Devotion and Destruction: Christian Materiality in Germany during the Thirty Years War (1618 – 1648)
Lutheranism was a religion of the Word, yet it was embedded in physical spaces and in material objects. Churches and their furnishings lay at the heart of Lutheran communal religious life and were central to confessional identity. During the Thirty Years War many of these buildings and objects, from altarpieces to liturgical vessels and books, were destroyed or damaged in sacrilegious acts carried out by both Catholic and Protestant troops. Using Saxony, the heartland of the Reformation, as a case study, this paper will ask what motivated the destruction and will analyse the responses of Lutheran pastors and their parishioners. It will argue that this new wave of iconoclasm compounded the horrors of war and increased Lutheran attachment to material expressions of faith.
Bridget Heal is professor of early modern history at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the long-term impact of religious division on German society and culture. Her publications include The Cult of the Virgin Mary in Early Modern Germany: Protestant and Catholic Piety, 1500-1648 (Cambridge, 2007) and A Magnificent Faith: Art and Identity in Lutheran Germany (Oxford, 2017). Her current project, Faith and Survival: A Religious History of the Thirty Years War, explores the ways in which religion shaped experiences and understandings of conflict in seventeenth-century Germany. Preliminary results of this project have been published in a special issue of Germany History on “Houses of Worship in Times of War” (42/2, June 2024). Bridget edits two monograph series: St Andrews Studies in Reformation History (Brill) and Studies in German History (O.U.P.).
