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Craig Koslofsky, Philip M. Soergel. Miracles and the Protestant Imagination: The Evangelical Wonder Book in Reformation Germany., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 602–603, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.2.602
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Extract
Compiling and interpreting accounts of strange events—ancient or contemporary, beneficial or baleful, local or distant—was the task of the wonder book (Wunderzeichenbuch), a genre of German Lutheran writing that emerged in the 1550s. In this vivid and engaging study, Philip M. Soergel uses the emergence of the wonder book in sixteenth-century Germany to explore a surprisingly broad range of topics in the history of early modern culture and belief. This book delivers more than its title or subject headings might suggest, as it illuminates the growth of popular publishing, changing attitudes toward the natural world, and key contrasts between Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic piety.
Soergel reminds us that his authors and their readers lived in a “semiotic universe” in which no event, and certainly no strange event, lacked significance for humankind. The wonder books that made sense of such events prove to be a valuable source for our understanding of early modern Germany. The book's first two chapters establish the roots of the genre in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, as one-off publications about comets, miracles, and disasters multiplied. Soergel first examines the many discussions of the Ensisheim meteorite of 1492, as well as the growing interest in reports of monstrous births, and then turns to Martin Luther in the second chapter. For the Wittenberg theologian, the widely circulated accounts of wonders, signs, and monstrous births were—compared with God's Word—a distinctly inferior form of divine revelation. Luther was willing to comment on such wonders as the birth of the monk calf in 1523, balancing his desire for divine warnings about the last days with consistent caution about any specific prophecy or sign. Soergel brings together Luther's views on saints and their miracles, signs in the natural world, and angelology to illuminate the reformer's thought.
