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Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany. By Jacob M. Baum. Studies in Sensory History 9. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. xii + 296 pp. $110.00 cloth; $35.00 paper; $19.95 e-book.

complex age together in a series of complementary snapshots that bring new points of observation to readers’ minds. Most of the book treats sixteenth-century developments, but his detailed depiction of the seven images of Luther that he finds dominating the last three centuries of Luther interpretation (prophet, demon-loving heretic, omni-Protestant figurehead, cultural icon, liberal Protestant, national Gargantua, and Catholic reformer) is fascinating in its presentation of how Luther could so often be employed to oppose his own views. Ocker certainly does not ignore the role of theology among the many factors that contributed to the Reformation and its enduring attraction as a topic of study and discussion. However, he sells the significance of the relationship with God for sixteenth-century Western Europeans short when he suggests that theology was important because of “the political stake rulers had in religious orthodoxy” (174). Certainly, some rulers made decisions regarding reform with careful political calculations, but both those who ignored the negative impact of religious decisions upon their political status and those who practiced shrewd politics sincerely wrote out private prayers and a few even learned the biblical languages to read scripture in its original form. Ocker’s brief recapitulation of the heart of Luther’s primary concern, summarized as “justification by faith,” lies at the heart of a significant omission in his analysis. Ocker does not adequately treat Luther’s transformation of the definition of what it means to be “justified”—to be Christian— because he fails to recognize the reformer’s distinction between two aspects of human righteousness. Luther distinguished the “passive justice” (better “righteousness”), given by God’s unconditional love and grace for his chosen, from his “active justice,” which consists in obedient performance of God’s will for daily life in the love and service that trust in Christ that God’s gift of righteousness motivates (107). This change of definition, clearly, played a role alongside a host of other religious, social, and political factors. But despite the lack of “conversion” accounts that Ocker notes, Luther’s rejection of a ritual-based, hierarchically governed understanding of Christian life and his recognition of trust in Christ in response to God’s unreserved embrace of sinners as the center of Christian living seems to have played a significant role in expediting rather rapid change in personal religious convictions and allegiances. Even at points of disagreement, Ocker stimulates and offers new perspectives and insights. This volume will provoke lively discussion and the deepening of insights into the dynamics let loose by that Wittenberg “monk, priest, intellectual, and revolutionary” (13) on the next five centuries.