I think I have read Susan Karant-Nunn's 1997 book, The Reformation of Ritual, more times than anyone else alive. (A few years ago when I was in New York, a friend of mine told me he was "going to a lecture." When—after the lecture—he mentioned that the lecturer was Karant-Nunn, I shrieked: Why didn't you tell me that's who was lecturing? You know I've read her book 16 times this year alone! Ah, well; perhaps I'll have the chance to hear her some other time.) In that study, Karant-Nunn traces the ways that key rituals—for example, baptism, marriage—were reshaped by the Reformers. It has been crucially helpful to me in my ongoing efforts to write intelligently about American baptismal practices.

Now Karant-Nunn has turned her attention to emotion: what kinds of emotional experiences and affective states did Reformation-era preachers aim to foster in their auditors? She gets at this chiefly through an analysis of Passion sermons. To oversimplify her conclusions: Catholic Reformation preachers wanted their auditors to identify with the sufferings of Jesus; they sought "a proper response to Christ's raw pain …. The preacher and the people were to be united in a paroxysm of grief." Lutheran preachers emphasized the comfort Christians could find in the Gospel, encouraging a posture of thankfulness. Luther wanted people to be familiar with the events of the Crucifixion, but he did not want them endlessly to "flagellate themselves" before the suffering Christ; rather, they should "move quickly … to God's love for them." Sorrow and struggle were part of the Lutheran's emotional life, but they pointed one toward joy—joy for all God had done for you.

Reformed preachers, by contrast, sought most to cultivate in auditors a sense of sorrow for their own sinfulness: key notes on the Reformed emotional register were abasement, penitence, and regret. There was variation among Reformed preachers, of course (as, indeed, there was among Catholic and Lutheran preachers), but "the establishment of greater distance between the individual soul and its divine Progenitor is a feature of Reformed preaching in general… . The mood [of Reformed preaching] … is to shift backward in time to the judgmental Deity of the period prior to the twelfth century," a deity who demands uprightness from his children, but who also responds to "heartfelt attempts among believers to reform their lives."

All in all, this is an elegant way of probing the differences the Reformations (Protestant and Catholic) made. With each new inquiry, Karant-Nunn moves us closer to a re-creation of the experience of living through the tumults of the Reformations—first the experience of transformed ritual practice, and now, more elementally, the moods, the tempers, of different Reformation communities. And, if she does not write with an explicitly presentist aim, for those who preach or listen to sermons in the 21st-century, she nonetheless suggests a question to ponder: what emotional experience do the sermons of my church invite today?

Lauren Winner is an assistant professor at Duke Divinity School.

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