Joseph Leo Koerner

Bridget Heal

The religious turmoil of the sixteenth century constituted a turning point in the history of Western Christian art. The essays presented in this volume investigate the ways in which both Protestant and Catholic reform stimulated the production of religious images, drawing on examples from across Europe and beyond. Eight essays by leading scholars in the field Brings art historians and historians into productive dialogue Broad chronology, from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century Broad geographical coverage Richly illustrated

Art and Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

Ole Peter Grell

Recent decades have witnessed the fragmentation of Reformation studies. High-level research has tended to be confined within specific geographical, confessional or chronological boundaries. By bringing together scholars working on a wide variety of topics, this volume aims to counteract this centrifugal trend and to provide a broad perspective on the impact of the European reformation. The essays present new research from historians of politics, of the church and of belief. Their geographical scope ranges from Scotland and England via France and Germany to Transylvania and their chronological span from the 1520s to the 1690s. Together, they demonstrate that movements for religious reform left no sphere of European life untouched.

Princes, Clergy and People

The Impact of the European Reformation

A Magnificent Faith explains how and why Lutheranism--a confession that derived its significance from the promulgation of God's Word--became a visually magnificent faith, a faith whose adherents sought to captivate Christians' hearts and minds through seeing as well as through hearing. Although Protestantism is no longer understood as an exclusively word-based religion, the paradigm of evangelical ambivalence towards images retains its power. This is the first study to offer an account of the Reformation origins and subsequent flourishing of the Lutheran baroque, of the rich visual culture that developed in parts of the Holy Roman Empire during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. The volume opens with a discussion of the legacy of the Wittenberg Reformation. Three sections then focus on the confessional, devotional, and magnificent image, exploring turning points in Lutherans' attitudes towards religious art. Drawing on a wide variety of archival, printed, and visual sources from two of the Empire's most important Protestant territories--Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, and Brandenburg--A Magnificent Faith shows the extent to which Lutheran culture was shaped by territorial divisions. It traces the development of a theologically-grounded aesthetic, and argues that images became prominent vehicles for the articulation of Lutheran identity not only amongst theologians but also amongst laymen and women. By examining the role of images in the Lutheran tradition as it developed over the course of two centuries, A Magnificent Faith offers a new understanding of the relationship between Protestantism and the visual arts.

Bridget Heal

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