About the Project

This on-line bibliographical database of Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed sermons published in German-speaking Europe between 1517 and 1650 is an ambitious, multi-year project that involves locating and identifying the contents of one of the most significant literary genres to be published in the century after the Reformation.

In the largely illiterate society of early modern Europe, sermons were an essential tool used by the educated elite to teach, inform, and indoctrinate the common man and woman concerning religious, political and social issues. Preaching was the most important means of both propagating and combating the spread of new religious ideas in the wake of the Reformation. As the boundaries between the Catholic, Lutheran and Reformed churches hardened, preaching became the central element of each church's efforts to teach its adherents correct doctrine, warn them against heresy, and instill a confessional identity.

Sermons were by no means limited to doctrine, however. They also commented on and responded to current events, provided popular history lessons on the distant (both Biblical and classical) as well as the more recent past, reinforced gender roles and patterns of social and political hierarchy, presented models of comportment and attitudes to be imitated, and provided patterns for interpreting life events, particularly in difficult circumstances such as sickness and death.

Sermons preached on specific occasions reveal fundamental attitudes and outlooks of the period; thus wedding sermons inform us about the proper relations between husband and wife, sermons preached at the installation of new governments contain discussions of the duties of political office, and sermons on rare phenomena such as comets or disasters such as earthquakes tell us much about views of nature and science.

The study of sermons raises questions about the transmission of ideas and thought patterns in the early modern period and sheds light on aspects of popular culture and popular religious practice not provided by other sources.

Our bibliographic database will give scholars a much more precise overview of preaching within each confession by identifying popular or often-reprinted sermons and their authors, and by revealing patterns of publication (where, when, and by what printers), distribution (which and what kind of sermons circulated only locally, and which ones ended up in more distant territories), and patronage (as indicated in prefaces or dedications).

This bibliographical information will provide a better framework for scholars to categorize the vast number of Lutheran sermons. It will also make clear the number of sermon publications by Catholic and Reformed authors, generating more research on preaching within these confessional churches and prompting cross-confessional comparisons.

The bibliographical database will be a valuable tool for researchers working in a variety of related disciplines, not only those interested in historical theology but also intellectual and cultural historians, scholars from art history, the history of science, and the history of political thought, of books and printing, and of folklore and popular culture.

The database will also provide location information for these sermons, so that scholars will know in which libraries they are preserved. This information is particularly important for North American scholars who generally have only a limited time to work in European libraries, since it will enable them to plan their visits to Europe more effectively.

This website was developed at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities. The project team includes Zach Bajaber, Karin Dalziel, Brian L. Pytlik Zillig, Stacy Rickel, Katherine L. Walter and Laura Weakly from CDRH, along with students Kory Bajus and Jeff Godfrey.