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Susan Felch's study of English prayer books illustrates a double change in English piety: the eclipse of Latin devotional works by those printed in English, and the shift from books that were intended to be memorized to books that were intended to be read. For example, she points out that the delightfully named Monument of Matrones, which weighed in at over 1500 pages, simply could not be memorized in its entirety. It had to be read.
Other essays work to show the reader a mixture of change and continuity. Bodo Nischan considers differences between Lutheran and Reformed church furniture, specifically between altars (enclosed boxes on top of which communion was celebrated) and communion tables (tables with open legs), to illustrate that change and continuity existed within the Protestant tradition. Luther's conviction that Christian practices not expressly prohibited in the Bible were acceptable for continued use meant that he generally advised leaving most Catholic church furnishings, including altars, untouched. Zwinglians and Calvinists, certain that only behavior explicitly ordered in the Bible was acceptable, changed church decorations more often. In Reformed thinking, the probability that Christ had celebrated the last supper at a table with his disciples meant that his 16th-century followers should also hold communion at a table and not around a box.
At times, the emphasis on continuity and change becomes tedious. Finding new things in the 16th and 17th centuries is hardly surprising, while identifying enduring patterns in a time when so much did change can seem like grasping at straws. But even if the theme is belabored, this attention to continuity and change yields insights both for current discussions of worship and for historical studies of the early modern period. For those concerned with contemporary worship, remembering that previous generations simultaneously did things the same and did things differently can serve to temper disputes. Worship changes slowly; worship is always changing. If John Calvin was willing to accept less frequent communion services than he desired, surely contemporary worshippers can accept transforming their church services more slowly or more rapidly than they desire. For historians, balancing continuity and change provides a more nuanced view of the early modern period, making it easier to study the 16th and 17th centuries on their own terms and not merely as staging grounds for later developments. The Protestant Reformation did not immediately produce the 19th century and its strict confessional boundaries.
For those who are intrigued by the complications of the early modern period, Music and Religious Identity in Counter-Reformation Augsburg, 1580-1630 offers an opportunity to delve further into the subject of continuity and change in religious practice in a particular context and medium. The study is bounded by the opening of a Jesuit house in Augsburg, which introduced vibrant Counter-Reformation Catholicism to Augsburg, and battles in the Thirty Years' War, which destroyed the city. Unlike Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, which seems to have been written for both historians and church people, Alexander Fisher's book is intended primarily for historians and musicologists.
Fisher argues that in Augsburg, a free imperial city with both Catholic and Protestant inhabitants, musical practice became essential to residents' religious identity. While Catholics and Protestants disputed doctrine, they expressed their beliefs in strikingly similar ways. Both groups performed music (whether in church or on the streets) to form and reinforce confessional solidarity. Protestant laypeople expressed their opposition to calendar reform instituted by the mostly Catholic city council (the changeover from the Julian to Gregorian calendar was widely regarded as Papist meddling) by writing and trading songs that celebrated Protestants persecuted for opposing the new calendar. When Protestant worship was banned in the late 1620s following Protestant defeats in the Thirty Years' War, Protestants gathered outside the city walls to sing Lutheran classics. As Fisher describes it, Catholic identity owed a great debt to professionals, specifically priests and musicians. The city council employed Catholic composers and the Jesuit congregation in Augsburg arranged performances of their works. When priests and monks organized processions and pilgrimages to nearby holy sites, they integrated music that emphasized typically Counter-Reformation themes of Marian and eucharistic piety.
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