These two fine collections of essays demonstrate how the historical study of Christianity benefits from the careful scrutiny of material culture. Late medieval/early modernity (1300 to 1700) and the long nineteenth century (from the French Revolution to the First World War) were periods of dramatic social change, powered by new visual and print technologies, religious reforms, seismic shifts in church-state relations, and new developments in devotional piety and religious practice. Material forms from the built environment to clothing, images, illustrated books and the printed page, and a host of artifacts register changes that actively participated in making the life-worlds of Catholics and Protestants.
Jan De Maeyer and Peter Margry have edited a weighty, beautifully produced tome that is the culmination of a research project that began in 2008 and issued in five volumes on religion in northwestern Europe in the long nineteenth century. Theirs is the final installment in the series. It contributes a sustained focus on the material characteristics of Christianity in the group of books. In their introduction De Maeyer and Margry highlight the structural role that industrialization, urbanization, and church-state relations as the conditions of the reform. Individual authors take these themes up in a series of essays focusing on four major areas: the role of «pressure groups»; space and the fabric of buildings; furnishings and building interiors; and the role of material artifacts and practices in everyday or lived religion.
Catholic and Protestant practices and attitudes changed in this period as the churches entered the domain of growing privatization and the gradual relaxation of state regulation, especially on formerly marginalized groups – Catholics in Britain and the Dutch Netherlands and non-conformist Protestant groups everywhere. Privatization in the nineteenth century meant a shift toward the cultural marketplace for religious organizations. While the Catholic hierarchy raged against modernism, public education, democracy, and access to the Bible, it had its own way of dealing with the competition generated by privatization. The dramatic increase in sodalities, lay confraternities, and indulgenced devotional practices were the equivalent of the explosion of Protestant voluntaristic associations such as bible societies, tract societies, and mission societies. These Protestant parachurch organizations and the countless Catholic lay groups generated enormous amounts of print and material artifacts to flood the public with outreach and evangelism. The first section of the book treats these as among what the authors call «pressure groups», that is, associations within major church bodies or parachurch organizations that effectively lobbied for change by issuing influential books and pamphlets and often raised money to help finance innovations. The very idea of pressuring ecclesial bodies, politicians, and citizens is a fundamental feature of competition in the cultural marketplace.
As cityscapes changed to accommodate factories and residential needs, new church construction grew apace. Many of the authors make a strong case for the role of architectural style as competitive signage in a marketplace where potential members were customers to be attracted and persuaded. What all of the authors agree on is that the long nineteenth century was not a period of «radical secularization», a wholesale abandonment of Christian belief and practice (115). Rather than defeated by the conditions of modernity, Catholics and Protestants actively developed the means of capitalizing on the transportation networks (rail and steamboat), industrial print technology (steam-powered printing press, mechanized paper production), commercial means (mail-order catalogs and postal systems), adaptation of modern building materials, and new reproductive technologies (lithography, photography) to heighten and expand the visibility of Christianity. Indeed, many Christians came to regard these features as providential advantages offered to the cause of evangelism.
As a key feature of competition, church groups looked to architectural style as a public signature of presence and identity. One of the most fascinating aspects of the many essays is the range of meanings that the Gothic style accommodated in architecture, ornamentation, art, and religious commodities. They show quite clearly that there is no single meaning to the Gothic revival that dominated church construction for much of the period under investigation in Germany, Netherlands, Britain, and Scandinavia. This material discourse was intended to shape public opinion and shape its morality and collective sense of purpose in the face of the challenges posed by urbanization, immigration, and the impact of industrialized labor.
The final two sections of the book demonstrate the importance of interior spaces. The section on furnishings introduces one of the important developments in the nineteenth century: the commercial production of virtually everything that religious communities and individuals might require for the practice of faith. This innovation was not only an accommodation of private devotional practice, but also a powerful tool for liturgical reform, urging particular styles on congregations and architects, from elevation plans to fabricated motifs, stained glass, interior decoration, liturgical books and spiritual classics, illustrated bibles, sacred art, plaster statuary, tapestry, organs, and reproductions of famous sculptures and paintings. Commerce played an important and growing role here as church goods stores, mail order catalogues, advertising, and firms offering skilled labor for commissioned work became costeffective for congregations. Of course, some liturgical reformers was adamantly opposed to what one Catholic advocate of the ultramontane Gothic called «soulless manufactured goods» (283).

Material Cultures of Devotion in the Age of Reformations is a project that collectively shows the diversity of thought and practice among both Protestant and Catholic groups in Germany, England, Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. In her essay, for instance, Emma Wells effectively counters an extreme in the historiography on the sixteenth century, most colorfully articulated by Patrick Collinson for whom Protestantism sponsored «visual anorexia» and «iconophobia». As a concept, iconophobia tends to pathologize what was likely for most advocates of removing images and artifacts from churches and devotional practice a theological and political act. Whatever else they were, in the culture wars that spread across the sixteenth century in northwestern Europe and elsewhere, images and sacramentals became totems, the banner one fought for or against. What people hated or adored about them was inseparable from the threat of disorder, revolution, and the toppling of regimes. Images and sacred objects meant many things to different people, and the chapters in this book make that very clear. As Aislinn Muller points out, for Elisabeth I and her regime outlawing the use of sacred objects and its enforcement thereafter was not a preternatural hatred of images – an iconophobia – but a political expedient (58). In 1570, Elisabeth was excommunicated by Pius V who also pressed her subjects to civil disobedience lest they themselves face excommunication. The need to secure order and demand loyalty was compelling. Images and sacramentals became focal points in this battle for power. Destroying and banning images in this case is not motivated by iconophobia, but fear of political rebellion.
But in addition to the politics of rivalry and power, the editors and their contributors want to argue that material culture needs to be understood as a fundamental aspect of any religious disposition. Material culture is not optional, but fundamental to any form of religion, though what it will look like and how it will perform varies considerably.
The editors signal from the outset that their book’s fondest concern is to champion and examine the significance of materiality in the study of religion. «Religious devotions, we contend, are fundamentally interwoven with material culture. Devotion may involve the use of material objects…and involve the entire body…and may be framed by architectural structures» (6). Henrik von Achen also puts the same view very nicely when he writes that «The instruments of devotion were embedded in practices, simultaneously shaping piety and being shaped by it» (101). This can be said of the use of Catholic sacramentals but also of the evangelical use of bibles and tracts. In a fascinating chapter on the materiality of early Lutheran catechisms in Germany, Lee Palmer Wandel argues that the printed object was in its physical features – its layout, size, font, and structure as a codex – a vehicle of instruction. «The codicil catechisms of the sixteenth century were to mediate knowledge of Christianity through their very matter» (167).
Examining sixteenthcentury translations of Lutheran books in Denmark, especially Luther’s Passional and Betbüchlein, Laura Katrine Skinnebach considers the important relationships between word and image. The devotional apparatus of pamphlets focused on the Passion are important for many reasons, one of which is that rather than an abrupt break they present a striking continuity between Lutheranism and late medieval Catholicism. That’s not surprising, given Luther’s view of the Eucharist and his attitude toward images. Rob Faesen’s fascinating essay on «interiority» includes an insightful study of a compilation known as the Institutiones Taulerianae, which was based on the works of Johannes Tauler, one of Luther’s formative sources. Tauler made a powerful case for the turn inward – not as a turn to the self, but a transcendence of it. Yet this mystical quest was not aniconic. To the contrary: «Among the noblest things that a person can do in this life must certainly be undergoing spiritual transformation by spiritual images» (160).
But there were other instances in which seeing the materiality of images was precisely what Protestant iconoclasts wanted. They were careful to preserve these images as registering their outrage and revealing the material substrate. Statuary of Mary and other saints were often defaced or marred and then left in situ as a kind of enduring material sermon against worshipping images. The very matter of the figures was made manifest as if to break the spell of figuration, the power of the face or gaze, the beguiling beauty – whatever might tempt one to regard images as more than matter. Framing some instances of iconoclasm in this way comes close to what Emma Wells observes is the «ritualistic» nature of some acts of iconoclasm (206). It could be an act that did more than demolition. Wells contends that «iconoclasm was more than just the smashing of images, it was a profound mental revolution towards the role of the sensory in religious perception» (204). Learning to interpret iconoclasm in richer ways than wanton destruction is something a new generation of scholarship has undertaken. Not as an apology for Protestantism, but as part of a broader and more incisive approach to material culture as a vital aspect of religious practice and imagination as well as the history of power relations. Thus, Wells aptly describes the larger scope as «a ‹reorientation› of the senses or sensory experience through a transformation of the devotional material habitus» (203). This places the study of Protestantism in the register of the history of the senses, and by doing so underscores the relevance and importance of studying the material culture of religion.

Zitierweise:
Morgan, David: Rezension zu: de Maeyer, Jan ; Margry, Peter Jan (Eds.): Material Change: The Impact of Reform and Modernity on Material Religion in North-West Europe, 1780–1920, Leuven 2021. Zuerst erschienen in: Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte, Vol. 117, 2023, S. 454-457. Online: https://doi.org/10.24894/2673-3641.00155.