts inwardly, will instruct them, inflame them, and shatter them.) He evidently did learn how to say, “I believe,” in each language-area and at a crucial point led his listeners in shouting, “I believe! I believe! I believe!”249 In Vienna on one occasion, he chanted, “Rosenkranz! Rosenkranz!” (Rosary! Rosary!) to the masses to encourage them to say the rosary regularly.250 In 1680, Brother Marco walked from Verona to Cologne and Dusseldorf, preaching at many sites along the way. In 1681, he continued his venture, extending his reach into Louvain, Mechelen, and Antwerp. In 1682, he preached in Innsbruck, Salzburg, and Vienna. In 1683, he was back in Austria, and in 1684, he included Buda, Pest, and Visegrad in his sweep. In 1685, he pressed yet farther to the east, and in 1687 went south to Mohacs, the scene of the Ottoman victory of 1526, which the Habsburgs had just reconquered. In 1689, he preached in Belgrade.251 Artists and publishers of the time have left us several pictorial renderings of him holding forth before veritable throngs—in the accompanying prose estimated in the tens of thousands.252 The broadsheet account of Marco’s visit to Augsburg leaves no doubt about his effects upon the people:


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Thereupon the blessed father spoke forth the ritual of penance and sorrow, and the true love of God above all else, which is genuine contrition. He did this with unspeakable zeal. The entire populace responded to him with bended knees and heartbreaking tears and crying out (Geschrey). They then received the holy blessing. And after this, many thousands of persons in one voice said five Our Fathers and Ave Marias in honor of the holy wounds of Christ.253 Marco’s preaching called for repentance and avoidance of Protestant heresy; this was the core of his message. He shouted out to the masses of Augsburg, “Oh, you suffering people who are worthy of tears! Convert [in Latin: convertere, in German bekehre], convert, convert totally to God! Convert, convert, convert to your God and Lord! Abandon error and confess for the sake of Jesus Christ the proper ancient path of the holy Catholic faith! With all my strength I cry out to you! Oh, most beloved, in your hearts hear my voice!”254 Marco d’Aviano called the people to feeling with feeling everywhere he went. Louis XIV held him under arrest for five days, possibly with the encouragement of Jesuits whose sway was threatened by the Capuchins or who simply resented the brothers’ popularity. D’Aviano was reputed to have attracted 150,000 people to hear him in Liège.255 At the same time, however, and as a result of Capuchin evangelism, 30,000 souls were said to have sought confession and Communion among the Jesuits.256 A contemporary Benedictine monk from the monastery of Kremsmünster, Simon Rettenbacher, wrote an ode to d’Aviano after the Christian defeat of the Turks at Vienna: Even if a singer strikes the harp louder In celebrating princes and generals, I am inspired only by Markus Still and pious. His poor gown moves me, the shivering cloak. With prayer he compelled the bands of Thracians. The double-headed eagle frightens, And perceives the peak of the bald mountain. The sign of the pale moon flees. The enemy trembles in retreat, Because he, our Markus, lifts his hands in blessing, Like Moses long ago. Because of him Europe conquers Asia’s pride.257

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Marcus d’Aviano did not leave us his Passion meditations. Nevertheless, his advocacy of affective piety is beyond contestation. His brother Capuchin and contemporary, Martin von Cochem (1634–1712), did write a series of forty Passion meditations and prayers, and these have survived.258 According to the author, these were designed as Lenten devotional guides, but they could as well have served as a structure for the famed forty-hour prayer of Holy Week and other pressing occasions. Von Cochem, alius Linius, came from Cochem near the Mosel River in the ancient diocese of Trier. As a teenager he joined the Capuchin order, studied theology, and was ordained a priest. He served the laity, including as preacher, in a number of parishes, some as far away as Linz and Prague. He was an official parish visitor in the archdiocese of Trier. Von Cochem has been called “the most significant and widely read baroque author in the Rhineland of popular and edifying literature.”259 He was a prolific author, and some of his spiritual works were published into the twentieth century.260 One of these is his book on the Passion of Christ. Having looked at the tendency of his order and his fellow preachers who engage their own feelings entirely in the suffering of Christ, and by means of this engagement as they told the story, to help their listeners to allow their own “hearts to be softened,” we immediately see how representative Martin von Cochem is of this pattern. Once again, Jesus’ agony on the Mount of Olives introduces the devout to what is to come. Using all our imaginative powers, we are to place ourselves in the position of observer—but more, of participant. The disciples may have slept, but we do not: All of a sudden his members began to tremble, and all the strength of his soul is terrified. His knees banged against each other, his blood vessels contracted, his bones shook, his blood became motionless, his face grew pale and his lips blue. His hair stood up, and his chest contracted such that his breathing grew shallow. His eyes collapsed (fielen ein), and his heart pounded violently. His powers of imagination produced terror, his spirit was horrified, and his whole being was filled with fear. Like somebody who is frightened by a ghost of the night, the Lord shuddered backward, because he saw standing before him the horrifying death, the most gruesome torments, the most hideous abomination of sins.261 His method of arousal is to heap up emotive words and even to use their superlative forms: zittern, entsetzen sich, erstarren, verengen, pochte ungestüm, erschrak, mit Furcht erfüllt, schauderte zurück, den schrecklichsten Tod, die grausamsten Martyr, die gräβlichste Abscheulichkeit. Christ looks about himself for some source of comfort, and finding none, he collapses in moaning, weeping, and lamenting—just


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the behavior that van Cochen demands of his audience. “Oh, Christian heart! Consider what your Redeemer endures here!” His suffering is as though an entire army stood before him and each individual soldier unremittingly thrust his sword into Jesus’ heart.262 Jesus confronts the sinner with his responsibility for this martyrdom, a repeated theme. Yet very few souls would ever take his Passion to heart (zu Herzen) and bear him sympathy.263 He focuses, like his forebears, upon the Christ’s bloody sweat, the result, he says, of the battle within the Savior between his love for humanity and his fear of torture: O horrific conflict! O unspeakable anxiety! What bitter distress it must have been to make the Redeemer not alone sweat blood, but in such quantities that the earth was reddened by it! . . . . O God, what horrible anxiety our Savior will have endured in his body and his soul to make him sweat so many drops of bloody sweat! O incomprehensible miracle, O unspeakable misery! It can also be believed that Christ did not only perspire blood but that he also wept blood, as we hear from the legends of St. Margaretha of Cortona and other saints.264 After Christ’s arrest, the thugs dragged him along the stony path, which cut his feet and left a trail of blood. Instead of pulling him through the poisonous brook of Cedron, the Jews threw him into it from the bridge that crossed over it. In the fall, his hands came free so that he could protect his head, a miracle.265 Von Cochem passes up no opportunity to embroider, for which purposes he has clearly tapped every Church Father’s surmise and every saint’s revelation. He reaps the harvest of the Catholic Church’s vast tillage, and he often refers to his sources: “Honor,” he urges his hearers, “his holy battered members according to the example of St. Gertude, who, as she once greeted all the separate members of Christ, saw that each member, as soon as she greeted it, gave out a divine radiance and illuminated her soul.”266 Martin is a travel guide who annotates his audience’s internal venture. After Caiaphas’s condemnation of Jesus, the high priest’s men went on beating him, “yes, not alone with their hands, but also with cudgels, whips, and rods. They abused him so greatly with blows to the jaw and strokes that his entire body was uniformly covered and swollen up with welts and bruises. O poor Jesus! How hard must a heart be that does not feel pity toward you!”267 The men applied every new torment that their devilish imaginations could produce.268 The Man of Sorrows turns in misery toward each soul within the preacher’s range and laments that he or she is not moved: I am so torn apart in all my members that in my pain I don’t know where I should turn; and yet I have nothing to assuage my suffering.

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I am so tired and exhausted that I can hardly stand upon my feet, and nevertheless I may neither sit nor lie down. My heart is so weak that it hardly sustains itself, yet I am lacking every means of refreshment or strengthening. I am completely dirtied by the spit of those who spat upon me, but I have no one to wipe me clean. I stand here in this prison like an arrested evildoer, and I am the object of general mockery and contempt. The angels in heaven feel compassion for me, but they do not help me. My heavenly Father well sees how badly things go with me, but he doesn’t defend me. You, my child! You too well recognize my extreme wretchedness, but you alone do not take it to heart!269 Even though they do not act, God and his angels at least sympathize with Christ in his ordeal. Only the Christian’s heart is impenetrable. Von Cochem thinks the account of Christ’s beating by Pilate’s men will surely melt the listeners’ “stone-hard hearts.” This is a mystery, he says, to which saints down through the ages have contributed their revelations. St. Jerome said that Pilate assigned precisely six men to this punitive task. St. Vincent Ferrer related that they systematically began with the soles of Jesus’ feet and gradually worked their way to the top of his head. They did this so that they could be certain of covering his body with wounds. If they had begun at the top, the blood flowing downward would have concealed his skin.270 When Jesus first glimpses the cross on which he will die, Certainly his entire body felt a cold shudder, which went through his very marrow. Out of love for our salvation, he knelt before the cross, bent his head down to the ground, kissed it with tearful eyes, and spoke: “I greet thee, oh holy cross, you bed of repose for my afflicted body. I have always loved thee, I have long desired thee, and I have descended from heaven in order to suffer and die upon thee for the human race.”271 The prayer that closes this meditation again takes up the witness’s feelings. “O true lover of the cross, when I consider how patiently you took up your cross, my heart has to be moved out of compassion.” Again, as Jesus carries his cross, the worshiper is guided to say, “O my dearest, cross-bearing Jesus! In consideration of this last and bitterest path my heart is filled with such pity that I can find neither measure nor end [to it].” The Christian kneels down and with a contrite heart devoutly kisses the pathway and the bloody tracks.272 Von Cochem knows precisely how many steps Jesus took at every phase of his Passion. Calvary is only thirty paces long and twenty-four wide.273 The question of Jesus’ nakedness comes up again, and as ever, he is judged to have been completely


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bare and ashamed, subject to “a thousand impure glances.”274 The nails are dull. The placement and hurt of each nail, the executioners’ stretching out the body, receive close attention.275 Jesus’ first word on the cross, von Cochem asserts, “converted many thousands of Jews who stood around the cross”—albeit he has just told us how narrow the space at the top of Golgotha was. The fourth word, “My God, my God!” does not elicit a firm explanation from the preacher; he calls it a high mystery (hohes Geheimniβ ) that can hardly be explained. Neither reason nor nature can grasp it. He observes that God complains against God.276 This is incomprehensible. When Jesus dies and Longinus opens his side (and heart) with a spear, the following prayer is prescribed: O Jesus, rich in love! I almost become numb in the contemplation of your love, and for amazement I do not know what to say. Is it then possible that you love me and wanted to die the most bitter death, but also that after your death you allowed your most love-rich heart to be opened in order to show that you are ready to die for me again? . . . O Jesus, my only love . . . I have no friend as true on earth as you; for neither father nor mother, nor my most faithful friend would let himself be killed for me, as my Jesus has done.277 Mary, the mother of Jesus, is a prominent figure here. Von Cochem urges the devout to “offer to Jesus” his own suffering. This is presumably parallel to the sacrifice of the Mass, in which the priest offers to God a sacrifice that Christ has already made. Even individual Christians, by this line of reasoning, were able by their meditations to offer Christ’s Passion to him. As the eighteenth century opened, it was possible to sing the entire Passion.278 Protestants, including Anabaptists, had long recognized the potency of the hymn in conveying doctrine to and conferring memory upon ordinary people. In this sphere, the Catholic Church probably had seen the value of this medium. It went hand in hand with sermon and catechism as a means of confirming the essential core of the faith. Without further study, it is impossible to estimate how widespread the singing of songs that comprehended the entire Passion, or even extensive portions of it, might have been.

The New-Old Catholic Tradition In this chapter, it was necessary to trace Catholic pulpit rhetoric farther forward in time owing to its later, and especially its post-Tridentine maturation as an early-modern form. Or so I anticipated. Yet surprisingly, we see in this array of

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clergymen from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries a striking degree of similarity. Of course, contrasts in the men’s tastes and temperaments are visible. But Paul Wann and Martin von Cochem have far more in common in the way they present the Passion and in the devotion that they urge upon their audiences than we might have expected given the intervening Reformations, the rise of the disciplining state with its claims upon religion, and the emergence of a precapitalist economy. The most surprising feature of early-modern Catholic devotion is its spreading preference for the most emotive strand proffered on the brightly striated skirt of Holy Mother Church at the end of the Middle Ages. Clergy across a broad spectrum—diocesan priests, older orders, and the newer Society of Jesus and the Capuchins—appropriated affective piety and advocated it to their fellow clerics and to the gamut of lay worshipers; they no longer treated it as a semimystical form reserved to monastic adepts and a few close members of their inner lay circles. Emotional identification with Christ was now the basis and the evidence of commitment to the Catholic faith. Although this was a seasonal and cathartic ritual, the spirituality of imagined presence at the Savior’s torment was now held out as the proper foundation of Catholicism the whole year around. What occurred in the preaching of each Lenten- and Eastertide was the reinfusion of energy into the apperceptions of each soul. Familiarity with the biblical story was revived, to be sure, but more important, the year’s accretion of indifference was pared away until a proper response to Christ’s raw pain was brought again to the surface. The preacher and the people were to be united in a paroxysm of grief. This sympathy—literally, this feeling together—should ideally bind Catholic Christians to one another firmly in the future. It should provide a foundation for their mutual aid, and it should cement their identity as members of the One True Church, the Body of Christ. This affective, dramatic demonstration of feeling, along with the assumptions that underlay it, set Catholics distinctly apart from Protestants. To evangelicals and Reformed who understood the ideological substratum of their own faith, such doctrine and the resultant behaviors were abhorrent. Jesus as the Son of God had accomplished the Atonement once and for all. They thought Catholics behaved as though their efforts to revivify the Passion had merit in themselves—as indeed their preachers implied. The Catholic position was that Christians could only appreciate the Atonement if they felt to their very quick the horror of what it meant to consent to the role of Redeemer and then to experience the torture of it. They should do this over and over again. Furthermore, the preachers were of one mind about Jesus’ hypersensitivity and his consequent hypersuffering. Exert their mental powers as they might, the preachers said, ordinary humans were incapable of experiencing the exquisite


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psychic and physical agony of Christ. Nonetheless, they must try. Appreciation of the Atonement must not be casual; it must not lie in the rational apprehension of it but in the empathic sensations of sinews, nerves, and hearts. True appreciation grips and shakes the Christian; it undoes her mundane steadiness. The pious will not be able to bear the thought of their Lord’s ordeal. They will lose control, moan, and weep. The bodily dimensions both of these Passion accounts and their hoped-for reception are striking to the Protestant mind-set. No minutia of torture or endurance is negligible. A mentality that demands of those who make their confession a recital of each and every sinful thought and sensation, shows itself here in the tireless embroidery of scripturally attested suffering. Preachers distinguish themselves by their ability to expand their homiletics to several hundred printed pages. They do this precisely by the device of repetition and elaboration—often including, as we have seen, the heaping up of emotionladen words, the creation of lists, and the explanation of each item on them. A marathon of invention seeks to elicit a marathon of attendance and overwhelmed response. Huizinga noted the tendency in the “autumn” of the Middle Ages to engage in tedious description.279 Catholic preachers perpetuate this quality. They may limit their sermons to one hour on most occasions, but these occasions of preaching are numerous and follow one another closely. Related to this quality is the trend, already visible during the late Middle Ages, to separate and personify the Savior’s wounds into independent holy objects that one may invoke—his heart, the side-wound, the hand- and foot-wounds, the wounds caused by the crown of thorns. By the end of the seventeenth century, formal stations of the cross will be readily available to guide people’s meditations upon the phases of Christ’s ordeal.280 Artists working in every medium will continue the late-medieval tradition until they have rendered such images virtually ubiquitous throughout Europe. This program makes the Catholic world visually and emotionally different from the Protestant, regardless of creed. We have seen preachers’ attention to Jesus’ inner agony, particularly in the Garden of Gethsemane and when he cries out, “My God, my God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?” The former anguish has the extraordinary effect of causing the Lord to perspire blood. The corporal experience of the Passion is never dispensed with but serves as the vehicle by means of which worshipers achieve the higher state of bewailing their wickedness. The agonized flesh leads the pious to seek redemption. The Christian treads the Neoplatonic path to the realm of the soul by means of the body.281 Catholic preachers, however, holding forth to the ordinary masses, do not leave the physical aside however much they might, as educated men, have been aware of this philosophical possibility. Their audiences must strive to share Christ’s bodily torment as a condition of

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comprehending either his extreme love or his inner anguish on humans’ account. Chronologically and logically, his psychic state should precede his physical Passion, but the sermonizers devote far more attention to the assaults upon him. The pastoral reality was that they had to enlist their hearers’ more abstract sympathies by presenting to their senses the horrific pain that the Son of God endured. The envisioning of Christ’s physical suffering had a better chance of eliciting sorrow for sin. Human transgression bore the responsibility, and the preachers made sure that the individuals in attendance took this blame personally. Catholic devotional conviction expressed itself, too, through the bodies of the faithful. Worshipers knew the meanings of kneeling, clasping, reaching out or upward, of prostrating themselves before the statue of the Virgin at Altötting or another shrine. The gesture of grief is beyond our perception in the reading of Passion sermons or dramas, but closely related as these media were, the making of gesture is beyond doubt. Those whose hearts finally melted, as the preachers demanded, had sufficiently absorbed the religious conventions of their society that they were able to show this. Weeping and moaning are gestural and postural as well as emotional expressions; they, along with subtler facial shift, bring body and feeling together.282 The Church was not wrong in its practice of utilizing physical position as a means of fostering interior state. The sensitive tone of Catholic homiletics is opposed to that of Neostoicism. If any of the preachers, as intellectuals, felt themselves attracted to the Stoic currents that flowed widely among them, they tacitly acknowledged that their approach to the broad laity must favor and exploit the emotions. On another level, however, there is little doubt that these preachers sought to tame expression that they saw to be inimical to Christian devotion as well as to an orderly society. Their pastoral duties—whether or not they technically possessed the cure of souls—led them to seek pacification among their charges. If Catholic clergy were more tolerant than Protestant of social festivities such as dancing, drinking, dining, and all manner of recreational expression, they nonetheless shared in the search of all those in authority for calm obedience. Curiously, they used religious emotion as an instrument toward that end. The harsh exuberance of Passion customs was to lead all Christians onto the paths of worldly reconciliation and peace. By the late seventeenth century, after the Thirty Years’ War, Catholic preachers may have ceased to lash Protestantism with their whips of invective, but nonetheless the affective earmarks of their faith set them starkly apart from their non-Catholic brethren.

2 The Lutheran Churches

Late-Medieval Piety One of the incentives to historians to begin examining the emotional dimensions of devotion was the popularization of the concept of affective piety. In her famous work about the spirituality of the twelfth century, Carolyn Walker Bynum uses this phrase in describing a pattern of expression that became a model inside and outside the Cistercian monastery. Taking up themes that were originally treated by André Vauchez and André Wilmart, Bynum pursues, more pointedly than they, specifically the emphasis upon feeling that rose to prominence through the writings not only of the Cistercians but also of Franciscans, and that underwent elaboration in the worship of communities of beguines and nuns. Affective piety accompanied, according to Bynum, a twelfth-century shift from a conception of the Deity as harsh judge to one of Christ as human being.1 The ordinary Christian could intensely empathize with his suffering and, via the Eucharist, be transitorily joined to his divinity. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the cult of the Passion, Christ’s Wounds, and the Eucharist (Corpus Christi) grew apace.2 In another of her extraordinary works, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Good to Medieval Women, Bynum explores the relationship between piety, especially focused upon the eucharistic meal and fasting, and physicality among high-medieval religious women. Among other things, abstinence from food lent these women

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a control over their lives that they would hardly have possessed in society at large.3 Although this was not the intention of her book, reading it and Bynum’s further essays on gender and the human body has caused me to reflect on the emotionality and the physicality of much German popular devotion in the late Middle Ages, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. It would appear that during the late fifteenth century, bodiliness as a provider of access to divinity was as characteristic of male as of female religious expression.4 Sacred objects, both representing and containing divine power, were the meditative points that facilitated the recollection of the devout and elicited their affective response. They often demonstrated this feeling in bodily ways. Of course, it was the very connection between physicality and fervor—more bluntly stated, the inherent claim that God interacted with his children via the material world and that people could manipulate sacral artifacts and influence God to grant them favors— that moved the Reformers to condemn the artifacts and their veneration as idolatry. Bynum herself notes that recent scholarship stresses “continuities between twelfth- and fifteenth-century piety.”5 Undoubtedly, people’s environment and outlook having changed, the meanings of sentiment-laden devotion on the eve of the Reformation were different from those of a century or three earlier. Nevertheless, recent scholarship on pre-Reformation religiosity has perceived the widespread manifestation of fervor as an ideal, and it has sometimes adopted the specific phrase, affective piety, to denote the practice and the model.6 The research in archival documents, the primary and secondary literature, and the art of the period, can find every indication that in German-speaking lands, emotive, somatically engaged forms of expression that would have been recognizable to Elisabeth of Schönau and Mechthild of Magdeburg were widespread among the people when the Reformation began. These forms were closely tied to holy icons, places, and the accoutrements of the Mass; they were generated by the ubiquitous tangible symbols of God’s present action among his followers. In his pathbreaking article of the mid-1960s, Bernd Moeller describes as “intense” and “ardent” and as characterized by “passion,” “forcefulness,” and “fervor” the devotion of the German people around 1500.7 The institutional Church, however, failed to quench their appetite and left the faithful longing for something deeper, Moeller thinks.8 The inference to be drawn from this well-known essay is that the Lutheran Reformation met the genuine—the spiritual—needs of the populace, as distinct from the artificial needs created by a system of elaborate sacramental ritual acts, a self-promoting clergy, and a theology of salvation by works. Ardor, in Moeller’s terms, may be seen as a code word for exteriority and vacuousness, resulting, in some desperate quarters, in

THE LUTHERAN CHURCHES

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the effort to find relief in mysticism as well as excessive pious acts. Ardor is a thin veneer covering alienation, in the years just before the radical acts of Martin Luther. Steven Ozment’s views are similar.9 Newer, anthropologically influenced scholarship has investigated the rich and variegated forms of late-medieval German piety. Robert Scribner has led the way in describing, but also in tying religious observance to, ingrained ways of life and worldview. In connection with iconoclasm, he has written about the theory and meaning of images to ordinary worshipers.10 German medievalists have recently taken the field yet farther with their resort to multiple media forms in analyzing late-medieval religiosity. Klaus Schreiner and Marc Müntz’s coedited Frömmigkeit im Mittelalter contains several essays that point in new directions.11 I propose to show how the adherents of the evangelical forms of belief were made aware, by means of ritual and the decoration of Lutheran sanctuaries, that along with late-medieval Catholic Christianity, emotion-oriented piety was at an end, or at least to be severely curtailed and redirected. Lutheran divines intended to communicate to the members of their congregations that God was present spiritually. He was not approachable physically or susceptible of manipulation by humankind. Changes in liturgical words, gestures, cultic artifacts, and the arrangement of the sacral space—in short, in the whole of ecclesiastical ritual—gave people to understand that they should not dramatically act out their devotion. In general, the new program strove to dampen the outer demonstration of religious fervor, though not piety itself. Protestant piety, guided by the Word of God, was explicitly and semiotically defined as quiet submission to the workings of faith within the individual Christian and, externally, as gentle, less emotive (however feeling), non-flaunting submission to authority and the service of one’s neighbor. Princes, reformers, and magistrates simultaneously sought to suppress flamboyant demonstrativeness in social relations as well.

Lutheran Church Adornment The artistic representations that filled the late-medieval churches were often designed to arouse more than awareness of the story of this or that martyrsaint. They were concomitantly to elicit identification, horror at the ordeal each one suffered for the faith, sympathy, penitence for one’s own sin, and ultimately a deeper appreciation of the saints’ as well as the Savior’s intercessory powers. Images of suffering were meant to inspire suffering in the observer, though on a much more modest scale in all but the most committed, such as

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Saint Francis. In proportion to their means and their luck in possessing patrons, churches were full of two- and three-dimensional renderings of the gruesome torment of the saints: Saint Katherine with the wheel on which her torturers tried to break her, resorting in the end to decapitation; Saint Lawrence being roasted on a gridiron; Saint Erasmus with his innards being wound out on a windlass; Saint Sebastian penetrated by numerous arrows; Saint Agatha having her breasts cut off or bearing them on a tray like loaves of bread; Saint Bartholomew being flayed alive. Even when these and myriad others were not actually displayed in their death throes, the instruments or the emblems of their torture informed onlookers of their identity and also stimulated physical revulsion, terror and grief, inspiration and repentance. That was their goal, at any rate. Undoubtedly, frequent encounters with all these images tended to dull people’s reactions. Nevertheless, a fundamental purpose of such art was to arouse emotion. The agonized body was a vehicle of such arousal. Crucifixion, too, was a ghastly form of corporal punishment.12 The crucifixes and paintings of the Crucifixion and the preliminary sufferings of Christ were, we know, often more graphically grisly in the north of Europe than in the classically affected south. They are striking for the bodily anguish with which they confront the viewer. The Savior’s face was contorted in agony, and His body was spattered with blood. A major purpose of the clerics who directed the artistic program of the churches or who, at the very least, influenced the wealthy patrons who selected artists, was to call forth in the devout a sense of Jesus’ excruciating pain—and thus both of his humanness and of his willingness to endure the unendurable in order to atone for humankind’s vast sinfulness. The Christian ought to feel with the Son of God and to be moved to regret for his part in causing such suffering.13 The pious should experience this sympathy, if possible, in their bodies as in their psyches. If, in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, such sensations were advocated especially for the inmates of convents in monasteries, with the passage of time, the laity, too, were called on to concentrate and to care. This transmission from the religious to incorporate those Christians living worldly lives is one of the shifts of the late Middle Ages. The Church’s own system of signs indicates that salvation ought to be the result of more than refraining from the worst misdeeds and the fulfillment of one’s Holy Week obligations. Faith should engross those who possess it and permeate their hearts. The strain of heartfelt commitment, too, was available in latemedieval Catholicism even if, as Luther and other Reformers alleged, its emphasis was too evidently upon the Church-enriching endeavors of endowment, offering, payments for penitential and other services, and pilgrimage. The artistic presence of the Virgin and other female saints had its own additional semiotic meaning. It is well known that in the Middle Ages and on


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up to the modern era, emotionality and corporality stood at the center of the definition of femininity.14 From one perspective, this was a weakness: It had made Eve, and through her the whole human race, vulnerable to seduction by Satan. It had produced the Fall. It provided justification for women’s enforced subordination to (reasoning) men. Women, inescapably physical, were easily moved, and they were therefore undependable; as such they constituted a threat to society. Men were seen as more likely to be rational and to subject matter to mind, and because of that quality they were the fundament of a stable social order. From another perspective, however, the Virgin and some other established holy women presented a model of all womanly virtues. Among Mary’s outstanding features were the heights of her maternal love for Jesus and her inconsolable grief at the execution of her Son. Although swords pierced her heart during the latter event, she remained constant.15 Hers were the kinds of profound feelings that her followers ought to emulate.16 Some of the cultic objects were forcibly removed during early, isolated episodes of iconoclasm.17 I regard the smashing of idols, at one level, as a late outburst of that intensely emotive piety which was about to be disapproved of, as in the conflict between Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt and Martin Luther. The image breakers punished the sacral objects for their presumptuousness and ineffectuality. Most works of art disappeared not as a result of violence, however, but of the determination of princes and Reformers to eliminate all depictions that could not withstand scriptural and historical scrutiny. The purpose of those that remained, as of those that were added after the Reformation had begun, was to teach the basic precepts of the faith.18 Jesus’ Passion as drawn-out physical ordeal was no longer the center of attention, nor was there the same acute need to experience it vicariously. Instead, the Christian was to understand with the mind, and with the heart that lurks in the word heartfelt, the doctrine of the atonement. Intellectual apprehension of this key theological doctrine was not sufficient; the faithful would also lend the feeling of conviction to their affirmation as expressed in the Nicene and the Apostles’ Creed. Here, then, the physicality of approved early-modern piety underwent reduction. The saints’ presence in the sanctuaries of Germany would be misunderstood by the masses of the uninformed faithful, and this temptation had to be taken from their path.19 The saints, as Luther taught, had achieved no good by themselves. Their virtues were entirely the result of God’s gracious gift. They were not in any sense mediators and should not be the objects of Christians’ entreaty. Their physicality could only mislead people into attributing sacral power to things, whether artifacts or the human bodies with which they were associated. Christ, however, as God the Son, could be prayed to. In Lutheran churches, the presence of saints radically diminished—that is, as soon as authorities could organize themselves

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adequately to see that such icons were removed. This took several visitations and other parish inspections, and at least two full generations after the introduction of reform.20 Crucifixes were permitted to remain but not usually such scenes as the descent from the cross or the Pietà, which diverted attention from the act of atonement. In brief compass, this was the theological reason for the disappearance of most icons from the sacred theater. At the conscious level, leaders of church and state believed that they were leading the faithful to focus on Christ’s salvific sacrifice. I am arguing that there were other effects, unconscious though they may have been. For one thing, holy women with all their levels of meaning nearly vanished. Where pictures of Mary the Mother of Christ remained, they usually cast her as but one sorrowing figure at the foot of the cross.21 The aggregation of people in this scene reduced attention to the Virgin. The viewer was to concentrate upon her Son hanging above. His body was no longer contorted but hung limp, temporarily a soulless corpse. The masculine, with its rational connotations, and the far less embodied spirit now permeated the surfaces of the church interior. The near elimination of pictures of women—those emblems of emotionality and loss of control—and of the acutest suffering signaled to the pious that the best religiosity was calm, interior, and unrelated to material objects.22 It was unshakably sincere. By contrast, Catholic shrines, chapels, churches, and cathedrals remained filled with images of women, each signaling iconographically the story of her suffering.23 But the Protestant devout were to enter the church in a collected state and retain their composure. This does not mean that they were to be immune to inner movement. But outward tranquility as an accompaniment to serious reflection was to guide their demeanor as they returned home, too. Other aspects of the decoration of churches conveyed the new norms.24 Even in the villages, peasants, with the sometimes considerable help of neighboring knights’ families and cloisters, adorned their churches with objects of gleaming metal and vivid embroidery. It has become rather a cliché that the people of the late Middle Ages, upon visiting a cathedral or any other richly ornamented church, felt themselves to be in an anteroom of heaven. To the limits of communities’ means, this was also true in the humbler temples of the countryside. Torches and candelabra, candles, incense, hand-held bells for ringing during the services, patens, monstrances, chalices, vestments, tapestries, drapes, altar cloths, and all other ritual objects clearly marked the contrast between the sacral sphere and the mundane environment beyond the church— although we must note additionally that in the people’s opinion, godly power extended beyond the walls of the church at least to the far reaches of the cemetery


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(Kirchhof ). The great bell in the belfry, also a ritual object, lent its beneficent effect as far as its knell could be heard. Precisely for this reason, the authorities of church and state tried to curtail bell-ringing. They encountered widespread popular resistance and often had to moderate their directives, leaving a modest tolling for specific purposes (definitely not for preventing storm damage!) in place along with plentiful explications of its strictly communicative function. All these eye-catching treasures of the church served to elicit human emotion and thereby to underscore the perception of the divine service as bracketed outside the mundane, to be sure, but as a ready source of supernatural power that could be applied with great benefit in managing the vicissitudes of daily life. They allowed worshipers to apprehend the divine through their senses, to verify and tap God’s presence among them. As a generalization, both Lutheran and Reformed varieties of Protestantism cleansed the sanctuaries of elaborate and valuable cultic equipment. But no generalization can encompass the wide range of developments in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire; there are always exceptions “that prove the rule.” In practice, there were a range of styles, although all shared a reduction when compared with Catholicism. The Electorate of Brandenburg, which throughout the sixteenth century was “higher church” than any other Lutheran territory, provides the most notable exception.25 A comprehensive handbook of instructions for the parish of Neustadt Salzwedel in Brandenburg takes us through the various dimensions of decor and procedure between 1541 and 1579. The elector declares in 1579 that “the old Christian ceremonies are to remain,” and they are to be identical throughout his lands. “The pastor should perform his office on high feasts as has been brought down from previous times, as an ornament to the churches.” This specifically includes the elevation of the sacramental elements.26 The utraquist plural indicates that certain key Lutheran changes have been assimilated. The Danish, Wittenberg-educated superintendent, Peder Palladius, evidently preferred retaining many older stylistic and decorative features in King Christian III’s domains.27 But even in Brandenburg and Denmark, monstrances, pyxes, and thuribles all had their raisons d’être in a sacrificial theology of the Mass, but as soon as this theology was banned, they became redundant. This itself was justification for selling them off or melting them down. Heavily embroidered vestments, cloths, and hangings enhanced the meditative and sacred office of the priesthood and could no longer be tolerated. Often the less valuable accoutrements were simply stored in the sacristy or an attic, and in later inventories, their presence could be noted. The St. Lorenz Church in Pegau, for example, was as late as 1579 still in possession of chasubles in practically every color of the rainbow, to match each ecclesiastical

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season: gold, red velvet, black velvet, green velvet, blue velvet, flesh-colored, brown, yellow, and white, together with all their appurtenances.28 Such objects could be found throughout Lutheran Germany. They were present in NassauDillenburg, even in villages, in 1567.29 But most assuredly they were not in use.30 Their designation as “levitical” garments reveals the inspectors’ contemptuous attitude toward them.31 Gradually governors of the church ordered their sale, and the distribution of vestments and cloths to the poor.32 Modifications were more thorough and more immediately noticeable in Reformed sanctuaries, but they occurred in Lutheran churches as well. In the latter setting, the process was less rapid and took the form most often of ornamental simplification. The altars remained in most evangelical sanctuaries, although they were moved forward to the front edge of the chancel dais so that the pastor could face the congregation while administering Holy Communion.33 To these, God’s children came forward, soberly, in their sex-specific ranks, to receive what were still the Body and the Blood of Christ.34 Likewise, the principal rituals of worship were less showy than their Catholic counterparts. Gradually, the presiding clergy, far fewer in number than their predecessors, ceased to wear impressive chasubles and made do with simple surplices (Chorröcke).35 What had been in Latin became, in time, simple German—until, late in the sixteenth century, in a fancifying era and with a nod to the Latin-school boys who made up the choir, some Latin was reintroduced. Above all, the central feature of the service, now usually called the service of God (Gottesdienst) and no longer designated the Mass, was the spoken or sung word, made up of Bible verses, collects, hymns, and sermons. The sacrament of the Eucharist was no longer a replication of Christ’s sacrifice enacted by the priest, and the charged atmosphere of the Mass gave way to a less moving but altogether serious partaking of the Lord’s Supper (Abendmahl) after the sermon. One practice that made this sacrament so serious was that the Lutheran churches retained auricular confession on the preceding day. The enumeration of all sins had been abandoned, but in the confrontation between pastor and his individual charges lay plentiful opportunity for the criticism of faulty knowledge concerning the faith and of obvious moral transgressions.36 The retention of the Real Presence by Lutheranism had the potential to negate the semiotics of tranquil gratitude and mental comprehension of the atonement.37 Even if the presiding clergymen no longer possessed the ability to transform mere bread and wine into the veritable Body and Blood of God, they continued to administer what in popular opinion may well still have been a miracle. When communicants came forward, they took into their hands and mouths elements that could not be defined as ordinary: the True Flesh and


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Blood of the historic Savior, under the forms of bread and wine. This surely moved the sincere believer. In most Lutheran parishes, the bread continued to be specially prepared in the form of flat, round hosts, which emphasized its exceptional, even traditional (Catholic) nature. Zwinglians and Calvinists would employ simple table bread in order to stress the absence of Christ’s physical body from the earth. Small wonder, then, that Lutheran instructions to the pastorate and to the sextons insisted that any leftover elements, and the water used in baptism, must be disposed of so that people could not procure these remains for their own “superstitious” purposes.38 Such instructions simultaneously inform us that at least some laypeople continued to regard these substances as efficacious sacramentals, useful in healing family members, livestock, and crops. The element of corporeal presence that remained—we can surely surmise this—supported a perceptible residue of popular opinion that the Communion bread still had considerable apotropaic power. This led to the temptation to retain crumbs of it in the mouth or elsewhere and to convey them out of the sanctuary. The sexton’s precautions could not completely hinder this. Popular resistance to the official definition of the nature of the Eucharist appears in the recurrent concerns expressed about the well-being and the proper handling of the Host. Lutheran parishioners were unhappy enough to inform parish visitors that their pastor had dropped the wafers, or that he had broken them in pieces in case there were not enough to go around.39 At the core of these differences is not simply a differing theological outlook but rather another cosmic view; the elements of Communion possessed supernatural and thus emotional force among some people. They were still the very present Body of the Lord. Within Lutheranism, the organizing divines took other measures—verbal, visual, and disciplinary—to reduce the inclination toward emotive piety. The predella of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s famous Wittenberg altarpiece shows Martin Luther in a wall-niche pulpit at the right, pointing toward the central figure of the crucified Christ, whose emotional remoteness is conveyed not only by his limp, spiritless earthly remains but also by the fanciful, smoke-like wafting in either direction of his overlong loincloth.40 We witness an iconography of spiritualization. The contrast between the peace of Christ’s body in the Wittenberg predella and the agonized facial features of the Lord in many contemporary Catholic crucifixes is remarkable. The Man of Sorrows with his gruesome, moving wounds, and his eyes still open (despite the side-wound, which in the Bible was inflicted after he gave up His spirit) and gazing down at the sinner who has brought this horror about—an image that characterized Cranach’s Crucifixions, too, before the Reformation—has disappeared, replaced by the obedient Son of God who has fulfilled His task of atonement.41 His sacrificial reconciliation of God and humans is accomplished. A minimum of blood is

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visible on his corpse, another break with Catholic convention, according to which multiple wounds and spattered flesh and blood had been a means of moving observers. To the left of Cranach’s work, the women (all but one) sit, and the men stand, intent upon the meaning of the doubly presented Word.42 Their faces reflect serene attention but neither awe nor any other sort of overt feeling. In Cranach’s later altarpieces, the blood that spurts from the sidewound onto a favored person’s head has a wholly different, and a happier, meaning. It is metaphorical, and as such it confers peace as shown on the contented faces of its recipients.43 The visitation records reveal, however, that especially pregnant women and the sick desired frequent communion, and this reflects the special potency that they, and no doubt many of their fellows, continued to attribute to the physical elements of this sacrament. Cranach’s rendering of the crucified Christ appears to have become a model for Lutheran depiction in this genre. Nonetheless, much local variation persisted. Nuremberg’s retention of Veit Stoss’s dramatic crucifix, with its open eyes and fearsome suffering (despite the presence of the side-wound), offers a starkly countervailing image within Lutheran Germany.44

The Word Preached, Theory Signage was inadequate to convey everything that Christians ought to know. Furthermore, semiotics, as this book argues, because it was born of partly unconscious convictions along with the doctrinal core, did not always correspond precisely with overt preaching.45 Indeed, the Reformers could hardly have addressed in twenty-first-century terms the questions of cultural history that fascinate us today. The sermon in particular, where its text has survived for our examination, is a particularly valuable indication of the intentions of its author. Bernd Moeller is famous for his insistence that without the printed book, there could have been no Reformation.46 One could just as well assert that without the sermon, there could have been no Reformation. The sermon’s audience very likely encompassed a greater mass of hearers than all the pamphlets and books did readers, even when one accepts, as I do for the German setting, Scribner’s theory of their contents’ dispersal to illiterate groups.47 Nor was the sermon largely a Reformation phenomenon. We specialists often overlook the huge body of medieval sermons that has survived, and whose texts have engrossed generations of scholars.48 In an age such as the fifteenth century, before electronic media, sermons were the principal formal means of collective communication. To be sure, this device functioned better in towns, for preachers naturally gravitated to aggregations of listeners. But


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friars entertained audiences in very diverse circumstances, and even convents admitted laypeople to their chapels so that these might benefit from edifying homilies. Historians of the Reformation are not wrong in their contention that the evangelical movement heightened the emphasis upon Scripture as preached. They simply tend to overdraw the discrepancy between late-medieval and Reformation availability of sermons, as though the contrast were between little or no preaching and ubiquitous preaching. One dimension of the earlysixteenth-century environment that proved favorable to Lutheranism and Zwinglianism (not to mention the previous Hussitism) was people’s avid desire to know more about their faith. With death and other tribulations all around them, they wanted to hear biblical stories and uplifting messages, and they wanted to know how to be saved. Even in the villages, they may have desired this more often than during Holy Week, when to give a sermon on the Passion was incumbent on every cleric possessing the cure of souls. Humble folk, too, were willing to travel some distance to hear a clergyman hold forth. Individuals of means increasingly endowed preacherships in the great urban churches. Ulrich Zwingli himself, we recall, was appointed “preacher to the people.” These pulpits became platforms for the dissemination of diverse theological strains.49 Yet medieval preachers were persuaded that their purpose was to explicate the Bible, and they believed that they remained true to this holy text. Here the Reformers and they parted company. Luther and his fellows vigorously criticized their definition of Scripture (which included the Apocrypha), their interpretation of it, and their tendency to entertain their hearers through the inclusion of popular tales and legends. Catholic preachers stressed the Word of God, but they did not do it in a manner that Luther would approve of. Additionally, their frame of reference did include those other sources of authority that Luther dismissed, namely, the writings of Church Fathers, the decrees of ecumenical councils, and formal decisions enunciated ex cathedra by the popes. The artist Georg Pencz (ca. 1500–1550) has left us one of those polemical anti-Catholic contrast-broadsheets, in which representatives of the “True Faith” perform a function on one side, in this case the left side, of the scene (which is divided by a pillar), and the misguided Catholic Church performs it on the other, the viewer’s right side. In the present instance, the activity being depicted is preaching.50 On the left, the youthful, unadorned clergyman stands with his open Bible in a simple pulpit, gesturing down toward the women seated on three-legged collapsible stools at the base. One elderly man sits on a chair, and another man, barely visible, sits behind the pulpit. The other men gather thickly around, all standing. Their socioeconomic provenance is doubtless varied, but they appear humble of mien, as though they appreciate the elevated value of the message they are receiving. On the right side, by contrast, the fat priest wears a

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lavish garment and holds forth in a richly carved pulpit. He has no Bible before him. The women are similarly hunkered down, along with an aged man. The male audience, as well as some of the women, wear lavish garb. Most handle thick-beaded rosaries and thus appear to recite their prayers automatically even as the preacher speaks. One man of high station kneels in a prayer-stool. The laity’s interest on either side of the central column seems equally great. A Bible verse, on the left above the evangelical section of the illustration, declares, “I will give you pastors according to my heart, who will pasture you wisely, without joking” (based on Jeremiah 3:15). The verse above the Catholic preacher proclaims, “Woe to the shepherds who feed themselves and greatly neglect my sheep! You desire the milk and the wool, but I have not commanded you to take it” (based on Ezekiel 34). Under the engraving, long, rhymed discourses describe the respective clerics’ conflicting visions of their purpose. The evangelical preacher announces, “You children of Christ, pay attention and diligently hear the saving Word of God!” He tells them that they cannot refrain from sin, and when God becomes aware of their helpless misery, he offers them the consolation of the Gospel alone. Christ has come to earth for the sake of the sinner and gladly died for us. With his own power he fulfilled the law and paid the debt of sin. Whoever believes in him will not die but is newly born in the love of God, even in the midst of persecution and death. Christ is his hope, consolation, and bliss. Such people manifest the love of God to their neighbors and struggle against the flesh. “All this is a true Christian life.” The Catholic preacher starts off in a different spirit: “Listen, you Christians, do what God and the holy Church command; follow what the pope has ordained, or you will be banned.” A long list of priests’ and monks’ holy deeds follows, which should, as appropriate, be imitated by laypeople: “wear a cowl, have a tonsure, pray at matins, vesper, compline; go without sleep, fast, grow a long beard . . . sound the bells, strike the organ, show the relics, carry candles, bless candles, salt, wax. . . . You laypeople, [do what is righteous] with offerings and burning candles, pilgrimage, and serving the saints, fasting and keeping feast-days, and confessing as often as you can.” Laymen should join brotherhoods, he goes on, and join in processions, kiss the pax,51 look at relics, endow masses, decorate churches, have masses read to release souls from purgatory, and buy indulgences. He concludes that the pope cannot err. He sits in the place of God, and wields power throughout the earth. The priest warns his audience to avoid heretics. “They say a great deal about Scripture and mix their poison in with it.” “Do what I say, and you will be pious.” This is clearly a Lutheran and biased presentation of the requirements of the faith. As such, however, it clearly attributes to Catholic practice a level of outer activity and potentially inner agitation as the serious participant


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undertakes a quest for salvation. This depiction jibes nicely with modern Protestant interpretations of the “burden” of late-medieval Catholicism.52 By contrast, the evangelical mood is simple, peaceful, and calming. The reader of this frank propaganda is meant to absorb the stark contrast that is presented and decidedly to prefer the Lutheran approach. He or she is to sigh with relief as the necessity of perpetual acts is rejected in favor of belief in the efficacy of Christ’s atonement.

The Word Preached in Surviving Sermons During the entire early-modern period, Lutheran clergymen left a plentiful homiletic record. If, as Rudolf Lenz estimates, the residue of funeral sermons alone is around 250,000, then the homiletic heritage from all sorts of occasions would surely reach a million.53 We should not imagine, however, that this inheritance is provided by humble pastors. They were usually less well educated than their fewer colleagues who rose into urban and court posts, and they were encouraged not to wax creative in their nonprestigious pulpits. In the early years, rural clerics were often shockingly ignorant of both Catholic and Lutheran teaching, and their resort to Luther’s postils was a practical necessity. Gradually, churches were able to improve the level of preparation in simple pastors, even if this essentially meant insisting that they understand what teachings constituted the indispensable core of the evangelical faith, and that they master the catechism so that they could teach it to others. In Saxony, the first heartland of the Reformation, a pattern of higher training emerges only early in the seventeenth century, nearly four generations after the 1521 Diet of Worms.54 Visitation records from the so-called Age of Orthodoxy increasingly indicate authorities’ worry that preachers will express their uninformed personal convictions and that these may be tinged with error if not outright heresy. Parish overseers fostered reliance on the published sermons of Lutheran leaders, in some places leading rural pastors to read these aloud. This practice seems a strange eventuality for a denomination that initially regarded the sermon as the result of the working of the Holy Spirit within the man of the cloth. Yet it is in keeping with the slow progress of the pastorate and with the growing authoritarian tenor of the age.55 In Lutheran Germany, learning to preach was haphazard and piecemeal. In early Swiss Protestantism, the Prophezei was quickly established as a periodic, in Zurich a weekly, meeting to which divines but also young men destined for the pastorate came to hear treatments of theology and to practice preaching.56 Most of the non-Swiss German-speaking lands had no such mechanism.57

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At the end of the Middle Ages, the principal way that young men prepared for the priesthood, particularly the rural priesthood, was through imitation, with or without the formal status of apprentice or assistant ( famulus) to a qualified clergyman. The sacrament of priestly ordination did entail an examination—not as to theological preparedness, but as to the candidates’ ability accurately to carry out the rites of the sacred office. Even so, various visitation committees found to their dismay that the priests could not always recite the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer, and the Ten Commandments; the first two were in fact part of the rubric of one or more sacraments. We need to bear this in mind in contemplating whether Catholic priests were exposed to Aristotle’s (much less Cicero’s or Quintilian’s) principles of rhetoric with their instructions on affect. Their low level of preparation would suggest that they were not. Within the Order of Preachers itself, a member’s appointment seems to have depended on whether he had a natural aptitude for homiletics. The great late-medieval preachers, whatever their order or their diocesan status, learned by imitation of the best rhetoricians within their environment. They probably sensed rather than cogitated upon the necessity of blending rational arguments with emotive appeals in order to produce the deepest conviction in their hearers. They felt their audiences’ response. A considerable genre of publications, the pastor’s manual, filled in obvious gaps for the simple men who were able to acquire one.58 These, too, told priests how to perform their duties. A further genre was the artes praedicandi literature, holding out to its readers an introduction to the art of successful preaching. Again, few ordinary priests would have had access to such a book. This category is not represented in the transitional parish inventories that I have encountered. Luther’s postils, usually one-half or the other of the two-volume set collected by Zwickau scribe Stephan Roth that comprehended the entire church year, because few pastors owned both volumes, quite quickly are represented, however, as occasionally are the collected sermons of other leading divines. In 1577, the visitors in the city of Coburg recorded admiringly that one of the deacons there “read his Bible daily, with diligence, alternating between the Old and New Testament, and besides that, writings of Luther, Philipp [Melanchthon], [and Johannes] Brenz; he has consistently abstained from polemical literature (hedder bucher).”59 Despite notable exceptions and regional variations, we may well imagine that imitation and/or reading homilies aloud describe the average clerical level of performance. And so it remained during most of the sixteenth century throughout Germany’s northern tier—with the qualification that gradually, a grammarschool education, with its own attention to elementary rhetoric, was becoming virtually universal among the future clergy. By the beginning of the seventeenth


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century, parish inspectors could anticipate at least some exposure to university study among those whom they examined, although their Latin and their understanding of the faith left much to be desired. Often, they demanded that the clergymen being tested demonstrate their doctrinal mastery and their declaratory skills from the pulpit in the form of a sermon.60 They also asked simple laymen of the community what they thought of their pastor’s preaching. Andreas Hyperius (1511–1564) accurately perceived a great need. He may be the founder of what is today called “practical theology.” Not a Lutheran, he trod a path that historians cannot be certain of, between Zwingli/Calvin and Luther, perhaps not remote from Melanchthon’s route. He was an admirer of Martin Bucer, whose opinions on firm ecclesiastical discipline he shared. The humanist movement also shaped him. During his own lifetime, his perceived adherence to a Reformed variation of Protestantism made him unpalatable in the Lutheran world.61 His influence nevertheless extended beyond specifically Reformed lands. Indeed, his treatise on the formation of the preacher, De formandis concionibus sacris seu de interpretatione Scripturarum (1553),62 was translated into English as The Practis of preaching, otherwise called the pathway to the pulpit in 1577.63 A work on a related subject, De recte formando Theologiae studio, appeared in 1556.64 Hyperius himself took a position in the Theological Faculty at the University of Marburg, and he offered instruction, along with exegesis and dogmatics, in preaching. He disregarded conventional rules of rhetoric, regarding sermons as having a missionary nature: to teach, give pleasure, and persuade. Their chief source is Scripture, out of which the preacher brings to the hearer admonitions, warnings, and consolation.65 Hyperius was a prolific writer, and his works constitute forty-two entries in the VD-16.66 Other reprints followed in the seventeenth century. A modern biographer describes his dedication to the training of preachers. Clerical candidates at Marburg had to give demonstration sermons for his critique, before they preached to a lay audience. He paid attention to their voice and gestures as well as the content.67 He regarded the rhetorician’s attention to moving hearers to be crucial to his success, and he devotes a section of De formandis concionibus sacris to it.68 Despite their theological differences with this man, Lutheran theologians probably adopted and developed his principles as a basis for training in homiletics for evangelical clerics, being careful to remove theological precepts with which they disagreed.69 In turning to the emotional content of sermons actually presented, then, I must admit that the formative influences upon the preachers during the sixteenth century were highly individual.70 Indisputably, by late in the century some in the southwest were undergoing formal training. At the least, during the Age of Orthodoxy a pastoral culture was emerging along with a sense of

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common identity as Lutheran clergymen.71 Had the Thirty Years’ War not intervened and turned settled assumptions topsy-turvy, a firm curriculum in theology might have lent structure to the training of the majority of future pastors in the seventeenth century. As things were, in the worst-affected areas, the churches clung precariously to old patterns and nearly had to reestablish themselves beginning at mid-century.

Martin Luther As indicated in the introduction, I have chosen to examine Lutheran preaching on the Passion in view of the fact that in dealing with this topic, no cleric could circumvent the feelings elicited by such a gruesome execution. And following in the medieval tradition of obligation to preach at Easter even if at no other time, virtually every Protestant pastor did fulfill this seasonal duty.72 Even if Martin Luther, from his preaching niche, calmly pointed his listeners’ eyes toward the Cranach crucifix, sermons presented a fuller recommendation. How was the Gospel-oriented Christian to understand and react to this tormented body that hung at the heart of the faith? Luther dismissed as improper the demonstrative Catholic practices during Holy Week. He described his vision of reformed observances in his Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdiensts of 1526: Lent, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week shall be retained, not to force anyone to fast, but to preserve the Passion history and the Gospels appointed for that season. This, however, does not include the Lenten veil, throwing of palms, veiling of pictures, and whatever else there is of such tomfoolery—not chanting the four Passions, not preaching on the Passion for eight hours on Good Friday. Holy Week shall be like any other week save that the Passion history be explained every day for an hour throughout the week or on as many days as may be desirable, and that the sacrament be given to everyone who desires it. For among Christians the whole service should center in the Word and sacrament.73 This statement jibes nicely with the Cranach predella described above. From the earliest surviving records, we see that the style and content of Luther’s own Lenten, Passion, and Easter sermons match the tone of the predella. A number are extant from the mid-1520s. In a 1525 sermon at the beginning of Lent, the Reformer rejects the idea that we should imitate Christ’s forty-day sojourn in the wilderness. He labels this practice “monkey-business”


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(Affenspiel) and says that Lenten self-denial was meant as a good work through which one could earn credit toward salvation. The Bible does not prescribe this; rather, it was invented by men. Of their own free will, people could choose to fast, in order to “restrain the flesh.”74 He means that the whole world should not go around in sack-cloth and ashes, openly denying itself adequate food and drink and making a display of piety. Rather, the observance of the Lenten season should be a private spiritual matter, not binding on anyone. As we know, this included the consumption of meat. Outer demonstration was to give way to inner devotion, perceptible only to those who knew a practitioner well. In a Palm Sunday homily delivered in 1523, Luther criticizes the throngs of Jews who “screamed and leaped” when Jesus entered Jerusalem on a donkey. They did not feel love in their hearts for Jesus. The law, he declares, does not produce love; faith does.75 On Good Friday in 1526, Luther acknowledged that it was still the custom to preach the details of Christ’s suffering. The congregation before him, indeed in that year still “standing around” (herumstehend), well knew what the predominant practice was, and from repeated hearing they held the details in their memory. Luther concedes that Christians should know the whole story (alle stucke) from the four Gospels of the New Testament; the account is relevant for the whole year and not just this day. Indeed, the Wittenberg city pastor, Johannes Bugenhagen, did collate Luther’s own homiletic account of Jesus’ ordeal.76 On this occasion, so far as this Latin abbreviation allows us to see, Luther does not hold forth either in a detailed or a moving fashion—except for his brief insistence that the Jews crucified Christ. He stresses instead the fact that “Christ shed his blood for us.” He saved us from the wrath of God. This thought should be the consolation for sins.77 Two days later, on Easter Sunday, he repeats that by means of the Crucifixion, God reveals his might in Christ; he rouses us and takes away the power of death and of Satan.78 Even these brief summaries reveal that for Luther, this high holiday provides an opportunity, not to reflect on Christ’s broken body or Mary’s bereavement, but to convey an understanding of the benefit of the sacrifice to those who believe. Luther does not seek to move so much as to teach. Through persuasion may come personal relief and gratitude toward God. In these same years, Luther did, nevertheless, himself describe in shortened form the fundamental agony of the Crucifixion, adhering to the Gospel account. As in the Catholic tradition, he draws attention to the psychological pain that the Son of God endured. “My God, my God [why hast thou forsaken me?],” he says, comes from Jesus’ heart. Not only physical insults but the humiliation contributes to his suffering. “‘If you are the Son of God,’ etc.” Luther comments that such poisonous, evil words are heard not only with the

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ears but touch the heart and are felt in the heart. The fact that God did not rescue his Son suggested that Jesus was actually an enemy of God, and that was hard to bear. He was seen as accursed and not righteous. “My God, my God” was Christ’s death cry. “Thus, in the greatest anguish (dolore), Christ died.”79 Quickly and certainly, Luther comes to his main point, which is not Jesus’ agony. He urges his listeners to give thanks to Christ and consider how in all these things he desires to spare them eternal suffering, “so that you don’t have to experience such a death-cry, anxiety, pain, and mockery.” I should be comforted by his agony, for he has done this for me.80 He later adds that one must be sustained by faith in the midst of tribulation and look into Christ’s heart.81 Luther parts company with most of his Catholic predecessors and contemporaries in using bodily metaphors, to be sure, but no longer literally interpreting the physical experience of Christ’s pain as prelude to and vehicle for benefiting from the Crucifixion. Significantly, the record that we possess of Johann von Staupitz’s twelve sermons that have survived from a series he gave in 1512 reveals that Luther breaks with the physicality and emotional tenor of his mentor.82 Christ is the highest priest, Luther compares, who departs this life for heaven; from there, with his finger—that is, the Holy Spirit—he asperses the hearts of believers with his own blood. He spreads his blood throughout the world by means of the sermon. His blood cleans us of all sin, not by the rite of aspersing, unless it is grasped in faith. “Along with the death of Christ, all that pertained to the Old Adam and all that was taught in the law has died away; and all things are made new.”83 “For that reason, he continues, one should preach about the Passion of Christ, which has occurred and been given to me.”84 His sermon series of 1525 is (to speak of aspersing!) sprinkled with references to the accomplishment of the Crucifixion: “It is not enough to know the story of the Resurrection, but also the use and the fruit that it has earned.” He does invariably begin with an aspect of the story, but conveyed briefly; he then moves on, and continually returns to, the meaning for Christians. The angel’s words to the women at the tomb, “Do not be afraid!” were the first preaching about the Resurrection of Jesus. And then Jesus himself tells the women, “Go and tell my brothers!” which is the first word of Christ after his Resurrection. He parses the word brother as above, making it of keen significance to the faithful; they are now, by virtue of the atonement, truly siblings and coheirs of Christ. Luther does indeed tell the biblical story, but he weaves its strands into a tale of personal applicability to the congregation.85 Catholic Passion sermons often ended with, “It is finished,” and Jesus’ death. What came afterward was less important than what he had endured. For Luther this is not at all the case; the Resurrection of the Lord marks the completion of atonement; it delineates a new phase in the life of his followers in which the Word must be carried into all the


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world. “Do not be afraid!” and “Go tell my brothers!” thus usher in a new era. This era is characterized not by weeping and withdrawal but my remaining in the world and bearing witness. Quite remarkable is the fact that Luther preaches on this subject midway through Lent. In 1525, he does not wait until Easter Sunday or Easter Monday. On Palm Sunday, he preaches on the consolation of the Eucharist. The bond between Crucifixion and the sacrament is clear, in that the latter postfigures the former. The Lord’s Supper announces the remission of sins, which should be preached abroad. It is done “in memory of me,” and “for you.”86 The Wittenberg Reformer, then, repudiates those preachers who have wasted many words in recounting the details of the Passion and have left out the important part, the use of the sacrifice to Christians. He advocates leaving behind the useless chatter and many words, with which preachers have shown off their skills. These have let the core of the matter fall away.87 “For that reason, you must pay attention that you know what it is worth to you and what he [the Evangelist] means by it. It is not enough that you hear it, see, and marvel at it as though at a beautiful painting created by a painter; it touches you, it is of value to you, that you be risen in Christ and he in you, otherwise it is lost, as Paul says in 1 Corinthians 15.”88 “Grasp that saying deep in your heart: ‘Because of our sin,’ and ‘for our justification’; for these are excellent words, and they contain the usefulness of the Resurrection within themselves.”89 “So great are these words that they could not enter into the human heart unless the spirit of God illuminated it. The words are too great for anyone to believe them unless the Holy Spirit inscribes them on the heart.”90 He mentions that the congregation was singing on that day the new hymn, “Christus lag in Todesbanden.” Thus, in addition to hearing the sermon, the people had sung or were about to sing: 1 Christ lag in Todesbanden Für unsre Sünd gegeben, Er ist wieder erstanden Und hat uns bracht das Leben; Des wir sollen fröhlich sein, Gott loben und ihm dankbar sein Und singen hallelujah, Halleluja!

Christ lay in death’s bonds handed over for our sins; he is risen again and has brought us life. For this we should be joyful, praise God and be thankful to Him and sing alleluia, Alleluia.

3 Jesus Christus, Gottes Sohn, An unser Statt ist kommen

Jesus Christ, God’s son, has come to [take] our place

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Und hat die Sünde weggetan, Damit dem Tod genommen All sein Recht und sein Gewalt, Da bleibet nichts denn Tods Gestalt Den Stach’l hat er verloren. Halleluja!

and has put aside our sins, and in this way from death has taken all its rights and [all] its power, here remains nothing but death’s outward Form; it has lost its sting. Alleluia!

4 Es war ein wunderlicher Krieg, Da Tod und Leben rungen, Das Leben behielt den Sieg, Es hat den Tod verschlungen. Die Schrift hat verkündigt das, Wie ein Tod den andern fraβ, Ein Spott aus dem Tod ist worden. Halleluja!

It was an astonishing battle in which death and life contended. Life won the victory, It has swallowed up death. Scripture has proclaimed how one death ate the other, death has become a mockery. Alleluia!

5 Hier ist das rechte Osterlamm, Davon Gott hat geboten, Das ist hoch an des Kreuzes Stamm In heiβer Lieb gebraten, Das Blut zeichnet unser Tür, Das halt der Glaub dem Tode für, Der Würger kann uns nicht mehr schaden, Halleluja!91

Here is the true Easter lamb that God has offered, which high on the trunk of the cross is roasted in burning love. Its blood marks our doors, which faith holds up before death. The strangler can harm us no more, Alleluia!92

In these lyrics are evident both the teaching of the atonement itself and the emotional tone that it embodies. Christians are to rejoice and be profoundly grateful for the gift that has been given them. The mystical element of the sacrificial lamb’s being roasted in burning love, and the Christian’s being marked with blood, too, is apparent. The faithful relate to their Savior inwardly and with feeling. They demonstrate this love outwardly, however, not in obvious ecstasy or with tears but in the loving service of their neighbor. And they join in song together, to mark the earthly gathering and their unanimity.


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Luther preaches God’s own emotion—His love and compassion—as the motivating force behind the Crucifixion. That is well known. As God, then, Christ bears these sentiments toward sinful humankind. God’s love as shown in Christ’s self-sacrifice elicits requital from the faithful. Believers must respond. A persistent conviction to which Luther gives expression in myriad venues is the worthlessness of reason in religious questions. In his Palm Sunday sermon of 1528, he sums up his perspective to an audience that is doubtless already well acquainted with his opinion: That is the sum total of the entire Gospel, namely, that it builds and sets itself exclusively upon Christ, so that we ever measure ourselves by him and hold him before us as our Righteousness and our Redeemer. [We should] close our eyes, see and hear, feel and think nothing [on our own] but remain glued to the Word alone. For faith is nothing other than that one believes that which he cannot see or comprehend, that which he cannot understand or observe; that in which faith alone stands. For whatever one sees or feels with his reason, that he does not believe. . . . For that reason, he has to hang on the bare Word, shut his eyes, blind his reason, and only prick up his ears and stand upon the Word and write it on his heart.93 It surely bears on the question of emotion if the use of reason is ruled out and only feeling elicited by hearing the Scripture preached is admissible. Faith will reveal itself as a sensation in “the heart.” This indefinable metaphor of the bodily organ marked from ancient times the location of genuine conviction. In these years, Luther did not avoid the problems of just who received faith. On some Maundy Thursday prior to 1528, so the Zwickauer Stephan Roth noted, this preacher conceded that although Jesus holds out his love to us all, he possesses the gift of faith and bestows it only on those “whom he will.”94 This message could have come from early in Luther’s career, for with the passage of time, the Reformer, except at the dinner table and in letters (both in response to the queries of others), held forth on the subject of election less and less. He generally stated that this was part of God’s hidden will and not ours to probe or concern ourselves with.

Luther’s Followers Those who worked with Martin Luther in Wittenberg knew immediately what he meant when he urged a toning down of the treatment of the Passion. Johannes

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Kymeus (1498–1552), a former Franciscan, came out of an order that particularly stressed the Lenten and Holy Week ritual of arousal.95 He knew what he was talking about, then, when he announced in a sermon that he had presumably given on a Palm Sunday, and then allowed to be published: “And thus it was the final purpose, when someone preached the Passion to us, how one could move the people to weeping, to howling, and to lamenting over the unkind Jews and mean-spirited peoples who killed Christ, God’s Son. But the recognition of sins, and faith, which one was above all supposed to bring about by means of the Passion—these remained behind.”96 The content of his sermons follows the model of the Reformer. The physical details of Christ’s ordeal are assumed to be well known; they are not recounted. Rather, each phase of Jesus’ progress from Bethany to Golgotha serves as a reminder of some deeper lesson. He urges his listeners or readers to “examine your own heart and conscience. If you find in your heart the recognition of your sins, don’t be driven away from this [Lord’s] Supper.” “Don’t,” he admonishes, echoing Luther, “apply reason to Christ’s presence in the Eucharist, only faith.”97 He regards Pilate and Herod as rational in their approach to Jesus. Instead, they should have listened to the whole story and learned about sin.98 Kymeus regards Judas as having repented of betraying his Master; yet he despaired and hanged himself. The preacher omits the vivid and rousing version of that act that has Judas’s abdomen bursting open and his entrails pouring out upon the ground.99 Throughout, Kymeus’s tone is moderate, his telling of the biblical story brief, and his stress upon the meaning of the Crucifixion. Only in discussing the Jews does he reinvigorate the tendency of his former order to lambaste them without restraint.100 Each Lutheran divine will show his own individuality in the way he treats the Passion, as every other subject, and Johannes Brenz is a good example of this. The Swabian Reformer did not live in proximity to Luther, whom he followed nonetheless; the distance between them and Brenz’s support by the ducal house of Württemberg as well as others enabled him to evolve in interaction with personalities and circumstances around him. Luther himself admired Brenz as a theologian.101 Brenz’s volume of Passion sermons reflects his own inclinations.102 No summary retelling, Passio Vnsers Herren Jesu Christi leyden vnd sterben is made up of twenty-three sermons.103 These were originally written in Latin but had doubtless been given in the vernacular, whether or not precisely as they appear here. Internal evidence suggests that they really were presented as the Passion part of a longer series on the life of Christ. At the outset, Brenz informs his audience that the purpose of the Lord’s suffering is not only to move us in human fashion to sympathize with him but above all to make us recognize God’s good will toward us humans.104


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Remarking on the woman’s pouring costly ointment on Jesus’ head in the home of his friends in Bethany—Brenz was not alone in including this early episode as part of the larger Passion account—the clergyman says that she did not earn anything by this good work. Her deed is praiseworthy “because it had its source and flowed from true faith and love for Christ.”105 He turns the figure of Judas into the image of all people’s sins. Even if they are not openly murderers, thieves, and drunks, they are all guilty of such transgressions as “envy and hate, poisonous rage, slandering the Word of God, neglecting office and vocation, lying and perjury, mischief and shameful insolence.”106 In recounting the fate of Judas, Brenz retains the riveting, shameful feature of his midsection having split open to spill out his internal organs.107 In contrast with Luther, Brenz states that Christians are “constantly and always” to retain within the church the memory of Christ’s suffering, seeming to include the physical experience. Luther appears overall to stress this less than his colleague. However, the two men agree entirely that the Passion, like the Eucharist, is to be apprehended with faith, “in a supernatural and heavenly manner.”108 The Swabian devotes an entire sermon to the maintenance of secular peace. Christ desires that his divine Word be “quietly and peacefully” announced and taught.109 Speaking about Gethsemane, like Luther, Brenz assures his hearers that Jesus’ psychological torment was much worse than the physical. Here Brenz himself seems to be moved as he recalls the Catholic depiction of the Savior’s agony in the garden, which only his sense of desolation on the cross would equal. These he calls the most agonizing parts of the Passion. He uses extreme language to engage the attention: “Now we want to speak about the sadness that Christ confesses, how he is troubled unto death, and that such grief drives bloody sweat out of his body. He began, the Evangelists say, to be terrified, to be afraid, and to tremble, and to be most extremely afflicted in all his soul. . . . Such pains are so great that the godless would rather hang themselves than endure and bear them.”110 He concludes this sermon, “Yes, we should all regard ourselves in no other way than that the sins of each of us are those very ones that drove bloody sweat out of Christ.” The detail with which Brenz proceeds sets him apart from Luther. Brenz insists by his action in the pulpit that the preacher should catalog every indignity that Christ suffered. “For that reason, we now want to lay out that part of the Passion that Christ endured in the form of unspeakably great pains in his state of mind (seines gemüts) and also in his body, such as how he was taken captive, bound, despised, mocked, spat upon, struck, beaten, and finally nailed on the cross between two murderers.”111 The succeeding homilies follow this stated plan, although never to the extreme length, degree, and departure from Scripture as the typical Catholic telling. At nearly each phase, he recapitulates

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the physical insults that Jesus had undergone. As a rhetorician, he deliberately seeks to maintain a level of negative sentiment in his listeners. He strongly, repeatedly depicts what he, along with all his contemporaries, regards as the responsibility of the Jews for this disaster. His language is not attractive. Simultaneously, he reiterates human beings’ responsibility for these events: “In the Passion of Christ, we should recognize the magnitude of our sins and the heavy, gruesome wrath of God in response to these sins, and the great and violent punishment that these earn, and that will follow should we not improve ourselves and stop sinning.”112 Brenz evidently believes in people’s ability to resist sinning, particularly those individuals who have faith. Elsewhere he comments that those with faith “improve themselves with time” and acknowledge their sin.113 He agreed with Zwingli and with the later Calvin. Brenz waxes dramatic in using verses from the Old Testament, especially but not only Psalm 88, to portray Jesus’ state of mind when he cried out in despair, “My God! My God! Why hast Thou forsaken me?” He elaborates: I howl, but my help is distant; I am a worm and not a man, a mockery before the people and despised by all who see me. They deride me, open their mouths, and shake their heads. I am poured out like water. All my limbs have separated from each other, my heart in my body is like melted wax; my powers are dried out like a [pot]shard, and my tongue adheres to my gums. . . . God help me, for the water rises up to my soul, I sink into the mud, which has no bottom; I am in deep water, and the flood will drown me.114 When Christ died and darkness covered the earth, Brenz drew on his rhetorical training to make an impression on the congregation. He repeats the word darkness over and over in his sermon on Jesus’ expiration, alluding to the dark character of these events along with the alleged eclipse of the sun.115 Even though Brenz surpasses Luther in the degree of his concentration upon Christ’s psychic and corporeal pain, and in the extent to which he urges the mental perception of that pain upon his hearers, he does noticeably abandon the extremities of Catholic portrayal—extremities of length, detail, and invention. He clearly falls within the moderating pattern of Lutheranism, which, as I shall continue to maintain, yet fostered Christians’ use of their capacity to envision Christ’s own agony and their responsibility for it. Brenz uses the word consolation (Trost) far less often than Luther and stresses the need for people to repent and reform their lives. This focus upon renewal of life under inspiration of the Passion story will persist in each tradition, the new ones and the old. It will be most marked, however, within Catholicism and Calvinism, but in different manners.


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Another contemporary and follower of Martin Luther, one who left a series of sixteen Passion sermons, is Veit Dietrich (1506–1549), a former student of Luther who fell out with his mentor and, faithful nonetheless to the Lutheran reform, is chiefly associated with Nuremberg. In this great imperial city he published Passio, Oder histori vom leyden Christi Jesu vnsers Heylands, and he states explicitly that he had preached the contents in his home town.116 At the very outset, he declares that our focus must be upon the reason why Christ died: to atone for our sins. We could not, he opines, begin to feel the torment that Jesus experienced. “Our hearts are much too weak to hold up under such distress.”117 Dietrich has the Passion begin in Gethsemane, but he dwells very little upon Jesus’ trembling and his sweating blood. He explains why Christ had to die: to atone for our sins and reconcile us with God.118 The preacher does express his antipathy for both Jews and Roman Catholics; he does convey feeling of an immediate and earthly sort to those who stand and sit around him. His efforts to differentiate his position from Catholicism are pronounced and passionate. A small engraving inserted amid the text has the pope, bishops, a nun, and monks nailing Christ to the tree.119 The Catholic Church, he accuses, “flays and slays the body, goods, and soul.” He decries its theology of works.120 This rhetoric of confessionalization is designed to inflame in a way that compels listeners to reject the faith to which most of them had earlier adhered.121 Yet when he addresses Judas’s suicide, the betrayer’s mid-section does not split open; he avoids the most elemental method of gaining attention.122 Dietrich recounts the Gospel stories at some length at the beginning of each sermon, and then he proceeds to stress the analogies he draws between the ancient accounts and contemporary existence. Judas was the treasurer of the disciples, and he came to love money too much.123 Simon the Cyrene’s burden as he helps to bear the cross is figurative, too; it refers to the hardships that God assigns people to bear in life.124 Jesus’ love for us is as great as that of a parent who “runs through fire to rescue his children.”125 Mary the mother of Jesus was the only person present who dared to weep—this itself is a departure from most late-medieval artistic renderings, in which, at the very least, other women also cry, as well as John the Beloved Disciple.126 The Nuremberg preacher concludes with three general principles: First, life on earth is a pilgrimage during which one has no refuge and must ever “stretch out his head” and keep going in the direction of the one true and eternal Fatherland.127 Second, he attests that we have learned through these sermons how great and abhorrent sin is. Third, we should ever console ourselves by remembering the sacrifice of Christ: Christ paid the price of our sins.128 Cyriakus Spangenberg (1528–1604) was a member of the second generation of a veritable dynasty of Lutheran clergymen.129 He served much of his

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career in the county of Mansfeld, until, in the 1570s, he took the side of Matthias Flaccius Illyricus in a dispute over the extent of damage to the human will in the Fall.130 The men on both sides of this issue considered themselves to adhere to “true” Lutheran teaching. Spangenberg was a dedicated and successful pastor, but, like his father Johannes, he nevertheless found time to write a vast array of works that were disseminated in Lutheran Germany and beyond for their edifying and, in part, polemical content.131 His collection of Passion sermons went through five editions in the sixteenth century, beginning in 1557 under the title Passio: Vom Leiden vnd sterben vnsers HErrn, Heilands vnd Seligmachers Jesu Christi.132 He informs his readers, and presumably before that his congregation, that it is a fine, old custom every year to review the events of the Passion. In order for it to bear fruit in the individual, however, he must “believe from the heart.” One purpose is simply to keep awareness of the story alive. The second goal is more important and specifically involves the emotions of the faithful. We must understand that Christ suffered because of our own sins and misdeeds. Spangenberg’s language is strong, and the emotive terms stand out: “Truly, if a person rightly considers this, he will not depart without great horror and grieving of conscience. For who would not be touched by fear, anxiety, and pain who feels in his heart what a shameful thing sin is and how violently God rages against it.”133 Horror, grief, fear, anxiety, pain, shame, violent rage—the preacher leaves no doubt about his own sentiment. Spangenberg holds the Christian responsible for the betterment of his own deportment. He insists, “Such gratitude does not consist alone in gestures and words, but also in deeds and works—that is, in an entirely new life and Christian behavior. This is the righteous repentance that is pleasing to God.”134 Luther himself urged improvement of life, but he was not sanguine about humans’ potential for success. Many who came after him, not to mention men like Zwingli and Calvin, were convinced that the recipient of faith could and indeed must make progress in the earthly realm in the cultivation of inner virtues and the exercise of outer self-control. We see the tension between these points of view not only in the controversy that arose among Lutheran theologians over the necessity of good works but also in the divided messages of sermons. In this day, the disciplinary urge was so pronounced that even if a preacher happened to believe that Christians remain mired in sin and can contribute nothing to their salvation, still that cleric in the pulpit was likely to threaten disaster in this world and hellfire in the next if people did not refrain from misbehavior. This tension was not resolved during the entire longer Reformation era. Spangenberg reminds his listeners that “just as Christ was obedient to his Father in enduring the cross and pain, so must we be patient, humble, obedient, chaste, moderate, [and] withdrawn (eingezogen).135 Our


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virtue, he goes on, is a response to God’s own feelings for us—His “mercy, truth, love, and pity . . . toward us human beings, who are lost.”136 We must respond to His demonstrativeness toward us. He exhorts his listeners to struggle against their fury of hate and envy by recalling Christ’s friendliness on the cross toward his enemies. Spangenberg employs the rhetorical device of anaphora in repeating the word fight at the beginning of each part of a series of admonitions: “Fight your arrogance. . . . Fight your laziness and carelessness. . . . Fight your hate and envy. . . . Fight your overeating and drunkenness. . . . Fight your habitual appetites (Wassersucht) and avarice. . . . Fight the hot fever of vengefulness and . . . presumption and self-certainty and inconstancy and doubt.”137 He verbally pounds upon the vices of members of his congregation. Spangenberg observes in passing that some members of his parish had complained about his reading the entire pertinent section of the Passion story, from not just one but from every Gospel that dealt with a particular episode, at the beginning of each sermon. He believed that this ought to be done as a reminder of what the Bible said.138 Perhaps some of those present (who already knew the events of the Passion well) considered their preacher to be just a bit too Catholic in his attention to detail instead of to the story’s meaning for Christians. In his ninth Passion sermon, Spangenberg turns to the great love that existed between the Father and the Son. Christ strongly yearned for his Father. “We know how a proper father feels toward his child.” The word father, he says, strengthens our faith and makes our hearts joyful.139 With this discussion, the author sets the stage for Jesus’ agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, where he did indeed sweat drops of blood. In combining the accounts of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, Spangenberg extracts a story that has a most dramatic impact upon his audience: These versions vary in the number of times that Jesus asked the chosen disciples to watch and pray, and thus the number of times that they failed to do so. Like all his contemporaries, too, Spangenberg accepts the bloody sweat and the comfort given to Jesus by an angel in the midst of his suffering “unto death.” Like Brenz, he draws out the Lord’s inner anguish in the garden and describes its effects on his body: The trembling is the outward pain that he felt in his tender body as he out of fright completely shook and quaked, and his heart with hard constant beating and thumping fought within his body; and soon he sweated out of fear, and a troubling coldness pressed through all his marrow and bones. As a result, he is totally confounded, collapsed, terrified, and his whole body is seized, such that he could not see or hear in the garden, and this [would have] lasted until his departure on the holy cross.

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He felt the burden of “all the sins that had been committed by all people, by the most godless and accursed people, from the beginning of the world, and which still occur and will occur until the Last Day. This was a hideous sight.”140 In his struggle with death, bloody sweat dripped from his pores, falling on his face and clothing and finally onto the ground, “which is unheard of and was above nature.”141 The consolation rendered by the angel was amazing because here a creature (the angel) ministered to the Creator of the world! This shows how abased Christ was.142 Spangenberg prolongs his efforts to arouse his hearers. It is a gruesome thing, and horrible to see, when a wild animal—bear, lion, or swine—tears a person apart. But when God in anger slays and attacks, then that is a consuming fire, and drives apart the sinner in no other way than a . . . lion with his teeth, which crunches the bones of a tender little lamb so that nothing remains. . . . That most of the masses in the midst of his [Jesus’] suffering, sweating, enduring, bleeding, and being wounded . . . would so disgracefully curse, swear, and blaspheme—this penetrates right into his holy heart; that makes it well necessary for him to sweat blood out of fear.143 Spangenberg clearly seeks to involve his hearers’ and readers’ bodies and feelings more than his model, Martin Luther, had. He describes Peter’s grief over having denied Christ and adds, “Such weeping is a certain testimony to Christian repentance. . . . Tears and crying are sure signs of inner pain and regret.”144 He implies that such demonstration would be desirable without, however, engaging in the explicit solicitation of his Catholic counterparts at this time. Spangenberg notes twice that the original account in Matthew of Judas’s suicide does not contain the verse about his abdomen bursting and his entrails spilling out.145 He is, however, exercised over the Interim and mingles his condemnation of those who have accepted it with “papists” before returning to Christians’ responsibility for their Savior’s unbearable pain. Ah, dear Christians, how has it cost our Lord Christ so much pain to bear for our sinfulness? What do you intend in causing him extreme suffering beyond all measure, for one mercilessly ripped apart with lashes? When the thorns were pressed into his head and his holy blood poured profusely over his holy countenance? Such scourges and thorns are yours and my sins, with which I and you have caused him such misery. Our hate, envy, pride, unchastity, blasphemy, and other sins whip and impose the thorns on Jesus anew!146


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In drawing a clear distinction for his audience between proper Lutheran devotion and the “invented” teachings of Catholic preachers, Spangenberg refutes Catholic attention to the Virgin Mary’s grief, which, he thinks, ultimately denigrates her and distracts from the central message of her Son’s Passion. Although like any mother, Mary bore great pain, “still there was hardly a stronger, more courageous, or more manly woman on the face of the earth than the dear, holy Virgin Mary.”147 But his readers should imitate not her but the converted murderer [sic] crucified on Christ’s right-hand side.148 Spangenberg’s nineteenth sermon, which concludes his initial series—four more would be tacked on to the next edition—is a résumé of the entire Passion story. It does not end on a note of consolation to Christians who are mired in anxiety over their ability of refrain from sin. Instead, it recapitulates the physical torments of the ordeal and lays the blame squarely, emphatically, upon “Jews and heathens.” But then it creates distance between Christians and Jews and withdraws the possibility of displacing the blame: “If the Passion of Christ is to bear fruit within us poor humans, we must confess before God that we are those who have caused Christ such martyrdom and pain; [we must admit] that in this case, the Jews were the servants of our sin.”149 Cyriakus Spangenberg, doubtless in his own opinion a true follower of the Wittenberg Reformer, actually departs from him in his attention to human sinfulness. He relentlessly presses his audience to feel with the suffering Jesus— even though, it is true, he never approaches the length, detail, or extremes of inventive description engaged in by many Catholic preachers of the time. He strives to arouse the self-accusation, guilt, and sorrow of his parishioners. He urges them to feel as much as they are able of Christ’s physical as well as mental agony, for, he evidently thinks, only via the establishment of close and sensitive identity can they be brought to true repentance. The burden of reform is upon himself and his hearers, and neither divine assistance nor comfort is prominent within his overall tidings. Although his life was shorter, the Brunswick pastor and theologian Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586) was Spangenberg’s contemporary. He took a more moderate position than Spangenberg, however, in those ideological conflicts that divided Lutheranism in the Age of Orthodoxy. He joined with others in writing a compromise text, the Formula of Concord (1577), which was designed to bring peace to the belligerents. The final document, The Book of Concord (1580), did attain at least a measure of its goal. Shortly after his death, in 1591, his successor in Brunswick compiled and published Chemnitz’s passion sermons as Historia der Passion vnsers lieben HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi.150 The compiler, Melchior Newkirchen, states openly in his foreword that Chemnitz himself was content to deliver “twelve to thirteen or at most fifteen sermons to tell the

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story of the Passion,” but he, Newkirchen, has added a number of others to either end of the account of Christ’s suffering. He tells the reader that it is not enough to hear about the torment; the main thing is that Christ was obedient to his Father.151 Newkirchen concedes that “even in the darkness of popery, the Passion remained and was diligently taught, and pious souls were sustained by it.”152 He cites Irenaeus as observing that even in his day, some preachers took “eight days, fourteen days, four weeks, six weeks to explain the whole Passion to the people.” He rejects this, preferring that Lent be used for teaching the catechism and Holy Week for the Passion. “The Word,” he concludes, “is the only means by which the Holy Spirit shows its works in us so that we grow from day to day in the fear of God.”153 Chemnitz himself, in expounding on the Bible’s shortest verse, says that Christ’s weeping over the death of Lazarus (who stank after four days!) shows that the Savior has “a hearty sympathy with us.” We should not allow our reason to interfere with the enlightenment of the spirit, as Martha of Bethany did.154 Chemnitz returns often to the theme of the betrayal of the Jews. When Jesus curses the fig-tree, the preacher makes this analogous to condemning the hypocrisy and evil of the Jewish people and pointing toward the terrible end that they will meet.155 He regards God as holding all people’s hearts and lives in his hand, and as governing the order of events in the Passion.156 He explains the Jewish Passover, commenting, “We have to smear the blood of the proper Easter Lamb upon the door-posts of our hearts and thereby indicate to the evil Satan’s destroying angel that it cannot injure us.”157 Chemnitz dwells upon Christ’s agony in the Garden, drawing upon all the Old Testament texts that he takes to foretell the Passion, such as Isaiah 42, Psalm 6, Psalm 22, Psalm 55, and Psalm 62. He recites the details of Jesus’ trembling, his fear, and his sweating blood.158 Although he refers to the atonement, this grim experience of Christ must also remain in the mind: “Just as to this end, the story of the Passion is so diligently told by the Holy Ghost, and God has it preached and presented to us by his servants, so that it may enflame devotion within us and that from it we may learn to recognize God’s seriousness against sin and flee from sin. In addition, so that we learn to observe and acknowledge the unspeakable love of God toward us poor humans.”159 He returns to the theme of atonement as God’s demonstration of love. We experience renewal and consolation when we remember Jesus’ suffering on our behalf.160 When we on our deathbed produce cold sweat, we can comfort ourselves with the recollection of Christ’s bloody sweat. For Chemnitz as for Brenz and Spangenberg, the Savior’s inner anguish, with its bodily manifestations, in the Garden of Gethsemane “is one of the most distinguished parts of


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the Passion.”161 We respond to Jesus’ own love toward us and his submission on our account. All of the Son’s ordeal was part of God’s command. We cannot blame it on the Jews “or others.” Rather, “this is what God’s will and hand does.”162 Chemnitz’s rendering of the scriptural account is quite abbreviated. He reviews the physical affronts to Christ that are conveyed in the Gospels—the blow to his face, the false witness, the mockery, the spitting—but only infrequently those that are not. Instead, he devotes himself mainly to formulating the moral meaning for those in his congregation. In discussing Peter’s denial of his Master, he calls the denial a “gruesome sin,” which nevertheless meets with God’s “great mercy” in taking Peter into his good graces again.163 By analogy, and sometimes directly, the preacher holds out to committers of very significant offenses the possibility that they, too, may be reconciled through Christ with their Heavenly Father. He urges everyone to imitate Mary Magdalene in feeling deeply sorry from the heart for sin.164 Chemnitz devotes much attention to the fate of Judas, who, he says, had no faith in Christ. The divine affirms his belief in predestination: “A person can do nothing from his own reason or power to believe in Jesus Christ, or to come to him; rather, the Holy Spirit must bring him to this, for faith is the gift of God.” Why did not Judas have faith? He replies to his rhetorical question that the ways of God are inscrutable and unknowable. “We can not and should not investigate this.” Nevertheless, we should abstain from sin.165 One of Chemnitz’s embroideries on the bare biblical account of Jesus’ suffering (one with considerable precedent) occurs when he is discussing Pilate’s treatment of the Lord. He asserts that Pilate had Christ scourged beyond the norm in order to move the Jews to compassion. He attributes to Isaiah 50 and 53 the traditional view that on Christ’s entire body there was no sound or whole place, from his skull down to the soles of his feet.166 In this section of his sermons, Chemnitz recites this, until it becomes virtually a refrain.167 He desires to call up an image of affliction for his listeners that moves them to compassion, sorrow, and repentance; it is a classic pattern, here employed also to arouse feeling against the Jews. He intermittently returns to the theme of atonement: “This is our medicine (Ertzney); by means of this we are helped,” a rewording of “and by his stripes we are healed.”168 Chemnitz explicitly rejects the Catholic manner of preaching the Passion: “Under popery one strove, in preaching the Passion, to make [the story] so lamentable that the people shed tears and were moved to weep; and whoever was able to achieve this was regarded as the best Passion preacher.”169 Chemnitz insists that that is not his goal. Christ told the women of Jerusalem, “Don’t weep over me . . . !”170 Yet, the length of his excursus, his choice of descriptive

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words, his emphasis upon Christ’s physical torment all taken together reveal a traditional technique of bringing to repentance. Although shorter and ultimately more moderate than Catholic versions either of the late Middle Ages or his own day, Chemnitz recites physical details to fascinate and arouse his audience, to foster their own feeling in sympathy with their Savior, to bring them to sorrowful confession of their own role, and to move them to repentance. He refers to Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and admonishes: We should follow that example, and grasp the same devotion from it in our hearts when we hear how the Crucifixion occurred . . . that Christ was bared and stripped naked, his limbs stretched out, and how with rods and whips he was dealt with [until he was] bloody, covered with sores, welts, and wounds, [and] hung on the cross because he desired to pay and make snow-white our sins, which are blood-red before God’s face . . . [and] hideous and abominable to look upon.171 He rejects as gruesome Catholic blasphemy the participation of Mary in helping Christians to attain salvation.172 He ends the entire series of sermons with an admonition to Christians to reflect on each and every segment of “this horrible spectacle” and what it means to us.173 Another great Lutheran preacher of the second half of the sixteenth century, Nicolaus Selnecker, composed a series of prayerful meditations on the Passion in 1572, dedicated to Duchess Sophie Hedwig of Brunswick and Lüneburg.174 The small size of the volume hints that it was intended to guide extra-ecclesiastical lay devotions during Holy Week. It offers up as the objects and stimuli of daily reflection episodes in the longer tale of torment. Its descriptive lists are seemingly endless and laden with emotion. An example is the “third reason that should compel and move us to contemplation of the suffering and death of Jesus Christ”: So that the same [story] we diligently learn, read, hear, teach, and always carry it with us; [ for it] is our own great need, grief, and misery, effort and labor, in which we all, together and individually, persist with soul and body. We are conceived and born in sin, and [we] are by nature children of wrath, also poor, wretched, bare, naked, ragged beggars, subject to every hardship and misfortune, and we have neither true happiness nor joy in this world; for all is transitory and fleeting, everything [is] rotten, disappearing, passing away, and turned to dust; many demands, cares, work, illness, and accidents occur every day, and the world is besides untrue and false, proud and


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poisonous, evil and quickly turned to what is wicked, and full of unrest, envy, quarrel, argument, fakery, and intrigue, also filled with danger, wretchedness and grief, as much among the most powerful as among the poor, until death, as the last depositor, separates soul and body from each other and bids us to remove our hats.175 In the classic pattern of the mystic, the contemplator is to begin with the emptiness of this life in eternal terms, its betrayal, and the individual’s fundamental worthlessness as an inveterate, unsalvageable sinner. But, like a beacon of light, at the end of these devotions stands the Passion of Christ and the doctrine of the atonement. The Christian must, however, transit the former to arrive at the latter: Oh, Lord Jesus Christ, how great is your Passion, how hard is your pain, how many are your sufferings, how deep are your wounds, how bitter and painful is your death; how unspeakable your love, with which you have reconciled us with your dear Father, so that our of deathly anxiety on the Mount of Olives sweat blood and the drops fell upon the earth, and even there you were abandoned by all your disciples, gave yourself willingly into the hands of the stubborn, vile Jews and godless crowd; who bound you, the Lord of Lords, hard . . . [although you were] not forced (ungeschwungen), and led you from one unjust judge to another, brought false charges against you, spat, mocked, and thirstily, devilishly struck you in your divine, worthy, highly praised face. Oh, Lord, you were wounded for our transgression and for our sake beaten, scourged, crowned with thorns, and lamentably dealt with, and you were kicked like a poor worm that bears no resemblance to a human being. For you were the most despised and worthless one, full of pains and affliction, such that even a heathen and worldly heart would have taken pity and said, “Look, what kind of man is that?” You have borne our sins as you carried your cross, and on account of our misdeeds were placed between two evildoers, and hung up as one accursed, your hands and feet bored through with nails, and in your desperate thirst given vinegar and gall to drink; and in great pain you gave up your spirit so that you might pay our debt, and so that we might be healed by means of your wounds. For all your suffering and pain, Lord Jesus Christ, we give you praise and thanks from our hearts, and we ask you not to let your holy, bitter torment be lost on us poor sinners. Instead, that we may from our hearts be comforted and rejoice (rhümen), and that we may also observe and contemplate it so that all

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evil desires are extinguished in us and subdued, and in contrast all virtues are implanted and increased in us, such that we may die to sin, live to righteousness, and so that we may imitate your calm model, walk in your footsteps, endure injustice with a clear conscience, and thus daily await a blessed hour of death (Stündelein), and finally through you become blessed.176 Selnecker completed this work, he signs at the end, in Wolfenbüttel, on the eve of Easter, 5 April 1572. Writing these meditations was thus an act of personal devotion.

Provisional Conclusions I have not yet treated the subject of dying and death. This will await a later chapter. At this point, nevertheless, it is possible to pull together some threads of generalization concerning Lutheran beliefs about the religious emotions. As indicated at the beginning, I was wrong to regard the church founded by Martin Luther as striving to eliminate strong feelings in response to its spiritual ministrations. Luther’s chief response to the Passion is gratitude, and its degree is not supposed to be slight. He advocates to his (actually Johannes Bugenhagen’s) flocks in Wittenberg the cultivation of heartfelt appreciation for the Passion as a divine measure of reconciliation between God and humans. The preacher’s role in crafting this thankfulness is central, for the Holy Spirit works in the hearts of the faithful as the Word is announced in the pulpit. Luther’s own emphasis upon the comfort or consolation that the Gospel message confers upon the believer marks a distinct departure from Catholic reenactment of each blow of the Passion. Without question, from Saint Anselm forward the Western church accepted more or less the same definition of Christ’s mode of reconciling the Divinity with humanity. This is, then, not to suggest that the Catholic Church at any time drew away from the doctrine of the atonement. But as we have seen more clearly in the chapter on Catholic preaching, Catholic preachers aimed first to move the hearer to repentance of sin by means of a vividly retold and partly embellished, or at least not biblical, description of every blow meted out to the Son of God. Identification with Christ’s bodily and mental torment as he anticipated the immediate future was to move people to sorrow precisely for their part in making this painful sacrifice necessary. Luther himself takes a different route to a similar end, circumventing the fullest, and certainly the fictionalized, catalogue of the aspects of Jesus’


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martyrdom. The key word for him is Trost, which recurs in every one of his accounts of the Passion that I have consulted. Every Christian is to know the basic Gospel story of Christ’s ordeal, and to this end a limited number of sermons must be given each year during Holy Week. This is a seasonal ritual that prepares the faithful for the celebration of Easter, the central feast-day of the Christian calendar. It also conditions them to receive the Eucharist—which the visitation records reveal many German laypeople continued to seek only once a year—in the right spirit of understanding and appreciation. The focus nonetheless shifted in Luther’s perspective from the darkness of Holy Week to the joyous thanksgiving of Easter Sunday. Other media, such as art and hymn, deriving from the Wittenberg setting bear this out. Luther did not want the laity to figuratively flagellate themselves and to weep. Having mastered the story, they were to move quickly beyond it to God’s love for them, and Christ’s obedience in fulfilling the ordained atonement. On this they were to rest their thought and their feelings. “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth on him shall not perish but have everlasting life!” Sorrow over sin, he taught, struggle to contain it, but finally rejoice that this inborn and ongoing inclination does not prevent your salvation. Luther’s followers, we must surmise, understood the mood of their mentor to varying degrees. All were of one mind in acknowledging the importance of the atonement. They tended to agree in rejecting the Catholic model of arousing their audiences and moving them to tears of sorrow and self-recrimination. Yet there are noticeable qualitative differences in their handling of the Passion. Veit Dietrich, who knew Luther well, comes closest to the founder’s style of recounting Scripture but neglecting horror. He prefers instead to lead his hearers toward the meaning that the events of the Passion may hold for their lives. The comfort of the atonement is prominent in the sermons of one late-century devoted Lutheran preacher whom I have consulted, namely Tilemann Heβhusen, who had personal need of consolation: As he states in his foreword, he had been driven out of clerical positions seven times in twenty-eight years.177 He accuses Catholic clerics of neglecting Trost in their Passion preaching.178 Martin Moller (1547–1606), a Lutheran pastor who was suspected of Calvinist tendencies at the end of his life, also stresses Trost in his Soliloqvia de passione Iesu Christi. He exhibits mystical qualities in his meditations, but Trost in itself need not be mystical. Moller sets himself apart from Catholic physicality and dwells on the atonement at length. From that doctrine, Christians must derive their comfort.179 Brenz, Chemnitz, Spangenberg, and Selnecker, by contrast, direct their rhetoric more toward the grisly nature of Christ’s martyrdom in their effort to move, literally to move, their listeners and readers to repentance. These men have unwittingly expressed the conviction that only through such

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inner identification with Jesus’ agony will weak human beings come around to the improvement of life. These divines are not as relaxed as Luther concerning the inevitability of sin, and they demand not merely a life-long battle, even though a largely losing one, against sin; they appear to require that that battle in fact not be totally in vain. The emotional tone of their Passion sermons hints at a conviction that the elect will make progress toward restraint of sin in this life. Brenz at one point actually says so: Those who have faith “improve themselves with time” and acknowledge their faults.180 Nevertheless, they can not attain salvation without the atonement. Yet they must regret their helplessness in the face of sin, and they must try to avoid it. Caspar Sauter, pastor in Augsburg at the end of the sixteenth century, describes the proper state of mind: Now let us inwardly bewail our sins and misdeeds. . . . Oh, how should this [presumably, sorrow] not penetrate our marrow and bone, yes, our bodies and souls, as often as we think of our sins and misdeeds? Will Christ the Lord’s side be opened on our account? Then, let us open our sinful hearts for once and groan with the prophet David: “There is no peace in my bones on account of my sin.” The whole day I go around in sadness. I am very bruised. I howl because of the unrest in my heart. My heart trembles. My strength has gone out of me. . . . Oh, how heavy are our sins!181 This obligation to try to constrain our transgressions becomes more urgent in Europe from mid-century on. Those who promote the attempt are identified with both sides of, or all locations upon, the Lutheran theological spectrum. The use of sermons and other devotions intended for lay consumption enables us to see not only what these men’s formal doctrinal positions were but especially what they advocated to their hearers when they held forth during Holy Week. Catechisms can be spare and dry, but sermons cannot. If, then, consolation is Luther’s central message, and although it remains as a prominent feature of pastoral recommendation in the longer Reformation era, Luther’s successors will characteristically add another: the pressing obligation to repent, not simply as a state of mind, but to demonstrate that mood in the betterment of one’s outer life. Brenz’s Passion series of sermons contains fully eleven segments on repentance.182 Faith must bear fruit, and that fruit must be perceptible to one’s neighbors. The Lutheran clergyman Johann Habermann, preaching in Zeitz in 1584, says that reflection on the Passion is “a powerful deterrent (abschreckung) of sin.” He stresses that works must proceed from faith, even though our good works are too weak and few to earn eternal life.183 Failure to give such behavioral testimony will bring God’s wrath upon the collectivity, not in some eternal future but in the here and now. This cast of mind


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would usher in the establishment of monthly weekdays of repentance (Buβtage), when all parishioners were to dedicate themselves to attending church, abasing their transgressive selves before the Most High, and praying to God to avert his anger. This practice, of course, experienced a noticeable advance during the Thirty Years’ War, but it was not only connected with that disaster. Implicit in it was the confidence, never eradicated within Lutheranism, that restraint of sin (works) would pacify God’s temporal vengeance, even if it did not explicitly earn salvation for the masters of self-control. This is the context for the dispute over good works that so engrossed theologians. Capturing the uncertainties within Lutheranism at the end of the sixteenth century is Hans Vredemann de Vries’s painting, “Allegory of Sin and Redemption,” in the Church of the Virgin Mary in Wolfenbüttel—hanging today not above the altar but on the north side of the choir, an unobtrusive location. The prominent musculature of every figure underscores the element of tension. The artist may be showing off his familiarity with human anatomy, but on another level he practices physiognomy, the art of revealing inner character in outer portrayal. Before the crucifix kneel a beseeching Eve and Adam. But for her grip on the earthbound Adam, Eve, with miniature horns and demon’s wings, clutching the bitten apple in her upraised left hand, sinks as in quicksand into the engulfing earth. On hers and their progeny’s behalf, Adam begs the crucified Christ for assistance. The sign above the Savior’s head reads INRI for Iesus Nazarenus Rex Iudeorum, but it also says, Consumatum est (“It is finished”). The sense of the latter refers to Christ’s life and his final words, but it also clearly refers to the act of atonement as the only means by which infected humankind may come to salvation. But this is no longer the unadulterated message of comfort depicted by Cranach the Elder. Here too are woman’s diabolical postlapsarian nature and her reliance on man’s aid in invoking the Lord for his intercession. The possibility of ruination still looms for both at century’s end.


3 The Reformed Churches

Calvinism and Its Age Calvinism was quite suited to the Mannerist aesthetic that surrounded it when it reached its first maturation. This sounds like an oxymoron in view of Ulrich Zwingli’s and John Calvin’s opposition to figural depiction within the church—one cannot even legitimately say “within the sacred space,” for these men challenged the Catholic assumption that some locations on earth were holier than others. From their initial “cleansing” of icons, then, there were in the temples under allegiance to their teachings no visual representations of any kind.1 Clearly, the age of the baroque with its affinity for intense color, motion, and its visions of heavenly hosts ran counter to Reformed sensibilities whether in life or in art—even if certain upright works of art did still have their places within the civil and personal realm.2 Even in published books, Calvinist divines did not like to visualize; illustrations played a far smaller role than throughout the Catholic and Lutheran worlds. In contrast to baroque features, the mannerist universe is tense and uncertain, asymmetrical and foreboding. It does not contain the ebullient, jubilant acceptance of souls floating through a light-filled heavenly ether. It thinks about the hereafter, an uncertain condition, but it is tethered to this world, which is not a pleasant place. John Calvin repeatedly expressed this tension and foreboding.

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The absence of representations is a semiotics of its own. The founding divines followed a conviction, whether thought through and articulated or not, that reminds one at first of the sacred spaces of the early Cistercian movement with their utter simplicity and lack of elaborate art. The intention then, as 450 years later, was to call the worshiper inward to the contemplation of spiritual verities. Bernard of Clairvaux, in the recollection of the Passion of Christ that he so touted, may well, however, have begun with a physical representation, a simple crucifix. The style of his own day would suggest that he took his recollective departure not from an agonized Christ-figure but from a Romanesque manikin that, like many others of its day, appeared almost unmoved. Nonetheless, its placement on the cross and the presence of wounds indicated torment and could lead an adept like St. Bernard toward the interior grasping of Christ’s ordeal. Bernard resides within the venerable Catholic and Neoplatonic tradition of moving in one’s spiritual reflections from outward to inward. Catholics, however, could not leave the body behind, even as they ascended mentally toward the Heavenly Father. Their bodies, too, according to the lives of the great medieval mystics, bore the effects and sometimes the marks of their meditations. Zwingli and Calvin were undoubtedly familiar with past ecclesiastical debates on attributing sacred power to icons and seeking to relate to them as though they were persons in their own right. The cleansing of the churches under their influence was a reaction against this perceived transgression, the inability to regard images as mere reminders of a higher truth. In practice, icons attracted their devotion, which violated the second of the Ten Commandments and possibly also the first.3 Reformed churches came to no Byzantine solution: the removal of three-dimensional but the retention of flat depictions. They eliminated nearly every art form, whether visual or aural, whether affording sensation to the nose or to the touch. Not only crucifixes but also bare crosses disappeared.4 Calvinist services were pared back to their ideological core, leaving God and the Word more starkly the centerpiece. Only metric Psalms, sung in unison and by definition scriptural, relieved the spoken word of the liturgy; and to Zwingli even these were vanities. Seldom in the sixteenth century was it possible to build new churches that incorporated these new lessons.5 Where possible, the interior layout of churches was revised to eradicate choir and altar spaces, as these too were tainted by old attributions of sacrality—the altar as the receptacle of relics, as the womb of the Church, as the stage upon which the drama of transubstantiation was performed.6 Reformed churches went even farther than the Lutheran in eliminating decorative chalices and ruling out the use of candles by daylight. The cup containing the wine of the Eucharist should not suggest the presence of Christ’s

THE REFORMED CHURCHES

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True Blood, nor should flickering candles hint at the presence in the flame of the Holy Spirit.7 Calvin and his immediate followers thoroughly separated the divine from the human sphere. God is a Spirit, and He is to be worshiped in spirit and in truth. Bodies—either ours or Christ’s or saints’—could not serve as a nexus between the telluric and the heavenly. The symbolism of the church spaces assures us of this. Rather, the duly appointed preacher while playing his eponymous role is the point of contact between the Father and his earthly sheep. The appointed deliverer of the divine message is still a person apart, and the focus of the service of worship is the pulpit. This furnishing is elevated high over the people’s heads, allegedly so that they may hear easily, and yet we may take this height to indicate the reviving clericalism of the second half of the sixteenth century.8 Furthermore, the Holy Spirit acted upon pastors and preachers as they held forth on the Word of God. In preaching about Pentecost and the descent of the Holy Ghost, Calvin draws a connection between the Spirit coming to the Apostles and the Spirit’s work upon the preacher. The Holy Spirit, he says, comes down in firelike tongues and is inseparable from the Word preached by his appointed servant.9 If divinity approaches gathered humanity in any locally determinable place, it is when a clergyman ascends into the pulpit and interprets the Word of God to his congregation, and only for the duration of that act. Simultaneously, the Spirit works within the hearts of the elect as they listen, advancing their belief and enabling them to bring forth the fruits of faith in their lives. Fides ex auditu; faith derives from hearing. Reformed pulpits of the sixteenth century were not as fancy as those of baroque Catholicism and Lutheranism, but they were raised up and prominent. There and there only could congregations rest their gaze.10 The walls were now whitewashed, the plain-glazed windows graceful in their sensuous Gothic outlines only because they could not be replaced. The light surging through them, white, nonpictorial, intangible, too declared God’s spiritual nature. The humble communion table at the pulpit’s base, unadorned except when in use, offered no eye-catching object. Attendees at sermons had to listen to the Word. God was real, but he made himself known only in his Word as preached, in verbal abstractions, and in the secret working of the Spirit upon those individuals whom he had selected.11 Calvin may have been attracted to Stoicism as a younger man, when he wrote his preface to Seneca’s treatise “On Clemency.” Gerhard Oestreich has stated that the influence of Seneca, the Roman Stoic, accompanied the French Reformer through all his works.12 Alexandre Ganoczy and Stefan Scheld agree.13 Olivier Millet, the expert on Calvin’s rhetoric, observes that Calvin did not advocate freeing oneself from all feeling. Millet rightly states that Calvin

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urged compassion on all Christians.14 But this is far from sufficient. As the reformer of an actual city, and one who strove to reach his fellow Frenchmen over a much larger expanse of land, he sought to engage his listeners’ strong feelings. He may have cared foremost for their personal spiritual well-being, but he sought, too, to convey with passionate conviction—his words are filled with his own feeling—the correctness of his beliefs. He saw himself as a prophet. Max Engammare has pointed this out.15 Others needed desperately to adopt his perspective, he thought, and in the role of teacher-persuader he sought to move them. His own language is a record of his declared program for his spiritual children. Calvin would, of course, be deeply offended by this description, but theologically, the preacher was God’s instrument, and his humble self-image needed to reflect his utter subordination to the Word. Theodore Beza estimated that John Calvin delivered some 286 sermons a year.16 It bears noting, since this book is mainly about Germany, that Calvin’s example was crucial in every territory within the Empire where the Reformed version of Protestantism took hold—even though, without his published homilies, it was not possible for preachers who had not personally sat in his audience to imitate him in the same way that Lutheran clergymen used Luther’s postils.17 Men who had heard him and who derived their creedal summaries from that experience, from the Genevan’s lesser writings, and from The Institutes of the Christian Religion, strove to convey his content and his spirit as they held forth.18 Calvin’s natural affinity, as I see it, for the Mannerist style lies in the qualitative intersection between his severe pulpit oratory and the discipline meted out weekly by the Genevan Consistory on Thursday mornings.19 Within the church, sermons for common workers began before daybreak; services pointed unerringly toward the homiletic denouement and were indeed often referred to in their entirety as “the sermon.” Just one generation after Luther’s prominence, pews had been built into most urban sanctuaries, and these assisted congregations in staying in place, their heads pointed in the direction of the preacher’s stead––physical fixity; guided attention.20 This bespoke the centrality of the preaching of the Word in Calvin’s scheme, unrivaled as in the Lutheran Lord’s Supper by the Real Presence. All had to attend the sabbath sermon, whether they were forbidden to receive the Eucharist or not on those days when it was distributed. Regular seating-places, along with elders’ assistance in the tally, helped clerics to be sure who was present and who not. So urgent was the hearing of God’s own message that lackadaisical appearance both threatened to hinder the free functioning of the Holy Ghost and hinted at the reprobation of the guilty ones. If widespread enough, it could precipitate some collective disaster, such as fire, pestilence, or war.21


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Consolation was hardly the gift that Calvin, the master artist, desired to confer upon his charges. Of course, he desired to teach his listeners, to increase their knowledge of the faith. But our subject here is the emotional rather than the intellectual qualities of his preaching.22 Drawing on ready strains of self-incrimination as a prerequisite of repentance in the Middle Ages, he strove to drive home the deadly seriousness of Christian worship. Much was at stake, even as he simultaneously insisted that God had already determined, before the foundation of the world, every outcome. This tension between urging repentance and predetermination is central to what I am calling Calvin’s mannerist style. It is of little interest that in the Supplementa Calviniana Passion, Easter, and Whitsun sermons, as the editor points out, the word predestination does not appear once.23 Loyal Catholics such as Ignatius of Loyola adhered theologically to such a doctrine, if in somewhat other form than Calvin, yet the Basque Reformer instructed his followers not to present it to the laity in view of the dangers inherent in it for nonintellectual Christians.24 Martin Luther consigned election to God’s hidden will and tried to pacify the scholars at his table and the occasional correspondent concerning this subject.25 But in Calvin’s sermons, the doctrine of predestination, even if in other words, occurs multiple times. Before the Last Judgment, when all will be known, there can be no relaxation, no peace, no resolution. Like Luther, Calvin repeated to his followers that reasonableness was not a touchstone of ultimate truth. Unlike Luther, the Genevan Reformer averred that the elect will give evidence of spiritual progress while they are still in this life. Their neighbors will know, as certainly their spiritual overseers and the magistrates also will, who is most likely to be saved and who damned. The inclusion of predestination in public preaching remains characteristic for several generations. In the mid-seventeenth century, Adolph Fabritius, a clergyman in Hesse-Kassel, declares: To some extent, one’s election can be noticed by the children of the world in a person’s outer works. Christ indicates . . . that the true Christians are hated by the world for the very reason that the children of the world see that Christ has chosen his own in the world. The world with its thoughts cannot ascend or dig out the eternal counsel and election of God, as it could if he were an ordinary person. But in the works of God and of his blessed people, they can in part discern what God has decided and which individuals Christ, through the preaching of his Word and the powerful drawing of his Holy Ghost, has chosen in the world and separated out.26 Another possible contradiction within the church that Calvin structured in Geneva was that between individualism and communalism. We readily see the

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soul, seeking God in its single essence, giving account of itself before his high throne. Yet the sacraments no longer saved in themselves. Rather, they demarcated the outwardly Christian collectivity. In a symbolic sense, they joined the faithful to the body of Christ. God had determined all. Residents bowed to his will in receiving the nurturance of bread and wine—sustaining to those whom he had chosen. The people of Geneva communed together, out of desire, obedience, custom, hope, but without demonstrating merit or deriving grace. This was a common activity that testified to their civil and their spiritual identity. John Bossy’s Catholic Mass was far more complex, with personal, eternal, temporal, and collective layers of significance.27 Catholic Mass was entered into almost freely—I bear in mind the annual obligation, which was not ferociously enforced—but John Calvin’s Eucharist quickly came to be compelled; or temporarily forbidden. The compulsion was almost equally characteristic of the Lutheran world.28 Under Zwingli’s and Calvin’s leadership, Reformed churches also altered baptism.29 These changes, too, reflect the tension between individuality and commonality. Within Catholicism and Lutheranism, infants needed to be christened with the utmost dispatch so that if they perished, their souls would enjoy the benefits of the sacrament. Both creeds retained the venerable option of allowing midwives (or, technically, any Christian adult) to administer the formula, “I baptize thee in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” to any child in extremis. Very gradually during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the governors of some Lutheran churches adopted the Reformed rationale for conceding funeral liturgy and Christian burial to the miniature corpses, however unbaptized, borne of faithful parents.30 This bespeaks Reformed concern for the eternal rest of helpless (but not sinless) offspring, some of whom would surely be on God’s secret list of those to be saved. At the same time, however, Zwingli and Calvin withdrew the option of emergency baptism and taught their followers that not even baptism itself could modify God’s eternal decree.31 In fact, baptism was no prerequisite of entering the presence of God, and so exorcism was unnecessary. Some ordinary people continued to fear that without Christian initiation, their little ones would languish forever in some nether world, whether limbo, a version of purgatory, or one of the higher circles of hell. Popular belief could not be instantaneously transformed. They felt concern for their dead infants. In the Reformed scheme, baptism became a collective ceremony of welcoming the newly born into the figurative body of Christ, his church; and of vowing to raise them attentively in the true faith. It now took place before the congregation at a Sunday or other service, “after the sermon.” All in attendance witnessed the sacrament and thus participated in it. Calvin and his admirers


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insisted that biological fathers be present along with godparents, and that fathers, too, vow to bring up their babies properly. This was a veritable revolution in baptismal practice.32 Here, then, one takes cognizance of the young person, but the comprehensive dimensions of the rite—including its setting— indicate the importance of the community. Calvin’s standpoint cannot be described solely as isolating the individual before God. Each Christian is embedded in a collectivity, the visible church, and in an overriding sense, the invisible union of the elect with the Savior through all time.

The Mood of Calvin’s Preaching Historians and theologians have concentrated their attention on the Reformer’s life, theology, and the structures he laid down for the Genevan church. Those who have casually remarked on his seeming “dourness” have been regarded as detractors. William Bouwsma went so far as to identify anxiety in this foundational divine’s psychological makeup. His analysis did not attract the label of anti-Calvinist.33 As stated in my introduction, I find that the interdisciplinary attention to the emotions invites the consideration of the sensitive qualities of Calvin’s sermons.34 What was the tone of his rhetoric, and what do his words suggest that he sought to impress upon his hearers? As already said in the introduction, Calvin prepared assiduously for his sermons but gave them spontaneously, without notes.35 Between 1549 and 1560, Denis Raguenier and his group of stenographers took down in shorthand what he said, afterward transcribing their record into the full texts.36 Thus, the sermons that remain to us are possibly much closer to what the Reformer actually told those in attendance than the sermons that other preachers prepared in advance and then revised for dissemination, whether before the advent of the printing press or after.37 Two exceptions to this are: four sermons on various topics, Quatre sermons de M. Jehan Calvin, and a larger collection that Calvin saw into press in 1558, Plusiers Sermons de Iehan Calvin touchant la Divinite, humanite et nativite de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christi.38 There are a number of others.39 Nine of the homilies included here from the latter work are on the Passion. The latter title is the only one that Calvin himself prepared, although he must have been aware that others were publishing his words. Calvin’s expatiation on Christ’s suffering is almost nil. Having, we assume, read the scriptural text aloud, he then refers to it almost obliquely, as a springboard for his remarks on Christians’ moral condition, which is poor. He assumes throughout that the recipients of his commentary are thoroughly

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familiar with the story. He declares that in order to comprehend Christ’s suffering, we must be aware of our faults and be horrified by our state. For his part, Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane had to experience in his own person “the fears, the doubts, and the torments that we endure” or he would not feel the pity for us that he does.40 Having begun with humans’ sinfulness, he explains why Jesus had to suffer the same afflictions as we in order then to make satisfaction for them. Jesus had to experience the “malediction of God.”41 Calvin does not shun the topic of God’s Providence. As Father, he can give to each of his children whatever he desires. Christ has gained passage through fire and death for those who have come to him in faith. But he requires us to fight against our affections, and if we do not, it is impossible for human beings to move a finger without provoking the anger of God. God declares that we are perverse, and “everything that humankind is able to contrive in his spirit is nothing but unseemliness and vanity. From our infancy we show that we are steeped in all the infection of sin.” Even young children, he continues, “are like little serpents, full of venom, malice, and disdain.”42 Having devoted the central portion of his sermon to human sinfulness, he ends on a more hopeful note. Christ calls us, he says, to take part in his suffering and death by means of the Eucharist.43 Our life is a path that God had had us take, and he will not abandon us in the middle of it.44 In another of the pre-1558 Passion sermons, Calvin confronts his hearers with the futility of the efforts of all who are not “called to grace.” These cannot benefit from the Passion. Taking the examples of Peter and Judas, he begins by stating that the Passion works to the salvation of those who are called and the damnation of those who are not. Peter had grace, but Judas did not. “We are not only disfigured by our sins but full of infection and abominable.”45 We are, he repeats, on the brink of the abyss. Remarking on Peter’s tears, he opines that if we only weep before men, we show our hypocrisy. Rather, each one of us must examine our faults and sins when we are privately meditating (recueilli a soy).46 Public tears were a symptom of Catholicism. Calvin uses Jesus’ appearance before Pontius Pilate to decry human corruption. Christ is disfigured by his injuries, and we will correspondingly appear at the Last Judgment as savage beasts. We enrich ourselves by illicit means, by cruelty and extortion. We engage in fraud and other wicked practices. People have perverted every order. They use ambition and illicit means to achieve office. They do this in spite of God. Pilate was presumptuous to think that in washing his hands, he could free himself of guilt.47 The Genevan Reformer does not refer to the women of Jerusalem weeping as Christ carried his cross. It does not here attract his attention. Rather, he is drawn by the thief who in every artistic portrayal hangs crucified on Jesus’


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right-hand side. He is a model of repentance of sin. “He endures some horrible torments: he waits for the one who comes to break and shatter his [leg] bones such that he will be dismembered.”48 Those who listen may recoil inwardly as they imagine a blow to their shins. Calvin addresses here in a negative manner the Jews and the Catholic Church, which believes in good works for gaining divine grace. He condemns, as frequently throughout his sermons, the “blasphemy of the Mass.” He notes Christ’s despair when he utters, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” He ends once again with the image of God, by means of the atonement, drawing humankind back from the abyss.49 In one of the closing sermons of this series, Calvin addresses the atonement with greater concentration. We are full of pollution, he recites anew. But we are sprinkled with his blood, “with this aspersion that is carried out within our souls by the Holy Spirit; thus we are purified, and God accepts and receives us as his people.”50 He compares this washing with that of baptism. The emotional trajectory of these Passion sermons is then upward; the congregation is taken from the horror and depths of its corruption to, in conclusion, the possibility of reconciliation with the Heavenly Father. Perhaps the series should have ended on this note. But in the final sermon, on the Resurrection, Calvin remarks on the fact that the women who went to Christ’s tomb preceded the disciples in hearing the astonishing news. In telling about the Resurrection first to women, who are by nature weak, ignorant, and infirm, God wanted to demonstrate “the humbleness of our faith.”51 The men, normally elevated and designated to engage in public transactions, deserved punishment, in any case, for having abandoned their master. But God accepts the service even of the weak—he is referring here to the women.52 Finally Calvin returns to the atonement. Christ calls us his brothers, but most important, he has united us with God the Father, “which is one hundred times better than calling us brothers.”53 Our pollution through sin is so complete that only by means of this purification can we be members of his body and participants in his life.54 Those Passion sermons that survived by chance in the manuscript form provided by Raguenier and his scribes are likewise striking, first of all, for their neglect of Christ’s own ordeal.55 The story lurks in the background, and clearly Calvin believes that every listener is familiar with it. Calvin preached these sermons between 1559 and 1562, when the city was full of refugees from persecution, many of them of more than adequate means and above-average education; and so a majority of those present were familiar with the events of the Passion. The preacher turns each phase immediately to his moral and admonitory ends. A sermon on the Resurrection that has survived from early in this four-year period once again attempts to impress people with the striking contrast between the divine Jesus and the human creature. Calvin declares once again that “we are

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nothing but poor vermin and rottenness according to the body, full of foulness and of all abomination according to the soul, so much are we infected with sin.” Here the Reformer echoes, certainly knowingly, the Psalmist (22:6), whose cry that “I am a worm and no man” had found resonance in traditional (Catholic) Eastertide preaching. God descends to us, “who are lost and damned.” He desires to raise us up but finds that we are in the bonds of Satan and under the tyranny of sin and hell and plunged in all malediction.”56 Calvin softens momentarily. He adds that even though God’s majesty is terrible, he wants to give us the courage and boldness to come to him, and to approach him in a familiar way.57 In the face of this generosity, we remain mired in a great pile of dirt, filth, and foulness. He drives this home with a list of specific types of moral filth: “drunkenness, bawdiness . . . thievery, plunder, fraud, lying, cruelty, extortion, pride, ambition, hatred, vindictiveness, envy, enmity, dissension, faultfinding.”58 If we resist these, and if we persevere “not just for a day, a month, or a year,” he will not leave us in the middle of the path. But the duty is ours to continue in our efforts to the end of our lives. Nevertheless, he concentrates on the fact that the elect are open to the divine message. “It is a special privilege that God asserts his Word to such a degree that we are touched to the quick, and our hearts and emotions pierced through. But we (sic) who are not the recipients of God’s pity shall go through such horrors that we will not be able to distinguish between white and black; in our filth, we will be a stench in the nostrils [nous serons enpunaisiz]; we will be as the decaying dead in the sepulcher of hell.”59 God admonishes us to bear patiently all the miseries and afflictions that He subjects us to. Jesus’ silence before Pilate demonstrated this obedience. In concluding, he returns to the atonement: “The death and Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ have appeased the anger of God, his Father.”60 Calvin compresses the entire early part of the Passion into a single sermon from 1562, ranging from Gethsemane to Peter’s denial. He urges Christians to lay their cares upon God as the Lord did. “We don’t need great words, but let us simply display (desployons) our feelings [to God] and cast our concerns and worries upon him. He stings us with the heat of the afflictions that he sends us.”61 He does not even refer to Jesus’ bloody sweat. He contrasts Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial of Christ. Peter could not help going from bad to worse, even though it was “only a woman” who asked him if he were not a member of Jesus’ party. Nonetheless, Peter was doubtless one of those whom God had chosen as his own before the founding of the world, whereas Judas was not. Calvin does not mention Judas’s suicide, much less the alleged opening of his midsection. Even the elect will retain “a residue of our Old Man” and will never be fully reformed in this life. “We see that the church is filled with Judases.” There are a great multitude of people who are iniquitous and perverse.62


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In another sermon delivered the same day, Calvin continues his excursus. When we confront the Scriptures, he says, and contemplate the judgment of God, and the fact that nothing is done outside of his providence, we shall embrace the virtue of the death of our Lord.63 Here the Reformer states almost in passing that Christ was tied and bound (il a eté lié et garotté ). His emphasis, as throughout, is on his hearers’ horrific sinfulness. From our mother’s womb, he insists, all of us are of the devil. We are slaves of Satan. Jesus bore his ordeal for our salvation. His torturers spat in his face, slapped him, and mocked in every way that they could devise. This is virtually everything Calvin says about the assault upon Jesus. He returns immediately to his listeners’ villainy: “We should view ourselves [in relation to] the law of God, and we shall find that we are not only covered with spittle and vileness, but that each of us bears the marks of the devil.”64 The Lord’s disfigurement makes him physically resemble the state of humans’ souls. He elaborates in the following sermon, given two days later, on 26 March 1562, that Christ bore the judgment that we merited for the enormity of our transgressions. Our image, he says, is restored by the defacement of Jesus Christ.65 When we are joined to him, “he will conduct us in his glory through the midst of all ignominy.”66 In his sermon of the following day, Calvin took up Christ’s despair on the cross as he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me?” He stresses, as he had said apropos of Gethsemane, that the Lord’s suffering was as much psychic as it was physical. Christ, he explains, had to bear a spiritual punishment, too, in order to pay our debt before God.67 We ourselves should call upon God and never lose confidence in him.68 When Jesus cried out in a loud voice and gave up his spirit, it was as though he invoked God for the repose of our own souls. The anxieties that assail us should not turn us away from him who is the author of our salvation.69 In the final surviving sermon from this series, given on 28 March 1562, about Christ’s burial in the tomb belonging to Joseph of Arimathea, again Calvin reveals little of the biblical account. Instead, he takes the opportunity to expatiate upon the meaning of the Lord’s Supper. “He testifies to us by means of visible signs when in the Meal he desires us to eat the bread and drink the wine—as certitude that we live in him and have our substance and virtue in him, and that nothing will be lacking to us when we take our nourishment from him.”70 He decries the “detestable pollutions of the papists,” noting their “enormous sacrilege” and their “diabolical blasphemy.”71 He consistently draws dividing lines between what he regards as true believers and both the Catholics and the Jews. But he does not spare those who are present. He interjects descriptions of “our horrible dissipation,” and reaffirms that “outside our Lord Jesus Christ, there is nothing but abomination in us.”72

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For Calvin, God’s greatness is measured by the distance between the Divinity and his human creatures. He was not alone in seeking to impress his audiences with the horror of—well, of what? In Calvin’s case, it is their nature as well as the deeds that proceed from it, their bad fruits, to use the good-and-bad-tree metaphor. Penitential preachers of late-medieval Europe, too, believed that the fall of Eve and Adam had precipitated humankind into the chasm of original sin, and they passionately called the people around them to repentance. They believed that exertion of the will and availing oneself of the sacramental system of the Church could effect eternal rest for those who were earnest. Calvin, as we know, believed that will and act per se were virtually impotent. God had ordained, before the foundation of the world, that Adam and Eve should fall. This was essential in view of Calvin’s conviction that God had determined, by his secret Providence, all things that would come to pass.73 Calvin did not consign this teaching to an impenetrable hidden divine will, as Luther did. Luther said that we did not have access to this will and should not even entertain curiosity about it. Calvin insisted that he did know the general outlines of God’s will, and that it most specifically included the predetermination of every happening throughout history. The need of sermons is not simply defined by God’s commandment to teach and preach. For Calvin, the Heavenly Father has provided that the faith that preserves the elect results fundamentally from the atonement achieved by the death of Jesus upon the cross. Additionally, however, Christians must come to understand that upon which their eternal life depends. Their saving belief develops within them by the work of the Holy Spirit as they listen to the Word preached. Christians are gradually brought to a higher, although ever imperfect, state of conviction through precisely their hearing (Romans 10:17). I conjecture that in the sixteenth century, few Calvinist sermons were published for this reason: sermons had to be heard with the ears.74 Two participants in the Calvinist reform of the Rhenish Palatinate beginning in 1563 come close to spelling out the Reformed doctrine of faith’s dependency upon the faculty of hearing (fides ex auditu). In defending the Heidelberg Catechism, of which he was a leading author, Zacharias Ursinus stated that the Holy Spirit works within Christians’ hearts as they listen to sermons and as they partake of the two sacraments, baptism and the Lord’s Supper. He cites Saint Paul’s letter to Romans: “as Paul says, ‘Faith comes out of hearing as the Word goes into one’s ears.’”75 The sacraments do not have the power to bring about salvation, however. The vocal preaching of the Word is paramount. The printed text cannot replicate this effect.76 Echoing this is Ursinus’s colleague and coauthor of the Heidelberg Catechism, Caspar Olevianus, in a sermon that he had preached in that city on the Neckar. Olevianus declares that God has added the outer sign and promise of the sacraments on to the Word concerning Christ’s atonement for our sins, “so that by means of our


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eyes and other senses he gives our hearts to understand, to trust, and always to remember what he has already given him [sic] to understand and has promised through the ears, namely that each person individually can obtain forgiveness of sins and peace with God by no other means than the one-time suffering of Christ on the cross—provided that he places his trust in it.”77 The Heidelberg Catechism itself briefly contains this doctrine: QUESTION:

Where does such faith come from?

The Holy Spirit brings it about in our hearts through the preaching of the holy Gospel, and confirms it by means of participation in the holy sacraments.78

ANSWER:

Olevianus repeats essentially this message two years later in his explication of the creed.79 Unquestionably, Calvin adheres to the doctrine of the atonement; it is central to his conception of salvation for worthless humankind. Yet, so important is it to him to impress his charges with their worthlessness that he resorts to the emotive vocabulary of shaming and condemnation. His language is extreme, and it is designed to break down any lingering sense of self-worth and self-reliance in those around him. His initial stress is upon the nullity of human self-esteem. He proffers the atonement only secondarily, after he has rhetorically (he hopes) reduced his audience to the verminous level to which he repeatedly assigns it. First drastic reduction, then a ray of hope. He decries the downward pull of the flesh over and over again, and yet the human spirit is every bit as culpable in its fraud, rage, and slander. In the end, he incriminates equally both body and soul. God and human beings are at opposite poles, logically lacking in any possibility of conciliation. This context, selected by the Reformer but with ample medieval precedent, renders the atonement all the more astonishing. The Deity reaches down to the vilest filth and offers it the mediation of his Son. Whereas Luther has portrayed God as a loving Father with whom each of his children can have an intimate conversation, Calvin magnifies God by making his relationship to people seem out of proportion and ludicrous, in defiance of every rational principle.80 John Calvin as preacher created a ritual of his own, one to which he adhered in ending virtually every sermon of which we have record. It is a closing exhortation to the gathered people to abase themselves and express sorrow for their sins. The contents vary, but nearly all begin with the words, “Let us prostrate ourselves before the good God,” and then, within a narrow range of wording, draw attention to their transgressions. A representative example would be: Now let us prostrate ourselves before the majesty of our good God, in repentance of the offenses of which we are guilty, praying that it may

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please him to make us feel that we have displeased him truly, to bemoan them [the offenses] continually before him, so that he may strip away all the corruption of our flesh and so promote his Word among us that we may show that we are truly members of our Lord Jesus Christ . . . and that we may aspire every day to that renewal toward which the Gospel exhorts us.81 These benedictional refrains are spontaneous and thus varied in their specific content, but they are uniform in their general features. Because they are not formally composed, they are also syntactically chaotic. Another example will assist in conveying their variety: Now let us prostrate ourselves before the majesty of our good God in recognition of our faults, praying him to make us feel them more and more. And to the extent that we are thus numbed in this world, that by his Holy Spirit he touches us to the quick and has our ears opened to receive the threats and corrections that he addresses to us every day. And that each one among us, in order to acknowledge the faults that we have committed, and so that we learn to humble ourselves by this means so that God does not enter into an accounting with us, but rather receives us in his mercy when in proper repentance we come to him, praying that he save us in his love; and that seeing how he punishes those who hold his Word in contempt, and those who rise up for the encounter with him in incorrigible pride, that we be kept in this manner in fear of him so as not to follow those who behave in this way. And that in the meantime, he afflict us for our sins as we well deserve, so that we don’t doubt at all that he will mitigate our sadness or that the outcome will be good for our salvation, when in the midst of our troubles, we are able to run to that One who is nearby to receive us by mercy in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, who has been appointed mediator for us to help us gain access to him.82 The two constant elements are self-denigration for sin and begging God to have mercy upon us through his Son. The effect of these conclusions is to underscore Calvin’s preoccupation with human unworthiness. They form an insistent ceremonial refrain, a beating drum, even in those sermons that are devoted to the explication of a particular book or chapter of the Bible. His congregation could anticipate this condemning chorus each time it heard him preach: let us prostrate ourselves, let us prostrate ourselves. The response that Calvin desired first and foremost was the cast-down heart of personal recognition and


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profound sorrow. These were not sermons of good cheer. In their content as well as their emotional tone, they do not bear out Calvin’s intellectual opinion that the doctrine of election represents the lifting of people’s burden of worry about their souls’ destination.83 Although notes of hope and consolation may be heard, they are far surpassed in number and sound as the Reformer ever returns, with all the creative force of his genius, to the theme of human dissoluteness. Calvin is Geneva’s Jeremiah, harbinger of a well-deserved doom, a man of verbal violence.84 Threats of damnation conflict with the simplicity and grace of the stripped church interiors and with the image that they might extend in the unenhanced daylight of the Holy Spirit among people. This contradiction reminds me of Mannerist tensions. Those in whom the Holy Spirit works the gift of faith during the sermon will feel that God has made the imprint of salvation upon their very hearts. They are not encouraged to express this joyous feeling but to bear daily witness in the tenor of their lives. Nevertheless, amid Calvin’s vocabulary of extreme condemnation reposes a softer ingredient of hope for eternal life. Despite setbacks in the shape of sins committed and doubts entertained, the elect will be moved to inner thanksgiving.85 Theodore Beza’s reputation was also widespread in Germany.86 It may, then, not be simply a matter of curiosity to note whether his own Passion sermons departed from the tenor of those of his predecessor. He is as abstractly intellectual as Calvin in the content, and he dwells as noticeably on human sin: “We ought to detest our sins and iniquities; we ought to learn to recognize our ingratitude, rebellion, and obdurateness for what they are so that we abase ourselves all the way to hell.”87 Beza is equally persuaded of the loftiness of God in relation to his creation and of the improbability that the Father should be willing to demonstrate mercy to completely base souls. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus shows his willingness to bear the extreme wrath of his Father. We should be astonished by this, he says, for no human being can imagine the extent of his suffering.88 The Genevan divine explores the problem of whether Christ, who was one with the Father, was praying to himself.89 In his treatment, Beza repeatedly returns to the subject of the emotions, which are entirely corrupted in humankind.90 Only the Holy Spirit can penetrate to the quick of people’s feelings and move them to repentance. Until then, “the affections remain suspended and not regenerated until the reason, as much as is in them, gains the upper hand for purposes of embracing this shadow of virtue. . . . Finally the spirit gains in strength by the grace of God, and victorious after all, produces repentance and its fruits.”91 Christ’s great sadness in the Garden is our joy and consolation. His humiliation is our lifting up, and his death is our life.92 The story itself, with Christ’s physical as well as inner

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affliction, is minimal and serves merely as a springboard for moral and theological exploration. Beza resorts as well to intermittent language of demarcation between the “true” Christianity that he sees in the Reformed churches, and the false faith of others, both Catholic and Lutheran. The boundaries that he traces are meant to be felt as well as understood, and they represent another point at which the preacher deliberately appeals to his hearers’ emotions. He urges them, “Flee from the false church, which is the kingdom of perdition! . . . They [adherents of other faiths] follow only a mute Jesus Christ—as these idols such as the crucifix are which are painted or carved by the hands of men and not by the Spirit of God. These are adored by people who do not possess the true life. . . . The idols that they worship, these are not the true and unique Jesus Christ whom the Scriptures all depict and speak of. . . . They are a stupid delusion [vn sot phantasme].”93 Like Calvin, Beza deliberately stirs the feelings of his congregation. Like Calvin, his object is far less to arouse sympathy toward Jesus, on whose suffering he says very little directly. He tells them that they should not be angered against the Jews or Judas or Caiaphas or Pilate. Rather, they must let their hearts be “touched to the quick” by the awareness of their own shortcomings. This story cannot be brought up without one’s being justly impassioned. But a heart [must be] touched to the quick by a sense of our faults, which the Lord bore upon the cross with such anguish; by a true detestation and recognition of his past life and a genuine desire to amend it; by a very ardent apprehension of the height, amplitude, and depth of this incomprehensible love of God in having given his only Son for our sins.94 From this “very high mystery” we may draw sweetness, Beza says in language reminiscent of the mystics, so that we may be refreshed forever.95 This concept alone may set him apart from Calvin. Having belabored human sin, Beza is able to end with an upward, encouraging flourish.

Reformed Preaching in Germany No orderly way existed of transmitting the lessons of Calvin’s preaching to all those who freely or forcibly took up Reformed theology as the basis of their creed. Zacharias Ursinus (alias Bär) visited Geneva as a young man and heard Calvin preach. He and Caspar Olevianus, who also met the Swiss Reformer, later dissembled in stating that they did not regard the Genevan divine as their preceptor.96 They did. At that early stage of the introduction of Calvinism into the Rhenish Palatinate, they were helping to conceal the territory’s departure


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from imperial legality; in 1563, only Catholicism and Lutheranism were permissible choices for princes to make. But, as I have observed, there was as yet no systematic way of training clergymen. Just as college teachers today generally imitate the best of their own former instructors and join to this the innovations dictated by experience and academic evolution, so too did late-medieval preachers hold forth in accordance with their models and their individual gifts. Calvin provided such a paragonic image to his clerical followers. Both these men, too, were influenced by Philipp Melanchthon. Ursinus studied with him in Wittenberg from 1550 to 1557.97 He doubtless imbibed Melanchthon’s humanist-influenced doctrinal moderation but ultimately settled somewhat further to Melanchthon’s left (defined as degrees of removal from Catholicism!) in such matters as predestination and the Eucharist.98 Both Ursinus and Olevianus favored the disciplinary powers for church leaders that Martin Bucer sought in vain in Strasbourg.99 Their militant elector, Friedrich III, took the same view, with the exception that he regarded himself as the ultimate supervisor of the churches and dispenser of chastisement.100 Reminiscent of Michael Servetus’s burning in Geneva in 1553, and aware of that example, Ursinus and Olevianus acceded to the public beheading on the marketplace of Johannes Sylvanus, a Heidelberg theologian and Hebraist, on 23 December 1572, for being an anti-trinitarian. Geneva recommended this penalty, while Zurich favored moderation.101 It may be relevant that Sylvanus also opposed the Genevan model of ecclesiastical discipline that Ursinus and Olevianus sought.102 It is certainly relevant to the subject of emotion that these learned men took part in a public decapitation and were in no doubt about the example being provided to the laity, many of whom were undoubtedly present, on the possible consequences of even casual blasphemy. Like Calvin, then, these divines were serious men, men inclined toward the use of compulsion. Their ruler and patron, Elector Friedrich III, manifested not only similar tendencies but also the sense of princely entitlement that was characteristic of the day; Friedrich ordered Sylvanus’s beheading for the crime of blasphemy.103 Ursinus and Olevianus together wrote the Heidelberg Catechism. On 19 January 1563, Friedrich commanded that this primer of the faith be diligently preached to the common man. He explained his motivation: Out of our divinely ordained office, vocation, and government, to direct and institute a peaceful way of life and to maintain righteous, upstanding, and virtuous behavior and life among our subjects, but also, and above all, to instruct and bring them to the honest recognition and fear of the Almighty and his saving Word as the single foundation of all virtue and obedience, the longer the more.104

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Lacking most but not all of these men’s sermons, I shall begin with the document that lay and still lies at the core of the church of which they were founding fathers. Like preaching, catechisms were intended for the instruction of every layperson. Through them as through sermons, then, we may gain insight, not so much into their theology, which is well known, but into the religious feeling that they enjoined upon members. The text begins with the comfort (Trost) of the atonement on the cross. The person being questioned is “Christ’s own,” for the Savior, “with his precious blood has completely paid for all my sins and freed me completely from the power of the devil.”105 The first thing that the Christian has to know is how great his sin and misery are. Only in the light of that recognition can the atonement be effective.106 The authors use the first person: I cannot keep God’s commandment because I am by nature inclined to hate God and my neighbor. This is the result of the Fall, which poisoned us.107 God may be loving, but he is also just, and Jesus has fulfilled this demand for justice with his death. However, the mystery of God’s providence is not concealed: Nothing happens that God has not ordained.108 Christ’s ordeal receives a certain delineation: “My Lord Christ has redeemed me from the anxiety and pain of hell through his unspeakable anguish, suffering, and horror, which he endured in his soul, both on the cross and before.”109 The young Christian who is committing this to memory, along with young and old together to whom the catechism is preached, are implicitly enjoined to contemplate this terror. The assurance of the second coming should comfort Christians, for all their enemies will then be cast into eternal damnation; the elect, however, will be taken immediately into Christ’s presence.110 Where does saving faith come from? “The Holy Ghost effects it in our hearts by means of the preaching of the holy Gospel, and confirms it through participation in the holy sacraments.”111 Quite a long section treats the matter of discipline. The clergy play a part in opening and closing the gates to heaven. Those who do not lead an upright life are excluded from the sacraments and from the Christian assembly, “and by God himself are barred from the kingdom of Christ” unless they show improvement.112 We can tell by our behavior whether we are saved. The document specifies a number of transgressions: “No unchaste person, idolater, adulterer, thief, miser, drunk, slanderer, robber, and similar people will inherit the kingdom of God.”113 After going through the Ten Commandments, the manual concludes with the advice that we pray to God to grow in this life more and more toward his image. Caspar Olevianus is reputed to have been a riveting, compelling preacher. The story has come down to us that as a young man in Trier, a Catholic priest impressed upon him that he must believe in and be comforted by Christ’s


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reconciliation of God with his people through the Son’s death on the cross. He did not devalue this lesson even after his conversion to the Reformed creed.114 This is reflected in one sermon of his that has survived and in a longer apologetic treatise. The sermon is designed to correct misinterpretations of the Lord’s Supper.115 It begins precisely with the assertion that only (allein, allein sag ich) in Christ’s death upon the cross is forgiveness of sins to be found. He immediately adds that our trust should not be in the sacraments themselves, which are only signs. They direct our trust to the proper object.116 Olevianus’s sincerity is perceptible even on the printed page. Predestination, of course, involves its defenders in certain contortions. The preacher insists that Adam trusted in Christ’s Passion. The first human knew that Jesus’ suffering was a precious medication or salve that, Olevianus says, “you have to apply to your wounds.”117 One must trust exclusively in what one has heard preached through the ears, namely, that only by means of Christ’s agony on the cross are we saved, “and in no other way.” “Faith directs its gaze toward the Passion of Jesus Christ.”118 Baptism cannot take away sin as many people, even some learned ones—an oblique reference to Catholic and Lutheran theologians— still think.119 Olevianus is very physical in the images he draws for his hearers. He writes (as he had preached) that circumcision is meaningless unless it is the figurative circumcision of the heart.120 We should wash our hearts in the Passion of the Lord and “in true trust and with genuine repentance of their [sic] bestial and shameful life, turn back toward God.”121 The Lord’s Supper is supposed to direct us to the sacrifice of Christ, the only solution. Nevertheless, when believers partake of communion, the Holy Spirit does work upon their souls: “through which Holy Spirit he [Christ] makes us increasingly over time [je lenger je mehr] into members of his true body, even though his literal body remains in heaven.”122 This is clearly an admonitory, instructional, and also a polemical piece. He mocks the Catholic vision: Thus, the mass-priest (Meβpfaff ) takes the round idol-bread in his hand and breathes over it (haucht) with his stinking breath and says these words to the bread. . . . When now the poor, accursed masspriest has enchanted his bread-deity and the poor folk have prayed to it (as I myself in my heart have done to the bread-god when I unfortunately still went to Mass), he does not leave it at this idolatry but says that he is sacrificing the body and the blood of Christ to the Heavenly Father in payment for the sins of the living and the dead. He makes out of the Supper a sacrifice for sin. In saying these same words, the mass-priest is caught in unspeakable blasphemy!123

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Polemic such as this has the dual function of demarcating one group from another, in this case Reformed from Catholic, and of arousing negative emotions so that “true” Christians will avoid associating with the “evil.” Preachers’ expressions of antipathy seek to underscore theological and liturgical separation by creating fervent prejudice in their hearers, too. Revulsion against certain categories of one’s fellows on earth is clearly a form of emotion that is widely found in early-modern sermons. Olevianus ends his sermon with a distinct, elongated emphasis on the consolation (Trost) that the Lord’s Supper offers to the elect. Christ’s sacrifice is their promise and their hope. “Christ, true God and man, is announced to the faithful in the entirety of the preaching office through the Word and sacraments, so that he is entirely our own for the forgiveness of sins and renewal in eternal life.”124 Intermittently throughout his closing, he repeats the word Trost, Trost. In contrast to Calvin, it is the thought that he wishes to leave with his audience. The concluding mood is one of thanksgiving. In his long (224-page) analysis of the Apostles’ Creed two years later, probably directed toward the laity in view of his use of the vernacular, Olevianus finds space for a brief, graphic description of Christ’s agony. His reader does have to understand that Jesus’ Passion was no lark. Like Calvin, he stresses the inclusion, indeed the centrality, of the psychic dimension of that suffering. In his entire Passion . . . in body and in soul—but especially in his soul—he felt such terror, fear, and pain as the accursed ones in hell experience. . . . This hellish anxiety that Christ suffered for us throughout his entire ordeal, bears witness, first of all as he enters this hellish fear and horrifying abyss, [to] the Word of Christ, Matthew 26, “My soul is troubled unto death.” Second, as he descended yet deeper into this hellish anxiety and struggled in the garden with death and with the wrath of God, the drops of blood that fell from his countenance upon the ground (which no human being has since experienced) testify that Christ felt hellish anxiety and distress. Third, when he was in most extremely deep hellish torment (im allertieffsten hellischen quall) and martyrdom, like those who are abandoned by God, he cried out in deep, hellish distress on the cross, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”125 The preacher, with his resounding enunciation of hellish, hellish, hellish—seven times in this short passage—means to impress his readers. Such verbal repetition was a rhetorical technique (anaphora) that he employed to drive home important messages. He wants them to feel Christ’s own desolation, endured on their behalf. He asks rhetorically, “Why did he have to suffer inwardly?”


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He replies that it is because we mainly sin inwardly.126 This is virtually the only descriptive and lingering excursus on the Passion in the entire treatise, and it is a mere mention in comparison to the treatments of this topic by his Catholic and some Lutheran contemporaries. Olevianus’s preferred refrain is, as in the sermon above, the comfort that Christ’s sacrifice affords the faithful. “Christ calls it [the Holy Spirit] the Comforter,” he says, “for the reason that in every situation it gives believers advice, comfort, and strength, such that the faithful have peace and joy in their hearts even in the midst of physical affliction.”127 Until the very end of the world, he declares, God will convey the Holy Ghost to us by means of the preaching of the Gospel. For, he adds, faith comes from hearing the sermon, and he cites Romans 10. He ends this lengthy work with his customary note of hope: We are considered righteous because of the “Passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ.”128 His sacrifice, he reassures his readers, covers sins of commission and sins of omission.129 Olevianus’s partner in preparing the Heidelberg Catechism, Zacharias Ursinus, allocated part of his career to explaining and defending that summary of the faith. His extended commentaries on it appeared on into the seventeenth century, long after his death in 1583. A long, Latinate one was clearly designed for clerical consumption.130 Given the lack of his sermons, one is compelled to look to other works, potentially more removed from the chancel, in order to speculate on the mood and emphasis of his preaching. His longer treatise on the catechism is obviously directed toward his peers, and yet it contains his fundamental views on a number of issues, such as the Passion of Christ.131 His stance would hardly have been different, if more simply presented, in the pulpit. Ursinus actually uses the Latin sentence, Fides enim ex auditu (Faith comes through hearing).132 He was very nearly true to this conviction in not preparing his own sermons for publication. He reveals his perspective on the central role of the clergy. After posing the question, What are the keys to heaven? he answers, “the preaching of the Gospel and ecclesiastical discipline, by means of which heaven is opened to those who believe. To the infidels, however, it is closed.”133 Preaching and imposing discipline constitute the power of the keys.134 In dealing with the Passion, Ursinus’s stress, like that of Olevianus, is on Christ’s mental anguish. Jesus endured more than the holy martyrs of early Christianity, even more than Saint Lawrence (who was roasted on a grill), because these saints did not have to feel the wrath of God. “In his body and his spirit, Christ felt the entire anger of God.”135 He bore what we would have had to bear throughout all eternity for our sins.136 Christ not only underwent a horrific physical ordeal, but he experienced the degradation of being crucified, a dishonorable, shameful death. This form of execution signaled that he was accursed for us.137 Ursinus insists that when Christ descended into hell, he

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actually joined the ranks of the damned and knew their torment.138 The Savior’s agony possesses value only for the elect. The section on the Passion is but a small fraction of this 744-page book. It does not end on a note of hopefulness. Olevianus’s repetition does seem to arise out of his own past and persuasion. Ursinus remains more detached. He focuses on the mental dimensions of Christ’s torment and God’s fury over human sin. In this, he follows, if more moderately, in the footsteps of John Calvin. This Reformed theologian is certain that the faithful are aware that they are among the elect. “The believer knows that he believes” (Credens scit se credere). Believers will also perceive in themselves a steadily growing ability to control sin.139 “Whoever professes to believe is lying if he does not have the works” to prove it.140 This itself could produce anxiety in the conscientious souls who were present at his sermons, for they might well fear that their daily failings indicated a less than happy eternal destination. A less well-known Heidelberg colleague of Olevianus and Ursinus was Johann Willing (b.?–d. 1572), one of Friedrich III’s court preachers. He allowed a collection of fourteen sermons to appear in print.141 He was inspired to do so by the presence of the plague in the vicinity. These texts were to help fortify frightened souls. He states in the foreword that he had presented these aloud, and internal evidence indicates that they were given in the electoral presence.142 Willing’s underlying message, recited through the book, is that disaster and death are the payment of sin. He brings forward ample examples from the Bible. “You have just (nechst) heard that through his angel, on account of David’s sin, God struck the people of Israel so hard with pestilence that in three days’ time, 70,000 men [or people; Mann] had to die of it.” God has to keep us in a state of fear, “for when the fear of death is gone, regret and repentance also cease.” The preacher admits to the use of fear that Calvin and his clerical followers often made. The single remedy is repentance (Buβ ): Healing repentance is a true and heartfelt pain that arises as a result of sin by means of which people have angered God; and along with that, faith, hope, and prayer that God will be gracious [and] forgive the sin on account of the sacrifice of his Son. And [along with that] a serious desire and intention that with especial diligence he will avoid all sin and wish to take up and lead a life in accordance with the holy and revealed will of God.143 But if a person does not have faith, he will be ruined: If now a human being in this overly great anxiety and distress does not have hope through faith, he would have to perish and be reduced


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to nothing. But if, in the midst of such terror, trembling, and shaking, one reflects on the grace and mercy that God has promised us in Christ, then the heart receives a hearty and comforting certainty that, for Christ’s sake, God will not count our sin against us, but will forgive it and forget it.144 The eyes of faith, he relents, must fix on Christ hanging on the cross. We recall that in his scheme, there can be no concrete image of Christ hanging on the cross; the Christian must exert the imagination. Physical metaphors are permitted, however: “For that reason, I bend the knee of my heart and beg you, Lord, for grace.”145 Elsewhere Willing repeats that the most effective consolation comes from contemplating what God the Lord suffered—but, again, it must be an inward exercise, without sensual crutches: The absolute best and most powerful medication against all the hurts of illness and painful days is the faithful consideration of the gracefilled image of the martyrdom of our dearest Lord and savior Jesus Christ. When a Christian remembers how much and what great things his Redeemer Christ bore and suffered for his sake, namely, everything that could be thought up that was embarrassing and painful, shameful and offensive, both outwardly and inwardly . . . [his spiritual ills will be ameliorated].146 Willing draws a sweeping comparison. If all the suffering of human beings throughout the world were put together, it would not match what Jesus endured out of pure love for us, “so that we would not have to bear eternal punishment and perish.”147 Willing’s remaining sermons specifically treat dying and death, to which I shall return later. In that connection, he will emphasize consolation more than he has until now. Up till now, he has concentrated upon human sinfulness as the cause of illness, catastrophe, and death, and mortals’ need to own up to their responsibility and regret their behavior. They need to cultivate an inner picture of the crucified Christ, perceive his sacrificial agony out of love for us, and comprehend that only by means of the atonement, carried out only once, can they be reconciled with their Heavenly Father. Christians must regard themselves as the cause of earthly ills—and Willing cites the poisonous verse of the apocryphal Book of Ecclesiasticus (Jesus Syrach), “Woman is the origin of sin, and it is through her that we all die” (25:24).148 Daniel Tossanus “the Elder” (1541–1602) was a Huguenot who escaped the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and came as preacher to the Rhenish

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Palatinate before the death of Friedrich III. When the Lutheran Ludwig VI succeeded Friedrich, he turned the Reformed clergy out of office. Tossanus (like the older Ursinus) then served another Reformed member of the family, Count Johann Casimir, in Neustadt an der Hardt. After Ludwig’s death, Johann Casimir became elector, moved to Heidelberg, and took his theologians and preachers with him. From 1586, in addition to his duties at the university and in the Church of the Holy Spirit, the Frenchman became superintendent. In the contentious Age of Orthodoxy, he defended Reformed doctrines against both Catholic and Lutheran attack. An anti-Lutheran pamphlet exemplifies the element of polemical demarcation seen in Olevianus above. It was a frequent ingredient of other sermons of the day and thus most likely also in those of embattled Reformed divines. Tossanus writes here against the Lutheran preference for ritual observance: By their nature, the people prefer to go around with outward and visible ceremonies that do not belong to the New Testament, rather than troubling themselves with the true, inner, and spiritual service of worship. What is pitiful is that people today press hard for such ceremonies, which are [put in place] by the order of men, so that even if these people [who are responsible] allege in their writings that those ceremonies that they have instituted are “indifferent matters,” and thus can be omitted, nevertheless, such ceremonies are today the distinguishing features of the Lutheran churches, as one calls them.149 He declares that the Reformed are the true Lutherans: We recognize gladly the gifts that were in him [Luther], [and] we read his writings, and we don’t warn anybody off—except that we warn against that which, the product of his self-love, is not in accord with the spirit of Christ or with his Word. Also [against that which is written] out of anger, impatience, and human frailty, or out of the old sourdough of papalism, in which he was steeped and which continued to stick to him, as he himself admitted. . . . For that reason, we are the true Lutherans, but [we are] not those who canonize everything that Luther did and said.150 Tossanus reminds us that there were other voices in the early Lutheran Reformation, such as that of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, with whom he evidently agreed on some issues. Johann Philipp Mylaeus (Müller), whose exact dates appear to be unknown, was a member of the succeeding generation of clergymen serving the Rhenish


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Palatinate, and specifically Amberg and Heidelberg. He gave one of the funeral sermons for Tossanus, as well as for others of his colleagues. His publisher styled him on the title page of a volume of postils, “the old pastor in Heidelberg.”151 The very publication of such a collection hints at the softening of the previously exclusive principle, fides ex auditu, in favor of private spiritual edification that included the reading of homilies. Mylaeus’s Passion sermons form a separately titled section at the back, and this title is itself worthy of note: Passions Predigten, Oder Christliche Erklärung der tröstlichen History deβ Leidens vnnd Sterbens vnsers HERRN vnd Heylandts Jesu.152 It contains the word comforting (tröstlich) as a prominent indicator of the tone of its content. We shall see whether the content bears out that emphasis. The label, in including the word explanation (Erklärung), also hints at a desire to instruct readers in proper Christian (Reformed) teaching. There are fourteen sermons in all, a rather larger number than one might have expected a Calvinist preacher to give. Inasmuch as the series does not include the Resurrection, the number fourteen hints at two presentations a day from Palm Sunday through Easter Saturday. Internal evidence—the address, “Euer lieb,” perhaps referring to the elector or another person of high rank— tells us that these sermons were indeed delivered. Each section begins with the complete biblical passage upon which it is based and then proceeds to elucidation. Mylaeus immediately rejects Catholic emotionality: “In popery one was of the opinion that the proper contemplation of the Passion of Christ lay in this, that when one [a preacher] told the people the story of the Passion of Christ, he pressed it upon them with such lamenting and sad words and gestures that many people were moved to howling and weeping thereby.” Simultaneously the preacher rouses his listeners to anger against Judas, Pilate, and others, and they ignore the innocence of Christ and [the fact] that he paid for our sins.153 He continues that the proper object of our anger ought to be our sin. He exclaims over the profound wrath that the Savior bore for us and calls this the result of “God’s inexpressible love” for us.154 The first sermon ends with the assertion that all evil, too, is under the rule of God’s providence and cannot hurt a hair of our heads without divine permission. He repeats that the Passion should console us. The fifth sermon calls believers to concentrate on the inner and not the outer suffering of the Lord: . . . the great, heavy, and inner suffering of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is the foremost part of the entire Passion. For Christ’s being beaten, crucified, mocked, and killed can also happen to other godly people; but to struggle against the wrath of God and to experience the

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pangs of eternal death and the anxiety of hell, and in such a struggle not to be defeated but to attain the victory and to overcome—that no ordinary person can do. Christ was able to do it because he was also true God.155 Jesus’ trembling and shaking, his words, “My soul is troubled unto death,” his bloody sweat were inhuman (unmenschlich) and against nature. Mylaeus reiterates the Savior’s inner torment and his powerful sensitivity (kräfftige Empfindung) to the anger of his Father, and this is the key to his atonement for the evil that we do. Christ’s own emotions (Affecten) were pure and flowed from a clean [and] holy heart. Ours, by contrast, are “turbid and mixed with sins; they flow from a muddy fountain.”156 He adds that the Holy Trinity had decided “once and for all” just who would benefit from the death of God’s Son.157 Subsequent sections likewise focus upon the inner turmoil of the Lord. Judas’s betrayal causes him much pain, as did Peter’s denial.158 There is no mention of Judas’s entrails.159 The account is interrupted by what I have called verbal demarcation, language directed against Catholics and Jews. Mylaeus’s words are immoderate, laden with incitement to hatred. This feature forms part of the emotional content of his sermons. He also severely criticizes the women who wanted to embalm Christ’s corpse. This desire showed a weakness in their faith. Women, he says, tend to press themselves forward in a “fresh manner.” Instead, they should maintain proper shame and decency.160 This preacher concludes his Holy Week preaching with a call to his hearers to remember that Christ is our Redeemer. All that he underwent was for our sake. We owe him everything. Although Mylaeus does not use the word Trost here, the essence of his final paragraphs is just that. Nevertheless, even in this closing sermon, taken as a whole, his invective is noticeable. Women may be included in God’s grace despite their weakness, but Catholics and Jews, he clearly thinks, are not.161 Other Reformed preachers, too, both in the very printing of their sermons and even explicitly in their content reveal that as the seventeenth century matures, fides ex auditu is no longer the shibboleth that it had been. Georg Spindler (1525–1605), a Saxon educated in Wittenberg but gradually drawn into the Calvinist fold, ended up in the Palatinate and amid his pastoral cares writing a number of edifying works. In his Passio et Resurrectio Christi (1596), he declares, “The Holy Spirit is effective in the read and observed Word. For that reason, my dear brothers and sisters, read your little book on the Passion diligently, in addition look to see where the Evangelists direct you. . . . [If you do that] the Holy Spirit will be powerful within you by means of the read and meditated Word, and will bring you to spiritual contemplation.”162 The Emden


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cleric Abraham Scultetus (1566–1625), previously theologian and court preacher to the ill-fated elector Palatine Frederick V in Heidelberg, states his motive: “I am having these, which I have previously given [aloud], printed for no other purpose than that through them the saving recognition of Christ our Redeemer and true godliness might be planted in some hearts, even if not in many.”163 The Holy Spirit can apparently now do its work even when the Word of God enters through the eyes. Perhaps a remnant of Catholicism lurks within Georg Spindler’s call to his hearers and readers to regard Christ’s torment in some detail. In a prayer with which he closes one of his Passion sermons, he urges: “Observe how his corpse has been ripped apart by the blows of whips and rods, and his head penetrated by a crown of thorns, so that he is sprayed with blood, as though he had pressed out [grapes for] red wine. See how his face gleams with spit and how it is covered with blows.”164 Spindler is in fact unique among the Calvinist preachers whom I have examined. He incorporates more of Christ’s physical ordeal into his recounting of the Passion, even though, in balance, his stress remains on human sinfulness. He emphatically adheres to the key Reformed precept that Christ did not die for all human beings but only for the elect.165 In his prefatory remarks, he explains to the electress Luisa-Juliane that the Word that is preached becomes effective in the elect by the working of the Holy Spirit, “which opens their hearts and illumines their spirits (Gemüte).” “By this means, the Holy Spirit awakens the hearts of the elect to faith such that they gladly rely upon it and in Christ’s wounds perceive the love of the Heavenly Father and are incorporated into the faith of Christ and become participants in his spirit and live in him.”166 Spindler is curious as well for recounting the Fall of Adam and Eve and stating that after that, and in a state of rage because of it, God decided to lay the penalties upon his son.167 Those to whom he preached this would surely have come away with a more comfortable sublapsarian perspective. Yet, in a prayer, he intones, “Lord God . . . we thank you from our hearts that from all eternity you ordained your Son as a sacrifice for our sins.”168 Overall, Spindler repeats as a chorus humans’ complete responsibility for the suffering of the Passion. Judas merely mirrors our own evil back to us. Such is explicitly the case with Saint Peter as well: “We should see ourselves reflected in Peter and learn to recognize our weakness and recall that with our own powers we cannot withstand the rapid attacks (Anlauf ) and thumps of Satan if God removes his hand from us.”169 Even though Peter wept when he realized that he had denied Christ, Spindler does not urge his audience to weep. Rather, in semi-Lutheran style, he declares that we may acknowledge our sins and be comforted on

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account of Jesus’ obedience to the Father and his atonement for our transgressions.170 He lists the attacks that the Savior endured—“false witness and being cursed, being struck in the face, being led before a secular court, being accused as a rascal and criminal, and finally, being mocked, flogged, condemned, and as an accursed person being nailed on the cross—but he does not describe each one at length.171 The character of Spindler’s sermons is to tell the biblical story, either as though some of his listeners might not be entirely familiar with it, or because it is an Eastertide ritual to do so. The preacher’s emotional weight lies in reminding those before him of their fearful corruption and helplessness to overcome this state without the atonement. Secondarily, Spindler is acutely, loudly, repeatedly anti-Semitic—which I have taken up elsewhere.172 In contrast with John Calvin’s perspective, Spindler regards with admiration the Lord’s mother under the cross as well as Mary Magdalene and other women who are present. He praises the faith and constancy of the Magdalene, and he seems not to notice anything amiss in the women’s desiring to embalm Jesus’ corpse. “Even though Mary [Magdalene] errs and is betrayed by her emotions when she thinks that the Lord has been stolen, nonetheless she is correct in seeking Christ and in wanting to have him again.”173 He finds nothing wrong in Jesus’ appearing first to Mary Magdalene.

Conclusions Whether in Lutheranism, Catholicism, or Calvinism, there is always room for individuality in the personal style of pastors and in the temperament they display to their congregations as they preach. These temperaments, along with theological persuasion, help to determine the sensitive atmosphere within a service. Calvin is not typical of those of his followers who ministered within the Holy Roman Empire and who most assuredly agreed with him on the core doctrines of predestination and the atonement. Calvin is in fact more dour than most and as disciplinary as any, a man of determination to impress upon his listeners their utter worthlessness. T.H.L. Parker put the matter more sympathetically: The people “had to be spoken to bluntly and forcefully.”174 In my view, Calvin borders on the vindictive, sometimes forgetting even rhetorically to include himself within the ranks of the wretched. Like his faith-mates, he radically plays down the assaults on Jesus’ body that constitute the Passion, favoring the inner torment of Gethsemane and Christ’s Sixth Word, “My God, my God!” Calvin and his fellow Reformers leave intact, however, the miracle of the sweating of blood because it is useful to them in underscoring the external evidence of the inner tumult of the Lord as he faced the prospect of degrading


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execution. Otherwise, they depart drastically from Catholic practice, and indeed from some of their Lutheran counterparts. They render the Passion of Christ mainly psychological even though the Bible testifies to Jesus’ horrific physical ordeal. Calvin urges his hearers to incriminate themselves for all that Jesus endured. He concentrates his energy in the effort to confront with their spiritual and moral filth—he never minces words—the nominal Christians who are gathered around him as he speaks. He is uninterested in the logical incompatibility of his insistence that human beings are condemned by their own perversity, and his equally fierce assertion—not in the least avoided—that God has ordained all that would happen from before the founding of the world. God has not simply foreknown that people would sin; he has brought it about. His own providence laid down that Eve and Adam would fall, and they themselves were in no wise pre-Christians but acknowledged the saving power of the eternal God-Christ. Reason—on this point, Calvin agreed with Luther—is not to be brought into the equation; these issues are matters of faith and not logic. Calvin’s language is immoderate and often violent. Any who were sensitive and listened carefully could have come away from sermon after sermon with a diminished sense of their adequacy in dealing with the world. They were verminous, destitute, and lost. They were certainly damned. Calvin concluded every sermon, on whatever topic, with his ritual reassertion of human misery: Or nous-nous prosternerons deuant la maieste de nostre bon Dieu en cognoissance de nos fautes le prians que de plus en plus il nous les face sentir. . . .175 For the Geneva divine, nevertheless, the list of sins of which members of his congregation are guilty includes those of the flesh (lust, eating and drinking to excess) as well as of the mind (fraud, lying, envy, backbiting). If in Calvin’s attentions to the Passion, Christ’s body tends to fade into the background, people’s own bodily nature with its corruptions remains prominent. Calvin is more of a dualist than Luther. Even though, according to his Institutes of the Christian Religion, the natural world informs all people of the existence of God and they cannot hide behind ignorance, human corporality is always inferior to spirituality, and concessions to it, while understandable and in part an aspect of God’s ordinance, are never carefree. They are linked to sin. They must be carefully inhibited—with the frequent assistance of civil and ecclesiastical authority. Church interiors bear witness to the suspicion with which Calvin and his colleagues regarded the material world. The Reformed decorative program was designed to help release members of the church from their earth-bound condition so that they could better reflect on invisible truths. Proper Christian emotion, then, means cultivating similar suspicion and, above all, achieving heights and depths of regret for one’s flaws of character and

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of act. Calvin wants his hearers to feel strongly, and the feeling he solicits in his sermons is profound sorrow for sin and self-recrimination. Such positive sensations as thanksgiving and love are possible to the elect, but these must result from a preceding submissive deprecation. Further, the thanksgiving and the love should be directed toward the triune God for his great mercy in bringing the atonement about. In sermon 20 on Ephesians, Calvin speaks of the possibility of being ravished in love with our God.176 It is hard to imagine Calvin as “ravished in love,” even with God. Unquestionably, however, one ought to love God well above one’s earthly family, although in the mortal setting, certainly a sign of progressive sanctification will be a person’s harmonious and helpful relationship with relatives and neighbors. Within these domestic bonds, the Christian can act out the gratitude felt toward God for his compassionate grace. For his part, God is either wrathful or intensely loving of his creatures. His own emotions are extreme and polarized. Lutheranism and Catholicism manifest the same binary quality in their image of God. The entire era seems charged with expectation of God’s punitive disaster inflicted upon his disobedient creation. In some measure, this expectation is separate from apocalypticism.177 Disasters distinct from the end of the world could occur as interim punitive measures against a wayward humanity.178 But in both the latter creeds, there would appear to be more room than in Calvinism for God’s pleasure or God’s satisfaction—or God’s mere annoyance rather than vengeful rage. As noted earlier, Luther could envision having a Father-son talk with God. His exchanges with God were intimate. Calvin, I think, could not entertain such a concept. God by his very definition had to be above and grandiose so that redemption could be a more amazing gift to the elect.179 Despite patterns that we detect, each preacher is different. It is important to note that within Calvinism, there was space for Olevianus’s greater and Mylaeus’s lesser emphasis upon the comfort offered to the faithful by Christ’s atoning sacrifice. Doctrinally, this would be a possible refuge that any Calvinist preacher could extend to his audience. Yet it is characteristic of Olevianus’s and some of Mylaeus’s sermons and not of Calvin’s. The Heidelberg theologian Olevianus reveals the origin of his conviction and does not conceal that he learned in his youth of God’s consolation of his children from a Catholic priest. Despite his disciplinary tendencies—which he regards as perfectly upright— the word Trost is prominent in his preaching vocabulary. Georg Spindler, too, can write of the “instruction, comfort, and joy” that Christians can derive (schöpfen) from contemplating the Passion.180 Such concepts are infrequent in Calvin’s sermons. Nonetheless, the establishment of greater distance between the individual soul and its divine Progenitor is a feature of Reformed preaching in general.


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What are the emotional consequences of such a program likely to have been? The mood of Calvin’s preaching, and to a lesser extent that of his Germanophone followers whom we have examined, is to shift backward in time to the judgmental Deity of the period prior to the twelfth century. This God does not bend down his ear to his beloved children; this God requires uprightness, is ever alert to its lack, and demands recompense for every transgression. He does, however, respond when he detects ardent, truly heartfelt attempts among believers to reform their lives. Thus, according to the preachers, Christians’ quest to conform themselves to God’s express will must engross their innermost selves, the kernel of sincerity. They must prostrate themselves before the Most High, as Calvin repeated, with fervor. Prostration of the self before someone is a severe physical act, one undertaken by priests at their ordination and monks and nuns at their consecration. It signals the limitless submission of that person who performs it. Mere acts, however, do not elicit divine approval. Preachers forecasting the collective doom appear not to notice the additional tension between their vision of a God who reacts favorably to the individual who struggles against sin, and that of a God who threatens the entire collectivity, including the repentant, for widespread but not universal misdeeds. One cannot be secure in this “vale of tears” (Jammerthal). Peace come only with total reliance upon the will of God—with that inner self-relinquishment (Gelassenheit) that no longer feared illness or catastrophic event. Reformed preachers, however, do not stress this peace. If they did, it might be hard to regard them as mannerist in their qualities. Instead, their eyes and their tongues are directed toward the impenitent. This is surely why Calvin is alleged to have been described at the University of Paris as “the accusatory mode.”181


4 Condemnation of the Jews

Every Christian denomination shared the conviction that the Jews, the Chosen People of God, were responsible for the death of the Messiah whom God had sent to them.1 The Jews not only failed to recognize their Anointed One, but they “killed” him—that is, they persuaded Pontius Pilate to have him killed—in a grisly manner. The preaching of this theme in often condemning tones across creedal boundaries must be seen as an aspect of arousing emotions. Whether these emotions should be conceived of as strictly religious is another question, inasmuch as attitudes reinforced within the church could not help but translate to the social arena outside the sanctuary. The social consequences are well known, as is the fact that across Europe with few exceptions such as Italy, Jews had been expelled beginning in the thirteenth century—I neglect for present purposes the pogroms attendant on the First Crusade. Wherever they remained, whatever lands they traversed (if permitted), rabid discrimination allegedly based on the Passion story beset them.2 Anti-Jewish messages might occur in any sermon at any season. Artistic depictions of the Passion included sometimes monstrous renderings of Jewish participants in the Passion, and these remained on display all year around. Even where the portrayed actors looked like normal human beings albeit with large noses, they were shown with distinct clothing, headgear, and sometimes yellow circles on their apparel. Yellow in the West was ever the color of ignominy.3

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So it remains in our own vocabulary, in which to be yellow means to be a coward. Although Heiko Oberman was certainly correct in regarding the Reformation as a nexus whereby medieval anti-Semitism was passed on to early-modern generations, the Catholic tradition is the great ideological and cultural wellspring out of which this bias flowed.4 Early-modern Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed preachers alike drew their basic formulations from it and moderated these as their persuasions and the times evolved. Into the modern age, however, preaching at Eastertide was most likely to include sometimes subtle, sometimes brash and insistent messages concerning the “treachery” of the Jewish people. This was delivered not only with a sense of past wrongs but also with a reminder that, according to the Gospel, the Jews who ranted to Pilate that Jesus of Nazareth must be crucified called down any blood-guilt not just upon their own heads but upon those of their children. The word children is read to mean all future generations. A side effect, then, of homiletic rituals during Holy Week was the resounding renewal of blame against the Jews, even though, as many clergymen did not fail to note, the actual responsibility for the death of the Son of God was humans ourselves, who could not refrain from sin. The one conviction did not nullify the other. “The Jews” was not entirely a metaphorical expression for Gentiles’ transgressive nature.

Catholic Preaching Even though every preacher’s style differed from that of every other, in general continuity marked the ideological framework of Catholic preaching in the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. Our Passau acquaintance, Father Paul Wann (d. 1489), invoked an inherited manner (herkömmliche Art) of presenting.5 Each clergyman explicitly stated his adherence to the accounts of the New Testament. Even if today we look with jaundiced vision at the pejorative embroidery of the Gospel accounts, clearly early-modern homileticians adhered to their sense of the legitimacy of imagining the world behind the bare text. Any crucifixion was by definition gruesome, and so it hardly violated biblical fidelity to lend vividness to the telling. Tradition, indeed, demanded utter engagement with the tragic story, and this standard elicited demonstration. Every speaker in the pulpit was convinced of the culpability of the Jews as described in the Bible, and to elaborate was to the mind of the day hardly to invent. To twenty-firstcentury historians specializing in this period, the debate over Georg Friedrich Handel’s anti-Semitism is laughable.6 He could not have been otherwise in the

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seventeenth-century milieu. We might well transfer to this setting Barbara Rosenwein’s concept of liturgy as ritual aggression.7 Whatever an individual cleric’s experience had been and his social environment now was, his words were deeds of aggression against an existing group whom he was otherwise not allowed to touch. He was nonetheless conditioned to feel anger toward that group and here found a venue for expressing it and reinforcing likemindedness. In the service of devotion, his goal was simply that; he ordinarily did not intend to set off an outburst of violence among his listeners. Paul Wann’s sermons on the Passion are typical even though not identical to others’. Remarks on the Jews’ treachery and their hatefulness punctuate his account. Jesus’ own ethnic brethren are never absent, and they are never in good odor. If Christ had turned toward his mother, she would have seen his disfigured countenance, to which the disgusting spittle of the Jews still clung, and the traces of the fist-blows of these coarse servants (of the high priest).8 He repeatedly includes condemnation such as, “O you blinded Jews! Not the place makes the soul impure, but your unrighteousness and bad deeds!”9 The preacher thinks that Pilate had Jesus beaten beyond the norm for such criminals in the hope of inspiring the Jews to relent out of pity when they saw his condition.10 That they did not do so made them all the worse. He harangues, “Shame on you, you accursed Jews standing before the heathen Pilate! He had no law allowing him to shed innocent blood; he drew back from such an act. But you wanted to commit murder under cover of the law.”11 He points out that although Pilate was not without guilt, the Jews were far more responsible. “The hatred of the Jews burned in full blaze and was not to be put out.”12 He verbally shudders with horror at the Jews’ exclamation, “His blood be upon us and upon our children!” “With consideration the Jews have thereby taken bloodguilt upon themselves, from which they can never be cleansed; they have to bear this curse until the end of the world.”13 Henceforward, he judges, “the Jews are dried-out trees without blossoms or fruit, worth no more than to chop down and throw into the fire.” He castigates them further in another sermon: “O you common Jewish souls! Your evil truly surpasses all measure!”14 Even around the cross and after Jesus’ death, Wann perceives ongoing malice: “In their raging hatred, the Jews would have gladly seen the Savior, like both robbers, cut to pieces and dismembered. But the soldiers considered this superfluous because he was already dead.”15 Another regular urban preacher, Johannes Wild (Ferus; 1495–1554), whose career overlapped with the early Reformation, raged incessantly against the Jews in his surviving Passion sermons, which he first wrote in 1541.16 So pervasive is this quality that it is virtually impossible to make fine distinctions among Wild’s utterances. His intent must have been to arouse his listeners to renewed

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hatred—but city governments did not want preachers to foster unrest in the citizenry. Perhaps at that time the city had been so “cleansed” of its Jewish population that invective was not a threat. Among much else, he declares that the Jews hate light and truth.17 He rages, “You killed your own Messiah, that true and great prophet, the Savior of Israel, the king of glory, prince of life, and the shepherd; the best one who was sent to you lost sheep out of the immeasurable mercy of God.”18 Wild, like other preachers, clearly associates Judas’s betrayal with the Jews. For this purpose, Judas is considered to be acting in accord with his Jewish identity. Wild prolongs this segment of the story by listing a dire result of this treachery for each piece of silver that the disciple was paid: thirty pieces, thirty results.19 The cleric nonetheless proclaims, “The preacher of the Gospel ought to do nothing other than announce the Word and command of the Lord; he should neither add to nor subtract from the Word of the Lord.”20 He views himself as adhering to this principle. Wild goes into great detail concerning Jesus’ being dragged out of the Garden and brought before Caiaphas. The Jews are responsible for Christ’s ordeal in this phase, and he recites that by their own laws they were not allowed to draw blood at Passover.21 Nor does Wild make a distinction between ordinary Jews and their leaders. He labels the Jewish masses at best fickle, who had so recently hailed Jesus as he entered Jerusalem and now turned against him, demanding his death. They are insane and obstinate.22 Wild concludes, when he tells of the Jews’ taking Christ’s blood upon theirs and their children’s heads, “And upon our children, ‘et super filios nostros.’ O impious parents, by this one word they have lost themselves and all their posterity. O brood of vipers!” Their hands, he says, are polluted with blood. He tells them that they will be wanderers upon the earth, just like Cain, finding no place of repose.23 He later adds about the Jews, “Whoever throws a stone up into the air receives it on his head!”24 The convert from Lutheranism, Caspar Franck (1543–1584), doctor of theology and court preacher in Munich, lards his Passion sermons with rather trite terms of denigration, such as “The devil blinded the bloodthirsty Jews and Pharisees.”25 In fact, the relative poverty of his language contrasts with his vivid fluency in describing Jesus’ ordeal. This raises the question of whether he himself does not feel the deep antipathy of some other, more emphatic preachers but realizes that he must pay lip-service to inherited sentiment. It is a question that cannot be answered at present. Franck’s treatment of Judas’s state of mind as he committed suicide suggests that God might have been willing to pardon Judas’s infamous betrayal—if only Judas had realized that God’s mercy could encompass even such unparalleled villainy.26 When Judas hanged himself, his abdomen opened and his entrails spilled out—a startling detail by itself—but


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Franck does not relate this disciple’s disastrous end to the fate of the Jewish people in general.27 By contrast, the writings of the Observant Franciscan Heinrich Helm leave no doubt of his personal anti-Semitism. His words strike one as sincere, deliberate, and violent—invented not merely to persuade but to give vent to his offense at some (he would inculpate all) Jews’ participation in the condemnation of Jesus. He goes on at length: “Ungrateful Judaea, the elect people, gives back to him evil for good and unjust hatred for his love. Sinful nation, people of grave iniquity, vile seed, sons of Belial, vicious devils, brood of vipers, exasperating house, wasted branches and untamable of heart, repaying evil for good, it took away the Son of God.”28 Helm rants for pages early in his account, telling the audience why the Jews so hated Christ: for his perfection, his divine deeds, his miracles. They envied him.29 None other than the Jews work their torment upon the Son of God. The Jews—he repeats their name and thus his accusation—beat, mock, spit upon, and desire the crucifixion of the Messiah. Why didn’t they simply kill him, Helm asks rhetorically. Because they did not wish to sully themselves on the Passover; they wanted to be pure to eat the paschal lamb. Helm presents this statement with irony. He ridicules Pilate’s desire to placate the Jews and derides their impure purity, their wicked sanctity, their execrable piety, their unjust and damnable justice.30 Helm gives as one reason for the Jews’ behavior their “election.”31 The Franciscan father earlier referred to “the most blessed treasure of predestination and election, before the founding of the world,” and he affirmed that none of the predestined would be lost.32 It is the more curious, then, that he seems consumed by hatred even as he believes that God had ordained that the Jews should be the instruments of the atonement. His description and condemnation of the Jews is virtually unabated through his sermons. Bartholomeus Wagner, evidently a secular priest of high education and reputable position, serving in Augsburg—his earliest dated publication is 1584—is restrained in the sense that he prefers to refer to the Jews as das Volck. That is, Wagner catalogues the torturous acts of violence committed against Jesus but only occasionally uses the word Juden. This is hardly a mitigation, for the entire audience has been conditioned over many years to know precisely who is meant. And in case they should lapse into doubt, the label is used often enough as a reminder: After Judas gave the other Jews the sign (kissing Jesus), “they trembled for envy, for hate, and panted on him [blatzten den HErrn an] just like a wild beast. Therefore, David rightly says, ‘Circumdederunt me canes multi, many dogs have surrounded me.’”33 He calls the Jews’ thirst for blood insatiable. Not even the Crucifixion, he goes on, quenched this thirst. “They desire still more blood!”34 He concludes, “This stubborn people wants to die in

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its error and go to its ruin, for which we should ask and pray with the Church that they finally repent; sanguis eius, ‘his blood,’ they cry, ‘be upon us and upon our children!’” But, he adds on this point, we must remember that we, too, are partly [responsible] for [the spilling of ] his rose-colored blood.35 Without a systematic study of sermon content across the Catholic orders and the secular priesthood, it is not possible to discern whether the Church harbored certain repositories of anti-Semitism that were more venomous than others. In this slender survey, Helm holds the dubious distinction for vitriol. But it is not lacking anywhere. In Peter Canisius’s famed Catholischer Catechismus, which was widely in use, the author guarantees the Jews’ final ruination: “The sinners’ death is very evil, namely, that of those who, like the stiff-necked Jews, die in their sins without remorse and on account of which perish, such that they must be eternally tormented in hell.”36 Canisius was an inveterate preacher, besides which his printed homilies undoubtedly served as models in Catholic southern Germany and beyond.37 Here, in his postil for “Passion Sunday or Judica,” he comments, probably on John 8:46–59: He [Jesus] speaks . . . against the extremely bad Jews among those who are listening to him, who could not endure to hear the divine truth and grasp it in faith. They openly persecuted the Lord of the prophets and their own Messiah with hostile hearts and with slanderous words, indeed even intended to kill him with stones in the consecrated temple. Such a horrifying hatred possessed their hearts that, raging, they conspired to bring him down, and their rage knew no end until they had finally done away with the King of Glory . . . with the most gruesome form of execution.38 Canisius explains by oblique reference to their Jewish obstinacy the dramatic change of heart that the welcoming throngs of Palm Sunday underwent during the ensuing days: “They reverted back to their old state of mind [Sinn] and fell into the vice of the highest ingratitude,” and they did this, too, in order to satisfy their leaders, the godless Pharisees.39 In a homily called “On the Patience of the Lord,” he calls Jesus’ tormenters, the Jews by name, “roaring lions and rapacious wolves.”40 He later notes the irony that as Jesus was one with the Father and fully God, he was in fact the Creator; the Jews slew the author of life itself!41 Georg Scherer (1540–1605), an Austrian, was precisely Canisius’s contemporary and his brother in the Society of Jesus. From 1577 to 1600, he was court preacher to Archduke Matthias. Both at court and elsewhere, he preached incessantly. He prepared his own sermons for publication.42 Like his fellows, Scherer does not spare the Jews his bile. He declares that the Jews must pay


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(for allegedly killing Christ) wherever they go. “For just as they mocked the Lord, ridiculed and spat upon him, so will they be despised in the entire world and regarded as unworthy. One whistles, hisses, and spits (spürtzet) at them, wherever they go and stay.”43 He repeats the idea that Pilate had Jesus more severely beaten than other prisoners in the hope of moving the Jews to compassion.44 This ploy failed, however. He includes in his devotions a prayer for the conversion of the Jews: Let us also request for the purjurious Jews, that our God and Lord remove the cover (Decke) from their hearts so that they may acknowledge our Lord Jesus Christ. Almighty [and] eternal God, who out of thy mercy doth not reject the purjurious Jews, hear the prayer that we offer for this obdurate people, so that they may recognize the light of truth, which is Christ, and may be freed from their darkness. Through the same Christ Jesus, Amen.45 These men’s Jesuit brother of a generation later, Philipp Kisel (1609–1681), is tireless and inventive in his reprobation: O you adulterous and flesh-indulging rabble, full of wantonness and forgetful of modesty! O you who are bent on wrath and revenge! O you self-serving envious hearts! Conjuratio! Conjuratio! Rebellion! Rebellion is at hand! You! You are the raging dog, the embittered and unrestrained lion that again revolts against my Jesus and overpowers and lays hands upon him. O you excessive eaters and drinkers, you slaves and unfree Bacchus-brothers! You fat oxen who keep the Son of God from standing up! You fat oxen who dare to rise up against the Son of God.46 In response to the Jews’ calling to Pilate for Jesus’ crucifixion, Kisel raves on: Whereupon the entire Jewish assembly, like the baying hound and roaring lion and howling wolf, once again, whether they stood under or over, to the right or to the left, raised up its deplorable, most urgent clamor, and to be sure with such a fury, urging crucifixion. Every one of them who was present, if he had been able, would have scratched him to pieces with his sharp claws, ripped him apart with biting teeth, and kicked him. This is the answer of the Jews; this is what they wanted to do with Jesus.47 They invented new torments that occurred to them. The more blood they drew, the more the Jews enjoyed themselves. They rejoiced and exulted over it.48

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Compared to Kisel, some other preachers may seem moderate and trite. Yet every clergyman whose sermons I have consulted at the very least conveyed the same sentiments to his audience. Even at their most modest, these rhetoricians are extremely prejudicial. The great Capuchin preachers continue in the same pattern. The theologian Donatus of Passau waxes eloquent as he recounts Jesus’ arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane. He reproaches the Jews: “O you imprudent nonhumans! What are you thinking? You senseless people, what are you doing?” He says that the Jews fell on Jesus “like furious lions, like bloodthirsty tigers, like hungry wolves. They grabbed him, bound and tethered him, threw him to the ground, and kicked him with their accursed feet.”49 The animal metaphors appear to have been irresistible, as well as biblically ready at hand. The Jews, in the opinion of these clerics, are not human, and one must resort to comparisons with beasts in order to capture their departure from the norm. The Jews in Pilate’s courtroom, Donatus insists, are “more enraged than the unicorn, bloodthirstier than the tiger, more furious than the lion, hungrier than the wolf, better able to rip [their victim] apart than the bear, more immoveable than the elephant, more poisonously envious than the basilisk.” They were not satisfied with Jesus’ having been beaten down to the bone. They desired even more blood.50 As Jesus bears his cross, Donatus draws again to his listeners’ attention the Jewish masses in attendance: “so many high priests, elders and [other] most prominent people among the Jews, so many prisoners of Satan, the Pharisees and men learned in the scriptures, the raging rabble—all represented furious animals.”51 As we have seen, Martin von Cochem’s (1634–1712) devotions on the Passion seem to have been a widely disseminated early-modern account of Christ’s suffering.52 There are forty of these meditations, which may indicate their origin in a forty-hour combination of postils and prayers, both delivered by the presiding priest or friar. His pastoral works continued to be printed into the twentieth century. The homilies and prayers at the core of the Passion meditations have undergone a complicated metamorphosis.53 One seventeenthcentury edition was intended, according to its title, for the use of women and girls.54 That the “gentle sex” was its targeted audience is itself significant. In the early chapters, the author stresses human sin as the cause of Christ’s agony. But in due course, as the familiar story progresses, he will tap and transmit the age-old springs of hatred for the Jews to that gender that was charged with inculcating values upon children: As Christ was still speaking with Judas, the executioners’ servants fell upon him with great violence. One grabbed him by the hair, the other around the neck, the third by the arms. And so this innocent lamb


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was quickly thrown to the ground, as they called out to him, “Lie there, you magician! You have thrown us to the ground with your magical arts; now we’re going to pay you back!” O Christian soul! Think how these raving animals treated Christ and how they abused him in the worst manner! Saint Bonaventura says that the godless gang drew the dear Savior to the ground, then lifted him up in the air and threw him down again—without any mercy they kicked him, thrust their knees into his body, struck him in the face with their fists, and ripped out a large part of his hair and his beard.55 All this has occurred before he is brought to Caiaphas. A major concentration of these devotions is in fact the suffering that specifically the Jews inflicted upon the Lord. One segment is devoted to the spittle on Jesus’ face. The prayer reads, “O gleam of heavenly glory, Jesus Christ! Be a reminder of the gruesome abuse that the Jews carried out upon you, as they spat in your holy face and disfigured it with their saliva in such a dreadful way. Oh, the incomprehensible insult and unspeakable disgrace! Who would have believed that human evil would go so far that they did not hesitate to spit in the face of almighty God Himself!”56 In the following commentary, the invective continues. The Jews are labeled “the servants of the devil.”57 The author cites Saint Jerome in maintaining that the Jews paid extra money to those who beat Jesus (of whom Jerome alleged that there were six, three pairs, each armed with different instruments of torture) so that they would be heartless and unrelenting.58 The Jews’ words before Pilate, “His blood be upon us and upon our children!” caused them forevermore to be accursed of God, “down to the present day” and until the end of time.59 In his commentary on Christ’s first word on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do,” Capuchin Pater von Cochem contrasts the Redeemer’s pardoning spirit to the nature of the Jews, which he characterizes as “the enemy.” You ask on behalf of your slanderer and forgive your accusers, yes, you pray for your fiercest enemies. They scream against you before Pilate, “Away with him!” but you call out for them, “Father, forgive them!” They cry, “His blood be upon us and our children!” but you speak, “My Father, I offer you my poured-out blood for the pardon of their sins.” They cry out, “Crucify him! Crucify him!” but you say, “Father, forgive them by means of my cross and my death, for they do not know what they do.” They blasphemed and slandered you, they cursed and execrated you; but you speak good for them and wish them your Father’s heavenly blessing.60

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Von Cochem’s vitriol does not subside after the Romans take possession of Jesus and carry out the crucifixion. The clergyman fabricates the Jews’ desire to see that the soldiers hacked at Jesus’ legs, even as they broke those of the criminals on either side of him, but before he died so that he would endure yet more exquisite pain. They were not yet satisfied, he maintains, with Jesus’ suffering up till then. They sought this additional “gruesome, heathen . . . entirely unusual torture of leg-breaking,” which was “bitterer and more ignominious than the crucifixion itself.”61

Lutheran Preaching In the late twentieth century, even confessional historians finally came to terms with Martin Luther’s own anti-Semitism. Luther derived from a culture, obliquely described above, that harbored no doubts about the diabolical nature of the Jews, all of the Jews, regardless of whether the Emperor Maximilian, Johannes Reuchlin, or Martin Luther required the services of physicians and other learned Jews for their particular purposes, such as translating the Old Testament. Despite Luther’s early sanguinity concerning the conversion of the Jews as soon as they heard the true Word of God (as interpreted by Luther himself),62 their failure to do so won the Wittenberger’s implacable condemnation.63 His own Passion sermons reveal his fundamental rejection of the recitation of Jesus’ tribulations or the Jews’ unrelenting hostility. In 1525, he could preach, “One should not do as those do [i.e., Catholics] who rebuke the Jews. In the heart of Christ we shall see faith and charity.”64 Luther follows this advice. Preaching on Good Friday afternoon (19 April) 1538, he decries those authorities on the Passion from which he had drawn his models when he was a monk (monachus), such as Saint Brigitta of Sweden and Albertus Magnus. Luther accuses these and the entire Catholic Church of making a work out of piety surrounding the Crucifixion: “Is that not the blameworthy devil, that one makes out of the Passion of Christ a work, in which one [then] trusts?” This problem of whether he had meditated on the suffering sufficiently beset him until he was miserable. “But if faith in the remission and satisfaction of Christ had remained, such grief would not have arisen under popery.”65 He announces his underlying principle: We must think about the Passion all year around, and not just during Easter season.66 However much his theological convictions moved him to alter the tenor of his Passion sermons, Luther retained his distaste for the Jews. On 1 February and 7 February 1546, deep in the winter on his final trip to Eisleben, where he would die on February 18, Luther wrote home to Katharina Lutheryn as he


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passed through a Jewish-occupied area governed by the Countess of Mansfeld, the widow von Solmis. He told her that a cold and harrowing wind blew on him, a sign of the devilish nature of the residents there. He was determined, he said, as soon as he finished his current business with the counts of Mansfeld, to see that these Jews were banned and driven out.67 He was implacable. He was a man of his day, as we are people of ours. As we have seen, within Lutheranism in general preachers advocate what I am calling a reduction in the outer display of emotionality. Inner feeling must and will, however, result from a Christian’s genuine engagement with faith. Nobody can be familiar with the events of the Passion and not be moved by the love of Christ for his sinful followers. The devout will be impressed by this love and will find consolation in the atonement for their worrisome, besetting inability to refrain from sin. The lesser emphasis upon Jesus’ physical ordeal and the relative elimination of the human body as the means by which Christians derive inspiration to repent carries with it the side effect that the torments inflicted on the Savior by the Jews become a less prominent aspect of the story. Nicolaus Manlius (d. 1569), pastor in Ansbach/Saxony, focuses virtually entirely, in his two published sermons, on the sins of humankind and the doctrine of reconciliation between the Divinity and humanity.68 There is much feeling in this pamphlet, but none of it is generated by antipathy for the Jews. Because of Jesus’ atonement, we can enjoy consolation now and anticipate future joy. This by no means signifies that Lutheran divines regarded the Jews with less prejudice or that they moderated the blame assigned to Jews in Catholic homiletics. Less incitement to hatred might help to produce lessened allegations of culpability in the distant future—or, as I have suggested, they might not—but that day was far off. One of Johann Kymeus’s Passion sermons in the Wittenberg Passional Buch of 1540 declares about the Jews, “This people may well be called a stubborn people which has always striven against God.”69 He insists that human sin is the real lash with which Christ was beaten, and he says that Catholic preachers rarely get around to that.70 They have wasted their time trying to get people to weep and howl about “the bad Jews.”71 For himself, Kymeus stresses the atonement. The Passion sermons of Luther’s long-time acquaintance Veit Dietrich are filled with consolation. They draw the conclusion continually to those who are listening or reading that Christians may take comfort in the atoning sacrifice of Christ. In this respect, they depart, as other Lutheran postils do, from Catholic characteristics. In their commentary on the Jews, however, despite a lesser palette of detail concerning Jesus’ torture, they are similar. We might even anticipate a relative exoneration of the Jews when Dietrich writes that previous

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descriptions of the Passion always ascribe these horrors to the Jews and to the heathens. “But I, you, and we all have caused (verdienet) this.” We have, he continues, the whole burden of sin upon us. Christ has paid the price for us.72 This notwithstanding, he ultimately shows the Jews no mercy. They are, he said, “an old, rotten, dried-out, unproductive tree that does no more than wander (irren) in the garden and is useless for anything except to be cut down and thrown into the fire.”73 He holds forth on the fate of the Jews: Still today, for almost 1,500 years, they remain in misery [and] have no place where they can stay; and it is a slight thing in temporal terms, that they are so badly off. Their hearts are embittered against the Son of God, from whom they were supposed to seek and expect forgiveness of sins and eternal life. They desire lies and error. They search with diligence how they may obscure the meaning of Scripture and cannot come to a proper understanding of it. When they want to defend themselves, they call on God and [say that they] serve God—[but in truth] they serve the disagreeable devil, and God will not hear them. And finally, there is nothing more certain—because they don’t want to be freed of sin by the Son of God—than that they will die in their sins and must perish eternally.74 A prominent early reformer and follower of Luther, Johannes Brenz, devotes more attention to the details of Christ’s suffering than some of his fellows, and he uses the word comfort (Trost) infrequently. He makes clear in his Passio Vnsers Herren Jesu Christi that he has preached these sermons, and that they form part of a longer series, also given in the flesh, on the entire life of Jesus.75 Brenz immediately distinguishes his overall goal from that of Catholic preachers: “The purpose of Christ’s suffering is not alone to [move us] to consider, and in our minds in the human manner to have sympathy for Christ.” Above all, we do this so that we recognize God’s good will toward us. The focal point is, then, God’s reconciliation with his human creatures.76 The teaching of God’s word should not threaten governmental authority, but it should be articulated quietly and peaceably.77 Peter’s denial of Jesus constituted his failure to love his neighbor, which lies at the heart of the Christian faith.78 Nevertheless, Brenz describes Jesus’ pain in the Garden of Gethsemane as of such severity that it “would drive the godless to kill themselves.”79 There is no lack of feeling here—only it is much reduced in comparison with the Catholic tone; it is directed elsewhere. Brenz’s antipathy toward the Jews, his preservation of long-standing traditions, comes to the fore in his description of Jesus’ appearance before Pilate. Here he resorts to the categories of physical assault upon Christ: “beating, thorns, the blow to the jaw, being spat upon, and public ridicule.”80 Not one


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person in the sanctuary as he spoke these words could have doubted who it was who had committed these atrocities. He draws upon the old animal metaphors for the aggressors: “While so many bulls, lions, and dogs raged against Christ, how did Christ bear himself in relation to them?” He finds the answer in Isaiah 53:7: “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth.” Brenz says, “From this we should recognize the extremely great senselessness and ranting against Christ by the Jews.”81 He concludes this sermon with an ironic twist: “We should wish for ourselves, and always cry out in our hearts, that his blood—that is the merits of the blood of Christ—come upon us and upon our children.”82 Whether he was aware of this difference or not, Tilemann Hesshusen (1527–1588) sets himself apart from other Lutheran preachers in maintaining that the ordinary Jews were not those who poured their torrents of wrath upon Jesus. Rather, it was the high priests, the learned in scripture (Schriftgelehrten), the elders, the rulers, and the city councilors. These, Hesshusen says, were full of hate; they were the “most exceedingly bitter and the most extreme enemies of the truth.” He sees their likeness in the Catholic prelates, who “are the most bloodthirsty persecutors of Christ and the most wicked blasphemers of the Son of God.”83 The subject of the one leads immediately to the subject of the other. In relative terms, he devotes more time to lambasting the Catholics than he does the Jews. Yet this is hardly a form of moderation; the language he employs against the Jews is violent and reinforces the existing sentiment of those who either hear or read his messages. In assessing the Jewish leaders’ words before Pilate, “His blood be upon us and upon our children!” he remarks, “That is a gruesome stubbornness of the Jews, that they so dissolutely cast God’s judgment into the winds.” He recites, albeit in concise form, the atrocities that the Jews committed upon Jesus.84 Hesshusen does later remind his audience that the Jews were not exclusively at fault. They were the instrument of God’s will; God had determined that his Son should die.85 The heart of Hesshusen’s instruction is that Christians should take comfort in the atonement. Still, the preacher adheres to and disseminates the prejudicial beliefs of his day. In the meantime, Cyriakus Spangenberg, in his own Passion sermons, given and then overseen for publication in Mansfeld, leaves no doubt about his condemnation of the Jews. He titles one sermon, “On the False Witness of the Jews.”86 In another, he recites the horrors perpetrated upon Jesus and tells us who carried them out. Just as important to this divine, however, is the responsibility of human sin for these offenses: Oh, dear Christians, how did it cost the Lord Christ so much pain to bear for our sins? What do you mean that it hurt him exceedingly

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and beyond all measure; that they mercilessly ripped him apart with lashes, and that they pressed the thorns into his head such that his holy blood flowed down over his holy countenance? Such lashing and thorns are my and your sins; I and you have thereby caused him such grief.87 Nicolaus Selnecker (1530–1592) leaves no doubt of his anti-Jewish views: The will of the Jews is in no way conformable to the will of God. For God allowed his Son to suffer out of immeasurable mercy toward the human race, and at the request of the Son, who presents himself as paying the penalty for us. And he desires that the Son be obedient, and through this obedience he subdues the anger of God and brings the human race back to [the possibility of obtaining] eternal life. But Judas and the Jews are full of vehement envy, greed, hate, and ill-will against the Lord, who chastises their blasphemies, false teaching, pride, and infidelity. And it is their will that this Lord in his suffering shall die, and that they, in their proud, spiritless idolatry and evil, do not err.88 In the prayer with which he closes the entire volume, dated 1572 from Wolfenbüttel, Selnecker offers thanks to Christ for all that he had endured, including allowing himself to fall into the hands “of the obdurate, vile Jews.” The preacher follows this with a summary listing of all the types of assault that the Jews had carried out upon him.89 Andreas Musculus put together thirty-eight meditations on the Passion, and they do not explicitly derive from his sermons. Yet this inveterate preacher could hardly have maintained separate contents for his expatiations from the pulpit and those that he advocated as the basis for private devotion. His sections are very like the homilies of his Lutheran colleagues.90 He immediately distinguishes his content from that of Catholic treatments of the Passion. Priests, he accuses with distaste, have let the core meaning of Christ’s ordeal fall away—that is repentance and forgiveness of sin—have busied themselves with other matters, and have “played with empty nutshells.”91 He provides a model to his readers in bewailing his own responsibility for Christ’s suffering.92 He wishes them to do likewise. While Musculus is quite clear that it is Pilate’s (Roman) soldiers who flagellated and imposed the crown of thorns on Jesus, and absurdly garbed and ridiculed him, he holds the Jews answerable for the even more fearful outcome. By having Jesus beaten to excess, Pilate “wanted to quiet the Jews’ fury. But there is no quiet [to be had]; there is no compassion. They [the Jews] become


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[even] more daring and raving [as a result] and cry out, saying, ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’” Their behavior is lamentable and disgraceful.93 Musculus exclaims about Jesus’ torturers, “Oh, what great anger and eternal rage will follow from this for those who despise your [Jesus’] love, let it pass them by, and tread entirely in filth [or excrement].” Hell, fire, and pain await them.94 Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586), the former superintendent in Braunschweig, conveys to his readers from the beginning of his sermon collection his negative feeling toward the Jews. He tells of Jesus’ condemning the fig tree: “He wanted hereby to depict and describe the hypocrisy and evil of the Jewish people, and at the same time to indicate through it [his curse] the gruesome punishment that would ultimately fall upon them.”95 In Chemnitz’s account, the Jews are the authors of Christ’s ordeal, which he recounts in only moderate detail, but in quite lofty intellectual tones. This preacher does admit that Judas was God’s tool for realizing his purposes. God’s will, he says, is inscrutable; faith is God’s gift, and he did not make this gift to Judas. We should not seek to understand why.96 Chemnitz repeats three times the story of Pilate’s having had Jesus more horrifically beaten than other people whom he had condemned to death, in the hope that the Jews would be satisfied when they viewed his condition.97 The preacher remarks on the irony that “the very ones who had so recently cried ‘Hosannah’ now loudly screamed, ‘Away, away with him! Crucify him! Away with him to the gallows of the cross!’ so that he might die an accursed death on the wood.”98 Chemnitz elaborates on other torturous aspects of the Passion to a degree that is comparatively uncommon among Lutheran clerics. His ultimate goal in preaching and publishing on the Passion is nonetheless twofold: “so that such devotion might be inflamed in us, in order that from this story we might learn to recognize the seriousness of God concerning sin and flee from sin; and besides that, so that we learn to consider and acknowledge the unspeakable love of God toward us poor people.”99 As a group, Lutheran writings on the Passion devote less space to the physical torment of Christ. Nevertheless, their authors think it an indispensable dimension of the story, one that the Bible in fact outlines. Its recitation is to ensure familiarity with Scripture, but beyond that to impress hearers and readers with the harsh reality that their own sins have brought the Son of God to this horrendous pass. Descriptions of agony, as in Catholic preaching, are still seen as a means of convincing Christians of their own role in the Crucifixion. But to an extent not seen in Catholic homiletics, evangelical clergymen compress the tale of torment and render it—not exactly peripheral but still less central than it had been. In the process of rearranging their theological and pastoral priorities, Lutheran divines also diminish the attendant belaboring of

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the Jews’ alleged qualities. There is no evangelical anthology of sermons, nevertheless, that does not communicate to its perusers the severely negative traditional estimation of the Jews. We may assume this to have been true as well of actual Holy Week preaching. Published texts of Lutheran preaching may appear to mitigate older messages, until one comes across, as one inevitably does, a writer’s excoriation of the Jews, usually in connection with Judas’s betrayal of Christ or the Jewish mob’s insistence before Pilate on his crucifixion and the simultaneous liberation of Barabbas.

Reformed Preaching As asserted earlier, John Calvin, as one of the foundational theologians of the age, exercised a significant influence upon his followers in German-speaking lands. In my judgment, we must assume that these followers strove not only to be faithful to his teaching in the abstract but, insofar as they could conceptualize it, also to take note of his preaching. Although Calvin shares the Christian outlook on the Jews that prevailed in his time, as we have seen, his pattern in the pulpit was to concentrate upon what he regarded as the moral filth of those before him. Thus, the horrifying ordeal of the Crucifixion hardly appears in literal terms, and with it disappear the Jews as prominent embodiments of evil. He does decry the deportment of the Jews before Pilate, but he prefers to transform the story of Jesus’ suffering into a metaphor for sin-laden humanity. We are the ones in danger of becoming wild beasts. We enrich ourselves by illicit means, through cruelty and extortion. We need to examine ourselves in the “mirror of all perfection.”100 His opinion of the Jews is visible, yet he regards them as tools of God’s providence.101 He declares to the people seated around him: “We should know that Christ’s treatment in such a cruel, opprobrious, contumelious manner was by God’s decree two thousand years before Jesus was born, and even before the law [of the Old Testament] was given and written. . . . And we should know that everything that Judas, the Jews, the soldiers, and Pilate did was determined by God long ago.”102 Nevertheless, Calvin is able to assert that God’s grace has been withdrawn from the Jews on account of their ingratitude.103 He describes them, too, as having a “malign and frenetic ignorance,” as if Satan possessed them and as if they were monsters formed contrary to nature.104 His steadiest refrain concerns not the Jews but ordinary Christians: “We have always to consider that God wants to lead us to be more affected (touchez) by our faults, to hold them in horror and detestation.”105 The Reformer is often more forceful in his language than in this example. He urges people to see


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their actual nature in the deportment of the Jews and their ideal character in Jesus. The Jews and the Savior are opposing mirrors, both of use to Christians. This model of avoidance occurs intermittently in those of Calvin’s Passion sermons written down by Denis Raguenier and his staff. Calvin will speak of “the hardness and diabolical obstinacy” of the Jews.106 Elsewhere, he claims that “papists today are the successors of the Jews.”107 His immediately following harangue against the Jews, then, performs the double duty of marking the line between followers of Calvin and papists as well as between Christians and Jews: “For they [the Jews] are like dogs in their religion. For today in their schools they have no regard for the redemption of the human race. They mock the immortality of the soul—in brief, they are worse than dogs and monsters, and they deserve to be ruined (abismez), as Saint Paul says.”108 Calvin’s successor Theodore Beza shares the view that more important than cataloguing the offenses of the Jews is Christians’ encounter with their own awful sinfulness. It is not enough that the listener, on hearing the Passion described, should become angry at the Jews, Judas, Caiaphas, and Pilate. “However much this history cannot be brought up without touching the heart to the quick with the feeling that the Lord has borne our sins upon the wood with such anguish, a true contempt for and acknowledgement of our past life, [and] a genuine desire to make amends” is the proper inner response to it:109 It is not Satan, not Judas, not the Jews, not Pilate, not the executioners who have crucified Jesus but we ourselves, we, I say, who have caused him to be most cruelly and ignominiously tied and bound, condemned as a blasphemer, found culpable of lèse majesté both divine and human, to be mocked, struck in the face, flogged, crucified, pierced [in the side], entered into death, and even cursed by God according to the law.110 Just when the reader may have thought that Beza was uncommonly mild for a man of his era and might be breaking with the vitriol of those who had gone before, he declares, apropos of the Jewish high priests’ men arresting Jesus: “The prisoner you have taken, bound, and pinned down . . . has been the means, the instrument, and the cause of your total ruination and final extermination. For in taking Jesus Christ as you have . . . you have lost, sacrificers, your sacrifice!”111 To be sure, this could be regarded as a theological statement—but the audience would have recognized it as one also containing God’s righteous vengeance against the Jews at the Last Judgment.112 Such statements could not be simply abstract; they were also social principles in case Geneva’s citizens should ever encounter living Jews. Beza devotes an entire sermon to the Jews’ efforts to organize false testimony against Jesus.113 His predictions concerning

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the Last Judgment are friendly neither for sinners nor for the “nation of the Jews.”114 After Christians’ sinfulness, Beza’s predominant bête noire is the Catholic Church as represented by its priesthood. He is as likely as Calvin to burst forth in rancor against Catholicism. The Jews come in a distant third, behind both of these. The Heidelberg Catechism manifests the preeminence of human sin and the need to refute Catholic belief and practice. These are the theological priority but also of personal emotional immediacy to its composers, Zacharias Ursinus (1534–1583) and Caspar Olevianus (1536–1587). This order appears to be representative of Reformed preachers in general. We must consider whether the relatively few harsh utterances against Jews in their sermons indicates a moderating attitude toward this European minority. Ascertaining this, as stated earlier, is rendered difficult for the sixteenth century, during which Reformed preachers were reluctant to have their sermons printed. Nevertheless, the few Passion homilies that exist reveal in their frame of reference a persistent belief in the condemnability of the Jewish people. Where sermon texts do not exist, I have drawn on other works that contain the fundamental convictions of men who, whatever else they may have done in their careers, preached often. Caspar Olevianus, the Heidelberg court-preacher and theologian, states that the Jews together with all the godless shut Christ’s grace and suffering out of their hearts. The other godless, too, along with the Jews, are responsible for the Lord’s suffering even if, technically, the Roman soldiers nailed him to the cross. Altogether they are executioners, and his blood shall come over them all, Jews and non-Jews alike.115 The cleric declares that Christ’s death on the cross fulfills his promise to Adam. He refutes the need for circumcision and opines that the Jews have made of this ritual “an idol.”116 He goes on, “The circumcision of the heart is a [true] circumcision.” We should wash our hearts in the suffering of Christ “in genuine trust and true repentance of our bestial and shameful lives.”117 Elsewhere, in a summary and explanation of the creed, Olevianus declares that Jews and Turks do not believe in God, for there is only one God, the triune God. The Turkish faith, he adds, comes from the devil.118 Then he draws both Catholics and Lutherans into the circle of his condemnation. Those who practice idolatry, he judges, are worse than heathens.119 Ursinus, also a Reformed theologian in Heidelberg, wrote a long commentary on the catechism.120 He states that the Jews did in fact kill Christ. They called for his blood on a day (Passover) when according to their own law, killing was not permissible.121 Johann Willing (1525–1572) was a colleague of Olevianus and Ursinus, serving Count Palatine of the Rhine Friedrich III and then his brother Johann Casimir. Willing underwent a metamorphosis that took him from the Catholic


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priesthood via Lutheranism to Reformed perspectives.122 He temporarily fell out with Friedrich III over strict church discipline, which the ruler imposed on his subjects. In a series of sermons that he presented in Augsburg and that aroused much contention, Willing referred intermittently and in passing to the Jews. In fact, his slighting remarks about them were not at all among the messages that caused disunity. All his listeners would have agreed that the Jews and Turks did not enjoy the true faith as measured by the Apostles’ Creed.123 More injurious to some of those present in that city of mixed faith would have been his facile lumping together of Jews, Turks, and papists.124 Like several others of his Reformed brethren of the cloth, he considered Catholics to be just as far beyond the pale of “true” Christianity as adherents of the Jewish and Muslim faiths. Perhaps the most openly and relentlessly anti-Semitic preacher of the Calvinist divines whose sermons I have studied was Georg Spindler (1525–1605). Educated in Wittenberg, Spindler had migrated through Lutheranism—he studied in Wittenberg—into the Reformed persuasion. He served an evangelical church in Bohemia, but when the trajectory of his development became clear, he was fired. For a time, the Reformed counts of the Rhenish Palatinate, Johann Casimir and Friedrich IV, contributed to his support. He preached and published plentifully. As seen earlier, he may well include more description of Jesus’ abuse in the Passion as a result of Lutheran beginnings. We could speculate that his Catholic and Lutheran heritage shows itself again in his harsh attentions to alleged Jewish character and infractions. In his Passio et Resurrectio Christi (1596), he takes up the Jews both obliquely and directly. In his aspersions toward Judas, he clearly makes this disciple the figure of both Jews in general and Catholics, whom he regards as “betrayers of Christ.” Judas, he says, has left many Judas-brothers behind: the pope, cardinals, monks, and priests.125 The pope and his helpers are the successors of Caiaphas: they are newe Caiphaisten.126 The persistent linkage between the Jews and the Catholics, once again, is an effort to draw upon existing anti-Semitism to make the Catholic Church as despicable to his audience. Whatever his reasons, Spindler is immoderate and insistent. He rants in reaction to the Jewish leaders’ not desiring to be tainted by entering the courthouse: These hypocrites are concerned that they might become impure because of the house, and they take care to see that they don’t become tainted from spilling innocent blood. They are full of filth, their hearts are filled with hate, envy, desire for vengeance, cunning, treachery, ambition, unchastity, and tyranny. They are an

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abomination, who with their stench could stink up heaven and earth—and these are worried that a house may make them impure. They know nothing of the filth of the heart and think that outward impurity will do them injury. Oh, such foolish and godless blindness! Oh, their painted-on and hypocritical sanctity that wishes to create impurity where there is none; on the contrary, they do not perceive and guard themselves against abomination, sin, and impurity.127 As sly sycophants, they twist their words before Pilate in order to persuade him to do their bidding.128 Spindler calls them “bloodhounds who bay at Christ.”129 He instructs his listeners to reflect on the frivolity and inconstancy of the Jewish people.130 Jews have, he tells them, “adamantine hearts”; they cannot be moved to pity.131 As Jesus is crucified in Spindler’s account, he condemns them again: “We see too in this court action a gruesome mercilessness and a diabolical stubbornness in the high priests, their servants, and the entire [Jewish] people.”132 He actively arouses his listeners’ negative feelings. Although this preacher is often indirect and implicit in his narrative, he clearly implicates the Jews at places where they appear in the biblical story. But at other moments, Spindler is direct and explicit. When the crowd rants before Pilate, the clergyman reveals his persuasion: Once again, Pilate has had Jesus more thoroughly beaten than usual in the hope of moving the Jews to compassion. He hopefully displays the prisoner: Ecce homo! But when the high priest and his servants see Jesus, “they scream, and like the evil worms and gruesome lions and unicorns, they open their mouths (maul) and roar and cry out all together, ‘Only to the gallows of the cross with this evildoer!’ In their cold and poisonous hearts, there is no pity.”133 In subsequent sermons, Spindler returns to the Jews. They are, he says, the real blasphemers for denying Christ his due honor. Again, he immediately identifies the Catholic Church with the Jews.134 When Jesus’ body is being taken down from the cross, he comments on the Jews’ nastiness: They follow the letter of the law—in this case, that Jesus’ corpse should be buried immediately—but they ignore its main points.135 He agrees with both John and Peter, who write that even though the Roman soldiers physically nailed Christ on the cross, the Jews had actually crucified him themselves. The blame is theirs.136 Abraham Scultetus (1566–1625) demonstrates the continuation of these patterns well into the seventeenth century. A Silesian by birth, he was a professor of theology and court preacher in Heidelberg under Count Palatine Friedrich V. He spent the last three years of his life in Reformed Emden. He testifies in his foreword of 1611 that he had actually preached the sermons that


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are collected here.137 Ten of them are on the theme of “The Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ.”138 He immediately identifies the Catholic Church with the Jews in their alleged mutual conspiracy to kill Christ.139 The servants of Caiaphas beat Jesus thoroughly. Caiaphas is so angry that he “nearly bursts.”140 A feature of the Jews as they are portrayed in these sermons is their own emotionality. They cannot control themselves, and the priest embodies this lack of restraint. All the Jews, Scultetus asserts, “begin to rave.” Roman Catholic priests, too, he says, “only appear pious. They are really full of hypocrisy and vice.”141 But most of this sermon depicts the Jews as unrelenting in their drive to have Jesus crucified. He ends, “They will answer to God for everything they have done in this business!”142 Another member of the Heidelberg circle, Johann Philipp Mylaeus (dates unknown), styled in this publications “deacon in Amberg and pastor in Heidelberg,” criticizes both Jews’ and Jesuits’ preoccupation with outer sacrifice and other regulations. He counts members of the Society of Jesus among those who, he says, “thirst for the blood of Christ.”143 His characterization of Caiaphas as an “arch-knave and hypocrite” coincides with his harsh critique of Catholicism (Babstumb).144 Peter’s denial of Christ would be as if a person went over to the Turkish or Jewish religion.145 His most prolonged condemnation of the Jews occurs in the usual connection, namely, when Jesus stands in the charge of Pontius Pilate. When we sin, Mylaeus admonishes, we show our own preference for Barabbas. We should never tread in the Jews’ footsteps. The Jews, along with “misers, usurers, whore-masters, and others” are enemies of the Christian religion.146 The preacher summarizes, “They and their children for over sixteen hundred years now have had no proper place where they could dwell; in sum, many of them peer into the mirror of wrath and of divine vengeance. Well, they did not desire God’s blessing, and therefore it is proper that the curse should come over them.”147 No other light will come to them and save them, he says. “Yes, they should be struck with eternal blindness and darkness,” in which they live today.148

Anti-Semitism and Religious Emotion This brief assemblage of excerpts from Passion sermons across time and across the emerging creedal divides is intended to demonstrate, first of all, the fact that conventions of anti-Semitic utterance in preaching on the Crucifixion did not soften with the coming of the Reformation. Post-Reformation Catholic preachers continued to tap them with full enthusiasm, and Lutheran and Reformed clergy all drew upon them. Congregations knew the scripts well.

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Jews were universally called “blind” and “stubborn” or hard-hearted. To them was assigned the responsibility for having crucified Jesus, and they would all have, in due course, to feel the effects of the blood of Christ upon their heads. Part of the ritual of arousal at Easter time was to hear with dismay what a “godless” minority, still represented in Europe despite widespread relegation, had done to the Son of God. These parts and passages were designed to elicit feeling. In this basic dimension of the derogation of the Jews, however, differences became evident among the three leading denominations. The preachers reveal to some degree their own awareness of these distinctions. Catholic divines did indeed treat the Jews rhetorically as the perpetrators of the most ferocious torture upon Jesus. The recitation, and in part the invention, of their minutest acts may have had the effect of eliciting yet more hatred of a people that most Christians were acquainted with only in the abstract. One can detest all the more readily people whom one does not know but on whom one believes oneself to be an expert. Thus, the emphasis upon the minutiae of Christ’s physical suffering, with its unquestioned connection to the Jewish perpetrators, heightened the sought-for abhorrent reaction to bodily torment. It may have been a good thing that some city governments required Jews to remain indoors and out of sight during Holy Week! Their safety could not be assured. Catholic preachers did not fail to admonish their audiences concerning their own responsibility for sin. But it is just this personal answerability that made the Jews all the more blameworthy for what they, in Catholic eyes, chose to do. They did not restrain themselves from committing atrocities. Christians were confronted by means of Lenten and Holy Week preaching with their personal capacity to do or not to do. Their spiritual exhorters urge them to turn back, to foreswear their not only foolish but damnable ways. Lutheran pastors retained the conviction that the Jews were indeed the authors of the gravest offenses against Christ. These remain most assuredly physical, even though the tendency within the evangelical movement is to tamp down not just the length of Passion preaching—which itself would curtail elaboration—but also the sensual horror of the Crucifixion. Where there is less detail of torture, there is less opportunity to repeat blame. To speak about the suffering of Christ during two or three one-hour periods is a very different matter from going on for perhaps even forty hours. A Catholic clergyman participating in the so-called forty-hour devotions had to fill those hours. Jesus’ agony and the Jews’ infliction of it were ready topics for almost infinite embroidery. Martin Luther immediately withdrew from this display and explicitly emphasized the meaning of the atonement. Catholic preachers had never failed to mention this doctrine that lay, and lies, at the heart of Christianity. Its relative


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weight within the Catholic schema, however, was smaller. Despite what we know concerning the Wittenberg Reformer’s deep bias against the Jews, the effect of his and his followers’ truncation would be to reduce the Jews’ atrocious deeds to several increasingly formulaic sentences. Yet anti-Semitism was entirely genuine and ongoing. The hearers of these foreshortened messages knew their prejudicial context not just from the experience of listening to preaching year after year but also from art and popular culture. John Calvin and his Reformed followers rendered the Jews’ culpability yet more abstract. As we have seen, they adhered to it faithfully, but they turned the figure of the treacherous Jewish mob into a metaphor for their verminously sinful human charges, including themselves. Artistic depictions having been removed from the sanctuaries, visions of their Savior’s suffering had to come from within themselves. Preachers, however, treated neither physical ordeal nor Jewish betrayers at the same length as non-Reformed divines. But the key phrases, the verbal cues remained to inform us of their outlook on the religions of the world—on Judaism and Islam. Reformed preachers did not wish to enflame passions against the Jews—whom they regarded, after all, as God’s foreordained instruments in bringing about Christ’s atoning death—as much as they sought to inspire self-recrimination for sin. There is a certain irony in this fundamental similarity with Catholic goals. A major difference separates the two faiths, however. Catholic preachers employed the body of Christ and of the believer to effect repentance. Their approach is basic and comprehensible. Calvinists avoided the body and appealed to the mind. Some of their preaching is so abstruse as to make one ask whether any but the most highly literate people sitting before them could possibly have understood it. If the three creeds resemble one another in the retention of anti-Semitic conviction, other finer features, partly hinted at above, set them apart. The Lutherans abandon the marathon of Holy Week devotions, compress their preaching, diminish their attentions to the Jews as a consequence, and retain from their Catholic heritage the stress upon human responsibility for the Crucifixion. Both Catholic preachers and Lutheran at least implicitly made the stark contrast between the purity of Christ and the “impure” Jews. Jesus and his tormenters were at opposite ends of the moral spectrum: the one God himself, the others of the devil. But Lutheran homileticians will not draw the full consequences from this polarization that they might have. Lutheran divines depart drastically from Catholicism, however, in their assertion that no matter how avidly people attempt to rectify their fallen nature (first of all, through baptism) and their immoral lives, they cannot please God. They cannot assist themselves in gaining salvation, no matter that God has obligated them to attempt to reform their outer and inner selves. The upright

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Lutheran mentality recognizes only helplessness and utter reliance upon the graciousness of God in being reconciled to his children. Within themselves, evangelical Christians must grieve over their own ultimate intractability. But the only way to salvation is through the ignominious death of the Son of God. The treachery and assaults of the Jews are a part of Christ’s disgrace. He has had to undergo not just the wholly dishonorable form of execution that crucifixion was, but the Jews, his own people, carried out upon him the most execrable tortures. In Lutheran eyes, this people, individually and collectively, must pay the price on earth and in eternity for their crime. Their crime extended into the early-modern period in that they had not in the meantime seen the light and converted to Christianity. Evangelical theologians did not interest themselves in whether God had designated the Jews as an instrument for the fulfillment of his will, although this is logically implied by their confidence that the Old Testament prophesied what was to take place in the New. Only one of the Lutheran clergymen whose sermons I have consulted, Tilemann Hesshusen, exempted ordinary Jews from guilt in Christ’s death. Additionally, only he made a metaphorical connection between the Jews of Jesus’ day and sixteenth-century Catholics. I suspect that others will have shown this linkage as elements of Calvinism, both actual and concealed (CryptoCalvinism) spread in the latter sixteenth century and beyond. Hesshusen’s assertion hints at Calvinist influence, an argument that will shortly become clear. Hesshusen had, after all, spent years in Heidelberg and lost his position when the Count Palatine of the Rhine Friedrich III adopted Calvinism as the official religion of his lands in 1563. He may have absorbed some of the inclinations of his colleagues there. Like John Calvin before him, Hesshusen asserts that Roman Catholic clergymen are the new Jews: they betray and they torture Christ. This rhetorical arrow was meant to be painful to Catholic hearers in the Age of Orthodoxy, in which adherents of differing confessions were at each other’s throats. Reformed preachers would develop and perfect the theme of the “modern” betrayers of Christ. Despite Calvin’s clear ongoing contempt for the Jews and his declaration that God has removed his grace from them, the form of predestination that he articulates demands that—and Calvin affirms this—God ordained the function of the Jews before the founding of the world. They carried out the divine will. Logically, this should mitigate the Jews’ assigned culpability, but it does not. Logic is not Calvin’s criterion of religious truth. Above all, Calvin and his followers concentrate on the sins of the mass of humanity gathered before them, and their misdeeds, too, had been established by the omnipotent God, for reasons of his own. Nevertheless, Calvin tells them, “You, you are the Jews, the crucifiers of Christ!” Christ and the Jews are at opposite poles,


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but they are now two mirrors into which Christians should peer, the one of unsullied purity, the other of diabolical filth. Gazing into the first will reveal to Christians how far short they fall; gazing into the other will reveal how devilish they, too, are. Searching in either direction will not be a pleasant experience. As the Turks continue their pressure upon Eastern Europe, the Turks also become figurative Jews. Calvinist pulpit-orators thus expand the figurative concept of the Jew as torturers of Christ to include Catholics, Turks, and any other “heathens” (unnamed) that may still be lurking within or around Western Europe. Although Lutherans are seldom specified, when preachers harangue against idolatry (the retention of images in the churches) and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, it becomes evident that they have evangelicals as well within their sights. For the Reformed theologian, the Jew is any religious opponent. Their collective consignment to hell is not subtle, and it is not at all beyond the listeners’ range. These Eastertide attacks are designed to demarcate the lines being clearly drawn between doctrinal propriety and impropriety. These lines depend for their effectiveness on moving the audience to feelings of vindictiveness. Whether aimed against simply Jews as Jews or against Catholics and Protestant nonconformists, whether literal or comprehensively metaphorical, the portrayal of the Jews in Passion sermons is designed to elicit feelings of revulsion and hostility.149 In every creedal category, that revulsion must begin with revulsion over one’s own sins. Christians must cast out, if possible, the Jew within.


5 The Mother Stood at the Foot of the Cross Mary’s Suffering as Incentive to Feel

Throughout the Middle Ages, emotionality was associated with femininity.1 The contrast between the perceived natures of men and women is visible in myriad accounts of the Fall from grace in the Garden of Eden. Adam was calmer, cleverer, and more rational than his partner; he was the man. Eve was vulnerable and easily led astray—precisely because she gave in to her feelings. She was not as intelligent as Adam and not always guided by reason. She was the woman. Even though before God she was equal to her husband in her worth as a soul, before the Fall, too, she required the supervision of her spouse. Medieval thinkers were of similar, though not identical, opinions in this matter. The serpent pursued Eve because Satan knew that he would gain easier entry with her than with Adam for his evil designs. He found resonance in Eve’s pride and ambition, which is to say, in two of her emotions. But the devil’s ultimate success lay in Adam’s emotion too: Although the first man recognized his transgression in eating the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, he loved his wife too much. He permitted her to have her way. Thus, feelings lie at the core of the original human beings’ tragedy. After the Fall, the extent of Eve’s subjugation deepened. God assigned married men thereafter the task of keeping the ill effects of the feminine nature under control. This perception, that women present a danger to society, was widespread at the end of the Middle Ages. One thinks of the frequent depiction—in artists’ prints, on

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city walls, on household artifacts such as water vessels and metal stove-plates— of Phyllis riding Aristotle, Samson and Delilah with her scissors, Solomon and his idolatrous concubines, and Virgil in a basket. The Mother of God was regarded as the healer of the sin of Eve and as the opposite of her misbehaving sisters from classical mythology and the Bible.2

Time Machines of the Imagination But Mary, too, was thought to be highly emotional. This quality was, to the minds of late-medieval preachers, not only a consequence of her tender nature. It was also a virtue.3 The stereotype had it that women could not only transgress with their feelings, as in shedding tears in order to persuade their fathers or husbands in some matter, or as in losing their tempers and fighting tooth and nail with other women.4 The best of them could also divert these impulses toward piety. Mary surpassed all others in using extremes of sentiment in the service of God.5 Her tears and her agony were signals of her unbounded submission to the heavenly Father, and to God as her Son. The representation of the Virgin Mary in late-medieval religious art is ubiquitous. Although a preponderance of late-medieval theologians denied Christ’s mother the honor of coredemptrix, that reservation aside, this holy woman’s image and reputation were central to Catholic devotion after the twelfth century.6 As Jesus evolved into a softer, more vulnerable figure, his female parent’s simultaneously waxing prominence enhanced the approachability of the human nature of God’s hypostasis as Son. Jesus was the Son of God, and he was, much more comprehensibly to Christians, also the son of the chosen vessel of the Holy Spirit, the spotless maid Mary. As Caroline Walker Bynum has shown, Jesus is motherly. At the same time, his mother’s motherliness is increasingly accessible.7 The biblical account of Mary is spare, but in this setting, too, late medieval preachers perceived no fault in extending their mundane experience, enhanced by imagination, backward in time. Mary acquired an entire circle of kin, and the little we know of her life underwent a fantastic elaboration: her conception in the womb of her mother Anne, her learning to read, her bat mitzva, her giving birth. Her devotees’ equivocation in applying their own acquaintance with the feminine sex shows itself only in the process of idealization. Mary draws away from her real-life sisters in her paragonic embodiment of every virtue—despite some discussion of her behavior at the Wedding at Cana, when Jesus upbraided her for attempting to hasten his display of miraculous powers. She was not quite to match her son in perfection.

THE MOTHER STOOD AT THE FOOT OF THE CROSS

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Medieval people were not self-conscious about the intensity of the relationship between a widow and her only son. They could well believe that Mary and Jesus were completely devoted to one another, despite their mutual recognition of the remarkable status of the younger and his need to “be about his Father’s business” in due course. Here again, both artists and preachers were hardly shy in portraying the intimacy of their bond—beginning with the many thousands of Madonna-and-Childs throughout Europe.8 The subtle ways in which these images display affective interaction tell us of the ascent of maternal and filial love in the evolving depiction of these holy people. Scholars may have judged Philippe Ariès incorrect in his assertion that medieval adults did not care much for their offspring as individuals or perceive childhood to be a distinct phase of life.9 Nonetheless, male artists as a category increasingly manifest their sense that maternity possesses psychic as well as biological dimensions. The best mothers demonstrated loving concern toward their infants, and the ideal little ones entirely reciprocated that sentiment. Knowing what she knew, Mary had also to manifest adoration toward the very Godhead who sat upon her lap. Artists found bliss far harder to depict than the horrors of hell. The combination of maternal love and divine ardor must have proved more elusive still. As we consider the Virgin’s deportment in relation to the cross, we must bear in mind her feelings toward the infant. Renderings of the domestic gathering between Jesus’ infancy (including the presentation/purification in the temple, and the flight into Egypt) and the beginning of his ministry do exist, but they are far fewer in number. Above all Mary’s traits, whatever Jesus’ age as a human being, stands her dedication to her God-child. To the limits of her mortal capacity, she empathizes with him. This conditions her reactions to his execution. In the minds of the pre- and post-Reformation preachers, only Christ’s own pain could have surpassed her own. The imitation of Mary provides to worshipers an alternate route for Catholics to experience the Passion. During the high and late Middle Ages, confessors of nuns as well as curers of souls might suggest deepening the meaning of recollection as an aid to prayer. If to recollect something was to bring it (again) into one’s awareness, it also became now, under spiritual guidance, a remembrance of events of the past as though one had been present—despite that having been literally impossible. The person(s) engaging in contemplation of, for example, the Passion of Christ, were to be transported in two ways, including backward in time, through envisioning acts in which they could not have participated. The line between chronological possibility and impossibility is deliberately blurred.10 Fourteenth-century Clarisses (alias Poor Clares), although enclosed, could mentally escape their cloister walls and venture through Nazareth and Jerusalem with Mary; they imagined that they accompanied her on her

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visits to give relief to the poor around her.11 The chancellor of the University of Paris and theologian Jean Gerson (d. 1429) translated a Latin treatise (of his own) into French for his sister, a nun, to assist her in meditating on the Passion. He divides his guide into seven parts, to be taken up at the seven canonical hours. Throughout, she is to envision herself as a witness of the historic Crucifixion. Two of the segments pertain to Mary.12 Gerson’s sister is to relate to her very closely. “In the furtherance of your devotion, imagine that you bring this news [of Jesus’ arrest and preliminary torture] to his mother.” Consider “how you enter the house and with moaning and weeping inquire, ‘Is not the mother of my Lord Jesus here?’ and when you meet her, how you say to her, ‘O most noble lady! Ah, mother of Jesus! O my hope! In truth I bring you sad news; I am sorry to report this to you, but love and necessity compel me.’ Now completely confounded and terrified, she will say to you, ‘What is it? Why are you crying? Tell me quickly and don’t conceal it!’ You reply, ‘O my very sweetest Virgin! Come in haste to your dear child, for in fact they have seized and bound him. Come quickly so that you may find him still alive!’” Mary faints. Gerson continues, “Oh, my sister, think what pain she had!” The nun is to lead (the recovered) Mary through the streets of Jerusalem searching for her son. The Virgin wails, “Why have the Jews taken him away from me?” The chancellor’s sister is to reflect on the suffering of both mother and son.13 In a later phase, Gerson has Mary cover Christ’s genitals with her veil.14 The divine explicitly cites Bernard of Clairvaux on the agony of the mother.15 Gerson urges his sister to consider the Virgin’s torment as she embraced the cross and kissed it until she was covered with blood. In the process, he says, Mary fell to the ground and tried to mop up her son’s blood with her body.16 As his corpse was taken down from the cross, her grief was so extreme that “even the Jews had great compassion for her.” She did not want him to be buried; she threw herself upon his body, embraced and kissed him, and cried out pitifully.17 On through the fifteenth century, the fostering of mental transportation backward in time obtains. Stephan Fridolin, a German Franciscan who preached to nuns in several cities, might be expected to urge the sisters before him personally to converse with Mary about her dismay.18 Paul Wann (d. 1489), the Passau canon and cathedral preacher, articulates his message to the public as well as his fellow clergymen. He believes that when Jesus appeared before Caiaphas, Mary did not yet know of his arrest. But, he says, had she known, she would have hastened to the spot and called out to the godless men, “What are you doing to my beloved, innocent child? He has done nothing evil! I know him better than you do! If you wish to be so gruesome, then take me, but spare him!”19 But Wann is sure that John bore the horrific news to Mary at her house, and we are to envision his bearing of tidings:


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Let us go perhaps in spirit to her and report what has happened to her son up till now. In any case, the Apostle John undertook this task. . . . In the deep of night he came to the house where the mother of the Lord together with his own mother and some other women relatives stayed. Let us step in with John and be witnesses of the mourning lament of the purest, most holy mother! John cannot refrain from tears as, after a time, the holy woman comes out of the bedroom. He hurries toward her, and, deeply moved, he greets her. “O my mistress, all my joy, our most beloved mother and friend! How are you? What matters occupy your thoughts and your heart? Ach, ach, I must report something awful. I wish I could avoid it. But fear drives me; and love of you and of my Lord does not permit me to be silent.” Horrified, the mother of Jesus answers, “What is the matter, John? Why are you crying so bitterly? What do you have to tell me? Has something happened to my son? He is the most dear to me, and I love him above everything [else] in the world.”20 Finally John stammers to her, “He has been taken prisoner by the Jews, and now . . . they hold court and intend to kill him.” Wann interjects, “What a calamitous announcement John had to bring to his lady!” Mary’s response is predictably moved and moving: “As she is being informed, with excitement and in broken sentences, she has become transfixed and as pale as a corpse, and she now collapses as though lifeless.”21 At some length, and repeated at points through his sermon series, Wann urges his hearers to share her profound suffering. He asks his audience, “Who should not sympathize with her? Who could suppress his tears when he sees this best mother weeping and cast into such deep grief?”22 John goes on to describe to her Judas’s betrayal and Peter’s denial. Wann now adds, “In case the mother’s pain was already as deep and unbounded as the sea, now as a result of John’s account, this sea has been restirred to its depths.” Mary breaks into loud laments: “O my heart’s beloved son! How much suffering has stormed in upon you? Are you truly lost to me? Who will advise and help me in the future? In you I possessed everything that my soul desired!”23 In Wann’s telling, Jesus’ mother then accompanies her son virtually through his entire ordeal. The listeners thereby observe Mary as she observes Jesus. The cleric is hard-pressed to find freshly compelling language with which to move those who listen to him. As she sees Jesus dressed in “the dress of a fool,” she “has hardly any more tears to spend, but she trembled in her entire body and supported herself against the faithful John so that she would not once again sink to the earth.”24 Those among Wann’s audience who cannot weep

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should, he recommends, pray to Mary for the gift of tears.25 The modest mother rushes to cover her son’s nakedness with her veil, a deed that the preacher attributes to the authority of St. Bernard. “For her purest heart this shameless exposure of her son was unendurable. She could not have held herself back from this act of holy mother’s love even if the soldiers and executioners had struck or killed her. O purest mother! O most courageous mother!”26 When Jesus commends his mother to John and vice versa, Wann returns to the Virgin’s and Jesus’ reciprocal feeling for one another: Let us consider and marvel at this love! The best son lies (liegt) in his last breaths, his body is stretched out on the martyring wood, all his members are bound, he can freely use only his eyes and his tongue. He uses these to offer his mother comfort and protection. And the mother needs this comfort; she has become poor and wretched. Her single wealth up till now has been her divine son, and now she is supposed to lose this too. Then she will be entirely robbed, denuded, abandoned. Love transfers the pain that the mother’s heart feels into the divine heart of the son. And this pain of love opens the eye of the dying one . . . in order to send the mother one more glance—a glance of melancholy concern.27 The canon excuses Jesus’ use of the word woman (weib) in addressing his parent. If he had spoken to her tenderly, Wann states, her very heart would have dissolved in grief and pain.28 Paul Wann ends his series of sermons with concluding points. The penultimate of these is to pray to the Virgin Mary for assistance. Wann thinks of Mary asking her son what she is to do now that he has left her. Christ instructs her to take under her care all those who have served her and him. “The love of people, redeeming love, triumphs in you over mother-love.” The preacher ends, “On account of your double love and your double pain, stand by us in the hour of our death, good mother, so that we too can say with confidence, ‘It is finished.’”29 In these events as he conceives them, Wann finds the fulfillment of Simeon’s prediction that a sword would pierce Mary’s heart.30 This simile of the sword-as-grief is a Marian leitmotif of late-medieval and early-modern Catholic devotion, and it has an ancient lineage.31 It is prominent in the fifteenth century. In my judgment, one of the most vivid efforts at the artistic portrayal of Mary’s suffering by means of this image is Hans Burgkmair the Elder’s print, “Mater Dolorosa,” of 1524.32 Burgkmair has been so bold as to contort the Virgin visage so that her usual beauty is turned to ugliness. Her face is not symmetrical, and tears indelicately gush over her. She is seated on the


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ground, and one sword pierces her through. Nonetheless, in circular insets above her head all seven of the traditional sources of grief stand enumerated. Although the caption speaks only of her son’s torment and death, the insets include such early events as the flight into Egypt. During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, preachers will speak to their human flocks again and again about the swords (usually seven swords rather than Burgkmair’s single blade) through Mary’s heart.

Catholic Reformed Preaching on Mary Catholic homileticians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries virtually seamlessly attach their pulpit-rhetoric to this well-established precedent. As in their treatment of the Passion as a whole, they sought to enable their hearers so acutely to envision the painful events of the Crucifixion that they could be said to be present at it. If the Mass replicated the sacrifice of Christ, albeit for a somewhat other purpose, why could not the Passion itself recur each Holy Week at the very least? Protestant theologians would be offended by what they regarded as Catholic presumption in repeating the sacrifice of the Son of God upon every altar and ever more frequently throughout the year. Despite Lutheran and Reformed arguments about the unbiblical nature of such practice, and despite their technical appeal to belief rather than reason in grasping the mystery of faith, they also found such repetition illogical to their humanistically honed sense of history. Historic events as such could not occur again, and worshipers could not roam backward to a prior age. In support of their position, Protestant polemicists often did invoke reason. Catholics suffered from no such compunctions. They were persuaded that their audiences’ eternal well-being depended upon their own ability to revivify the atoning Christ along with his co-mediating mother. In the service of salvation, they tried to connect their listeners to a living past.33 Nevertheless, as ever, individual differences persisted. Johannes Wild (1495–1554), the long-term preacher in and around Mainz, is intensely emotional in his detailed presentation (518 pages) of the Passion ordeal. He directs far more intensity toward the purported crimes of the Jews than toward the suffering of the Virgin. He does not hesitate to depart from the literal Gospel account. Yet, he confines most of his limited attention to Mary to his explanation of Jesus’ third word upon the cross, “Woman, behold, your son! . . . Behold, your mother! (Ecce mater tua!).”34 He adduces the cliché that God chooses the weak of the world in order to confound the powerful. Mary remained, while the disciples had fled. He weaves a recapitulation of Christ’s thoughts upon viewing

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his mother and rationalizes his calling her Woman instead of Mother. Jesus recognizes her mercy, her piety, her charity. “I know that I am the sole cause of your pain,” he means when he entrusts her to John. “You have shown yourself to be a faithful mother to me. John will be your son and will honor you all his life.” He intends to console her in her irrepressible maternal grieving. Mary represents, Wild says, the entire Christian church.35 So she is as well for a secular priest, Doctor of Theology Caspar Franck (1543–1584).36 His 550 pages of sermons are extremely detailed. Like Wild, Franck does not focus extensively on Mary. It is possible that his audience was mainly male when he deviated from a strict account of Peter’s denial in order to accuse all womankind—as represented by the maid (thorhütherin) who inveigled Peter into denying his association with Jesus—of bringing men down. In passing support of his tangential opinion, he mentions Delilah, Solomon’s wives, and Eve. Men, he declares categorically, should stay away from women because “if straw and fire are near one another, they quickly burn.”37 His estimation of Mary is at the opposite pole—that of profound admiration. He refers to the “sword rending her soul” as she witnesses “such vile, inhuman slander; gruesome torment; doggish sarcasm (hündischer Sarcasmos), and mocking laughter.” The dishonorable form of execution, in the company of outlaws, at a “stinking, unclean, terrifying, and abominable place” is revolting to her.38 Seeing his mother in pain tormented her son even more.39 Franck intersperses similar observations throughout his discourse on Jesus’ hanging from the cross. Mary’s grief was “thousandfold.” She stood at the cross “in pain, pale, weak, wretched, and abandoned.” “With what an abundance of weeping and countless tears she covered and moistened his most extremely holy wounds. O you very most holy Virgin Mary, pray to God for us poor sinners!”40 Jacob Feucht (d. 1581) was suffragan bishop of the Bamberg diocese. He was an energetic writer who sometimes concealed his authorial identity. In one such work, which in its structure adumbrates the future stations of the cross, Feucht desires to lead the worshiper physically as well as contemplatively through what he conceives as nine phases of the Passion.41 That the larger public was his audience is revealed in his admonitions to women not to adorn themselves.42 Feucht believes that the sight of his mother as he hung on the cross increased his agony, and the cleric imagines a conversation between son and mother. Mary tells Jesus that the Jews hate her just as much as him. She laments being “so totally left alone.” She exclaims, “O God, that I might kiss you just one more time before you die!” In response, Jesus commends her to John.43 The Society of Jesus and the Capuchins, new missionizing orders that found in preaching an indispensable tool in their campaigns of conversion,


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both drew heavily on the mystical strains of late-medieval piety.44 Ignatius of Loyola clearly promoted the use of all one’s faculties in approaching his Spiritual Exercises and religious expression in general. He conditioned his heirs to develop their apperceptive and demonstrative capacities.45 Despite Loyola’s shift toward education, the times demanded the retention of stress upon homiletics for chosen brothers.46 The Jesuit and Capuchin sermons that I have examined make Mary a central personage. This is true of Peter Canisius (1520–1597), a figure of enduring influence within Germanophone Catholicism. In what appears to be a guide to his subordinates in preaching on the Passion, he admonishes, we should stand under the cross with the wretched Mary, “who is the mother of our church.” With her and with the disciples, we should wail and weep. We ought to be sad.47 The Virgin is a recurrent protagonist throughout his ministry. In his catechism, when he is explaining the Ave Maria, he tells his pupils that Mary is in fact the new Eve and has taken away from humankind the curse of the latter. Eve was not blessed (vnselig), but Mary stands over all the choirs of angels.48 Canisius’s homilies on the Passion are restrained in their attention to Mary. She does suffer terribly at the cross as she observes her son’s agony. But along with her, every Christian is wounded in his soul as he observes the torture of Christ.49 The Jesuit father waxes especially lyrical when treating the feast day of the Assumption. This, he says, is her most important holy day, for Christ and all his angels received her bodily into heaven. The son was overjoyed to see his mother and kissed her lovingly. Mary is superior to all other saints, partly in view of the fact that even other saints’ glorified bodies would not be rejoined to their souls until the Last Judgment; but Mary’s physical union with her soul was unique in being immediate. Canisius admits that many parts of Mary’s life “are concealed.” However, other authorities have written about them, and he takes these to be accurate. Whereas the Bible may not provide a record of her having been bodily assumed into paradise, Augustine and Thomas Aquinas do.50 The full weight of Canisius’s and other preachers’ fervor toward Mary often appears in those sermons or treatises that they composed to honor the Virgin on one of her feast days. In the Catholic world, where, compared to the Lutheran sphere, wedding sermons remained rare, the searcher can find in Marian sermons an articulation of priestly marital ideals, including descriptions of the Christian wife’s perfect behavior. The Jesuit in question is revealing, for example, in his excursus on the death (dormition) of the Virgin, a popular event in the late Middle Ages and much painted by artists.51 The translator from Latin into German, Johann Landolt, pastor in Our Lady’s Cathedral in Freiburg/ Breisgau, declares in his introduction that Mary was the strongest woman

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who ever lived. At one level, this may be true, for she had to bear, the preachers tell us, more than any other mother and human being. Nonetheless, when Canisius begins to outline her virtues, she conforms to the paragonic cluster for pious women of quietude, withdrawal, meditation, and service of the poor. Her strength lies in her interiority and not in outward exertion. Her company, Canisius says, is “the gathering of those who first believed,” that is, the disciples, along with Christian widows and penitents.52 At Pentecost, the descent of the Holy Ghost, the spirit was poured out upon her first.53 She prophesied before other scriptural women. She went to the temple and received the Eucharist every day.54 Her pronounced sentiment shows itself, according to Canisius, in her regular contemplation. The proverbial sword of pain had penetrated her and enflamed her soul until it was a burnt offering (Brandtopffer).55 He pretends to use her own words: Her soul melted from the heat, “not only the one time when he died, but as often as I lift the bar across my door and he speaks with me.”56 Shifting back to the third person, Canisius goes on: If devotion is a mother of tears, accordingly holy people, when they reflect on godly things or, with Saint Augustine, hear holy songs of praise sung or spoken, cannot refrain from weeping and shedding tears. What will we say, then, about this most holy Virgin, who at all times contemplated divine things and was filled with the Spirit of God and was pressed into the groundlessness of God (in den abgrundt Gottes eingetruckt)? For tears are brought forth not alone as a result of pain but also of joy. The more often and with the greater desire she thought of the lovely words and secrets of her son, the more they [tears] flowed from the Virgin.57 He cites Sophronius’s characterization of the love of Mary toward her son, finding the language of the Song of Songs to be an apt description of it. Gradually her love of Christ grew into a desire (begird) of such proportions and constancy, ever renewing itself, that it surpassed all considerations of the world around her and even of herself (auch sich selbs vberstigen).58 From the time that she became the Mother of God, she was so full of holy mysteries and was so extremely illuminated by the Holy Ghost and wounded with the arrows of love that it is a marvel, he says, that “she was not drowned in the immeasurable sea of great mysteries.”59 The heat of this love was immense, and bearing it was a heavy burden. Canisius continues that the Holy Spirit so completely instructed her in divine matters that she could discuss the intricate and secret truths of the faith with the Apostles and inform them. “For Mary was taught and instructed in the divine Word to such an extent by the angel Gabriel and by her


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son Christ—as Saint Bernard confesses—that she understood matters of the Gospel, time, and order. And consequently she was the better able to reveal the evangelical truth to the Gospel writers and preachers.”60 The Jesuit leader refutes Martin Luther’s rejection of the feast day of the Assumption; he quotes Luther as saying abusively, “It’s of no interest to us how Mary lives in heaven!”61 Among Catholics, Mary stands, then, as an incentive and a model to feel strongly. Christians should aspire to weep and to love as she did. Based on our reading of Peter Canisius’s few extant writings, we might believe that the Catholic Church encouraged the pious to cultivate mystical devotion. On the popular dissemination of such practices, however, the early modern Church was distinctly ambivalent. The Virgin is a prominent figure in the Passion story that Jesuit Philipp Kisel (1609–1681) tells. This fluent, inventive preacher draws his listeners and readers into scenes that themselves arouse; but even as he shapes his account in line with the received stereotypes and authorities, he simultaneously taps a virtually unparalleled arsenal of inciting language. He burrows into his own and his audience’s stores of feeling and compels them to follow. It is hard to doubt his own sentiment; his histrionics are most likely genuine. We have seen this earlier. Kisel takes up the ongoing (although not present in the sermons of Wild and Franck) theme of Jesus’ pre-Crucifixion leave-taking from his mother. He combines entreaty with fanciful recapitulation: O you most deeply afflicted Virgin! O you most miserable mother! . . . Through the outpouring of your flowing tears, I beg and entreat you to give me a sign of your favor—you who have fallen and sunk into the most extremely bitter and deepest sea of wretchedness . . . that same hour in which your JESUS, with downcast (bestürtzten) mouth and mood, called out to you his last farewell. . . . O sad mother! The tears that rained down on this evening as you embraced him around the neck and pressed your motherly kisses upon him, and especially as your dearest son disappeared from your sight—these [tears] cannot be captured and delimited in numbers. She calls out to him, “Ah, Jesus! Ah, my son Jesus! My dearest life, my single consolation! Where are you going?”62 Mary appears intermittently in Kisel’s account thereafter. He refers to unnamed authorities in citing the possibility that on the road to Calvary, Jesus fell at his mother’s feet with the cross on top of him. The preacher exclaims, “O Mother! Look at your child! Do you recognize him?” He has Jesus say to her, “O my heart’s most beloved mother! See, I go to my death.” She does not recognize

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him by appearance but by the sound of his voice. She replies, “O my heart’s dearest child! Your voice is exceedingly sweet!”63 Drawing on St. Bonaventura, Kisel has Christ confide to Mary that he loves her above all other creatures. He thanks her for giving birth to him, nursing, and caring for him. She in turn expresses gratitude for the privilege of doing so.64 Kisel finds credibility in the Jesuit founding father Alphonsus Salmerón’s assertion that Mary became people’s mediator with her son at the moment when he uttered his first word on the cross, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!” (Kisel calls the seven last words “the trumpets that brought down Jericho’s walls.”)65 On hearing this, she allegedly fell to her knees and with tears streaming down, repeated Jesus’ prayer as her own.66 This would be her perpetual obsecration on behalf of sinners. Similarly, he cites Peter Damian in asserting that Mary persuaded her son to respond favorably to the repentant criminal, called Dismas, who was crucified on Christ’s right-hand side: “Verily . . . thou shalt be with me in paradise today.” Kisel thinks that she must have implored, “Oh, yes, my son, regard this sinner with favor!”67 The Jesuit preacher shares his private religious life with his audience: “When I wish to console myself with the sweetest thought, so that my [own] heart may be melted and may flow with an agreeable flame of love toward the very most blessed Virgin, I picture to myself the virginal heart and the sword of pain penetrating it.” He imagines that he is the child of this wounded heart and that Christ is his father and Mary his mother. Who could not think about this, he asks, without deriving comfort from it?68 Kisel allocates a lengthy sermon to the Virgin’s suffering.69 He acknowledges his debt to St. Brigitta of Sweden’s revelations.70 His talent for envisioning and arousing through language is captured in Mary’s combined reproach and veneration of the nails that pinned her son’s hands and feet to the cross: O you nails! O you nails! You have contributed not a little to the gruesome death of my beloved! O you nails! O you nails! How great are the wounds that were forced upon my JESUS! O you nails! O you nails! I see that you are colored with the precious juice of the divine blood. Oh, how devoutly I honor you! Oh, how dear and valuable you are to me! I could well wish that you were enclosed in my own heart!71 The clergyman closes this sermon, “Beloved listeners, with the moaning Virgin let us, too, moan and cry. Let us keep Mary’s moaning in continual memory. Let the sword that pierced her heart also pierce ours so that we moan along with MARY, the highly praised Mother of God, in her sad and lamentable suffering.”72


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We might expect our latter-day Franciscans, the Capuchin fathers, to share and perpetuate the mystical devotion of their patron saint. Donatus of Passau (dates unknown, but seventeenth century) does indeed do that, even though not many of his hundred collected homilies, his metaphoric rose petals, on the Passion involve the Virgin. He is both poetic and unrelenting in his stress on the psychic as well as the physical dimensions of the Passion. A number of his sermon titles incorporate oxymorons, or at least paradoxes, perhaps as a means of drawing the reader in: “Filthy Profit, Eternal Loss”; “Terrified Boldness”; “Joy that Grieves”; “Disinclined Inclination”; “Marvelously Powerful Weakness”; “The Dishonored Honor”; “Unjust Justice”; and “The Infertile Fertility” to name a few; many do not translate well into English. He concentrates on Jesus himself, although Mary and other holy women such as the Magdalene appear in his pages. Mary was the first of five people who ever kissed Jesus.73 The preacher enjoins his hearers to kiss Jesus along with Mary and Joseph, “in fiery ardor and love.”74 If we are pious children of the Virgin Mother, along with her we should lay our hearts upon the shoulder and the cross of Jesus and, like her, help him in sympathy to bear it.75 Donatus reveals his assumption that Mary was in the company that made its way to Golgotha and was able to interact with him. Mentally at the cross itself, the cleric devotes four sermons to the third word, Jesus’ entrusting his mother to John’s care. Opening the first, he again urges his audience to let themselves be moved: “Which person ought not to cry when he sees such pain as the suffering of the mother of Christ?” In contrast to the hard hearts that he perceives about him in the sanctuary, the cleric quotes St. Bernard in asserting that there is nothing hard about Mary: “She is loving toward all and offers honey, milk, and well-being.”76 In the second, he refers to the sword that Simeon had predicted. He says that she may have escaped the usual pains of childbirth, but now she is a “martyr of the soul” rather than the body. She is the refuge of all sinners.77 Her tears are innumerable. In the third sermon, Donatus concentrates anew on Mary’s tears as she stands at the foot of the cross. He quotes Jeremiah 9:18: “That our eyes may run down with tears, and our eyelids gush with water.”78 In the fourth, he indicates that if those listening to him could not be moved by Jesus’ own plight, surely the sword through Mary’s soul ought to affect them. “JESUS,” he writes (having earlier preached), “was MARY’s spouse, bridegroom, son, child, and the only comfort of her soul.” Should she not weep, he asks.79 Donatus’s spiritual brother, tireless author of devotional works, and inveterate preacher in the Capuchin Order, Martin von Cochem (1634–1712) makes no effort to conceal his attraction to mysticism.80 He prepared a book of prayers inspired by the revelations of Gertrude of Hackeborn (1232–1292) and her sister, Mechthild of Hackeborn (1241–99).81 These sisters, as he portrays them,

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are paragons of emotional religiosity. This work is a fine example of the earlymodern Catholic dissemination of a form of spirituality that had earlier expanded less widely beyond the convent, beguinage, and monastery.82 The physicality of its images cannot be overlooked. That it is directed toward the laity is borne out by the inclusion of prayers for pregnant women.83 Yet its purpose here is to gain insight into the preacher’s view of Mary, one of the saints who allegedly revealed divine secrets to Gertrude and Mechthild. Here, too, we find in full bloom the effort to transport oneself back to biblical days by means of the mind’s eye. Mechthild imagines, and Martin advocates, taking the Christ child up to heaven and laying him in Mary’s arms. She says, and the worshiper ought to say, “O you very most blessed Virgin Mary, with a humble and friendly heart I come to you and offer you your heart’s very most beloved son, with all the love with which the Holy Trinity gave him to you as your son. And through this tribute, I desire to renew and to increase all the joys that you had with him upon earth.”84 In (re)living the Passion, Martin von Cochem tells of Gertrude’s greeting in prayer at some length each part of Christ’s body.85 This is followed by prayers to the wound on Jesus’ shoulder from bearing the cross—which St. Bernard noticed had never entered the formal count—and the wound to his heart (the side-wound, which was thought to have penetrated to his heart).86 Mary’s position is also prominent, for section 7 of the entire volume, eighty-two pages in length, is made up of “Prayers to the Mother of God.”87 Mechthild recalled from a revelation how Jesus and his mother had kissed one another. Included are seven prayers to the Virgin, one for each sword that pierced her heart (die siben Hertzen=Stich), for a pious death.88 Ordinarily, at least four of those swords are related to his, and therefore her, suffering during the Crucifixion. Von Cochem’s widely reprinted treatment of the Passion per se, The Great Myrrh-Garden of the Bitter Passion, is similar in its style.89 He provides prayers to body parts, such as to Christ’s blood, specifically of the side-wound and heart.90 His recommendations for hearing the Mass underscore the close connection between the historic Passion and its repetition by the officiating priest. Mary enters the picture from time to time. She witnesses his mockery, and her pain is immense.91 She embraces her son for the last time as he is bearing the cross. Mother’s and son’s hearts are bound by a most profound and intimate love.92 The worshiper should envision every detail as though present. “The Eighth Garden” is made up of prayers to the suffering mother as well as to her son.93 On into modern times, devotional guides of many types incorporate invocations of Mary that are quite separate from the ritualized Ave Maria of the rosary, a Catholic shibboleth. In the early eighteenth century, a prayer to the heart of Mary reads, “O blessed heart of Mary, O most blessed heart of my


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most kind Virgin and Mother Mary . . . O heart of all hearts most holy, next to that of Jesus Christ, the most extremely useful to the human race.” Mary has on earth, the anonymous author writes, no equal in constancy, gentleness, kindness, and patience in [the midst of ] persecution. The worshiper begs to be a partaker of the benefits of her heart “now and in the hour of death.” He should pray to her for the souls in purgatory, with whose release she is firmly associated.94 As we have seen, Catholic preachers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries vary in their exploitation of the Virgin Mary as they attempt to “soften their hearers’ hearts.” While all regard her as having endured an agony close to parallel with her son’s,95 owing to her incomparable ability to empathize with the person who was dearest to her and whom, in fact, she worshiped as God, each man stresses or neglects her role in keeping with his own inclination. Wild, Franck, and Helm, most of whose careers were over as the Tridentine era arrived with its determination and coordination of effort, seem to concentrate on Jesus’ own agony and on the revulsion they felt toward the Jews. They direct their congregations’ affect more toward these objects of adoration and hate, respectively. Undoubtedly, there was more variation than I am able to document owing to the slender survival rate of sermons compared to the millions that were surely given.96 The lack of firm clerical oversight in the Catholic Church during the first half of the sixteenth century effectively prevented any master principle from taking effect, even had such a principle existed. The tradition of Mary’s suffering remained readily at hand, to be taken up by any who cared to use it. Here I depart from the assertion of Donna Spivey Ellington, who finds that Marian devotion in Europe waned in early-modern Catholicism.97 It is not surprising that the mystically inclined soldiers of the Catholic faith, the Jesuits and the Capuchin Friars Minor, should reach into their rhetorical quivers and draw out the arrow of the Virgin’s ordeal. They knew its substance well and very likely included it in their own devotions. They were personally inclined to do so, and they were conditioned toward mystical expression by the culture of their orders. The second half of the sixteenth century ushered in a period of intensification of all the earmarks of Catholic identity: supervision and the imposition of discipline, the decoration of churches, moral oversight, preaching and teaching by every mechanism.98 Mary’s pain, the swords through her soul or through her heart, constituted a means of enhancing the two foci of meditation that the preachers had to set before their audiences: Christ’s own agony and, as they all saw it, the blameworthy behavior of the Jews. As they fostered an atmosphere within which Christian men, too, could express with feeling their gratitude for the torment of accomplishing the Atonement, Mary gave license. The authority of Bernard of Clairvaux rendered

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men’s expressions all the more permissible, and no preacher failed to name him. This historic saint was a devotee of the Virgin, and they should be as well, the divines implied. Curiously, however, Mary’s torment is inner and emotional, even though that psychic suffering shows itself in bodily effects, such as weeping and temporary loss of consciousness. Jesus himself experiences physical along with psychological pain. Mary as woman, with her moaning and lamenting, and because of the entrenched cultural stereotype of women as symbols and embodiments of all that is fleshly, may represent the earthly body, but she herself departs from the ordinary womanly existence: She is always fully clothed, experienced no pain in childbirth, and in Catholic teaching remained sexually virginal.99 Her exemplarity lies partly in her ability to detach herself from and rise above the body. Her son’s humiliation lies partly in being subjected to the body as vehicle of pain and embarrassment; his tormentors would deny him holy detachment.100 As a vector, Mary points in two directions at once: toward human life and away from it.

Lutheran Passion Preachers and the Virgin Mary A striking difference between Catholic and Protestant Passion homiletics is the diminution of attention in the latter toward the mother of Jesus. Luther wrote in connection with the celebration of Christ’s nativity that it is certain that if there is a birth, a mother is there. But we want to give our notice to the Christ child and not to the mother.101 He nevertheless did deal with her in every suitable context, praising her for undergoing ritual purification even though she wasn’t impure, or criticizing her for pressing Jesus prematurely to perform a miracle at Cana.102 Luther was persuaded that Mary was and remained a virgin, forgoing conjugal sex with Joseph and of course having no further children. Her role at the Crucifixion is strictly circumscribed, a departure from Catholic practice. He does not doubt that she suffered, and she has cameo parts in his Passion sermons: Simeon’s figurative sword did go through her heart, for mothers are indeed anxious when their children are endangered. Having said that, he returns with dispatch to the doctrine of atonement.103 He disparages the so-called revelations of St. Brigitta—and by implication others saints’ revelations—for their, as he saw it, invention and for their stress upon works. He paraphrases Brigitta, “If you recall the Passion and bewail his [Christ’s] pains, you have earned this or that.” He is incensed: “Is that not the disagreeable devil that one should make a work out of Christ’s Passion and then trust in it?”104 As always, the Wittenberg Reformer’s guide was what appeared in Scripture. In


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the Gospel story, Mary stood at the foot of the cross long enough to be conveyed to John’s care. At one point, Luther imagines that after her son relinquished his spirit, but before his body was removed from the cross, she along with everyone else departed from the scene.105 We can infer that she was also among those, including the Apostles, upon whom the Holy Spirit descended at Pentecost.106 Otherwise, she fades from view, and her later life does not attract much Protestant consideration. Johannes Kymeus, one of Luther’s colleagues in Wittenberg, fleetingly takes up the subject of Mary in his series of six Passion sermons. She did suffer, there is no doubt; but she did nothing improper “as some preachers of fables and tales lie.” She did not run around the city trying to get her son released, nor did she tear her hair.107 Without further detail, this preacher conveys his broader perspective on Mary to us: Catholics have fabricated her deeds and exaggerated her importance. Lutheran and Calvinist divines were well aware of the chasm that separated them from Catholicism in regard to the Virgin Mary. The avid polemicist and Wittenberg theologian Samuel Huber (1547–1624) attacked the Viennese Jesuit Georg Scherer on a number of points, calling him a “priest of Baal in his Babylonian church.”108 Addressing Scherer with the demeaning nickname, mein Jergle (“my little Georgie”), he verbally shreds the Catholic Church. Among much else, Huber declares that it has made Mary a god. He accuses the Church of turning over to her Christ’s work of redemption. At the Crucifixion, Jesus’ mother is made to suffer as much as Christ––even more, in fact. “These things show sufficiently that the Roman Church attributes to Saint Mary the omnipotence, high [and] great power over everything, and assistance in redemption to the entire human race through her suffering and pain.” He further alleges that in Catholic teaching, Mary and Jesus have become one flesh and that “we are fed and given to drink of her body and blood in the sacrament of her son.” In sum, the Church has made Mary a person in the Godhead.109 Many preachers demonstrate their altered outlook on Mary simply by their neglect of her. In Catholic homiletics, she had been and remained prominent; in Lutheran and Reformed Holy Week and other sacred rhetoric, she hardly appears at all. There are moments when she must be mentioned, as when she is given into John’s care at the cross. Upon introducing the third word of Christ, Veit Dietrich of Nuremberg turns immediately from the specific bond between Mary and Jesus to the greater significance for all human relations: “We are all to be like mother and son to one another, heartily love one another, and help and advise where we can.” There is, he concedes, no stronger love than between mother and child.110 Dietrich is willing to envision her presence as the body was lowered from the cross, but it is not laid across her lap. “His mother, the dear Virgin Mary, stood there as an afflicted woman, and beside her other

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women. Just as she earlier had held fast to the angel’s sermon [Gabriel’s annunciation] and the pious [and] holy people’s foretelling of the baby Jesus, the present heartfelt pain is so great and causes her such distress that she can hardly listen.”111 Dietrich’s Swabian colleague Johannes Brenz confines his treatment of the Virgin to his discussion of Jesus’ third word upon the cross, “Mother, behold thy son . . . . [Son] behold thy mother!” Without naming his target, he severely criticizes the Catholic custom of drawing attention to Mary’s suffering: “There are some who, when they preach about the Passion of Christ, allot more time to pitying Mary, the mother of Christ, than to his [own] physical martyrdom. Who would deny that Mary did suffer . . . but the pain of Mary is to be observed in such a way that the pain and torment of Christ remain, unobscured.”112 Her place in his telling is abbreviated.113 Another Lutheran pastor, Nicolaus Manlius of Ansbach (d. 1569), constructs an unusual conversation between Eve and Mary. His emphasis is entirely upon the consolation of the Atonement. After the Fall, the Son of God had taken human misery and its relief upon himself. After the Resurrection, Jesus had awakened a number of holy people, including Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, “and countless others.” Some of the women among them—Eve, Sarah, Rachel, and Leah—conversed with Mary during the next forty days. Eve told her, “Ach, my dear daughter, God be praised that you bore this Savior! See that you keep to faith alone in this Savior as you have done up till now. Oh, how blessed you are! Now then, dear child, from this time, in eternal heaven, we will praise, honor, and glorify God.”114 Eve instructs Mary; Mary is a “dear child,” and her station is lower than Eve’s despite the Virgin’s “blessedness”! Manlius accords a favor to Eve that most of his peers would have disputed. She remained for them the cause of men’s and humans’ perdition. Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586), superintendent in Brunswick, in his Passion sermons, rejects Catholic claims made for Mary.115 “Under popery the people were told that, along with the Lord Christ, Mary suffered for our sins; that not alone Christ gained salvation for us through his torment, but that his mother helped to this end.” He rejects this as abominable blasphemy.116 Elsewhere, Chemnitz exhorts his readers (as earlier his listeners) to imitate the penitential weeping of Peter and Mary Magdalene.117 Mary is not a model for the faithful. Tilemann Heβhusen (1527–1588), embattled theologian in a Heidelberg that was becoming Reformed, had quite a positive outlook upon Mary. Although discussing her chiefly in connection with Christ’s third word, he expresses admiration. This woman had astonishing strength, faith, and constancy in the face of the ordeal of watching what was done to her son. She suffered awfully.


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She stands in faith, he says, “like a mighty heroine,” even though the sword foretold by Simeon pierced her soul. She had always known that she would have to endure much. She had weighed the biblical passages concerning the Messiah and knew that he would undergo torture and die.118 We should imitate her when confronting adversity.119 Nicolaus Selnecker (1532–1592), organist, coauthor of the Formula of Concord, and court preacher, is somewhat more favorable toward the Virgin than his clerical contemporaries—although equally brief in his attentions. He writes in his discourse on the Passion: But what heartache the holy mother of God, the tender, chaste, pure Virgin Mary must have derived from the spectacle of her innocent son hanging so disgracefully upon the gallows of the cross, a person with our understanding cannot comprehend. Motherly hearts . . . cannot speak of this without deep sighing. And here is properly fulfilled the saying of Simeon, Luke 2: “And a sword will pierce through your own soul.”120 In the collected Passion sermons that he dedicated to the Freiberg/Saxony city council, Cyriakus Spangenberg (1528–1604), the finally controversial Mansfeld superintendent, disparages the Catholic manner of presenting Mary.121 He digresses as he explains the third word of Christ: Under popery, in [preaching on] this piece, one used many words about the pitiful and deplorable pains of the holy Virgin Mary, and about her lamentable gestures, falling down, ripping out her hair, wringing her hands, the beating of her heart, her fainting and her loud outcry. And one stressed these things to such a degree that he forgot about the Lord Christ and the fruit of his suffering; one only bewailed the Virgin Mary.122 He says that all of this is sheer invention, although, like any mother, Mary suffered greatly. “There has hardly ever been on earth . . . a stronger, more courageous, more manly woman than the dear, holy Virgin Mary.”123 Both Heβhusen and Spangenberg were familiar with Saint John Chrysostom’s commentary on Genesis 3. Jesus gave his mother into John’s care because John was the youngest of the disciples and would be pastor in Ephesus for sixty-eight years.124 When expounding on Christ’s receiving the spear-thrust in his side, he asserts that out of this came the Christian church. Jesus produced the church, the mother of all believers, from his side, a parallel to the mother of humanity, Eve, emerging from Adam’s side.125 Mary is definitively not the mother of the church, as Catholic preachers had it.126

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Caspar Sauter (1547–1604), pastor at Saint Anna’s Church in Augsburg, carries the secondary theme of Jesus as the second Adam throughout his Passion sermons.127 Faded out of the picture is Mary as the second Eve. He refutes the alleged Catholic claim that Dismas, the criminal crucified on Christ’s righthand side, turned to Mary for her intercession in gaining him entry to paradise. This is not true, Sauter declares: Dismas went directly to Christ.128 When Jesus entrusted his mother to John, the preacher quickly asserts and passes the question by, he was simply giving her a guardian—which he considered to be universal practice.129 The mystically inclined clergyman Martin Moller (1547–1606), who was suspected of harboring Calvinist sympathies late in his life, shows signs of the ongoing influence upon him of late-medieval devotional strains. Reformed theologians would not have found his treatment to their taste. Although the Virgin, in keeping with Lutheran innovation, is not prominent, when she appears, she is a personality whom Catholics would recognize. In his Soliloquy on the Passion, he states that he has preached on the Passion and “laid before everyone the teaching and the consolation of it.” Now he writes this “booklet” (of nearly five hundred pages, a “Catholic” length) as an accompaniment to his sermons.130 His particular target is “the simple layman.”131 He vividly, meticulously describes Jesus’ every affliction, and it is thus not surprising that the holy mother’s discomfort should also be included. Yet, in Lutheran fashion, his emphasis is upon comfort (Trost). Mary receives scrutiny only in those episodes that appear in the Gospels. But Moller renders that scrutiny with feeling, which he strives throughout to arouse in his readers. “When the Lord sees his mother standing there, filled with grief and pain, his childlike heart breaks toward her. He speaks to her and says . . ..” He makes John her guardian (Vormund). “See, dear soul, there the prophecy of the aged Simeon is fulfilled in the Virgin, and a double-edged (zweyschneidig) sword—that is a deep affliction and pain—presses through her soul. But the Lord comforts her with his glance and refreshes her with his word. He heals her broken heart and binds her wounds.”132 Moller admonishes, “Take to heart, dear soul, the burning love of your Lord for his mother. See how he ordered a caretaker for her in her miserable widowhood.” He urges his charges likewise to honor and obey their own parents.133 His treatment of Mary is, then, confined but traditionally passionate. He notes that as the corpse was removed from the cross, the women who were present wept most bitterly. “How many thousands of tears his mother will have poured out!”134 They provide an apt model for the Christian souls whom he frequently exhorts to cry: “Let your eyes flow with tears, dear soul, and do not let up.”135 By contrast, Heinrich Nicolai (d. 1616), retired preacher in Hildesheim, vehemently attacks the Catholic


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attribution of mediatory powers to the Virgin. He attacks as blasphemy the celebration of nonscriptural feast days such as the assumption of Mary into heaven.136 His mood is such that it is hard to think of him wishing to weep “along with” the mother at the foot of the cross. He and Moller would agree on much, but Moller makes a place for the feminization of self in contemplating the Passion.

Reformed Preaching In common with their Lutheran brethren, Zwinglian and Calvinist preachers reduce the Virgin to a peripheral figure. Indeed, she is barely a presence in their excursus on the Passion. If in general their sermons describe hardly at all the torture meted out to Jesus himself, how much less would they be concerned with the “sword” through Mary’s heart, despite its biblical reference? Leo Jud (1482–1542), the clerical colleague of Zwingli in Zurich, denies that Mary grieved immoderately at the foot of the cross: “Although Mary was very sad and troubled, she did not behave improperly or immodestly as people of flesh who are suffering often do. She stands with honorable decorum, made firm by the Holy Spirit that sustains her inwardly. [This is so] that we learn [ from her example] not to mourn too immodestly for our dear friends when they die.”137 Calvin himself employs physical metaphors such as being asperged with the blood of Christ. But he speaks very little about bodily ordeals. He hardly mentions Mary—condemning as “true sorcery” and “babble” the automatic recitation of the Ave Marias and Our Fathers.138 Jane Dempsey Douglass and John Thompson have debated whether Calvin left the way open for women’s service in the church of the future; Douglass thinks yes and Thompson no.139 I am impressed by Calvin’s repeatedly expressed low estimation of women in the sermons I have read. Apropos of the Resurrection—where Protestant preachers by conviction place greater emphasis—the women going to the tomb with embalming substances are the butts of his derogation. God used women to inform the disciples of the Resurrection in order to punish them, the men, for their trepidation; he ordained the more fearful and foolish sex to teach them, a marked lowering of the men’s status—a “light punishment,” Calvin calls it.140 Instead of seeking Christ’s tomb, the women should have lifted their spirits upward, waiting for the Resurrection that had been promised them. They were characterized by “ignorance and infirmity.” In a later sermon on the women at the tomb, he declares, perfectly in keeping with the prevailing opinion of his day, “Women are the weaker vessel and need to be taught by men.” But there are, he admits, some who have exhibited firm constancy and have even left their homelands in order to follow the Lord and benefit from his teaching.

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Nevertheless, he insists, Jesus’ body did not need to be embalmed.141 Calvin goes on at length about women’s weakness. But, he concedes, God accepts the affection and zeal of these early-morning seekers. “He corrects them through the voice of the angel, who is there in his name.”142 The women at the tomb present to us the uncouthness and feebleness that beset all of us sinners.143 Their lower status and capacity notwithstanding, when Calvin preaches on Pentecost, he notes that the Holy Spirit works equally in both sexes.144 He inserts into his homily the penitential preachers’ long-standing habit of criticizing female behavior. Women, he opines, who ought to be humble and walk in all modesty and honesty, are “full of dissoluteness, pomp, vanity, and every vain excess.”145 The Virgin Mary simply does not appear. This is virtually so as well in the Passion sermons of Calvin’s successor, Theodore Beza.146 Among Calvin’s followers in the German-speaking lands whose sermons I have consulted, Mary is invisible, with few exceptions. Georg Spindler (1525– 1605), a convert from Lutheranism, exceeds many of his creedal brothers in discussing her presence as Christ pronounces his third word on the cross. He refutes the common Catholic portrayal: “Naturally at that time a sword penetrated her heart, as the aged Simeon had earlier predicted. She does not complain against God, she doesn’t cry out, tear her hair, and wring her hands, and does not present herself in contortions (stellet sich nicht vngeberdig). Instead, she suppresses the great pain in her heart and endures with patience everything that God sends to her.” We too must bear without complaint every trial that comes our way.147 Christians are to imitate Mary, then, but in her quietude and not her expression of grief. He concedes this to her: “If Mary . . . had not believed that her son was the Redeemer of the world, who through his cross and suffering paid for her [own] and the whole world’s transgressions, she would not have been able to withstand the great pains in her broken and crushed heart.”148 The preachers, like their inspiration, the divine of Geneva, look more closely at the Resurrection than at the ordeal of Jesus’ flagellation, humiliation, and crucifixion. Johann Philipp Mylaeus (dates unknown; pastor in Heidelberg) refers to the women’s desire to embalm the corpse “a weakness in their faith,” for it reflected their doubt that Jesus would arise from the dead.149 Women, he admonishes, should not attend such spectacles as executions. They press themselves in, in a fresh manner (frecher Weiβ ).150

The Divergent Fates of the Virgin Catholic preachers reflect several qualities of the church’s advocacy during the early-modern period. First, we have seen in general, beginning in the late


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Middle Ages, they disseminated to a broader audience highly affective meditation on the agony of Christ during the entire Passion. Leading clergymen spoke and then published at great length on even the slightest affronts to their Lord, and just as Protestant leaders later accused them, their purpose was to arouse to inner empathy that helplessly spilled over into outer display of feeling. This visible, audible drama, including that of the preachers themselves, provided testimony to the interior experience of disbelief, outrage, grief, and repentance, the desired progression of feeling that would precede, the clergy hoped, the desired reform of life. Before 1500, Mary was already, in the Romanist scenario, a protagonist in the familiar script—but, as said, one that was now more energetically promoted among the laity than previously. Sacral rhetoricians enjoined their listeners to form a close bond with the mother of Jesus, to travel mentally back through the ages and converse with her, and to share her unendurable maternal torment. Needless to add, they were to do this in relation to her son, too, but Jesus had not been, and was not now, the exclusive object of such devotion. After the beginning of the Reformation, the cult of Mary remained an earmark of papist allegiance, one touted deliberately and with conviction. The art of the baroque era features her along with Christ in the full range of settings, both biblical and simply traditional but unattested. Cultures are never monolithic. It may seem odd to find the Church consolidating the Virgin’s position for the early-modern and modern eras as intercessor with her son for the heavenly disposition of souls still on earth or in purgatory, even as the ecclesiastical mistrust of women, including nuns, deepened. This paradox has a precedent in the twelfth century, as Mary gains in prominence and earthly women’s social position deteriorates.151 In the sixteenth century, the Society of Jesus rejects the efforts of would-be Jesuitesses to form a female auxiliary of that order,152 and by the early seventeenth century most nuns, though never all, have been cloistered whether they desired to be or not.153 The person of Joseph, the stepfather of Jesus, rises in importance, and one can encounter portraits of father-and-child in addition to the still ubiquitous mother-and-child. Marian preaching of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries often stresses the feminine domestic virtues of the Virgin in relation to her husband. She was thoroughly subordinate to him despite being the Mother of God and the future Queen of Heaven. She was reclusive and quiet, occupying her time in spinning and weaving or in relieving the misery of the poor. After her son’s demise and resurrection, which occurs after the death of Joseph, she is able to withdraw from most company and contemplate her divine Spouse, her son. In this capacity, too, she is emotional. She is filled with a fiery ardor over which she has little control. Her task on earth is ever to submit: “Let it be done to me according to thy word.”154

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Second, although we have observed of late that the Catholic Reform had a number of features in common with the Protestant Reformation, Catholics did not merely react to the religious revolution, and reflected the same latemedieval impulses if in a slightly different way; Catholic elevation of Mary and Protestant demotion of her mark a noticeable parting of the ways.155 This may be well known, but it is particularly evident as one surveys the Passion treatments of an array of early-modern clergymen. In their already monumental, meticulous descriptions, Catholic preachers tend—although Wild and Franck, for example, do not—to allocate significant space to Mary’s suffering. The length and physicality of their treatments, the size of the role assigned to her, and their inventiveness and/or their drawing upon a wide range of historical commentary in filling out her life and sentiment all contribute to her prominence. The fundament of Lutheran innovation is to confine the Virgin’s role to her appearances in Scripture. This alone reduces multifold the scope of her participation in the Passion. She stands with John beneath the cross, and by inference she was present at the descent of the Holy Spirit. Already she is peripheral. Simeon’s prediction at the time when she visited the temple for purification after giving birth is now seen to be fulfilled and elicits brief comment. The third word of Jesus as he hangs from the cross, entrusting her to John’s care, cannot be avoided. Tilemann Heβhusen and Cyriakus Spangenberg allow us a glimpse of their Catholic antecedents in featuring Mary’s strength, Heβhusen even calling her a heroine. These are brief but significant passages in their homiletics. If we investigate their meaning of strength or manliness, it is closely related to Mary’s perdurance in the face of almost unbearable grief. Apart from those, Lutheran preachers are far more concerned with the other women who desire to embalm Christ’s earthly remains. Beth Kreitzer has taken up in detail a larger group of sermons on Mary, and she correctly notes the departures from the word of the Bible by these devotees of sola scriptura; they did adhere to several traditional but unsubstantiated views such as the Virgin’s perpetual abstinence from sex and the painlessness of her parturition.156 Because the Protestant account concentrates far more upon the atonement than upon the Crucifixion ordeal, Mary is rendered superfluous in yet another way. Christ’s body does not disappear from Lutheran Holy Week homiletics, but stress upon its ordeal, including the psychological dimensions of it, decreases. Preachers’ depictions do vary. In general, however, there is less reason to point to Mary’s being appalled and flattened by what she must witness. Lutheran theologians insisted that she played no part in the atonement. Christ’s purpose in being incarnated is now fulfilled. Mary bore and raised him, but the redeeming sacrifice was his alone. Lutherans theologically reject out of hand the idea that Mary had palliative powers in overcoming Eve’s fatal transgression.


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When they mention this, they seem to do so as though it confers poetic justice and resolution on a matter left in suspense. Caspar Huberinus (1500–1553) could note—I take it conversationally—that Mary was an exceptional “daughter of Eve” (all women) and even taps medieval precedent in envisioning God crowning her with flowers.157 Huberinus is himself not typical and has not evolved away from his antecedents. Mary is the metaphoric reversal of Eve. She could in no way assist in the salvation of humankind, either at the foot of the cross or in some fanciful seat next to her son in heaven. As Luther remarks, the Virgin’s afterlife should be of no interest to us. In sum, Lutheran treatments of Mary at the Passion are largely scriptural and, compared to Catholic ones, highly circumscribed. They decisively criticize Catholic exaggeration of her participation in the crucial conclusion of Christ’s earthly life. Calvinists, by contrast, reveal their contempt through utter neglect. The Virgin Mary concerns them not at all. Their sermons are hardly physical, their attention to Jesus’ own suffering minimal. Their vision fixes upon human beings’ dire and unmitigated sinfulness. No Passion preacher, whether Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, failed to point out precisely why Jesus had to die his grisly death. All call sinners to account. But Reformed preachers in particular withdraw into a lofty world of doctrine mixed with accusation, including selfaccusation. They assume that their audiences already know the story of the Passion itself, and they need not retell it. In such a setting, Mary hardly ever appears. It is striking how little the earthly person of Christ himself appears, though this varies from cleric to cleric. As a group, they are far more (but in all little) concerned with the mentality of the women who go to Christ’s tomb on Easter morning. They evidently feel a need to explain how mere females, with all their feebleness of body and character, could have heard the news of the Resurrection before Jesus’ very disciples. The portrayal of these women is infrequent and often negative.

The Reformations and Feminine Inclusion In 1992, Lyndal Roper posed the question, Was there a crisis in gender relations in sixteenth-century Germany?158 She drew attention to the riddles concerning the interaction between women and men and demanded further scholarly attention to the subject. Remarkable to some of us in the modern West has been the ongoing early-modern suspicion toward women that, in its worst manifestation, produced the witch hunts of the era. As Roper herself has masterfully demonstrated in her book Witch Craze, these accusations, taken together, reveal Europeans’ abiding fears of the older woman as people who

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posed danger to life and livelihood.159 But younger women and even children were accused, as well.160 Men who found themselves in court often were associated with suspected females. Reading Roper’s work has drawn me to inquire about something as seemingly remote as the figure of Mary in Passion sermons and church art. May we not find similar indications of unease between the sexes in this improbable setting? Catholic and Protestant preachers, who as a professional group were not infrequently involved in aspects of witch prosecution, clearly chose contrasting means of expressing their anxiety. The Catholic one is of long standing and is quite familiar: The Virgin, as disseminated intensely among lay Christians, is unlike any real woman. Mary’s feelings, her behavior during her son’s ordeal, and her subsequent life of withdrawal and contemplation provide a “model” that her fellow “daughters of Eve” outside the cloister could hardly have imitated and survived. Her elaboration and elevation at the hands of churchmen, in keeping with baroque decoration and fancy, is ever more rarefied and remote, albeit that numerous Catholics in practice may honor a more human and accessible image of her. As ever when drawing evidence from sermons, we must form a distinction between the platform that high-ranking clergy present in them and what is internalized by or practicable for people in the larger community. In view of the Church’s ongoing mistrust of women and its more energetic efforts to oversee and control those within its monastic purview, it would be hard to assert that Catholicism as practiced became more feminine. At the same time, women wandered more freely into Catholic sanctuaries, where pews were later in becoming the norm. Symbolically, in every sanctuary women were richly in evidence—in word and icon. Mary’s tears, her utter wretchedness upon losing her only child, the attempts of preachers to employ her as well as Jesus to “break their hearers’ hearts,” suggests an openness in the spiritual realm to feminine forms of expression for men as well as women. All were to cry. Ulrike Strasser has written concerning Ignatius of Loyola that the founder of the Jesuits sought to define for his followers a new form of masculinity, one in which men could literally cry their devotion unto God.161 We might see the Catholic Passion preachers as collectively attempting a revision of gender definitions. Or did these stereotyped definitions have any validity in the sixteenth century anyway? My own impression is that so far as the world was concerned, clergymen’s social attitudes conformed astonishingly to the binary models of the past. Karin Hausen’s important article of 1976 places, in my view, the firm distinctions between women and men too far forward in time, as a preparation for modernity.162 Centuries before the eighteenth century, women, including Mary, were weak and subordinate; men were the leaders in the public sphere,


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asserted themselves in marketplace and in arms, and exercised what they saw ever as their God-given authority over women. The wedding sermons of the day reiterate these roles incessantly as the only ones of which God approved.163 But even in the world of spirituality the preachers called up before the laity, it appears to me that binary models obtained but should be modified, either for life or seasonally, in the service of God. Bartholomeus Wagner (dates unknown but late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries), tireless preacher in Augsburg and publisher of sermons and outspoken servant of the Virgin, described his Holy Week goal with astonishing candor: In this holy time of repentance, we should have about ourselves a feminine manner when we look upon Christ crucified, such that we begin to cry. For we are the true causes of his martyrdom and should weep over the sins that we have committed. . . . It is unfortunately an age in which the men and high-ranking lords are of the opinion that it is a womanish thing to cry; it makes [they think] a mockery of a man if he should shed tears. O dear Christians, let us not delude ourselves. We should all bewail our sins with one another and assume a proper feminine way (arth).164 Wagner understood, from the norms that governed society in his day, that to give vent to tears was a weakness, was “feminine,” but he thought that Christians at Eastertime ought to be willing to subordinate themselves openly as small cognizance of their part in causing the Crucifixion. The preachers encountered difficulty in wringing tears out of grown men. Not only Wagner said that this was so. Caroline Bynum has observed how frequently medieval theologians alluded to Jesus as mother.165 In the portrayals of the Passion, Jesus weeps, is vulnerable, naked, silent, obedient in the extreme. He nourishes his children with the blood and water that flow from his side/heart. Why do the clerics admire such characteristics in the Son of God and of Mary? According to their norms, Jesus has taken on feminine submission in order to save us. The preachers thus enjoin men to weep. To do so would be a suitable imitation of Christ. This does not indicate an attempted revolution in the behavior of the sexes in everyday life. Instead, the preachers carry out themselves and urge upon their male hearers, too, a temporary offering up, a compromising, of their masculinity as a special gift to God, in imitation of Jesus, when remembering the horror of the Passion and why it occurred. We do not need to detect, in the thicket of intensity and violence that these centuries bring, a moderating of the configuration of masculine qualities. Like the figure of the Virgin herself, those who hold forth from the pulpit point upward to heaven, where ideals such as complete

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equality of females to males, and simultaneously downward to earth, where women must obey and submit. The proliferation of Marian sodalities for men and the presence of female images throughout Catholic churches show that one could be masculine and yet anticipate that realm where saintly women enjoyed as much of the glory of God as saintly men. But that equality must never transfer to mundane society. Protestant clerics had more difficulty envisioning an egalitarian heaven. They paid lip-service to it but without conviction. When one looks across the spectrum of media that became widespread within Lutheranism, one finds a net displacement of women from positions of honor. Women’s bodies quickly become fixed in separate pews, as we see in the 1650 painting of the cathedral in Basle.166 Men sat too, and in this they equally submitted. But their larger function was to oversee women and girls (along with dependent or subordinate males).167 Images of women all but disappear from the churches. The new genre of wedding sermons, delivered in churches, impresses upon brides, grooms, and bridal parties that wives must obey and husbands govern, even within the household.168 The downgrading of Mary by a combination of omission and commission leaves her a person of honor but one who receives her virtue as a gift from God; those qualities that women may strive to imitate in the Virgin and other female saints are not of these holy figures’ own achieving. Mary’s outpouring of grief is understandable in view of her condition as Jesus’ mother, but it is not an activity that real women should emulate.169 Grieving overmuch, as we shall see, is a fault. Her weeping avails her nothing. In Calvinist homiletics, Mary is hardly present at the Passion, which is truly about human sin rather than either Jesus’ or his mother’s agony. Protestant treatments of the Passion events, whether Lutheran or Reformed, share qualities of restraint. This restraint is enhanced by brevity of development: Neither wing of Protestantism engages in forty-hour devotions. Some Lutheran clerics do give in to the historic pattern of drawing attention to Christ’s abuse, but Calvinists hardly ever do. The emotions they try to generate are, respectively, gratitude toward God and abject self-recrimination for sin. These are powerful, to be sure. They involve an intellectual understanding of the atonement that is undergirded with affective conviction. These are to be cultivated inside the individual Christian. Mary as a stock personality plays little or no part in generating these feelings. In their restraint, their appeal to theological comprehension, and their derogation of the “excessive” emotion embodied by Mary, Lutheranism and Calvinism are, according to the definitions that prevailed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more masculine than Catholicism. Such a label is only apt if one is willing to concede that the preachers of that day shared similarly


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binary definitions of masculinity and femininity.170 The theologians engage tirelessly in polemics. One of their stock pieces of ammunition is to accuse their opponents of effeminacy. The Calvinist Christoph Pezel criticized the Lutheran Nicolaus Selnecker of “effeminate powerlessness of spirit.” Selnecker, in his refutation, recalled Pezel’s characterization of him as lashing out with invective on all sides like women and fools, in an inconstant, vengeful frame of mind.171 All subscribed to an enduring critique of the feminine sex, one that itself involved the emotion of fear in various early modern contexts. Within the sanctuary, their expressions of this fear varied somewhat according to denomination. Comportment in everyday life need not be consistent with the gender ideals that a society articulates. In the face of emergency or even just necessity, women have always abandoned all models and leaped into the fields, the market, the workplace, or even onto the ramparts of a besieged fortification. But because such feats are not officially recognized and because they cease when the need abates—because men and their activities are the markers that count— I have referred to women’s space as “interstitial.”172 Women are formally under and between men, their place narrow, unless perchance under pressure of circumstance they must expand their purview. However life-saving their intermittent assertions may be, ordinarily they do not claim credit for them but conform to the expectation that they will relinquish their public role as quickly as possible. Like all women who, under pressure, achieve something astonishing, Mary might be strong, manly, or heroic at the Passion, but as soon as she was able, she withdrew to devote herself to contemplation. Catholic preachers saw her so. Only after her death, and owing to her unparalleled piety, could she wield influence with her son in heaven. And she did so by obsecration—by begging him on behalf of particular souls, which conforms to the stereotype of women beseeching men, in whose power rendering judgment lies. For Protestants, after the Passion she becomes—although sometimes sooner, sometimes later—a virtual nonentity, as remote as any of the nonapostolic saints. The Apostles were all men. The preachers verbally shuddered to think of Mary Magdalene as a member of their ranks. After Peter’s sorrow at denying his master, Protestant preachers apparently do not regard the Apostles as having wept. Catholics, on the other hand, believed that as Mary lay dying, many years after the Crucifixion, Jesus’ inner circle of followers gathered around her bed and cried.173


6 Proper Feelings in and around the Death-Bed

The Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ conferred upon Christianity its essential meaning. The Passion was to guide the faithful through their entire existence on earth. Even had they failed to apply its meaning consistently owing to sin and the distractions of life, at no time was it more crucial that they do so than as they approached their departure from this world. Similarly, the relatives, friends, neighbors, and servants who gathered around and witnessed their final breaths ought to absorb the lessons of the godly demise and be brought back to concentration upon the death of Jesus upon the cross. All confronted the dual pressures of grievous separation from loved ones and the admonition to concentrate fully upon the image of Christ. The messages of Good Friday to Easter must triumph now, however. This much was true across the spectrum of German Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism.

Catholicism Despite its semi-satirical nature, Erasmus’s colloquium “The Funeral” takes its inspiration from discrepancies that the humanist had witnessed between the pious ideals of the Church and the temptations that potential gain put in the way of its clergy who ministered to the better-off laity.1 The affluence of the dying elites, particularly the burgher elites whose monetary gifts were not

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as circumscribed by familial prescription as noble testaments were likely to be, could result in competition among religious orders and the secular priesthood. Testamentary donations were among the good works that could assist a soul in attaining paradise after a (lesser) time in purgatory. Surviving art-of-dying (ars moriendi) illustrations, intended for a broader laity than treatises on the good death, usually show a man embattled between the contorted minions of the devil and the well-formed saints and angels of God. Arthur Imhof envisions a case in an upper-Rhenish town, in which a pastor lends his own copy of an art-of-dying block-book to his parishioners when they are near their end so that they may look upon and benefit from the illustrations.2 Across this genre, whatever pain afflicted one, the Christian was not to give in to despair, which emotion itself was ever a deadly sin and would produce relegation to eternal darkness. Instead, the intercessory powers of the compassionate saints, some of them martyrs who by definition had undergone harrowing ordeals, along with the vision of light provided by hovering angels, were meant to sustain the dying in their throes.3 Often present, too, as a third element was a prominent, even life-size, crucifix, serving to remind the notquite decedent of the teachings transmitted through a lifetime of exposure to image and perhaps also to preached word. How confident we may be that those who died in the late-fifteenth and early-sixteenth centuries actually understood the doctrine of the atonement is uncertain. But the design program incorporated into the ars moriendi literature pointedly refers to it as one component. Now was the moment, more than any other, when it was essential to understand that Christ’s sacrifice possessed redemptive powers for the genuinely penitent. Thus, for the late medieval Catholic, recalling one’s sins and sorrowing for them was a crucial aspect of preparation for death. Foremost in their capacity as confessors, clergymen legitimately gathered around. The pamphlet of the upper Rhine analyzed by Imhof depicts the crucifix in only two of its eleven prints. Other parts of the Passion, however, are also on display, with their well-known meanings as conveyed in sermons and other works of art. In the fourth picture, holy penitents dominate the scene: Saint Peter, who wept out of regret after denying Jesus; Mary Magdalene, who repented of her prostitution and was believed by many to have been the woman at the dinner table in Bethany who anointed the Lord’s head (or feet) with pure nard;4 a writhing “Dismas,” one of the two criminals who were crucified on either side of Jesus and who said to him, “Remember me when you come into your kingdom”;5 and, clinging to a fallen horse on the floor at the bottom of the bed, a bearded knight who, as Saul, is meant to be the future Saint Paul as he is struck blind on the way to Damascus and subsequently converts.6 Peter, the Magdalene, and Dismas all figured prominently in late-medieval accounts of

PROPER FEELINGS IN AND AROUND THE DEATH-BED

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the Passion; yet the emphasis is upon sorrow for one’s sinful deeds. Only one demon remains out in the open; another flees under the bed.7 Christ on the cross appears only in the last two segments as the demons are frustrated and the saints, angels, and Savior triumph.8 Through the ministrations of all of these, the atonement becomes valid for the dying man. Nonetheless, the distribution of actors in the entire sequence of eleven scenes conveys a sharing of saving power among the dying man himself, who can and must regret his sins, and the other categories of holy personage. The pictures warn Christians away from emotional disquietude, which is to say a lack of acceptance of God’s will, and toward peaceful submission. In the last frame, the recumbent smiles as, under the giant crucifix, a lighted candle is caught from his hands. Angels receive his soul, throngs of saints gather in devotion to the pendant Christ, and six diabolical figures realize that this believer has evaded their grasp.9 A further characteristic of death in the late Middle Ages, and on into the era of Catholic reform in the sixteenth century, was its collective nature. Even though the early-sixteenth-century Netherlandish morality play, “Everyman,” stresses that no one will accompany the soul on its final journey other than its “good deeds,” dying as practiced was generally structured to occur in the presence of others. The most important reason was loving solidarity of close relatives with the departed; but secondarily those present were to encourage and witness the pious departure. Despair was identified with isolation—as when Jesus cried out in extremis, “My God, my God, why hast thou foresaken me?” Preachers had a hard time explaining that utterance, but in practice, among mortals, they found it comprehensible. God did not abandon his sorrowing sinners, but those sinners needed to be reminded of this fact by those in their company. As fellow members of the body of Christ, the Church, the people in attendance had a crucial role to play. They were to labor to ensure that their relative confessed thoroughly to a priest so as to be disencumbered of sin. They were to comfort him in an effort to bring him to a peaceful leave-taking: falling asleep “like a candle going out.” Thrashing and moaning cast doubt, even in official eyes, on the destiny of the sufferer. This remained true within Lutheranism.10 The curers of souls promoted patience (Geduld), by which they meant total submission to whatever final Cross (Kreuz)—a further appropriation of a central implement of the Passion—God had imposed on his dying child. Inner patience showed itself in quietude. The dominant emotions of the deathbed were to be profound sorrow for sin, confidence in the network of kin- and holyhelpers, and total acceptance of God’s will. Extreme unction was a ritual over which the range of Catholics, from theologians to the illiterate poor, could agree. The spectrum of late-medieval believers saw the natural and supernatural worlds as interpenetrating. Through the

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application of consecrated oil to the body parts of the sinner, together with the pronouncing of prescribed prayers, attending clergymen could convert natural substances into apotropaic remedies and thereby assuage humans’ pain and guilt by means of the divine. In the nonecclesiastical ambience of the bedchamber, they stood at the nexus between the secular and sacred spheres. Their eucharistic gifts, of course, bore on the death-bed setting, not only because with the viaticum they carried the Host to the dying. The chrism itself had also been sanctified in a eucharistic environment. Through the application of the oil, the body, a major source of sin, is subordinated to the spiritual. To sum up explicitly: late-medieval and early-modern Catholicism, while accepting the atonement as core belief, simultaneously presented to the laity an array of assistance in attaining salvation. Although crucifixes were ubiquitous, other locales, representations, and occasions—from ossuary chapels to icons of the intercessory Virgin, from souls suffering in purgatory to soul-baths and death-anniversary services—informed the faithful that they had but to regret their misdeeds and they, too, could be saved. Depictions of the danse macabre encouraged them to do so. Time was short, both because life was manifestly uncertain and because the end of the world was at hand.11 A prominent model in the Catholic world, before as after the beginning of the reform movement, was the death of Mary.12 Paintings and reliefs depicting the final going-to-sleep (dormition) of the Virgin proliferated.13 These combine religious vision with social practice. With the Veit Stoβ exception noted earlier, in which the Virgin was standing or kneeling as she expired, the Mother of Jesus reclines on her bed, just at the moment of relinquishing her hold on the candle in her hand—in other words, at the very instant of death. The Apostles gathered around her have been variously reading, praying, weeping, and studying her face in order to detect the departure of her soul. All are meant to be affected, even if some artists are less skilled at portraying the grief of Christ’s closest followers. In early-modern mourning, outward display of bereavement was accepted, even expected. Families of means employed wailing-women to amplify the demonstrative force of women relatives left behind. These were sometimes the same women who washed the bodies of the dead and might sit around the corpse through the night until it was borne to interment. Such women do not appear at the Virgin’s dormition, however, for the frame is sufficiently full of sad Apostles. Mary’s state of mind and her behavior as she departed were paragons of Christian propriety, just as her life had been. Peter Canisius wrote a treatise on the death of Mary, initially in Latin.14 As noted in the chapter on the Virgin at the cross, Catholic preachers revealed the demeanor they favored for all women in the sermons they gave on the Virgin. Here the Jesuit father, before coming


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to her death, characterizes Mary in life as the one on whom the Holy Spirit was first poured out at Pentecost, above the Disciples. Mary surpassed all prophetesses, yet she was the humblest of people. After the Crucifixion, she withdrew from the world, toward which she conceived an annoyance (Verdruβ ), into mystical devotion. She poured out tears both of pain and of ecstatic joy, “the oftener and more desirously she thought about the dear words and secrets of her son.”15 Canisius adds that Mary’s love for her son is described in the Song of Songs. Her desire (begird) for him grew ever more powerful and finally overcame her.16 The Holy Ghost continued to stream down upon her until she suffered not only from swords of negative pain but from the ecstasy-producing wounds of its arrows.17 When out of her house, she was in the church, receiving the Eucharist every day.18 Whether or not she traveled to Asia, she returned to Jerusalem. An angel (unspecified) revealed to her that she was about to die, to which she replied once again, “Let it be done to me according to Thy word.”19 She was completely obedient in the manner of her dying, desiring above all to see her son again. The Apostles ranged grieving around her bed.20 Estimates of her age ranged between forty-nine and eighty-two years.21 In Canisius’s opinion, Mary enjoyed a unique exemption from the human separation of body and soul at death. Christ assumed his mother’s corpse into heaven and rejoined it with her soul, while other mortals were obligated to await the Last Judgment for this reunification.22 Evidently, the assumption did not take place, however, before the burial of Mary’s remains, which, Canisius writes, took place within the Garden of Gethsemane, the location where Jesus’ extreme mental suffering had begun and where he sweated blood. The Apostles promptly carried the bodily residue to that site with burning torches and song.23 Procession and recitation marked the usual manner of Catholic interment. If we accept Peter Burschel’s sketches of “masculine” and “feminine” death in the early modern period, Mary’s is clearly feminine.24 It features mystical love, spiritual motherhood (or in the Virgin’s personal case also fleshly motherhood), prophecy, ascetic isolation and prayer, obedience, and humility.25 Burschel sees this style of demise as fading from ecclesiastical approval, but Canisius would not agree. He holds Mary up to men as well as women for imitation. Lutherans vociferously begged to differ.26 A restraining trend in the way loved ones lamented their bereavement is perceptible within Catholicism before the Reformation. Although, as said above, Catholic mores were more permissive than the Protestant proved to be, and wailing women could continue their eponymous activity, Johannes Geiler von Kaisersberg (1445–1510), the renowned preacher of Strasbourg, urged mourners to hold their expression and indeed their feeling itself within bounds. He exhorts, “Christ our Lord desires that we do not grieve immoderately. . . .

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Regrettably, such immoderation in mourning gains the upper hand with many people, who do not allow themselves to be consoled.”27 His basic premise is that God has ordained all things that occur—“every bird-feather, every flower, every leaf of a tree.” Everything is subject to his governance. Thus, to complain unduly because a loved one has died is, he implies, to express dissatisfaction with the divine will.28 He lists several additional reasons why such grieving is not permissible: Death is inevitable, as we are all aware; in excessive mourning and weeping, we seek our own advantage (eigner nutz); and we fail to take into account the heavenly peace and joy that may come to us for eternity and contemplate only our short-term pleasure. A century later, the anthologist Matthaeus Tympius (d. after 1615) includes this admonition toward restraint in a collection of Catholic funeral sermons that he prepared for the use of parish priests who required some guidance in the wielding of the genre. The original author (not specified in this case) upbraids parents who grieve immoderately on the death of their child: Those parents behave entirely foolishly who let themselves be consoled in no way when a child departs from them by death; and they deal all the more ill-advisedly when they thereby show themselves to be impatient toward God for taking it [the child] away. God does such a thing for their good and that of the child. . . . For that reason, parents should not bewail the deaths of their children but rather rejoice; for such [deaths] serve them [the children] much more to happiness than to sadness.29 In his not-always-attributed selections, Tympius shows his adherence to the late-medieval belief that one’s manner of dying and other circumstances of the demise indicated where the decedent’s soul would go. He does allow for the possibility that a violent outer demeanor, or a demise as a result of violence, could nonetheless be accompanied by “a gentle, quiet, peaceful” inner death.30 The reverse could occur. People could die the hoped-for “gentle death” and yet be inwardly poisonous. Examples of this category, no matter how they died, were, Tympius asserts, “Jews, Turks, heretics, usurers, and others like them.” All were damned. Martin Luther, he adds, went immediately to hell!31 The human reality was that however preachers described the ideal leavetaking and burial observances, close relatives were likely to display their sense of loss. The age did not officially apprehend what we today are convinced of, namely, that the sharing of bereavement helps survivors to proceed on into a life that will be devoid of a key person. Yet, in social practice, judged by acts rather than tractates, it did. Mourning takes one across a necessary threshold into a future less bolstered by a circle of affection. Perhaps collective rituals of


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sorrow help to mend the tear left by the decedent and to form new bonds. Catholic leave-taking remained markedly collective. Despite Erasmus’s satirical treatment of the subject, the late-medieval and early-modern faithful continued to be surrounded by a broad palette of saints, rituals, and clergy to assist them in their final hours. Many of these, such as potent relics, the crucifix and other symbols, and the ceremonies of Eucharist and anointment, were seen as physically efficacious. They did not merely assuage through association. They constituted powerful medications for the soul. The entire emerging spectrum of Protestantism abandoned these, with the significant exception of the Lutheran retention of the Real Presence. Lutheranism still made concessions to “weak consciences” in the form of reassuring pastoral ministrations (that may have referred to election only in this creed’s early years), of prayers, hymns, and crucifixes. The Reformed churches hardly did.

Lutheranism The portrayal of Mary lamenting at the foot of the cross and tearfully holding the body of her adult son in the Pietà was visible to nearly every early modern resident of city and village. Geiler von Kaisersberg could hardly gainsay the ubiquitous model. Nonetheless, Lutheran divines selected the strain that Geiler so aptly articulated. In the advocated emotions surrounding death, then, early Protestantism departed from the Catholic demonstrativeness that would prevail without hindrance throughout the early modern era. To be sure, stoically influenced leaders across the emerging denominations would look askance at wailing and tearing of hair. Ordinary people very likely followed their inclinations and the informal standard set by their peers. Martin Luther laid down his principle in 1525, when he preached a funeral sermon in honor of his patron, Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony. He said that although it was suitable to mourn, and the more so because of the duke’s high rank and the fact that he had secured peace throughout his reign, yet Christians should be comforted in the knowledge that the faithful dead were only sleeping and would live again.32 Of course, he understood the pain of bereavement and offered epistolary consolation to those who had lost loved ones. The form of that consolation, however, was the effort to lift the recipient above desolation and tears. He held out the promise of eternal bliss, which relatives and friends should devoutly wish for their own. In 1542, when the Luthers’ daughter Magdalena died, Katharina Lutheryn wept openly. Luther wrestled with his pain, even urging the neighbors who accompanied her body to the grave not to express undue sympathy toward him.33 Katharina did not go

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to the cemetery, probably because she could not contain herself, as well as because it was often the custom for men to represent the household and women to remain at home. Their beloved child’s demise was God’s specific will for her, they thought, and she was far better off than in earth’s “vale of tears” ( Jammerthal). Additionally, Luther implicitly transferred the consolation (Trost) that he attributed to and derived from the doctrine of the atonement from the arena of guilt for sin to that of death. In his eyes, in fact, transferred would be the wrong word inasmuch as sin caused death. The qualities of the deathbed exchange had to be that finally the dying person took cognizance of his or her sins and fully acknowledged certain damnation but for the gratuitous mercy of a loving heavenly Father. Comfort for the dying lay in their appropriation in faith of the blood of Christ. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lutheran clergy in attendance at deaths were expected to verify the repentance of the mortally ill and by no means—according to ecclesiastical ordinances—to dispense the Eucharist to them without a suitable verbal (or, voice failing, manual) assurance. The dying needed to identify their behavior as sinful and proceed to feelings of responsibility and regret for it. They were to move from an intellectual recognition to a concomitant movement of the metaphorical heart. In this spirit, they needed to confess the general categories of transgression to the pastor and seek his absolution. Only then was the sacrament forthcoming, along with assurance of divine pardon and ultimate redemption. The Lutheran funeral sermon, which emerges as genre and obligation from around the middle of the sixteenth century, reveals a pattern in those sections that describe the deathbed behavior of the deceased.34 Ideally, every demise provided an occasion to go through this succession of emotions and ritual acts, not only for the sake of the dying but also for others in the room. Death being as frequent an event as it was in this period, many if not most people had ample opportunity to witness these rituals and to absorb the valuations embedded in them. Very likely dying itself rather than sermons or treatises informed the Christian’s outlook. But in the Lutheran churches, sermons quickly came to complement the lessons of the dying chamber. I take prescriptive pamphlets and books by leading preachers to reflect the messages that these authors dispensed intermittently over years from the chancel.35 Johannes Spangenberg (1484–1550), prolific scion of an illustrious clerical family and father of Cyriakus Spangenberg, preached in Nordhausen. In his booklet on preparing to die, he emphasizes the comfort that we have seen as characteristic of Lutheran treatment of the Passion, including in his title.36 The true preparation for death is the knightly (ritterlich) struggle to live a Christian life: “Whoever believes in God and heartily trusts Him, and besides that leads


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and walks the Christian life, does not regret to die. For that person knows where he goes, namely to the lap of the dear Father. . . . Christ will say to him and to all the elect, ‘Come here, you blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom that has been prepared for you from the beginning of the world.’”37 Johannes Spangenberg, an exact contemporary of Luther, reflects the trend of early Lutheranism to speak of the elect. Most divines of this persuasion would do so far less frequently from the next generation forward, and certainly than their Reformed fellows would. Spangenberg writes of the consolation on one’s deathbed, too, of recalling one’s baptism. For Lutherans, baptism is a literal instrument of engraftment onto the body of Christ, and especially of spiritual cleansing, without which salvation is hardly imaginable. It is, as within Catholicism, a prerequisite for entering the eternal life. The application of this sacrament is urgent for the newly born.38 Thus, recalling that one was baptized as an infant (the adult has been informed by those who were present) will also be reassuring as one prepares to enter the posthumous world. “You should endure temptation and disgust in accordance with the example of your Savior Christ and take your cross upon you and follow him. In your baptism, you have received letter and seal [testifying] that your temptation, cross, suffering, and death are not yours but are Christ’s temptation, cross, suffering, and death.”39 Be that as it might, heartfelt repentance of sin is indispensable. The dying should cry out to God, “I open my heart to you and lament my sin, my anxiety, and my importunity.”40 He ought to recall as well the symbolism of the Eucharist and cling to the remembrance of the bread and wine, which were in fact the true body and blood of Christ that were shed for sinners, to effect their payment for sin. For the believer, Spangenberg stresses, the debt of sin is definitively paid. This preacher does not refer to the admonitory ritual of the dying room, for his words in his pamphlet constitute that instruction. He may even have intended this little work in part for less educated clerics who required some guidance in ministering to the mortally ill. Many of his writings may be seen as having that dual purpose of aiding both laity and clergy. Martin Moller (1547–1606) prepared one of the most long-lived and influential manuals on preparation for death.41 He composed it in Latin and German late in his own life, and he could well have intended it as an exercise to assist him in preparing to depart. It was reprinted often during the seventeenth century and was republished as late as the mid-nineteenth century.42 Moller was Saxon by birth and did not attend a university. He held posts in several towns. He was mystically inclined and included Jakob Böhme among the members of the last congregation over which he presided, in Görlitz. Moller placed more emphasis than some of his colleagues on the “good death.” He frames a prayer as follows: “Lord Jesus, my Savior, protect me from painful illnesses and

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horrible death. Do not assault me in [the midst of ] my sins, and do not let me die unrepentant. Grant me a quiet, gentle end, without great anxiety and pain, so that in [possession of my] reason, with consideration, I may make a good end.”43 He asserts in a manner resembling a theology of works that “he who persists until the end will be saved.”44 He warns, “Fear God and keep his commandment, for that pertains to all human beings. For God will bring all deeds before [his] court, [including] what has been concealed, whether good or evil.”45 In stating this, Moller reflects the pastoral as well as the well-known theological tension that exists throughout early modern Protestantism between the insistent demand for upright living and the doctrine of salvation by faith alone. These two threads are continually interwoven, even though the rhetorical warp that surrounds them often makes them sound incompatible. It appears to be up to the dying person whether he chooses to make a “good end” and not relinquish his faith. Some will not be able to achieve this, and they will perish. Another famous Lutheran and author, whose expertise ranged across the spectrum from theology through music to childhood education, was Lucas Lossius (1508–1582).46 Lossius spent the bulk of his career in Lüneberg. His writings underscore the reality of damnation: The temporal death is a departure from the world [and the] separation of the soul from the body. . . . Eternal death is the unending departure of the soul from God and all happiness and blessedness; the unending fright (erschreckung) of the human conscience and the ultimate doubt in God’s grace and mercy. Into this [kind of ] death all the godless and unrepentant people fall after this life by means of their temporal death; they remain therein forever.47 The threat of hellfire is not, then, missing from Lutheran devotions even if comfort figures prominently in their discourse. Lossius himself remarks, “Hell is not as hot and the devil not as black and horrible as the priests (Pfaffen) say from the chancel and as the painters paint.” Rather, they are a thousand times more gruesome and awful!48 Moller’s tone, too, is deeply deprecating, which accompanies his stress upon regret for sin. “How heavily I have sinned. . . . In me nothing good resides!”49 At length, the soul through whom Moller speaks laments its wickedness. Sin suffuses and surrounds it. Even if it had committed no transgressions, yet its very nature is deformed by original sin. “O anxiety! O horror! O you filthy, sinful, stinking soul! I am furious with myself because I have become such an abomination before my God. Yes, my God, I am not worthy to be called a human being!”50 But he then turns to Christ’s atoning payment of the penalty of sin. “You are may Savior, the only sacrifice, by means of which I am


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reconciled with God. . . . Your hellish anxiety is my heavenly comfort, your bonds are my release [Erlösung, a play on this word’s root meaning], your shame is my honor, your wounds and welts are my adornment.”51 The soul in whose mouth Moller places many words prays, “Grant me that I daily crucify my sinful flesh, tamp down and master the lusts of the flesh, that I die [more] to sin from day to day, and apply myself to all upright behavior and virtue.”52 Moller evokes for his readers—as he surely had for his churchly audience— the memory of their baptism. He has his subject express gratitude for surviving to receive the sacrament: I thank you, my Lord Jesus Christ, for this your unspeakable kindness in not only drawing me alive from my mother’s body, but also—because I was dead in my [original] sin—in having me come to holy baptism and thereby enclosing me in the convenant (Bund) of grace, [giving me] new birth through your Spirit, tearing me out of the devil’s vengeance, and accepting me as your child and heir of heaven—before I knew you.53 To faith, then, he adds baptism as a prerequisite of eternal life, citing Scripture: “Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved.”54 The trick is to sustain belief through the ordeal, the Kreuz, of dying. Moller occasionally makes this seem to be up to the patient’s will. On others, he invokes God’s eternal providence: “O most beautiful, most sweet, most beloved, most friendly Lord, for you I live, for you I die. I am yours both dead and alive. I am entirely assured, sealed, confirmed, and convinced in my heart that I am an elected heir of eternal blessedness.”55 Even though Moller’s mystical language may make the mood he advocates for his readers more highly charged than that of other writers, in fact he promotes the same succession of feelings: recognition of sin, deep regret, prayer for forgiveness, and joyous comprehension of the meaning of the atonement as accomplished in the Passion. To this he, like some others, adds a thankful grasp of the significance of baptism for the individual soul. In achieving this state, the dying are able to rise above the pain and anxiety that otherwise assailed them. Angels, he says, gather around the sickbed and wait for the soul’s release into their care. “The faithful children of God rejoice from the heart and are glad that eternal life is ready for them; they yearn for it, wish it for themselves, and sigh [with longing] for the future with Christ, so that this miserable life might cease and the eternal one begin.”56 Moller concludes the section on dying by returning to consolation (Trost): He understands that those who are bereft will grieve and weep, for this is natural. He recommends against extremes of dramatization, however, such as ritualized “wailing and other contortions.” We

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should let ourselves be comforted, he says.57 Our feelings should be felt inside and less visible from the outside. The prayers that he composes contain the interior happiness that every ill Christian should pursue: Lord Jesus, you are my bliss, you are my joy, you are my money and my property; you are my honor, reputation, glory, desire, and eternal wealth. I love you heartily, Lord, my strength—you, Lord, my rock, my fortress, my rescuer, my God, the treasure on which I rely, my shield and the callus of my healing,58 and my protection. If I have you, I have no curiosity about heaven and earth; and even if both body and soul should [threaten to] wither away (verschmachten), you God are throughout the comfort of my heart and my portion. Such faith, such love, such fervor toward you, my Lord Jesus, have taken possession of my heart and strengthened me that I fear neither distress nor death.59 Moller relates Philipp Melanchthon’s story about Luther’s source of strength when he, Luther, thought himself deathly ill. He consoled himself with the Pauline assurance that “God has determined everything concerning the unbelievers so that he could have mercy on all.”60 Such Bible verses are very useful, Moller thinks, to those who are sick and dying.61 Samuel Huber (1547–1624), a tireless anti-Calvinist and anti-Jesuit polemicist, preached in Rostock on 30 April 1595 on the subject of conquering death: See, here is my Christ, who damned the sin in my flesh. He has paid; he has washed me of all my sins. This is what my most beloved Savior has done. He has elevated his grace over and against sin and has won everything. He gives me this victory, which is now my own. That I have this victory is good enough and sufficient for me so that no one can damn me. . . . Even if sin bites and stings me, it has nevertheless lost. It has lost its power, for the law is fulfilled through Christ for my sake.62 An owner of the copy that I used wrote in the margin, “Note with diligence these comforting words.”63 The religious public was uneasy not just about the process of dying but also about the fate of the body. Perhaps this unease increased as one’s demise loomed larger and was an aspect of the emotion of death. The book-buying world apparently created a ready market for works that entirely or in part conveyed the nature of heaven and the manner in which the body and soul, reunited once again, would dwell there. Throughout their lives, people had seen cadavers taken to the cemetery and, during the sixteenth century at least,


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summarily deposited in the ground. They knew that animals rooted there and that bones penetrated the surface and stuck up out of the earth. This did not seem heavenly in the least. Although my concern here is primarily the feelings that representatives of the institutional churches elicited from their audiences, they had also to respond to popular concern. Lutheran divines hung suspended between two interpretations of the inception of the afterlife: first, that bodies and souls together slept, despite the evident rotting of the former, until the Last Judgment; and second, that souls went to their final destinations immediately, to be joined to their physical remains at the Last Judgment. Luther adhered to the former but mitigated his view by resort to the metaphor of reposing in Abraham’s bosom (in German, Schoβ, literally lap); Calvin to the latter; and especially Luther’s followers ranged inconsistently between these positions. Another of the age’s great Lutheran divines, Andreas Musculus (1514–1581), in the end a Gnesiolutheran, admitted that he could not be sure of the state of the soul between a person’s earthly death and the end-times.64 “How it [the soul] lives and what sort of life it has, how it hears and sees, conceives [of things] and intends, has this and that in mind—that we cannot know, just as we don’t know what is going on within us when we sleep.”65 Admission of ignorance was not a common feature of this era of orthodoxy. Philipp Kegel (d. 1614), a former teacher in the princely household of Lüneburg, partly wrote and partly compiled devotions to assist Christians in directing their lives in accord with the prospect of their own demise. He intended his collection for people of every rank and specifically mentions the day laborers in stone quarries.66 The Passion of Christ figures prominently in these prayers; it is the incentive to improve and the basis of hope for eternal life. A prayer to the son of God reads: “My Lord and God, the light of my heart, my strength and comfort, give to me, a poor and needy creature (who without you neither wishes nor can nor has it in its power to understand), your blessing and assistance. I turn to you with my whole heart, so that I may understand and feel how sweet you are in all that you have earned, done, and suffered on my behalf.”67 Another is directed to God. It begins with a lament of one’s inner filth, “which cannot be cleansed, unless, through the outpouring of your love, grace, and mercy, you purify and cleanse me with the precious, powerful, and rose-colored blood of Jesus Christ, your very dearest son.”68 Everything hinges upon Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross, which occupies the center point of Lutheran devotion. It represents God’s passionate love of his children and extends to all—or perhaps all, for one does occasionally still encounter the word Auserwehlten a century after the Reformation’s beginning—who would accept what God offers. This work concentrates upon comforting the troubled hearts of Christians. As often throughout, the word Trost is multiply present. One

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devotion is entitled, “Ein gar schön Trostgebet, darinnen ein gleubiges Hertz die heiligen Wunden vnsers Seligmachers betrachtet, vnd sich derselben hertzlich tröstet.”69 A prayer specifically for the dying taps the key theme of the atonement: “May the weakness of the crucified Jesus Christ be my strength; the wounds of Jesus my medication; the cross of Jesus my victory; the death of Jesus my life; the bloodletting of Jesus the washing clean of all my sins and the acquisition of eternal blessedness, Amen.”70 Kegel’s contemporary, Philipp Han, cathedral preacher in Magdeburg, found a clever means of conveying the inseparability of preparation for death and the passion of Christ: He wrote a funeral sermon for Jesus. He gave it in the cathedral on Good Friday 1609. We should, he tells his doubtless sizable audience, hold such a sermon for this man, because he was in fact the greatest person. He died to save the whole human race “so that his Father’s wrath might be quieted. . . . He was wounded for our transgression and battered on account of our sin. The punishment for our sins was laid upon him so that we might have peace; by his stripes we are healed.”71 This homily at the burial of a “prominent citizen” did not refrain from praise! He concludes with a characteristic note of comfort: “Sey vnser Trost in aller Noth.”72

The Reformed Churches The Calvinist churches from their inception departed more radically from Catholicism in their treatment of death than the Lutheran churches did. It was no coincidence that John Calvin very early on wrote against the Anabaptist (and Lutheran) teaching that the souls of the dead slept until they were awakened at the end of the world.73 Calvin’s doctrine of unyielding double predestination moved him to focus his main attention on edifying the living. At the end of life, the most that could be done was to encourage the dying to feel confident that they were among those elected to salvation—even though neither subject nor observer could be certain. Yet Calvin taught that the elect would gradually give evidence of their favorable destiny in the more upright way in which they led their lives, including the visibility of their devotion. Their qualities and their acts would not be unblemished in this life, but they would perceptibly improve over time. Thus, in some sense Reformed pastors might think they knew where a particular soul in their care was headed. They were obliged to offer comfort to each one, nevertheless. The admonitions of the dying-chamber had different purposes in the two strands of Protestantism. For Lutherans, despite the lingering mystery of God’s Providence, confession and repentance were the proper frame of mind. The


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rituals of death hint at a residue of salvation by works. Pastors are to warn and solicit an expression of heartfelt remorse before they may dispense the sacrament, and to this sacrament, as parish visitors complain, parishioners continue to attach signal importance in shaping the afterlife. The tone of deathbed ministrations was, normative records suggest, not invariably pacifying—even if, ironically, Passion sermons were meant to be so. For Reformed clergy, the message of the Passion as preached was anything but comforting, but that of the dying chamber was directed more toward reassurance. As Reformed souls approached their final hours, those in attendance were to call a man of the cloth. When he came, he did not bring the Eucharist with him. He did not try to arouse sorrow for sin. He did not receive the confession of the human being lying before him, for the Calvinist churches had quickly abolished confession with its implied remediation. For them, a person’s departure was, had always been, ordained by God. The clerical presence simply acknowledged that every mere mortal would probably experience some degree of fear.74 Consolation might lie in simply reminding the dying that they were now, as they had ever been, firmly in the divine hand and plan. They did not flounder in uncertainty but must abandon themselves to the majestic Will that governed the universe. They ought to be at peace. On the peaceful exit as such, Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed could agree. Nonetheless, a grimace or a moan hardly guaranteed, from the Reformed viewpoint, that the protagonist of the dying-chamber was bound for hell. The 1563 ecclesiastical ordinance of Elector Frederick of the Palatinate of the Rhine, the prince who introduced Calvinism to his lands, takes up death among much else.75 The ritual prescribed for use when visiting the sick is made up of biblical reassurances. The clergyman informs the afflicted that Christ bears the weight of his or her sins. He then should offer the following prayer— which is by no means simply a suggested form: Elector Frederick was determined to have each cleric in his lands adopt this text: Eternal [and] merciful God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who hold death and life in your hands alone and without interruption provide for us, such that neither health nor illness nor anything else that is good or bad can happen to us—yes, so that no hair can fall from our heads without your paternal will, and so that we can encounter nothing in this life that serves toward our salvation and blessedness that you have not directed toward us: We beg you, because you have visited upon us weakness of the body or other tribulation, that you would also lend us the grace of your Holy Spirit, such that we would first of all recognize in our hearts your paternal

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discipline (Rutten), which we have well deserved on account of our manifold sins—and indeed [we have deserved] much harsher punishment. [We beg], secondly, that you maintain this living consolation constant and firm in our hearts, so that this gracious affliction is not a sign of your wrath against us but instead of your paternal love toward us, [a sign] that you discipline us (vns züchtigest) so that we are not already [known] in this world [to be] damned, but through the exercise and increase of our faith, true repentance, childlike obedience, and invocation of your grace, we are drawn more and more toward you.76 Friedrich’s theological advisors, prominent among them Zacharias Ursinus (1534–1583), the real authors of this ordinance, continue: We pray you that you might wish, as you have promised us, never to let us be tempted concerning our [earthly] wealth (vermögen), but to turn temptation into profit in the end, so that we can endure [ertragen: double meaning related to profit: to bear and to yield], especially at the time when your fatherly will is to take us out of this vale of tears to yourself in your eternal kingdom. Would you graciously moderate and soften (benemen) our pain and fear in our physical death, guard us against all temptation, strengthen the weakness of our flesh with the power of your Holy Ghost, and take our spirit[s] into your hand as we trust truly [and] constantly in your mercy, which you have shown us in Jesus Christ if we truly call on him in your name with peaceful hearts—so that we may glorify you in eternal life with all your angels and elect.77 If Luther himself explicitly took comfort in the doctrine of predestination as he conceived of it early in his career as a Reformer, then we should beware of finding the teachings laid out in this prayer, from our modern and Western perspective, somewhat weak in consolation. The ill Christian is essentially taught to acknowledge his or her deserving of illness and death, for both are the result of human sin. Second, the sufferer and all those gathered at the bedside are informed that, as Scripture says, God is in control of every sparrow and every hair. Nothing at all can occur that God has not willed. The only attitude of the believer, then, is to accept without reservation whatever might be in store. One is expected to hope that one will be counted among the elect, as the last line cited above reveals. But lurking in the background is ever the possibility that the person prayed with and over will not be so blessed. The doctrine of predestination does enter the dying-chamber, but in this setting it would be


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cruel to lay out its full ramifications. The feelings proposed here are abasement because of sin, unqualified submission to God’s will, and hope—hope both for relief from current pain and for eternal life. Jesus is mentioned and perhaps the atonement weakly alluded to, but God the Father and the Holy Spirit take preeminence in this long supplication. God must have originally provided for the regeneration and salvation of the particular soul in question or the hope cultivated through prayer will be in vain. God the Son is more in evidence later in this ecclesiastical ordinance, when Friedrich and his advisors set out what a preacher should preach on the occasion of a burial, either at the grave site or in the church. Owing to the German practice of presenting a homily at such observances, and perhaps not wishing to alienate his subjects even more than the introduction of Calvinism already did, the prince was willing to compromise.78 In Calvin’s Geneva, clergymen went to the bedsides of the dying, but they did not take part in funerals.79 In the Rhenish Palatinate, brief funeral sermons or admonitions could be held. They were to be the same for poor and rich and were by no means to praise the deceased. Instead, for the edification of all who were present, the focus was on what to believe about and how to prepare for death. The prayers assigned to this rite do not mention the dead person at all. All preachers were to clearly make the points that the cause of death is sin, and that in life we make ourselves ready for our inevitable end through unbroken repentance and conformity to God’s will. A third point, however, concerns the atonement. We may find comfort in the knowledge that, through his death on the cross, Jesus has justified and reconciled us with the Father. That fact notwithstanding, all those who die without faith are thrown into eternal damnation. “On that account, they cannot be helped by us,” as through our prayers, pious deeds, or anniversary services.80 A governing principle of Reformed funerals is that “all papist and superstitious ceremonies” shall be omitted.81 The pertinent writings of clerical authors may afford us an opportunity to estimate how normative regulations may have been interpreted. Johann Willing preached a series of fourteen sermons on sickness and death to Elector Friedrich himself and his retinue. These were published in Heidelberg the year following the first edition of the ecclesiastical ordinances.82 Predictably, Willing begins with sin and the anger it arouses in God. “Because in the eyes of God all human beings are sinners [and] even the innocent are not without guilt, [and because] he hates and punishes sin, so we cannot believe that anyone goes forth [ from the earth] unpunished.”83 Even though transgression is unavoidable, the Christian must try to be free of it. Repentance begins with self-examination, which can lead to “a great anxious [sense of ] horror.”84 So many are one’s misdeeds that no other destination than hell would be possible. The one remedy

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lies in “God’s grace and compassion, which He has promised us in Christ.” We must develop a heartfelt trust that, for Christ’s sake, God will not count our sin against us “but will forgive and forget.”85 Out of sheer gratitude, Willing says, probably revealing himself more than rhetorically, “I bend the knee of my heart and pray to the Lord for grace.”86 In a sermon that especially stresses consolation, the court preacher places the atonement at the center of his argument. “Christ was the sacrifice for sin, and God laid all of our sins upon him.”87 Departing from the style of John Calvin, he repeats the word comfort (Trost) several times. Christ is the hope of the dying person: The very best and most powerful medication against every sort of pain and illness and troubled day is the faithful contemplation of the grace-filled martyr-image of our dearest Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. When a Christian considers how many and great things his Redeemer Christ bore and suffered for his sake—namely, everything that could be thought of that was painful and hurtful, slanderous and shameful, considered from the outside and the inside . . . and endured that out of pure love for us so that we would not have to suffer eternally and be ruined— that Christian will be deeply grateful.88 Like many of his contemporaries, Willing rejects reason as a criterion of religious truths. We cannot understand what happens in death with our rational capacity. We are naturally afraid to die. Our only consolation lies in Christ’s Resurrection. “He [Christ] has extinguished death and brought us eternal life in its stead. He has jousted (durnieret) with death and run at it forcefully,” the preacher tells his high-ranking warrior audience. “He [Christ] has broken his [death’s] spear and staff.” Your reason makes you fear that you will be damned, the cleric goes on. But we should rely on the Gospel word: “I have overcome the world!”89 We can recall and take solace in the good deaths, the “manly and comforting” deaths of others.90 Death will relieve us of fleshly desires and emotions. We will recognize each other, but our wills will desire only God’s will. For that reason we will not be sad if some of our relatives and friends are in hell.91 Willing devotes an entire sermon to election. He states directly that God has chosen his elect before the foundation of the world, and to those whom he has elected, he has given justifying faith. All others will be damned. The Last Judgment is simply the ultimate fulfillment of what God had ordered from eternity. Still, we should not doubt as we lie dying that God has elected us. We could have known here on earth, Willing affirms, what the destination of each would be.92 This is surely because, in his view, the elect would already have


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begun visibly to improve their demeanor, which is to say the outer evidence of their inner state. The emotional tension in this bifurcated message will be evident to modern readers. Unlike Catholicism and Lutheranism, there is no place for last-minute moral refurbishment. God’s everlasting will dominates the scene, and none can alter it. Fear of hellfire is comprehensible, but the only permissible feeling at the end of life is utter and contented submission to the Almighty. At the same time, suspending all orderly theological knowledge, the dying person must assume that the atonement is valid for him and that he shall end in paradise. Strangely perhaps, Willing devotes one sermon to fending off Satan as one dies. This Satan, though described as literally an “armed and gruesome enemy,” could be understood as the inclination of mortals to doubt in the face of death. Indeed, Willing, in contrast to other preachers, seems to see Jesus as having given in to diabolical temptation when he cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?”93 The preacher declares that angels help people fight against the devil, as does the church militant. An arsenal of suitable scriptural verses are helpful against the devil in one’s last hours. Yet, we may object, a strict predestinarian could not think that the devil had the slightest chance of victory over one of God’s elect. Satan’s presence may well be an image drawn from medieval tradition. Willing was not alone in employing it. Ursinus, Willing’s fellow at the electoral court, appears to have adhered most closely to the conviction that sermons should exclusively be heard and not also read (fides ex auditu). But, as we have seen, he did leave writings that provide clues to those beliefs that surely were well represented in his homiletic activities.94 That he intended his remarks for daily reading is suggested by the miniature size of his Reminder of How a Christian Should Console Himself on the Death and Burial of His Brothers (1589): Its dimensions are approximately 3 1/2 inches by 5 inches by 3/16 inch thick.95 The theologian concurs with Willing that preparation for death should take place over the Christian’s entire life-span. The slings of the devil are hard to withstand when a person is most vulnerable—that is, when dying. Years of self-arming are needed. This takes the form of cognizance of sin and “heartfelt, continual prayer to God that he may strengthen our faith, not let us be stuck in temptation, and impart his Holy Spirit to us more and more, until, by means of a blessed end, he takes us out of this difficult life to himself [and] into eternal blessedness.”96 Then at last we will be freed from the devil, who rages around us like a roaring lion, looking for opportunities to seize us.97 Ursinus, too, makes Satan seem to pose a real danger, even to the elect. At no time more than when one is dying, he says, does the devil roar and try to fling men “into eternal despair and blasphemy.”98 He goes on at length about the blindness with which God afflicts those who despise and mock, so that they cannot come to repentance.99

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The dying person must reject every worldly placatory device; these are all in vain. The only legitimate consolation derives from our forgiveness and redemption, which are the result of Christ’s death on the cross. On that alone we should concentrate. This is taught to us, he says, in preaching that we hear while we are well and able to attend church.100 About the deaths of others, we must not grieve exceedingly, pray for their souls, or wish them back in this life. We must not love father, mother, or child more than the Deity. Neither on their account nor for ourselves when we come to die should we “display any impatience with his [God’s] paternal will.” Rather, we should rejoice because we have a chance to practice and to demonstrate our childlike obedience toward God.101 Our entire lives should be a school within which we learn to die.102 Our faith in God and repentance must increase daily, “such that we ever more acknowledge and bewail that with our sins we have so enraged God. We must hate and flee from [these sins] and rejoice and console ourselves that God is gracious to us through Christ. . . . This fruit of faith [our constant obedience] must follow, for without it there is no true, living faith. If we are without this, we would in vain invent a faith and comfort in the face of death.”103 Only upright behavior signifies eligibility for pacifying refuge in the atonement. If we are not generally good, we are surely doomed. Ursinus’s closing prayer affirms that Christ’s atonement is valid only for “all those who [die] in true faith on Jesus Christ and proper invocation of thy [God’s] name.” Only the souls of those will be received into eternal life.104 When Elector Friedrich III died in 1576, one of the preachers of his funeral sermons was the Heidelberg theologian Daniel Tossanus (1541–1602).105 Although in general funeral preaching was not allowed, exceptions had to be made for people of highest rank. As in his Passion sermons, so in his funeral sermon, Tossanus makes room for comforting his listeners. He admonishes people to remember that “death is a work of God, not a destruction of his work.”106 Tossanus represents the prince’s demise as a warning to God’s people, who despite this sign of divine anger do not convert (bekehren).107 He criticizes Friedrich’s subjects for neither trying to live uprightly nor praying for their God-given ruler. This comment may reflect some citizens’ opposition to the changes in religion that Friedrich introduced.108 He praises the deceased for bringing order to the Palatinate. Within Heidelberg itself, Friedrich’s governance produced “a quiet[er] and [more] withdrawn life-style than was the case some years ago.”109 Such a remark was designed to ingratiate him with the ruling family, for pacification had been a goal of this determined prince. But if it contained a kernel of truth, it reveals the regime’s success at restraining the public expression of every strong emotion, from erotic love (as at wedding dances) to social hatred (as in brawling and fighting).


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The man of the cloth notes the prince’s perfectly placid departure in a willing and consoled frame of mind. Precisely this is desirable; his was a model death. Friedrich had spoken to those who tended him, “It is enough. . . . It is time for me to die and be gathered in to the true rest by my Savior.”110 His subjects ought to pray that God not chastise them for their sins but rather comfort them in their bereavement.111 No one prays for the repose of Friedrich’s soul, of course. God’s decision in this matter is unchangeable. Abraham Scultetus (1566–1625) was a theologian and court preacher of a succeeding generation.112 He was involved in his elector Friedrich V’s misadventure in Prague, to which this clergyman contributed through his effort to cleanse the Bohemian cathedral of its icons. He spent the last three years of his career in the service of Emden. From this city, he wrote a tribute upon the death of the administrator of Friedrich’s court (Hofmeister) in 1624.113 This half-inchthick treatise fulfills the function of a funeral sermon. In an early phase it urges this officer’s widow and children not to mourn immoderately, even though the widow’s heart will have been “cut in two.” Johann Albrecht, count of Solms, had been a quiet, prayerful man. This was unusual in one of such eminence. “Prominent people are ordinarily very impassioned and are too much inclined toward emotion. The lord Groβhoffmeister of pious [memory] was, in the movement of his passions, in eating and drinking, in words and speech so moderate that it seemed as though he held all affect under control, yes, even that he . . . had no emotions.”114 To Scultetus, this was the ideal. The count of Solms had shown “gentle patience” in the face of tribulation. Patience (Geduld) meant responding with contented submission to every sort of hardship. By means of Bible-reading, conversation with preachers, “praying, interrogation [of knowledgeable clergy?], silence, and occasionally a deep sighing,” he and his wife drove away impatience.115 The author looks back over his experience as minister to the dying. “I have now occupied the office of preacher for going on thirty years and have attended many dying people. I have never seen a person who had led an upright life die a bad death.” This was true of the count of Solms: As he had lived, so he died a gentle death.116 Scultetus returns emphatically to the theme that immoderate grieving is wrong. In fact, one should be happy for the dead, as some in the early Christian church had been.117 He cites Geiler von Kaisersberg as writing on his birthday that the day of birth was the beginning of all wretchedness.118 One’s death day is the beginning of peace and rest—although this condition is not complete until body and soul are reunited on the Last Day.119 The count’s soul will experience “fiery love” in heaven, as Johann Albrecht fully grasps God’s beneficence toward humans, and then his justification will be complete.120 It would seem that passionate emotion for this reserved man had to await heaven.

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When Scultetus himself died in October 1624, Frideric Salmut, preacher in Emden and as such Scultetus’s colleague at the end of his life, wrote a tract in honor of Scultetus, and in so doing violated the Calvinist precept of not praising the dead. Salmut composed a profile of the ideal preacher. He states that occasionally, Scultetus moved his congregation deeply, “because he carried out his office with such charming and at the same time penetrating words! And he sometimes pressed bright tears from his listeners, which afterward many a pious Christian, when he recalled it, felt his heart to be pierced.”121

Death and the Emotions Early modern Christianity was indifferent in none of its forms to sin. Although Catholicism, Lutheranism, and the Calvinist-derived churches all adhered to doctrines of original sin and the atonement, their popular and practical expounding and application of them reveal more than simply theological differences. They reveal differing attitudes toward humankind and its relationship with God. In no context are these better articulated than in connection with dying and death. A certain urgency colors the visits of clergy to those who face their last hour. Now is the time to “get it right,” which is to cease all self-delusion and appropriate what the clerics define as the ultimate truths. Luther knew well that the Catholic Church did lay weight upon the Christian’s own ability to incline toward or away from salvation. However much human beings might technically require divine aid in attaining eternal bliss, yet this condition demanded their cooperation through self-discipline, availing themselves of churchly ministrations (especially the sacraments), and prayer. A continuity of image and ceremony characterizes the late medieval and early modern period, and these demonstrate, along with written texts, that people can earn admittance to heaven. Memento mori depictions suggest that the remembrance of one’s mortality ought to serve as a goad to ensure that the Christian did not earn unending torment through failure to repent. Hell was presented to the populace as a literal bodily (as well as psychic) end-withoutend. Fear had a legitimate place in the atmosphere of the dying-chamber; it was not simply a “natural” reaction of mere mortals to an unknown process and destination. Early-modern Catholicism sustains the anxiety of the deathbed even as it continues to offer palliative measures: confession, absolution, the viaticum, extreme unction, the intercessory services of saints and Virgin, and the doctrine of the atonement. It provided additional opportunities to increase the bulk of one’s good works through such external measures as testamentary


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donations and internal states of mind such as trust in God as his will was explained by the priesthood. Polemicists may have thought of the Church as holding people subject to it through the number of requirements it imposed. From another perspective, however, we may see the Church as empowering its members. Catholics were invited to participate actively in their own salvation. They could even contribute to the salvation of others by the devices of indulgences and memorial masses. Even though reformed Catholicism may have looked on moderation in grieving as preferable to the more extreme display that was entrenched, the earlymodern Church tolerated custom far more than any Protestant denomination. Social standards demanded a suitable acting out of bereavement along with a commitment by those left behind to undertake permissible measures to facilitate a dead relative’s prompt exit from purgatory and entry into heaven. This is well known. What may not have been considered is the manner in which this commitment of act and thought sustained a sense of loss over time. These rituals, too, remained longer as reminders to the living; they were another medium of conveying the lesson of memento mori. The emotional impact of death thus remained, was meant to remain, longer within Holy Mother Church. Lutheranism manifested considerable continuity with Catholic practice. Lutheran divines might not have wished to hear this. Despite Luther’s and Melanchthon’s early subscription to a variety of predestination, their attention to this relaxed with time. Certainly, in the pastoral milieu they altered the sensitive tone of the faith. Luther’s preaching is, overall, instructive, morally admonitory, and encouraging. His personality inclined toward the simple people who gathered to listen to him, and he wished to stoop down a bit and lift them up as much as they were able, a counterpart, perhaps, to God’s stooping down to speak into his ear. Although he strenuously objected to the “fables” and “foolishness” with which he thought Catholic preachers embellished their sermons, as is well known he incorporated into his own all manner of familiar phrase and predicament. He did not dissociate his explications in the pulpit from the world in which his hearers (and he) were embedded. Nor did he hesitate to excoriate them for their collective transgressions, including those to which they were culturally heir. He had the gift of combining remonstration, edification, and consolation. Because his followers desired to be like him and because his works were quickly available, it is possible that his pastoral style did influence Lutheran Germany. Whatever the reason, I have found the assuaging mood of Lutheran preaching and writing about death to place the doctrine of the atonement at the center. As ever, there are bound to be individual differences among the preachers.

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Calvinist preachers are more concerned for Bekehrung, repentance and its consequent reform of life, than with relieving the anxieties of dying. Theologically they insisted that Jesus did not die for all but only for the elect. In the preface to his sermons on the Passion, the Calvinist Georg Spindler (1525–1605) states explicitly that Christ did not die for everyone.122 He preaches, “The Lord Jesus suffers and dies for us insofar as we believe this and through such recognition and faithful trust are incorporated into him and are participants in his merits.”123 Christ did not die for most of humanity. All the same, the prayers that conclude each sermon text embrace this uncertainty and turn it into advocacy of a pious frame of mind and compassionate works that the elect must cultivate during life: Help, dear Father, that we guard ourselves against certainty and presumption, always stand in fear, and devote our entire attention to your commandment to avoid sin and opportunities to sin, so that we do not stumble and fall. . . . [May we] truly turn ourselves toward you, henceforth provide for ourselves that we shun the godless and keep to the pious, always proceed cautiously and take care to walk in obedience to you, execute our [life] course blessedly, and achieve the end of faith, [which is] salvation, Amen.124 For their part, late-century Lutheran divines were appalled by the notion that Christ had not died for all, and they leveled their polemics against their Calvinist counterparts.125 How can one reconcile, then, the disciplinary tone of those portions of ecclesiastical ordinances that deal with death, with the function of pastoral consolation? In this age of “confessionalization,” princes sat in oversight over the wording of the rules governing their churches. These authorities increasingly desired to ensure the upstanding life style of their subjects and the nearuniformity of clergymen’s discourse, even at the deathbed. In the abstract, the divines who advised princes could hardly object to the goal of bringing sinners on the brink of death to a recognition of their wrongdoing and -being. Arousing sorrow for the ill that one had done was quite in keeping with the efforts of governors, including magistrates, to effect docility and obedience in the citizenry. This was the tenor of the day. Those who stood at the bedside of a person who, whatever the weaknesses of his or her life, was now no longer able to damage the community, had other factors in mind. They thought not in the abstract any longer but in terms of the suffering, anxious human being, possibly surrounded by afflicted relatives, who lay before them. In this setting, comfort was in order. The empathetic pastor could not avoid rendering it. Very likely the attending clergy managed to


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combine sufficient discipline with reassurance so that officials were satisfied that the requirements laid out in the ordinances had been met. As the authoritarian mood deepened, clergymen increasingly found themselves mediating between the state-promoted ideal and the vicissitudes of reality.126 Yet representatives of both state and church were probably sincere when they exhorted people not to grieve too dramatically or long over the loss of their dear ones. Conformity with regulations as well as acceptance of palliative thoughts were both compatible with the suppression of extreme overt mourning. God’s will was, after all, done on earth as it was in heaven, and one should not rebel against it. The Reformed churches broke most visibly from past and ongoing treatments of death. The idea that Calvinist preachers slighted predestination in their sermons and their bedside pronouncements appears not to be true. Despite a paucity of published Reformed sermons, those that exist very frequently call attention to God’s ordination, before the founding of the world, of all that would occur. God called his children to repentance throughout their lives, the hour of death included, and for that reason they should hasten to admit their grave and damning shortcomings. But no confession, admonition, or other confrontations remain from the Catholic past. The message of consolation dispensed to the dying—and genuinely intended as such—is that predestination should not give rise to fear but should reassure the believer that she or he is bound for glory. As Abraham Scultetus implied, those who had led upstanding lives were virtually certain to be among the saved. Who knows what pastors said to miscreants in their final hours? Clergymen were required to appear at every bedside when notified of serious illness, and this included the dwellings of those most resistant to improvement. We do not hear of this dimension of their ministry. Those who had striven toward righteousness, however, were to find comfort in predestination. This teaching permeates the atmosphere of the dying-chamber. Any who did not take heart at this precept were not true believers. Naturally, the reconciling force of Christ’s death on the cross constitutes part of the placatory message. It is not as central in Reformed as in Lutheran consolation. Theologically, the atonement is the device chosen by God, foreordained by him, to permit the divine reconciliation with the sinners whom he had elected to benefit from it. It is subordinate to the larger scheme of God’s omnipotent Providence. Doubtless many people found peace in this teaching. We cannot know how numerous they were. The emotional aura surrounding death depends in large part precisely on the extent to which the clergy were able to persuade their charges of the benefit to them of this concept. Additionally, it is impossible to

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say whether in practice the Reformed churches were even less tolerant of dramatic grieving than Lutheran churches were. Certainly, the former stressed more pointedly the objectionable nature of mourning. Those left behind must be confident of the happy condition of the deceased, or at any rate accept God’s decree for their relatives. Their love for the departed is best expressed in gratification that the beloved relation or friend has found release from “this vale of tears.” It is selfish, even rebellious toward God, to wish that this dear one had not died. Christians must not struggle against God’s will.

7 The Formation of Religious Sensibilities The Reception of Recommendations for Proper Feeling

The problem of the reception of elite messages is a besetting one. One of the qualities that mark Peter Burke’s pioneering book Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe as of enduring value was precisely Burke’s insistence that influences traveled in two directions: from the social echelons above, in whose hands most power reposed, to those below; and also from the levels below, whose ability to affect polity was long thought to be minimal, to those above.1 This principle is, of course, well understood by anthropologists.2 Our understanding of the first half of this dual equation, long taken for granted, needs to be seen today as modified by the dynamics of the second half. Artisans, peasants, and day laborers were hardly the passive recipients of prescription from their “betters.” The less well-off classes seldom rebelled, as in the great Peasants’ War of 1524–1526, but they had well-rehearsed methods of resistance. Many of these were unconscious and lay in their unsheddable (though not unmodifiable) worldview. At the end of the Middle Ages, nearly all of German society shared the outlook that the cosmos was not only divinely formed and overseen but also characterized by an interpenetration of spirituality and materiality. God, his dead saints, his loyal angels, and that fallen angel Lucifer with his minions were available on earth, either directly or through artifacts and representatives whom they sent. The material world was highly charged. Humans could avail themselves of, even manipulate, these forces to the benefit of themselves or the detriment of enemies.

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Europe’s greatest intellectuals emerged from the world of these assumptions—their cultural origins were no loftier than those of their illiterate servants. The Witch Craze alone is evidence of this generalization, for many educated men accepted its precepts and took part in its persecutions. This broad mind-set receded only gradually, persisting in the European countryside into the nineteenth century and perhaps into the twentieth.3 When after 1991 Western folklorists finally gained access to the rural populace of the former Soviet Union, they encountered a wealth of fairies and other enchantments. Only very gradually did first the learned, and then urban, populations narrow the range of their resort to the unseen. This process merely began in our period, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and then as a result of the greater availability of education beyond elementary school—which itself took centuries and governmental compulsion to effect. More motivating still was the threat of ecclesiastical and public punishment for detectable outward manifestations of forbidden worldviews. We can tell from the imposition of penalties that these worldviews still existed. Protestant as well as Catholic women who were facing the risks of childbirth still sought to have “the Virgin Mary’s belt” laid across their laboring abdomens. Ordinary women under Calvinist dominion sought Catholic midwives for the additional aids that these were allowed to administer, in the form of substances and invocations.4 Ordinary Lutherans sought to retain pieces of the Host in their mouths or baptismal water in small vessels in order to apply their supernatural substance to themselves or their livestock. Calvinist Genevans rioted when forbidden to confer the name Claude upon their infants. This prohibition denied their offspring the popular saint’s salvific interventions with God.5 Unfortunately, we cannot tell how widespread these convictions continued to be. Danger lay in acting upon them. I would guess that they were initially very widespread indeed and only diminished with time, consistent indoctrination, and the certainty of punishment. Official Protestantism declared with varying degrees of conviction that the spheres of heaven and earth were distinctly separate. The Catholic Church, by contrast, retained its traditional beliefs concerning interpenetration. Nevertheless, Catholic divines, too, joined in the age’s discouragement of “superstition,” by which they meant the attribution of disapproved powers and the use of unauthorized rites. Approved and authorized forces should be sufficient to satisfy the faithful of every condition. Lutheran theologians were ultimately ambiguous in their removal of divinity from direct human access. The visual and palpable textures of the adornment of sanctuaries, the wonderments of organ playing and increasingly multipart choral singing, the retention of some tintinnabulation and modest

THE FORMATION OF RELIGIOUS SENSIBILITIES

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procession, the regionally variable clerical vestments—all these nurtured a sense of the sacrality of the church interior, its accoutrements, and its immediate environment. Whether articulated or not, these features were designed to create an aura of devotion that enveloped the Christian upon entry. The very space and people’s experiences within it were to focus their moods as well as their thoughts. They were here to sigh (seufzen) to God, thank him for his loving goodness, and beseech him for righteousness, for control over their sinful natures. Martin Luther’s own vision of the Heavenly Father as a parent with whom he could have an intimate conversation also bespeaks the approachability of God. Luther is a fine example, because of the ample witness he left of his experience, of rootedness in despite partial departure from the world of his ancestors. His folkloric debts have been well studied.6 John Calvin’s God existed at a greater remove from the individual’s mortal life, including prayer, despite his all-knowing and omnipotent nature. Prayer is of course a regular dimension of Reformed spirituality, and yet, if we scrutinize the way in which this activity is described, we may not find the close, immediate bond between Christian and Divinity that the Wittenberger testified to. God was conceived of as drastically above and superior to his mere creatures, although he marvelously deigned to bend down to them if they profoundly regretted and struggled against their unworthiness—and if God had already written their names in the Book of Eternal Life. As we have seen, predestination was a regular if not constant theme in Reformed preaching, and this may have penetrated hearers’ awareness. Luther’s own correspondence and dinner-table conversation reveals that even among his followers, where teachings concerning election were aired infrequently, both laity and clergy could worry about their fate.7 The Lutheran doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ’s body and blood beside the bread and wine, and of its ability to be everywhere at the same time (ubiquity) both revealed and sustained Lutherans’ hesitancy to theoretically release the divine from encapsulation in any secular medium. Surely the devout sometimes felt awe upon receiving Holy Communion, for in a manner very similar to that of their ancestors and their living Catholic cousins, they were in the corporeal presence of Jesus himself; and they took, Luther stressed, his veritable body and blood into their own mouths. No amount of homiletic distancing of humans from the coarse presumptions of their forebears could gainsay the might of that central eucharistic assertion. Thus, altering traditional mentalities probably took place over a longer interval than might otherwise have been the case. It was carried out with the aid of a subtle combination of media that altogether shaped a new affirmation without completely obliterating

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all the Catholic practice that had gone before. Luther had early on taken his stand against compelling consciences. Lutherans were thus reshaped and reconditioned Catholics. Part of this reshaping was emotional. This is not to say that Lutheran princes and magistrates did not resort to compulsion. They did. The masters of immediate and thoroughgoing “rectification” were, however, the Calvinists. Particularly those in a city such as Geneva or Heidelberg could exert a degree of oversight that made detection of disobedience and punishment virtually certain. The extent of the Wettin lands and after 1613 the Hohenzollern lands further north were at least one factor in preventing the ruthless, single-minded pursuit of every transgressor, every would-be recusant.8 Nevertheless, unbridled authoritarians like August of Saxony (d. 1586) created bureaucracies of state and church that, by means of church ordinance, visitation, and consistory, enabled a very high degree of enforcement. Calvin in Geneva, with the assent of the city fathers, surpassed him. Here even aged women who crossed themselves or invoked the Virgin were cited before the consistory. The pastors and elders remonstrated and instructed them, and they often barred them from the Eucharist until they had demonstrated a proper understanding and remorse.9 The consistory minutes themselves indicate that even under circumstances the most favorable for conversion, popular misunderstanding and/or resistance did exist. Ministerial resolve and the drastic measures taken to obliterate every “idolatrous” artifact from the Catholic past, as well as to detect and penalize every misstep, assisted the determined fathers of Geneva in attaining their ends. Yet preaching was not a negligible instrument. Discipline could never suffice as a means of molding a Protestant—or as Luther and Calvin would have agreed—a Christian frame of mind. Beginning in the Middle Ages, where and when it was available, the sermon was a salient medium for transmitting information to the populace and entertaining it. Hans-Christoph Rublack has maintained that at least the Lutheran sermon helped listeners to integrate dimensions of their world.10 The socio-recreational feature, along with the incentives of piety, must explain why ostensibly many thousands of people could turn up to hear the rhetoric of a famous preacher. Within the Catholic fold, the papal nuncio Antonio Albergati reported to Cardinal Scipione Borghese in 1613 from Cologne that the Capuchin preachers were very popular and were attended by a rush (Zulauf) of Protestants.11 These Catholic brothers often stayed in the regions where they were posted and informed themselves on local issues. They, too, doubtless performed Rublack’s integrative function as they faced the throngs. Sermons provided occasions for the coming together of relatives and neighbors and for the exchange of news and gossip. The resident of the Western world today demands a similar “grand distraction” from


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routine on a daily basis, via Internet, theater, live sporting match, or party. It is hard for us to grasp the tedium of past lives and the eager resort to “modest distraction” on the few occasions when it was available or, more often, could be devised. This reality encouraged attendance at church services, and it rendered homiletics a proper focus of reformers’ attention. Particularly as the Protestant churches required attendance, the pastoral duty of teaching provided a principal arena of instruction. But if social and religious motives were so mingled—preachers from Berthold von Regensburg forward complained especially of women talking in church and of both sexes walking in and out of services at will—how are we to judge actual reception of clerical messages? Alas, in a scientific, verifiable sense, we cannot. Or at least we cannot generalize about the population at large, whose responses to the Word spoken from the elevated pulpit must have varied considerably. Even if it was too early for atheism and agnosticism to have become widespread, levels of interest and conviction varied.12 The situation within institutional Catholicism was somewhat different. Inasmuch as attendance at Mass remained noncompulsory and the general populace could, as since the thirteenth century, be expected to fulfill its yearly obligation mainly at Eastertime, the late-Lenten season had from a practical as well as a theological standpoint to constitute the main period of homiletic effort. Nevertheless, the Church put greater emphasis on preaching in general.13 But the conscientious priest’s best hope of touching souls lay in his exertions during Holy Week. Many motivational paths all led to the vivid description of Christ’s torment and the minute rendering of his execution. Yet the Church increasingly encouraged adherents to demonstrate their faith by more frequent attendance at Masses. Because the liturgy of the Mass purported to have the priest offer up to God a replication of Christ’s original sacrifice, it underscored the centrality of the Passion to devotions around the calendar. The Mass, then, demanded, though it could not require, the cultivation of feeling. Some people’s attachment to a more frequent celebration of the Eucharist is itself evidence of the reception of and conformity to clerical exhortations. The indifferent and overburdened could stay away, but others sought to commune with greater frequency than their ancestors. We are justified in thinking that a portion of these entered emotionally into the spirit of the sacred celebration. The writings of three laypeople, the late-medieval Catholic physician Ulrich Pinder, the blind unmarried woman (Jungfraw) of Braunschweig Justitia Sengers, and the seventeenth-century noblewoman Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, leave us a record of their own affinity for the affective spirituality fostered by contemplation of the Passion.

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Individuals Ulrich Pinder, M. D. Little is known about Dr. Pinder’s life. He was a citizen of Nuremberg. He wrote and published a number of books on aspects of medicine, including one on how to maintain physical well-being through a healthy regimen and diet.14 He probably died either in 1510 or 1519. To judge from the titles of his writings, he may have been a member of the Confraternity of Saint Ursula.15 He was also devoted to the Virgin Mary, for he left a tract entitled The Enclosed Garden of the Rosary of Mary.16 A man of great piety, his works hint at the view that bodily and spiritual health are inextricably linked. Medicine may be applied to the outer receptacle of the soul, but it must also be applied to that immortal human core. This connection was hardly unusual. It corresponds to the belief, close to universal among clergy who left a homiletic record, that illness and death are the results of sin. Hence, sin must be treated as avidly as ailments of the flesh. Pinder evidently saw his role as treating the body and as supporting the ministers to the spirit, the priesthood. From this perspective, then, we can understand the trouble this physician took to pen his detailed Mirror of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, initially self-published in Latin in 1507 and evidently not translated into German until the seventeenth century.17 Thus, its intended readership was male and learned— the body of Pinder’s professional and governmental peers in Nuremberg, the men with whom he consorted and who may well have made up the majority of his patients. In writing this, he must have meant to complement his physical ministrations to them with medication for their souls. He was clearly dedicated to his profession writ large as well as to God. The original edition opens with attention to the emotions. It is not sufficient, Pinder says, for one to apprehend the passions with his understanding. Through meditation one’s affect becomes inflamed. He specifically names piety and compassion. The Lord’s suffering leaves an imprint upon our hearts, which remains behind when we conclude our formal devotions. Our feelings will be both bitter and of the utmost sweetness, just as our tears will express both these seeming opposites. Christ’s agonies are turned into sweetness for us.18 Pinder’s treatise itself begins with prayers. One reads: Lord Jesus Christ, who voluntarily came to the passion, come into my poor heart through grace. You have restored me through your cross. Again make up for the Fall through that same beatific passion. Grant me, Lord, that in all things I preserve your humility and gentleness,


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and that in flesh and spirit I am completely subordinate to you, so that as your beast of burden you may sit upon me; that with inner peace like a beast of burden you may govern me to your liking.19 As a pre-Reformation Catholic, Pinder accepted and integrated into his account the stories of Jesus’ leave-taking from his mother. He admits that the Gospel writers had not said much about this, but, he adds, the “saintly teachers” have, especially Anselm, Augustine, and John of Capistrano.20 Mary notices that her son is pale and asks “the light of my eyes” why this is the case. Jesus replies: “O blessed mother, you know that I was made man and took on flesh from you. Because of that [flesh], you desire to know the cause of my sadness. I tell you that the time has come in which I will be separated from you by my most bitter passion for the liberation of the human race.” . . . When the mother heard that her son’s death would occur in the near future, oh, God, how she grieved! How many tears flowed out of her eyes! The mother, Mary Magdalene, and Martha of Bethany beg Jesus not to go near the men who they know desire to kill him.21 They urge him to celebrate Passover there with them. He explains again that this time has been set by God himself. The women have no choice but to accept Christ’s wishes. “And so, on Maundy Thursday morning, they [mother and son] knelt down weeping and kissing [and] took their leave of one another.”22 The Virgin vows to accompany him throughout his coming torment, but he begs her not to, inasmuch as her tears only increase his ordeal. “A sword pierces my heart whenever I see you weeping.” He asks her to go to the home of the one to whom he would commend her—meaning John, the Beloved Disciple. But Mary thinks he means Judas, whom she begs to look after Jesus. Pinder attributes this anecdote to St. Bernard.23 This misunderstanding might have aroused horror in readers, for they knew of Judas’s betrayal. Drawing on some acknowledged and some unacknowledged sources, Pinder then proceeds from inner struggle to affront to agony and death. He omits the Last Supper and begins with Christ’s fear of his approaching torture. He devotes a separate entry—there are sixty-five in all—to each aspect of the Savior’s ordeal, intending each singly to be the blood-star of mental concentration for the pious Christian’s day or hour. Each meditative exertion contains within itself particular lessons or helps. Apropos of Jesus’ anxiety in the Garden of Gethsemane, Pinder draws this instruction (Lehr): Like Christ, we should find a place apart from others to pray over our sadness, troubles, pains, and weaknesses. Like him, we must finally relinquish them all to God’s will. “For

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just as the suffering of Christ has produced endless fruits [the Fruits of the Passion] in heaven and on earth, so will our pains and troubles bear fruit to the extent that we entrust them to the Passion of Christ; they will bring joy to the angels in heaven, merits to the righteous on earth, pardon to sinners, and great refreshment to the poor souls in purgatory.”24 It is noticeable that upon Christ’s arrest, Pinder does not go on at length against the Jews. He does identify the Jews as those who “laid their godless hands” upon Jesus, and all readers will know to extend that identity to all those who initially afflict Christ in person and who incite the Roman soldiers, by means of Pilate, to do so in their stead.25 The first harangue against the Jews comes in article 17, “The Spitting”: “The shameless flippancy of the Jews . . . stained the countenance of the Savior with spit. . . . It was the Jews’ custom to spit into the face of that person whom they wished to insult and shame. Oh, abominable jealousy of the Jews, that they are not offended to taint and stain with spittle that so lovely and beautiful face into which the angels yearn to look.”26 This is clearly meant, as wherever we have encountered it, to create sensations of sympathy by rousing to anger against the Jews. In his article 20, Pinder returns to the intolerable grief of the Virgin Mary as John finds her in Bethany and tells her of her son’s fearsome suffering. The author attributes this story to “some” (es sagen etliche).27 We have seen this version in the renderings of preachers. Hurrying to speak with Mary, he calls to her from the doorway, which the Magdalene opens. John enters howling and weeping. Mary herself is in similar condition already, even before she hears the news. She has been trembling, terrified, and praying. Now she cries out to John, “Where is my son? Where is Jesus, my only comfort, how does it go with him? Is he still living, or have the Jews already killed him?” John is barely able to recover himself, he is snuffling and hiccupping (Häschetzen) so much. He manages to answer, “To be sure, he is not dead, but it is their intent that he should die. They hold him tied up in the house of Caiaphas, and the roguish Pharisees and the learned in Scripture say that he should be condemned to death.”28 The following article has Mary running with her “sisters” through the streets of Jerusalem, “half dead with unspeakable weeping, sobbing (seufzen), and lamenting . . . pouring forth tears without ceasing.” When they reach the place where he is held and he perceives their presence, as he had predicted his pain increases “to the highest degree.”29 Pinder draws a parallel between clerical garments and the purple gown that Christ was compelled to wear. After listing all manner of correspondence, he notes that priests who perform the Mass must have a particular emotional bond with Christ. “Through contemplation they should have an understanding of the suffering of Christ,” bearing its details in their memory. In their


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preparation for the rite as in carrying it out, they should feel a right pity for him. They must not only act out their duty properly but they must also sympathize inwardly with Christ. Otherwise, they truly mock him.30 As he depicts the Jews ranting to Pontius Pilate for Jesus’ crucifixion, he estimates that there were 80,000 of them—of whom, he adds, Peter subsequently converted 3,000 on just one occasion, and Paul another 5,000.31 Such numbers are designed to ratchet up anger. As Pinder describes Christ’s carrying of his cross, he draws on St. Bernard’s assertion that many people went along to mock and humiliate further, throwing filth (Koth) even into his face. The revolting features of Golgotha were much in evidence. There was nothing but horror and stench at that place where one hanged and beheaded criminals. Jesus was crucified, then, among the most despicable villains and their remains, for many corpses still hung upon the instruments of their execution, and many bones and skulls lay strewn about the ground.32 It is unclear whether Pinder thinks that the Jews literally or only morally pounded twenty-six times on the nails that were driven into Jesus’ hands and thirty-six times on those that penetrated his feet.33 Jesus’ own torture increased through his having to listen to the screams of the criminals who were being crucified on either side of him.34 In an article entitled “Sympathy for Maternal Pain,” Pinder addresses the speech of Christ in which he entrusts his mother to John’s care. He elaborates on Mary’s sensations again, depicting her suffering in ways designed to affect readers.35 As a very special person, she was able to love her son more than any other mother had ever loved hers. Her suffering was thus worse than any other human mother’s could ever be.36 When Jesus noted her presence, “all his innards were moved on her account. He bore pity toward his afflicted mother and sent her back her arrow of love, so that they could mutually say, ‘You have wounded my heart with the glance of your eyes.’”37 She now made up for the fact that she had experienced no pain in giving birth. She poured out her tears and voiced her lamentation, but in contrast, she was manly in her perdurance at the cross.38 She should have fallen into unconsciousness as a result of her pain, but she did not. “Even the men [who witnessed her grieving] were moved to pity and mourning.”39 This observation was an encouragement to Pinder’s audience to find their empathetic capability and to sorrow with the Virgin. The medical doctor has no difficulty in explaining Christ’s cry, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” Pinder’s position is that Jesus had to endure every possible human pain without mitigation. This was his inner cry of despair. It did not represent a fall from perfection.40 After Jesus’ death and his deposition from the cross, Mother Mary could not relinquish her son’s body. Certain that the tableau that constituted every pietà had actually taken place, Pinder remarks that the Virgin became covered

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in blood. He imagines tension between Mary and Joseph of Arimathea, for she would not let go of the corpse across her lap, and he desired to proceed with the burial.41 She examined and kissed each one of his wounds “and could not be sated by her looking and weeping.” Bystanders thought that her flesh and her spirit would melt together in a lake of tears.42 After the entombment, the disciples had to carry the “half dead” Mary home. Prostrated by her experiences, she could not accompany the other three women to the grave on Sunday morning. Pinder prefers the explanation that the Virgin already knew that her son would not be there, that he had risen. He self-consciously adopts the popular story that Jesus appeared to his mother before anyone else: “And even though, to be sure, this appearance first of all to the Mother of God is not contained in the Gospel, the teachers regard it as proper and beyond doubt.”43 Jesus was wearing white garments. Although Mary arose with tears when she saw him, her close examination of his wounds and his face turned her grief to happiness. “Oh, with what joy her maternal heart is filled when she saw her son free of pain! And she knew that he would not only live eternally but that he would rightly rule over all creatures in heaven and earth.”44 Ulrich Pinder was highly educated, sufficiently well-to-do to publish his own books until or unless commercial printers saw potential commercial value in bringing them out, and deeply pious.45 He had absorbed the lessons of varied preachers, to be sure, but especially atypical was his direct resort to the ancient and medieval sources of devotion to the Passion. He was a model Catholic of his pre-Reformation day. His sixty-five articles, far more than needed for just the Lenten and Holy Week season, suggest his placement of Christ’s suffering at the center of his reflections all year round—as indeed theologians across denominational lines would later agree that it should be. Of greatest importance for present purposes are the physicality and the intensity of emotion that he holds out to those who use his guides. In this he reflects both his sources, from the Gospel writers to Reinhard von Laudenburg (d. 1502), and the culture of palpability that prevailed in his day. We may speculate that the last, von Laudenburg, working in Nuremberg, Pinder’s home town too, until his death, may have affected the physician’s assumptions in person.46 Pinder demands of the committed that they enumerate and share each of Christ’s physical torments and that this corporality draw their sensibilities into accord with those of the Savior as much as possible. This lending by the penitent worshiper of his and her complete self to the cognition of suffering is in itself a meritorious work, but it also precipitates the person into comprehension of responsibility for these dire events. Christ’s bleeding body is both physically and metaphorically at the kernel of Christian meaning. The devout must


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share in this body with all the strength of their imaginations, with all their ability to create sensation, with all their powers to evoke empathy, and by participation in the Eucharist. During the high and late Middle Ages, they were encouraged to permit the Virgin to assist them. Her feminine inclination to love of child, sympathy, and tearfulness presumably fostered similarities in those who concentrated upon her. Yet, it strikes this modern interpreter as even more soul-rending, using the gendered value-system of that day, to contemplate the masculine Lord of the Universe brought low through the abuses to which his tormenters subjected him. They violated his manly honor, whereas Mary remained an exemplar of womanhood, even when she exceeded the lower feminine standard in persevering at the cross. The elite Ulrich Pinder and the “teachers” on whom he relies, as well as their successors in early-modern Catholicism, remain closer to the broad assumptions of the populace concerning the interspersion and interpenetration of the intangible divine within the phenomenal. At no time do Catholic leaders demand that the people in their charge rend the visible and the invisible to the extent that Protestant authorities would. Within Catholicism a continuity prevails that facilitates popular access to the ceremonially dramatized meaning of the faith, even if not to the mediational circle that is closed off to all but the priestly few.47

Justitia Sengers Little is know about Justitia Sengers other than what she herself or her publisher revealed in the 1593 reprint of her book, From the Holy Ghost’s Description of the Suffering and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ, by a Maiden Who Was Born Blind, Justitia Sengers in Braunschweig.48 The Herzog August Bibliothek counts nine copies of the first edition of 1586 among its collections, which hints at a wide circulation of this lengthy book—it was not a “little book” as she repeatedly asserted. The foreword, dated 14 December 1585, dedicates the work to King Frederick II of Denmark, the son of Christian III. While this does not necessarily indicate that Sengers sprang from the upper burgher classes of Braunschweig, it hints at her self-confidence. She does, however, note that God has graced her with “spiritual and material (leiblichen) goods.” That she became literate despite her handicap suggests that a parent or other person charged with her oversight took the effort to have her instructed in the formation of letters and must have read devotional literature to her regularly. Alternatively, she may have dictated her reflections. In addition, it is clear that she attended the Lutheran sermons held in her community. She was acquainted with the Bible and had some knowledge of the life, career, and teachings of Martin Luther.

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In her foreword, she purports to have been driven by the Holy Spirit to write, even though she was reluctant. She tells of her long-term resistance to the impulse “because I know well that the majority will despise this.” But finally she had to be obedient to God’s will. Although she could not view the world with her physical eyes, “he nevertheless so richly illuminated me and so plentifully blessed me with the light of his cognition that I can never sufficiently extol and praise him.” She is, she insists, “his most inferior maid.”49 At the same time, she defends herself as author. Women, too, are allowed to praise God and have made up songs, such as “Miriam, Mary, [and] Monica.” She concludes, “Despite the fact that there will be many who will not like this little book and will speak idle things about me, such as that I wrote out of arrogance, etc., God will know how to check such loose mouths (Meulern).”50 Sengers’s selection of the sixty-ninth Psalm as her starting point has a dual significance. Its cry of despair to God may be seen as suited to Christ’s dire circumstances as he endured all that befell him at the end of his life. It may also bespeak the unenviable position of a disadvantaged person in early-modern society. Physical disabilities often barred one from entering into marriage and other contracts, guild membership, and positions of authority. So profound was the prejudice against such people during the sixteenth century that Sengers could well have said about herself, “More in number than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause; mighty are those who would destroy me, those who attack me with lies.”51 Pregnant women would have avoided even the sight of her for fear that they, as a result, would bear a blind child. The key concept throughout Sengers’s book is consolation. The word Trost appears unendingly, and the title of the first edition is Trostbüchlein, Little Book of Comfort. Every dimension of Jesus’ ordeal reminds the author of the placation to be drawn from it. We may well believe that in her circumstances she needed to be consoled. Her Lutheran faith clearly held out to her the hope of this spiritual remedy by means of Christ’s death on the cross. The underlying premises of her treatment are humans’ sinfulness and the Redeemer’s “hearty, burning, and fiery love” for us. She draws the events and the agony of the Passion realistically, but not in the detail of some Catholic preachers. She seems to wish to convince of physical suffering but not to require of her readers that they fully share that pain so much as that they grasp Jesus’ love in willingly undergoing it. We must understand the pain, to be sure, in order fully to appreciate the intensity of God’s devotion to his human children; but the latter is ultimately her focus. In remarking on Jesus’ excruciating meditation in the Garden of Gethsemane, she stresses that in bearing even this first stage, the psychological struggle, Christ defeated the devil and took away the sting of death.52 We are to derive from this “the splendid comfort. Your Lord


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Christ leads you with him into the garden in order to give you a certain sign that he loves you, yes, that he is your friend; and we should not let this comfort be taken away.”53 Whenever we think that we cannot bear the weight of our cross, “we should seize upon the splendid comfort of knowing that we have the Lord with us.”54 She frames even God’s punishment as loving in intent rather than born of his rage. When God sends misfortune upon us, it is because he wishes us to flourish eternally.55 Even when we find that we cannot pray, he sends the Holy Spirit into our hearts to pray on our behalf. The Holy Spirit represents us mightily, putting “unspeakable sighs” into our mouths, and it will save us, in the next world if not in this.56 This informal doctrine of substitution for the Christian soul by the Holy Spirit is surely uncommon and bears witness to Sengers’s fundamental optimism in her resort to the saving intentions of the Deity. By contrast, her attitude toward the Jews conforms to the mood that prevailed in her day. She declares that “almost the entire Jewish people, including his [Jesus’] own blood relations, were hostile toward him.”57 “The entire Jewish people . . . was so aroused against the Lord Christ—just like the hounds when they have a wild animal and cannot be sated until they have ripped it to pieces. Just so is this people. It could not be satisfied until it had killed our Lord Christ.”58 God sent the Messiah to the Jews, but they cast this gift to the four winds.59 He had the temple destroyed because of Jewish thanklessness and “the many gruesome sins in which they lived.” They had made the temple into a den of murderers.60 She contrasts Jewish “blindness” with her own. Theirs is of the heart. She may be physically blind, but she enjoys the more important inner enlightenment.61 Her anti-Jewish commentary does not consist of lengthy accusations but are rather encountered intermittently, a steady theme if in low decibel. Nevertheless, she insists, we ourselves are the ones who brought this upon Jesus by means of our sins.62 She has some idea of God’s providence, for she writes of the Trinity’s having laid down all that would happen “because it was pleasing to him [God the Father].” A lack of clarity here does not concern her. She opines elsewhere that most people would be lost despite Christ’s sacrifice. This was not God’s fault but people’s own. God desires, she states, every person’s salvation.63 Still, he had “elected us before the foundations of the world were laid.” God foresaw the Fall but did not prevent it, so that he could demonstrate his love for his children. She refers to Jesus as “God’s elected Son.”64 The Son left his throne in heaven and came into the world for us, to become our highest prince of victory.65 Later on, she states that God’s decisions are beyond our knowledge. We should do as Martin Luther did, which was to cling to the cradle in Bethlehem in which the infant Jesus lay. That child is God’s counsel and will.66 Her own culture, and perhaps her very pastor, lent her the metaphor of the Christian soul as knight. She prays to Christ, “Oh, you unconquerable prince

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of victory, strengthen me with your divine might so that as a Christian soldier, I may battle like a knight, and in every hardship and trouble finally triumph and emerge victorious.” Her booty will be eternal life.67 We should not be ashamed to weep when our cross seems too heavy, she advises. We should take comfort from the fact that Christ endured this too.68 Our tears are for ourselves and not for the Savior. This author does indeed attend to Jesus’ corporeal ordeal. She describes his being beaten, covered with wounds, despised, soaked in blood, derided, crowned, garbed in purple, struck in the face with fists and on the head with the thick reed (Rohr).69 Her account, however, is abbreviated and her emphasis slight when compared with all Catholic preachers and even a few Lutheran preachers of her time. She uses the catch-all phrase, “and whatever else happened to him,” instead of drawing out her portrayal of Christ’s afflictions.70 The prayers she intersperses throughout the Passion story all concentrate on assuagement: “O LORD Jesus Christ, who are the strength of the weak, the power of those who toil (der Mühseligen), the comfort of the troubled, a joy to the sad, an aid to those who are tempted, a God of comfort and of patience.”71 Finally, in connection with Jesus’ death, and in anticipation of her own, she looks forward eagerly. She foretells that with the Second Coming, she will be made to see, just like the servant of Elisha in 2 Kings 6:15–17. She and all the elect will be surrounded by the Trinity: the Father, “that unfathomable light who will illumine us”; the Son, the eternal sun of righteousness, “the radiance of the glory of his Father, which will fill heaven with its gleam and transfigure us”; and the Holy Spirit, “that fire of divine love,” who will make our hearts fiery and impassioned about all heavenly things.72 Sengers’s treatise is close to what we have come to expect of Lutheran preaching on the Passion in this period. Mary hardly appears in it. Its details of Jesus’ suffering are fewer than Catholics described, for its underlying principles are different. Sengers’s perspective is, like that of those who guided her, that Christians need to be aware of what their Savior endured so that they will not take the atonement lightly. Their own bodies do not need to bear the imprint of Jesus’ agony. The Lutheran’s attention has shifted, from the acts that produced such painful sensations and the shedding of blood, to blood as metaphor. Although Jesus shed his actual blood, this corporeal reality came for Luther and his followers to be subsumed under the abstraction of blood as the symbol of the atonement. The salient feature to be recalled is that Christ’s sacrifice effected our reconciliation with God and thereby enabled our salvation. The devout will naturally feel tremendous relief, pacification, and gratitude. All their anxieties are now assuaged; they may take comfort in the assuredness of their acceptability to God.


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Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg Two generations later, another layperson, a Lutheran woman, recorded her ideal devotion to and her experience of the Passion of Christ. She was as socially atypical as Pinder had been. Not only her noble status and her early literary inclinations set Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (1633–1694) apart from the commoners around her.73 She was born Baroness von Seyssenegg near Amstetten, Austria. She was raised in the Lutheran creed, but at a time when, as they were able, the Habsburg rulers were taking measures to compel the nobility to return to the Catholic fold or lose their patrimonies. The choice became conversion or impoverishment. By the Edict of Restitution of 1629, Ferdinand II banned Lutheran clergy and teachers. Von Greiffenberg was educated by her mother and then by her uncle Hans Rudolf von Greiffenberg (whom she later married) in Latin, theology, philosophy, history, and science.74 She was regarded as a prodigy. At the age of eighteen, she underwent what we would call a conversion experience, a spiritual crisis and enhancement that informed her recollections from that time on. For a number of years von Greiffenberg sustained her faith through reading and correspondence. Personally intrepid, she attempted to convert Emperor Leopold I. A widow, she lost her husband’s and her own lands and retired to Nuremberg, where she enjoyed moral support for her steadfastness. She took an active part in the intellectual life of that imperial city, even heading the local chapter of a German literary society, the Lilienzunft.75 From her first publication, an initial volume of “spiritual sonnets” (Geistliche Sonette, 1662), her authorial endeavors were the product of her spiritually charged psyche. Her strength in every trial was derived from, as she saw it, her intense relationship with Jesus. The first part of her meditations on the life and miracles of Christ, On the Very Most Holy and Very Most Healing Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ, appeared in 1672, when she was thirty-nine.76 What makes the Frau von Greiffenberg problematic to use in the matter of lay reception is precisely the fact that she did not hear the Passion preached, unless, perchance, she attended a Catholic Holy Week observance. This seems unlikely. She writes in her preface to the reader—she does aspire toward an actual readership—that she had written in isolation. “I wrote it not alone as a simple, weak, and unlearned woman (Weibsbild), but in addition in such loneliness that I was removed from the consultation of wise and learned people and all assistance.”77 It is more probable that she read collections of Passion postils, for her family, including her former-tutor husband, presided over a collection of books, the extent of which was manifestly beyond merely adequate. Through this library she had acquired her own exceptional erudition. The impassioned and occasionally erotic nature of her meditations is reminiscent of long-standing

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Catholic tradition and in particular of its mystical elements.78 Perhaps she had read Catholic sermons as well as Lutheran ones, for via the printing press both were available to her. Especially as a result of her strong ties to educated Nuremberg circles, she could have obtained Lutheran examples that she did not already own. The Nuremberg connection would help to explain the consolatory dimension of her Passion reflections. In the degree of emphasis she places upon Trost, she departs from the prevalent Catholic mood. Lady Catharina Regina’s meditations begin with the anointing of Christ’s feet with costly perfume in Bethany. Apart from the act itself, she notes that the Lord did not shun women. He honored all women in defending this one.79 She turns this one woman’s sacrificial deed into a metaphor for life. She must be ready at any time out of love to smash the vessel of her life and of her heart. She wishes to commit herself with the same devotion to her Savior. She yearns: Oh, that all my thoughts, doings, and invention [or her poetry, Dichten] flowed into the love and honor of you, just as the rivers pour into the sea! That I could think of nothing else but your love and your suffering! speak of nothing other than your wounds and miracles! write (dichten) to no other purpose than your honor and magnification; do nothing except what was the most pleasant and dearest to you, O most worthy Treasure of my Soul (Seelen=Schatz)!80 Interspersed throughout her prose composition are those poems, often sonnets, for which she is most famed today. In these she releases the full dazzle of her mystical vision: “Heart, glow fully! Desires, sit still [and] unenflamed! You veins, move and leap! Melt apart, strength and spirit! Flow out into words of commendation! Let Jesus be praised!”81 Such mystical effulgence characterizes her poems throughout—but not only her poems. In contemplating the Last Supper, she is explicitly Lutheran, urging those who will meditate along with her not to doubt that the flesh of Christ is indeed “with and in the bread.” “Receive,” she urges, “that one who has taken your illness and pain upon himself so that you will be healed. Eat the real and true Easter lamb, physically and substantially.” She continues, “Drink, my dears, and become drunk! Drink, I say, the juice of redemption, the power of love, the nectar of heaven, the wine of joy, the blood of the immortality of the dying, which makes you live forever!”82 She concludes in verse: My heart is your heart in its inner core. O my mouth, for love kiss and eat him all! O soul and gullet, leap as one And consume the spirit of lust!83


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In her lengthy consideration of Jesus on the Mount of Olives, she enlists her entire body in the praise of God: her legs, thighs, knees, liver, lungs, heart, hands, throat, tongue, lips, cheeks, eyes, forehead, brain, memory, will, skull, and veins.84 Like all of her contemporaries, she believes that Christ quite literally sweated blood (attested in Luke 22:44), and this miracle is the object of further exuberance. She expresses confidence in the Savior’s unique atonement. “The most pure one is soaked over and over with blood, so that our blood-red sins are made as snow! O marvel! The snow here turns purple, the lily to rose, alabaster into red marble, and the milk-white body of Jesus into a blood-spraying grape, trodden in the winepress of divine wrath. . . . He alone sweats blood on account of our sins: for that reason, our expiation is to be ascribed to no one but him.”85 Her celebratory poems are impassioned and captivating, demonstrating the care with which she composed them. For my purposes, to convey their ideational content is more important than to imitate her literary qualities: I want to be a little bee and fly to Jesus-clover. ..................... The purple pearls [drops of bloody sweat] outshine the heavenly stars, They make the spirit well, but mortally ill with love They put out the glow of hell, enflame the fire of thankfulness. Trembling, I set my tongue in motion . . . Suck in the heavenly marrow. Oh, pleasant thing! I suck the juice of godhood, drink from the fountain of the sun. The essence of this same power flows into me, The Three-in-One-Clover yields its honey forth. Possessing this Allness, what can one desire more?86 Lady Catharina Regina decries the evil of Judas’s deeds and marvels at Jesus’ ongoing love of his enemy.87 She reserves her vehemence specifically against the Jews for their behavior at the court of Pontius Pilate. Yet, before this it is clear, despite her poetic nomenclature for Christ’s malefactors (KriegsFurien, Plaggeistern), she knows their religious identity.88 With her mind’s eye, she watches them attack him and longs to be adequately repentant. The cause of Jesus’ torment does not escape her. We! Oh, we have all been his damners with our sins! All the sins of all people have brought about this damnation! Oh, that we all, or at least I, could sufficiently regret them! Oh, heart! Why do you not spring apart from horror and pain? You blood vessels! Why do you

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not explode from the pounding and raging of the repentant blood? You kidneys and intestines! How are you not melted together and poured out from innermost sorrow and yearning, because you caused the death of the very sweetest friend?89 Her question echoes the dire fate of Judas, whose innards do, in her retelling as in others, pour out when he hangs himself.90 Jesus is brought before Pilate. Frau von Greiffenberg hoots at the Jews for wishing not to sully themselves by entering the courtroom: “A further continuation of their hypocrisy! The stone courthouse is supposed to make them impure when they already carry in their hearts the font of all impurity, evil, and falsehood! They worry that the lifeless stone might infect them, but they fear no injury from the dragon in their conscience.”91 In this meditation, she expresses heights of feeling: All spirits and drops of blood will receive you with jubilation and joy. All senses sing and exult, all powers strain and praise so that impulses to feeling grow excited and bold to meet you; so that the sensibilities pour out their deepest emotion and, touched to the depths, become almost unconscious in drawing you to themselves. Desires will practically melt together out of love, to take you into themselves. In sum: the entire heart will glow and flame to have part in you.92 In her mystical ebullience she resonates deeply with strains of the Christian past that Protestantism would, in the short term, attempt to eliminate. Indeed, without referring to the Virgin Mary, she assumes the demeanor that Catholic preachers very often ascribed to the Mother of God, examples of whom we have encountered in chapter 5 above. Her choices among available precedents do not always conform to those of Martin Luther and his followers. Yet, she is able to define the Lutheran doctrine of the relationship of bread and body, wine and blood; and she decries the Catholic practice of reserving the chalice for the priesthood, describing this as denying the laity “the spirit of love, the power of redemption, the balsam of divinity, the angel of ardor, the very dearest flameriver of the sweetest love.”93 In response to the Jews’ crying, “Crucify him!” the noblewoman strives toward ever greater invention: Oh, gratitude, rise up! Swing your wing of praise over all the clouds, yes even to the third heaven! Turn all the sun’s particles to eagles of honor, so that they may fly upward with the praise of Christ and perpetually renew it. My heart, draw therefrom the juice and might of


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every growth of spring—those that flowed into the laurels and palms of the forest of praise that was devoted to my Redeemer. Ah, if only the praise of Jesus were a certain plant or another creature, and I could actually turn myself into it!94 As she tells of Pilate’s having Jesus beaten, Frau von Greiffenberg calls the Roman soldiers not merely bestial but “tiger-tyrannical” and their deeds “panther-evil.”95 She describes the thorns pressing into Christ’s head. She yearns, “Ah, if I could only hold my mouth to catch these drops [of blood]! Oh, lovely stream of roses! Let my soul be a channel through which you flow. . . . I desire to throw myself under this marvel- and wound-art and rain of fire and feel the delightful moisture of it.”96 His actual crucifixion causes opposing sensations in her. She is thrown into confusion. It: opens in me the depths of dismay and praise, so that I don’t know to which I should stride, with which I should begin, or which I should most highly and particularly attend to. I become poor out of riches, dumb out of a desire to praise, and faint from an excessive flood of thoughts. How can I express the dismay that I feel over the suffering that is joined to the Divine Majesty, over the humiliation of the Most High, over the worm-wretchedness of the very Glory of Heaven?97 Frau von Greiffenberg professes deep sympathy for the Virgin Mary, who stood, she says, by the cross together with Mary’s sister and Mary Magdalene. They stood there, the writer explains, not out of desire for revenge but out of love. “They felt his wounds and nails in their hearts and his anxiety in their souls.” “His thorns pierce them through marrow and bone. They endlessly embraced the stem of the cross, which was spattered with his blood.” Mary’s suffering is inestimable, for she had swaddled Jesus’ tender hands and feet, through which nails had now been driven. She had nursed him through his “dearest mouth” with her “heart-honey and breast-sugar.” Catharina Regina describes at length both hers and her son’s feelings as they looked upon one another.98 Frau von Greiffenberg may reveal her lack of pastoral guidance in the unusual way in which she deals with Christ’s seeming despair as he cries out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” She rejects his sense of abandonment and concludes that because he addresses his Heavenly Father, even though he might feel removed from the divine presence, he nevertheless perceives God’s sustenance (Erhaltung). “Even if every sensation of divinity [the divine presence] departs from me, he is actually present in his existence

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(wesenheit).”99 When he gives up his spirit, Jesus means to say, in keeping with the fulfillment of the atonement, “Rejoice! You are liberated if you repent and believe in me. You are free from the bonds of sin, the law, and bad conscience, death, the Last Judgment, and hell. You are free from their punishments, curse, judgment, and pain if you only desire to be comforted by my atonement.” Sin is paid for, the law fulfilled, and death is conquered.100 In celebrating the significance of Christ’s side-wound and the blood and water that flowed out of it, she again waxes lyrical. She resorts to the metaphor of the convent, which remained familiar to her because of her lifetime of residence in Counter-Reformation Austria. This wound, she declares, is my cloister, into which by oath I swear myself to voluntary poverty, entire obedience, and perpetual chastity. I let myself be clad in this purple [the blood from Christ’s side] and dedicate myself with this very most blessed holy water; I have my hair shorn of all empty desires, I throw away the wreath of all vileness, and I say, “World! Take this little wreath, the reward of vanity! My Jesus is giving me the eternal crown.” After her novitiate, she adds, she intends to become a choir-sister “and sing and ring [the bell].”101 Frau von Greiffenberg is a curious hybrid of varying strains that she has inherited and that continue to surround her in her homeland. Although a Lutheran, we must assume that this Lutheranism, even before the Edict of Restitution, took shape in reciprocity with the Catholicism around it. Catharina Regina’s heights of feeling are of course partly the result of her own inclination and capacities. At the same time, they reflect the mystical heritage that she remained free to select from the palette of late-medieval Catholic spiritual offerings. She has absorbed the doctrinal core of genuine Lutheranism, but the culture of that creed has not developed fully around her. Its teachings existed within a traditional matrix that allowed extremes of physical involvement in devotion, in conceptualization as well as act. This milieu may have allowed her, too, to cultivate the near-ecstasy that she is wont to express in her meditations on the Passion, both in prose and poetic form. Just how Catholic patterns penetrated her awareness would make an interesting study—if it were possible to reconstruct it. She must have seen Catholic shrines and other works of art whenever she ventured out of her manor-house. Mary’s remaining prominent for her could perhaps be explained by the persuasive power of these images. If some of her servants, the peasants on her lands, and other retainers were also Catholic or influenced by the Church’s culture, this fact, too, might have provided an ingredient that would elsewhere have jarred Lutheran sensibilities. As


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stated at the beginning of this chapter, it is highly credible today that influence flowed from her underlings upward into the noble ranks. At the same time, the Protestantism of the seventeenth century, like contemporary Catholicism, existed within a baroque environment. Across creedal boundaries, color and movement and the sentiments that both expressed were appealing. The manifestations of this esthetic and this mood cannot be entirely suppressed even in Reformed sanctuaries.102 Lutheranism itself is accommodating impulses that soon will be called Pietist and that must be seen as more openly emotive than the first five generations of Lutheran theologians might have preferred. Catharina Regina’s exuberance and mysticism may, then, also reflect developments in the spiritual conventions of her day. The shifts that are evident in the late seventeenth century help to explain why I have chosen not to proceed chronologically farther.

Other Voices Other literary remains from the Lutheran sphere in the seventeenth century suggest that among noblewomen, a culture of devotion, including devotion concentrated on the Passion, arose in their circles. It was pronounced by the middle of the seventeenth century. It deserves further historical research. This perception provides a broader context for the meditations of Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg. Despite those features that make her outpouring distinctly her own, and despite her isolation as a Protestant in Austria, she forms part of a wider subculture of high-ranking women’s piety. Within northern and eastern Germany, the gradual rise of individual and pious strains of Christian practice that would result in Pietism (as opposed to the mastery of theological precepts) blends in with this feminine noble culture. Henrietta Katharina von Gersdorf (1648–1726), the grandmother of Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and a friend of August Hermann Francke, wrote and saw to press a pamphlet of highly emotional verse on the Passion.103 It opens with her call to weep:

JESVS! Where are you, Tears? What makes you tarry? Why do you not hasten immediately to frequent flowing? You daughter of pain, arrive! Ah, ah, what stays you? Run out of this eye-pair with all your might! Weep, weep without ceasing, you faithful star-gazers, Pour plentifully from my cheeks, you damp daughters of sorrow,

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You stream of tearful mildness, you rivulet of misery, flow! Oh, forth! Why do you neglect to pour? For now is the time to mourn and lament, Because my Jesus is dead; his trembling, fear, and quailing Are now repeated. I give him such pain Through my debt—should that not be bewailed?104 .................... I can best refresh (laben) myself from my Jesus’ death If I now bring forth regretful tears As full of love and faith as I am able, To fruitfully look upon his anguish, fear, and death .................... Give me [God] a weeping heart with which to repent of sin.105 Only having set the proper mood can she proceed to the story itself. Her telling is brief and poetic. Jesus sweats blood. The disciples abandon him at his arrest. Baroness von Gersdorf interrupts repeatedly to call again for tears: If you feel my mood and Jesus ponder rightly, Flow, my tears, spring from your eye-fountain!106 She calls the Jews a “godless pack.” They are, she versifies, “a brood of vipers, false Pharisees.”107 She longs for words adequate to condemnation of the Jews when they wished to post guards at Christ’s tomb to ensure that no one stole his corpse. Ah, if I could search out here sufficient words This false and obdurate heart, as proper, to confound, In grim serpent-style that grimly after [Jesus’] death With embittered sense still slander their God.108 She attacks the Roman Church as well, a century and a half after the Reformation’s beginning and a number of years after the close of the Thirty Years’ War. The bitterness of creedal conflict has not yet subsided. Here persists in von Gersdorf’s work the emotion of boundary maintenance: Yes, those who are called the head and holy fathers of the Church, These are the most wicked of all those who rip apart Christ’s flocks; They are like wild wolves: [they desire that] the little heap Of the truly faithful should be exterminated.109


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Judas was not among the early faithful. He “hanged himself and burst in two. This was his treachery’s reward.” He was cast into hell.110 The noblewoman outlines in several pages the torment of Christ before Pilate, the Jews’ calling for his crucifixion, Pilate’s having him rebeaten, the imposition of the crown of thorns, the mockery of Jesus. She breaks into lamentation, calling herself once more to profound grief: Ah, if only my heart could pour itself out like a brook! Oh, if only blood could flow from my eyes As I bewailed that inner pain That I prepared for you, Jesus, through my sin! Be ever praised, my helper, healing, and life, Who through your death gave life to me.111 In depicting Christ’s word to the criminal on his right-hand side, “Verily thou shalt be with me in paradise today,” Baroness von Gersdorf applies this mercy to his faithful in her own time: This does my Jesus still, striking our sin down, He speaks to us as friend and comforts the soul again. When we almost completely expire in our hardship and pain, He shows us his kingdom and its glory.112 She concludes with projection toward the hour of her death. Even when she can no longer speak, either aloud or in poetry, she wishes her spirit to be commended to Christ: Yes, lead me through, out of all suffering and pain, From this [world of ] vanity to steady bliss and joy, That I the angels’ song, like [all] the elect, May sing to you eternally in your Father’s realm.113 Henrietta Katharina von Gersdorf was a friend of August Hermann Francke. If she was Zinzendorf’s grandmother, her contemporary Philipp Jakob Spener was his godfather. Clearly, by her day the lines between orthodox Lutheranism and its latter-day practitioners the Pietists, whose leaders Spener and Francke were, were beginning to blur. Pietism fostered emotive commitment, self-examination, and personal correction of sinful ways. Like Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, von Gersdorf both tapped traditions of long standing that continued to flourish, and incorporated new elements in her devotions that, whether she perceived them as such, were available to her. Or were these practices of self-criticism and affective piety indeed a revival of a late-medieval

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Catholic approach to religiosity that in Lutheranism had never been entirely suppressed? Not everyone was attracted to them. Elisabeth Juliane (1634–1704) was a Danish princess who became duchess of Braunschweig and Lüneburg through her marriage to Duke Anton-Ulrich in 1565. She and her husband pursued a lively, arts-filled court life. But worldly pleasures did not prevent her from producing a fat collection of devotions. As said above, this activity may have been requisite for the “good noblewoman” of her day, but piety must have motivated it as well. She founded a convent (Damenstift) in the orangerie of the couple’s castle at Salzdahlum, for Lutheranism had never fully eliminated female monasticism. Several of her meditations are prayers inspired by the Passion.114 The duchess indicates expressly that recollection on the Passion occurs at one season: “Highly praised God, because the time when you experienced your Passion approaches again, grant that I experience the same with penitent heart and broken spirit.”115 And in another place: “Oh, most worthy, most noble Splendor, my one Salvation, Lord Jesus Christ! Now we are in observance of your Passion. Ah, grant that we remember the same with proper seriousness and diligence and ever bear you, Crucified Christ, in our hearts and thoughts.”116 The deep lowering of self before the Divinity and the cultivation of grief are a temporary annual exercise—but nonetheless sincere as she carries them out. She begs Christ to grant her the proper frame of mind: Dearest Jesus, with your cross shatter and bruise my stone-hard heart, yes, make it soft so that you can impress your image into it and I become your follower. Then I shall examine my way of living [and study] whether it is directed in your paths and not according to the sinful ocean of this world. Ah, you only blessedness, allow me by your grace to consider what is the most useful to me: to walk with you or with the world. If I let myself be guided by the world, yes, when I concern myself about it and look toward its transitory glory, what do I have to await as a result except anguish, danger, and ruin? When the world passes away, all the effort that I expended in and for the sake of the world is gone and lost, and I have as my reward only regret and pain. But, my Jesus, if with you I endure shame, mockery, and contempt, then, when heaven and earth pass away, I can expect from you the eternal crown of joy, and you, transfiguration itself. All trouble will be at an end, and only eternal recompense will be allotted without ceasing. Now, my savior, pour upon me (überschütte mich) this reward in eternity! Amen.


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Every pious Christian desired his own ultimate well-being in the shaping of devotion and the struggle toward upright behavior. Nevertheless, Elisabeth Juliane appears a bit more cursory than those writers with whom we are in a position to compare her. She goes through the proper motions, including seeking the desirable emotions, for this time of year. We do not gain a sense, from what she has left us, of unusual concern for the repose of her soul. She is engaged in this life, which includes meeting the authorial expectations for women of her class. Yet she is sincere. She admits indeed that she does not always lead an inoffensive life: Very dearest Father in heaven, how ashamed and infirm do I stand before you; I dare not lift up my eyes to look upon you in your majesty and glory, for that would be much too terrifying for a person so laden with bloody transgressions, as I find myself. . . . Ah, my heart boils from grief; it ferments (garret) like a dove that has lost its protection and consolation—yes, my heart breaks from sighing to see and enjoy your grace once again. These the most interior eyes of my heart, with which I previously sought and found you, yes, even the penetrating heart-sighs and tears should seek you until I find you again. You, my Light, why do you go so far away? Jesus, Jesus, may your innocence spring to me and make up for my sin; may your martyrdom and suffering assuage and comfort me in my fear and true suffering. Grant me this consolation: that you take to heart this, my innermost [ feeling]. May your heart break, so that you have mercy upon me and that I realize my desire for your grace. I shall not stop seeking you whom my soul so loves. I shall shoot my sighs and tears at you like burning and enamored arrows, my intercessor Jesus, until once again you are wounded with love toward me.117 The former princess beseeches Jesus in biblical and courtly language to be reconciled with her. She is unique among all the writers in demanding that Christ’s own heart break for her. She appears to worry about the Savior’s permanent exclusion of her from the benefits of the atonement. Notwithstanding, she too has digested the lessons of official teaching and preaching and incorporated a more than passable facsimile of them in the prayers she has composed. The obvious lack among these lay voices is a representative of the Reformed tradition. A future reader will inevitably make me aware of a German Calvinist testimony that I could have adopted had I found it. Reformed Protestantism was more relentlessly disciplinary in an already disciplinary age. John Calvin and his followers felt an urgency to compel those in their charge toward right belief and upright lifestyle. They radically altered the liturgical practices of the

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churches. There is evidence of antipathy between pastors and parishioners as a result, although this could also arise within Lutheran communities, too, in the Age of Orthodoxy.118 But popular disinclination toward Calvinism within German-speaking lands is detectable—Paul Münch describes it as massive.119 The debacle of the Thirty Years’ War interrupted attempts to impose righteousness within the Holy Roman Empire. Survival was paramount. But both before and afterward, princes and magistrates exerted themselves, and some ordinary Christians resisted. They did this especially when they thought that their traditional social and economic transactions were under siege. Daniel Tossanus (1541–1602), the Heidelberg divine who was now (1578) writing in exile and smarting from the experience, vented his frustration over some people’s reluctance to submit themselves to the Reformed regimen and accept the elimination of every symbol of the presence of divinity: The people are of such a nature that they would much rather keep company (vmbgehen) with outward and visible ceremonies that don’t belong to the New Testament than worry about the true, inward, and spiritual service of God. And what is pitiable today is that people press so hard in favor of such ceremonies, which are recommended by humans. Although the people, in their writings, argue that those rites that are invented by humans are adiaphora (Mittelding) [and] may be omitted [or not], nevertheless such present-day rituals are the earmarks of the Lutheran churches, as one calls them. People, he goes on, are attracted to these churches because “the discipline of repentance (Buβzucht) is not so strictly adhered to, and each one is allowed to do practically as he wishes.”120 The theologically trained guardians of Calvinist propriety may tacitly even if not explicitly have discouraged the laity from taking up the pen. Had a layperson chanced to articulate a less than perfectly approved version of any point of teaching, he or she might well have heard from the local consistory. This could, of course, equally occur within the more structured Lutheran churches in stable times. We must observe that every lay author but one, the blind woman Justitia Sengers, enjoyed the protections afforded by high rank. That rank also conferred the possibility of exceptional exposure to book-learning as well as—most notable in the case of Ulrich Pinder—the means of financing publication. It is astonishing that in an era when women did not yet write a great deal for public consumption—their principal medium was still the personal epistle— all but one of the laity here discussed are female. But women were expected to be models of piety, and indeed to serve their husbands and other male members of their families as incentives to adhere to churchly norms. They were still


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to serve as Monica in relation to Saint Augustine’s father Patricius. The subjectareas on which they might express themselves without incurring relatives’ and the public’s opposition were housekeeping, health, and piety. They could even allow their thoughts to be published as long as their works proved them exemplars of conformity. It is not surprising, then, that despite their individual differences, these treatments of the Passion fundamentally embody the teachings that the women had heard preached and had read. Justitia Sengers, by contrast, did not enjoy the protections of nobility. She states that she endures derision. Not allowed to marry, she could not play the role of Monica. Although a prodigy, like the court fool, she could be seen in two lights: as a miracle from God in view of her extraordinary gifts, and as a curse upon those in whose proximity she lived. In early-modern society, she was a liminal being. Likewise, comets blazed through the skies, and they portended disaster. The Lutheran lay writers particularly allow us to see the extent to which Lutheranism bore within itself the potential for, and then in the seventeenth century the reality of, a revival of affective devotion to the Passion. It never attained the level of Catholic intensity, however, which was fed by Catholics’ evocation of each and every physical affront to Jesus. Lutherans did not receive the stigmata—or in case any rare Lutheran did, he would quickly have fallen into official disrepute. The great continuous mass of popular sentiment would have been attracted to such a marvel, but the institutional church would have nipped such papist effrontery in the proverbial bud. Like the prophesying of simple folk, which met in Protestantism with an unpleasant fate, this would have constituted an example of popular culture wafting upward and, under new circumstances, being beaten decisively back.121 The atmosphere within early-modern Catholicism was different. Here folk and elite culture, and what lay between on a broad spectrum, could still intertwine. Even as hierarchical attitudes prevailed, the comparative flexibility of real life facilitated flow. The challenge of the witch hunts brought elements to the fore again that, in theory, Protestants, if not Catholics, should have shunned. Yet this perceived assault of the diabolical upon settled humanity soon revealed how thin even in the Calvinist world the veneer of separation between the seen and the unseen actually was.122 Even many learned men were quickly in thrall to ancient folk beliefs.

The Collectivity When the Lutheran Reformation began and preachers bore their interpretations of its messages from town to town over much of Germany, people heard

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them as liberating.123 Many invited each individual to approach the Bible for him- and herself—an incentive to read in some quarters perhaps—and find the truth that lay there. Why not hear the voice of God directly and personally? They held out the promise of eliminating the priestly caste that had grown so immense that its economic parasitism may have seemed about to consume the host (no pun intended) itself. Instead, it offered a priestly position—a figurative one, of course, but not always understood as such—to every Christian; it empowered the faithful. Certain peasants even thought that the invocation of the Bible as the criterion of eternal verities was meant to incorporate the world of social, economic, and judicial arrangements and become the touchstone, too, by which the legitimacy of rural subjugation would be judged. As Peter Blickle has observed, they sought to establish the “godly law.”124 Amid the wariness of the majority, some enthusiasm was perceptible. That minority enthusiasm soon extended further beyond the bounds of permissibility than even its empowered backers envisioned. A few adherents took to the violent destruction of images in the churches. Others, upon reading the Bible or hearing it read, insisted that infant baptism was not represented in its pages and adopted “believers’ baptism.” Magistrates and nobles saw hopeful signs for the mitigation of their financial woes in the advocacy of bringing monasticism and chantry offices to an end. The 1520s were a time of optimism, of experiment, of opportunism. For some they ended in disillusionment—although this dating was postponed in areas that first digested the Reformation later in the century. The great Wurttemberg ecclesiastical ordinance did not appear until 1559, at a time, after the Peace of Augsburg, when the Saxon pioneers were sitting back on their heels and contemplating their future strategy. I am speculating that the people who were usually without a voice began to perceive that while the Reformation had promised much, its most immediate and fulsome gains reposed in the purview of authorities, who since at least the mid-fifteenth century had sought to curtail the privileges of the entire institutional Church. These had found the near-fulfillment of their visions as benefices, properties, and jurisdictions fell into their hands at last.125 These authorities’ justifications of their expanded resources were invariably pious— they invoked the Scripture and the will of God. Who is to say that they were insincere? After having consolidated the most basic religious changes by means of bureaucratic organization, visitations, and ecclesiastical ordinances, they turned to the behavior of the citizenry. There is a direct correlation between the curtailment of emotional display in religiosity and the definition of upright Christianity as quiescent. A desirable quality, continuously for women but now increasingly for men, is Zurückgezogenheit, the spirit of withdrawal and a


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preference for seclusion. Bernd Moeller was entirely correct when he saw that the Reformation embodied the spirit of a new monasticism.126 At one and the same time, it broke with monastic vows and closed most houses, and it was attracted to aspects of the monastic lifestyle and attitude toward community. I would add that this attraction lasted beyond the early Reformation.127 A sign of this affinity is the speed with which Lutheran territories did away with carnival festivities, those embodiments of popular “laughter.” No longer were the lower classes even to pantomime overturning elite hegemony, nor on that one day (often extended to several but ending on Ash Wednesday) to mingle with their betters without qualm. Such long-standing customs as the spinning bee became peremptorily illegal. The people’s determination to continue them is evident in the visitation protocols. Within the arena of quietude, we may see the gentlemen’s affinity for that stoic revival that characterized some educated men’s interests.128 Within Geneva, and subsequently within those German lands that followed its pattern, those in positions of civic and ecclesiastical power strove to compel an even more thoroughgoing tranquillity. Their ministrations sought drastically to curtail the celebratory transactions of traditional culture. Even dancing at weddings was now forbidden. This level of intrusion into personal, theretofore discretionary, life is the key to popular disillusionment. Although they could do little of a formal nature to prevent its exercise, they resorted to opportunistic resistance, as in going across jurisdictional boundaries in order to attend a church fair (Kirmes). The populace at large had initially heard strains of liberation and was drawn to them. In the end, it bore the lashes of disrupted social mechanisms, including prior conceptions of the communal well-being. This was less true, but only by degrees, within Lutheranism than within Calvinism. All were asked to renounce their most outwardly obvious and allegedly disruptive, indeed allegedly evil, expressions of feeling. This was least true within territories that remained or that returned to being Catholic. Catholic powers were as ambivalent about unruliness as their Protestant cousins. Their forced enclosure of nuns reveals this unease. Nevertheless, their tolerance of outer expressions, whether secular or religious, was far greater than within Protestantism. Just as they were convinced that physical participation in Christ’s Passion could lead inward to repentance and reform of life, so they tacitly accepted the joys of palpability throughout human interaction. Theirs was to persuade rather than compel the improvement of the Christian. Drawing on art, embroidery, decoration, ritual, theology, and sermon, they became masters of those arts. Emotional involvement was an ingredient and means of persuasion. Then as now, people desired to feel and to observe feeling. The popularity of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ provides a convenient

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modern example of supposedly sophisticated Westerners’ attraction to precisely the same topic and manner of presentation as Catholic audiences heard in former times.129 Millions of Americans could not stay away from the theaters. An impediment to Catholic discipline surely lay in the fragmented nature of the institutional church, both at the micro and at the macro level. Whereas Protestant reform had facilitated consolidation, rationalization, and centralization, Catholic measures in those directions were of necessity piecemeal and negotiated. With the passage of time, memory also fades. People lost track of their previous expectations, their disappointments. At any rate, the nature of earlymodern government, which was inching toward (though it did not achieve) absolutism, was such that people found no remedy for the interference in their recreational and “superstitious” lives. The solutions that they found will surely be related to the evolution of concepts of privacy in the early-modern world.

8 The Religious Emotions Conclusions

From the early years of the Lutheran Reformation, leading clergymen of every emerging party recognized that qualitative as well as theological differences distinguished them from one another. In his own sermons on the Passion, Martin Luther looked back to his youth. He had been taught, following the revelations of Saint Brigitta and the Sententia of Albertus Magnus, that he needed to bemoan Jesus’ afflictions. “Is that not the very devil,” he exclaimed, “that one should make a work out of the Passion of Christ and trust in it?” As a monk, he had been persuaded that if he did not meditate sufficiently on the Passion, he would be damned. He imagined Christ as a judge in the matter. He was so miserable “that it cannot be adequately bewailed.” If only faith and the remission of sins had been the centerpiece, “there would not have been such wretchedness under popery.”1 Before 1539, Luther’s colleague Johannes Kymeus (1498–1552) had held forth in Wittenberg about the flogging of Jesus, I well know that in earlier times one strained himself to stir the people’s imagination . . . with words of lamentation and pitiable gestures, and with miserable depictions and images. And that preacher was the best who could arouse the greatest outcry and weeping. I say this not because I despise or object to Christian devotion and sympathy. But I do criticize those same preachers because they have left out the proper description and image of Christ’s Passion, which is

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the image of our sin. This is the living scourge with which Christ is beaten.2 This Lutheran critique of the priestly mode in handling the Passion ran on through the century. Andreas Musculus (1514–1581) observed in his Easter devotions, “The papists let the core of the passion, about repentance and the forgiveness of sins, stay behind and be abandoned; and they deal with other childish things and play with empty nutshells.”3 Tilemann Heβhusen (1527– 1588), after being dismissed from Heidelberg, composed a postil for the entire year. He left no doubt about his attitude toward papist assumptions: In the darkness and blindness of popery, we thought that whoever could make the business moving and bring the people to weeping— that man was an outstanding Passion preacher; we allowed ourselves to think that if we had heard and read the story, and had additionally looked on with sadness and lamented over Christ, we had done a good work and deserved indulgences and forgiveness of sins. But, dear ones, you should avoid such superstition and misunderstanding, for the suffering of Jesus Christ is thereby more weakened than honored.4 Later on he concedes that Catholic preachers do urge penitence and turning toward God, “but they omit the best and most necessary piece out: they say nothing about faith or consolation.”5 His contemporary, Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586), who compared to other Lutheran preachers is quite graphic in his description of Jesus’ agony, nevertheless sets himself, too, apart from Catholic norms. His words are so similar to his colleagues’ that we might believe that late-century preaching circles were apprised of each others’ printed sentiments as well as those of Luther and Kymeus: “In popery one endeavored in preaching the Passion to make it so lamentable that it set free the tears of the people and moved them to crying. And whoever could do this was judged to be the best Passion-preacher. . . . But Christ said to the women, “Do not weep over me.”6 Caspar Sauter (1547–1604), in his Passion sermons given in the St. Anna Church in Augsburg, admonished against breaking into tears along with the women of Jerusalem. “Not that we would want to weep over Christ with these women as is still done in popery. There one is of the opinion that if he curses Judas, spits on Pilate, damns the Jews to hell, and so movingly describes the Passion that many a person has to cry, then one has carried out everything well.” Instead, he insists, we should weep over our sins.7 Followers of John Calvin likewise characterized the traits that set them apart from Catholicism. Georg Spindler (1525–1605) opines briefly in attempting to

THE RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS: CONCLUSIONS

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protect his charges against Catholicism, “Some look upon a crucifix or the story of Christ as it is painted, and they are of the opinion that they can constitute a devotion from that. That is foolishness.” Devotion, he maintains, must come from the proper recognition of the cause of Jesus’ suffering—our own sin.8 Johann Philipp Mylaeus, deacon in Amberg, seems to have read Lutheran phrases on Catholic customs: “In popery one thought that the proper meditation on the Passion of Christ consisted in, when one recounted to the people the story of the suffering of Christ, to know how to press so hard with lamentable and sad words and gestures that the people were moved thereby to howling and weeping.”9 Catholic divines were not helpless to defend themselves. At least some of them were persuaded of the rectitude of their own approach to the end of their Savior’s life. With the Lutherans in mind, Caspar Franck, doctor of theology and court preacher in Munich, declared: The Catholic Church does not hold forth and teach only with words and preaching. Rather, [in the service of ] outward and inward memory, it everywhere holds out and describes [the Passion] with gestures, pictures, crucifixes, [and] Lenten cloths so that we do not forget the great fruit and benefits of Christ. . . . In this way, we can then have comfort, joy, and peace from this fervent and constant meditation on the Passion.10 A generation later the Jesuit father Georg Scherer (1540–1605) replied pointedly to the accusations. Taking his inspiration from the biblical women of Jerusalem whom Christ encountered as he bore his cross to Golgotha, Scherer retorts to his adversaries: Certain fanatics (Schwermer) of our times have indicated that it is improper and a sin to weep over Christ and to have a heartfelt sympathy with him. They poke at and pound on Catholic preachers that a while back their sermons were intended solely to move the people to weeping and lamenting. [And they say that] those who were able to arouse much crying in the churches were regarded as the best Passion preachers. That must be a huge mortal sin among these fanatics. But on the contrary, [they think] it is right and proper on Friday, yes, on Good Friday [itself ], and during Holy Week (Marterwochen), when we are holding a memorial of Christ’s Passion and suffering, to have a great feast and dinner party, play music, spring and dance, and become wildly drunk (toll und voll). To this I must answer and with certain arguments prove that the Christian faithful do not sin if they mourn and bewail his [Christ’s] death.11

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Later in the seventeenth century, the Jesuit father Philipp Kisel (1609–1681) excoriated the “shameless” Calvinists in particular for allegedly maintaining that when Jesus cried out, “My God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” he was really in despair. Kisel calls such an assertion “highly punishable blasphemy.” In Kisel’s eyes, Christ said this simply to reveal the depth of his agony.12 In view of the density of polemics during the Age of Orthodoxy and the Thirty Years’ War, it is perhaps surprising that both Lutherans and Reformed writers direct their venom in Passion sermons and devotional works chiefly at the Catholics. Nevertheless, the reciprocal condemnation of the two leading groups of Protestants is not in doubt. It springs into evidence from time to time, as when the Heidelberg theologian Caspar Olevianus remarks, “The evangelicals want to serve the Gospel and idolatry at the same time. But this isn’t possible. Those who practice idolatry are worse than the heathens.”13

The Heart I would venture to guess that every late-medieval and early-modern preacher employed the metaphor of the heart. The heart, as we have seen, was regarded from ancient times as the source and repository of feeling. The examples drawn from each denomination above reveal its characteristic uses of the term. Within Catholicism, the heart is no simple abstraction. While preachers invoke it metaphorically, they simultaneously mean it physically, as the seat of sincerity, conviction, and emotion. If you search on Google for either the Sacred Heart of Jesus or the Sacred Heart of Mary today, you will quickly be led to the New Advent Encyclopedia’s discussion of the relation of physical and representative hearts: In order that, properly speaking, there may be devotion to the Heart of Mary, the attention and the homage of the faithful must be directed to the physical heart itself. However, this in itself is not sufficient; the faithful must read therein all that the human heart of Mary suggests, [ for] all of which it is the expressive symbol and the living reminder: Mary’s interior life, her joys and sorrows, her virtues and hidden perfections, and, above all, her virginal love for her God, her maternal love for her Divine Son, and her motherly and compassionate love for her sinful and miserable children here below.14 The mingling of organic and figurative denotation comes through in the earlymodern age’s breaking off and sacralization of the hearts of Jesus and Mary. Longinus’s spear pierces the Lord’s right side, but preachers early observed that


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it penetrated to his heart and that the water and blood that issued from his wound flow through the ages onto the faithful by means of the chalice and the Host and are an expression of his intense love for his people. Catholics are invited to pray to the very hearts of these two holy figures, as though they were separate saints, both having intermediary powers. Orders formed that were dedicated to the Sacred Heart of either Son or Mother.15 This form of piety, of course, originates in the mysticism of the high Middle Ages that in convents and monasteries more may have aspired to under the recollective models of the day but few claimed to achieve. Those who did felt their own hearts to be involved in the process. The affect of the heart, both that of Jesus and his mother, and of the devout, allowed of no reservation. The heart is an absolute. It forges a close bond between spirit and body. At the core of the body, it should be hot with fervor and should radiate its heat outward. In its bloody functioning, it is dynamic. Christian hearts can be neither dry nor hard, still nor cool. The paradigmatic Reformers and their followers abandon the corporality that appealed to their religious forebears. For Luther and Calvin, worship cannot be directed toward, or even conceived in terms of, a body part, either of the Virgin Mary or of Jesus himself. References to the corporal heart nevertheless direct attention toward that organ as the generator and repository of feeling and persuasion. They reject the transitory body in their use of metaphor. The heart as a term means meaning it. Meaning something equates to heartfelt sincerity. Indeed, no sincerity can be other than heartfelt. There can be no conviction based solely in reason, and rational analysis can overturn the proper commitments of the heart. For Martin Luther and most of his immediate followers—before the full effects of Melanchthonian synergism were in place—Jesus’ effusion of literal blood during the Passion was an essential emotive, to use William Reddy’s word. It changed the universe in that it effectuated the salvation of sinners. Yet, its depiction by Lucas Cranach, in my view, is meant as an abstraction and not as evidence of the Savior’s tormented death. It signals the accomplished Atonement, for Jesus was dead when his side was punctured. Even though Luther himself retains the physical presence in his conception of the eucharistic elements, he does not intend thereby to cast communicants into a mood of grieving, much less torrents of tears. Instead, the ingestion of allegedly true flesh and blood together with the bread and wine must move the participants’ hearts, that is their feelings, to wonderment and gratitude. God has performed a seeming marvel for their souls’ sake, and they should reflect on that comforting fact. For Calvin, references to blood, whether verbal or visual, are virtually absent. It appears that he and his adherents in German-speaking lands assume the prior edification of their audiences and do not need to review the details of the grisly

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story. But blood as an abstraction is essential to the eternal well-being of the elect. Christ shed his blood solely for the elect. Up till now, discussion of the theory of confessionalization as independently conceived by Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard in the early 1980s has concentrated on the correctness and the limitations of their perception of cooperation between church and state, even appropriation of religion as a tool by the state, in inculcating their belief systems on, respectively, Catholic and Protestant (Lutheran and Reformed) laity.16 The underlying problem was to persuade subjects to identify themselves as members of a designated community of faith, including its specific doctrines and appropriate outer behavior. What we have not sufficiently appreciated is the extent to which each denomination was determined to appeal to the emotions as an indispensable underpinning of belief and deportment. This study has shown how those in positions of authority, depending on their confessional identity, espoused the conveyance of mood and inner movement in ways that lent subjects greater inner conviction than rational argumentation or compulsion could have done. Among much else, they employed images of the heart in that endeavor. I have not maintained that these authorities succeeded. To appreciate the depth of their target, at the “heart” of human existence, is sufficient achievement for the present.

The Broader Conceptual Format Having examined the sermons of men who are representative of their respective faith-alliances, I now return to the question of these early modern preachers’ labeling of the feelings that they strove to inculcate on their hearers. Through the words they chose (and the charged manner in which they presented these), even though I have had to translate them into English, we may come closer to grasping the spiritual state that they regarded as ideal. Neither they nor their charges could ever really sustain such arousal uniformly even through the Lenten and Easter season, much less, as sought, through the entire year. Yet their chosen frameworks were the ones that the pious ought to aspire to. Across creedal lines, the feelings inspired by the Passion were central to proper Christianity. We have seen that in every medium, in its retention of the physical Christ and palpable, visible symbols of Christ, Lutheranism did not depart as far from its antecedents as Calvinism did. This is well known. Correspondingly, approaches to the Passion of Christ retained various degrees of sympathy with Jesus’ physical and spiritual ordeals. Lutherans could well be asked to exercise their imaginations and in so doing to comprehend better the significance of the


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atonement. This, the preachers said, is what your Redeemer had to undergo! This makes the atonement an overwhelming sacrifice of love. The sinner, which is to say every Christian, is to be brought to regret for sin, but is not to remain at that stage or be overwhelmed by it. Instead, one should progress during the homiletic depiction or through reading to a grasp of what accomplishing the atonement was based upon, namely divine love, and what it achieved, the salvation of the faithful. The pious must, then, arrive at gratitude in response to God’s love, and must in the limited way that mortals can, reciprocate God’s love. Gratitude alone does not suffice. This love will reveal itself not just in serenity of expression but in the renewed effort to limit one’s sin and especially in love of neighbor. Love begets love. Yet, as we know, Luther himself had no illusions about the attainment of earthly righteousness. Human efforts would at the very least fail to reach the level of perfection that an absolute standard demanded. Luther felt tremendous relief upon accepting the Pauline precept of sola fide, that he would be saved through faith alone.17 But faith in what? Incorporating this Reformation slogan into a longer phrase that made its meaning clear might produce something like: faith in the atoning power of Jesus’ death upon the cross for us. Luther curtailed his Holy Week sermons far more than many of his followers ultimately would, because for him, the dead Christ upon the cross meant everything. It provided him the consolation that he had so avidly sought, and he regarded it as sufficient for every Christian. The chief emotions that Christians should consequently feel are sorrow for sin, gratitude, love of God and neighbor, and reassurance (Trost). Even though Luther’s successors might take their flocks through a more detailed and painful outline of the Passion than the Reformer himself, the outcome for all of them is most remarkably Trost. In their published sermons, this word resounds by means of frequent repetition. It is ubiquitous. They join in a chorus of affirmation that God has voluntarily removed the dire penalty of sin from his children. We do not envision the clerics of the Age of Orthodoxy as a happy lot, but in this conclusion they are more positive than many of their counterparts in other persuasions. They urge this same spirit upon the laity in their cura animarum. As I began this study, I did not anticipate that the mood of Reformed preaching would be strikingly different from the Lutheran. Here are the serious and determined men! I hasten to add that they are by no means identical. Caspar Olevianus, the Heidelberg divine, makes comfort (Trost) a prominent theme in his preaching, admitting that, in his youth, a Catholic priest in Trier had impressed this upon him. He never forgot that lesson. Nonetheless, the Reformed churches draw markedly away from the tenor as well as the teaching of Catholicism. God is now disembodied, and as such the horrors of his son’s

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torments do not need to be depicted. Reformed preachers wished to wean the laity away from its reliance upon material aids to their spirituality, and that weaning was precipitous rather than gradual. Seeing themselves as called to install an upright regimen in the place of what they considered the corrupt preceding one, they were prophets holding forth in the wilderness of ruined humanity. In contrast to Luther, they were unflagging in their adherence to a righteous and uncompromisingly omnipotent Deity. They brought the doctrine of predestination to their sanctuaries with regularity. The truth could not be veiled. Calvinism won the allegiance of the self-confident. We do not know how the insecure received it, for they dared not speak their doubts. Calvinist preachers on the Passion and on death emphasize human sin and helplessness. Christians must daily confront their corruption and agonize over their sins. Emotionally, early-modern Reformed religion was a penitential faith, except that only the elect could truly cultivate this feeling. The devout must abase themselves before God, for there is no good in them. Nevertheless, and despite God’s having decided “before the foundation of the world” who would be saved and who damned, he could respond to humans’ sorrowful beseeching. He would reach down from the unbridgeable metaphorical (and in Calvinists’ minds probably also actual) space that divided him from his children, to test them or to assuage their fears. Regret, self-abasement, and glorification of a hyper-elevated God are dominant in Reformed prescriptions. Fear is ambiguous inasmuch as it may be a salubrious predecessor (Catholic theologians would have said attrition) of regret; but it could also, like unassuaged grief, indicate that its host did not accept the totality of divine providence. As for gratitude, only the elect would be able to feel this. And they should. But as the preachers repeated, the congregations were “full of Judases,” and these could never attain a proper emotional state. Still, the chosen ones could take heart and appreciate that, as the device by means of which God’s demand for justice was satisfied, the atoning work of Christ saved them from hell. One wonders what Reformed clergymen were able to offer when they visited the deathbeds of those who through life had remained visibly mired in sin. The elect were, after all, to make detectable progress toward righteousness while still on earth. Because they left behind funeral sermons only for people of the highest rank, it is more challenging to ferret out their demeanor around flawed humanity at large. I have portrayed Catholics as sharing a quite widely approved culture of palpability. This remained the case as the Church responded to the challenges leveled at it by Protestantism. Condoned Catholic practice retained a cosmic view that admitted the divine to material objects and thus to the human presence. In continuity with late-medieval religious culture, clergy and laity alike


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shared a conviction that the way to the divine led over and through the physical.18 Experiencing the physical pain of the Crucifixion enabled one to grasp precisely what Christ had undergone for his beloved children, so that they might not be cast into perpetual darkness. This is surely why, in the dark recesses of rural New Mexico today, some intrepid Catholic men, it is asserted, have themselves actually crucified on Good Friday. (They are reputedly taken down before they asphyxiate.) They come thereby to a greater insight into Jesus’ sacrifice.19 It can never be simply theological for them. But the Church could never condone such acts of violence and tried, in the early-modern period, to help worshipers to experience torment via their imaginations. Through their mental athleticism, they share in the Savior’s feelings of anguish, despair, grief, and disappointment, not to mention bodily torment. Tears, which are the physical result of inner movement, will give evidence of their success. This experiencing along with Jesus, the preachers insist, is to produce the most profound sense of responsibility for sin—the sin that itself was the cause of the Crucifixion. That guilt can and must lead to voluntary reform of life. The atonement is offered to human beings. They must appropriate it. Their means must include the sacraments of the Church, for they do not have the ability without them to become fully deserving of bliss. Catholicism’s own doctrines concerning election sank into desuetude in the face of the predestinarian challenge. In addition to spiritual feelings—those experienced by the devout Christian in relation to God the Trinity—homileticians deliberately cultivated sentiments in their audiences that they intended to have societal repercussions. First of all, they were to avoid the “idolatrous” or “heretical” celebrations of churches other than their own and have as little to do with their adherents as possible. Demarcating speech in nearly all sermons is not simply pro forma, in the nature of inherited convention. In an age torn by violent confrontation that possessed at least a religious element, the speakers in the pulpits were altogether serious. Their success at persuasion was limited by the geographic proximity of the “other,” by legality, kinship, and economic advantage. By the late sixteenth century, urban divines were occasionally having to yield to mixed marriage and mixed godparenthood, though not yet ordinarily between Catholics and Protestants but among Protestants.20 As for anti-Jewish language of sermons and treatises, early modern Germans’ anti-Semitism did not merely take the form of ideological affirmation that the Jews of the biblical age had “killed Christ.” This may seem ironic in view of the small numbers of Jews that remained within the Empire. The 1519 events of Regensburg reposed within the memory of some; certainly these did not lie within some biblical past. Passion preachers across the spectrum tapped their rhetorical skills in coloring the Jews’ behavior as “monstrous.” They often

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stressed that the Jews were to suffer in perpetuity, down to every generation, because those in Pilate’s court had shouted, “His blood be upon us and upon our children!” If Calvinists were somewhat more restrained than others in elaborating on Jewish affronts to Christ during the Passion, this was the result of their not describing Jesus’ afflictions. Their stress was rather upon human degradation. They left sufficient verbal proof in place to show that they shared the views of their contemporaries. Research must be carried out on the many post-earlymodern German sermons that remain in seminary libraries in an effort to determine whether nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century pulpit rhetoric helped to condition Germans as well as other Europeans to accede to the Nazi Holocaust. Then as now, some Christians were not content to be either unmoved or less moved. The most obvious feature of the Pietism that would arise within Lutheranism at the end of the seventeenth century was its sincerity. Those who were drawn to it sought to feel the presence of God, not merely to learn about it. At the same time, within the evangelical churches as a group, the baroque style with its inherent swirl and passion affected worship. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Easter cantata, “Christus lag in Todesbanden,” is but one example of a mood of drama that came over the churches quite apart from Pietism.21 The Reformed churches resisted this spirit more concertedly. Nonetheless, they allowed organs to return to the churches at the end of the sixteenth century. But in those settings in which harsh discipline became increasingly difficult to inflict—where other denominational choices were available—even the latter-day Calvinist divines had to moderate their judgments. The United Provinces of the Netherlands was one of those settings.22 In the New World environment, some people tired of the dry rigor of Puritan preachers and drew away to listen to the more vibrant, personal style of traveling inspirators.23 The new men were willing to break with the Calvinist convention of calm, text-based declamation and instead to include demonstrative references to everyday experience. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed leaders had rather specific expectations for upright Christians’ feelings. In the course of the Reformation and immediate post-Reformation era, each creed developed what we might call, following the linguist Anna Wierzbicka, its own “emotion script.” Wierzbicka states as a general principle: Although human emotional endowment is no doubt largely innate and universal, people’s emotional lives are shaped, to a considerable extent, by their culture. Every culture offers not only a linguistically embodied grid for the conceptualization of emotions, but also a set of “scripts” suggesting to people how to feel, how to express their feelings, how to think about their own and other people’s feelings, and so on.24


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This book has studied a set of what were intended to be emotion scripts. All three creedal groups shared late-medieval origins, and their scripts overlapped at the edges. Within society and bearing on roles that the preachers played within the community, they shared the view that accused witches ought, under interrogation, to cry. They scrutinized the faces of their victims in an effort to detect real tears. The absence of tears provided some proof of guilt.25 Many of the assumptions that underlay these fearful persecutions have now passed away. Yet the Catholic attribution of voluminous tears to the Virgin Mary remains inscribed upon that faith. Tears are still a powerful index of identity. Catholic statues of the Virgin burst into tears around the world. They continue to be evidence of her efficacy as a channel of sanctity for the faithful.26 For the Catholic laity, the divine is still available on earth, and humans’ encounter with it is expected to be moving. Protestants generally regard such emoting as an alien model. Yet within the history of Protestantism, Pietism and several religious “awakenings” lay in the future. A tendency among the laity toward stronger feeling and devotional expression underlies the pattern among the present-day descendants of early modern Lutheranism and Calvinism to include at least one service on Sunday mornings in which attendees are encouraged to allow the Holy Spirit to shake them and to act out the inner movement that they experience. Their founding fathers would be perplexed, to say the least. Much has transpired between their day and ours.


Notes

COLLECTIONS USED

Staats- und Stadtbibliothek Augsburg Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin Bayerisches Staatsarchiv, Coburg. Johannes à Lasco Bibliothek, Emden Bibliothèque de l’Institut d’Histoire de la Réformation, Geneva Thüringische Forschungsbibliothek Gotha Library of the Max-Planck-Institut für Geschichte, Göttingen Hauptuniversitätsbibliothek, University of Göttingen Henry H. Meeter Center, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, Michigan Bibliothek der Theologischen Fakultät, University of Heidelberg Hauptuniversitätsbibliothek, University of Heidelberg Bibliothek des bischöflichen Priesterseminars, Mainz Hauptuniversitätsbibliothek, University of Mainz Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel

INTRODUCTION

1. Chronicle of Higher Education (February 21, 2003), “Getting Emotional”; the on-line version does not provide page numbers. 2. I purchased the December 2006 issue. It is evidently published by G + J Emotion Verlag, 81664 Munich. 3. I find Hans Medick’s and David Warren Sabean’s coedited book, Interest and Emotion: Essays on the Study of Family and Kinship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), to be more about kinship and less

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about emotion, but its title along with a couple of the essays do indicate a pioneering interest in the early-modern emotions. The Journal of Social History from an early date has shown its awareness of feelings as a significant topic for research. I shall not list all its articles and book reviews on this subject. The following will suffice: Peter N. Stearns, “Social History Update: Sociology of Emotion,” Journal of Social History 22, 3 (1989), 592–99; Cas Wouters, “On Status Competition and Emotion Management,” Journal of Social History 24, 4 (1991), 699–717; Dorothée Sturkenboom, “Historicizing the Gender of Emotions: Changing Perceptions in Dutch Enlightenment Thought,” Journal of Social History 34, 1 (2000), 55–75. 4. See some of the essays in Johann Anselm Steiger, ed., Passion, Affekt und Leidenschaft in der frühen Neuzeit, 2 vols., Wolfenbütteler Arbeiten zur Barockforschung 43 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), especially those by Ralf Georg Bogner, “Bewegliche Beredsamkeit, passionierende Poesie. Zur rhetorischen Stimulierung der Affekte in der lutherischen Literarisierung der Leidengeschichte Jesu,” 1: 145–67; Johann Anselm Steiger, “Zorn Gottes, Leiden Christi und die Affekte der Passionsbetrachtung bei Luther und im Luthertum des 17. Jahrhunderts,” 1: 179–202; Lothar Steiger, “‘Meine Seele ist betrübt bis an den Tod.’ Gethsemane als geometrischer Ort der Gewiβheit bei Martin Luther und seinen Nachfolgern in der Frühen Neuzeit,” 1: 217–50; Hartmut Laufhütte, “Passion Christi bei Sigmund von Birken und Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg,” 1: 271–88; and Ernst Koch, “Passion und Affekte in der lutherischen Erbauungsliteratur des 17. Jahrhunderts,” 2: 509–18. In late-medieval Catholicism, Holly Johnson, “‘The hard bed of the cross’: Good Friday Preaching and the Seven Deadly Sins,” in The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals, edited by Richard Newhauser (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 129–44. 5. Gerhard Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1969), a somewhat altered of version of which appeared in English as Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, translated by David McLintock, edited by Brigitte Oestreich and Helmut G. Koenigsberger (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); see esp. “‘Police’ and Prudentia civilis in the Seventeenth Century,” 155–65. The concept of “social disciplining” has resulted in significant contributions to the literature on early-modern communication. See, for example, Ralf Georg Bogner, Die Bezähmung der Zunge: Literatur und Disziplinierung der Alltagskommunikation in der frühen Neuzeit, Frühe Neuzeit 31 (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1997). 6. A model study of the relationship between preaching and social policy is Norbert Haag, Predigt und Gesellschaft: Die Lutherische Orthodoxie in Ulm, 1640–1740 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1992). 7. Barbara H. Rosenwein, ed., Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998). 8. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006. 9. On the reduction of emotion through the civilizing process, see Norbert Elias, Power and Civility, vol. 2, The Civilizing Process, translated by Edmund Jephcott (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 291. I was unable to locate this passage in the German. 10. Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977); translated

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by Sabine Offe into German as Leidenschaften und Interessen: Politische Begründungen des Kapitalismus vor seinem Sieg (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1980). 11. Hirschmann, Leidenschaften, 55. 12. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), esp. part 2, 141–256. 13. Ibid., 105. 14. Ibid., 332. 15. See Todd W. Reeser, Moderating Masculinity in Early Modern Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), esp. the introduction, 1–48, in which women recur as the opposite of moderation. 16. My essay, “‘Gedanken, Herz und Sinn’: Die Unterdrückung der religiösen Emotionen,” in Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch, 1400–1600, edited by Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 69–95; a revised and translated version of which appears as “‘Christians’ Mourning and Lament Should Not Be Like the Heathens’: The Suppression of Religious Emotion in the Reformation,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, edited by John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2004), 107–30. Parts of the English version are incorporated into chapter 1. 17. I am grateful to Natalie Zemon Davis for bringing to my attention her “The Delight of Re-imagined Feelings,” in Annual Report, Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1997–1998), 25–28, which summarizes an international conference and seminar on “The Historicity of the Emotions.” The problems raised at the conference make my awareness of the difficulty of examining the emotions of a past era all the more acute. 18. By personal communication. 19. I strongly recommend Sabine Holtz, Theologie und Alltag: Lehre und Leben in den Predigten der Tübinger Theologen 1550–1750, Spätmittelalter und Reformation, Neue Reihe (New Series) 3 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1993), passim, but initially p. 4: “Die Predigt wird so zu einem Spiegel der Zeitströmungen, der politischen, sozialen und religiösen Erwartungshaltungen. Dieser Tatbestand ist es, der die Predigten auch für die sozialgeschichtliche Forschung interessant macht.” I could not agree more. 20. See, for example, Ludwig Hödl and Wendelin Knoch, eds., Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters für die Zeit von 1350–1500 (Münster/Westphalia: Aschendorff, 2001), available in CD-ROM form from the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel. 21. Amy Nelson Burnett and Luise Schorn-Schütte are cooperating in compiling a bibliography of all surviving sermons printed in the Holy Roman Empire. The endeavor is formally called the German Sermon Bibliographic Project. This will be an invaluable resource. 22. The latter does not include funeral sermons (Leichenpredigten). Because these are given after the event and may prettify the demise and embellish the virtues of the deceased, I found them to be unsuitable. In any case, these were not given in Calvinist

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churches except for persons of the highest ranks. On medieval devotion to the Passion, see Eric L. Saak, High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform between Reform and Reformation, 1292–1524 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002), 505–82, an excellent introduction. 23. On emotional centers in the brain, see a popularized rendition of the findings of Tor Wager of Columbia University, in The Economist (December 23, 2006, to January 5, 2007), 4–7, with drawings. For a cognitive interpretation of ritual, including ecclesiastical ritual, see Eugene G. d’Aquili, Charles D. Laughlin, Jr., and John McManus, eds., The Spectrum of Ritual: A Biogenetic Structural Analysis (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), esp. introduction, 7–39. 24. I use the word confessionalizing deliberately. I find that despite the heavy critique that has been leveled in part against the theory developed simultaneously by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, at least within the German setting, this concept of cooperation between state and church, directed toward inculcating proper belief and gaining popular obedience, remains valid. Certainly criticism that has insisted on greater flexibility over geography and time has performed a valuable service. Models are useful only through continual modification. Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1981), which is summarized in English in Schilling, Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 205–45; Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977), 226–52; “Konfession und Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland,” in Reinhard, ed., Bekenntnis und Geschichte: Die Confessio Augustana im historischen Zusammenhang, Schriften der Philosophischen Fakultäten der Universität Augsburg (Munich: Vogel, 1981), 165–89; Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983), 257–77. For a recent exchange, see Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “Confessionalization: The Career of a Concept,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, 1–20; and the two essays immediately following: Heinz Schilling, “Confessionalization: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives of a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Paradigm,” 21–36; and Harm Klueting, “Problems of the Term and Concept ‘Second Reformation’: Memories of a 1980s Debate,” 37–49. Do not overlook Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 114–55. Finally, Ute Lotz-Heumann has provided a comprehensive overview in “Confessionalization,” in Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research, edited by David M. Whitford (Kirksville: Truman State University Press, 2008), 136–57. 25. John Corrigan, The Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Corrigan, Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). Nico H. Frijda and Batja Mesquita, “Beliefs through Emotions,” in Emotions and Beliefs: How Feelings Influence Thoughts, edited by Nico H. Frijda, Antony S. R. Manstead, and

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Sacha Bem (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 45–77; and Nico H. Frijda, Batja Mesquita, J. Sonnemans, and S. Van Goozen, “The Duration of Affective Phenomena, or Emotions, Sentiments and Passions,” in International Review of Emotion and Motivation, edited by K. Strongman (New York: Wiley, 1991), 187–225. 26. Described in Axel Hübler, The Expressivity of Grammar: Grammatical Devices Expressing Emotion across Time (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1998), for example, 10–14 on contextualization. 27. My personal favorite of the many renderings of this scene is Hans Baldung Grien’s engraving of 1513. 28. Cheshire Calhoun and Robert C. Solomon, eds., What Is an Emotion? Classic Readings in Philosophical Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984), 42. 29. W. W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion: A Contribution to Philosophical Psychology, Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and Ethics (London: Duckworth, 1975), 9. 30. On Melanchthon’s derivation of his Affektenlehre from Aristotle and his original contributions to rhetorical theory, see Olaf Bernwald, Philipp Melanchthons Sicht der Rhetorik (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1994), 8, 50–56. See Melanchthon’s own textbook of 1521: Joachim Knape, ed., Philipp Melanchthons “Rhetorik” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993), 84–85, 139–40. Knape declares in his introduction, “Die Wirkungsgeschichte der ‘Thetorik’ Melanchthons ist noch nicht geschrieben” (3). In Germany the text had a wide dispersal, including in abbreviated and tabulated form (Knape, 23). 31. Rhetorik, 84, 139. 32. Günter Bäder, Symbolik des Todes Jesu (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1988), esp. 60. 33. See the stimulating essays in Richard Newhauser, ed., The Seven Deadly Sins: From Communities to Individuals (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007). 34. Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), on literature, 329–81. 35. Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, vol. 1, edited by Paul Joachimsen (reprinted Meersburg: F. W. Hendel, 1933), 136–38. Consider, too, Jean Delumeau’s contention that only with the Reformation was true Christianity attained: Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: A New View of the Counter-Reformation (London: Burns and Oates, 1977). 36. Bernd Moeller, “Piety in Germany around 1500,” in The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, edited by Steven Ozment (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 50–75; the prior German version appeared in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 56 (1965), 5–30; Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 9, 21–46. I admire the attempt of Berndt Hamm, in his concept of “normative centering,” to find an explanation for the apparently precipitous abandonment by ordinary people of practices to which they had long adhered, in preference for, Hamm asserts, a polity that lay closer to their true values. Those allegedly true values would encompass such principles as the common economic and moral good, both of which could only be aided by the exclusion of an undomesticated, juridically and financially

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exempted Catholic clergy. Concisely defined in Hamm, “Reformation als normative Zentrierung von Religion and Gesellschaft,” Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie 7 (1992), 241–79. Cf. Hamm, Bürgertum und Glaube: Konturen der städtischen Reformation (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), 73–76. See also by Hamm, “Wollen und Nicht-Können als Thema der spätmittelalterlichen Buβseelsorge,” in Berndt Hamm and Thomas Lentes, eds., Spätmittelalterliche Frömmigkeit zwischen Ideal und Praxis (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 112–46, in which Hamm explores what he regards as people’s growing sense of spiritual inadequacy at the end of the Middle Ages. 37. Translated by Eric Nicholson (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990); the French original was Le Péché et la peur (Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1983). 38. See my essay,“Reformation und Askese: Das Pfarrhaus als evangelisches Kloster” (The Reformation and Asceticism: The Parsonage as an Evangelical Cloister), in Kommunikation und Transfer im Christentum der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Irene Dingel and Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele, Veröffentlichtungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte 174 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 2008), 211–28. 39. For a broad depiction, see Jo Ann Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 506–25. 40. Zwickauer Stadtarchiv, Ratsprotokolle 1528–29 (for 1529), fol. 63. Apropos mainly of English attitudes, see Michael Heyd, “Be Sober and Reasonable”: The Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995). 41. Christopher Ocker notes the ambivalent attitude toward the beguines, not just because of their mystical style, beginning in the fourteenth century: “Lacrima ecclesie: Konrad of Megenberg, the Friars, and the Beguines,” in Das Wissen der Zeit: Konrad von Megenberg und sein Werk, edited by Gisela Drossbach, Claudia Märtel, and Martin Kintzinger (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2007), 169–200, esp. 169–71, 182–86. 42. On the background to concentration on Christ’s physical suffering, see Donna Trembinski, “[Pro]passio Doloris: Early Dominican Conceptions of Christ’s Physical Pain,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 59, 4 (2008), 630–56. 43. On the responses of Lutheran preachers to a bicreedal situation, that in Augsburg, see Hans-Christoph Rublack, “Augsburger Predigt im Zeitalter der lutherischen Orthodoxie,” Die Augsburger Kirchenordnung von 1537 und ihr Umfeld, edited by Reinhard Schwarz (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1988), 123–59. 44. See Brian Ogren’s online summary and bibliography at www.ul.ed/~philos/ vol8/aristotle.html. 45. Even the words Gefühl and Emotion underwent shifts in meaning. See Sabine Plum, “‘Das Hertz muβ brennen.’ Zur Bedeutungsgeschichte der Ausdrücke ‘Gefühl’ und ‘Empfindung’ im 18. Jahrhundert,” Grazer Linguistische Studien 33/34 (1990), 241–52. 46. See Peter Burke, Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). 47. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002). See also

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Evonne Anita Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), which covers more than the German-speaking lands. 48. Alun Munslow, The New History (Harlow, Eng.: Pearson Longman, 2003), 1–2. CHAPTER

1

1. Trembinski, “[Pro]passio Doloris: Early Dominican Conceptions of Christ’s Physical Pain,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History 59, 4 (2008), 630–56. 2. Thomas L. Amos, Eugene A. Green, and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, eds., De ore Domini: Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989); Rudolf Cruel, Geschichte der deutschen Predigt im Mittelalter (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966); Jacqueline Hamesse, Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and Anne T. Thayer, eds., Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University (Louvain-laNeuve: Fédération Internationale des Institutes d’Études Médiévales, 1998); JeanClaude Schmitt, ed., Prêcher d’exemples: Récits de prédicateurs du moyen âge (Paris: Éditions Stock, 1985). 3. Ulrich Montag, Das Werk der heiligen Birgitta von Schweden in oberdeutscher Überlieferung, Münchner Texte und Untersuchungen zur deutschen Literatur des Mittelalters 18 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1968); Sven Stolpe, Die Offenbarungen der heiligen Birgitta von Schweden (Frankfurt/Main: Joseph Knecht, 1961), introduction, n. p.: Revelationes celestes domine Birgitte de Swedia. Stolpe notes that many copies were distributed in Europe after her canonization (p. 23). Brigitta was devoted to Mary as much as to Jesus. 4. See, for example, Petra Krutisch, “Niederrheinische Kruzifixe der Spätgotik: Die plastischen Kruzifixe und Kreuzigungsgruppen des späten 15. und frühen 16. Jahrhunderts im Herzogtum Kleve,” Ph.D. dissertation in art history, University of Bonn, 1987. I used it at the library of the University of Heidelberg. 5. I find very moving the gilded crucifix on the front of the so-called Evangeliar aus Niederalteich (ca. 1030–40) in the collections of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. This was hardly for popular consumption; I suspect a wealthy monastic patron. Moving or not, compared to the style that would succeed the Romanesque, this rendering of the suffering Christ is physically immobile and emotionally detached. 6. Marrow, Passion Iconography in North European Art in the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, Belgium: Van Ghemmert, 1979); Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996). Marrow is an art historian, and Bestul a literature scholar. Marrow attributes the most intense Passion devotion to the Low Countries and nearby territories, and he describes Passion iconography in detail. His assumptions would contradict another art historian’s, Anne Derbes’s, assertion that such images and the practices connected to them arose first in Italy under Franciscan influence: Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 7. Drama on the Passion as well as myriad other biblically based and traditional stories was another medium for fostering popular devotion. See, for example, Maurice

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Accarie, Le théâtre sacré de la fin du moyen âge: Étude sur le sens moral de la Passion de Jean Michel, Publications Romanes et Françaises 150 (Geneva: Librarie Droz, 1979). 8. See my essay “Catholic Intensity in Post-Reformation Germany: Preaching on the Passion and Catholic Identity in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Politics and Reformations: Studies in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., edited by Peter Wallace, Peter Starenko, Michael Printy, and Christopher Ocker (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 373–96. 9. Thus, Andrew Pettegree’s “culture of persuasion” applies as much to Catholics in a world in which there were now choices, as it did to Protestants: Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 10. The scholarly literature is immense and cannot be listed here. An example is the long and magisterial study of Jean-Pierre Bordier, Le Jeu de la Passion: Le message chrétien et le théâtre français (XIIIe-XVIe s.), Bibliothèque du XVe siècle 58 (Paris: Champion, 1998). For a close examination of one play, see Accarie, Le théâtre sacré de la fin du moyen âge. 11. See Johannes Janota’s massive work on late-medieval Hessian plays: Die Hessische Passionsspielgruppe, 4 vols. (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1996, 2002, 2004). The fourth of these is edited by Klaus Wolf and is a small ancillary volume (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2002). 12. Rita Voltmer, Wie der Wächter auf dem Turm. Ein Prediger und seine Stadt, Johannes Geiler von Kayersberg (1445–1510) und Straβburg, Beiträge zur Landes- und Kulturgeschichte 4 (Trier: Porta Alba Verlag, 2005); and by his contemporaries, Jakob Wimpfeling and Beatus Rhenanus, Das Leben des Johannes Geiler von Kaysersberg, edited by Otto Herding (Munich: Fink, 1970). 13. Paul Wann, Die Passion des Herrn (Passauer Passionale): Gepredigt im Passauer Dom im Jahre 1460, edited and translated by Franz Xavier Zacher (Augsburg: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag, 1928), introduction, 22–23. Zacher, on p. 21, describes the subjects of Wann’s sermons during other years. 14. Zacher, introduction to Wann, Passion, 9–25. 15. These particular sermons presumably still repose in manuscript form in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. However, Wann’s sermons for the entire year did appear in print before the Reformation more than once, for example, as Sermones dominicales per anni circulum (Hagenau: Rynman, 1512). 16. Wann, Passion, ser. 1, 30. 17. Zacher, introduction to Wann, Passion, 24. 18. Wann, Passion, ser. 1, 29. 19. Ibid., ser. 1, 29. 20. Ibid., ser. 1, 30–31. 21. Ibid., ser. 1, 32–33. 22. Ibid., ser. 2, 38. 23. Ibid., ser. 2, 41. 24. Ibid., ser. 2, 43. 25. Ibid., ser. 2, 43–44. 26. Ibid., ser. 3, 51.

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27. Ibid., ser. 3, 53. 28. Ibid., ser. 3, 56. 29. Ibid., ser. 3, 57. 30. Ibid., ser. 4, 70–71. 31. Ibid., ser. 5, 75, 77. 32. Ibid., ser. 5, 77. 33. Ibid., ser. 5, 79. 34. Ibid., ser. 5, 79, 81. Psalm 22: 6 (in the modern Bible); Wann cites 21: 7. 35. Ibid., ser. 6, 84. 36. A generation after Wann, for example, see the Passion sermons of the Augustinian eremite Reinhard de Laudenburg, Passio domini nostri Jesu Christi predicata siue compilata per modum quadragesimalis . . . (Nuremberg: Balthasar Schleifer, 1501), on this subject fols. 68–70, and esp. 68 (recto). 37. Wann, Passion, ser. 6, 85. 38. Ibid., ser. 6, 86–87. 39. Ibid., ser. 6, 92. 40. Ibid., ser. 6, 94. 41. Ibid., ser. 6, 95. 42. Ibid. 43. Ibid., ser. 6, 96. 44. Ibid., ser. 6, 99. 45. Quoted by Wann, ibid., ser. 6, 100. 46. Ibid., ser. 6, 101. 47. Ibid., ser. 6, 103–5. 48. Ibid., ser. 7, 111–12. 49. Ibid., ser. 7, 112. 50. Ibid., ser. 7, 116. 51. Ibid. 52. Ibid., ser. 7, 117–18. 53. Ibid., ser. 7, 119. 54. Ibid., ser. 8, 123, 125. 55. Ibid., ser. 8, 127. 56. Ibid., ser. 8, 128. 57. Brian Patrick McGuire, Jean Gerson and the Last Medieval Reformation (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005), 145, where McGuire cites royal secretary Jean de Montreuil’s preference to hear Gerson preach on the Passion, for Gerson “could move his listeners.” 58. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 59. See the introduction of this book. 60. See the Catholic Encyclopedia online: www.newadvent.org/cathen/15621b. htm. This location finally confirmed to me Wild’s Franciscan identity. 61. Johannes Wild, Sacrosancta Passionis Saluatoris nostri Iesu Christi Hystoria, Ex quatuor Euangelistis studiose concinnata & in quatuor partes rite distincta (Mainz:

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Franciscus Behem, 1555), 518 pp.; Heinrich Helm, PASSIO Domini nostri Iesv Christi, secvndvm qvatuor Euangelistas ([Cologne]: Iaspar Gennepaeus, 1557), 325 pp. Internal evidence dates Wild’s sermons from 1541 or before (p. 518). 62. Wild, Sacrosancta Passionis, 39–40. 63. Ibid., 45. 64. Ibid., 51. 65. Ibid., 61. 66. Ibid., 64. 67. Ibid., 65. 68. Ibid., 73. 69. Ibid., 123. 70. Ibid., 151–55. 71. Ibid., 169. 72. Ibid., 184. 73. Ibid., 199–201. 74. Ibid., 222. 75. Ibid., 244. 76. Ibid., 254. 77. Ibid., 296. 78. Ibid., 297. 79. Ibid., 311–12. 80. Ibid., 354. 81. Ibid., 398. 82. Ibid., 414. 83. Ibid., 416. 84. Ibid., 482. 85. Ibid., 517. 86. Helm, PASSIO Domini, opening, n.p., addressed to his auditoribus. 87. Ibid., 17–22. 88. Ibid., 19. 89. Ibid., 65. 90. Ibid., 81. 91. Ibid., 86–87. 92. Ibid., 183–84. 93. Ibid., 237. 94. Ibid., 241–42. 95. Ibid., 247–48. 96. Ibid., 276–78. 97. Moeller, “Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als neues Mönchtum,” in Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch, edited by Bernd Moeller and Stephen E. Buckwalter, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 199 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 76–91. 98. For a comprehensive listing of Catholic sermon collections, refer to Werner Welzig, ed., Katalog gedruckter deutschsprachiger katholischer Predigtsammlungen, 2 vols.

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(Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984, 1987). One hundred thirty-nine entries are from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and over five hundred from the eighteenth. 99. The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 6 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1909); I used it online, n.p. 100. I consulted two editions of this work: (1) Caspar Franck, Passion, Das Leyden vnnd Sterben vnsers Herren Iesv Christi, auβ den H. vier Euangelisten zusammen gezogen (Ingolstadt: David Sartorio, 1576); and (2) Kaspar Franck, Passion, Das Leyden vnnd Sterben vnsers Herren IESV CHRISTI, auβ den H. vier Euangelisten, zusammen gezogen . . .. (Ingolstadt: David Sartorius, 1577). 101. Franck (1), Passion, fol. vii (verso). 102. Ibid., fol. ii (recto). 103. Ibid., fol. 2 (verso). He repeats this sentiment at fol. 31 (recto). 104. Ibid., fol. 4 (recto). 105. Ibid., fol. 9 (verso)–10 (recto). 106. Ibid., fol. 15 (verso)–16 (recto). 107. Ibid., fol. 17 (recto). 108. Ibid., fol. 39 (verso). 109. Ibid., fol. 31 (verso). 110. Ibid., fol. 51 (verso). 111. Ibid., fol. 58 (verso). 112. Ibid., fol. 110 (recto). 113. Ibid., fol. 88 (recto)–89 (recto). 114. Ibid., fol. 111 (recto). 115 Ibid., fol. 208 (recto). 116. Ibid., fol. 83 (recto). 117. Ibid., fol. 87 (verso). See Thomas Lentes, “Gebetbuch und Gebärde: Religiöses Ausdrucksverhalten in Gebetbüchern aus dem Dominikanerinnen-Kloster St. Nikolaus in undis zu Straβburg (1350–1550),” 2 vols., Th.D. dissertation, WilhelmsUniversity Münster/Westphalia, 1996. 118. Canisius, Catholischer Catechismus Oder Summarien CHristlicher Lehr, Jn Frag vnnd Antwort, der Christlicher Jugendt, vnnd allen Einfeltigen zu nutz vnd heil gestelt (Cologne: Maternum Cholinum, 1569), fol. Yi (verso)––Yii (recto): “For the Lord Christ himself also prayed to the Father, now with eyes uplifted to heaven, then lying on the earth upon his face.” Lowered eyes and beating one’s breast are also good “because they exercise the body piously and bring it into conformity and service to the Creator and awaken, encourage, and help the spirit and the temperament [enter] into interior service.” 119. Franck (2), Passion, fol. 123. 120. Franck (1), Passion, fol. 146 (verso). 121. Franck (2), Passion, fol. 173. 122. Franck (1), Passion, fol. 191 (verso). 123. Ibid., fol. 161 (recto). 124. Ibid., fol. 106 (recto)–107 (recto).

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125. Ibid., fol. 125 (recto). 126. Ibid., fol. 139 (verso). See www.religionfacts.com/christianity/people/arius. htm, which I consulted on April 2, 2007 via Google. A direct citation from Socrates Scholasticus on the death of Arius is on the final page (n.p.). 127. Franck (1), Passion, fol. 275 (recto). 128. I read a later edition, Christliche Wallfahrt: In welcher die Neun Führungen, oder Gäng unsers HErrn JESU CHRISTI, In Seinem bittern Leyden durch die Charwochen sonderlich bey Besuchung der Gräber; Und durch das Jahr bey den Processionen, Besuchung der Kirchen, oder neun Altären, etc., heylsamblich zuverehren (Munich: Allmosen S. Joan. Bapt.; Maria Magdalena Riedlin Wittib, 1723). According to Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienen Drucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts (by convention referred to as VD-16) (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1983–2000), the first printed edition of this work was probably 1576. 129. “At Lent, a Most Powerful Rendering of the 14 Stations,” New York Times (1 March 2008), B11. 130. Feucht, Christliche Wallfahrt, 2. 131. Ibid., 3. 132. Ibid., 5. 133. Ibid., 8–9. 134. Ibid., 12. 135. Ibid., 24. 136. Ibid., 27. 137. Ibid., 35, 37. 138. Ibid., 42–43. 139. Ibid., 55. 140. Ibid., 71–73, here at 71. 141. Louis Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, translated by Jean Birrell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989; French original, Paris 1987); Châtellier, The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–c. 1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Also see George Huppert, Public Schools in Renaissance France (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 104–15 on the Jesuits’ entry into schools there; also works on geographically narrow places, such as Dominik Sieber, Jesuitische Missionierung, priesterliche Liebe, sakramentale Magie: Volkskulturen in Luzern 1563–1614 (Basel: Schwabe, 2005). 142. Rüdiger Funiok, ed., Ignatius von Loyola und die Pädagogik der Jesuiten: Ein Modell für Schule und Persönlichkeitsbildung (Donauwörth: Auer, 2000); Rolf Selbmann, Vom Jesuitenkolleg zum humanistischen Gymnasium, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Deutschunterrichts 26 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1996); Barbara Bauer, Jesuitische “ars rhetorica” im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe, Mikrokosmos, Beiträge zur Literaturwissenschaft und Bedeutungsforschung 18 (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1986), 134, on the goal of moving students’ feelings. 143. As introductions to this subject, see the comprehensively erudite books of Jean-Marie Valentin: Theatrum Catholicum: Les jésuites et la scène en Allemagne au

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XVIe et au XVIIe siècles (Nancy: Presses Universitaires de Nancy, 1990); and Les jésuites et le théâtre (1554–1680): Contribution à l’histoire culturelle du monde catholique dans le Saint-Empire romain germanique (Paris: Éditions Desjonqueres, 2001). 144. Valentin, Les jésuites et le theatre, 48. 145. Ibid., 52. 146. Carl M. Haas, Das Theater der Jesuiten in Ingolstadt: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des geistlichen Theaters in Süddeutschland, Schaubühne 51 (Emsdetten: n. p., 1958), 16. See also Elfriede Moser-Rath, ed., Predigtmärlein der Barockzeit: Exempel, Sage, Schwank und Fabel in geistlichen Quellen des oberdeutschen Raumes (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1964), 69, n. 246. Cf. Peter-Paul Lenhard, Religiöse Weltanschauung und Didaktik im Jesuitendrama: Interpretationen zu den Schauspielen Jacob Bidermanns (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang; Bern: Herbert Lang, 1978), 437–60. 147. John M. Headley, “Borromean Reform in the Empire? La Strada Rigorosa of Giovanni Francesco Bonomi,” in San Carlo Borromeo: Catholic Reform and Ecclesiastical Politics in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century, edited by John M. Headley and John B. Tomaro (Washington, D.C.: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1988), 228–49. See esp. 241–44. 148. Heinrich Reinhardt and Franz Steffens, Einleitung: Studien zur Geschichte der katholischen Schweiz im Zeitalter Carlo Borromeos (Solothurn: Druck und Commissionsverlag der Union, 1910). This 434-page volume is the introduction to Die Nuntiaturberichte von Giovanni Francesco Bonhomini 1579–1581, Nuntiaturberichte aus der Schweiz seit dem Concil von Trient, Part I. 149. Borromeo issued numerous Instructiones. See, for example, a late compendium, Acta Ecclesiae Mediolanensis, sive sancti Caroli Borromaei Instrvctiones, et Decreta. In quibus, De Ecclesiarum fabrica, suppellectile & ornatu; de Virorum Ecclesiasticorum dignitate, Vita & officio; de politia Ecclesiastica, cultu diuino, animarum regimine, 7 omnium hominum salute procuranda, piè, sanctè ac cumulatè praecipitur (Paris: Ioannes Iost, 1643), which date of publication is long after Borromeo’s death and has multiple precedents. But they do not appear in the VD-16. Headley, “Borromean Reform,” 242, notes that Plantin published Borromeo’s Pastorum Instructiones plus six of the divine’s sermons in Antwerp in 1586. 150. Jeffrey Chipps Smith, Sensuous Worship: Jesuits and the Art of the Early Catholic Reformation in Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Evonne Levy, Propaganda and the Jesuit Baroque (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004); Luce Giard and Louis de Vaucelles, eds., Les Jésuites à l’âge baroque, 1540–1640 (Grenoble: Millon, 1996). 151. Certainly Herenäus Haid thinks so: Leben und Wirken des ehrwürdigen Vaters und Lehrers Petrus Canisius . . . (Landshut: Johann Thomann, 1826). For information on all the known Jesuits, consult Carlos Sommervogel, comp., Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 12 vols. (Brussels: Oxcar Schepens; Paris: Alphonse Picard; Louvain: Editions de la Bibliothèque S.J., 1890–1932; 1960). 152. Haid, Leben und Wirken, 45, 66, 83. 153. Ibid., 11.

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154. Canisius, Homilien oder Bemerkungen über die evangelischen Lesungen, welche das ganze Jahr hindurch an Sonn- und Festtagen in der Katholischen Kirche treffen, 2 vols. (Augsburg: Karl Kollmann’schen Buchhandlung, 1845–1847), vol. 1, pt. 2, “Am sechsten Tag der Charwoche,” 127. 155. Canisius, Lectiones et Precationes Ecclesiasticae (Ingolstadt: Alexander & Samuel Weissenhorn, 1556), fol. 132 (verso). 156. Canisius, Christenlicher Catholischer, wolbegründter Bericht, von dem seligen Ableiben, Sterben vnd Entschlaffen; Auch von der heyligen vnd frewdenreichen Aufferweckung vnd Auffnemmung in den Himmel, der Allerheiligsten Junckfraw vnd Gottes Gebärerin Marie . . . , translated by Joachim Landolt (Dillingen: Johann Mayer, 1592), fol. 18 (verso). 157. This is also true of attentions to all the instruments of torment, especially the cross itself, the nails, the crown of thorns, and the lance that pierced Christ’s side. See Volker Schier and Corine Schleif, “Seeing and Singing, Touching and Tasting the Holy Lance: The Power and Politics of Embodied Religious Experiences in Nuremberg, 1424–1524,” in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and Their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000, edited by Hils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver, and Nicolas Bell (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2004), 400–26. 158. Canisius, Homilien, ser. 14, 145–46. 159. Georg Scherer, Auβlegung der Fest- vnd Feyr-täglichen Euangelien durch das gantze Jar, Sambt Auβführlicher Erklärung der Historien vom Leyden vnd Sterben Christi . . . (Munich: Nicolaus Henricus, 1608), 297. 160. Ibid., 207. 161. Ibid., 166. 162. Ibid., 186. 163. Ibid., 272–73. 164. Jacob Bidermann, Cenodoxus, edited and translated by D. G. Dyer, Bilingual Library 9 (Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh Press, 1975), 16. 165. Lipsius appears to have vacillated, with a Lutheran interlude, between Catholicism and Calvinism. I find it perfectly understandable that Lipsius should have resided in Calvinist Leiden for eleven years without being labeled a nonconformist. 166. Bidermann, Cenodoxus, 151. 167. Ibid., 177. 168. For another example of a Jesuit who combines media in appealing to his audiences, see Martin Mulsow, “Exemplum und Affektenlehre bei Georg Stengel S.J.,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 73, 2 (1991), 313–33. 169. Dramata Sacra, Oder Hertzrührende Schaubühne, Auff welcher Allen Christlichen Gemütern zu sonderbahrem Trost vnd Erquickung theils Das H. Leiden Christi, theils auch andere Denckwürdige Geschichten, Durch Redende Personen in Teutschen Versen vorgestellet werden (Salzburg: Johann Baptista Mayr, 1684). A modern edition appears in the series Literatur der Barockzeit 10 (Amsterdam and Maarssen: Holland University Press, 1986), with an afterword by Jean-Marie Valentin, paginated separately as 1–48. Valentin summarizes Brunner’s career and his place within the field of Jesuit theater. Valentin calls Brunner’s theater a mixture of catechism and sermon (afterword, 10).

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170. Brunner, Dramata Sacra, fol. Avii (verso), Unterricht I, verse 27. 171. Ibid., fol. Bv (verso), Unterricht III, verse 8. 172. Ibid., fol. Bv (verso)–Bvi (recto), Unterricht III, verse 10. 173. Ibid., fol. Bx (verso), Unterricht IV, verse 4. 174. Ibid., fol. Ci (recto), Unterricht IV, verse 12. 175. Ibid., fol. Dv (verso), Unterricht VI, verse 20. 176. Ibid., fol. Fvi (verso), verse 7. 177. Ibid., fols. ix (recto)–Gvii (verso). 178. Ibid., fol. Hiv (recto), Fourth Geheimnis. 179. Ibid., fol. Ki (verso), seventh Geheimnis. 180. Siebenf ältig=Blutiges Schau=Spiel Deβ Siebenströmigen Geistlichen Nili=Flusses, Das ist: Sieben Passions=Predigten von dem Gnadenfliessenden und Schmertzhafften Leyden und Sterben unsers Einigen Erlösers und Heyl=Erwerbers JESU CHRISTI, translated by Andrea Bresson (Bamberg: Johann Elias Höffling; printed in Hochfürstl. Druckerey bei Jacob Immel, 1679). 181. Kisel, Siebenf ältig, 207. 182. Ibid., 3. 183. Ibid., 9. 184. Ibid., 24. 185. Ibid., 27. 186. Ibid., 48–49. 187. Ibid., 54. 188. Ibid., 55. 189. Ibid., 56. 190. Ibid., 55–77. 191. Ibid., 84. 192. Ibid., 85. 193. Ibid., 111. 194. Ibid., 116. 195. Ibid., 136. 196. Ibid., 137. 197. Ibid., 177. 198. Ibid., 191. 199. Ibid., 301. 200. Ibid., 304. 201. Ibid., 318–19. 202. Ibid., 376. 203. On the founding of the order, see Bonaventura von Mehr, Das Predigtwesen in der kölnischen und rheinischen Kapuzinerprovinz im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Bibliotheca Seraphica-Capuccina, Sectio Historica 6 (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Fr. Min. Cappuccini, 1945), 17. On their move outside Italy, see Georg Manz, “Die Kapuziner im rechtsrheinischen Gebiet des Bistums Speyer im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert,” Th.D. dissertation, University of Freiburg/Breisgau, 1979, 5.

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204. Hillard von Thiessen, Die Kapuziner zwischen Konfessionalisierung und Alltagskultur: Vergleichende Fallstudie am Beispiel Freiburgs und Hildesheims 1599–1750 (Freiburg/Br.: Rombach, 2002), 62. 205. Bernardinus a Colpetrazzo, Historia ordinis fratrum minorum Capuccinorum (1525–1593), vol. 1, Praecipue nascentis ordinis eventus, edited by Melchior a Pobladura (Assisi: Collegio S. Lorenzo da Brindisi dei Minori Cappuccini, 1939). On their work in Italy, see especially Arsenio d’Ascoli, La Predicazione dei Cappuccini nel Cinquecento in Italia, Studio Teologico Lauretano dei Frati Minori Cappuccini 2 (Loreta/Ancona: Libreria S. Francesco d’Assisi, 1956); Vincenzo Criscuolo, ed., I Cappuccini nell’Umbria del Cinquecento 1525–1619, Bibliotheca Seraphico-Capuccina 62 (Rome: Instituto storico dei Cappuccini, 2001). 206. D’Ascoli, La Predicazione, 55. 207. Ibid., 69. 208. Ibid., 170. 209. Eberhard Mossmaier, Die Kapuziner in Mainz 1618–1802 (Mainz: KapuzinerKloster Mainz, 1953), quoted without documentation, 31. 210. Franz M. Eybl, Gebrauchsfunktionen barocker Predigtliteratur: Studien zur katholischen Predigtsammlung am Beispiel lateinischer und deutscher Übersetzungen des Pierre de Besse (Vienna: W. Braumüller, 1982), 44. 211. See von Mehr, Predigtwesen, 39–47. 212. Ibid., 124–25. 213. Ibid., 126–28, 131–36. 214. Ibid., 136. 215. Quoted by d’Ascoli, La Predicazione, 180. 216. Ibid., 271. 217. See von Thiessen, Kapuziner, 103, where the author speculates on its organization. Von Mehr, Predigtwesen, says that sermons were not involved except as a possible introduction to (each of?) the separate forty-hour devotions; 51–53, 191–93. Cf. Maximilian Pöckl, Die Kapuziner in Bayern von ihrem Entstehen an bis auf die gegenwärtige Zeit (Sulzbach: J. E. von Seidelschen Kunst- und Buchhandlung, 1826), 23: “Bey dem 40stündigen Gebete, das am Palmsonntag anfieng und bis zum Mittwoch dauerte (wovon P. Sylverius von Bregenz im Jahre 1629 Urheber war), hielt man anfangs alle Stunden kurze Anreden, in der Folge aber zu gewissen Stunden eine Predigt, und in allem 24 derselben.” More recent scholarship does not accept this account. 218. D’Ascoli, La Predicazione, 419. 219. Von Mehr, Predigtwesen, 35. 220. Mossmaier, Die Kapuziner, 12, 14. 221. Von Thiessen, Kapuziner, 73. 222. Ibid., 152. 223. Quoted in ibid., 175, n. 10, from Romualdus, Historia, vol. 5, fol. 263. 224. Von Mehr, Predigtwesen, 88–89. 225. Retold by von Thiessen, Die Kapuziner zwischen, 175. 226. Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland: Die Kölner Nuntiatur, Nuntius Antonio Albergati (1610 Mai-1614 Mai), Nuntiaturberichte

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aus Deutschland, vol. 5/1/1 and 5/1/2 (Munich, Paderborn, and Vienna: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1972), 5/1/1, Nr. 65, p. 109. 227. Ibid., 5/1/1, Nr. 426, 1 August 1611, pp. 402–404. 228. Ibid., 5/1/1, Nr. 741, 10 November 1612, pp. 721–22; Nr. 747, 18 November 1612, p. 727. 229. Ibid., 5/1/2, Nr. 840a, 2 August 1613, pp. 820–22. 230. Pöckl, Kapuziner in Bayern, 22–24. 231. Arsenio Theobald Jacobs, Die Rheinischen Kapuziner 1611–1725: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der katholischen Reform (Münster/Westphalia: Aschendorffschen Buchdruckerei, 1933), 115–16. 232. The title is Rosetum dolorosum Centifoliatum: Schmertzhaffter Rosen=Bart von hundert Blättigen Rosen, Das seynd Hundert . . . Predigen von dem Bitteren Leyden und Sterben JESU Christi . . . (Passau: Rudolph Wege, 1694). 233. Donatus von Passau, Rosetum dolorosum, ser. 3, 29–30. 234. Ibid., ser. 4, 35. 235. Ibid., ser. 4, 40. 236. Ibid., ser. 6, 51–52. 237. Ibid., ser. 18, 164. 238. Ibid., ser. 23, 204–205. 239. Ibid., ser. 25, 230–31. 240. Ibid., ser. 32, 300, 306. 241. Ibid., ser. 51, 490–91. 242. Ibid., ser. 56, 544. 243. Ibid., ser. 57, 554. 244. Ibid., ser. 64, 630. 245. Ibid., ser. 67, 661. 246. Ibid., ser. 79, 805. 247. See M. Heyret, ed., P. Marcus von Aviano, O. M. Cap. (1631–1699): Einführung in seine Korrespondenz, 2 vols. (Munich: Josef Kösel & Friedrich Pustet, 1937, 1938), 1: 274–75. 248. Erich Feigl, Halbmond und Kreuz: Marco d’Aviano und die Rettung Europeas (Vienna: Amalthea, 1993), 70. 249. Ibid., 72. 250. Ibid., 104. 251. Ibid., maps on pp. 53, 73, 147, 179, 181–183, 185. 252. For example, on the front of a broadside entitled “Die wahre Abbildung der Hochfürstlichen, Bischoflichen Residentz zu Augsburg auff dem Fronhof, da der Wohl-Ehrwürdige P. MARCUS de Aviano Capuciner Prediger, welche er den 18. November Nachmittag zwischen 2. vnd 3. Vhr vom Ercker der Hochfürstlichen Pfalz auff dem genandten Fronhof zu vil tausent gegenwartigen Personen gehabt hat . . . 1680” (Augsburg: Matthaus Schmid Brieffmahler, presumably also 1680). This is reproduced in Feigl, Halbmond und Kreuz, 17; in t he same vol., 86–87, an engraving of Father d’Aviano preaching in 1681 in Ghent

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to an audience that fills the spacious marketplace. Some onlookers swoon and collapse. 253. I am deciphering this from the photoreproduction in Feigel, Halbmond und Kreuz, 17. 254. Ibid. 255. Ibid., 85. 256. Ibid., 84. 257. Ibid., 8, my translation. 258. Martin von Cochem, Der groβe Myrrhengarten des bittern Leidens (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1912). 259. Martin Persch, “Martin von Cochem,” Biographisch-Bibliographisches Kirchenlexikon, cols. 947–948, online edition, 222.bautz.de/bbkl, consulted 6 April 2007, n.p. 260. Ibid. 261. Von Cochem, Der groβe Myrrhengarten, Gärtlein 7, 251. 262. Ibid., 251–52. 263. Ibid., 257. 264. Ibid., 263. 265. Ibid., 270. 266. Ibid., 279. 267. Ibid., 278. 268. Ibid., 283. 269. Ibid., 284. 270. Ibid., 297–98. 271. Ibid., 311. 272. Ibid., 315. 273. Ibid., 316. 274. Ibid., 318–19. 275. Ibid., 21–24. 276. Ibid., 337. 277. Ibid., 354. 278. Geistliche Klag=Lieder Uber Das gantze bittere Leyden und Sterben Unsers Heylands Jesu Christi zum Trost, Nutzen, und Nachfolg Christlicher Seelen (Würzburg: Johann Michael Kleyer, 1712), containing seventy-two hymns, each with multiple verses, on each affliction that made up the Passion. 279. Johann Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, translated by Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 339–40. 280. An anonymous early eighteenth-century sketch, in words and with an accompanying illustration of stations of the cross, is Andächtige Gebett Vnd Betrachtung Uber [sic] Die vornembste Geheimbnussen deβ bitteren Leyden vnd Sterben vnsers HErrn JEsu Christi Und Seiner liebsten betrübtisten Mutter MARJA . . . (Munich: Johann Lucas Straub, 1705). The illustration is the frontispiece. The author’s expressions of anti-Semitism are harsh, and as a subject for meditation are not to be passed over lightly. Foreshadowing this by over a century is Feucht’s

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Christliche Wallfahrt, discussed above. The latter includes specific prayers to the wounds of the left hand, right hand, right food, left foot, and side-wound, in that order, 71–73. 281. On the body in history, see, among many others, Kathleen Canning, “The Body as Method? Reflections on the Place of the Body in Gender History,” Gender and History 11, 3 (1999), 499–513. 282. Thomas Lentes’s dissertation has taught me to think in these terms: “Gebetbuch und Gebärde.” CHAPTER

2

Earlier versions of the first half of this chapter appeared as “‘Gedanken, Herz und Sinn’: Die Unterdrückung der religiösen Emotionen,” in Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400–1600, edited by Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 69–95; and in English as “’Christians’ Mourning and Lament Should Not Be Like the Heathens’: The Suppression of Religious Emotion in the Reformation,” in Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, edited by John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand, and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2004), 107–30. I am grateful for permission to rework and re-present parts of these essays. 1. Carolyn Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), esp. 3–21, 77–81, 105–9, 129–35; chap. 4, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in TwelfthCentury Cistercian Writing,” 110–69; and 264–65. When I inquired of Professor Bynum if she regarded herself as the “discoverer” of the concept of affective piety, she answered that one should probably seek the roots of the notion in such works as André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et texts dévots du moyen âge latin: Études d’histoire littèraire (Paris: Bloud et Gay, 1932); Louis Gougaud, Devotional and Ascetic Practices in the Middle Ages (London: Burns, Oates and Washbourne, 1927); Marie Dominique Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle, Études de philosophie médiévale 45 (Paris: J. Vrin, 1957); and André Vauchez, La spiritualité au moyen âge occidental: VIIIe-XIIe siècles (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1975). My thoughts have also been stimulated by such anthropological works as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, The Andaman Islanders (New York: Free Press, 1964); and Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, The Celebration of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). These scholars have investigated the relationship between ritual and emotion above all in death and burial ceremonies, in which one might expect that feeling would play a prominent role. More useful still for my purposes have been the more universally applicable theories of Maurice Bloch (“The Ritual of the Royal Bath,” in Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies, edited by David Cannadine and Simon Price (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 271–97; and Catherine Bell, Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), esp. chap. 9, “The Power of Ritualization, 197–223.

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2. Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Peter Browe, Die Verehrung der Eucharistie im Mittelalter (Munich: M. Hueber, 1933); and Browe, Die eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters (Breslau: Müller und Seifert, 1938). Anne Derbes, Picturing the Passion in Late Medieval Italy: Narrative Painting, Franciscan Ideologies, and the Levant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), attributes the revival of a feeling Christ to the Franciscans. But one reviewer, Gary M. Radke, has persuasively commented, “It is thus with some disappointment that the reader finds that Derbes has not discussed all Passion imagery prevalent in the thirteenth century but only that which can be particularly illuminated by the multiple perspectives of innovation, Byzantine sources, and Franciscanism”; Speculum 74, 1 (1999), 156. 3. Caroline Walker Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), esp. 219–76. For a perspective to which Bynum has taken exception, see Rudolph Bell, Holy Anorexia (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985). 4. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Later Middle Ages,” in Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 181–238, here at 186. See also Eamon Duffy, “Devotion to the Crucifix on the Eve of the Reformation,” in Bilder and Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Bob Scribner, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 46 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), 21–36. 5. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 108. She cites Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970); and Giles Constable, “Twelfth-Century Spirituality and the Late Middle Ages,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5: Proceedings of the Southern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer 1969 (1971), 27–60; reprinted in Constable, Religious Life and Thought (11th–12th Centuries), 2 vols. (London: Variorum Reprints, 1979). 6. Charles Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages in Fifteenth-Century Germany,” Past and Present 118 (1988), 25–64; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 11, here apropos of late-medieval observance, esp. 11–52 and 231–65; also Duffy, “Devotion to the Crucifix,” 21–36. 7. Bernd Moeller, “Piety in Germany around 1500,” translated by Joyce Irwin, in The Reformation in Medieval Perspective, edited by Steven Ozment (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), 50–75; the prior German version appeared in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 56 (1965), 5–30 8. Moeller regards the clergy as sharing little of the lay yearning, and as contributing less. He finds that the reforming impulse behind the Brethren of the Common Life, for example, was exhausted, shallow, and monotonous, in a negative manner preparing the way for the upheaval of the Reformation (“Piety,” 57). 9. Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975),

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9, 22–32 (concerning the “terrible burden of late medieval theology”); and The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), 204–22, esp. 208–209 (about the “inner anguish” of the Catholic laity). 10. By Scribner, above all the essays in Robert Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1987); Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800), edited by Lyndal Roper (Leiden: Brill, 2001); Scribner, “The Impact of the Reformation on Daily Life,” in Mensch und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit: Leben–Alltag–Kultur (Vienna: Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1990), 315–43; Scribner, “The Reformation and the Religion of the Common People,” in Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationen und Debatten (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1993), 221–41; Scribner, “Elements of Popular Belief,” in Handbook of European History 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1994), 1: 231–55 (not confined to Germany or the late Middle Ages); Scribner, “Das Visuelle in der Volksfrömmigkeit,” in Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Scribner, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 46 (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1990), 9–20. Andrew Pettegree has recently disputed Scribner’s thesis concerning the transmittal to illiterate audiences of the messages of printed pamphlets, either through their illustrations or through reading aloud in some public place: Andrew Pettegree, Reformation and the Culture of Persuasion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 102–27. 11. Subtitled Politisch-soziale Kontexte, visuelle Praxis, körperliche Ausdrucksformen (Munich: Fink, 2002); in particular Klaus Schreiner’s introduction, “Soziale, visuelle und körperliche Dimensionen mittelalterlicher Frömmigkeit: Fragen, Themen, Erträge einer Tagung,” 9–40; Thomas Lentes, “Inneres Auge, äuβerer Blick und heilige Schau. Ein Diskussionsbeitrag zur visuellen Praxis in Frömmigkeit und Moraldidaxe des späten Mittelalters,” 179–220; Otto Langer, “Leibhafter Erfahrung Gottes. Zu compassio und geistlicher Sinnlichkeit in der Frauenmystik des Mittelalters,” 439–62; Gerd Schwerhoff, “Christus zerstückeln. Das Schwören bei den Gliedern Gottes und die spätmittelalterliche Passionsfrömmigkeit,” 499–528. 12. See Justus Lipsius’s dispassionate treatment of the ancient practice of crucifixion: De Crvce Libri Tres Ad sacram profanamque historiam vtiles (Antwerp: Plantin, 1593). 13. Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996); James H. Marrow, Passion Iconography in Northern European Art of the Late Middle Ages and Early Renaissance (Kortrijk, Belgium: Van Ghemmert, 1979); Ellen M. Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). The enclosed sisters of the east Saxon Cistercian convent of St. Marienstern in 1998 displayed, among many other ancient treasures, the life-sized body of the crucified Christ, dating from 1510 and covered with gore. See the photograph of it in Die Zeit, 30 (16 July 1998), 17.

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14. Under the surface, this stereotype contained a variability that I shall return to in the conclusion of this book. See Dorothée Sturkenboom, “Historicizing the Gender of Emotions: Changing Perceptions in Dutch Enlightenment Thought,” Journal of Social History 34, 1 (2000), 55–75. 15. The German environment was replete with such images on the eve of the Reformation. A fine example for the misery that it succeeds in conveying to the viewer is a woodcut by Hans Burgkmair the Elder, “Mater Dolorosa, at Top the Seven Pains in Circles,” 1524, reproduced in F.W.H. Hollstein, German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts ca. 1400–1700, vol. 5 (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, n.d.), 66. 16. Modern specialists in mother-infant bonding, such as my niece Dr. Elizabeth Bogado Briganti, might consider whether medieval Marian devotion did not strive to encourage that process. See the essays in Naomi J. Miller and Naomi Yavneh, eds., Maternal Measures: Figuring Caregiving in the Early Modern Period (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2000). Thanks to Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks for recommending these to me. 17. See Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Scribner, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit; Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Norbert Schnitzler, “Bilderstürmer–Aufrührer oder Blasphemiker?” in Ordnung und Aufruhr im Mittelalter: Historische und juristische Studien zur Rebellion, edited by Marie Theres Fögen (Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann, 1995), 195–215. 18. Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 282–307. 19. Reinhard Lieske, in his “Die Bilderwelt evangelischer Kirchen in Württemberg,” Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte 90 (1990), 92–122, ignores the shifts in the iconographic message in the transition from Catholic to Lutheran and maintains that there were hardly any differences under Lutheranism in the appearance of the sanctuaries. Lieske observes simply that dukes Ulrich and Christopher ordered the removal of much artistic “buffoonery” (Gaukelwerk), a characterization of late-medieval ecclesiastical art that the author apparently accepts. He notes that themes not related to the life of Christ tend to disappear (97), but he does not seem to accord this great meaning. 20. See Thüringisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Weimar (THSAW), Reg. Ii 2769, “1560. Schriften betr. Den . . . Bericht über die Veränderungen der Altare, Ceremonien und noch vorhandenen Kirchen ornate, Bücher . . . .” for example, in Waltershausen, “Auch ist eine grosse gedreifechige Taffeln voller schneetzter vnd gemalter heiligen mit golde vbertzogen . . . die vor dreien Jaren mit vorwissen des . . . hern Bischof[s] . . . vom altar genommen, gleichwol noch Im Chor, doch verschlossen, bis vf diese Zeit, stehent blieben.” 21. Luther expressed his distaste for the Catholic depiction of the Virgin in his Christmas Day sermon of 1530, D. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar: Böhlau, 1883–2007; by convention hereafter WA for Weimarer Ausgabe), WA 47: 257): “Ich soll mich des Kindes annehmen und einer Geburt und soll der Mutter vergessen, so viel’s möglich ist—

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wiewohl ihrer nicht kann vergessen werden, denn wenn eine Geburt da ist, muss auch eine Mutter da sein—aber dennoch darf man nicht an die Mutter glauben, sondern nur daran, dass das Kindlein geboren ist”; quoted by Otto Clemen, Luther und die Volksfrömmigkeit seiner Zeit, Studien zur religiösen Volkskunde, Abt. B, Heft 6 (Dresden: Ungelenk, 1938), 11 Relevant to this and other points made in this chapter is Donna Spivey Ellington, “Impassioned Mother or Passive Icon: The Virgin’s Role in Late Medieval and Early Modern Passion Sermons,” Renaissance Quarterly 48, 2 (1995), 227–61, about which and about Ellington’s related book I shall have more to say in a later chapter. 22. The problem with the lovely coffee-table book by Astrid Utpatel-Hartwig and Ilse Schrama, Heilige Frauen in den Kirchen Mecklenburg-Vorpommerns (Stralsund: weiw [sic], 2004), is that it gathers the remaining medieval images of women without accompanying attention to how and where they survived. There are always exceptions to any generalization, and some of these saints’ images may have reposed throughout in the niche that they had occupied under Catholicism. However, they could have been stored within the church or community and been restored after the official prejudice against saints had abated. 23. I much appreciate Susanne Rau’s making known and available to me Wolfgang Schneider’s Aspectus populi: Kirchenräume der katholischen Reform und ihre Bildordnungen im Bistum Würzburg (Regensburg: Schnell und Steiner, 1999), with its parish-by-parish survey of the decoration of sanctuaries during the early seventeenth century. As far as the author was able to reconstruct the program of art, hardly any sanctuary was without a prominent depiction of a female saint, and some had many. 24. On the range and significance of nonpictorial implements of the Mass, see Wandel, Voracious Idols, esp. 26–51. 25. This is evident in the visitation protocols. For a general and illuminating treatment of the Brandenburg Reformation, see Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). Less valuable is Johannes Sonnek, “Die Beibehaltung katholischer Formen in der Reformation Joachims II. von Brandenburg und ihre allmähliche Beseitigung,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Rostock, 1903. 26. Brandenburgisches Landeshauptarchiv Potsdam (BLHAP), Pr. Br. Rep. 40A 648, “Neustadt Salzwedel, Visitationes de Annis 1541, 1551, und 1579,” 57, 60. 27. Margit Thofner, “Court and Urban Ceremonial,” paper presented on Peder Palladius, Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, 26 October 2006, Salt Lake City, Utah. 28. See Sächsische Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden (SHSAD) Loc. 1991, “Visitation der Superintendentur Grimma 1574,” a huge volume listing the economic arrangements and possessions of many parishes. 29. Hessisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Wiesbaden (HHSAW), Abt. 171, Nr. D258, for examples, fols. 27, 28, the villages of Honstedt and Niederhadamer. 30. In parishes governed by the Stift (bishop’s chapter) in Magdeburg, Catholic artifacts were very much in use. See Sachsen-Anhalt Landeshauptarchiv Magdeburg

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(S-ALHAM), Rep. A12 Gen. 2439, “Kirchenvisitation 1583/4 Dörfer im Holzkreis,” passim. By this time, the Lutheran influence was pronounced, but the Catholic past of this district is still in evidence. 31. The word levitical is part of the stock Protestant vocabulary of condemnation, employed in both Lutheran and Calvinist circles. 32. For example, in the county of Nassau-Weilburg senior line, which remained Lutheran, the visitors commanded in 1577 that remaining chasubles should be distributed to the Hausarmen, the poor who were confined to their homes. HHSAW, Abt. 171, Nr. E636, fol. 6, 21. The garments were by nature so grandiose that the thought of the poor wearing them to keep warm reminds one of the nursery rhyme, “Hark, hark! The dogs do bark! The beggars are coming to town! Some in rags and some in tags, and one in a velvet gown!” Their distribution to the poor is another expression of Protestant contempt for these artifacts. 33. For example, the city of Weida near Weimar, THSAW, Reg. Ii 23–26, “Registration der visitation welche Anno 1554 gehaldenn,” fol. 226 (verso)–227 (recto). In their summary at the conclusion of the 1554 visitation, the inspectors recommended to the three princes, “Weil auch allenthalben im Lande aus e. F. g. hern vatters etc. gotseligen beuelch, vnd sonst aus gutem grundt vnd vrsachen die altar in den kirchen dermassen zuzurichten vnd zwsezen beuolen, das der priester al sein kirchen ampt gegen dem volck verrichten moge, Vnd aber iederman auff Weimar ein Meister vnd furbildt doran zunemen sihet, So ist vnser vnderthenig bit, E. F. G. wolen auch alhir alsso vorordenen lassen.” THSAW, Reg. Ii 2487, fol. 6 (verso). Dated 4 March 1555. 34. The concern to keep the sexes separate may be found in all territories. See, for example, HHSAW, “Eigentliche Exploration, wie die Nassauw Saarbrückische Kirchenordtnung practicirt, vnd wie fern deren in durchgehender gleichheit vnd conformität gelebt . . .” date uncertain but just post-1618; Abt. 131, Nr. Xa, 1, fol. 50: “Ob Mannβ vnd weibs Personen, Jung vnd alt, promiscue Zum disch deβ herrn vndereinander gehen; oder mannβleuth pro ratione atatis ex ordinis vor, daβ weibs volck hernach?” Cf. Sachsen-Anhalt Landeshauptarchiv Magdeburg (S-ALHAM), Rep. A12, Gen. 2442, “Visitationsordnung 1585,” fol. 54 (verso), where men and boys are followed by unmarried women and girls and then by matrons. Strictly separating the sexes was another means of trying to dampen sensations—in this case, social and sexual ones. 35. Again, every region had its variations on this pattern. In 1554, the sons of former Saxon elector Johann Friedrich ruled that in the remaining Ernestine territories, the choir robe could not be worn during services, except for the acts that formed part of the distribution of the Lord’s Supper. THSAW, Reg. Ii 23–26, fol. 10 (verso): “Jdoch solle der Chorrock auff der Cantzel zugebrauchen in allewegen vnd an allen ortten durch aus abgeschaft aber vor dem altar vnter der Sacramentreichung nachgelassen werden.” Under those provisions, this garb would have underscored the extraordinary nature of the eucharistic elements. 36. See my chapter on penance and communion in The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997), 91–137. 37. Andreas Musculus’s (1514–1581) defense of the adoration of the Eucharist demonstrates the potential of the Real Presence within Lutheranism. See his

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Propositiones de vera, reali et substantiali praesentia, Corporis & Sanguinis IESU Christi in Sacramento Altaris (Frankfurt/Oder: 1573). 38. For example, S-ALHAM, Rep. A12, Gen. 2442, “Visitationsordnung 1585,” fol. 30 (recto). 39. Landeskirchenarchiv Braunschweig, V443, “Protokolle der Kirchen- und Schulvisitationen im Stifte Halberstadt” (1589), no pagination, but the village of “Sistedt.” If he had broken the wafers simply in half, the complainants might have been insinuating that their pastor was behaving as Catholic priests had. But this was not the case. 40. This altarpiece has been widely photographed. I initially examined it in Karlheinz Blaschke, Wittenberg, die Lutherstadt (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1977), plates 23–24. A slide of the predella is available directly from the Stadtkirche Lutherstadt Wittenberg, slide no. 1110–4. 41. Examples of Cranach’s earlier style are Alexander Stepanov, Lucas Cranach the Elder 1472–1553 (Bournemouth: Parkstone Press, 1997), plate 5, p. 9, “Golgotha,” dated before 1502; and Claus Grimm, Johannes Erichsen, and Evamaria Brockhoff, eds., Lucas Cranach: Ein Maler-Unternehmer aus Franken, Katalog zur Landesausstellung Festung Rosenberg, Kronach, 17. Mai–21. August 1994 (Munich: Haus der bayerischen Geschichte, 1994), plate 196, p. 367, “Kreuzigungstafel aus Posterstein,” dated between 1515 and 1520. Cf. Igor Schestkow-Epstein, Cranach’s Golgatha, translated by Ralf Tauscher (Chemnitz: n.p., 1998). 42. Pews were just beginning to be built in city churches for laity who were neither nobles nor magistrates. 43. Peter and Paul Church (Herderkirche) in Weimar possesses one of the famous Cranach altarpieces in question; and another is in Schneeberg. For the latter, see Caroline Bynum’s discussion in Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 228–29. I interpret the blood in these paintings differently than Bynum does. 44. Apparently consistently on display. Originally in Frauenkirche, today in St. Sebaldskirche, Nuremberg. 45. See my essay, “Patterns of Religious Practice: Nontheological Features,” in Thomas A. Brady, Jr., ed., Die deutsche Reformation zwischen Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, Schriften des Historischen Kollegs Kolloquien 50 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 159–71, in which I argue that our considerations of modes of communication other than the explicit may reveal different intentions than are formulated in words. 46. See exchange on this point among Bernd Moeller, Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Robert W. Scribner, and Steven Ozment in Stadtbürgertum und Adel in der Reformation: Studien zur Sozialgeschichte der Reformation in England und Deutschland, edited by Wolfgang J. Mommsen et al. (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1979), 25–48. 47. R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). 48. Germanists could well begin with Rudolf Cruel’s long Geschichte der deutschen Predigt im Mittelalter (originally published in 1879; reprinted Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966). His conclusion, 648–52, addresses the question of increased preaching with

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the coming of the Reformation. The literature on medieval preaching is immense, ranging from extensive publication of the sermons themselves to studies of particular aspects. In the former category for German-speaking lands, see Franz Karl Grieshaber, ed., Deutsche Predigten des XIII. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: K. F. Hering, 1844–1856). In the second category, see also Thomas L. Amos, Eugene A. Green, and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, eds., De ore Domini: Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989). A recent and suggestive collection of twenty-one papers is Jacqueline Hamesse, Beverly Mayne Kienzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and Anne T. Thayer, eds., Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Instituts d’Études Médiévales, 1998). See also Nicole Beriou and David L. D’Avray, eds., Modern Questions about Medieval Sermons: Essays on Marriage, Death, History and Sanctity (Spoleto: Centro italiano di studi sull’Alto medioevo, 1994), and Ludwig Hödl and Wendelin Knoch, Repertorium, der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters für die Zeit von 1350–1500 (Münster/Westphalia: Aschendorff, 2001), in CD-ROM form under the rubric of the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel. 49. Manfred Hannemann, The Diffusion of the Reformation in Southwestern Germany, 1518–1534 (Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography, 1975). Steven E. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 91–107, on the preacher Eberlin von Günzburg. I use the word diverse as a reaction against the main thesis of Bernd Moeller and Karl Stackmann, Städtische Predigt in der Frühzeit der Reformation: Eine Untersuchung deutscher Flugschriften der Jahre 1522 bis 1529, Abhandlungen der Akademie der Wissenschaften in Göttingen (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996), which is that the early urban preachers agreed theologically with Luther (lutherische Engführung). I find that they did not necessarily. See Moeller, “Was wurde in der Frühzeit der Reformation in den deutschen städten gepredigt?” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 75 (1984), 176–93; and my response, “What Was Preached in German Cities in the Early Years of the Reformation? Wildwuchs versus Lutheran Unity,” in The Process of Change in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Miriam Usher Chrisman, edited by Phillip N. Bebb and Sherrin Marshall (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), 81–96. 50. F.W.H. Hollstein, German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1400–1700, vol. 31, edited by Tilman Falk (Roosendaal, Netherlands: Koningklijke van Poll, 1991), 247. 51. Pacem, a tablet or small board, often decorated with the picture of Christ or another sacred figure, which attendants at Mass kissed at a designated stage in the ceremony. To the best of my ability to discern, in those parts of Germany that I have studied, the kiss of peace directly applied to another’s person was not used. 52. Ozment, The Reformation in the Cities, 9. 53. Lenz, De mortuis nil nisi bene? Leichenpredigten als multidisziplinäre Quelle unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der historischen Familienforschung, der Bildungsgeschichte und der Literaturgeschichte, Marburger Personalschriften-Forschungen 10 (Sigmaringen: Jan Thorbecke, 1990), 20–21. 54. Based on reading of Karl Pallas, Registraturen der Kirchenvisitationen im ehemals sächsischen Kurkreise, 7 vols. (Halle: O. Hendel, 1906–18).

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55. Luise Schorn-Schütte traces the emergence of the pastorate as a professional class in northern Germany during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Evangelische Geistlichkeit in der Frühneuzeit (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996). 56. Bruce Gordon, Clerical Discipline and the Rural Reformation: The Synod in Zurich, 1532–1580 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1992); Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 24–43, on the pastors’ education. Unfortunately, Fritz Büsser, Die Prophezei: Humanismus und Reformation in Zürich, Zürcher Beiträge zur Reformationsgeschichte 17 (Bern: Peter Lang, 1994), has virtually nothing to say about the Prophezei! On the Netherlands, see Hermann J. Selderhuis, “Predigterausbildung in den Niederlanden,” in Erziehung und Schulwesen zwischen Konfessionalisierung und Säkularisierung, edited by Heinz Schilling and Stefan Ehrenpreis (Münster/ Westphalia: Waxmann, 2004), 175–85. 57. On the Wurttemberg pastors’ education, see Bruce Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners in Württemberg during the Late Reformation, 1581–1621 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 24–43. 58. Harry Caplan, Mediaeval Artes Praedicandi: A Hand-List (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1934); Caplan, Mediaeval Artes Praedicandi: A Supplementary Hand-List (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1936); Th.-M. Charland, Artes Praedicandi (Paris: Vrin; and Ottawa: Institut d’Études Médiévales, 1936); Harry Caplan and Henry H. King, “Latin Tractates on Preaching: A Book-List,” Harvard Theological Review 42, 3 (1949), 185–206. See also Dorothea Roth, Die mittelalterliche Predigttheorie und das Manuale Curatorum des Johann Ulrich Surgant, Basler Beiträge zur Geschichtswissenschaft 58 (Basle: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1956). A recent contribution to the evaluative literature is Peter A. Dykema, “Handbooks for Pastors: Late Medieval Manuals for Parish Priests and Conrad Port’s Pastorale Lutheri (1582),” in Continuity and Change: The Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History, edited by Robert J. Bast and Andrew C. Gow (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 143–62. 59. Bayerische Staatsarchiv Coburg (BSAC), LA B 2468, “Visitatio Superintentur Coburg. Et Adiunctur, 1577,” fol. 14. 60. As a political as well as doctrinal test, the pastors of the Duchy of Braunschweig were compelled to deliver (12 December 1666) and also submit to their overseers the text of a sermon commemorating the death of Duke August the Younger (17 September 1666). All were assigned the text of Psalm 90 (or 91—there was some confusion as to the chapter they were to use). Amazingly, thirty-eight of these test sermons have survived. Mary Jane Haemig told me years ago that she planned to use these as the subject of scholarship. If she does not, then I shall. Landeskirchenarchiv Braunschweig (LKAB), two folders: V1765 and V1942. 61. He was a predestinarian, for example. On his ecclesiology, see Dieter Frielinghaus, Ecclesia und Vita: Eine Untersuchung zur Ekklesiologie des Andreas Hyperius, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Lehre der Reformierten Kirche 23 (Neukircheb-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1966), 34, 42: Before the Fall, God was pastor and preacher; after the Fall, God created the pastorate.

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62. Marburg: Andreas Kolbe, 1553. The foreword to the reader is dated October 1552. A second edition, appearing in 1562, was twice as long as the first. See the introduction to Andreas Hyperius, Die Homiletik und die Katechetik des Andreas Hyperius, edited and translated by Ernst Christian Achelis and Eugen Sachsse (Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1901), 3–13. 63. This title is available in the Early English Books Online series. On the excitation of the emotions through proper preaching, see Book I, chapter 16, “The mouinge of affections,” 41–50. Marjory E. Lange, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 70 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), chap. 3, “Preaching Tears,” 108–55, on Hyperius, 116. 64. Basle: Johannes Oporinus, 1556. This deals with the course of study that future clergymen should undergo, including what books they should read. Two alternative titles of later editions were: De ratione studii theologici and De Theologo seu de ratione studii theologici. See Achelis and Sachsse, Die Homiletik und die Katechetik, 5. 65. Martin Schian, “Welches ist die Bedeutung des Andreas Hyperius für die Wissenschcaft der Homiletik . . .” (n.p.: n.p., 1896), 12–14. 66. Bayerische Staatsbibliothek and Herzog August Bibliothek, eds., Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts, 40 vols. (Stuttgart: Anton Hiersemann, 1983–2000); referred to by scholars as VD-16. 67. Gerhard Krause, Andreas Gerhard Hyperius: Leben—Bilder—Schriften, Beiträge zur historischen Theologie 56 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1977), 31. See the twelve surviving portraits of Hyperius, 91–124, with Krause’s comment. Also of great interest is Gerhard Krause, ed. and trans., Andreas Gerhard Hyperius: Briefe 1530–1563 (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1981), seventy-four letters. 68. Schian, “Welches ist die Bedeutung des Andreas Hyperius,” evidently the record of a disputation held on this subject. On this point, p. 35. 69. Krause, Andreas Gerhard Hyperius, 48, on Hyperius’s anti-Lutheran sentiment and that of his students. 70. For the Low Countries, Selderhuis, “Predigerausbildung in den Niederlanden,” 175–85. 71. See Norbert Haag, Predigt und Gesellschaft: Die lutherische Orthodoxie in Ulm 1640–1740 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1992); and Sabine Holtz, Theologie und Alltag: Lehre und Leben in den Predigten der Tübinger Theologen 1550–1750 (Tübingen: Mohr, 1993). 72. See the list and analysis of Alfred Wiesenhütter, Die Passion Christi in der Predigt des deutschen Protestantismus von Luther bis Zinzendorf (Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1930). 73. The original is in WA 19, 112–13; this translation is from Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 53, Liturgy and Hymns, edited by Ulrich S. Leupold and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1965), 90. 74. WA, 17/2, “Euangelion am Ersten Sontage in der Fasten. Matthei am 4.,” 186–97, here at 187.

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75. WA 12, “Palmtag 29. März 1523,” 461–71, here at 463–65. 76. “Die Historia des leidens unsers Herren Jhesu Christi, nach den vier Euangelisten, Durch Johannem Buggenhagen Pomer, vleissig zusammen bracht,” included in “Stephan Roth’s Winterpostille (1528), WA 21, 165–80. A short document, and even though admittedly an abridgement, it supports the view that Luther, in his own practice, vastly curtailed the length and drama of Holy Week description. In this account, Luther retained the story of Judas’s abdomen bursting open when he hanged himself (173). I do not know the origin of this addition to Matthew 27: 5, or when and why it was removed after the Reformation. In a Passion sermon of the late sixteenth century, Martin Chemnitz (1522–1586), who was a prominent Lutheran theologian and superintendent in Brunswick, explained that Judas’s body bursting open was an analogy with 2 Chronicles 25:12, in which the men of Judah threw ten thousand men of Seir down from a cliff, and “they were all dashed to pieces.” Chemnitz states that this is what happened to the heretic Arius in the fourth century, “who wanted to rob Christ of his honor.” He gained a great following but finally “poured all his innards out and takes a gruesome and shameful death, just as Judas also does here.” Chemnitz repudiates a “fable” that Judas had hanged himself from a maple tree, which, being too weak to bear his weight, had let him fall to the ground. His corpse was run over by a wagon, which is what allegedly caused his intestines to pour out. Martin Chemnitz, Historia der Passion vnsers lieben HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi . . . (Wolfenbüttel: Horn, 1591), part 4, 11–12, 29–30. I gave a paper on this subject: “Non-theological Aspects of Religious Practice: The Intestines of Judas,” Department of Modern History, Trinity College, Dublin, 1999. 77. WA 20, “Predigt am Karfreitag,” 302–305. 78. WA 20, “Predigt am ersten Osterfeiertag Nachmittags,” 316–21, here at 316. 79. WA 17/1, “Predigt über die Passionsgeschichte am Montag nach Invokavit,” 6 March 1525, 67–75; two versions appear on these pages. This is one of a series of Lenten-Easter sermons that Luther gave in 1525. It is unusual (but understandable) that he should have begun the Lenten season with a sermon on Christ’s suffering on the cross, so that the congregation might grasp where it was headed. 80. Ibid., 71. 81. Ibid., 73. 82. Franz Posset, “Preaching the Passion of Christ on the Eve of the Reformation,” Concordia Theological Quarterly 59, 4 (1995), 279–300. See the sermon texts in Johann von Staupitz, Salzburger Predigten 1512: Eine textkritische Edition, edited by Wolfram Schneider-Lastin (Tübingen: Neuphilologische Fakultät, 1990). 83. WA 17/1, “Forsetzung der Predigten über die Passionsgeschichte,” 8 March 1525, 74–80, here at 76. 84. Ibid., 77. 85. WA 12, “Fortsetzung der Predigten über das Matthäusevangelium,” 15 March 1525, from section subtitled “De usu et fructu resurrectionis,” 92–102, here at 92–94.

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86. WA 12, “Predigt am Palmsonntag,” 9 April 1525, 170–73, here at 171. 87. WA 12, “Predigt am Ostertag,” 178–92, here at 184. 88. Ibid. 89. Ibid., 184–85. 90. Ibid., 185. 91. Evangelisches Kirchen-Gesangbuch (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1968), 76–77, Chorale, “Christ lag in Todesbanden,” words by Martin Luther (1524). 92. This translation is by Francis Browne (January 2005). I have made one or two alterations where I think that Browne’s choice of words is not as close as it might have been to Luther’s shades of meaning. See www.bach-cantatas.com/Texts/ Chorale012-Eng3.htm (last consulted on 22 February 2007), no pagination. 93. WA 21, From Stephan Roth’s Winterpostille 1528, “Am Palmsontage Euangelion Matthei. xxi,” 147–55, here at 149. 94. WA 21, “Am Grunendornstage, Euangelion Johannis. xiii,” 159. 95. See Ulrich Köpf, “Die Passion Christi in der lateinischen religiösen und theologischen Literatur des Spätmittelalters,” in Die Passion Christi in Literatur und Kunst des Spätmittelalters, edited by Walter Haug and Burghart Wachinger (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1993), 21–41. 96. Kymeus and Johann Bugenhagen, Passional Buch: Vom Leiden vnd Aufferstehung vnsers Herrn Jhesu Christi . . . (Wittenberg: Georg Rhau, 1540), ser. 1, fol. x, for Palm Sunday. The first six sermons are by Kymeus, and the seventh is by Bugenhagen. 97. Ibid., ser. 2, Monday of Holy Week, fol. xiv–xv. 98. Ibid., ser. 4, fol. xxi–xxii. 99. See St. Paul’s version: Acts 1: 18. 100. Kymeus and Bugenhagen, Passional Buch, ser. 5, for Maundy Thursday, fol. xxii. 101. James M. Estes, Godly Magistrates and Church Order: Johannes Brenz and the Establishment of the Lutheran Territorial Church in Germany, 1524–1559 (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2001); Isabella Fehle, ed., Johannes Brenz 1499–1570: Prediger––Reformator––Politiker (Schwäbisch-Hall: Hällisch-Fränkisches Museum, 1999). 102. See the published edition: Ernst Bizer, ed., Predigten des Johannes Brenz: Das Evangelium von der Passion und Auferstehung Jesu Christi (Stuttgart: Quell-Verlag, 1955). 103. Nuremberg: Johann Daubman, 1551. The author (or the printer) declares that he intends this volume for the use of patres familias (Hausväter) in instructing family members and guiding household devotions. 104. Ibid., ser. 1, fol. Bi. 105. Ibid., ser. 3, fol. Dv. 106. Ibid., ser. 5, fol. Gvi. 107. Ibid., ser. 14, fol. xv. 108. Ibid., ser. 6, fol. Ji. 109. Ibid., ser. 8, fol. Liiii. 110. Ibid., ser. 10, fol. Ovi–Pi. 111. Ibid., ser. 11, fol. Qiiii.

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112. Ibid., ser. 18, fol. Ddiiii. 113. Ibid., ser. 14, fol. xvi. 114. Ibid., ser. 18, fol. Ddv. 115. Ibid., ser. 21, esp. fol. Ggiiii. 116. Nuremberg: Johann vom Berg and Ulrich Newber, 1545; and thus before Dietrich’s death. The low number of Protestant sermons is itself a signal of the abbreviated treatment the subject was to receive in comparison to Catholic sermon series, which sometimes ran into the hundreds. This implicitly rules out preaching marathons and forces the compression of the story into smaller, and by definition less elaborated space. The number sixteen might suggest that Dietrich preached twice a day from Palm Sunday through Easter. 117. Dietrich, Passio, foreword, fol. bv. 118. Ibid., ser. 1, fols. biii–diii. 119. Ibid., ser. 10, fol. si. 120. Ibid., ser. 11, fol. v [letter vee] ii. 121. Ibid., ser. 12, fol. x [letter eks] viii. 122. Ibid., ser. 6, fol. kiiii. 123. Ibid., ser. 6, fol. l [letter el] v. 124. Ibid., ser. 9, fol. piiii–rii. 125. Ibid., ser. 11, fol. v [letter vee] iiii. 126. Ibid., ser. 13, fol. Ai [at end of vol. the alphabet starts over]. 127. Ibid., ser. 13, fol. Biiii. 128. Ibid., ser. 13, fol. Bv. 129. See his father’s own Passion sermons: Johannes Spangenberg, Die historia Vom Leiden vnd sterben, vnsers HERRN Jhesu Christi (Halle: Hans Frischmut, 1543). 130. Robert J. Christman, “Heretics in Luther’s Homeland: The Controversy over Original Sin in Late Sixteenth-Century Mansfeld,” Ph.D. dissertation in history, University of Arizona, 2004. 131. In the VD-16, items 7649, 7650, 7651, 7702, and 7703, stretching from 1557 to 1570. 132. Longer subtitle: Etliche schöne vnd nützliche Predigten. I used the second edition (Eisleben: Urban Gaubisch, 1564). The copy I used at the Herzog August Bibliothek was bound in leather, embossed on the front with a crucifix and a man kneeling at the foot of it. This edition contains nineteen sermons, followed by an additional four added on at the back. 133. Ibid., ser. 1, fol. Biii. 134. Ibid., ser. 1, fol. B4 (sic; the fol. numbering shifts from Roman numerals to Arabic numbers). 135. Ibid. 136. Ibid., ser. 1, fol. B6. 137. Ibid., ser. 1, fol. C2. 138. Ibid., ser. 3, fol. F4. Spangenberg states that Lazarus, after being revived from the dead, lived a long time and went to Marseilles with other disciples and became a preacher there (F4). 139. Ibid., ser. 9, fol. R4.

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140. Ibid., ser. 10, fol. T4–T5. 141. Ibid., ser. 10, fol. V2. 142. Ibid., ser. 10, fol. V2-V3. 143. Ibid., ser. 10, fol. V4. 144. Ibid., ser. 12, fol. Z5. 145. Ibid., ser. 14, fol. Bb7, Cc4–Cc5. There may well be a scholarly literature on this point. I have not found it. Early-modern Bibles that I have consulted are divided on Matthew 27: 5, but gradually Protestant ones omit it. 146. Ibid., ser. 15, fol. Ee4–Ee5. 147. Ibid., ser. 17, fol. Hh3. 148. Ibid., ser. 17, fol. Hh8. 149. Ibid., ser. 19, fol. Mm6. 150. Wolfenbüttel: Horn, 1591. The compiler, Melchior Newkirchen, notes in the preface that Chemnitz’s widow, too, desired the sermons to be published. 151. Chemnitz, Historia der Passion, p. 2. 152. Ibid., foreword, 2. 153. Ibid., foreword, 10–11. 154. Ibid., part 1 (the sermons are not individually numbered, yet the separate stories are evident), 41–44; on predestination, see also part 1, 145. 155. Ibid., part 1, 70–73. 156. Ibid., part 1, 104. 157. Ibid., part 1, 111. 158. Ibid., part 3, 179–84. 159. Ibid., part 3, 212. 160. Ibid., part 3, 214. 161. Ibid., part 3, 215. 162. Ibid., part 3, 260. 163. Ibid., part 3, 288–313, the long section on Peter’s denial, here at 295. 164. Ibid., part 3, 310. 165. Ibid., part 4, 17. 166. Ibid., part 4, 87–88. This does not appear in any Bible that I have consulted. 167. Ibid., part 4, 87, 88, 95, 96, 98. 168. Ibid., part 4, 99. 169. Ibid., part 4, 144. 170. Ibid., part 4, 139, 144. 171. Ibid., part 4, 153. 172. Ibid., part 4, 186. 173. Ibid., part 4, 194, 213–14. 174. Nicolaus Selnecker, Passio: Das Leiden vnd Sterben vnsers HErrn Jesu Christi, nach den vier Euangelisten . . . (Wittenberg: Clemens Schleich and Antonius Schöne, 1577). 175. Ibid., fol. Aiii. 176. Ibid., fols. Yiii–Yv. 177. Funffzehen Passion Predigten: Vom Leiden vnd Sterben vnsers HErrn vnd Heilandes JEsu Christi. Denen so verlangen haben nach gewissem Trost wider die Macht der

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289

Sünden, vnd mit Ernst trachten nach dem ewigen Leben, Tröstlich zu Lesen (Helmstedt: Jacob Lucius, 1581), foreword, n.p. Note the word Trost in the extended title. 178. Ibid., ser. 6, fol. XL, for example. 179. Martin Moller, Soliloqvia de passione Iesu Christi: Wie ein jeder Christen Mensch, das allerheyligste Leyden vnd Sterben vnsers HERRN Jesu Christi, jn seinem Hertzen bey sich selbst betrachten Allerley schöne Lehren vnd heylsamen Trost daraus schöpffen . . . (Görlitz: A. Fritsch, 1587). On Moller, see Elke Axmacher, Praxis Evangeliorum: Theologie und Frömmigkeit bei Martin Moller (1547–1606), Forschungen zur Kirchen- und Dogmengeschichte 43 (Berlin: Kirchliche Hochschule, 1986; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989). 180. Brenz, Passio, ser. XIV, fol. xvi. 181. Sauter, Passio Iesv Christi, Das ist Gründtliche vnd auβführliche Erklärung, der Trostreichen Historien, vom bittern vnd thewren Leiden, Sterben vnd Begräbnuβ vnsers HErrn vnd Heilands Jesu Christi, auβ den vier Euangelisten . . . alles in 26 Predigten verfaβt, vnd gepredigt zu Augsburg . . . (Lauingen: Leonhart Reinmichel, 1597), ser. 21, fol. 198 (verso). 182. Bizer, ed., Predigten des Johannes Brenz, 21–68, all given in 1547, when the debacle of the Schmalkaldic War seemed to demand it. 183. Habermann, Postille, Das ist, Auslegung vber die Sontags Euangelia, von Aduent bis auff Ostern, Sampt den Passion predigten (Wittenberg: Georg Müller, 1591), fol. 292.

CHAPTER

3

1. With the exception that eventually, a few churches would have, in place of altar paintings, a word-painting of the texts of the Ten Commandments or the Lord’s Prayer on display. On word-paintings, see Joseph Leo Koerner, The Reformation of the Image (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 289–303. 2. See Glenn Ehrstine, Theater, Culture, and Community in Reformation Bern, 1523–1555, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002). Lyndal Roper has related the witch craze, too, to the baroque, which would draw in swirling patterns of darkness and of fear. Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005). 3. Exodus 20:1–4. 4. Giuseppi Scavizzi, The Controversy on Images from Calvin to Baronius, Toronto Studies in Religion 14 (New York: Peter Lang, 1992), 205–23. There is no discussion of bare crosses here, however. 5. But in France it was. See Hélène Guicharnand, “An Introduction to the Architecture of Protestant Temples Constructed in France before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” in Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, edited by Paul Corby Finney (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 133–61. 6. In the same volume, cf. Raymond A. Mentzer, Jr., “The Reformed Churches of France and the Visual Arts,” 199–230. 7. Andrew Spicer’s paper, “Lutheran Churches in the Dutch Republic,” meetings of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, 26 October 2006, Atlanta, Georgia, observed that the layout of these sanctuaries reflected Reformed influence. See

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Christian Grosse, “Places of Sanctification: The Liturgical Sacrality of Genevan Reformed Churches, 1535–1566,” in Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe, edited by Will Coster and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 60–80. 8. R. W. Scribner, “Anticlericalism and the Reformation in Germany,” in Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London: Hambledon Press, 1987), 243–56; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Neoclericalism and Anticlericalism in Saxony, 1555–1675,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, 4 (Spring 1994), 615–37. 9. Calvin, Plusieurs sermons de Iehan Caluin touchant la diuinite, humanite & natiuite de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ. . . (Geneva: Conrad Badius, 1558), ser. 1 on Pentecost, 373–99, here at 379–80. 10. A Reformed art-historian colleague with whom I discussed the matter of gazing, said that as a boy he looked at the patterns in the ceiling tiles of his church’s sanctuary during the sermon. 11. Andreas Hyperius, too, is explicit on this point, and he writes, “Fides non habet locum, neque conciptur in hominum animis, nisi ennuncietur Euangelium. Fides est ex auditu: Rom. 10. Euangelium aut proponit ac praedicat IESVM Christum.” De recte formando Theologiae studio, libri IIII (Basle: Johannes Oporinus, 1556), 427. See T.H.L. Parker, Calvin’s Preaching (Louisville, Ken.: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1992), part 2, “The Word in Action,” 33–53. See also Jürgen Moltmann’s magisterial study, Christoph Pezel (1539–1604) und der Calvinismus in Bremen, Hospitium Ecclesiae: Forschungen zur bremischen Kirchengeschichte 2 (Bremen: Verlag Einkehr, 1958), esp. 90–93; and on hearing the sermon, Gottfried Adam, Der Streit um die Prädestination im ausgehenden 16. Jahrhundert: Eine Untersuchung zu den Entwürfen von Samuel Huber und Aegidius Hunnius (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1970), 126, 145. 12. “Calvinismus, Neustoizismus und Preussentum, eine Skizze,” Jahrbuch für die Geschichte Mittel- und Ostdeutschlands 5 (1956), 157–81, here at 160. Babette May Levy notes “Calvin’s frequent use of Senecan quotations.” Preaching in the First Half Century of New England History, Studies in Church History 6 (Hartford, Conn.: American Society of Church History, 1945), 119. 13. Cited by Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole: Étude de rhétorique réformé (Paris: Slatkine, 1992), 102. 14. Ibid., 94–97. 15. Engamarre, “Calvin: A Prophet without a Prophecy,” Church History 67, 4 (1998), 643–61. 16. Johannes Calvin, Psalmpredigten, Passions-, Oster- und Pfingstpredigten, Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inédits 7, edited by by Erwin Mülhaupt (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1981), foreword by James I. McCord, n.p. 17. See Rodolphe Peter and Jean-François Gilmont, Bibliotheca Calviniana: Les oeuvres de Jean Calvin publiées au XVIe siècle, 3 vols. (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1991–2000), vol. 1 containing the years 1532–1554; and vol. 2, 1555–1564. No data are available, but the rare existence of copies of these in German libraries suggests a much smaller circulation than of Luther’s postils.

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18. See Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, chap. 8, “The Transmission of the Sermons,” 65–75. 19. Thomas A. Lambert and Isabella M. Watt, eds., Registers of the Consistory of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, vol. 1, 1542–1544, translated by M. Wallace McDonald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmann, 2000). The French-language work is Lambert and Watt, eds., Registres du Consistoire de Genève au temps de Calvin, vol. 1, 1542–1544 (Geneva: Droz, 1996); vol. 2, 1545–1546 (2001); vol. 3, 1547–1548 (2004). 20. For a pictorial view of a large population seated in their pews in their categories listening to a sermon, see Alfred R. Weber, Im Basler Münster 1650 (Basel: Baumann, 1994). This is more a Reformed than a Lutheran arrangement, but a Lutheran-minded Antistes has added an altar to its former stead. One can see here, too, the effects of strict sumptuary ordinances, for the people are clothed very similarly, with distinctions based on rank and marital status. 21. In the English church, a debate took place, too, on whether precisely the hearing of the Word was required or whether in addition the reading of it could aid in the work of the Holy Spirit. See Richard Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Book V, edited by W. Speed Hill (Cambridge: Balknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1977), chaps. 21.1–22.20, pp. 83–110. I am grateful to Ashley Null for this reference. Hooker himself regards reading the Word as effective, too, for the elect. 22. Max Engammare rightly insisted to me in conversation that Calvin wanted his hearers to know about their faith. He agreed, however, that the intellectual level was often so high that the simple people who were the majority within the church may well not have understood; thus, those who were called before the consistory and asked to summarize the sermon genuinely could not do so. 23. Calvin, Psalmpredigten, Sermons inédits 7187. 24. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius, translated by Anthony Mottola (New York: Doubleday Image, 1989), 141. John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 50, 84. 25. WA, BR 11, no. 4144, pp. 165–66; WA, BR 12, no. 4244a, pp. 135–36; WA, TR 4, no. 5070, pp. 641–42. 26. Fabritius, Zwölf Predigten wieder Die Böse Welt, Vnd alle derselben sündliches, vngerechtes, thörichtes vnd eyteles Wesen (Cassel: Jacob Gentsch/Sebald Köhler, 1646), ser. 10, 345. 27. Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution,” Past and Present 100 (1983), 29–61. 28. It would appear from my reading of visitation protocols that, with territorial and princely variation, Lutheran authorities reacted to chronic neglect of the sermon and the sacrament, and that Reformed ones responded more quickly—perhaps because of their more nearly uniform assistance from elders, who kept watch over their neighbors. See Helga Schnabel-Schule, “Der groβe Unterschied und seine Folgen: Zum Problem der Kirchenzucht als Unterscheidungskriterium zwischen lutherischer und reformierter Konfession,” in Krisenbewuβtsein und Krisenbewältigung in der Frühen Zeuzeit: Festschrift für Hans-Christoph Rublack, edited by Monika Hagenmaier and Sabine Holtz (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 197–214; Paul Münch, Zucht und Ordnung: Reformierte Kirchenverfassungen im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Nassau-Dillenburg, Kurpfalz, Hessen-Kassel) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978); and my

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essay, “‘They have highly offended the community of God’: Pastoral Identity and Rituals of Ecclesiastical Discipline in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century German Parishes,” in festschrift for James D. Tracy, From the Middle Ages to Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, coedited by Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 211–29, here at 213–14, 218. 29. Karen E. Spierling, Infant Baptism in Reformation Geneva: The Shaping of a Community, 1536–1564 (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2005); Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “‘Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me, and Forbid Them Not’: The Social Location of Baptism in Early Modern Germany,” in Continuity and Change, the Harvest of Late Medieval and Reformation History: Studies in Honor of Heiko A. Oberman on His Seventieth Birthday, edited by Andrew C. Gow and Robert J. Bast (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 359–78; on Reformed practice, 367–70. 30. I tell more of this story in “Babies, Baptism, Bodies, Burials, and Bliss: Ghost Stories and Their Rejection in the Late Sixteenth Century,” in Tod und Jenseitsvorstellungen in der Schriftkultur der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Cornelia Niekus Moore and Marion Kobelt-Groch, published by the Herzog August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, Germany (Göttingen: Otto Harrasowitz, 2008), 11–22. On the controversy over exorcism, see Bodo Nischan, “The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism in the Late Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18, 1 (1987), 31–51. 31. See Zacharius Ursinus, Verantwortung wider die vngegründten Aufflagen vnnd Verkerungen, mit welchen der Catechismus christlicher Lere, zu Heidelberg im Jar MDLXIII aussgangen, von ettlichen vnbilliger Weise beschweret ist (Heidelberg: Johann Maier, 1564), section on emergency baptism and why it is wrong, fols. 36–39. 32. William G. Naphy, “Church Riots and Social Unrest in Calvin’s Geneva,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26, 1 (1995), 87–98. The name Claude was forbidden, for example, because it was that of a locally favored saint. 33. William J. Bouwsma, John Calvin: A Sixteenth-Century Portrait (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 49–65. But see Richard A. Muller, The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 79–96. 34. In omitting the Zwinglian Reformation, I do not mean to imply that it was without enduring effect. Zwingli’s friend and colleague in Zurich, Leo Jud (1482–1542), has left us his thoughts on the Passion of Christ in Des lydens Jesu Cristi . . . (Zurich: Christoffel Froschauer, 1539). His mood is very similar to Calvin’s in emphasizing human dissoluteness and neglecting Christ’s own ordeal. Jud does foster greater outward demonstration of inner emotional movement—but that movement is supposed to be the result of acute regret for sin. At the same time, Jud demonstrates an affinity with mysticism. See, for example, fols. L (verso)–LI (verso), on Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. 35. Millet, Calvin et la dynamique de la parole, 21, n. 28. 36. Bernard Gagnebin, “L’Histoire des manuscrits des sermons de Calvin,” in Sermons sur le Livre d’Esaïe, chapitres 13–29, edited by Georges A. Barrois, Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inédits 2 (Neukirchen Kreis Moers: Neukirchen Verlag der Buchhandlung des Erziehungsvereins, 1961), xiv–xxvii.

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37. Johannes Calvin, Psalmpredigten, Passions-, Oster- und Pfingstpredigten, Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inédits 7, edited by Erwin Mülhaupt (NeukirchenVluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1981). 38. Quatre sermons de M. Jehan Calvin, traictans des matières fort utiles pour nostre temps . . . (Geneva: Robert Estienne, 1552), only 81 fols.; and Plusieurs sermons de Iehan Calvin . . . (n.p.: Conrad Badius, 1558). The latter probably did not receive a wide circulation, for the Interlibrary Loan Department at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek could locate it only at the Herzog August Bibliothek, where I had already used it. Its system only searches within Germany, and it is doubtless available in Switzerland. Although 685 pages in length, this book is small, with tiny print, and must have been designed for the individual’s convenience. Others of Calvin’s sermons were disseminated late in the century, after his own and most of the following generation had passed away. An example is Predigten H. Iohannis Calvini vber das Buch Job: Wie dieselbe auss seinem Mund durch Befelch einer ehrsamen Rahts zu Genff seind verzeichnet worden, auss dem Französischen trewlich verteutscht (Herborn: Christoff Raben, 1587). For a complete listing, see Peter and Gilmont, Bibliotheca Calviniana. 39. Peter and Gilmont, Bibliotheca Calviniana. 40. Calvin, Plusieurs sermons, ser. 1, 28–54, here at 30–31. 41. Ibid., ser. 1, 43. 42. Ibid., ser. 1, 47–48. 43. Ibid., ser. 1, 52–53. 44. Ibid., ser. 1, 54. 45. Calvin, Plusieurs sermons, ser. 4, 119. 46. Ibid., ser. 4, 130. 47. Ibid., ser. 5, 166–74. 48. Ibid., ser. 6, 202. 49. Ibid., ser. 7, 221–31. 50. Ibid., ser. 8, 252. 51. Ibid., ser. 9, 269, 275, 277. 52. Ibid., ser. 9, 278. 53. Ibid., ser. 9, 289. 54. Ibid., ser. 9, 290. 55. The Passion and Easter sermons are in Calvin, Psalmpredigten, 83–169. 56. Ibid., sermon of 14 April 1560, 94. 57. Ibid., 96. 58. Ibid., 98. 59. Ibid., 112. 60. Ibid., 118. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid., 120–26. 63. Ibid., 132. 64. Ibid., 138. 65. Ibid., 146. 66. Ibid., 147.

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67. Catholics disagreed with both Luther’s and Calvin’s interpretations of Christ’s seeming despair on the cross. See, for example, Georg Scherer, S.J., Postill Oder Auβlegung der Fest- vnd Feyr-täglichen Euangelien durch des gantze Jar, Sambt Auβführlicher Erklärung der Historien vom Leyden vnd Sterben Christi . . . (Munich: Nicolaus Henricus, 1608), 298. 68. Calvin, Psalmpredigten, 153–55. 69. Ibid., 158. 70. Ibid., 161. 71. Ibid., 162. 72. Ibid., 163. 73. On this point the Marburg divine Andreas Hyperius (see preceding chapter) follows Calvin precisely: “Deum patrem elegisse nos in filio, antequam iacerentur fundamenta mundi: ut essemus sancti et irreprehensibiles coram illo per charitatem, qui praedestinavit nos ut adoptaret nos in filios per Jesum Christum in sese, iuxta beneplacitum voluntatis suae, ut laudetur gloria gratiae suae, qua charos nos reddidit per filium dilectum.” Quoted by Dieter Frielinghaus, Ecclesia und Vita: Eine Untersuchung zur Ekklesiologie des Andreas Hyperius, Beiträge zur Geschichte und Lehre der Reformierten Kirche 23 (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1966), 17. 74. In examining Phyllis Mack Crew’s Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands 1544–1569 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1978), I see that the author’s sources include many writings and letters of the instrumental clergymen but not their sermons (as far as I can tell). 75. Ursinus, Verantwortung wider die vngegründten Aufflagen, fol. 31. 76. On this point, I disagree with Olivier Millet, Calvin et la dynamique, 211, that the Word can be either written or preached. 77. Olevianus, Hauptursachen alles jrrthumbs im Heiligen Abendmal, Wie das Heil. Abendmal vnser hertz vnd vertrawen auff das heilige leiden Jesu Christi weiset. Dargegen auch, wie der böse Feind eben durch das H. Abendmal damit vns Christus zu seinem leiden füren wil, am aller meisten die Leut von dem heiligen leiden Christi abzufüren sich vnterstehet, welchs die Erste Hauptursach ist alles Miβuerstands im Heiligen Abendmal (Heidelberg: Johann Mayer, 1565), fol. 4. 78. I used a facsimile copy of the original, Catechismus Oder Christlicher Vnderricht, wie der in Kirchen vnd Schulen der Churfürstlichen Pfaltz getrieben wirdt (Heidelberg: Johann Meyer, 1563), 44–45, available in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. 79. Fester Grundt, das ist, Die Artickel des alten, waren, vngezweiffelten Christlichen Glaubens (Heidelberg: Michael Schirat, 1567), 161–63. Here, too, he cites Romans 10:17. 80. Bruce Gordon has observed that in the 1540s “many Genevans hated what they were hearing from the pulpits.” Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 139. 81. Calvin, Psalmpredigten, 139.

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82. Calvin, Sermons sur le Livre d’Esaïe, 9. 83. On this point, see Denis Crouzet, Jean Calvin: Vies parallèles (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 196. 84. Ibid., cf. 186, 150, respectively. 85. See Millet, Calvin et la dynamique, chap. 6, “Le Verbe divin: hermeneutique calvinienne de l’eloquence divine,” 207–24. 86. The VD-16 lists about forty publications of works by him during the sixteenth century, most of them in German translation. Michel Delval, “La Doctrine du salut dans l’oeuvre homilétique de Théodore de Bèze,” Th.D. dissertation, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Ve Section, Sciences Religieuses, Paris, 1982. 87. Theodore de Beze [sic], Sermons svr l’Histoire de la Passion et Sepulture de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ, descrite par les quatre Euangelistes (Geneva: Jean le Preux, 1592), ser. 1, 16. 88. Ibid., ser. 5, 104–5. 89. Ibid., 107. This is merely one example of the profound matters that Beza, like Calvin before him, presents to his audience. 90. Delval, “La Doctrine du salut,” 16–18; Beza, Sermons svr l’Histoire de la Passion, ser. 5, 96. 91. Beza, Sermons svr l’Histoire de la Passion, ser. 5, 112. 92. Ibid., ser. 6, 124. 93. Ibid., ser. 7, 169–70. 94. Ibid., ser. 1, 16. 95. Ibid., ser. 1, 4. 96. Ursinus, Verantwortung, fol. 28. Ursinus also insists that he honors Martin Luther as an instrument of God (fol. 28). 97. Karl Burkart, “Zacharius Ursinus in seinem Abhängigkeitsverhältnis zu Melanchthon,” Bonn dissertation for Licentiat in Theologie, 1925; used by me in the Staatsbibliothek Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Stelle 1, Berlin. Cf. Erdmann K. Sturm, Der junge Zacharias Ursin: Sein Weg vom Philippismus zum Calvinismus (1534–1562) (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1972). 98. Ursinus’s relationship to Melanchthon is a recurrent topic in Derk Visser, Zacharias Ursinus: The Reluctant Reformer, His Life and Times (New York: United Church Press, 1983). 99. Amy Nelson Burnett, The Yoke of Christ: Martin Bucer and Christian Discipline, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 26 (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1994). 100. There is still valuable information to be had on the atmosphere and partisan quarreling in Heidelberg in Karl Sudhoff, C. Olevianus und Z. Ursinus: Leben und ausgewählte Schriften. Leben und ausgewählte Schriften der Väter und Begründer der reformirten [sic] Kirche 8 (Elberfeld: R. L. Friderichs, 1857), esp. “Die Kämpfe wegen der Kirchenzucht,” 339–70. 101. Sudhoff, Olevianus und Ursinus, 357–60. An illustration of Sylvanus’s beheading may be seen in Bernard H. Bonkhoff, Bild-Atlas zur pf älzischen

296

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Kirchengeschichte (Speyer: Schnell & Steiner, 2000), 1: 165. Within Zurich, according to Franziska Loetz, the city fathers displayed little moderation in punishing blasphemy: Mit Gott handeln: Von den Zürcher Gotteslästerern der Frühen Neuzeit zu einer Kulturgeschichte des Religiösen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). In certain respects, however, Zurich urged a more moderate approach than Geneva did. 102. Some information obtained online 11 March 2007, under “Johannes Sylvanus,” no author given. 103. See Wilhelm Maurer’s trenchant summary of princes’ rise into overseers of morals, in “Die Entstehung des Landeskirchentums in der Reformation,” in Staat und Kirche im Wandel der Jahrhunderte, edited by Walther Peter Fuchs (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1966), 69–78, esp. 77; also Volker Press’s by now nearly classic study, Calvinismus und Territorialstaat: Regierung und Zentralbehörden der Kurpfalz 1559–1619 (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett, 1970), about Friedrich III’s church policies, esp. 221–66. 104. Facsimile of Catechismus Oder Christlicher Vnderricht, wie der in Kirchen vnd Schulen der Churfürstlichen Pfaltz getrieben wirdt (Heidelberg: Johann Meyer, 1563); reprinted Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1983), at the front of which is provided, as a foreword, Friedrich’s decree, 4–10, here at 4. 105. Catechismus Oder Christlicher Vnderricht, wie der in Kirchen vnd Schulen der Churfürstlichen Pfaltz getrieben wirdt (Heidelberg: Johann Meyer, 1563), 13. I document this separately because it is not the facsimile referred to above but the original, and the pagination is different. 106. Ibid., 14. 107. Ibid., 15–16. 108. Ibid., 26–27. 109. Ibid., 34–35. 110. Ibid., 38, 41. On this point, as on others, the Reformed departed from Luther, who believed that both body and soul sleep together until the Final Judgment. The soul itself may repose in the proverbial “bosom of Abraham,” in comfort and peace until awakened by Gabriel’s horn. 111. Ibid., 45. 112. Ibid., 58–59. 113. Ibid., 60. 114. Sudhoff, C. Olevianus und Z. Ursinus, 12. 115. Hauptursachen alles jrrthumbs im Heiligen Abendmal, Wie das Heil. Abendmal vnser hertz vnd vertrawen auff das heilige leiden Jesu Christi weiset. Dargegen auch, wie der böse Feind eben durch das H. Abendmal damit vns Christus zu seinem leiden füren wil, am aller meisten die Leut von dem heiligen leiden Christi abzufüren sich vnterstehet, welchs die Erste Hauptursach ist alles Miβuerstands im Heiligen Abendmal (Heidelberg: Johann Mayer, 1565). 116. Olevianus, Hauptursachen, fol. 2–3. 117. Ibid., fol. 3. 118. Ibid., fol. 4–5. 119. Ibid., fol. 9. 120. Ibid., fol. 10.

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121. Ibid., fol. 11. 122. Ibid., fol. 24–25. 123. Ibid., fol. 17. 124. Ibid., fol. 26–29, here at 26. 125. Ibid., fol. 119. 126. Ibid. 127. Ibid., fol. 159–60. 128. Ibid., fol. 199. 129. Ibid., fol. 206. 130. Corpus doctrinae Orthodoxae sive Catecheticarvm explicationem . . . (Heidelberg: Jonas Rhodius, 1612). 131. Ibid., section entitled “De passione Christi,” 244–67. 132. Ibid., 409, mistakenly numbered 369 in the copy I used at the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek in Munich. The complete sentence reads, “Fides enim ex auditu, auditus per verbum Dei.” The following sentence makes this conviction even clearer: “At sacramenta non praecise et absolute sunt necessaria omnibus nec per se sine verbo ad salutem sufficiunt.” 133. Ibid., 503. 134. See ibid., 646–48 on the duties and powers of the ministry. 135. Ibid., 245. 136. Ibid., 246. 137. Ibid., 251. 138. Ibid., 266. 139. Ibid., 371–72. 140. Ibid., 497. 141. Vierzehen Predigten Von gewisser bewarung vnd artzney, wider allen schrecken, gefar, vnd schaden, der schnelhinreissenden Pestilentz, vnd dergleichen plagen, auch des leiblichen thodes (Heidelberg: Johann Mayer, 1564). 142. Ibid., fol. Aiii. 143. Ibid., fol. 20–21. 144. Ibid., fol. 23. 145. Ibid., fol. 24. 146. Ibid., fol. 51. 147. Ibid., fol. 52. 148. Ibid., foreword, fol. Bii-Biii. 149. Tossanus, Trostschrift An alle guthertzige Christen, so von wegen der reynen, vnd vom Papistischen sauerteyg gesäuberten Lehr der Sacramenten, vnd besonders des H. Abentmals angefochten werden (Neustadt an der Hardt: Hans Meyer, 1578), fol. A5. 150. Ibid., fol. F8. 151. The title page is to Postilla, Oder Christlichen vnd schrifftliche Auβlegung der Euangelion, so in der Kirchen GOttes auff alle Sontag deβ Jahrs . . . vorgetragen wird (Heidelberg: Jonah Rosen, 1616). 152. Frankfurt/Main: Jonah Rosen, 1617. 153. Mylaeus, Passions Predigten, ser. 1, 8.

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154. Ibid., ser. 1, 9. 155. Ibid., ser. 5, 51. 156. Ibid., ser. 5, 53–57. 157. Ibid., ser. 5, 56. 158. Ibid., ser. 6, 64–75; ser. 8, 92–101. 159. Ibid., ser. 9, 104. 160. Ibid., ser. 14, 156–57. 161. Ibid., ser. 14, 153–68. 162. Spindler, Passio et Resurrectio Christi: Auβlegung der Historien vnd Geschichte vom leyden, sterben vnd auferstehung vnsers HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi, wie sie der Euangelist Johannes beschreibet (Siegen in der Grafschaft Nassau [sic]: Christoph Rab, 1596), 10. 163. Scultetus, KIrchen Postill, Das ist: Auβlegung der Sontäglichen Euangelischen Texten durchs gantze Jahr. Von newem Vbersehen, verbessert, vnd mit etlichen Sontäglichen: sampt fünff Predigten von der Aufferweckung Lazari, vnd einer vom Seufftzen der bedrangten Christen: Von dem Authore selbst Kurtz vor seinem Tode beygefüget vnd vermehret (Emden: Helvig Callenbach, 1632), foreward, n.p. This is the second edition; the first, shorter one was 1611. 164. ser. 3 (at back; a second ser. 3!), 152. 165. In foreword, which is unpaginated. The foreword is dated 30 August 1596. 166. Ibid., n.p. 167. Ibid., ser. 1, 1; ser. 4, 47. 168. Ibid., ser. 4, 49. 169. Ibid., ser. 7, 72. 170. Ibid., ser. 7, 77. 171. Ibid., ser. 8, prayer at end, 29. 172. See chapter 4, “Condemnation of the Jews.” 173. Spindler, Passio et Resurrectio, ser. 3 [the second sermon 3!], 21. This curious volume is made up of two separately paginated subvolumes with only the one title page at the front of the whole. The numbering of sermons also starts over. 174. Parker, Calvin’s Preaching, 115. See the whole chapter, “The Stimuli of Exhortations,” 114–28. 175. Calvin, Plusieurs sermons, here drawn from a sermon that is not on the Passion but on the Nativity, 27. 176. Wilhelm Baum, Edward Cunitz, and Edward Reuss, eds., Ioannis Calvini opera quae supersunt omnia, 59 vols., Corpus reformatorum 29–87 (Brunswick: Schwetschke [Bruhn] 1863–1900), 51: 496A; Plusieurs sermons, 295. 177. Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine, and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 178. The title of Emden preacher Frideric Salmut’s book reveals the desperation that he and doubtless others felt as the Thirty Years’ War descended upon them and they sought some explanation: Klagspiegel: Das ist, Auβführliche Erklärung der Klaglieder Ieremiae: in zwantzig Predigten verfasst. Darinnen vornemlich gelehret wird: Wie ein

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299

Christenmensch, der Kirchen Gottes, vnd sein Eignes Elend, in wahrer Buβe, vnd mit euferigem Gebette, recht beklagen sole: damits GOtt durchs hertz scheide, vnd seine hülfreiche hand eröfne (Emden: Helwich Kallenbach, 1624). Here we see his promulgation of deep feeling in an effort to move God to pity. 179. Denis Crouzet cites Pierre Chaunu without giving a location, on Calvin’s conviction that in Catholicism the Passion had concealed the Resurrection in “the phantasms of renascent piety . . . centered on the excessive pain of Christ.” Crouzet, Jean Calvin: Vies parallèles (Paris: Fayard, 2000), 45. 180. Spindler, Passio et Resurrectio, ser. 3, 32. 181. I cannot identify the origin of this much-told tale. Theodore Beza, in his biography of Calvin, states simply, “Quant à ses Moeurs, il estoit sur tout fort consciencieux, ennemi des vices, & fort adonné au seruice de Dieu . . . tellement que son Coeur tendoit entierement à la Theologie.” Theodore de Beze, L’Histoire de la vie & mort de fev m. Iean Caluin, fidele seruiteur de Iesvs Christ (Geneva: François Perrin, 1565), fol. Av (recto).

CHAPTER

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1. It is painful to reproduce the invective contained in this chapter. I decided that if I did not, I would be forced to omit a significant source of emotion intended in early-modern preaching. 2. The Jews’ place in medieval society is more complex than simply a consequence of religious bias. Years ago, for example, the economic historian Robert S. Lopez conjectured that during the high Middle Ages, Western European Gentiles finally desired to take part themselves in the economic activities that earlier had been largely the purview of Jews: The Commercial Revolution in the Middle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 121–22. 3. Ruth Mellinkoff, Outcasts: Signs of Otherness in European Art of the Late Middle Ages, 2 vols. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Mellinkoff, Antisemitic Hate Signs in Hebrew Illuminated Manuscripts from Medieval Germany (Jerusalem: Center for Jewish Art, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1999). Charles Zika, sees similarities in the visual images made of Jews and those made of witches: “Witches and Other Stereotypes: Image-Making in Early Modern Europe,” lecture given at the University of Arizona, October 26, 2005; partly included in Zika, Exorcising Our Demons: Magic, Witchcraft and Visual Culture in Early Modern Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2003), chapter 12, 477–79 4. Heiko Augustinus Oberman, The Roots of Anti-Semitism in the Age of Renaissance and Reformation (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1984). 5. Franz Xavier Zacher’s introduction to Wann’s Die Passion des Herrn (Passauer Passionale), Schriften zur deutschen Literatur für die Görresgesellschaft 12 (Augsburg: Dr. Genno Filser Verlag, 1928), 24. 6. “Hallelujah Indeed: Debating Handel’s Anti-Semitism,” New York Times, 23 April 2007, B3. Cf. Michael Marissen, Lutheranism, Anti-Judaism, and Bach’s “St. John Passion” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

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7. Rosenwein, “Feudal War and Monastic Peace: Cluniac Liturgy as Ritual Aggression,” Viator 2 (1971), 129–57. 8. Wann, Passion, 66. 9. Ibid., 69. 10. Ibid., 75. 11. Ibid., 82. 12. Ibid., 84. 13. Ibid., 86. 14. Ibid., 99. 15. Ibid., 123. 16. Johannes Wild, Sacrosancta Passionis Saluatoris nostri Iesu Christi Hystoria, Ex quatuor Euangelistis studiose concinnata 35 in quatuor partes rite distincta (Mainz: Franciscus Behem, 1555). For the original dating, see p. 518. 17. Ibid., 8. 18. Ibid., 9. 19. Ibid., 39–40. 20. Ibid., 45. 21. Ibid., 282–83. 22. Ibid., 354–56. 23. Ibid., 395. 24. Ibid., 507. 25. Caspar Franck, Passion, Das Leyden vnnd Sterben Vnsers Herren Iesv Christi, auβ den H. vier Euangelisten zusammen gezogen (Ingolstadt: David Sartorius, 1576), for example, fol. 19 (recto), 150 (recto–verso). 26. Ibid., 137 (verso)–139 (verso). 27. Ibid., 139 (recto–verso). 28. Heinrich Helm, PASSIO Domini nostri Iesv Christi, secvndvm qvatuor Euangelistas ([Cologne]: Jaspar Gennepaeus, 1557), 12. 29. Ibid., 13–17. 30. Ibid., 146. 31. Ibid., 176. 32. Ibid., 81. 33. Bartholomeus Wagner, Passionale Oder Fvnffzehen Auβerlesene, Andächtige Passion vnd Blütpredigen . . . (Freiburg/Br.: Martin Böckler, 1612), 39. 34. Ibid., 114–15. 35. Ibid., 120. 36. I used Catholischer Catechismus Oder Summarien CHristlicher Lehr, Jn Frag vnnd Antwort, der Christlicher Jugendt, vnnd allen Einfeltigen zu nutz vnd heil gestelt (Cologne: Maternus Cholinus, 1569), fol. Bb vii (recto). 37. Herenäus Haid, Leben und Wirken des ehrwürdigen Vaters und Lehrers Petrus Canisius . . . (Landshut: Johann Thomann, 1826), 28, 69, 76. 38. Canisius, Homilien oder Bemerkungen über die evangelischen Lesungen, welche das ganze Jahr hindurch an Sonn- und Festtagen in der Katholischen Kirche treffen. Translated by Herenäus Haid, 3 vols. (Augsburg: Karl Kollmann’schen Buchhandlung, 1845–1847), vol. 1, part 2, 81–82.

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301

39. Ibid., 96. 40. Ibid., 137. 41. Ibid., 154. 42. Postill Oder Auβlegung der Fest- vnd Feyr-täglichen Euangelien durch das gantze Jar, Sambt Auβführlicher Erklärung der Historien vom Leyden vnd Sterben Christi . . . (Munich: Nicolaus Heinrich, 1608). In the unpaginated foreword, Scherer states that these were given as sermons. He must have composed this preface just before his death. 43. Ibid., 232. 44. Ibid., 259. 45. Ibid., 169. 46. Kisel, Siebenf ältig=Blutiges Schau=Spiel Deβ Siebenströmigen Geistlichen Nili=Flusses, Das ist: Sieben Passion=Predigten von dem Gnadenfliessenden und Schmertzhafften Leyden und Sterben unsers Einigen Erlösers und Heyl=Erwerbers JESU CHRISTI, translated by Andrea Bresson (Bamberg: Johann Elias Höffling, 1679), 99. 47. Ibid., 161. 48. Ibid., 210. 49. Donatus of Passau, Rosetum dolorosum Centifoliatum: Schmertzhaffter Rosen=Bart von hundert Blättigen Rosen, Das seynd Hundert . . . Predigen von dem Bitteren Leyden und Sterben JESU Christi . . . (Passau: Rudolph Wege, 1694), 332. 50. Ibid., 491. 51. Ibid., 567. 52. I have used a modern edition: Der groβe Myrrhengarten des bittern Leidens (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1912). 53. See Konradin Roth, P. Martin von Cochem 1634–1712: Versuch einer Bibliographie (Koblenz: Ehrenbreitstein, 1980). 54. Von Cochem, Der Grosse-Wohlriechende Myrrhen-Garten . . . Zum sonderlichen Genügen der Jungfrawen und Weibern, so grossen Truck verlangen . . . mit vielen newen nothwendigen Gebetteren vermehrt (Cologne: Johann Sommer, 1690). The title indicates that this is an augmented edition (with large type!), but as yet I have not located the earlier one. 55. Von Cochem, Myrrhengarten, no. 8, 268. 56. Ibid., no. 14, 289. 57. Ibid., no. 15, 281. 58. Ibid., no. 21, 297. 59. Ibid., no. 25, 309. 60. Ibid., no. 30, 329. 61. Ibid., no. 38, 352. 62. “Das Jesus Christus ein geborener Jude sei. 1523,” WA 11, 314–36. 63. “Von den Juden und jren Lugen,” WA 53, 412–552. Kenneth Hagen, “Luther’s So-Called Judenschriften: A Genre Approach,” Archive for Reformation History 90 (1999), 130–48. 64. WA 10/1, “Predigt über die Passionsgeschichte am Montag nach Invokavit,” 6 March 1525, 67.

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142–146

65. WA 46, 293–95. 66. Ibid., 293. 67. WA, BR 11, no. 4195, pp. 275–76; no. 4201, pp. 286–87. 68. Von des Herrn Christi Leiden, von seinem Priestertumb vnd Aufferstehung, zwo Christliche seer tröstliche Predigten (Wittenberg: Georg Rhaws Erben, 1551). 69. Passional Buch (Wittenberg: Georg Rhaw, 1540), ser. 5, fol. 22 (verso); the first edition was 1539. 70. Ibid., ser. 5, fols. xxiii (verso)–xxiiii (recto). 71. Ibid., ser. 1, fol. 10 (recto–verso). 72. Veit Dietrich, Passio oder Histori vom leiden Christi Jesu vnsers Heylands: Gepredigt durch Vitum Dietrich zu Nürmberg (Nuremberg: Johann vom Berg and Ulrich Neuber, 1545), ser. 8, fol. nvi (recto). 73. Ibid., ser. 9, fol. qiii (recto). 74. Ibid., ser. 8, fol. o vi (verso)–o vii (recto). 75. Passio Vnsers Herren Jesu Christi leyden vnd sterben, nach Hystorischer beschreybung der vier Euangelisten . . . (Nuremberg: Johann Daubman, 1551). The first Passion sermon is labeled no. 45. 76. Brenz, Passio, ser. 1, fol. Bi. 77. Ibid., ser. 8, fol. Liiii. 78. Ibid., ser. 9, fols. Mii–Oi. 79. Ibid., ser. 10, fol. Pi. 80. Ibid., ser. 17, fol. Bbv. 81. Ibid., ser. 17, fol. Cciiii. 82. Ibid., ser. 17, fol. Ccv. 83. Tilemann Hesshusen, Postilla: Das ist, Außlegung der Evangelien auff alle Fest und Apostel Tage durchs gantze Jar (Helmstedt: Lucius, 1581), ser. 5, fol. xxix (recto–verso). 84. Ibid., ser. 9, fol. lx [LX] (recto–verso). 85. Ibid., ser. 11, fol. lxix (recto). 86. Spangenberg, Passio: Vom Leiden vnd sterben vnsers HErrn, Heilands vnd Seligmachers Jesu Christi, ettliche schöne vnd nützliche Predigten . . . (Eisleben: Urban Gaubisch, 1564), ser. 13, fols. Z8–Bb5. The texts reveal that Spangenberg had given these sermons at the time of the Interim, against which he also rages. The Interim was the primary object of his anger. 87. Ibid., ser. 15, fols. Ee4–Ee5. 88. Selnecker, Passio: Das Leiden vnd Sterben vnsers HErrn Jesu Christi, nach den vier Euangelisten . . . (Wittenberg: Clemens Schleich and Antonius Schöne, 1577), “Am Chürfreytage geschehen, früe vmb Sechs, Sieben, Acht vnd Neun Vhr,” fols. Piii (verso)–Piiii (recto). 89. Ibid., “Dancksagung für das Leiden Christi,” fols. Yiii (recto)–Yv (verso), here at Yiii (verso)–Yiiii (recto). 90. Musculus, Christliche betrachtung der Passion Jhesu Christi . . . zur buβ vnd vergebung der Sünden . . . (Frankfurt an der Oder: Johan Eichorn, 1565). 91. Ibid., fols. Aiii (verso)–Aiiii (recto): “mit ledigen Nusschalen gespielet.”

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303

92. Ibid., fol. Bii. 93. Ibid., fol. Oiiii. 94. Ibid., fol. Oi. 95. Chemnitz, Historia Der Passion vnsers lieben HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi . . . (Wolfenbüttel: Horn, 1591), 72–73. 96. Ibid., 17. Like numerous other Lutheran (not to mention Catholic) preachers, Chemnitz has Judas’s intestines spill out on the ground when he hangs himself—as had happened to Arius, he notes (11–12). 97. Ibid. 87, 88, 95. 98. Ibid., 77. 99. Ibid., 212. 100. See, in the one collection that Calvin himself approved for publication, Plusieurs sermons de Iehan Calvin touchant la Diuinite, humanite, et natiuite de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christi . . . (Geneva: Conrad Badius, 1558), ser. 5, 167, 171, 174. 101. Ibid., ser. 5, 164–65, 175–77; ser. 6, 213. 102. Ibid., ser. 3, 98–99. 103. Ibid., ser. 5, 177. 104. Ibid., ser. 6, 215. 105. Ibid., ser. 6, 182. 106. Johannes Calvin, Psalmpredigten, Passions-, Oster- und Pfingstpredigten, Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inédits 8, edited by by Erwin Mülhaupt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1981), 153. 107. “Du jeudi 26. mars 1562,” Johannes Calvin, Psalmpredigten, Passions-, Oster- und Pfingstpredigten, Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inédits 7, edited by Erwin Mülhaupt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1981), 143. 108. Ibid., 145–46. Calvin cites 1 Cor. 1:18 and 2 Cor. 4:3, neither of which precisely corresponds to what he is saying. 109. Beza, Sermons svr l’Histoire de la Passion et Sepulture de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ, descrite par les quatre Euangelistes (Geneva: Jean le Preux, 1592), ser. 1, 4. 110. Ibid., ser. 1, 16. 111. Ibid., 177. 112. Cf. ibid., 359, on the Last Day. 113. Ibid., ser. 12, 278–308. 114. Ibid., ser. 14, 341–77; on the “nation of the Jews,” 357. 115. Olevianus, Kurtze Summ vnd jnnhalt Ettlicher Predigten vom H. Abendmal vnsers Heilands Jesu Christi . . . (Heidelberg: Johannes Mayer 1563), fol. 28 (recto). The title page says that Olevianus preached these in Heidelberg during 1563. 116. Olevianus, Hauptursachen alles jrrthumbs im Heiligen Abendmal, Wie das Heil. Abendmal vnser hertz vnd vertrawen auff das heilige leiden Jesu Christi weiset . . . (Heidelberg: Johann Mayer, 1565), 7–8. 117. Ibid., 10–11. On the prominence of the Eucharist in Olevianus’s thought, see Karl Sudhoff, C. Olevianus und Z. Ursinus: Leben und ausgewählte Schriften. Leben und ausgewählte Schriften der Väter und Begründer der reformirten Kirche 8 (Elberfeld: R. L. Friderichs, 1857), 185–240.

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118. Olevianus, Fester Grundt, das ist, Die Artickel des alten, waren, vngezweiffelten Christlichen Glaubens (Heidelberg: Michael Schirat, 1567), 23–24. 119. Ibid., 25. 120. On his life, see also Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 39 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1971; reprint of 1895 original), 369–72. Derk Visser, Zacharias Ursinus: The Reluctant Reformer (New York: United Church Press, 1983). 121. I used a seventeenth-century edition of Ursinus, Corpus doctrinae Orthodoxae sive Catecheticarvm explicationem . . . (Heidelberg: Jonas Rhodius, 1612), 520; apparently emended by David Pareus. 122. See the summary of his life in the Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 43 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1971; reprint of 1898 original), 289–90. 123. Willing, Etliche Christliche predigten, so in werendem Reichβtag zu Augsburg, Anno Domini 1566 offentlich seind gehalten worden . . . (Heidelberg: Martin Agricola, 1567), ser. 5, fol. 41 (verso). 124. Ibid., fol. 69 (verso). 125. Spindler, Passio et Resurrectio Christi: Auβlegung der Historien vnd Geschichte vom Leyden, sterben vnd auferstehung vnsers HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi . . . (Siegen/Nassau: Christoph Rab, 1596), ser. 2, 22–23. 126. Ibid., ser. 6, 63. 127. Ibid., ser. 8, 83. 128. Ibid., ser. 9, 92. 129. Ibid., ser. 11, 112. 130. Ibid., ser. 11, 118. 131. Ibid., ser. 1 (second half of book, numbered and paginated separately from the first half), 129. 132. Ibid., ser. 3 (second part of book), 147. 133. Ibid., ser. 1 (the sermons are divided in half, and the numbering starts over again even though the pagination continues), 122. 134. Ibid., ser. 2 (second set), 135. 135. Ibid., ser. 6 (second set), 175. 136. Ibid., ser. 6 (second set), 182. 137. Scultetus, Kirchen Postill, Das ist: Auβlegung der Sontäglichen Euangelischen Texten durchs gantze Jahr . . . (Emden: Helvici Callenbach, 1632). 138. Ibid., “Vom Leyden vnd sterben Jesu Christi,” 507–671. 139. Ibid., ser. 1, 510, 517–18. 140. Ibid., ser. 5, 575. 141. Ibid., ser. 7, 602. 142. Ibid., ser. 7, 614. 143. Mylaeus, Passions Predigten, Oder Christliche Erklärung der tröstlichen History deβ Leidens vnnd Sterbens vnsers HERRN vnd Heylandts Jesu Christi (Frankfurt/M.: Jona Rosen, 1617), 13–14. 144. Ibid., ser. 7, 80–81, 88. 145. Ibid., ser. 8, 95. 146. Ibid., ser. 10, 119–20.

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305

147. Ibid., ser. 10, 120. 148. Ibid., ser. 13, 145. 149. Of interest is Louise Mirrer, “Representing ‘Other’ Men: Muslims, Jews, and Masculine Ideals in Medieval Castilian Epic and Ballad,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, edited by by Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 169–86. CHAPTER

5

See my German-language essay on the same subject, “Die Gefühle der Jungfrau: Weibliche Religiösität in einem ‘eisernen’ Zeitalter,” in Wege der Neuzeit: Festschrift für Heinz Schilling zum 65. Geburtstag, edited by Stefan Ehrenpreis, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Olaf Mörke, and Luise Schorn-Schütte (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2007), 127–42. This chapter is not a translation of that article, however, but is written from scratch. 1. Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Difference in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 4, “Feminine and Masculine Types,” 169–227. 2. Best known is Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: Knopf, 1976), 206–23. See Martina Wehrli-Johns, “Haushälterin Gottes: Zur Mariennachfolge der Beginen,” in Maria, Abbild oder Vorbild? Zur Sozialgeschichte mittelalterlicher Marienverehrung, edited by Hedwig Röckelein, Claudia Opitz, and Dieter R. Bauer (Tubingen: Edition Diskord, 1990), 147–67. 3. On the modern setting, see Marina Warner, “Blood and Tears,” New Yorker (April 8, 1996), 63–69. 4. For the latter infraction, in parts of Germany women had to “wear the [heavy] shame stones” around their necks and walk around the market place to endure the ridicule of their fellow citizens. These stones could be painted or carved with the figures of nasty-tempered women. Those on display in the Freiberg/Saxony city hall show pairs of women actually fighting on each of the two stones. 5. For Mary’s development, see Thomas H. Bestul, Texts of the Passion: Latin Devotional Literature and Medieval Society (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 111–44. Fundamental with respect to Mary is also Donna Spivey Ellington, “Impassioned Mother or Passive Icon: The Virgin’s Role in Late Medieval and Early Modern Passion Sermons,” Renaissance Quarterly 48, 2 (1995), 227–61. 6. In the sixteenth century, Franciscan Heinrich Helm rejects claims of her redemptive powers: PASSIO Domini nostril Iesv Christi secvndvm qvatuor Euangelistas ([Cologne]: Jaspar Gennepaeus, 1557), 278. Jesus did not need the help of humans in the work of redemption, Helm states. 7. Caroline Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 110–69. See Donald Weinstein and Rudolph M. Bell, Saints and Society: The Two Worlds of Western Christendom (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 220–38 on the gendering of sainthood in this period. 8. The tie between Mother and Child was described in nonvisual media, as well: Susan Boynton, “From the Lament of Rachel to the Lament of Mary: A Transformation

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in the History of Drama and Spirituality,” in Signs of Change: Transformations of Christian Traditions and Their Representation in the Arts, 1000–2000, edited by Nils Holger Petersen, Claus Clüver, and Nicolas Bell (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004), 319–40. 9. Ariès, Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life (New York: Knopf, 1962). See the insightful comments of Elfriede Moser-Rath, “Familienleben im Spiegel der Barockpredigt,” in Predigt und soziale Wirklichkeit: Beiträge zur Erforschung der Predigtliteratur, edited by Werner Welzig, Daphnis, vol. 10, part 1 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981), 47–65, here at 60–61. For critical comments on Ariès thesis, see, among many others, Shulamith Shahar, Childhood in the Middle Ages (London: Routledge, 1992), 1–7; Barbara A. Hanawalt, Growing up in Medieval London: The Experience of Childhood in History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 5–13; Nicholas Orme, Medieval Children (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 3–10. 10. See Thomas Lentes, “Gebetbuch und Gebärde: Religiöses Ausdrucksverhalten in Gebetbüchern aus dem Dominikanerinnen-Kloster St. Nikolaus in undis zu Straβburg (1350–1550),” Th.D. dissertation, Katholische Theologische Fakultät, Wilhelms-Universität Münster in Westfalen, 2 vols., 1996; Lentes writes of the nuns’ imagination of another world, 21–22. 11. Holly Flora, “A Book for Poverty’s Daughters: Gender and Devotion in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS Ital. 115,” in Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 7 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2003), 61–97. 12. I used a German version: Johannes Gerson, Betrachtungen über das Leiden und Sterben unsers Herrn Jesu Christi (Passau: A. Ambrosi, 1840), 20–21. 13. Ibid., 21. 14. Ibid., 27. 15. Ibid., 30–31. Bernard is cited by virtually every Catholic and Lutheran preacher in connection with some aspect of the passion. On Mary’s grief, see “Meditation by Bernard [of Clairvaux] on the Lamentation of the Blessed Virgin,” in Bestul, Texts of the Passion, 165–84. 16. Ibid., 28. 17. Ibid., 36. 18. Fridolin, Der Geistlich May Vnnd Geistliche Hörbst Auβgelegt auff das auβwendig vnd inwendig Leyden vnsers aller liebsten Herren vnd Seligmachers Iesv Christi . . . [I used a later reprint:] (Dillingen: Johann Mayer, 1581), 51–52. As the author states, 319, the autumn referred to in the title is the mental suffering of Christ. 19. Paul Wann, Die Passion des Herrn (Passauer Passionale), translated by Franz Xavier Zacher (Augsburg: Dr. Benno Filser Verlag, 1928), at matins, 58. 20. Ibid., at prime, 63. 21. Ibid., at prime, 64. 22. Ibid., at prime, 65. 23. Ibid., at prime, 66. 24. Ibid., at prime, 71. 25. Ibid., at sext, 95. 26. Ibid., at sext, 97.

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307

27. Ibid., at none, 109. 28. Ibid., at none, 110. 29. Ibid., at none, 120. 30. Ibid., at prime, 66. 31. See Johannes Zimmerman, Vir dolorum JESUS PATIENS per Jobum Patientem Virum inter Orientales, Magnum repraesentatus, Sive Passio Domini Nostri JESU CHRISTI, Cum Passione Jobi collate . . ., 2nd. ed. (Prague: Typis Universitatis Caroli-Ferdinandeae, 1691), 88–89 for a long list of the author’s sources on Mary, both ancient and more recent. I have not located information on the first edition. 32. Reproduced in F.W.H. Hollstein, German Engravings, Etchings, and Woodcuts, ca. 1400–1700, vol. 5 (Amsterdam: Menno Hertzberger, n.d. but in the 1950s), 66. 33. An example of a Passion account that chronologically bridges the late-medieval and Reformation eras as such is Anon., Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi ex Evangelistarum textu . . . (Basle: n.p., 1513), 27 folii, possibly with a Franciscan origin. This author frequently cites his sources; he devotes much attention to Mary’s suffering, fols. xxii (verso)–xxiiii (recto). Curiously, the Dominican Meister Eckhart urged the nuns in his audience to cultivate impassivity; he insisted that despite her grief and lamentation, Mary retained at her core an immovable detachment. R. D. Hale, “The ‘Silent’ Virgin: Marian Imagery in the Sermons of Meister Eckhart and Johannes Tauler,” in Medieval Sermons and Society: Cloister, City, University, edited by Jacqueline Hamesse, Beverly Mayne Kinzle, Debra L. Stoudt, and Anne T. Thayer (Louvain-la-Neuve: Fédération Internationale des Institutes d’Études Médiévales, 1998), 77–94, here at 83. 34. John 19:26–27. 35. Wild, Sacrosancta Passionis Saluatoris nostri Iesu Christi Hystoria, Ex quatuor Euangelistis . . . (Mainz: Franciscus Behem, 1555), 458–65, here at 463–64. 36. Franck, Passion, Das Leyden vnnd Sterben vnsers Herren Iesv Christi, auβ den H. vier Euangelisten zusammen gezogen (Ingolstadt: David Sartorius, 1576), fol. 263 (verso). 37. Ibid., fol. 123 (recto). 38. Ibid., fol. 146 (verso). 39. Ibid., fol. 191 (recto–verso) (there are two fols. 191; error in pagination). 40. Ibid., fol. 255 (recto–verso). 41. The original edition probably appears in 1576. I used a later reprint: Anon., Christliche Wallfahrt: In welcher die Neun Führungen, oder Gäng unsers HErrn JESU CHRISTI, In Seinem bittern Leyden durch die Charwochen . . . (Munich: Maria Magdalena Riedlin, 1723). 42. Ibid., 42–43. He uses the word Mensch, but he directs his critique at women. 43. Ibid., 64–66. 44. See Bonaventura von Mehr, Das Predigtwesen in der kölnischen und rheinischen Kapuzinerprovinz am 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Bibliotheca Seaphica-Capuccina, Sectio Historica 6 (Rome: Istituto Storica dei Fr. Min. Cappuccini, 1945); on forty-hour prayers during Holy Week, 51–52. 45. Ulrike Strasser, “The First Form and Grace: Ignatius of Loyola and the Reformation of Masculinity,” in Masculinity in the Reformation Era, edited by Scott H.

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Hendrix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2008), 45–70. For a brief but high-quality assessment of the Exercises, see John W. O’Malley, “Ignatius Loyola,” The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols., edited by Hans J. Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 2: 308–309. 46. Martin Mulsow, “Exemplum und Affektenlehre bei Georg Stengel S. J.,” Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 2 (1991), 313–50. 47. Canisius, Lectiones et Precationes Ecclesiasticae (Ingolstadt: Alexander & Samuel Weissenhorn, 1556), fol. 132 (verso). 48. I used Catholischer Catechismus Oder Summarien CHristlicher Lehr, Jn Frag vnnd Antwort, der Christlicher Jugendt, vnnd allen Einfeltigen zu nutz vnd heil gestelt (Cologne: Maternus Cholinus, 1569), fols. Cvi (verso)––Dv (recto), here at Di (recto), Dii (recto). 49. Canisius, Homilien oder Bemerkungen über die evangelischen Lesungen, welche das ganze Jahr hindurch an Sonn- vnd Festtagen in der Katholischen Kirche treffen, translated by Herenäus Haid, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Augsburg: Karl Kollmann’schen Buchhandlung, 1845), 142–43. 50. Ibid., vol. 2, pt. 2, 1848, 125–37. 51. Canisius, Christenlicher, Catholischer, wolbegründter Bericht, von dem seligen Ableiben, Sterben vnd Entschlaffen: Auch von der heyligen vnd frewdenreichen Aufferweckung vnd Auffnemmung in den Himmel, der Allerheiligsten Junckfraw vnd Gottes Gebärerin Marie . . . , translated by Joachim Landolt (Dillingen: Johann Mayer, 1592). This is drawn from one chapter of the Latin treatment of Mary by Canisius, the title of which I have not been able to identify. Veit Stoβ’s “Dormition” in St. Mary’s Church in Cracau is stunning in its psychological mastery as well as in the unique arrangement of its figures, with Mary kneeling as she departs instead of her usual reposing in bed. See a photo of this in Piotr Skubiszewski, Veit Stoß (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1985), plates 1–5, pp. 16–20. 52. Canisius, Christenlicher, fols. 7 (verso)–8 (recto). 53. Ibid., fol. 8 (verso). 54. Ibid., fol. 10 (verso). 55. On the metaphor of flame in French preaching at about the same time, see Peter Bayley, French Pulpit Oratory 1598–1650: A Study in Themes and Styles . . . (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 173–78. 56. Canisius, Christenlicher, fol. 18 (verso). 57. Ibid., fols. 18 (verso)–19 (recto). 58. Ibid., fol. 19 (verso). 59. Ibid., fol. 21 (verso). 60. Ibid., fol. 23 (recto). 61. Ibid., fol. 119 (verso). 62. Kisel, Siebenf ältig = Blutiges Schau = Spiel Deβ Siebenströmigen Geistlichen Nili = Flusses, Das ist: Sieben Passion = Predigten von dem Gnadenfliessenden und Schmertzhafften Leyden und Sterben unsers Einigen Erlösers und Heyl = Erwerbers JESU CHRISTI, translated by Andrea Bresson (Bamberg: Johann Elias Höffling / Jacob

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309

Immel, 1679),83; the Latin original, Nili Mystici Ex Paradiso Voluptatis, Sive Verbi Divini Septemplici Alveo Defluentis, et Totidem Effusionibus Pretiosi Sanguinis D. N. Jesu Christi (Bamberg: Cholinus, 1666–1679), appeared in parts. 63. Kisel, Siebenf ältig = Blutiges Schau, 232. 64. Ibid., 233. 65. Ibid., 325. 66. Ibid., 337–38. 67. Ibid., 350–51. 68. Ibid., 359. 69. Ibid., 393–468. 70. Ibid., esp. 395. 71. Ibid., 460. 72. Ibid., 468. 73. Von Passau, Rosetum dolorosum Centifoliatum: Schmertzhaffter Rosen = Bart von hundert Blättigen Rosen, Das seynd Hundert . . . Predigen von dem Bitteren Leyden und Sterben JESU Christi . . . (Passau: Rudolph Wege, 1694), 301. The others were Joseph, Simeon, Mary Magdalene (his feet), and Judas as he carried out his betrayal. 74. Ibid., 302. 75. Ibid., 638–39. 76. Ibid., 726, 732. 77. Ibid., 741, 745–46. 78. Ibid., 749. 79. Ibid., 767, 773. 80. See a brief summary of his known activities in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 20 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1970), 480–81. 81. Der zweyer HH. Schwestern S. Gertrudis Vnd S. Mechtildis Gebett = Buch, Darinn lauter Himmlische, vnd Göttliche Gebett, welche diesen HH. Jungfrawen theils von Christo, oder der Mutter Gottes mündtlich offenbahret, theils durch den H. Geist eyngeben worden . . . (Colmar: Johann-Jacob Decker, 1688). The title page does not refer to von Cochem. 82. Bynum, Jesus as Mother, esp. chap. 5, “Women Mystics in the Thirteenth Century: The Case of the Nuns of Helfta,” 170–265. 83. Ibid., 566–73. 84. Ibid., 100. 85. Ibid., 234–36. For an introduction to the mystical thought of medieval women saints, see Elizabeth Alvilda Petroff, ed., Medieval Women’s Visionary Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). On Mechthild of Magdeburg’s exchanges with the Virgin, 216–17. 86. Ibid., 237–39. 87. Ibid., 299–381. 88. Ibid., 358–73. 89. I used a modern reprint: Martin von Cochem, Der groβe Myrrhengarten des bittern Leidens (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1912). 90. Ibid., 399–400.

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91. Ibid., 99. 92. Ibid., 102. 93. Ibid., 364–423. 94. Anon., Andächtige Gebett Und Betrachtung Uber Die vornembste Geheimbnussen deβ bitteren Leyden vnd Sterben vnsers HErrn JEsu Christi Und Seiner liebsten betrübtisten Mutter MARJA . . . (Munich: Johann Lucas Straub, 1705), 54–55. 95. Anton Königstein (d. 1541), Passio Domini nostri secvndvm quatuor Euangelistas (possibly Cologne: Quentell, 1532), n.p. but on the front of the last page, explicitly makes this parallel, drawing, he says, on Augustine. I believe that at least two subsequent pages are missing from the Herzog August Bibliothek’s copy. 96. Consult first of all Werner Welzig, Katalog gedruckter deutschsprachiger katholischer Predigtsammlungen, 2 vols. (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1984, 1987). 97. From Sacred Body to Angelic Soul: Understanding Mary in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001). Ellington surveys all of Europe, and I do not. Perhaps she is right in the larger context. It may be that in German-speaking lands, the model of Francis de Sales, which promoted feminine withdrawal, was not as powerful as elsewhere (142–43 and passim). 98. See my essay, “Catholic Intensity in Post-Reformation Germany: Preaching on the Passion and Catholic Identity in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Politics and Reformations: Communities, Polities, Nations, and Empires. Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., edited by Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 273–96. 99. A representative devotional tract on Mary’s giving birth is Christopher Marianus (a professor of theology and canon in Würzburg), Pverperium Marianvm: Vnser Lieben Frawen Kindelbeth. Das ist: Ein Vorrat auβerleβenen Betrachtungen vnd Gebett, deren man sich nit allein inn den frölichen Weyhenacht Predigen, sonder auch zu Entzündung eigner Andacht gebrauchen möge (Constance: Nicolas Kalt, 1601), 329 pages. On the medieval debate over whether Mary menstruated, see Charles T. Wood, “The Doctors’ Dilemma: Sin, Salvation, and the Menstrual Cycle in Medieval Thought,” Speculum 56 (1981), 710–27. On woman as body even during the period of Lutheran orthodoxy, see Norbert Haag, Predigt und Gesellschaft: Die lutherische Orthodoxie in Ulm 1640–1740, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für europäische Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung Religionsgeschichte 145 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1992), 172. 100. See Arthur C. Danto’s review of paintings on Abu Ghraib by Fernando Botero: “The Body in Pain,” The Nation (November 27, 2006), 23–26. 101. “Predigt am ersten Weihnachtsfeiertag nachmittags,” WA 32, 25 December 1530, 263–65, here at 264. 102. Beth Kreitzer, Reforming Mary: Changing Images of the Virgin Mary in Lutheran Sermons of the Sixteenth Century, Oxford Studies in Historical Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). 103. WA 34/1, “Predigt am Karfreytag, nachmittags,” 7 April 1531, 250. 104. “Predigt am Karfreitag, nachmittags,” 19 April 1538, WA, 46, 290–97, here at 293–95.

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105. I used a group of fourteen of Luther’s sermons of 1522, only one of which was on the Passion. These were published as Vyertzehen schöner christlicher predig . . . (Strasbourg: Johann Schott, 1523), fol. R iv (recto). 106. Acts 1:14, and Acts 2:1. 107. Urbanus Rhegius, Johannes Kymeus, Johannes Bugenhagen, and Martin Luther, Passional Buch: Vom Leiden vnd Aufferstehung vnsers Herrn Jhesu Christi . . . (Wittenberg: Georg Rhaw, 1540), ser. 5, fols. xxvi (verso)–xxvii (recto). 108. Huber, Wider Georg Scherers des Jesuiters Bettlermantel, vnd seinen sibenziehen Flecken oder Lappen (Tubingen: Georg Gruppenbach, 1592), fol. ii (recto). 109. Ibid., 80–90. My italics. 110. Dietrich, Passio oder Histori vom leiden Christi Jesu vnsers Heylands . . . (Nuremberg: Johann vom Berg and Ulrich Neuber, 1545), ser. 12, X [letter] ii (verso). 111. Ibid., ser. 13, fol. Z [letter] iii (verso)–Z iiii (recto). 112. Brenz, Passio Vnsers Herren Jesu Christi leyden vnd sterben, nach Hystorischer beschreybung der vier Euangelisten . . . (Nuremberg: Johann Daubmann, 1551), ser. 20, fol. Ff iii (recto). 113. See Ernst Bizer, ed., Predigten des Johannes Brenz: Das Evangelium von der Passion und Auferstehung Jesu Christi (Stuttgart: Quellen Verlag, 1955). 114. Manlius, Von des Herrn Christi Leiden, von seinem Priestertumb vnd Aufferstehung, zwo Christliche seer tröstliche Predigten (Wittenberg: Georg Rhaws Erben, 1551), fol. E ii (recto)–E iii (verso). 115. Chemnitz, Historia Der Passion vnsers lieben HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi . . . compiled by Melchior Neukirchen (Wolfenbüttel: Horn, 1591). 116. Ibid., 186. 117. Ibid., 310. 118. Heβhusen, Postilla, Das ist, Auβlegung der Euangelien auff alle Fest vnd Apostel Tage durchs gantze Jar (Helmstedt: Jacob Lucius, 1581), ser. 12, fol. lxxiiii (recto). 119. Ibid., ser. 12, fol. lxxiiii (verso). 120. Selnecker, Passio. Das Leiden vnd Sterben vnsers HErrn Jesu Christi, nach den vier Euangelisten . . . (Wittenberg: Clemens Schleich / Antonius Schöne, 1577), fol. S vii (recto–verso). 121. Cyriakus Spangenberg, Passio. Vom Leiden vnd sterben vnsers HErrn, Heilands vnd Seligmachers Jesu Christi, etliche schöne vnd nützliche Predigten, 2nd expanded ed. (Eisleben: Urban Gaubisch, 1564); the dedication is dated 1557. 122. Ibid., ser. 17, fol. Hh3. 123. Ibid. 124. Ibid., ser. 17, fol. Hh4. 125. Ibid., ser. 18, fol. Kk4. 126. Spindler, Passio et Resurrection Christi: Auβlegung der Historien vnd Geschichte vom leyden, sterben vnd auferstehung vnsers HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi, wie sie der Euangelist Johannes beschreibet (Siegen “in der Graffschaft Nassaw”: Christoph Rab, 1596), 164. 127. Sauter, Passio Iesv Christi, Das ist Gründtliche vnd auβführliche Erklärung, der Trostreichen Historien, vom bittern vnd thewren Leiden, Sterben vnd Begräbnuβ vnsers

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HErrn vnd Heilands Jesu Christi . . . (Lauingen: Leonhart Reinmichel, 1597), fol. 5 (verso) for his explicit definition; but passim. 128. Ibid., ser. 23, fol. 213 (verso). 129. Ibid., ser. 24, fol. 222 (verso). 130. Soliloqvia de passione Iesu Christi. Wie ein jeder Christen Mensch, das allerheyligste Leyden vnd Sterben vnsers HERRN Jesu Christi, jn seinem Hertzen bey sich selbst betrachten . . . in teglichem Gebet vnd Seufftzen, nützlich gebrauchen sol (Görlitz: A. Fritsch, 1587), fol. d iiii (recto–verso). 131. Ibid., fol. d iiii (verso). 132. Ibid., fol. 208 (verso). 133. Ibid., fol. 209 (recto–verso). 134. Ibid., ser. 21, fol. 243 (recto–verso). 135. This example is from ibid., fol. 189 (recto). 136. Nicolai, Zwey Fragen. Die Erste, Ob das Bäptische Fest der entschlaffung vnd auffnemmung gen Himmel, der heiligen Mutter Gottes Mariae, Christlich vnd Schrifftmässig sey? Die Andere, Ob das Fronleichname Fest in Gottes Wort, vnd in der alten reinen Kirchen gewissen Grund habe? (Goslar: Johan Vogt, 1614). 137. Leo Jud, Des lydens Jesu Cristi . . . (Zurich: Christoffel Froschouer, 1539), fol. CI (recto). 138. Jean Calvin, Plusieurs sermons de Iehan Calvin touchant la Diuinite, humanite et natiuite de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christi . . . (n. p. [Geneva]: Conrad Badius, 1558), 59. 139. Jane E. Dempsey Douglass, Women, Freedom, and Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985); John L. Thompson, John Calvin and the Daughters of Sarah: Women in Regular and Exceptional Roles in the Exegesis of Calvin, His Predecessors, and His Contemporaries (Geneva: Droz, 1992). 140. Calvin, Plusieurs sermons, 269–70, here at 270. 141. Johannes Calvin, Psalmpredigten, Passions-, Oster- und Pfingstpredigten, Supplementa Calviniana, Sermons inédits 7, edited by Erwin Mülhaupt (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag des Erziehungsvereins, 1981), 167–68. 142. Ibid., 275–78. 143. Ibid., 284. 144. Ibid., 418. 145. Ibid., 422. 146. Theodore de Besze [sic], Sermons svr l’Histoire de la Passion et Sepulture de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ, descrite par les quatre Euangelistes (Geneva: Jean le Preux, 1592), over a thousand pages long. This is in the HAB in Latin: In Historiam Passionis et Sepulturae Domini Nostri Iesu Christi. Homiliae . . . (Geneva: LePreux, 1592). 147. Spindler, Passio et Resurrection Christi: Auβlegung der Historien vnd Geschichte vom leyden, sterben vnd auferstehung vnsers HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi, wie sie der Euangelist Johannes beschreibet (Siegen “in der Graffschaft Nassaw”: Christoph Rab, 1596), ser. 5 (second half of volume), 164. 148. Ibid., ser. 5, 164.

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149. Mylaeus, Postilla, Oder Christliche vnd schrifftliche Auβlegung der Euangelion, so in der Kirchen GOttes auff alle Sontag deβ Jahres . . . vorgetragen wird (Heidelberg: Jona Rosen, 1616), ser. 14, 156. 150. Ibid., 157. 151. Not on Mary but pertinent nonetheless is Jo Ann McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, edited by Clare A. Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–30. 152. Anne Conrad, Zwischen Kloster und Welt: Ursulinen und Jesuitinnen in der katholischen Reformbewegung des 16./17. Jahrhunderts, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung Religionsgeschichte 152 (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1991). 153. For a fine example, see Ulrike Strasser, “Cloistering Women’s Past: Conflicting Accounts of Enclosure in a Seventeenth-Century Munich Nunnery,” in Gender in Early Modern German History, edited by Ulinka Rublack (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 221–46. 154. Luke 1:38. 155. John O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000). 156. Kreitzer, Reforming Mary, 133–41, here at 134. 157. Huberinus, Postilla Teutsch, Vber alle Sontägliche Euangelien, vom Aduent biß auff Ostern, Kurtze vnd nützliche Außlegung (Nuremberg: Johann Daubman, 1548), fol. 145 (recto). A sixteenth-century owner of this book has written in the margin, “Dis exempel erinnert vns des gehorsams gegen vnsere eltern, ja auch der muterlichen herrzen der prediger vnd oberkeit nach inhalt der haus taffel.” 158. Reprinted in English in her own Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1992), 37–52. 159. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 160. Ibid., esp. chap. 9, “Godless Children,” 204–21. 161. Strasser, “The First Form and Grace,” 45–70. 162. Hausen, “Die Polarisierung der ‘Geschlechtscharaktere’—Eine Spiegelung der Dissoziation von Erwerbs- und Familienleben,” in Sozialgeschichte der Familie inb der Neuzeit Europas: Neue Forschungen, edited by Werner Conze (Stuttgart: Klett, 1976), 363–93. 163. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “’Kinder, Küche, Kirche’: Social Ideology in the Sermons of Johannes Mathesius,” in Germania Illustrata: Essays on Early Modern Germany, edited by Andrew C. Fix and Karant-Nunn (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 21–40; and on a related subject, my article “Fragrant Wedding Roses: Wedding Sermons and the Formation of Gender in Early Modern Germany,” in German History 17, 1 (1999), 25–40. 164. Wagner, Passionale Oder Fvnffzehen Auβerlesene, Andächtige Passion vnd Blütpredigen . . . (Freiburg/Br.: Martin Böckler, 1612), 129. 165. Bynum, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 93–114.

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166. Alfred R. Weber, Im Basler Münster 1650, Basler Kosbarkeiten 15 (Basel: Kreis Druck AG Basel, 1994). 167. Alexandra Shepard in Meanings of Manhood in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), has shown how men can assert their superiority in some relations and submit in others. Especially valuable is her observation concerning phases of domination and subordination through the male life-course. Heike Talkenberger also features flexibility, including of feeling, among men in her “Konstruktion von Männerrollen in württembergischen Leichenpredigten des 16.-18. Jahrhunderts,” in Hausväter, Priester, Kastraten: Zur Konstruktion von Männlichkeit in Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, edited by Martin Dinges (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1998), 29–74. Men were to become more sensitive as their deaths approached. Cf. Rüdiger Schnell, Frauendiskurs, Männerdiskurs, Ehediskurs: Textsorten und Geschlechterkonzepte in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 1998), passim but esp. 277–87. I also acknowledge Heide Wunder’s concept of the “partnership” between the sexes, even though the partners are by no means equal in formal authority and prestige, as her book title reveals: Er ist die Sonne, sie ist der Mond: Frauen in der Frühen Neuzeit (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1992), esp. 57–118, 262–68. 168. I disagree with Luise Schorn-Schütte on the definition of Mitregentin: “’Gef ährtin’ und ‘Mitregentin’: Zur Sozialgeschichte der evangelischen Pfarrfrau in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen zu Beginn der Neuzeit, edited by Heide Wunder and Christina Vanja (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991), 109–53. 169. Margot Todd has kindly informed me that in Presbyterian Scotland, sinners were expected to cry publicly (in church). See Marjory E. Lange, Telling Tears in the English Renaissance, Studies in the History of Christian Thought 70 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1996), chap. 3, “’To clime by teares the common staires of men’: Preaching Tears,” 108–55. 170. I deliberately omit the esoteric realm of scholastic and post-scholastic medical thought, in which wide variation between the sexes was conceded. See Joan Cadden, Meanings of Sex Differences in the Middle Ages: Medicine, Science, and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. chap. 3, “Academic Questions: Female and Male in Scholastic Medicine and Natural Philosophy,” 105–65. 171. Selnecker, Vngefehrliche kurtze Entwerffung der Christlichen Gegenantwort, So D. Nicolas Selneccerus Auff das Famos libel, welchs D. Christoph Pezelius zu Bremen, wider jhn in Truck gegeben, thunköndte (Tübingen: Georg Gruppenbach, 1592), 171. 172. Karant-Nunn, “The Reformation of Women,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History , 3rd ed., edited by Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), 197. 173. See any painting of the dormition of the Virgin. I have given the example above by Veit Stoβ in Cracow.

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1. Erasmus, Ten Colloquies, edited by Craig R. Thompson (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1957), 92–112.

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2. Arthur E. Imhof, Geschichte Sehen: Fünf Erzählungen nach historischen Bildern (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1990), 59–92, here at 59–60. See Frank Falk, Die deutschen Sterbebüchlein von der ältesten Zeit des Buchdruckes bis zum Jahre 1520 (Cologne: Bachem, 1890). I examined Anon., Ars moriendi (Leipzig: Konrad Kachelofen, ca. 1495/98); and a facsimile edition of another, Ars moriendi: Holztafeldruck von c. 1470 (Zwickau: F. Ullmann, 1910), with introduction by Otto Clemen. Not bad is en. wikipedia.org/wiki/Ars_moriendi, consulted 25 July 2007, n.p. 3. Some preachers, however, taught that the martyrs had been spared pain despite their often gruesome forms of execution. See Peter Dendle, “Pain and Saint-Making in Andreas, Bede, and the Old English Lives of St. Margaret,” in Varieties of Devotion in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, edited by Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Arizona Studies in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance 7 (Turnhout: Brepols, 2003), 39–52; Donna C. Trembinski, “Narratives of (Non) Suffering in Early Dominican Legendaries,” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Toronto, 2004. 4. Matthew 26:6–7; Mark 14:3–9 (both say head); John 12:3 says feet. 5. Luke 23:42–43. 6. Acts 9:1–30. 7. Imhof, Geschichte Sehen, 71. 8. The first is ibid., 81. 9. Ibid., 83. 10. I have written about this in The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997), 138–89. 11. For an introduction to the apocalyptic tenor of the age, see Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). 12. Sermons about Mary are many indeed. An example of this genre is Jacob Katz, preacher in Pfortzheim in the middle of the sixteenth century, Assvmptio Mariae: Von der schiedung [sic] Marie, der mutter Christi auβ diser welt, Vnd jhrer seligkeyt: etlich Predigen, Postillen weiβ zusammen getragen (Strasbourg: Jacob Frölich, 1556). 13. Cf. Arpád P. Orbán, ed., Sermones in dormitionem Mariae: Sermones patrvm Graecorum praesertim in dormitionem assvmptionemqve beatae Mariae virginis in Latinvm translati, ex codice Avgiensi LXXX (saec. IX), Corpus Christianarum: Continuatio mediaevalis 154 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2000). 14. Not in VD-16 or VD-17. The Latin edition referred to on the German title page evidently did not survive. 15. Canisius, Christenlicher, Catholischer, volbegründter Bericht, von dem seligen Ableiben, Sterben vnd Entschlaffen; Auch von der heyligen vnd frewdenreichen Aufferweckung vnd Auffnemmung in den Himmel, der Allerheiligsten Junckfraw vnd Gottes Gebärerin Marie . . . (Dillingen: Johann Mayer, 1592), fols. 8 (verso)–18 (verso), the quotation from 18 (verso). 16. Ibid., fol. 19 (verso). 17. Ibid., fol. 21 (verso). 18. Ibid., fol. 10 (verso). 19. Ibid., fol. 39 (recto).

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20. For the full account, see fols. 37 (verso)–53 (verso). 21. Ibid., fol. 1 (verso)–2 (recto). Canisius quotes Melanchthon as saying that she was fifty-nine when she died. 22. Ibid., fols. 87 (verso)–89 (recto). 23. Ibid., fol. 47 (recto). 24. Burschel, “Männliche Tode––weibliche Tode: Zur Anthropologie des Martyriums in der frühen Neuzeit,” Saeculum 50, 1 (1999), 75–97, particularly his description of Teresa of Avila’s mystical form of dying, 77–81. 25. Ibid., 79. 26. Heinrich Nicolai (d. 1616), Zwey Fragen. Die Erste, Ob das Bäptische Fest der entschlaffung vnd auffnemmung gen Himmel, der heiligen Mutter Gottes Mariae, Christlich vnd Schrifftmässig sey? Die Andere, Ob das Fronleichname Fest in Gottes Wort, vnd in der alten reinen Kirchen gewissen Grund habe? (Goslar: Johan Vogt, 1614), fols. Aiii (recto)– Fiii (verso). Nicolai preached in Hildesheim. 27. Geiler von Kaisersberg, [Das irrig Schaf ] Der Trostspiegel: Wider vnuernünfftigs trauren vmb die abgestorbnen fründ (Strasbourg: Matthias Schürer, [ca. 1510]), fol. Aaii. 28. Ibid., fol. Bbiiii. 29. Matthaus Tympius, comp., Catholische Leichpredigten (Münster/Westph.: Lambert Raβfeldt, 1609), ser. 18, ”Bey eines Kindts Begräbnuβ, 241, 244. According to the title page, the sermons were drawn from the opera of Georg Scherer, Jacob Gretser, Johann Osorius, Luis de Granada, ”and other highly illuminated and spirit-rich writers.” 30. Tympius, Catholische Leichpredigten, ser. 5, 66. 31. Ibid., ser. 5, 72–73. 32. WA 17/1, first sermon, 10 May 1525, 196–212; second sermon, 11 May 1525, 212–27. 33. WA, TR V, nos. 5491–5499, 187–93. In no. 5491, Luther consoles his weeping wife Katharina with the advice, p. 187: “Bedenck, wo sie hin kompt!” 34. There is quite a huge literature, which I have summarized in my Reformation of Ritual, 265–66, n. 76. See, most recently, Cornelia Niekus Moore, Patterned Lives: The Lutheran Funeral Biography in Early Modern Germany, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 111 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2006). 35. I highly recommend Austra Reinis, Reforming the Art of Dying: The “ars moriendi” in the German Reformation (1519–1528) (Aldershot, Hants.: Ashgate, 2007) as a survey of the departure from late-medieval Catholic treatment of death in the first decade of the Lutheran Reformation. 36. Ain new Trostbüchlin, Mit einer Christlichen vnderrichtung, Wie sich ein Mensch berayten soll, zu ainem seligen sterben . . . (Augsburg: Valentin Othmar, 1541). 37. Ibid., fol. Avii (verso). 38. Nevertheless, from an early date, voices were heard within Lutheranism that suggested that the faith of the parents could suffice for those babies who died before they could be christened. Yet, even those voices insisted on emergency baptism where possible. Luther’s associate Johannes Bugenhagen wrote to Christian of Denmark in 1542 about the sufficiency of parental belief and prayer, published as Von den vngeborn

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Kindern, vnd von den Kindern die wir nicht Teuffen, Vnd wolten doch gern . . . (Wittenberg: Lorentz Schwencken Erben, 1575). This discussion advanced with the rise of German Calvinism, whose members did not regard baptism as necessary in light of predestination and abolished emergency baptism. 39. J. Spangenberg, New Trostbüchlin, fol. Bvii (verso). 40. Ibid., fol. Bviii (verso). 41. Manuale de praeparatione ad mortem = Heylsame und sehr nützliche Betrachtung, wie ein Mensch Christlich leben, und Seliglich sterben sol (Görlitz: Rambau, 1605). An earlier edition appears to have been written in 1593, the date of the author’s introduction: Christliche Lebens- und Selige Sterbe=Kunst, Heilsame, und sehr nützliche Betrachtung, wie ein Christ sein gantzes Leben führen, in steter Busse zubringen, und sich allezeit zu einem seligen Sterb Stündlein bereit und gefast halten, auch dermahleins nach Gottes Willen in kräfftigem Glaubens=Trost wider allerley Anfechtung und Schrecken durch einen sanfften und seligen Tod von dieser Welt frölich und freudig abscheiden könne und solle (Leipzig: Johann Heinrich Ellinger, 1673), introduction, n.p. 42. Friedrich Wilhelm Bodemann, ed., Martin Moller’s [sic] Handbüchlein zur rechten Todesbereitung, das ist Heilsame Betrachtung, wie ein Mensch christlich leben und selig sterben soll (Neu-Ruppin: Alfred Oehmigke, 1863). 43. Bodemann, Martin Moller’s Handbüchlein, 14. 44. Ibid., 15. 45. Reprint: Leipzig: Johann Heinrich Ellinger, 1673, 17. 46. See a brief summary of his career as a teacher and musician at www. bach-cantatas.com/Lib/Lossius-Lucas.htm, consulted 1 August 2007, n.p. 47. Ewiger Warhafftiger vnd Göttlicher Trost, Hülffe, Erretunge vnd Beystand, in allerley Verfolgung, Not, Angst, Anfechtung vnd erschreckunge der Sünde, Todt, Teuffel, Helle, Welt, eigem Fleisch vnd Blut (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Braubach, 1556), 95, 97. 48. Ibid., 150. Cf. Losius’s Ein kurtze vnd einfeltige Trostschrifft, Für die jhenigen, welchen jhr Vatter, Mutter, Ehegemahel, Kinder, Bruder, Schwester, vnd andere gute Freund, auβ disem leben abgescheyden, vnd in dem Herren entschlaffen seind (Frankfurt/Main: Christian Egenolffs Erben, 1556). 49. Bodemann, Martin Moller’s Handbüchlein, 17. 50. From 1673 reprint, 24. 51. Bodemann, Martin Moller’s Handbüchlein, 21. 52. Ibid., 26. 53. Ibid., 36. 54. He cites Mark 16:16, but this is not correct. 55. Ibid., 87. 56. I take this from the author’s foreword (dated 11 April 1593) as reprinted in edition of Leipzig, 1673, n.p. 57. Bodemann, Martin Moller’s Handbüchlein, 118; 1673 edition, 272. 58. Horn meines Heyls. Not even Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 10 (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1984) makes the meaning exactly clear. In this context, it would appear to refer to thickened skin or a scab as a defense

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against attack from without. But it could allude to an animal horn as a figurative human weapon. 59. From Bodemann, Martin Moller’s Handbüchlein, 1673 edition, 193–94. 60. I have not identified Luther’s biblical source. 61. 1693 edition, 231. 62. Huber, Predigt, Von vberwindung des Todes (Mühlhausen: Andreas Hantzsch [1595]), fol. Bv (recto). 63. Copy held by Staats- und Stadt-Bibliothek Augsburg. 64. In addition to the usual biographical sources, see Christian Wilhelm Spieker, Lebensgeschichte des Andreas Musculus . . . ein Beitrag zur Reformations- und Sittengeschichte des 16ten Jahrhunderts (Nieuwkoop: B. de Graaf, 1964). 65. Gelegenheit, Thun vnd Wesen der Verstorbenen, von jrem Abschied an, aus diesem Leben, bis zum eingang nach gehaltenem Jüngsten Gericht, zum ewigen Leben (Frankfurt/ Oder: Johann Eichorn, 1565), fol. Biv (verso). Cf. his Unterrichtung vom Himel vnd der Hell, wie es in beiden, nach der zukunfft vnd gericht des HErrn Christi, zugehen werde, Mit was grosser vnd vnbegreiff licher frewd vnd ewiger herrligkeit, die Auserwelten werden gekrönet vnd begnadet werden. Vnd dargegen, Mit was zorn Gottes, Ewiger straff, vnd vnaussprechlicher pein vnd hertzenleid, die Gottlosen vnd verdampten, werden beladen vnd beschweret werden (Erfurt: Georg Baumann, 1559). 66. Philipp Kegel, Zwölff Geistliche Andachten, darin gar schöne trostreiche Gebet begriffen, Welches die recht bewehrte Mittel, dadurch man ein gnedigen Gott, ein friedsames fröliches Gewissen, vnd entlichen die Krone deβ ewigen Lebens erlangen kan (Goslar: Johan Vogt, 1622), foreword, fol. Aii (verso). Little is known about Kegel’s life. See Traugott Koch, Die Entstehung der lutherischen Frömmigkeit: Die Rezeption pseudo-augustinischer Gebetstexte in der Revision früher lutherischer Autoren (Andreas Musculus, Martin Moller, Philipp Kegel, Philipp Nicolai) (Waltrop: Hartmut Spenner, 2004), esp. 83. 67. Ibid., 6–7. 68. Ibid., 11. 69. Ibid., 196. 70. Ibid., 481. 71. Philipp Han, Leich Predigten. Bey Christlicher Bestattung Fürnehmer Adelichen, vnd anderer, Geistlichen vnnd Weltlichen, Manns vnd Weibes Personen, Jung vnd Alt, etc., 2 parts (Magdeburg: Ambrosius Kirchner, 1610), 2: 3. My thanks to Cornelia Niekus Moore for bringing this to my attention. 72. Ibid., 2: 18. “Be our consolation in all distress.” 73. Quite promptly translated into English by Thomas Stocker as Psychopannychia: An Excellent Treatise of the Immortalytie of the Soule, By which is proued, that the soules, after their departure out of the bodies, are avvake and doe lyue, contrary to that erroneous opinion of certen ignorant persons, who thinke them to lye asleape vntill the day of judgement (London: John Daye, 1581). 74. On remaining fears among the people, Andrew Spicer, “’Rest of their bones’: Fear of Death and Reformed Burial Practices,” in Fear in Early Modern Society, edited by William G. Naphy and Penny Roberts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997), 167–83.

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75. Kirchenordnung, Wie es mit der Christlichen Lehre, heiligen Sacramenten, vnnd Ceremonien, inn des Durchleuchtigsten Hochgebornen Fürsten vnnd Herren, Herrn Friderichs Pfalzgrauen bey Rhein, des heiligen Römischen Reichs Ertzdruchsessen vnnd Churfürsten, Hertzogen inn Bayrn etc. Churfürstenthumb bey Rhein, gehalten wirdt (Heidelberg: Johannes Maier, 1563). 76. Ibid., fol. 77 (verso). 77. Ibid., fol. 79 (verso). 78. Paul Münch, Zucht und Ordnung: Reformierte Kirchenverfassung im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Nassau-Dillenburg, Kurpfalz, Hessen-Kassel) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978). 79. Ursula Rohner-Baumberger von Rebstein, Begräbniswesen im calvinistischen Genf (Basel: Stehlin, 1975); also Friedemann Merkel, “Der Umgang mit Toten und Trauernden als Thema evangelischer Theologie und Kirchlicher Praxis,” in Der Umgang mit den Toten: Tod und Bestattung in der christlichen Gemeinde, edited by Klemens Richter (Freiburg/Br.: Herder, 1990), 48–62, here at 50. 80. Kirchenordnung, fol. 82 (verso). 81. Ibid., fol. 82 (recto). 82. Willing, Vierzehen Predigten Von gewisser bewerung vnd artzney, wider allen schrecken, gefar, vnd schaden, der schnelhinreissenden Pestilentz, vnd dergleichen plagen, auch des leiblichen thodes (Heidelberg: Johann Mayer, 1564). 83. Ibid., ser. 2, 11. 84. Ibid., ser. 4, 22–23. 85. Ibid., ser. 4, 23. 86. Ibid., ser. 4, 24. 87. Ibid., ser. 6, 39. 88. Ibid., ser. 7, 51–52. 89. Ibid., ser. 8, 60–62. He cites John 16:33. 90. Ibid., ser. 8, 66. 91. Ibid., ser. 9, 70–71. 92. Ibid., ser. 10, 79–80. 93. Ibid., ser. 11, 97. 94. I am using here his Erinnerung, Wessen sich ein Christ bey der absterbung vnd begräbnis seiner mitbrüder trösten, vnd wie er sich selbst seliglich zu sterben bereiten sol (Herborn: Christopff Rab, 1589). 95. Herzog August Bibliothek, call number Yj22 Helmst. 8º. 96. Ibid., 38. 97. Ibid., 42. 98. Ibid., 8. 99. Ibid., 9–12. 100. Ibid., 17. 101. Ibid., 31. 102. Ibid., 37–38. 103. Ibid., 34. 104. Ibid., 43.

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105. There is an old biography of Tossanus: Friedrich Wilhelm Cuno, Daniel Tossanus der Ältere, Professor der Theologie und Pastor (1541–1602), 2 vols. (Amsterdam: Scheffer, 1898). 106. Tossanus, Leichpredig, So zu Begrebnuss des Durchleuchtigsten, Hochgebornen Fürsten vnd Herrn, Friderichen, diβ Namens des dritten, Pfaltzgrauen bey Rhein, Hertzogs in Bayern . . . ist gehalten worden, Durch jhrer. Churf. G. Hoffpredigern, M. Danielem Tossanum, den 12. tag des Monats Nouembris, Anno 1576 (Heidelberg: Jacob Müller, 1576), 3. 107. Ibid., 4–5. 108. Ibid., 7. 109. Ibid., 13. 110. Ibid., 13. 111. Ibid., 13–14, 19. 112. Gustav Adolf Benrath, ed., Die Selbstbiographie des Heidelberger Theologen und Hofpredigers Abraham Scultetus (1566–1624), Veröffentlichungen des Vereins für Kirchengeschichte in der evangelischen Landeskirche in Baden 24 (Karlsruhe: Evangelischer Presseverband, 1966). 113. Scultetus, Bericht, Vom Christlichen Leben, seligen Sterben, gegenwertiger Ruh, vnd zukünftiger Herrligkeit, Deβ Weiland Hochwolgebornen Herrn, Herrn Johann Albrechts, Graven zu Solms, Herrn zu Mintzenberg . . .Churfürstlicher Pfaltz Groβhoffmeisters, vnd Königkl. Majestät in Böhemb gewesenen vornembsten Raths etc. Verfast in eine Trostschrifft (Emden: Helwich Kallenbach, 1624). 114. Ibid., fol. B2 (verso). 115. Ibid., fols. D1 (verso)–D2 (recto). 116. Ibid., fol. D3 (recto). 117. Ibid., fol. E2 (verso). 118. See Max Engammare, L’ordre du temps: L’invention de la ponctualité au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2004), 128–29, on the day of death as the “day of birth.” 119. Ibid., fols. E3 (verso), F3 (recto). 120. Ibid., fol. F4 (verso). 121. Salmut, Bildnuβ eines Euangelischen Predigers, auβ der 2. Epistel Pauli an die Corinthier am 6. Gerichtet Vff die Persohn, Leben, vnnd Tod, deβ Ehrwürdigen vnd Hochgelarten Herrn Abrahami Sculteti . . . (Emden: Helwig Kallenbach, 1625), 59. 122. Passio et Resurrectio Christi: Auβlegung der Historien vnd Geschichte vom leyden, sterben vnd auferstehung vnsers HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi, wie sie der Euangelist Johannes beschreibet (Siegen/Nassau: Christoff Rab, 1596), foreword, unpaginated. Cf., however, ser. 5, 164, where Spindler curiously observes that Mary could hardly have stood her pain had she not realized that her son was paying for the sins “der ganzen welt.” There is little doubt that preachers sometimes slighted the finer points of that theology to which they adhered when preaching to or writing for ordinary Christians. 123. Spindler, Passio, ser. 2, 18. 124. Ibid., ser. 7, 77. 125. See, for example, the harsh condemnations of Wittenberg theologian Samuel Huber, Bestende Entdeckung des Caluinischen Geists, welcher sich vnterstehe das Leiden

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Jhesu Christi, für vnsere Sünde, zu verläugnen vnd auffzuheben (Wittenberg: Christoph Axin / Paul Helwich, 1593). This is directed against Daniel Tossanus and other Heidelberg theologians. 126. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “‘They have highly offended the community of God’: Pastoral Identity and Rituals of Ecclesiastical Discipline in Late Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century German Parishes,” in festschrift for James D. Tracy, From the Middle Ages to Modernity: Individual and Community in the Early Modern World, edited by Charles H. Parker and Jerry H. Bentley (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 211–29.

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1. New York: Harper & Row, 1978. Before Burke on this point was, of course, Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, translated by Hélène Iswolsky (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1968). 2. Clifford Geertz (d. 2006), to name just one, saw the complexities of communication through much of his career. I still greatly admire his essay, “Ritual and Social Change: A Javanese Example,” included in the collection of his essays, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 142–69. 3. Matthias Zender, ed., Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde (orig. 1937–1939); Neue Folge, Atlas der deutschen Volkskunde: Auf Grund der von 1929 bis 1935 durchgeführten Sammlungen . . . 6 vols. (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1958–1985). 4. Eva Labouvie, “Sanctuaires à répit.” Zur Wiedererweckung toter Neugeborener: Zur Einnerungskultur und zur Jenseitsvorstellung im katholischen Milieu,” in Tod und Jenseits in der Schriftkultur der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Marion Kobelt-Groch and Cornelia Niekus Moore (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 79–96. 5. William G. Naphy, “Church Riots and Social Unrest in Calvin’s Geneva,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26, 1 (1995), 87–98. 6. As by Wolfgang Brückner, Volkserzählung und Reformation: Ein Handbuch zur Tradierung und Funktion von Erzählstoffen und Erzählliteratur im Protestantismus (Berlin: E. Schmidt, 1974). 7. For example, WA, BR 11, no. 4144, 165–66; WA, BR 12, no. 4244a, 135–36; WA, TR 4, 641–42. 8. Needless to add, far more was involved in the relative failure of compulsory confessionalization in Brandenburg. See Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). 9. Thomas A. Lambert and Isabella M. Watt, eds., Registers of the Consistory of Geneva in the Time of Calvin, vol. 1, 1542–1544, translated by M. Wallace McDonald (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000). 10. “Augsburger Predigt im Zeitalter der lutherischen Orthodoxie,” in Die Augsburger Kirchenordnung von 1537 und ihr Umfeld, edited by Reinhard Schwarz (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1988), 123–58, esp. the summary, 155–57.

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11. Wolfgang Reinhard, ed., Nuntiaturberichte aus Deutschland: Die Kölner Nuntiatur, vol. V/1/2: Nuntius Antonio Albergati (1610 Mai–1614 Mai) (Munich: Schöningh, 1972), 758. See the rapid rise in the number of Capuchins in general in the Cologne province but in particular, for our purposes, of preachers: Bonaventura von Mehr, Das Predigtwesen in der kölnischen und rheinischen Kapuzinerprovinz im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert, Bibliotheca Seraphica-Capuccina, Sectio Historica 6 (Rome: Istituto Storico dei Fr. Min. Cappuccini, 1945), 56–57. They preached with “glowing zeal,” 29. 12. Lucien Febvre, The Problem of Unbelief in the Sixteenth Century, the Religion of Rabelais, translated by Beatrice Gottlieb (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 13. Elfriede Moser-Rath’s studies of baroque literature including sermons are valuable. A collection was published after her death as Kleine Schriften zur populären Literatur des Barock, edited by Ulrich Marzolph and Ingrid Tomkowiak (Göttingen: Otto Schwartz, 1994). Ten of the twenty-one essays are on the sermon. 14. Compendium breve de bone valitudinis cura qd’ & regimen sanitatis atque dieta poterit nuncupari . . . (n.p.: n.p., 1510). 15. Die Bruderschafft sancte Ursule (Nuremberg: self-published, 1513). 16. Der beschlossen gart des rosenkrantz marie (Nuremberg: self-published, 1505). 17. Speculum passionis domini nostril Ihesu Christi (Nuremberg: self-published, 1507); republished with rich illustrations, some, it is thought, by Hans Baldung Grien, as Speculum passionis domini nostri Ihesu Christi (Strasbourg: Matthias Hupfuff, 1513); Specvlvm Passionis, Das ist: Spjegel deβ bitteren Leydens vnnd Sterbens JESU CHRISTI . . . (Salzburg: Johann Baptist Mayr, 1663). 18. I am quoting from the 1513 edition, fol. iii (recto). 19. Ibid., fol. xvii (recto). 20. SPJEGEL deβ bitteren Leydens, 85. Shortly thereafter, on p. 92, Pinder explains that the body of his mirror (SPJEGEL) is drawn from Jerome, Augustine, Bernard [of Clairvaux], Simone de Cascia, Reinhard von Laudenburg, and most of all from Ludolph of Saxony “after the tradition of the holy Evangelist.” See Eric L. Saak, High Way to Heaven: The Augustinian Platform between Reform and Reformation, 1292–1524 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002), 539. 21. Mary Magdalene was widely thought to have been the same as Mary of Bethany. Thus, Martha of Bethany, her sister, had to have been present, too. 22. SPJEGEL deβ bitteren Leydens, 87. 23. Speculum passionis domini, 1513 Latin edition, fol. xix (recto) 24. SPJEGEL deβ bitteren Leydens, 96. 25. Ibid., 106. 26. Ibid., 131–33. 27. Ibid., 137. 28. Ibid., 137–38. 29. Ibid., 140–41. 30. Ibid., article 27, 153. 31. Ibid., article 40, 175. 32. Ibid., article 44, 185. 33. Ibid., article 48, 195.

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34. Ibid., article 53, 204. 35. Ibid., article 58, 216–21. 36. Ibid., 217. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 220. 40. Ibid., article 59, 221–24. 41. Ibid., article 63, 238. 42. Ibid., 239. 43. This story is not part of the main body of Pinder’s Speculum but is appended in a list of ten miracles attendant upon the Passion of Christ, 260. 44. Ibid. 45. Depending on the year of his death, Pinder may have published all his books himself. 46. Laudenburg, Reinhard von, Passio d[omi]ni nostri Jesu Christi predicate siue co[m]pilata per modu[m] quadragesimalis a venerabili patre Reinhardo de Laudenburg sacre Theologie lectore ordinis sancti Augustini (Nuremberg: Balthasar Schleifer, 1501). The little that is known about him is summarized in Willigis Eckermann, “Reinhard de Laudenburg (†1502),” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed. (Freiburg/Br.: Herder, 1993–2001), 8: cols. 1009–10. 47. I comment on this in “Catholic Intensity in Post-Reformation Germany: Preaching on the Passion and Catholic Identity in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in Politics and Reformations: Studies in Honor of Thomas A. Brady, Jr., edited by Christopher Ocker, Michael Printy, Peter Starenko, and Peter Wallace (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2007), 373–96, esp. 373–75. 48. Des Heiligen Geistes Beschreibung Vom Leiden vnd Sterben vnsers HErrn Jesu Christi, durch ein blindgeborne Jungfraw Justitiae Sengers in Braunschweig (Hamburg: n.p., 1593). The title of the first edition is less forthcoming: Trostbüchlein, uber den Neun und Sechtzigsten Psalm: Von dem Leiden und Sterben, unsers Herrn Jhesu Christi, und von unserm Creutz und Leiden, wie wir in die Fusstapfen Christi treten müssen. Und was wir für einen herrlichen Lohn bekomen werden (Magdeburg: Donat, 1586). 49. I take these quotations from the foreword of the 1593 edition, which formed part of the original edition as well. Pagination is lacking. 50. From her preface to the Christian reader, likewise unpaginated. 51. Psalm 69: 4. 52. Des Heiligen Geistes Beschreibung, fols. 17 (verso)–18 (recto). 53. Ibid., fol. 17 (verso). 54. Ibid., fol. 38 (verso). 55. Ibid., fol. 52 (verso). 56. Ibid., fol. 57 (verso). 57. Ibid., fol. 59 (verso). 58. Ibid., fol. 61 (verso). 59. Ibid., fol. 237 (recto). 60. Ibid., fol. 251 (recto).

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61. Ibid., fol. 241 (recto). 62. Ibid., fol. 69 (verso). 63. Ibid., fol. 94 (verso). 64. Ibid., fol. 101 (verso). 65. Ibid., fol. 107 (verso). 66. Ibid., fol. 267 (recto). 67. Ibid., fol. 110 (recto). 68. Ibid., fol. 130 (verso). 69. Ibid., fols. 141 (verso)–143 (verso). 70. “vnnd was es sonsten mehr geschehen ist.” Ibid., fol. 146 (verso). 71. Ibid., fol. 208 (recto). 72. Ibid., fols. 286 (verso)–287 (recto). 73. So great has the attention of literary and feminist scholars now become to this writer that I shall not attempt to recite all works about her here. Suffice the following: Peter Maurice Daly, Dichtung und Emblematik bei Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag Herbert Grundmann, 1976); Daly, Die Metaphorik in den “Sonetten” der Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg (Zurich: Juris Verlag, 1964); Kathleen Foley-Beining, The Body and Eucharistic Devotion in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s “Meditations” (Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1997); Flora Graham Kimmich, Sonnets of Catharina von Greiffenberg: Methods of Composition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1975); Ruth Liwerski, Das Wörterwerk der Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, 2 vols., Berner Beiträge zur Barockgermanistik 1 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1978); and Elisabeth Bartsch Siekhaus, Die lyrischen Sonette der Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg, Berner Beiträge zur Barockgermanistik 4 (Berne: Peter Lang, 1983). 74. See Lynne Tatlock’s opening summary of von Greiffenberg’s life, followed by Tatlock’s translation of an excerpt from the Passion meditations, in Lynne Tatlock, ed., Seventeenth Century German Prose (New York: Continuum, 1993), 105. The translated excerpt is 106–10. 75. The best summary of her life is Lynne Tatlock’s introduction to her edition of Greiffenberg’s Meditations on the Incarnation, Passion, and Death of Jesus Christ (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1–38. 76. Des allerheiligst- und allerheilsamsten Leidens und Sterbens Jesu Christi, zwölf andächtige Betrachtungen (Nuremberg: Hofmann, 1672). This was followed by a second volume, Der allerheiligsten Menschwerdung, Geburt und Jugend Jesu Christi, zwölf andächtige Betrachtungen (Nuremberg: Hofmann, 1678); and a third and final volume in two parts, Des allerheiligsten Lebens Jesu Christi, sechs andächtige Betrachtungen von dessen Lehren und Wunderwercken (Nuremberg: Hoffmann, 1693); and Des allerheiligsten Lebens Jesu Christi, übrige sechs Betrachtungen, von dessen heiligem Wandel, Wundern und Weissagungen . . . (Nuremberg: Hofmann, 1693), shortly before her death. 77. My own notes on her Passion meditations are drawn from a facsimile reprint of a 1683 edition, Des Allerheiligst = und Allerheilsamsten leidens und Sterbens Jesu Christi: Zwölff andächtige Betrachtungen, durch Dessen innigste Liebhaberin und eifrigste Verehrerin . . . Zu Vermehrung der Ehre GOttes und Erweckung wahrer Andacht (Nuremberg: Johann Hofmann, 1683); this makes up vols. 9–10 of Catharina Regina von

NOTES TO PAGES

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Greiffenberg, Sämtliche Werke (Millwood, N.Y.: Kraus Reprints, 1983). This quotation is from her opening “VorAnsprache [sic] an den Edlen Leser,” n.p. 78. In her article, “Empathic Suffering: The Inscription and Transmutation of Gender in Catharina Regina von Greiffenberg’s Leiden und Sterben Jesu Christi,” Wolfenbütteler Barock-Nachrichten 34, 1 (2007), 27–50, attributes to Greiffenberg’s meditations specifically feminine dimensions. However, when placed in the context of prior and ongoing Catholic devotion to the Passion, von Greiffenberg departs little except in the extremity and poetic form of her opus. On the contrary, one could argue that, as the Catholic preacher Bartolomeus Wagner suggested, in regard to the Crucifixion, all good Christians were to take on submissive, physical, and emotive feminine qualities. And Christ himself becomes feminized. See chap. 5 above. However, Tatlock’s essay is valuable in highlighting von Greiffenberg’s drawing attention to women actors in the Passion other than the Virgin. 79. Von Greiffenberg, Sämtliche Werke, vol. 9, Betr. 1, 24. 80. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 1, 20. 81. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 1, 21. 82. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 2, 37, 39. 83. Ibid.., vol. 9, Betr. 2, 44, verse 11. 84. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 3, 64–65. 85. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 3, 110–11. 86. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 3, 115. 87. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 4, 143. 88. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 5, 248. 89. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 5, 230. 90. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 6, 287. 91. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 6, 292. 92. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 6, 313. 93. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 6, 333. 94. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 7, 408. 95. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 8, 416. 96. Ibid., vol. 9, Betr. 8, 432–33. 97. Ibid., vol. 10, Betr. 9, 556–57. 98. Ibid., vol. 10, Betr. 10, 681–87. 99. Ibid., vol. 10, Betr. 10, 749. 100. Ibid., vol. 10, Betr. 10, 770. 101. Ibid., vol. 10, Betr. 11, 845. 102. Sibylle Badstübner-Grögner, “Observations on the Arts of the Huguenots in Brandenburg-Prussia,” in Seeing beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, edited by Paul Corby Finney (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 269–98. 103. Heilsame Betrachtung der gnaden- und trostreichen Historie von dem seligmachenden Leiden und Sterben . . . Jesu Christi, Zu eigener Erbauung auffgesetzt durch eine Liebhaberin der Teutschen Poesie (Wittenberg: Matthaeus Henckel, 1665). 104. Ibid., fol. A2 (recto). 105. Ibid., fol. A3 (recto).

326

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106. Ibid., fol. B4 (verso). 107. Ibid., fol. C1 (verso). 108. Ibid., fol. F2 (recto). 109. Ibid., fol. C3 (recto). 110. Ibid., fol. D1 (recto–verso). 111. Ibid., fols. E1 (verso)–E2 (recto). 112. Ibid., fol. E4 (recto). 113. Ibid., fol. F2 (verso). 114. Opffer der Heiligen, 2 vols. (Oettingen: n.p., 1710). 115. Ibid., 1: 289. 116. Ibid., 1: 293. 117. Ibid., 1: 124–26. 118. See, for example, Helga Schnabel-Schule, “Der groβe Unterschied und seine Folgen: Zum Problem der Kirchenzucht als Unterscheidungskriterium zwischen lutherischer und reformierter Konfession,” in Krisenbewuβtsein und Krisenbewältigung in der Frühen Neuzeit: Festschrift für Hans-Christoph Rublack, edited by Monika Hagenmaier and Sabine Holtz (Frankfurt/Main: Peter Lang, 1992), 197–214. 119. “Volkskultur im Calvinismus: Zu Theorie und Praxis der ‘reformatio vitae’ während der ‘Zweiten Reformation,’” in Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung: Das Problem der “Zweiten Reformation” in Deutschland, edited by Heinz Schilling (Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1986), 291–307. See also Münch’s earlier book, Zucht und Ordnung: Reformierte Kirchenverfassung im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert (Nassau-Dillenburg, Kurpfalz, Hessen-Kassel) (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1978), which describes the development of bureaucratic forms that enabled the princes to rule efficiently—and also to impose religious and moral discipline on their subjects. 120. Tossanus, Trostschrift An alle guthertzige Christen, so von wegen der reynen, vnd vom Papistischen sauerteyg gesäuberten Lehr der Sacramenten, vnd besonders des H. Abentmals angefochten werden (Neustadt an der Hardt: Hans Meyer, 1578), fol. A5 (recto). 121. Peter Starenko, “In Luther’s Wake: Duke John Frederick II of Saxony, Angelic Prophecy, and the Gotha Rebellion of 1567,” Ph.D. dissertation in history, University of California, Berkeley, 2002; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Popular Culture as Religious Dissent in the Post-Reformation Era,” in Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert, edited by Hans-Jürgen Goertz and James M. Stayer, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 27 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), 189–202, on the peasant prophetess Anna Hillig, 199–200. 122. Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004). 123. Manfred Hannemann, The Diffusion of the Reformation in Southwestern Germany, 1518–1534 (Chicago: University of Chicago Department of Geography, 1975); Bernd Moeller, “Was wurde in der Frühzeit der Reformation in deutschen Städten gepredigt?” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 75 (1984), 176–93; my reply, “What Was Preached in German Cities in the Early Years of the Reformation? Wildwuchs versus

NOTES TO PAGES

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Lutheran Unity,” in The Process of Change in Early Modern Europe: Essays in Honor of Miriam Usher Chrisman, edited by Phillip N. Bebb and Sherrin Marshall (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1988), 81–96. 124. Blickle, Die Revolution von 1525 (Munich and Vienna: R. Oldenbourg, 1977); Deutsche Untertanen: Ein Widerspruch (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1981); Gemeindereformation: Die Menschen des 16. Jahrhunderts auf dem Weg zum Heil (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1985); and some of his most consequential essays, From the Communal Reformation to the Revolution of the Common Man, translated by Beat Kümin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998). 125. Christopher Ocker, Church Robbers and Reformers in Germany, 1525–1547: Confiscation and Religious Purpose in the Holy Roman Empire, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 114 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2006). Impressive is the extent to which Catholic authorities exploited the unrest surrounding the Reformation to seize and retain Church wealth. 126. Moeller, “Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als neues Mönchtum,” in Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch, edited by Bernd Moeller and Stephen E. Buckwalter, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 199 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1998), 76–91. 127. Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Reformation und Askese: Das Pfarrhaus als evangelisches Kloster,” in Kommunikation und Transfer im Christentum der Frühen Neuzeit, edited by Irene Dingel and Wolf-Friedrich Schäufele, Veröffentlichtungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte 174 (Mainz: Institut für Europäische Geschichte, 2008), 211–28. 128. As an introduction, see the essays of Gerhard Oestreich collected in Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, edited by Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger, translated by David McLintock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Oestrich, Antiker Geist und moderner Staat bei Justus Lipsius (1547–1606): Der Neostoizismus als politische Bewegung, edited by Nicolette Mout (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989). 129. Karant-Nunn, “Catholic Intensity in Post-Reformation Germany,” on Mel Gibson’s movie, 395–96.

CHAPTER

8

1. WA 46, “Predigt am Karfreitag” (19 April 1538), 293–95. 2. Urbanus Rhegius, Johannes Kymeus, Johannes Bugenhagen, and Martin Luther, Passional Buch: Vom Leiden vnd Aufferstehung vnsers Herrn Jhesu Christi . . . 2nd ed. (Wittenberg: Georg Rhaw, 1540), Kymeus’s ser. 5, xxiii–xxiiii. 3. Christliche betrachtung der Passion Jhesu Christi . . . zur buβ vnd vergebung der Sünden . . . 2nd ed. (Frankfurt an der Oder: Johan Eichorn, 1565), fol. Aiii (recto– verso). 4. Postilla, Das ist, Auβlegung der Euangelien auff alle Fest vnd Apostel Tage durchs gantze Jar (Helmstedt: Jacob Lucius, 1581), ser. 2, fol. 2 (recto). 5. Ibid., ser. 6, fol. 40 (recto).

328

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6. Historia Der Passion vnsers lieben HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi, comp. Melchior Newkirchen, 2nd ed. (Wolfenbüttel: Horn, 1591), part 4, 144. 7. Sauter, Passio Iesv Christi, Das ist Gründtliche vnd Auβführliche Erklärung, der Trostreichen Historienm, vom bittern vnd thewren Leiden, Sterben vnd Begräbnuβ vnsers HErrn vnd Heilands Jesu Christi . . . (Lauingen: Leonhart Reinmichel, 1597), fol. 190 (verso)–191 (recto). 8. Spindler, Passio et Resurrectio Christi: Auβlegung der Historien vnd Geschichte vom leyden, sterben vnd auferstehung vnsers HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi . . . (Siegen/Nassau: Christoph Rab, 1596), 13. 9. Mylaeus, Passions Predigten, Oder Christliche Erklärung der tröstlichen History deβ Leidens vnnd Sterbens vnsers HERRN vnd Heylandts Jesu Christi (Frankfurt/Main: Jona Rosen, 1617), ser. 11, 131. 10. Franck, Passion, Das Leyden vnnd Sterben vnsers Herren Iesv Christi, auβ den H. vier Euangelisten zusammen gezogen (Ingolstadt: David Sartorius, 1576), fol. 31 (verso). 11. Scherer, Postill Oder Auβlegung der Fest- vnd Feyr-täglichen Euangelien durch das gantze Jar, Sambt Auβführlicher Erklärung der Historien vom Leyden vnd Sterben Christi . . . (Munich: Nicolaus Henricus, 1608), 272–73. Mylaeus’s dates are evidently unknown. His publications span the years 1589–1617. He preached in Heidelberg. 12. Kisel, Siebenf ältig=Blutiges Schau=Spiel Deβ Siebenströmigen Geistlichen Nili-Flusses, Das ist, Sieben Passion=Predigten . . ., translated by Andreas Bresson (Bamberg: Johann Elias Höffling, 1679), 376–78. 13. Olevianus, Fester Grundt, das ist, Die Artickel des alten, waren, vngezweiffelten Christlichen Glaubens (Heidelberg: Michael Schirat, 1567), 25. 14. Found at: www.newadvent.org. 15. Likewise, plentifully documented through Google. 16. The literature has become vast. See Ute Lotz-Heumann, “Confessionalization,” in Reformation and Early Modern Europe: A Guide to Research, edited by David M. Whitford, Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies 79 (Kirksville, Mo.: Truman State University Press, 2008), 136–57, for a survey and bibliography. 17. Most readily available to American audiences is John Dillenberg’s translation in Martin Luther, Selections from His Writings (New York: Doubleday, 1962), “Bondage of the Will,” 199: “Now that God has taken my salvation out of the control of my own will and put it under the control of His, and promised to save me, not according to my working or running, but according to His own grace and mercy, I have the comfortable certainty that He is faithful and will not lie to me, and that He is also great and powerful, so that no devils or opposition can break Him or pluck me from Him.” 18. Caroline Walker Bynum’s book Wondrous Blood exemplifies this and brilliantly roots this cultural dimension in intellectual texts. 19. See Kirstin Valdez Quade, “The Five Wounds,” New Yorker (27 July 2009), 60–69, which is strictly fictional. 20. For the Dutch setting, see Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 276–93.

NOTES TO PAGES

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21. On the worshiper’s emotion as expressed by J. S. Bach, see Melvin P. Unger, “’Ich elender Mensch’: Bach on the Soul’s Torment,” in Johann Anselm Steiger, ed., Passion, Affekt und Leidenschaft in der frühen Neuzeit, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2005), 2: 543–58. 22. Robert A. Houston, “The Consistory of the Scots Church, Rotterdam: An Aspect of ‘Civic Calvinism,’ c. 1600–1800,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 87 (1996), 362–92; Douglas Catterall, Community without Borders: Scots Migrants and the Changing Face of Power in the Dutch Republic, c. 1600–1700 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004); James D. Tracy, “Begrenzter Dissens: Die rechtliche Stellung nichtcalvinistischer christlicher Gemeinden in Holland, 1572–1591,” in Radikalität und Dissent im 16. Jahrhundert, edited by Hans-Jürgen Goertz and James M. Stayer, Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 27 (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 2002), 221–32; the essays in R. Po-chia Hsia and Henk van Nierop, eds., Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), esp. 39–77. 23. I chanced to hear a riveting presentation on one of these inspirational preachers and people’s enthusiasm for him: Roy Phillips, “Wild Preaching and America’s Literary Beginnings,” presented to the Tucson Literary Club, 18 April 2005. The preacher in question was Edward Thompson Taylor (1793–1871). 24. Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Culture: Diversity and Universals (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 240. See also her article, “German ‘Cultural Scripts’: Public Signs as a Key to Social Attitudes and Cultural Values,” Discourse and Society 9, 2 (1998), 241–82. 25. One example is provided in the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Gotha, Hohenlohe Archiv—Kanzlei, Nr. 1250: “Inquisition Acta. Contra Hans Braun Witbe, Die alte WagenMeisterin genent 1688,” fol. 48 (recto). 26. Marina Warner, “Blood and Tears,” New Yorker (8 April 1996), 63–69.

Index

Adam, 99, 112, 119, 159 adornment of sacred spaces, 6 Calvinist opposition to, 101–2, 115, 129 in Catholicism, 38–39 in Lutheranism, 65–70, 216, 278 n. 19 (67) vestments, 69–70, 280 n. 32 (70) affective piety. See piety, affective Albergati, Antonio (papal nuncio of Cologne), 50, 218 Albertus Magnus, 142, 245 Albrecht, Johann (count of Solms), 209 “Allegory of Sin and Redemption” (de Vries), 99 Amberg, 125, 153, 247 anaphora, 39, 89, 120 angels at death-bed, 190–91, 199, 207 at Gethsemane, 58, 89–90 anger, 4, 8, 11 and anti-Semitism, 135, 149, 157, 223 in Catholicism, 52–53 of God, in Reformed programs, 110, 115, 121, 125–26, 130, 205 Ansbach, 143, 176 Anselm, Saint, 51, 96, 221 anti-Calvinism, 200, 240 anti-Catholicism in Lutheranism, 73, 87, 145, 175, 178, 236, 245–46

in Reformed churches, 109, 126, 150–53, 156–57 anti-Semitism, 253–254, 299 n. 2 (133) with anti-Catholicism, 145, 149, 151–53, 156, 157 as arousing religious emotion, 133–34, 153–57 blood-guilt of generations, 134–36, 138, 141, 145, 254 and Calvin, John, 109, 111, 148–49, 155 in Catholic homiletics, 21–23, 29–31, 36–37, 44, 46, 57, 134–42, 165–66, 173 comparisons with beasts in, 139–41, 145, 152 as inherited sentiment, 133–36, 142–43, 145, 148–49, 155 and Jewish law on bloodshed at Passover, 136, 137, 150 in lay literature, 222–23, 227, 231–32, 236 and Luther, Martin, 79, 142 in Lutheran homiletics, 79, 84, 86–87, 91–93, 142–48, 153–55 in Reformed homiletics, 134, 148–53, 153–57. See also Passion sermons and meditations, anti-Semitic messages in Apostles’ Creed, 33, 120 Ariès, Philippe, 161

INDEX

Aristotle, 7–8, 11, 76 Rhetoric, 7–8 ars moriendi, 10, 190–91, 196–202 art anti-Semitism in, 133–34 baroque, 5–6, 11–12, 38–39, 101, 181, 184 Burgkmair, Hans, the Elder, 164–65 Cranach, Lucas, the Elder, 71–72, 78, 99, 249 death-related, 190–93, 210 de Vries, Hans Vredemann, 99 frontispieces, 44, 51 Mannerist, 101, 104–5, 115, 131 Marian, 66–67, 160–61, 164–65, 181, 184, 192 Passion-related, 10–11, 17–18, 66–72, 99, 102, 263 n. 5 (18), 277 n. 13 (66) Pencz, Georg, 73–74 Romanesque, 18, 102 saints, 65–67 Stoss, Veit, 72, 192, 308 n. 51 (167) women depicted in, 66–68, 159–60, 186, 279 nn. 22–23 (68). See also iconography Assumption, the, 167, 169, 179, 193 atonement, the, 250–51 and Calvin, John, 109, 111–13, 128, 130, 137 in Catholicism, 25, 28, 33–34, 44–45, 60–61 death and, 190–92, 196–202, 205–8, 210–213 lay individuals on, 228, 231, 234, 239 in Lutheranism, 67–68, 70, 80–82, 86–87, 92–99, 143–45, 154, 174, 176 in Reformed programs, 109, 111–13, 118–19, 126, 128 Augsburg, 41, 54–55, 98, 137, 151 Augustine, Saint, 24 Austria, 51, 229, 234–35 Ave Maria, 167, 172 baptism, 106–7, 109, 112, 119, 242 and death, 197, 199 emergency, 197, 316–17 n. 38 (197) Barabbas, 53, 148, 153 baroque era, 5–6, 11–12, 38–39, 101, 289 n. 2 (101) Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 15, 17, 306 n. 15 (162) on Mary, 162, 164, 169, 171, 173–74, 221 on the Passion, 18, 94, 102, 172, 223 Bethany, dinner in, 28, 42, 85, 190, 230

331

Beza, Theodore, 104, 115–16, 149–50, 180 Bible, 200, 203, 207, 241 1 Corinthians, 81 Ecclesiasticus, 123 Ephesians, 130 Ezekiel, 74 Genesis, 177 Isaiah, 92, 93, 145 Jeremiah, 74, 171 2 Kings, 228 Psalms, 86, 92, 102, 110, 226 Romans, 112, 121, 294 n. 79 (113) Song of Songs, 168, 193. See also Gospels Bidermann, Jacob Cenodoxus, sive Doctor Parisiensis, 41 blood of Christ in Calvinism, 249–50 in Catholicism, 20–25, 28, 30, 35, 43–46, 53 Jewish guilt, as metaphor for, 134–36, 138, 141, 145, 254 in Lutheranism, 71–72, 80, 228, 249 perspiration of, 21, 30, 57, 85–95 passim, 126, 128, 231 tears of, 20, 57 body parts of Christ, 37, 39, 45, 57, 172 Bonaventure, Saint, 18, 46, 141, 170 Borromeo, Carlo (archbishop of Milan), 38–39, 48, 269 n. 149 (39) Bouwsma, William, 107 Brandenburg, 69 Braunschweig, 30, 147, 219, 225, 238 Brenz, Johannes (Swabian theologian), 84–86, 89, 97–98, 144–45, 176 Passio Vnsers Herren Jesu Christi leyden vnd sterben, 84–86, 144 Brigitta of Sweden, Saint, 17, 142 Revelationes, 17, 170, 174, 245 Brunner, Andreas Dramatica Sacra, 42–44, 270 n. 169 (42) Brunswick, 91, 94, 176 Bugenhagen, Johannes (Wittenberg pastor), 79 burial, 193, 201, 205 Burgkmair, Hans, the Elder “Mater Dolorosa,” 164–65 Burke, Peter, 215 Bynum, Caroline Walker, 63–64, 160, 185, 375 n. 1 (63) Caiaphas, 21, 57, 136, 141, 149, 153, 162

332

INDEX

Calvary, 29, 35, 59, 169–70, 171, 223 Calvinism, 6, 11, 101–16 anti-Calvinism, 200, 240 and anti-Semitism, 148–49, 155–57 and death, 202–10, 211–13, 259–60 n. 22 (7) individualism and communalism in, 105–7, 131 Mary’s absence from, 175, 179–80, 183, 186 women’s role in, 179, 187 Calvinist Passion preaching comparison to Catholic, 149, 175, 202, 246–47 comparison to Lutheran, 113, 129–30, 183, 212, 240 Calvin, John, 101–16, 128–31, 249–50 anti-Semitism and, 109, 111, 148–49, 155–57 commentary on, 47 on consolation, 105, 115 on death and dying, 202–8, 210, 211, 213 on discipline, 104, 218 and distance from God, 112, 130–31, 217, 252 and emotion, 103–4, 186 The Institutes of the Christian Religion, 104, 129 on Mary and women, 179–80 Passion sermons of, 105, 107–115, 129 and predestination, 105, 108–12, 119, 125, 128–29, 155–56 Quatre sermons de M. Jehan Calvin, 107–9, 293 n. 38 (107) sermons of, 13, 101–15, 129, 291 n. 22 (105) Canisius, Peter, 35, 39, 138, 167–69, 192–93 Catholischer Catechismus, 138 Capuchin Friars Minor, 37–38, 47–57, 218 anti-Semitism of, 140–41 and Mary, 166–67, 171–73 catechisms, 16, 27, 75, 92, 167 Catholischer Catechismus (Canisius), 138 Heidelberg Catechism, 112–13, 117–18, 121, 150 Catholicism, 5–6, 8–11, 28 anti-Catholicism in Lutheranism, 73, 87, 145, 175, 178, 236, 245–46 anti-Catholicism in Reformed churches, 109, 126, 150–53, 156–57 anti-Semitism in, 21–23, 29–31, 36–37, 44, 46, 57, 134–42, 153–54, 173

and death, 189–95, 210–11 emotions aroused by early-modern, 15–62, 307 n. 33 (165) flexibility of, 10, 241 laity emotionally engaged in, 219, 220–25, 243–44 Mary’s role in, 19–59 passim, 160–74, 182, 184, 307 n. 33 (165) as open to femininity, 184–86 preference for emotion, 60–62 and Protestantism, 182, 184, 195, 211, 225, 235, 243 Catholic Passion preaching comparison to Lutheran, 65–80, 85–97, 142–47, 154–55, 174–78, 186–186, 191–95, 211, 241 comparison to Reformed, 60, 101–6, 116, 119–20, 125–26, 129–30, 155, 175 Catholic Reform, 16–18, 26–27, 191, 211, 234 and suffering of Mary, 165–74, 182 Catholischer Catechismus (Canisius), 138 Cedron, brook of, 36, 40, 52, 57 Cenodoxus, sive Doctor Parisiensis (Bidermann), 41 Chemnitz, Martin (Brunswick pastor), 91–94, 147, 176, 246, 285 n. 76 (79), 303 n. 96 (147) Historia der Passion vnsers lieben HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi, 91–94 Christ our Mother, 54, 185 Christ, the crucified, 10–11 in Catholic venues, 17–18, 26, 33, 51, 224–25, 263 n. 5 (18), 277 n. 13 (66) at death-bed, 190–91, 195 Reformation changes to, 66–72, 99 in Reformed churches, 102, 123 Christian Pilgrimage (Feucht), 36–37 “Christus lag in Todesbanden,” 81–82, 254 Chrysostom, Saint John, 177 circumcision, 119, 150 Cistercians, 15–16, 63, 102, 277 n. 13 (66) “civilizing process,” 4 Clarisses (Poor Clares), 161–62 class, 243 burgher, 225, 241 elite, 50, 224, 229–37, 238–40 influences, 215, 234–35, 241 Coburg, 76 Communion. See Eucharist confession, 70, 190, 196, 202, 203 confessionalization, 7, 87, 250, 260 n. 24 (7)

INDEX

consolation in Lutheranism, 79–83, 84–95, 96–99, 143–45, 226–28, 251 in Lutheranism at death, 196, 199, 201–2 in Reformed programs, 118–19, 121, 125–26, 130, 206, 251 conversion, 32, 37–38, 55, 59, 229 of Jews, 139, 142 corporal identification. See physicality of devotion Counter-Reformation. See Catholic Reform Cranach, Lucas, the Elder Wittenberg altarpiece, 71–72, 78, 99, 249 cross. See Christ, the crucified; Passion, the, bearing the cross crown of thorns, 22, 37, 42–43, 46 crucifixion, 66, 253 of Christ, 17, 23–24, 26, 31, 43, 58–59 “culture of persuasion,” 264 n. 9 (18) d’Aviano, Marco (Capuchin preacher), 54–56, 273–74 n. 252 (54) death and dying, 10 behavior at last moment, 191, 194, 203 bereavement, 192–95, 211, 213–14 burial ceremonies, 193, 201, 205 Calvinist reassurance during, 202–8, 210, 211, 213 Catholic rituals, 189–95, 210–11 collective rituals, 191, 194–95, 196 and damnation, 198, 205 emotionality at, 189–214 fate of body, 200–201 fear of, 122, 203, 206–7, 210 the good death, 190, 197–98, 206, 209 Lutheran consolation during, 195–202, 211 memento mori, 210 and predestination, 202–8, 213–14 Reformed ecclesiastical ordinances on, 203–5, 212–13 and repentance of sin, 190–92, 196–99, 203, 205 death and dying, manuals on ars moriendi, 10, 190–91, 196–97, 197–200, 201–2 Reminder of How a Christian Should Console Himself on the Death and Burial of His Brothers (Ursinus), 207–8 death and dying, sermons on Huber, Samuel, 200–201 Willing, Johann, 205–6 death of Christ, 25, 53, 86 De formandis concionibus sacris (Hyperius), 77

333

Delumeau Jean, 261 n. 35 (8) Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries, 9 Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdienst (Luther), 78 de Vries, Hans Vredemann “Allegory of Sin and Redemption,” 99 Dietrich, Veit (Nuremberg preacher), 97, 143–44, 175–76 Passio, Oder histori vom leyden Christi Jesu vnsers Heylands, 87, 287 n. 116 (87) disaster, 88, 104, 122, 130–31 discipline and Calvin, John, 128, 218 and Catholicism, 34 corporal punishment, 66, 117 in Reformed churches, 117, 118, 121, 151, 212–13, 242 throughout Protestantism, 239–40, 240 Dismas (thief crucified on Christ’s right), 91, 108–9, 170, 178, 190–91, 223, 237 Dominicans, 15–16 Donatus of Passau (Capuchin preacher), 51–54, 140, 171–72 “Dormition” (Stoss), 72, 192, 308 n. 51 (167) dormition of the Virgin, 39, 167, 192–93, 308 n. 51 (167), 316 n. 21 (193) Douglass, Jane Dempsey, 179 Dramatica Sacra (Brunner), 42–44, 270 n. 169 (42) dramatization Cenodoxus, sive Doctor Parisiensis (Bidermann), 41 Dramatica Sacra (Brunner), 42–44, 270 n. 169 (42) of the Passion, 18, 38, 42–47, 263–64 n. 7 (18) Easter Catholic emphasis at, 36, 60, 219 Luther, Martin, sermons at, 78–81 97, 142 Reformed emphasis at, 110, 125 recalling “treachery” of the Jews at, 134, 154, 157 Edict of Restitution (1629), 229 education, 50, 76–77, 92, 216 election and Calvin, John, 107, 110–15, 130, 202 Catholic mention of, 30, 137 and Luther, Martin, 83, 105 in Reformed programs, 118–22, 127, 204–7, 212–13, 252, 320 n. 122 (212) Elias, Norbert, 4

334

INDEX

Elisabeth Juliane (duchess of Braunschweig and Lüneburg), 238–39 Ellington, Donna Spivey, 173, 310 n. 97 (173) Emden, 126–27, 152–53, 209–10 emotion, concepts of “communities of emotion,” 4 emotion scripts, 254–55 emotives, 5, 249 navigation, 5 Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Rosenwein), 4 emotions, 3–7 and anti-Semitism, 133–57 in Catholicism, 15–62, 307 n. 33 (165) at death, 189–214 lay reception of religious emotional cues, 215–44 in Lutheranism, 63–99, 251 and Mary’s suffering, 159–87, 178 in Reformed churches, 115, 125–28, 130–31 restrained, 84–89, 122, 143, 186, 193–94, 199–200, 208 rhetorical devices for arousing, 8, 31, 39, 56–57, 76, 89, 103–4, 120 vitriolic or excessive, 31, 50, 137, 138–39, 145, 165, 169. See also anger; fear; grief; love end-times, awareness of, 16, 90, 130, 192 Erasmus, 27 “The Funeral,” 189, 195 Eucharist, 63 in Catholicism, 192, 219, 224–25, 232 at death-bed, 195–96, 197, 203 and Lutheran Real Presence, 70–71, 81, 84–85, 97, 217, 232 in Reformed churches, 106, 108, 111, 112, 119–20 Eve, 67, 99, 112, 159 and Mary, 160, 167 176–78, 182–83 extreme unction, 191–92, 195, 210 Fabritius, Adolph (Hesse-Kassel clergyman), 105 faith in Lutheranism, 65–67, 83–86, 92–93, 96–98, 147, 196–200, 245–46 in Reformed churches, 113, 115, 122–23, 129, 205–8 and reason, 28, 83–84, 92, 105, 206 Fall, the, 67, 112, 118, 127, 129, 159 fasting, 63–64, 79 fear, 9, 11, 29, 88, 187

Christ’s, 28, 34–35, 221, 252 of death, 122, 203, 206–7, 210 Ferdinand II (Holy Roman emperor), 229 Feucht, Jacob (bishop of Bamberg), 166 Christian Pilgrimage, 36–37 fides ex auditu, 103, 112–13, 119–26 passim, 207–8, 297 n. 132 (121) “forty-hour devotion,” 49–50, 56, 140, 154, 272 n. 217 (49) France, 4, 15, 289 n. 5 (102) Francis of Assisi, Saint, 47–49 Franciscans, 27–31, 37, 63, 135–36, 162, 165–66, 276 n. 2 (63) Observant Franciscans, 27, 30–31, 137–38. See also Capuchin Friars Minor Franck, Kaspar, 32–36, 136–37, 166, 173, 247 Passion, Das Leyden vnnd Sterben Vnsers Herren Iesv Christi, 33–36 Frederick the Wise (elector of Saxony), 195 Fridolin, Stephan (German Franciscan), 162 Friedrich III (elector palatine of the Rhine), 117, 122, 150–51, 156, 203–5, 208–9 From the Holy Ghost’s Description of the Suffering and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ . . . (Sengers), 225–28 frontispieces, 33, 44, 51, 274 n. 280 (61) funeral sermons, Catholic Tympius, Matthaeus, 194 funeral sermons, Lutheran, 196 Han, Philipp, 202 Luther, Martin, 195 funeral sermons, Reformed, 205 Scultetus, Abraham, 209–10 Tossanus, Daniel, 208–9 “The Funeral” (Erasmus), 189, 195 Geiler von Kaisersberg [Kaysersberg], Johannes (Strasbourg preacher), 193–94, 209 gender, 9, 183, 184–87, 193, 314 n. 167 (186). See also women Geneva, 49, 104–8, 115–17, 218, 243 Gerson, Jean, 26, 162, 265 n. 57 (26) Gertrude of Hackeborn, 171–72 Gethsemane in Calvinist Passion preaching, 108, 115, 128 in Catholic Passion preaching, 21, 28, 33–34, 36, 45–56 passim, 61, 140, 221 in Lutheran Passion preaching, 85, 87, 89–90, 92–93, 226, 231 Mary’s burial, 193

INDEX

Gibson, Mel The Passion of the Christ, 243–44 God the Father binary quality of, 130 relationship with Christ, 80, 89, 115, 127 Golgotha. See Calvary Good Friday, 47, 78, 79 good works in Catholicism, 32, 190, 210–11 Luther, Martin, and dispute with, 79, 88, 98–99, 142, 174, 245–46 Görlitz, 197 Gospels Catholic recounting of, 28, 134, 136, 224 John, 24, 138 Luke, 177, 231 Lutheran recounting of, 78–79, 89, 93, 175 Matthew, 90 gratitude Lutheran emphasis on, 70, 79, 82, 96, 249, 251 Calvinist emphasis on, 130, 186, 252 The Great Myrrh-Garden of the Bitter Passion (von Cochem), 172 Gregory the Great, Saint, 20, 52 grief, 11 in Calvinism, 113–15, 130 Catholic arousal of, 20–26, 28–30, 32–34, 57–58,60–62 at death, 189–95, 208, 211, 213–14 excessive, 186, 193–94, 211, 237 Lutheran moderation of, 195 of Mary, 67, 164–66, 168–74, 179–82, 186, 222 Habermann, Johann (Lutheran clergyman), 98 Han, Philipp (Magdeburg preacher), 202 Hausen, Karin, 184 heart, 8 metaphor of the, 12, 83, 248 Sacred Heart of Jesus, 248–49 Sacred Heart of Mary, 248 heartfelt faith, 66–67, 83–88 passim, 96. See also wounds, side (and heart) Heidelberg, 112, 122–27, 150–53, 176, 205–8, 218, 246 hell, 106, 121–22, 237 threat of, at death, 198, 203, 205, 206, 210 Helm, Heinrich, 27, 30–31, 137–38, 173, 305 n. 6 (160)

335

Herod, 22, 84 Hesshusen, Tilemann (Heidelberg theologian), 97, 145, 156, 176–77, 182, 246 Hildesheim, 50, 178 Hirschman, Albert, 4 Historia der Passion vnsers lieben HERRN vnd Heylands Jesu Christi (Chemnitz), 91–94 Holy Roman Empire, 38–39, 229, 240 Holy Spirit doctrine of substitution for the soul, 227 in Lutheranism, 93 in Reformed churches, 103, 112–15, 118–21, 126–27 and Mary at Pentecost, 168, 175, 182, 193 Holy Week preaching, 189, 250 Catholic, 19–20, 36, 49, 60, 185, 219 Lutheran, 84, 92, 94, 98, 175, 182. See also Good Friday; Palm Sunday homiletics, 8 Catholic, 19–26, 27–41, 42–59, 62 Lutheran, 76, 89, 228, 236 Reformed, 103–4, 120 Huber, Samuel (Wittenberg theologian), 175, 200–201 Huberinus, Caspar, 183 Huizinga, Johan, 8, 61 human nature of Christ, 29–30, 39, 63, 276 n. 2 (63) Hyperius, Andreas, 77, 283 n. 61 (77), 294 n. 73 (112) De formandis concionibus sacris, 77 hypersensitivity of Christ, 25, 40, 60 iconoclasm, 67, 242 iconography, 64–65, 115–16, 157, 250, 277 n. 10 (65), 278 n. 19 (67) absence of, 101–2, 115, 155, 209, 240, 252, 289 n. 1 (101) death-related, 192, 210 disappearance of women in, 186 Passion-related, 10–11, 17–18, 26, 66–72, 102, 263 n. 5, 6 (18), 277 n. 13 (66). See also adornment of sacred spaces; Christ, the crucified Ignatius of Loyola, 105, 167, 184 Imhof, Arthur, 190 Innsbruck, 42 The Institutes of the Christian Religion (Calvin), 104, 129 Italy, 38–39, 47, 49, 133

336

INDEX

Jesuits, 35–41, 42–47, 49–50, 138–40, 153, 166–70, 173, 181, 192–93 Jews. See anti-Semitism Johann Casimir (count palatine of Pfalz-Simmern), 124, 150, 151 John the Beloved Disciple, 87, 162–64, 165–66, 175, 177–78, 221–23 John of Capistrano, 10–11 Joseph, 181 Joseph of Arimathea, 224 Jud, Leo (Zwinglian pastor), 179, 292 n. 34 (107) Judas in Catholic Passion, 21–22, 28–29, 30, 35, 52–53, 136–37, 221 in Lutheran Passion, 84–87, 90, 93, 146–47, 231–32, 237, 285 n. 76 (79) in Calvinist Passion, 108, 110, 126–27, 148, 151 associated with the Jews, 136, 146, 151 suicide of, 22, 28–29, 35, 84–87, 90, 110, 136–37, 232, 237, 285 n. 76 (79), 303 n. 96 (147) Judgment, Final, 149–50, 167, 193, 201, 206, 228 Kegel, Philipp (Lüneburg teacher), 201–2 Kisel, Philipp (Jesuit preacher), 44–47, 139–40, 169–70, 248 Kymeus, Johann (Wittenberg preacher), 83–84, 143, 175, 245–46 laity, 10, 62, 97 reception of religious emotional cues, 215–44 Landolt, Johann (Freiburg/Breisgau pastor), 167–68 Last Supper, 20–21, 28, 230 last words of Christ, 29 first word, 31, 59, 141, 170 third word, 29, 165–66, 171, 176–78, 180, 182, 223 fourth word, 29, 61, 79–80, 86, 109, 111, 207, 223, 233, 248 sixth word, 99, 128 Lazarus, 28, 92, 287 n. 138 (89) Lent Catholic preaching during, 51, 56, 60 Luther, Martin, sermons during, 78–79, 81 Lipsius, Justus (Flemish humanist), 41, 270 n. 165 (41)

Longinus, 25–26, 59, 248–49 Lord’s Supper. See Eucharist Lossius, Lucas (Lüneberg author), 198 love in Catholic Passion commentary, 22–24, 28–33, 43, 45–46, 51, 57–59, 62 in Lutheran Passion commentary, 82–83, 92–93, 97, 143, 226–228, 230–33, 251 in Reformed churches, 114, 116, 123–25, 130, 209 maternal love of Mary, 67, 161–64, 168–72, 175, 193, 223, 248 Lüneburg, 94, 198, 201, 238 Lutheranism, 5–6, 11, 75–76, 217–18 anti-Catholicism in, 73, 87, 145, 175, 178, 236, 245–46 anti-Semitism in, 79, 84, 86–87, 91–93, 142–48, 153–55 and death, 195–202, 211 emotional piety in early-modern, 63–99, 251 laity emotionally engaged, 219, 225–41 Mary’s role in, 174–79, 182–83, 186 and predestination, 83, 145, 196, 199, 217, 227 treatment of women in, 186 Lutheran Passion preaching, 147 comparison to Catholic, 65–80, 85–97, 142–47, 154–55, 174–78, 186–186, 191–95, 211, 241 comparison to Reformed, 101–6, 124, 128–30, 178–79, 183, 240, 251–52, 296 n. 110 (118) Luther, Martin, 5, 71, 75–76, 124, 194 anti-Semitism of, 79, 142 commentary on Mary, 169, 174–75 and dying and bereavement, 195–96, 200, 201, 212, 316 n. 33 (195) Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdienst (1526), 78 and God’s hidden will, 83, 105, 196, 217 Passion sermons and commentary of, 78–83, 96–98, 154, 174–75, 245, 251, 285 nn. 76, 79 (79–80) Lutheryn, Katharina, 195–96 Magdalena de Pazzi, Saint (Florentine nun), 51–52 Mainz, 27, 165 Manlius, Nicolaus (Ansbach/Saxony pastor), 143, 176 Mannerism, 101, 104–5, 115, 131

INDEX

Mansfeld, 88, 143, 145, 177 Marburg, University of, 77 Martha of Bethany, 43, 92, 221, 322 n. 21 (221) Mary artistic representation of, 66–67, 160–61, 164–65, 181, 184, 192 Assumption of, 167, 169, 179, 193 burial of, 193 at Cana wedding, 160, 174 as coredemptrix, 31, 94, 160, 175, 176, 182–83, 305 n. 6 (160) dormition of the Virgin, 39, 167, 192–93, 308 n. 51 (167), 316 n. 21 (193) emotions aroused by her suffering, 159–87, 178 and Eve, 160, 167, 176–78, 182–83 grief of, 67, 164–66, 168–74, 179–82, 186, 222 and Holy Spirit at Pentecost, 168, 175, 182, 193 as intercessor with Christ, 170, 173, 178–79, 181 invention regarding, 160–62, 172, 175, 177, 221–24 marginalized in Protestant traditions, 128, 174–79, 179–80, 182–83, 186 as model, 67, 169, 184, 192–3 as mother of the church, 166, 167, 177 and physical pain, 171, 174, 182, 223 and her relationship with Christ, 161, 166–72, 175, 181, 193, 223 her role in Catholicism, 19–59 passim, 160–74, 182, 184, 307 n. 33 (165) Sacred Heart of Mary, 248–49 as strong or manly, 91, 167–68, 177, 182, 187, 223 submission of, 181, 184, 193 tears of, 87, 160, 166–71, 178, 184, 193 her virginal status, 174, 182. See also Mary’s role in Passion events; Passion sermons and meditations, Marian commentary in Mary Cleophas, 43 Mary Magdalene, 20, 42, 93, 128, 190–91 Mary’s role in Passion events arrest of Christ, 162–63 covering Christ’s nakedness, 162, 164 leave-taking of Christ, 169, 221 mental transport through, 161–63, 165, 172, 181, 253 road to Calvary, 169–70, 171 sword/s through her heart, 164–66, 168, 170–74, 179–80

337

third word of Christ on the cross, 29, 165–66, 171, 176–78, 180, 182, 223 under the cross, 25, 166–67, 171, 175–79, 223–25, 233 Mass, 59, 106, 165, 219 critique of, 109, 119 new Lutheran service, 69–70 “Mater Dolorosa” (Burgkmair), 164–65 Mechthild of Hackeborn, 171–72 medicine, 220 Melanchthon, Philipp, 8, 117, 200, 211, 261 n. 30 (8) memento mori, 210 mental transportation, 161–63, 165, 172, 181, 253 Milan, 38, 48, 49 Mirror of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ (Pinder), 220–25, 322 n. 20 (221) Moeller, Bernd, 32, 64, 72, 243, 276 n. 8 (64) Moller, Martin (Lutheran pastor), 178–79, 197–200 Soliloqvia de passione Iesu Christi [Soliloquy on the Passion], 97, 178 Mount of Olives. See Gethsemane Munich, 33, 136, 247 Musculus, Andreas (Lutheran preacher), 146–47, 246 Mylaeus, Johann Philipp (Heidelberg pastor), 124–26, 130, 153, 180, 247 Passions Predigten, Oder Christliche Erklärung der tröstlichen History deß Leidens vnnd Sterbens vnsers HERRN vnd Heylandts Jesu, 125–26 mysticism, 17 in Catholicism, 43, 51, 166–67, 171–73, 249 in Lutheranism, 95, 97, 178, 199, 230–35 nakedness of Christ, 58–59, 162, 164 Neostoicism, 41, 62 Newkirchen, Melchior (Brunswick pastor), 91–92 Nicolai, Heinrich (Hildesheim preacher), 178–79 Nordhausen, 196 “normative centering,” 261–62 n. 36 (8) nuns, 51–52, 63, 161–62, 181, 277 n. 13 (66) Nuremberg, 72, 87, 175, 220, 224, 229–30 Oberman, Heiko, 134 Ochino, Bernardino (Capuchin brother), 49

338

INDEX

Olevianus, Caspar (Heidelberg theologian), 112–13, 116–22, 124, 130, 150, 251 Heidelberg Catechism, 112–13, 117–18, 121, 150 O’Malley, John Trent and All That, 26–27 On the Very Most Holy and Very Most Healing Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ (von Greiffenberg), 229–35 ordination, 76, 131 original sin, 112, 198, 210 Palmius, Benedict (Jesuit preacher), 47 Palm Sunday, 79, 81–83, 138 Passau, 19, 51, 134, 162 Passio et Resurrectio Christi (Spindler), 126, 151, 246–47, 320 n. 122 (212) Passion, Das Leyden vnnd Sterben Vnsers Herren Iesv Christi (Franck), 33–36 Passion, the, 11, 18 Barabbas, 53, 148, 153 bearing the cross, 23, 37, 46–47, 53, 58, 87, 223 Bethany, dinner in, 28, 42, 85, 190, 230 body parts of Christ, 37, 39, 45, 57, 172 Calvary, 29, 35, 59, 169–70, 171, 223 Cedron, brook of, 36, 40, 52, 57 and Christ’s power of divinity, 25 crown of thorns, 22, 37, 42–43, 46 crucifixion, 17, 23–24, 26, 31, 43, 58–59 death of Christ, 25, 53, 86 Dismas (thief crucified on Christ’s right), 91, 108–9, 170, 178, 190–91, 223, 237 dramatization of, 18, 38, 42–47, 263–64 n. 7 (18) hypersensitivity of Christ, 25, 40, 60 iconography related to, 10–11, 17–18, 26, 66–72, 102, 263 n. 5, 6 (18), 277 n. 13 (66) (see also Christ, the crucified) invented affronts to Christ, 23–24, 36, 40–44, 57, 60, 93, 134 Last Supper, 20–21, 28, 230 leave-taking of Mary, 169, 221 Longinus’ spear-thrust, 25–26, 59, 172, 177, 234, 248–49 nakedness of Christ, 58–59, 162, 164 physical participation in retelling, 35–36, 61–62, 166, 253, 267 n. 118 (35) Roman soldiers, 28, 142, 146–47, 152, 233 and women of Jerusalem, 46, 246–47. See also atonement, the; blood of Christ; Gethsemane; Judas; last words of

Christ; Mary’s role in Passion events; Peter, betrayal of; Pilate, Pontius; psychic torment of Christ Passionale (Wann), 19–26 Passion meditations of the laity, 219–220 Elisabeth Juliane (duchess of Braunschweig and Lüneberg), 238–39 Pinder, Ulrich (Nuremberg physician), 221–25 Sengers, Justitia (Braunschweig author), 225–28 von Gersdorf, Henrietta Katharina (German noblewoman), 235–237 von Grieffenberg, Catharina Regina (Austrian noblewoman), 229–35 The Passion of the Christ (Gibson), 243–44 Passion sermons and meditations, antiSemitic messages in, 133 Catholic, 134–42, 173 Lutheran, 142–47, 154, 156 Reformed, 149–53 Passion sermons and meditations, Catholic Canisius, Peter, 39–40, 138, 167–69, 192–93 Donatus of Passau, 51–54, 140, 171–72 Feucht, Jacob, 36–37, 166 Franck, Kaspar, 32–36, 136–37, 166, 173, 247 Helm, Heinrich, 27, 30–31, 137–38, 173 Kisel, Philipp, 44–47, 139–40, 169–70 Landolt, Johann, 167–68 Scherer, Georg, 40–41, 138–39 von Cochem, Martin, 56–60, 140–42, 171–73 Wagner, Bartholomeus, 137–38, 185 Wann, Paul, 19–26, 31, 60, 134–35, 162–64, 264 n. 15 (19) Wild, Johannes, 27–31, 135–36, 165–66, 173 Passion sermons and meditations, Lutheran Brenz, Johannes, 84–86, 97–98, 144–45, 176 Chemnitz, Martin, 91–94, 147, 176, 246, 285 n. 76 (79) Dietrich, Veit, 87, 97, 143–44, 175–76, 287 n. 116 (87) Habermann, Johann, 98 Hesshusen, Tilemann, 97, 145, 156, 176–77, 182, 246 Kymeus, Johannes, 83–84, 143, 175, 245–46 Moller, Martin, 97–98, 178–79 Musculus, Andreas, 146–47, 246 Newkirchen, Melchior, 91–92

INDEX

Sauter, Caspar, 98, 178, 246 Selnecker, Nicolaus, 94–96, 97–98, 146, 177 Spangenberg, Cyriakus, 87–91, 97–98, 145–46, 177, 182 Passion sermons and meditations, Marian commentary in, 161–62, 184–87 Catholic, 162–73, 192–93 Lutheran, 174–80, 182 Reformed, 179–80, 183 Passion sermons and meditations, Reformed Beza, Theodore, 115–16, 149–50, 180 Calvin, John, 105, 107–115, 129 Mylaeus, Johann Philipp, 124–26, 130, 153, 180 Olevianus, Caspar, 112–13, 116–22, 130, 150 Scultetus, Abraham, 127, 152–53 Spindler, Georg, 126–28, 151–52, 180, 212, 246–47, 320 n. 122 (212) Ursinus, Zacharias, 116–18, 122, 150 Passions Predigten, Oder Christliche Erklärung der tröstlichen History deß Leidens vnnd Sterbens vnsers HERRN vnd Heylandts Jesu (Mylaeus), 125–26 Passio, Oder histori vom leyden Christi Jesu vnsers Heylands (Dietrich), 87, 287 n. 116 (87) Passio Vnsers Herren Jesu Christi leyden vnd sterben (Brenz), 84–86, 144 Passio: Vom Leiden vnd sterben vnsers Herrn, Heilands vnd Seligmachers Jesu Christi (Cyriakus Spangenberg), 87–91 Passover, 92, 136, 137, 150 Paul, Saint, 190 Pencz, Georg, 73–74 Pentecost, 103, 168, 180 Peter, betrayal of, 90, 93, 144, 153, 187 and womanly deceit, 110, 166, 190–91 as predestined, 108, 110 pews, 104, 184, 186, 281 n. 42 (72) physicality of devotion and the Assumption, 193 and Catholic emphasis on identification with the Passion, 24–25, 33–36, 39, 1–62, 63–64, 166, 224–25 dramatization of the Passion, 18, 38, 42–47 and the fate of the body, 200–201 and femininity, 67 lessening in Protestantism, 129, 228, 249 and the Real Presence in the Eucharist, 70–71, 81, 84–85, 97, 217, 232

339

Pietism, 235, 237, 254, 255 piety, affective, 275 n. 1 (63) in Catholicism, 15, 45, 56, 60, 180–181 and the laity, 10, 215–44 in Protestantism, 60–65, 71, 237–38, 241 Pilate, Pontius in Catholic Passion preaching, 21–22, 53, 58, 133–35, 137, 139, 140–41 in Lutheran Passion preaching, 84, 93, 144, 145, 146–48, 231–33, 237 in Reformed Passion preaching, 108, 110, 152, 153 Pilate, wife of Pontius, 22 Pinder, Ulrich (Nuremberg physician), 219–25, 240, 323 n. 45 (224) Mirror of the Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, 220–25, 322 n. 20 (221) preaching, 6, 128, 218–19 in early-modern Catholicism, 15–18, 35–38, 41, 45–50, 96, 219 in early-modern Lutheranism, 75–78, 97, 218 instruction in, 27, 75–78, 104, 117, 194, 283 n. 60 (77) penitential, 16, 112, 180 predicatori, Capuchin, 48–49, 54 at Reformed burials, 205. See also rhetorical devices in Passion preaching predestination and Calvin, John, 105, 108–12, 119, 125, 128–29, 155–56 Catholic commentary on, 30, 137 and death, 202–8, 213–14 and the Jews, 137, 145, 155–56, 252 and Judas, 93 and Lutheranism, 83, 105, 145, 196, 199, 217, 227 in Reformed programs, 202–8, 213–14, 252 predicatori, Capuchin, 48–49, 54 Protestantism, 9 compared with Catholicism, death and dying, 195, 211 compared with Catholicism, homiletics, 27, 31–35, 40–41, 59, 75–76, 182, 235 compared with Catholicism, treatment of women, 184–87 worldview, 225, 255 psychic torment of Christ depicted in Catholicism, 25, 28, 33–35, 61–62

340

INDEX

psychic torment of Christ (continued) depicted in Lutheranism, 79, 85, 89, 92 depicted in Reformed preaching, 115–16, 120–22, 125–26, 128–29 purgatory, 173, 181, 190, 211 Quatre sermons de M. Jehan Calvin, 107–9, 293 n. 38 (107) Raguenier, Denis, 13, 107, 109, 149 rationality. See reason Real Presence in the Eucharist, 70–71, 81, 84–85, 97, 217, 232, 270 n. 37 (70) reason and emotion, 7–8, 61, 249 and faith, 28, 83–84, 92, 105, 206 as masculine, 67–68, 159 Reddy, William, 4–5, 249 Reformation, Protestant, 5, 16–18, 182, 241–44, 261 n. 35 (8) as nexus of anti-Semitism, 134, 153 Reformed churches, 6 adornment, elimination of, 69–70, 240, 252 anti-Catholicism in, 109, 126, 150–53, 156–57 anti-Semitism in, 134, 148–53, 153–57 corporality, abandonment of, 249 and death and dying, 202–10, 212–14, 252 emotions in early-modern, 101–31 and lay written reaction to emotional cues, absence of, 239–40 neglect of Mary in, 179–80 and predestination, 202–8, 213–14, 252. See also Calvinism; Zwinglianism Reformed Passion preaching comparison to Catholic, 60, 101–6, 116, 119–20, 125–26, 129–30, 155, 175 comparison to Lutheran, 101–6, 124, 178–79, 251–52, 296 n. 110 (118) relics, 39, 195 religious orders, 15–18, 32–33, 37–38, 60, 243 agendas, 3, 9 Capuchin Friars Minor, 37–38, 47–56, 140–41, 166–67, 171–73, 218 Cistercians, 15–16, 63, 102, 277 n. 13 (66) Dominicans, 15–16 Franciscans, 27–31, 37, 63, 135–36, 162, 165–66, 276 n. 2 (63) Jesuits, 35–41, 42–47, 49–50, 138–40, 153, 166–70, 173, 192–93 Observant Franciscans, 27, 30–31, 137–38

Reminder of How a Christian Should Console Himself on the Death and Burial of His Brothers (Ursinus), 207–8 repentance and Calvin, John, 105, 109, 112–13, 115, 121–22, 207–8, 212–13 and Catholic call for weeping, 24, 32, 55, 185 Lutheran emphasis on, 90–94, 96–99, 146, 202, 240, 251 Resurrection, Christ’s, 80–81, 176, 182, 236 Christ’s first appearance following, 128, 224 and women at tomb, 109, 126, 179–80, 183 Revelationes (Saint Brigitta), 17, 170, 174, 245 revulsion, 66, 120, 157, 173 Rhenish Palatinate, 116–17, 123–26, 150–52, 190, 203–5, 208 Rhetoric (Aristotle), 7–8 rhetorical devices in Passion preaching, 8, 31, 56–57, 76, 86, 103–4 anaphora, 39, 89, 120 Rhineland, 18, 54–56 rituals, 13, 65, 68–69 death, 189–95, 196, 202–3, 210–11 Roman soldiers, 28, 142, 146–47, 152, 233 Romanesque images, 18, 102 Roper, Lyndal, 183–84 Rosenwein, Barbara, 135 Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, 4 Rublack, Hans-Christoph, 218 sacraments, 106, 112–13, 118–20, 253. See also baptism; confession; Eucharist; extreme unction; ordination Sacred Heart of Jesus, 248–49 saints, 10, 57–58, 190–91 artistic representation of, 65–67 Salmerón, Alfonso, 170 Salmut, Frideric (Emden preacher), 210, 298–99 n. 178 (130) salvation and Calvinism, 111–15, 202, 205 earned in Catholicism, 190–92, 210 and Lutheranism, 66, 97–99, 155–56, 198, 228, 251 and Mary’s assistance, 94, 176, 183 Sauter, Caspar (Augsburg pastor), 98, 178, 246 Saxony, 75, 143, 177, 195, 218

INDEX

Scherer, Georg (Austrian Jesuit), 40–41, 138–39, 175, 247 Scribner, Robert, 3, 65, 72 Scripture. See Word of God Scultetus, Abraham (Emden cleric), 127, 152–53, 209–10, 213 “The Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ,” 153 Selnecker, Nicolas (Lutheran preacher), 94–96, 97–98, 146, 177, 186 Seneca, 41, 103 Sengers, Justitia (Braunschweig author), 219, 240–41 From the Holy Ghost’s Description of the Suffering and Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ . . ., 225–28 sermons, 6–8, 13, 16, 218–19 of Calvin, John, 13, 101–15, 129, 291 n. 22 (105) Catholic Passion, 19–41, 44–47, 51–60, 134–42, 185, 162–73, 192–93 of d’Aviano, Marco, 54–56, 273–74 n. 252 (54) on death and dying, 7, 200–201, 205–6 funeral, 194–96, 202, 205, 208–10 Lutheran Passion, 72–75, 83–98, 143–47, 156, 175–79, 182, 245–46 of Luther, Martin, 78–83, 96–98, 154, 174–75, 245, 251, 285 nn. 76, 79 (79–80) Reformed Passion, 112–22, 124–30, 149–53, 180, 246–47 sermons-as-given vs. sermons-asprinted, 6, 13, 107, 229 Simeon, prophecy of, 164–66, 168, 170–74, 177–80, 182 Simon the Cyrene, 87 sin Calvinism and human sinfulness, 108–16, 118–23, 127–30, 148–50, 183, 247, 252 Catholics moved to weep by, 24, 28–30, 40–41, 45–48, 53, 62 in Lutheran doctrine of atonement, 74, 80–81, 84–93, 96–99, 143–47, 226–27, 245–46 original sin, 112, 198, 210 and repentance at death, 189–92, 196–99, 203–5, 210 vs. Jews as cause of Christ’s death, 134, 154–57 Sin and Fear: The Emergence of a Western Guilt Culture, 13th–18th Centuries

341

(Delumeau), 9 Society of Jesus. See Jesuits Soliloqvia de passione Iesu Christi [Soliloquy on the Passion] (Moller), 97, 178 song, 59, 81–82, 102, 274 n. 278 (59) “Christus lag in Todesbanden,” 81–82, 254 Spangenberg, Cyriakus (Mansfeld superintendent), 97–98, 145–46, 177, 182 Passio: Vom Leiden vnd sterben vnsers Herrn, Heilands vnd Seligmachers Jesu Christi, 87–91 Spangenberg, Johannes (Nordhausen preacher, father of Cyriakus), 196–97 Spindler, Georg (Wittenberg Calvinist), 126–28, 151–52, 180, 212 Passio et Resurrectio Christi, 126, 151, 246–47, 320 n. 122 (212) stations of the cross, 36, 61, 274 n. 280 (61) Stoicism, 5, 41, 62, 103 Stoss, Veit “Dormition,” 72, 192, 308 n. 51 (167) Strasser, Ulrike, 184 “The Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ” (Scultetus), 153 Swabia, 84 Switzerland, 38–39, 49, 75–76 Sylvanus, Johannes (Heidelberg theologian), 117 thieves crucified with Christ, 135, 223 Dismas (thief on the right), 91, 108–9, 170, 178, 190–91, 223, 237 Thirty Years’ War, 78, 99, 240, 298–99 n. 178 (130) Thompson, John, 179 Tossanus, Daniel (Huguenot preacher), 123–24, 208–9, 240 Trent and All That (O’Malley), 26–27 Trent, Council of, 5, 16, 31–33 Trinity, Holy, 34, 126, 227, 228 Trost. See consolation Turks, 54–55, 150–51, 157 Tympius, Matthaeus, 194 Ursinus, Zacharias (Heidelberg theologian), 112, 116–18, 122, 150, 204, 207–8, 295 n. 96 (116) Heidelberg Catechism, 112–13, 117–18, 121, 150 Reminder of How a Christian Should Console Himself on the Death and Burial of His Brothers, 207–8

342

INDEX

Veronica, Saint, 46 vestments, 69–70, 280 nn. 32 (70) Vienna, 54, 55 von Bora, Katharina. See Lutheryn, Katharina von Cochem, Martin (Linius) (Capuchin brother), 56–60, 140–42, 171–73 The Great Myrrh-Garden of the Bitter Passion, 172 von Gersdorf, Henrietta Katharina (German noblewoman), 235–37 von Greiffenberg, Catharina Regina (Austrian noblewoman), 219, 229–35, 325 n. 78 (230) On the Very Most Holy and Very Most Healing Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ, 229–35 von Kaisersberg [Kaysersberg], Johannes Geiler. See Geiler von Kaisersberg [Kaysersberg], Johannes Wagner, Bartholomeus (Augsburg priest), 137–38, 185 Wann, Paul (Passau preacher), 31, 60, 134–35, 162–64, 264 n. 15 (19) Passionale, 19–26 weeping of Christ, 92 at death, 192–94, 195–96 as emotional evidence, 253, 255 intentional movement to tears, 20–62 passim, 84, 163–71, 185, 235–36, 247, 314 n. 169 (186) of Mary, 87, 160, 166–71, 178, 184, 193 men, 184–85, 187, 192 of Peter, 90, 127, 176, 187, 190 restrain, effort to, 93, 97, 125, 195–96, 245–46 Wierzbicka, Anna, 254 Wild, Johannes (Mainz preacher), 27–31, 135–36, 165–66, 173, 265 n. 60 (27) Willing, Johann (Heidelberg preacher), 122–23, 150–51, 205–7 witches, 183–84, 216, 241

Wittenberg, 83, 96–97, 143, 175, 245 Wittenberg altarpiece (Cranach), 71–72, 78, 99, 249 Wolfenbüttel, 96, 99, 146 women artistic representation of, 5, 66–68, 159–60, 186, 279 nn. 22–23 (68) Calvinist low estimation of, 109, 126, 179–80, 183 as emotional and a danger, 67–68, 99, 159–60, 166, 305 n. 4 (160) lay devotions writers, 225–28, 228–35, 235–41 meditations for, 140 nuns, 51–52, 63, 161–62, 181, 277 n. 13 (66) physicality among, 63–64, 67 saints, 66 subjugated to men, 99, 159, 184–86 witches, 183–84, 216, 241. See also gender Word of God as Lutheran focal point, 72–75, 75–78, 142, 174 in Reformed churches, 102–5, 112–14, 118, 120, 126–27. See also fides ex auditu wounds of Christ in Catholic Passion recount, 22–26, 35, 43–47, 224 in Lutheran Passion recount, 85, 93, 95 enumerated, 44, 46, 85, 224 nails in hands, 43, 170, 223 separate status of, 24, 37, 45–47, 55, 58, 61, 274 n. 280 (61) shoulder, 46–47, 172 side (and heart) wound, 25–26, 59, 172, 177, 185, 234, 248–49 Württemberg, 242 Zeitz, 98 Zurich, 75, 117, 295–96 n. 101 (117) Zwingli, Ulrich, 88, 101–2, 106 Zwinglianism, 6, 71, 73, 179, 292 n. 34 (107)

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