Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late‐Medieval and Reformation Germany

Abstract

Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late-Medieval and Reformation GermanyThe role of the visual image in the popular piety of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has long been one of the vastly neglected themes of Reformation historiography.This neglect seems to have originated from two directions.The first was a Protestant tendency to represent the Reformation as a radical rejection of a degenerate form of popular religion which had expressed itself in crassly material and superficial images of the holy.'This degeneration had progressed so far as to threaten the very fabric of Christian worship, and could only be reversed by a complete rooting out of the offending forms.Iconoclasm was therefore the correlative of the 'reformation of worship', and religion shifted its emphasis from the visible, the collective and the external to an invisible, interior realm of individual spirituality.2The second was the conventional wisdom, produced out of an older historiographical tradition, that the Reformation had contributed to the decline of the visual arts.The latter view has been effectively laid to rest by the work of Carl Christensen, and there is now a developing interest in the theme of 'art and the Reformation'.So far, however, this has been more the preserve of the historian of art than of the Ref~rmation.~Invaluable as this recent work has been to our understanding of visual traditions, many important questions have yet to be raised or explored.One question in particular has attracted little or no 1.The twentieth-century tradition begins with Johann Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Harmondsworth 1955 (1st edn 1924).Despite more nuanced work on the later middle ages it remains a conventional wisdom even in more recent literature: see the comments by Francis Oakley, 'Religious and Ecclesiastical Life on the Eve of the Reformation', in Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research, S .

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