Scholarship pertaining to the Reformations1 is as vast as it is varied; however, new research increasingly draws attention to the still many unanswered questions or understudied aspects of the Reformations, particularly in the context of everyday life in the early modern period. Editors Nina J. Koefoed and Bo Kristian Holm bring together essays from scholars focusing on the connections between the Protestant reforms, the “social imaginaries” (p. 15) created, and the individuals operating at all levels of society.

Emerging from a final REFORC2 conference for a multi-year collaborative on “Lutheranism and Social Development in Denmark,” the volume collates the scholarly contributions from authors focusing on different countries and territories throughout early modern Europe to demonstrate the interdisciplinarity and multi-faceted approaches used to explore the Reformations, their aftermath, and everyday life. The volume does not offer a comprehensive overview of the subject. Instead, Koefoed and Holm intended the anthology to inquire about the benefits of understanding the Reformations within the contexts of everyday life in early modern Europe with a special focus on Northern territories.

The essays are divided into three distinct sections: “Religious Formation of Everyday Life,” “Reformation and the household,” and “Negotiating Religion in Everyday Life.” “Religious Formation of Everyday Life” demonstrates the varying methods by which theology was transformed into religious practice and, inevitably, everyday life. Changing times and the evangelical reforms sounded throughout European society, altering attitudes and bringing theology closer to the masses than ever before. Lutheran confessional identity formation, as Jette Bendixen Rønkilde argues in her essay, hinged on the pattern of lived religion through sacramental practice, which “is consequently formative of emotions and actions in everyday life” (p. 65). The approach of lived religion, unlike literature focusing solely on everyday life, hones in on the spirituality found in daily life, intertwining around social networks and relations and religious practices themselves. This includes the sensory environments people aurally and visually experienced as “vernacular hymns became a prominent feature of Lutheran churches, schools, and, most notably, ordinary households” (p. 110) and as people cultivated “intellectual self-awareness” (p. 118). While modern scholars have the advantage of seeing a birds-eye view through the sources and therefore the patterns between places become clearer, early modern individuals experienced the reforms locally and through their eyes, creating their own interpretations and methods of carrying new teachings throughout daily life.

“Reformation and the household” emphasizes this religious mindfulness that was reciprocally integrated into daily life. As explored by Kirsi Stjerna, women were active participants in the reform movements and in Catholicism as confessors of the faith and remained religiously-minded, committed to their “chosen theological standing” (p. 146). Churching rituals for new mothers as they reentered the church after giving birth were steeped in religious meaning, while women interpreted it less as a confessional rite than a “life ritual, a healing ceremony” (p. 222). The household served as a site of daily life, religious instruction, and political inter-play for the roles and expectations of family members, theorized about by reformers and philosophers alike. Even in the educational journeys young men began to take regularly in the sixteenth century, the values instilled in the household through teachings of the catechism were shared among the travelers even if their destinations and routes may have differed. Catholic and Lutheran ideals and teachings steadily became integrated within the functioning of everyday society. In the same ways that Benedict Anderson argues for imagined communities in the sense that what binds certain communities of people together is the lived “image of their communion”3 and that Judith Butler’s notion of performativity contends that the body acts within “a culturally restricted corporeal space and enacts interpretations within the confines of already existing directives,”4 early moderns imagined their surrounding communities and enacted religious teachings based on a set of evolving socio-cultural expectations.

Perhaps the best example of both the performativity of Catholicism and Lutheranism is demonstrated in the essays in “Negotiating Religion in Everyday Life.” In his essay, Martin Berntson defines negotiation as a process that requires several groups or individuals to come together to willingly present “offers, counter-offers, or both” (p. 249). Considering the physical and theological conflicts that persisted throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, this definition saliently reflects the interpersonal negotiations exemplified through rebellions, as in Bernston’s essay, and women who defended their right to a contemplative life outside the confines of marriage, as Sini Mikkola explores. Equally, negotiation could also occur in the material and intellectual maneuverings of confessional expectations and personal preferences of groups and individuals. Collectively, the essays across all three sections showcase just how intertwined religion and everyday life became in the wake of the Reformations.

The authors do not shy away from confronting decades-long debates and contributing to the discussions with nods to the former and current state of the field. Earlier and ongoing debates such as the confessionalization theory, top-down approaches to the Reformation, and women’s roles in society changing as a result of the Reformations all point to an over-generalization or incomplete picture of life in the wake of religious reforms. The essays within the anthology point to the need for a more nuanced approach, not unlike other recent scholarly work5, that considers the complex array of actors and brings out new or understudied approaches. Lived religion, aural and sensory history, material culture, and social imaginaries represent some of the new approaches which help articulate the intellectual understandings of Reformation thought that occurred at all levels of society. Discussions of toleration and negotiation, especially, speak to this point, where top-down narratives no longer adequately explain the responsiveness of communities and individuals. Instead, discourses and actions begun and participated in by the laity reveal that the Reformations and subsequent religious change was by no means a passively-experienced process.6 In a scholarly world that so often seeks to divide and classify, these essays demonstrate the interwoven nature of those categories, where reformers wrote and performed their teachings; authorities instituted new, reformed policies adhering to the creation of new confessional identities, and individuals across class commented, negotiated, and rebelled in response to the changes. The authors’ holistic recognition of the inextricable, nuanced, and often-communal nature of the Reformations and everyday life is the greatest contribution of this volume.

Thus, the authors highlight the complexity in analyzing the ways reformation thought and theology interacted with the politics of everyday life throughout Europe. Contained within the minds and interpretive abilities of early modern people, the effects varied in time and place and from person to person. Taken together, the volume accentuates the realities of social imaginaries in the context of the Reformations. Multiple authors successfully stress, especially, the performative nature of lived religion and confessional identity formation in communities and in the writings left behind from the period. Furthermore, the essays reveal the multi-layered and multi-facetted lenses scholars must use to more fully access the social realities and imaginaries practiced within early modern communities. Overall, Reformation and Everyday Life grants readers with a background in Reformation history a peak into the complexity of the sixteenth-century Reformations and their aftermath in the lives and minds of early modern people, who wrote, interpreted, discussed, negotiated, fought, and compromised on the Reformation ideals and ideas circulating throughout early modern Europe.

Notes:
1 The authors of the volume reviewed here use the singular Reformation, which I depart from in this review. Rather, I prefer to use the term Reformations as opposed to its singular form to indicate that different reforms occurred throughout Europe, even those such as the Hussite movement that pre-dated the sixteenth century. While the link between all of these movements is their religious nature, each had unique contours that provide different perspectives on religious change in the premodern world. This characterization of Reformations also includes the different lenses through which historians craft narratives of the period and the plurality of perspectives from the premodern people who experienced these reform movements. While the volume’s authors and contributors provide no explanation for their preference to use the term in its singular form, scholars throughout are careful to offer qualifiers, such as the Lutheran Reformation or Counterreformation, making it clear that distinct religious movements occurred which resulted in the formation of different confessional cultures. For historians who give an overview of and commentary on the debate over terminology, see for example Carlos Eire, Reformations: The Early Modern World 1450-1650, New Haven 2016, p. ix-xi; Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations, London 2009, p. 1-22; and Thomas A. Brady Jr., Reformations in German Histories, Cambridge 2009, p. 4.
2 The international cooperation “The Reformation Research Consortium (REFORC)” focuses on Early Modern Christianity (ca. 1400-ca. 1700). For more information, visit: https://reforc.com/ (21.06.2024).
3 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised edition, London 2006, p. 6.
4 Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in: Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (December 1988), p. 526.
5 See for example Bridgit Heal, Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany, Oxford 2017; Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Stripping the Veil: Convent Reform, Protestant Nuns, and Female Devotional Life in Sixteenth Century Germany, Oxford 2022; and Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland, Oxford 2011.
6 See for example David M. Luebke, Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia, Charlottesville 2016; Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-Modern France, Washington, D.C. 2004; and Emily Michaelson, The Pulpit and the Press in Reformation Italy, Cambridge 2013.