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Martin Luther: Learning for Life. By Marilyn J. Harran. St. Louis: Concordia, 1997. 284 pp. $16.99 paper.

Louthan integrates the study of the court into the larger religious history of the age. He also makes very good use of artistic, literary, and ceremonial materials. Strikingly, he describes the 1563 procession of Maximilian into Vienna. Using the plans of court historian Wolfgang Lazius, Louthan details Lazius's traditional Catholic emphasis and contrasts this with the dynamic humanist ideas evident in the architecture of Jacopo Strada. The politicalreligious significance of Maximilian's entry finds a counterpart in the emperor's funeral more than a decade later. Louthan here contrasts the funeral ritual capturing Maximilian for all time as a Hapsburg within the traditional Catholic and imperial trappings, with Crato's funeral oration describing a very different and irenic emperor. As Louthan shows clearly, public ritual and liturgy had powerful political meanings that were fiercely contested among partisans. The Quest for Compromise is not without problems, however. While the author has demonstrated the presence of irenic voices in Vienna, he provides little evidence to show that these men constituted a movement to be termed "irenicism" or even advanced a consistent program. Despite the frequent correspondence and contact among them, a group of men advocating something as general as "conciliation and compromise" does not an irenic party make. As a result, we cannot assess the significance of these voices. The separate episodes Louthan details so well do not quite add up to a larger argument. The author has also tended to present the moderates in a favorable light, while reserving harsher judgment for the forces of Counter Reformation. This reviewer agrees, but the motives of these four irenicists receive relatively little attention from the author. The most serious difficulty, however, lies in the very breadth of materials he has tried to analyze. This short book presents four very different figures and a series of disparate episodes involving the history of literature, diplomacy, art, and architecture. This would be daunting even in a much longer book. But here the brevity of individual accounts makes them far less compelling. At one point, for example, the author undertakes a "close reading" or Maximilian's funeral, involving a politically portentous ritual, an official sermon designed to capture Maximilian II for the Counter Reformation, and a counter-oration by Johannes Crato establishing the emperor as a moderate and tolerant man. The author presents this as a struggle "for the soul of Central Europe" (134). The dose reading, however, takes place in a mere eight pages, which barely allows the author to mention the funeral and briefly synopsize the sermons. This makes it very difficult for the reader to assess either the argument or the sources. These criticisms aside, Howard Louthan's book introduces a distinctive perspective on sixteenth-century religious conflict. In doing so he cautions us about oversimplifying ideas about confessionalization. Louthan also presents a dense tapestry of court and religious life. Anyone seeking to understand the Holy Roman Empire will want to consult the author's deft use of a rich array of materials. All scholars will anticipate further and deeper work from so creative an historian.