Brown - Singing the Gospel



Reviewed work(s): Christopher Boyd Brown. Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 2005. Pp. 172 + appendices, endnotes, & index.

Singing the Gospel , in a nutshell, is a book about the popular, print and oral culture of the Reformation movement (not of the period in general). Brown specifically analyzes Protestantism’s success in terms of lay reception, rather than through more traditional means, which conclude that the Reformation was not successful because researchers tend to judge it in terms of Luther's own negative view of the Reform's outcome or by the Reforms institutional struggles to garner support from its followers. To that end, Brown argues that a better way of measuring the success of the movement is by looking at popular piety, represented in the hymns (collections of songs that explained Protestant teachings of the faith) that played a role in spreading Protestantism. Hymns were powerful because they were easy to remember and because they were popular. They were sung in taverns, in the home, and otherwise experienced a wide dissemination that, Brown argues, other Christian sects could not compete with, hence the "success" of the Reformation in appealing to the lay population. His entire book is centered in proving this point (25). As such, however, it the book's approach does give one the sense that the Reformation was more of a cultural movement than a religious one. That being said, what Brown is really alluding to is that it's foolish to measure the Reform's success only in terms of those who had big plans for it; things rarely turn out the way we want or expect them to and we're all to liable to write the result off it we happen to dislike the way things do turn out.

Moving along, it is clear that Brown has studied the Middle Ages as well as the reformation. He does not come right out with it, but he shows, as Francis Oakley has encouraged us to do in his work, The Western Church in the Later Middle Ages, what Reformation history in this case should look like: a continuation of religious history with its inherited traits, those new and those discarded, rather than as a distinct break from the Church’s past (20-1). Luther’s personal relationship with deity itself could be said to be remnants of that same medieval popular belief trend, but I can also see the influence of Dante’s (and others’) arguments for the importance of writing in the vernacular and the Renaissance’s artistic focus at work (Marius came to a similar conclusion, see 39-40, e.g.). Brown also takes his cues from looking at medieval popular piety, especially household and personal piety. As he says, "the laity sought to apply the comforts of the Gospel to themselves… The phenomenon to which the hymn bibliographies principally bear witness is not the imposition of Lutheran order in the churches but the flourishing of Lutheran piety in the home" (14). In medieval popular belief too, people applied the rituals of the Church as personal spells. A famous set of examples are outlined in Buchard of Worms’ Physician and Corrector, also translated as Doctor and Corrector. With Brown’s account, historians now have evidence that the the laity’s attraction to Evangelicalism over more rigid forms of Christianity was partly on account of the ecclesiastical acceptance—and transmission—of personal piety and its expressive forms like hymnals. Thus, as late as the Reformation, the attraction people felt towards personal belief practices had lived on from the Middle Ages. The difference between Evangelicals and medieval heretics, of course, was that Evangelicals were able to interpret the sermons delivered to them in their own language, while medieval Catholics were only able to regurgitate Latin words they did not understand the meaning of, even if they did grasp their purpose or effects. The latter often got it wrong by accident. The former got it wrong only in the eyes of competing Christian faiths. The hymn bibliographies, then, principally bear witness to a continued flourishing of piety in the home since the Middle Ages. The major difference was in the institution itself, where Lutherans (unlike Catholics) were receptive to popular demand and open to satisfying it.

Despite its strengths, the study has a few notable speed bumps. Several appear in the first chapter, while Brown formulates his argument. First is that he begins his sub-section on “Hymns and Hymn Printing” with an expression of the sheer numbers of hymns produced as indication of their popularity and influence. Brown would be smart to take caution here, since sheer numbers alone is not necessarily a good measure of popularity (alone) in this period, where the printing press makes large volumes of copies. He doesn't give us a reference point, that is a set of numbers that describe total number of printings or printings, so I am inclined to believe that he is mistakenly using a medieval estimation device on a society that has a printing press. Sheer numbers can indeed reflect popularity of a text in the Middle Ages, since manuscripts were expensive and time consuming to produce. Hand-written copies required a dedicated interest in the topic, so 2,000 hand-written (and surviving) copies of one text is a sure sign of interest in the text from that period. The survival rate of those can also be used to get a good estimate, but only before the printing press. Brown takes no time to convince me that survival rate can be used to estimate popularity after the printing press (5-6, 14).

That brings me to my next point, which is that Brown frequently writes out of context. I struggled to follow him at times because he was pulling from some collection of knowledge of book history, reform, or otherwise that I was unfamiliar with. I’m not a Reformation historian, I’m a Late Medieval historian, so I need more context to follow along, however interesting the topic may be. For example, there is also an assumption that readers know that Luther intended people to have close, personal contact with the teachings of his church. While I later found that to be true in other readings, readers who know little about the Reformation or Luther's intentions would be forced to accept it as true or seek out additional texts. A brief paragraph stating the relevant differences between medieval Catholicism and Reformation piety, with a source, would have been useful and not at all excessive for a book that contains a mere 172 pages of analysis.

Finally, a word on Brown’s empirical methodology is in order. The data table on page 6 shows a definite skewing of information towards one finding, and this kind of information is repeated in other tables. Brown gives us only the information we need to look at hymn publications, but does not give us anything to compare them against. When using the empirical methodology, Brown should account for others looking at the table in other ways. A book that is clearly written for Reformation historians, after all, will be opening itself up to people who are natural analysts. One might attempt, for instance, to use the noted table to determine the significance of music in hymnals vs non-musical hymnals. The table on page 6 would show, if correctly compiled, that it was smaller than Brown lets on. The most obvious issue preventing an accurate determination is that Brown counts all combined music/non-music hymn editions as “those with music,” skewing the data in favor of a prevalence of hymnals with music. It's like playing Roshambo against another player who has a rule where he wins all the ties. It’s as close as one can get to cheating without actually doing so. Combination hymnals should have been excluded or placed into their own category. Even with his skewed numbers, non-musical hymnals were more popularly printed until the 1560s, sometimes by twice as many. I also would have liked to have seen data on other types of religious printings, or printings in general. I naturally want to ask if the Church was simply unable to keep up with new technologies and can't answer that question because Brown skirts it.

Still, his evidence that the hymnals were primarily designed for the common laity is compelling, namely the size and structure of the prints, which were not terribly accessible to elite members of society with the talent to play music and who therefore complained about their usual format (he provides no examples on this, however, and doesn't intimate how many times he saw that remark, whether once or several; I worry that Brown has a tendency to over-generalize because of this and my earlier comment on relying on readers’ assumptions to fill in information gaps). Finally, while one might find it surprising that he excludes personal accounts showing personal piety at work in sources like diaries, it becomes clear that they are not needed evidence for the purpose of his argument (12-3). The evidence that even Catholics were selectively using Lutheran hymns is fascinating also, but I'd like to see more from the Catholic side than what was given, if only for comparative purposes. Brown quotes, for instance, a list of occupations that he claims "reflects both the wide popular diffusion of the hymns noted by Roman Catholic observers and their distinctive Lutheran use," but the quote is by a Lutheran and therefore less believable (15). A quote there by a Roman Catholic observer would have been much stronger evidence, since Brown has mentioned them a few times but given no actual evidence of their opinions by this early point in the book.

<span style="font-family:"PalatinoLinotype","serif"">On a more positive note, I do love the direct hymnal quotes. In the section “Doctrine and Piety in the Hymns,” Brown starts to pick up the pace with support for his statements and his explanations of what they mean in relation to the doctrine are clear and commendable (e.g., hymn on 17 and explanation on 18). He is very good at taking the reader along with him when he does provide enough cursory explanation.

<p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:"PalatinoLinotype","serif"">To wrap things up, I’d like to link Brown with two other readings I’ve done that future readers of this review may also encounter. The first is Brown’s disagreement with Marius in Martin Luther and the second is the correlation between hymnals and the Black Death, specifically mentioned in Cohn’s book, The Black Death Transformed.

<p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:"PalatinoLinotype","serif"">Marius paints a very negative picture of the success of the Evangelical movement, both from Luther's own perspective, but also from an institutional/operational perspective. He had mentioned that converts refused to donate any money to help the upkeep of the priests, for instance. Brown, on the other hand, speaks of the success of Protestantism as a religion, shown through hymnals. But his tone seems very interested in defining success in terms of conversion and public popularity. In this case, then, the disparity between their views is due to the subjective concept of success and how it is measured. It may be true that Evangelicals were not up to Luther's standards and institutionally struggled (and still do), but that alone isn't a measure of the success of the Protestant Reformation is what I think Brown is trying to say with his study on hymnals. I would argue that Marius’ viewpoint is exactly the kind that Brown is interested in toning down and their approach the kind he wishes to provide an alternative for (Marius see Intro., Brown, 1-5).

<p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:"PalatinoLinotype","serif"">As for Cohn’s book, one may find it interesting to know that in the early fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, plague tracts increasingly came to be written in the vernacular, “entering the homes of merchants and literary artisans with increasing numbers… the genre had become a form of popular literature by the fourteenth century” (Cohn, 68). Just like hymnals, plague tracts in the vernacular put information, and arguably some free will, in the hands of Everyman. This was probably due to a realization that it was easier to help spread word of treatment in an understandable language than in one that was cryptic to the average learned person (a similar discovery that the Koreans made during a plague of the Joseon period of the fifteenth century, which some argue was what prompted the emperor to realize a need for a Korean vernacular in the first place), but that is merely a conjecture based on the limited facts I have available to me. In any event, there is a clear trend for writing in the vernacular for specific purposes and this may, in fact, be where Luther got the idea that vernacular popular culture was a good way to spread the values and morals of his Reformation (Brown cites evidence specific to this intent on page four).

<p style="text-align:justify;"><span style="font-family:"PalatinoLinotype","serif"">My advice to a future reader is that the best way to approach Brown is to read a few books on the Reformation and Luther first, then to read Brown with patience as he takes the reader along his explanatory journey with the understanding that it will all make sense by the end. The book is a significant addition to Reformation texts and it's oral history in general exactly because it does question the validity of measuring the "success" of the Reformation through the eyes of the men who implemented and managed it, and who were subsequently disappointed by it when things did not go their way (Luther being no exception). It is an easy read, aside from the need for some background knowledge and is a worthwhile read if you're interested in popular culture and/or religion, methods for exploring oral histories for periods where evidence is hard to come by, and research that challenges the status quo in Reformation theory and methodologies.