Monographs by Bridget Heal
What happened to the fervent Marian piety of the late Middle Ages during Germany's Reformation an... more What happened to the fervent Marian piety of the late Middle Ages during Germany's Reformation and Counter-Reformation? It has been widely assumed that Mary disappeared from Protestant devotional life and subsequently became a figurehead for the Catholic Church's campaign of religious reconquest. This book presents a more finely nuanced account of the Virgin's significance. In many Lutheran territories Marian liturgy and images - from magnificent altarpieces to simple paintings and prints - survived, though their meaning was transformed. In Catholic areas baroque art and piety flourished, but the militant Virgin associated with the Counter-Reformation did not always dominate religious devotion. Traditional manifestations of Marian veneration persisted, despite the post-Tridentine Church's attempts to dictate a uniform style of religious life. This book demonstrates that local context played a key role in shaping Marian piety, and explores the significance of this diversity of Marian practice for women's and men's experiences of religious change.
Journal articles by Bridget Heal
This article explores the motivations behind Lutheran patronage of ecclesiastical art. Drawing on... more This article explores the motivations behind Lutheran patronage of ecclesiastical art. Drawing on a number of case studies from amongst the lesser nobility in Albertine Saxony during the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it asks why Lutherans gave images – pulpits, altars and epitaphs – to churches in the absence of any salvific imperative for doing good works. It argues that although individual and family commemoration had always been and remained an important motivator, we should not understand Protestant visual culture as purely commemorative. Lutheran patrons were prompted by their desire for dynastic representation, but also by a sense of duty to their local church and by their desire to express confessional loyalty. Yet other examples, such as a memorial church in the village of Prießnitz near Leipzig decorated in 1616 by Hans von Einsiedel as a memorial to his dead wife, show that after the Reformation, as before, religious and secular objectives sat side-by-side. Such monuments are in no sense secularized – their most obvious parallel was perhaps the Lutheran funeral sermon, which aimed to console, to promulgate confessional norms and to strengthen communal ties as well as to commemorate. The article closes with a consideration of other possible motivations, presenting sources that demonstrate the continued importance of pleasing God through such donations. By focusing less on iconography and more on the role of images in devotional practice, the article shows that Lutherans’ relationship with God could be mediated through images and objects – through pious donations – as well as through the word.
This article argues that Lutheran images moved from being adiaphora, matters of indifference to s... more This article argues that Lutheran images moved from being adiaphora, matters of indifference to salvation, to being confessional markers under the pressure of Calvinist iconoclasm. This was particularly true in Brandenburg, where Lutheran traditionalism was reinforced by Johann Sigismund’s ‘Second Reformation’ and the iconoclasm that it engendered in 1615. It was also true, however, in Albertine Saxony, where there was a cultural backlash against Christian I’s attempts to purify the Lutheran church (1586–1591). Conflicts within Protestantism, the article suggests, played an important role in embedding images in Lutheran culture and therefore contributed towards the flourishing of ecclesiastical art that occurred in Lutheran Germany during the later seventeenth century. The final section of the article asks how far Lutheran image use differed from Catholic. Concerns about idolatry never entirely disappeared from Lutheran discussions of images, and patrons and pastors sometimes came dangerously close to a return to works righteousness in their commemorations of the donation and adornment of churches. Yet during the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries the Lutheran church successfully assimilated even the theatricality and illusionism of baroque art into its devotional life.
Book Chapters by Bridget Heal
Web-based articles by Bridget Heal
This short paper forms the introduction to an open access Virtual Special Issue of 'German Histor... more This short paper forms the introduction to an open access Virtual Special Issue of 'German History' devoted to the topic 'Refugees and Migrants'. The context for this Special Issue is the current European refugee crisis: in this paper, we ask how History, a discipline whose object of study is the past, can formulate meaningful interventions in a crisis of the present. The full contents of the Special Issue can be accessed via http://www.oxfordjournals.org/our_journals/gh/refugees_migrants.html
Uploads
Monographs by Bridget Heal
Journal articles by Bridget Heal
Book Chapters by Bridget Heal
Web-based articles by Bridget Heal