The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500-1648.

Collins, David J.

The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500-1648. By Bridget Heal. Past and Present Publications. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. xvi + 344 pp. $99.00 cloth.

In this erudite and nuanced book, Bridget Heal explains the diversity of pious attitudes and practices associated with the Virgin Mary in Germany during the sixteenth-century Reformation. She accomplishes two significant tasks especially well: first, she marshals an impressive range of sources--literary, liturgical, legal, and above all artistic (the book is marvelously illustrated with 64 images)--to make her points. Second, she coherently analyzes her subject both across and within the confessions that shaped religious culture in this period. She not only compares Marian piety in Catholic, Lutheran, Zwinglian, and Calvinist worlds but also considers its diversity within each of these Christian communities.

After offering the reader helpful historical and methodological introductions, Heal turns in chapter 2 to the effects of the Lutheran reform in Nuremberg on Marian piety. Veit Stoss's Annunciation--still today a striking part of any visit to Nuremberg--is only the first of several dozen reference points she uses in explaining the theological, cultural, social, and financial forces that resulted in what she characterizes as a moderate transformation of Marian piety. In chapter 3, the author persuasively gainsays any notion of a single Protestant devotional stance vis-a-vis the Virgin Mary by outlining first the repudiatory approaches of Augsburg's earliest, Swiss-influenced reformers and then the qualified reanimation of Marian devotion once the Reformed preachers were replaced with Lutheran ones following the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. Heal highlights the differences between Lutheran attitudes in Augsburg and Nuremberg and explains the particularities of Marian piety among Lutherans in Augsburg with reference to the Zwinglian and Calvinist rejection of Marian devotion and the more elaborate, contemporaneous piety of the Catholic population in the bi-confessional Imperial free city.

In chapters 4 and 5, Heal examines Marian piety in Catholic Cologne, where she sheds light on a range of devotional practices, some of which evolved seamlessly out of the late Middle Ages, and others of which were inspired by new reforming ideas associated with the Council of Trent. These chapters are important for illuminating the multifarious world of sixteenth-century Catholicism in the empire and for the evidence they offer against exaggerated estimations of Jesuit influence and the order's centripetal effect on the organization of Catholic Europe. In Cologne, Heal shows, the Society of Jesus did not always get its way in attempting to supplant local practices with its own Counter-Reformation tactics. Of the three cities the author focuses on, Cologne is probably the least well known and understood in the world of Anglophone scholarship. The author's astute analysis of devotional life there is thus an especially welcome corrective to the crude, conventional characterization of the sixteenth-century city as a Hochburg of stagnant traditionalism.

One aspect of The Cult of the Virgin Mary that this reviewer regards with ambivalence is the author's extensive reference to secondary literature in the text. On the one hand, the author's index of secondary sources and her thoroughgoing examination of recent scholarship is an indicator of her own breadth and of her material's relevance to issues of current scholarly concern. On the other hand, it must be admitted that hardly a reader will come to this book unconversant with the works of, for example, Caroline Walker Bynum and Bob Scribner. The author's continual reference in the text to these and other scholars of lesser significance distracts the reader from the great strength of the book, which is the author's own original research and analysis of primary materials, especially the works of art. Many readers will also be confused as they attempt to distinguish the interpretations Heal wishes only to refer to from those she is making her own. This problem is most evident in chapter 6, in which she presents multiple sides to the argument over the misogyny of the early modern fashionings of the Virgin Mary. Here Heal does not clearly explain why she finds some scholars more persuasive than others, and her resolution of the 42-page chapter with passing reference to Victor Turner's notion of symbolic polyvalence (302) is ultimately unsatisfying. Finally, the extensive reference to so many contemporary scholars in the text brings the absence of others into high relief: how, for example, could she write about early modern religiosity in Germany without addressing the work of Berndt Harem, about humanist devotions without reference to Dieter Wuttke, and about religion in Cologne without citing Klaus Meuthen or James Mehl; and is it really fair to dismiss in passing the pertinent arguments of Klaus Schreiner as oversimplifications (268, 276)?

In the final analysis, this criticism has more to do with style than with substance; and there is no shortage of high-quality substance in Heal's study. The sheer quantity and diversity of sources she brings together, the nimbleness with which she moves between sources, and the discemment with which she analyzes them make The Cult of the Virgin Mary a significant piece of interdisciplinary scholarship and a necessary reference for any serious scholar of Christian piety in the long sixteenth century.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640709000201

David J. Collins, S.J.

Georgetown University