Kirche, Kunst und Kanzel: Luther und die Folgen der Reformation. Rolf Bothe. Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2017. 280 pp. €36.
tastes of the Florentine socio-political and cultural community. In late fifteenth-century Basel, a pastoral phenomenon arose: a cycle of fifty sermons on the prodigal son by Johan Meder. Meder’s preaching assumed a self-consciously dramatic form, as particular to him as his version’s trajectory, ending not with the father’s reception of his son but with a meditation on the Passion, in which the prodigal son assumes the characteristics of the sponsa Christi. The sermons were printed as an illustrated book, with a poetic introduction by Sebastian Brant and woodcuts by the artists who illustrated his Narrenschiff—a unique format for a fifteenth-century sermon collection. Delcorno turns at last to the new religious environment of the sixteenth century in German regions. In his consideration of both Lutheran and Catholic uses of the parable, he draws an intriguing conclusion: both saw the prodigal son as “the perfect mirror in which to contemplate one’s own life. The image reflected in the mirror was, however, no longer the same for everyone” (17).