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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 January 2021
Do historians look at Luther and the Lutheran Reformation differently in the aftermath of the Lutherjahr of 2017, and its frenzy of academic and public activity? As recent publications on Luther demonstrate – notably Lyndal Roper's 2016 biography Martin Luther: renegade and prophet – there is a still a great deal to say about Luther, and how his friendships, passions, prejudices and physical experiences shaped him. But while Luther was the monumental public figure of 2017, some of the most important work coinciding with the anniversary addressed instead Lutheranism as a movement, and the nature of religious identities in Luther's aftermath. It also demonstrated and furthered the impact of the visual and material turn in history and in Reformation studies. Building upon decades of scholarship on Lutheran visual images, recent Reformation scholarship has demonstrated in increasing depth how religious identity can and should be read through both material and visual culture. The three publications examined here – a monograph by Bridget Heal, a website by Brian Cummings, Ceri Law, Bronwyn Wallace and Alexandra Walsham, and the exhibition catalogue Luther! 95 treasures – 95 people – contribute to the material, sensory turn in Reformation and early modern scholarship, and in the latter two cases also reveal the impact of this upon public engagement with Reformation histories.
1 On print culture see especially Scribner, Robert W., For the sake of simple folk: popular propaganda for the German Reformation, 2nd edn, Cambridge 1994Google Scholar, and also Koerner, Joseph Leo, The reformation of the image, Chicago 2004Google Scholar.
2 Important recent examples include Walsham, Alexandra, ‘Domesticating the Reformation’, Renaissance Quarterly lxix (2016), 566–616CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Morrall, Andrew, ‘The family at table: Protestant identity, self-representation and the limits of the visual in seventeenth-century Europe’, in Heal, Bridget and Koerner, Joseph Leo (eds), Art and religious reform in early modern Europe, special issue supplement to Art History xl (2017), 336–57Google Scholar.
3 Rublack, Ulinka, ‘Introduction’, to Rublack, Ulinka (ed.), The Oxford handbook of the Protestant Reformations, Oxford 2016, p. viCrossRefGoogle Scholar.
4 See, for example, Gutjahr, Mirko, ‘Wie protestantisch ist Luthers Müll? Die Konfessionalisierung und ihre Auswirkungen auf die materielle Alltagskultur des 16. Jahrhunderts’, Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Archäologie des Mittelalters und der Neuzeit xxiii (2011), 43–50Google Scholar, and Miller, Harald (ed.), Fundsache Luther: Archäologen auf den Spuren des Reformators, Stuttgart 2008Google Scholar.
5 Roper, Lyndal, ‘Luther relics’, in Spinks, Jennifer and Eichberger, Dagmar (eds), Religion, the supernatural and visual culture in early modern Europe: an album amicorum for Charles Zika, Leiden 2015, 330–53Google Scholar; Rublack, Ulinka, ‘Grapho-relics: Lutheranism and the materialization of the word’, in Walsham, Alexandra (ed.), Relics and remains, special issue supplement 5 to Past and Present no. 206 (2010), 144–66Google Scholar.