Year: 2021
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: This chapter deals with the ways in which Jerusalem, both the earthly city and the notional promised future home, was present in the early modern Lutheran church interior. Whereas the examples on which the following builds are culled from the churches of Denmark, the conclusions drawn would certainly fit developments in churches across Scandinavia. Written sources from Germany are thus also quoted to show how the trends discussed here were a part of a larger, shared tradition. The Lutheran tradition, as it developed through the early modern period, inherited a rich fund of thinking and imagery from a medieval church transformed according to the theological concepts that came out of the confessional upheavals of the sixteenth century. It should accordingly be stressed from the outset that Jerusalem had not disappeared from church interiors by the onset of the Reformation. Jerusalem was as much present in the new Lutheran churches as it had been before, only it was now found in other places and in other forms.1 How the celestial city was envisioned and interpreted has varied over time, but the basic idea of it being the true heavenly home for mankind can hardly be described as anything but a significant, continuous trope in Christian thinking across all confessional divides. The question, when entering a church from a given period, is therefore not whether the complex of ideas around Jerusalem is represented or not, but more specifically in what form they occur. However, before we turn to the Lutheran church interior, it would be well to address a number of issues pertaining to the Middle Ages in order to clarify developments that followed the Reformation.
Source: De Gruyter eBooks
Author: Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen
Institutions: National Museum of Denmark, Danish Ministry of Culture
Language: English
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W3147588940