Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria.

This book examines a literary genre of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century: Bavarian pilgrimage books, which ranged from pamphlets to substantial works. They publicized saints' shrines, recounted miracles associated with them, and invited pilgrims to come. Predictably, pilgrimage books offer the historian precious evidence of people's beliefs, religious practices, and perceptions of the holy. According to the author, so far this literature has remained the preserve of German folklorists, receiving little scholarly attention in the English-speaking world despite its importance as a mirror of Counter-Reformation religious culture in Bavaria, the most Catholic state of Germany in the early modern period.

Opening with a background chapter on late medieval Bavarian pilgrimages, the book proceeds to discuss their decline in the wake of the Reformation. The following four chapters form the core of the work. The author stresses the close connection between resurgent Catholicism after 1560 and the political aims of the Wittelsbach dukes, anxious to tighten control over their territory. Among the means for achieving these aims was enforcing religious uniformity and rooting out the "heretical poison" of Protestantism which the Bavarian dukes saw as a threat to their authority. Church and state not only collaborated in strengthening the Catholic religion, each for its own purposes, but in creating Bavaria saneta, envisioned as a state ruled by godly, paternal dukes obedient to the pope in doctrinal matters and leading their people to salvation. According to the pilgrimage books, God himself showed his favor to Bavaria by working miracles through his saints so that his truth might be manifest and the Protestants confounded. Altoetting, the subject of a famous pilgrimage book by Martin Eisengrein (treated at some length), Andechs, or the Frauenkirche in Munich with the relics of St. Benno, rescued from Protestant Saxony, linked God's grace to specific places.

Professor Soergel's book contains much rich material touching on a variety of subjects of great interest to students of early modern Europe. But this very richness is also the work's weakness: it proceeds along too many lines and at times skates on thin ice. Despite his intention, clearly announced at the outset, to focus on pilgrimage books, they at times get lost among other topics like the specifically Bavarian forms taken by the revived Corpus Christi festival treated in chapter 3. While intensely interesting, this material is not well-integrated with issues raised by pilgrimage books. The sketchy treatment of both confessionalization and Sozialdisziplinierung, implicit in the whole thrust of the book, does not entirely satisfy the reader. How complex the debates about the impact of the Counter-Reformation on German states have become can be seen, for example, in the recent volume Die katholische Konfessionalisierung, edited by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (Guetersloh, 1995).

Among other matters of concern to the reader is the meaning of the term Counter-Reformation. As used in this book, it becomes too diffuse. Was every Catholic priest by definition a "Counter-Reformer?" Greater familiarity with recent literature on the Counter-Reformation as a cultural phenomenon outside Germany might have modified some of the author's generalizations. And is every writer about saints and shrines by definition a propagandist? What about the sincere believer - does he differ from a propagandist?

The author mentions the "fact [sic] that Luther's breakthrough and his triumph over Satan occurred in the monastery privy" (155) - despite the controversy to which Erikson's neo-Freudian emphasis gave rise a good many years ago. To move from author to editor, the latter should have caught the innumerable awkward phrases like "saintly conjurations," "saintly supplications," "saintly devotions," "mortal simulation," "sorcerous miracles," or "crucifixional victory." Maybe these are small matters, hardly worthy of inclusion in a brief review. Yet they mar the whole.

But I want to conclude with what is most important: despite some matters which could have been improved, this is a stimulating and rich work that makes a definite contribution to the ongoing debate about the nature of Counter-Reformation culture.

ELISABETH G. GLEASON University of San Francisco