Lutheran theology and religious practice re-shaped traditions from the ritual heritage of the Medieval Latin Church. Throughout the cultural history of European Lutheran areas, what came to be seen as 'the arts' may be discussed in the light of (changing) Lutheran traditions: the cultural heritage of Martin Luther. This volume presents a collection of nine essays on Lutheran traditions and the arts within the 500 years since the Reformation, as a special issue of the journal 'Transfiguration' in connection with the Tenth International Congress for Luther Research hosted at the Department of Church History, University of Copenhagen.

Continuity and change enclose a problem field that is fundamental to the interpretation of historical material. On the one hand the notions that are necessary to perceive the historical account as a narrative: continuity, tradition, constancy, consistency, identity; on the other those that provide an impetus or drive to that account: change, innovation, rupture, or discontinuity. Resonances: Historical Essays on Continuity and Change explores the historiographical question of the modes of interrelation between these motifs in historical narratives. The essays in the collection attempt to realize theoretical consciousness through historical narrative 'in practice', by discussing selected historical topics from Western cultural history, within the disciplines of history, literature, visual arts, musicology, archaeology, philosophy, and theology. The title Resonances indicates the overall perspective of the book: how connotations of past meanings may resonate through time, in new contexts, assuming new meanings without surrendering the old.

The polyphonic lauda had its place of prominence in the lay devotional confraternities in Italian cities in the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. A main theme of this volume is the influence of art music in devotional contexts dominated by ritual functionality, where a modern aesthetic perspective is rarely employed. The authors raise fundamental questions about the validity of such a distinction between functional simplicity and aesthetic sensibility, where the latter is usually reserved for advanced, secular genres such as opera and the madrigal. The question of an aesthetics avant la letter as applied to devotional practices in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance is examined through analyses of records from youth confraternities in Renaissance Florence. Further, the use during the seventeenth century of the traditional genre of the lauda in settings which stylistically reflect polyphonic art music is discussed and exemplified through the publication of 19 polyphonic laude from a seventeenth-century manuscript found in the archives of the Cathedral of Florence. Combining aspects of recent scholarship in musicology, liturgical history, and confraternity studies, the authors (a musicologist and a church historian) explore both the devotional use of stylistically advanced music in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as well as the idea that the beauty of music enhances devotion. The volume features an introduction and six chapters as well as a substantial appendix consisting of edited texts and music for several laude.

The meaning of the noun 'creation', and the verb 'to create', range from the traditional theological idea of God creating ex nihilo to a more recent sense of the process of artistic conception. This collection of thirteen essays, written by scholars of music, literature, the visual arts, and theology, explores the complicated relationship between medieval rituals and theology, and the development of an idea of human artistic creation, which came to the fore in the sixteenth century. The volume concentrates on the period from the Carolingians to the Counter-Reformation but also includes some twentieth-century musicians. Each essay is dedicated to a particular topic concerned with ritual or artistic beginnings, inventions, harmony and disharmony, as well as representations or celebrations of creation. Central themes include the interplay of the ideas of God as creator, of God acting and recreating in medieval liturgy, of God as artist - the deus artifex of the Pythagorean cosmology, which was occasionally referred to as recently as the early nineteenth century - and, finally, of the homo creator, a concept in which man reflected (and eventually replaced) God in his artistic creativity. This book therefore features new, significant, individual contributions from a range of scholarly disciplines, but, taken as a whole, it also constitutes a complex interdisciplinary study, with large-scale historical constructions. The essays in this volume, by scholars across a range of disciplines, explore the historical construction of and changes to the concept and experience of creation.