Magistrates, Madonnas, and Miracles

In this book, Trevor Johnson manages to do two things that do not always come naturally in studies of this kind. On the one hand, he has produced a work of exacting scholarship that draws on a specific case-study—in this instance the Upper Palatinate—in order to shed light on the process of religious reform. Primary sources, from parish documentation to polemical pamphlets, crowd the footnotes. At the same time, however, the book is extremely nuanced in its use of the theories and methods that have shaped the broader field of confessional studies. Throughout the text a deep understanding of the secondary literature informs the analysis, ranging from theories of popular religious perception to the finer points of Mariology. The end result is a book that is not only packed with interesting historical detail, it also teems with insights about the process of early modern religious reform in general. And it is all done with a fine sense for the telling fact and the apposite idea. At one stage the author claims that the process of Catholic reform in the Upper Palatinate was approached with a ‘supple vigour’ (p. 69). There is much in this phrase that captures the quality of the book itself

Archaeology · Confessional · Order (exchange · Political science · Politics · Prologue · Scholarship · Classics · Historical Geopolitical and Social Dynamics · Historical, Literary, and Cultural Studies · History · Law · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity