Are Things ‘Indifferent’? How Objects Change Our Understanding of Religious History

Abstract

I begin with a paradox. Our best evidence for the use of medieval religious art-that is, what most of us would think of as 'Catholic' art-survives in Protestant Germany. In Saxony and Lower Saxony alone, 545 medieval altarpieces survive in their churches; Mecklenburg has another 165. 1 There are more medieval mass chalices extant today from northern Germany than from anywhere else; the number may exceed 1000. Winged altars, rood screens, embroidered frontals and other church furnishings have also been preserved there in large numbers, often in their original liturgical settings. 2 The richest collection of medieval chasubles is found in Lutheran Germany, and many more survive in Lutheran churches in Hungary and Poland. 3 Such chalices, altar linens and altarpieces are not, for the most part, preserved in display cases; they are used * An early version of this paper was presented as the James Field Willard lecture at the University of Colorado at Boulder on October 23, 2014. I am grateful to Profs. Scott Bruce and Anne Lester for the invitation to Colorado and to the many helpful suggestions I received at the conference on 'Medieval Materiality' that followed on October 24 and 25. I also thank Richard Kieckhefer, Denise Koller, Guenther Roth, and two anonymous readers for German History for valuable suggestions. As always, I am grateful to Jeffrey Hamburger and Henrike Lähnemann for guiding me through materials from the Lüneburg cloisters and for their wide-ranging researches in the archives and libraries of the region.

Between the Altar and the Pulpit: The (New?) Materiality of the Spiritual

“…Instead, she alerts us to a different chronology, based on the "lives" of things, church furniture, vestments, and other items used in church services. She argues that many of these not only survived but continued to carry meaning in their local contexts of piety and devotion, but also as representations of prestige and power (Bynum 2016 Mochizuki has made a significant contribution to the understanding of the phenomenon of text decoration as an innovative form of Dutch Calvinist visual culture 'in the wake of iconoclasm ' (2005; 2007; 2008 and most of all it is regarded as offensive for the weak, slanderous for the opposition and disturbing for the papists, to paint images of human beings next to those inscriptions, as can be seen now in Rotterdam. Therefore, let the ministers of Rotterdam now be admonished to do their duty in this, and let everyone make sure that these things do not occur in their own region.…”

“…medieval) artwork(Bynum 2016). Van Oudenhoven specifically wrote his text, so he set out in his dedication to Prince Willem of Orange Nassau, to support the recruitment of more Reformed ministers in 's Hertogenbosch and its environment ("op dat de voornaamste Plaetsen met goede ende ghetrouwe Predikanten mochten bekleedt worden") (van Oudenhoven 1649, v).…”

Contested Space in a Contested Border Area: The Sint Jan in ‘s Hertogenbosch - Or: From Bosch to the Ten Commandments

“…Instead, she alerts us to a different chronology, based on the "lives" of things, church furniture, vestments, and other items used in church services. She argues that many of these not only survived but continued to carry meaning in their local contexts of piety and devotion, but also as representations of prestige and power (Bynum 2016). Van…”

“…medieval) artwork(Bynum 2016). Van Oudenhoven specifically wrote his text, so he set out in his dedication to Prince Willem of Orange Nassau, to support the recruitment of more Reformed ministers in 's Hertogenbosch and its environment ("op dat de voornaamste Plaetsen met goede ende ghetrouwe Predikanten mochten bekleedt worden") (van Oudenhoven 1649, v).5 Had he deemed the visual remains of the old faith a stumbling5 Van Oudenhoven refers to the recruitment efforts of the Synod of Den Bosch to muster sufficient candidates for positions in States-Brabant.…”

Religious Devotion, Gender and the Body in Europe, 1100–1800

“…The authors take up current scholarly debates about the role of embodied and emotional dimensions of religious observance, how the body expresses and shapes ideas about religious community, and in what ways bodies convey gendered and political meanings. 6 Importantly, these articles examine the interplay between materiality, belief, and emotion across the medieval and early modern periods, highlighting continuities in cultural ideas about the embodied expression of religious devotion through this timespan.…”