Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400-1600 by Bernhard Jussen; CraigKoslofskyReview by: Andrew GowThe American Historical Review, Vol. 105, No. 4 (Oct., 2000), pp. 1409-1410Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of the American Historical AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2651574 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 08:43

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Oxford University Press and American Historical Association are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to The American Historical Review.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.31.195.90 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:43:52 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Europe: Early Modern and Modern 1409

subjects in his patriarchally ordered kingdom, decreed the exploitation of Finland's iron deposits for the greater good of Sweden. The defense of the realm and its economy required ever-increasing supplies of arma- ments, tools for domestic use, and trade goods manu- factured from iron. Because Finland then had no indigenous labor force of skilled ironworkers, the Swedish state encouraged the immigration there of Swedish and foreign ironworkers, as well as other workmen in related trades, to mine the iron ore and to set up the ironworks it required.

To attract the necessary expertise from abroad, the Swedish crown offered foreign entrepreneurs and mas- ter ironworkers attractive incentives. It accorded to guilds involved in the industrial production of iron privileges not given to others. It fostered the establish- ment of new communities for accommodating the influx of ironworkers from abroad, of which fully a third were Germans and Walloons. Both the dynamics of immigration and the nature of the iron industry itself influenced the rise of nuclear families within the existing patriarchal structures that characterized the rest of Finnish society. Clearly, those people employed in ironworking and the ancillary trades of mining, wood felling, charcoal burning, and cartage were un- like the general Finnish population in many ways. For example, the agrarian Finnish majority neither enjoyed the privileges nor the status accorded to ironworkers. Nor were they of the same ethnic composition, and their social and economic organization still empha- sized the utility of the extended family.

Vilkuna discusses all of this and more. Just as the title of his book advertises, he is particularly attentive to the details animating the everyday life of the ironworkers and their families. His topics include the matter of wages and regulation of working conditions, the hierarchical structure in the workplace, the differ- ing roles of males and females in the ironworking milieu. Vilkuna also examines the place of religion, the use of alcohol, the occurrence of crime, and the role of courts in the lives of ironworkers. Equally important is the emphasis that he gives to the changing conditions in the daily life of ironworkers over the entire span of the Great Power period. After all, it was an era that lasted more than a hundred years, and, as we know, a lot can happen during that length of time.

The amazing thing is that Vilkuna has been able to pack so much detailed research and analysis in a short book of 196 pages, including indexes. His command of the subject and his ability to impart that knowledge to the reader is exceptional. Surely some of the credit for this must be attributed to the fact that his knowledge base and thinking have deepened considerably since the publication of Valtakunnan eduksi, isanmnaan kuni- niaksi, ruukinpatruunalle hyodyksi-Suomen rauitateol- lisuus suuivalta-ajalla [For the Advancement of the State, for the Honor of the Fatherland, for the Benefit of the Ironmaster-Finland's Iron Industry During the Great Power Period] (1994), his earlier work in the field. A comparison of that title with the one gracing

his current book is enough to show how far Vilkuna has developed his artistry and skill as a social historian.

EDWARD W. LAINE

Ottawa, Canada

BERNHARD JUSSEN and CRAIG KOSLOFSKY, editors. Kul- tutrelle Refor-mation: Sinnformationen imn Un br uch 1400-1600. (Veroffentlichungen des Max-Planck-In- stituts fur Geschichte, number 145.) G6ttingen: Van- denhoeck und Ruprecht. 1999. Pp. 386.

This volume makes a considerable contribution to an emerging field that might be called the cultural history of the Reformation, but that is actually the cultural history of the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation. The contributors attack social historians' preoccupation with modern social and political cate- gories of analysis (class, political faction, professional group) at the expense of such actors' categories as gender, devotional mode, manly honor, emotion, pov- erty, sorcery, and heresy. In addition to insisting on those phenomena that seemed most important to contemporaries, the contributors make clear that even if (traditional) political and social history can be done as though the Reformation began a new chapter in European history in 1517, cultural history must by its very nature take a longer-term view of historical continuity and change-as Heiko Oberman has amply demonstrated for the history of theology and of ideas.

Unfortunately, not all the articles live up to the promise of the volume's coordinated approach and methodologically explicit program. Thomas Lentes's essay, "Das religiose Ausdrucksverhalten" (Modes of Religious Expression), rightly emphasizes the different messages and modalities of images from those of texts and tracks the development of religious expression from imagistic and corporeal to textual formations over the course of the later Middle Ages. However, his conclusions blow his very interesting findings out of proportion. I do not think that the history of Christian art, or a change from image-oriented to text-oriented religion, can explain the Reformation any better than interpretations based on theology. Lentes doubts, plausibly enough, that religions change their dogmatic stance merely as a result of new theological insights (yet such insights do play a crucial role!), and he rejects as inadequate Bernd Moeller's recent formula- tion that the new doctrine of justification explains both the essence and the dynamics of the Reformation. Fundamental attacks on the scholarly consensus re- quire far more elaboration than these throw-away references at the end of an otherwise interesting and challenging article. Similarly, co-editor Craig Kos- lofsky overstates his case at the end of his essay on competing concepts of community (Gerneinschaft) as seen through the removal of cemeteries from inner- city churchyards to extramural sites. It might well be true that cemeteries were moved because a new sense of community based on hygiene and safety had dis- placed an older sacramental and devotional concept;

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2000

This content downloaded from 185.31.195.90 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:43:52 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

1410 Reviews of Books

the case is at least plausible as concerns the (re)order- ing of civic and religious space. But the author fails to prove that a new overarching concept of community based on hygiene (granting its existence for the sake of argument) actually replaced competing concepts (there were other, theological reasons for segregating the dead) or affected anything more than the location of cemeteries.

Charles Zika's richly detailed study rings the changes on a particular tradition of images: in the woodcut illustrations in incunabula, well-known im- ages of sorcery and magic involving weather, food, and love revealed older beliefs, but under the influence of the developing demonological literature (as Stuart Clark has recently shown), these topoi were recycled to cast witches and sorcerers as dupes of the Devil, part of the production of the full-blown "elaborated con- cept of witchcraft" (Wolfgang Behringer).

Christopher Ocker's article on mendicants, poverty, and ideas about the truly poor stands out as a daring fusion of church history and social history, history of ideas and texts with the history of welfare. The Refor- mation captured and enlarged upon existing tenden- cies to disqualify mendicants from the definition of worthy and true poverty-thus lumping them with vagabonds, "sturdy beggars," and con artists who faked injuries or illnesses. Co-editor Bernhard Jussen's learned article on the disappearance, by the end of the thirteenth century, of the old morally laden ideal categories of "virgins, widows and married women" traces a long development in detail but does not add a great deal to our understanding of gender dynamics during the Protestant Reformation itself. Susan Karant-Nunn concentrates on the Protestant suppres- sion of emotion and affective piety and its conse- quences during and after the Reformation. One won- ders whether affective piety had actually been as important as Karant-Nunn suggests and as the reform- ers thought it was. The author notes that Mikhail Bakhtin's opposition of fleshly Carnival to ascetic Lent obscures a mutual strengthening function, and she asks the important question as to how the (putatively) bare-bones piety of the early Reformation gave way, after the middle of the sixteenth century, to increasing affective expression and finally to Pietism.

Valentin Groebner (on the image of the crucified Jesus and the authorities' use of coercive violence) and Mireille Othenin-Girard (on the dead and the "econ- omy of exchange" with the living) make original but more narrowly focused contributions. Norbert Schnitz- ler proposes an entirely new way to study such reli- gious movements as the iconoclastic riots (Kirchen- bruch) at Stralsund in 1525. He focuses not on class interests or group dynamics but on detailed, local, family, and elite prosopographical histories that allow the historian to make sense of the individual targets, local peculiarities, and long-standing conflicts that were expressed in such episodes. Susanne Pohl's chap- ter on the varieties of manslaughter in Zurich law tracks social and cultural change from 1376 through

the end of the sixteenth century. Pohl's conclusions fit very neatly into the recently revived, rather controver- sial (and rather whiggish) theories of Norbert Elias concerning the development of affect control, the disciplining of impulse and emotion, and the "civilizing process." Her material also sheds some light on incip- ient state formation via the state's assumption of the monopoly of violence. However, Pohl fails to situate her evidence with regard to these historiographical contexts.

ANDREW Gow University of Alberta

KEITH H. PICKUS. Constructing Modern Identities: Jewish University Students in Germany 1815-1914. Detroit, Mich.: Wayne State University Press. 1999. Pp. 222. $29.95.

This is a case study in the formation of identities in a particular place, at a particular time, and within a particular social category. The place is Germany, the time the "long nineteenth century," the category the Jewish university student. The subject is well chosen, because the debate on national identity dominated much of the public discourse in nineteenth-century Germany, because students were at the heart of dis- putes about national cultures, and because Jews emerging from a segregated existence faced multiple challenges. This combination of factors justifies Keith H. Pickus's agenda of "emphasizing both the mutabil- ity and the social function of identity formation" (p. 11). He pursues this agenda under a number of headings. The first is that with emancipation, however partial, the question of Jewish identity ceases to be unproblematic. The second is that secularization raises the question of how far religion alone could continue to define Jewish existence. The third asks how realistic or helpful it was for Jews to seek complete assimilation into their surrounding society. The fourth is what the choices of associational affiliation made by Jewish students tell us about their aspirations and the limits to fulfilling these. Last there is the question of how far Jews in general, and Jewish students in particular, defined their identities in response to anti-Semitism.

To begin with the last question: anti-Semitism was certainly a factor and one that never went away, but entry into general society brought its own challenges, which would have existed even in the absence of hostility and discrimination. Until well into the nine- teenth century, the Jewish student was likely to be the first in his family to enter secular higher education in a system that had, as Pickus stresses, highly peculiar intellectual and cultural characteristics: a dedication to Bildung (self-cultivation through learning and reflec- tion) and pressures towards a certain kind of sociabil- ity that included beer drinking and dueling but also more serious pursuits and the worship of nature.

Jewish responses to these challenges predictably varied. There was no typical German Jewish student. Some became members of fraternities, including Bur-

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2000

This content downloaded from 185.31.195.90 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 08:43:52 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions