Denmark should be a fundamental part of Reformation studies. King Christian III converted the kingdom with forceful decisiveness after 1536 and remained a devout ruler with deep and ongoing ties to Wittenberg. A revised liturgy prepared by Johannes Bugenhagen was soon in use in the cathedrals and in the 1,730 or so parish churches scattered across the land. Nearly all these smaller churches were built in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, giving them a remarkable coherence of form. Martin Wangsgaard Jürgensen undertakes to study the effects of the Reformation in these churches, which met the spiritual needs of the vast majority of the population. (With few exceptions, the cathedrals and the urban churches in Copenhagen and Elsinore are absent from the discussion.) The author asks four basic questions: what did rural churches look like in the middle of the fifteenth century? How did they change between ca. 1450 and 1600? How were they integrated into public and private ceremony? And how were these churches perceived and experienced by those who used them?

The book is divided into two main parts. The first examines the physical state of these parish churches before and after the Reformation, and the second the more ephemeral human interaction with them. In both parts, Jürgensen takes a broad view, evaluating phenomena through a survey of a vast number of examples. There is much information of significance for our understanding of the Reformation and the arts. Nearly all parish churches had wall paintings, usually with religious subjects; sixty are known to have been painted after the Reformation. While many were whitewashed, in most cases this was done in the second half of the eighteenth century. The medieval altarpieces were rarely removed, and alterations were usually to update them—adding all'antica ornament, for instance—rather than to make substantive changes on theological grounds. Medieval crucifixes remained undisturbed in the churches, and where necessary more were added after the Reformation. There were, in fact, very few physical changes to the churches after 1536: the introduction of pulpits (relatively rare in medieval churches), confessional chairs (which are often associated with Catholic rather than Protestant worship), and pews stand out in an otherwise unchanging church room.

Jürgensen proposes that it is in the use and perception of these items that the effects of the Reformation can be discerned. He reconstructs the celebration of the Mass, baptism, and other ceremonies within the Reformed church, as well as the place of women and others who used the church. Much of this is very informative, but also necessarily speculative, since it requires the reconstruction of ephemeral experience. However, the broad, generalizing view employed throughout the book is less effective here, since, as he notes, there is no such thing as a “typical” parish priest. Nor is there a “typical” parishioner (423). Thus, as late as 1606 the king ordered a statue of Saint Dionysius removed from the church in Krogstrup because the parishioners adorned and venerated it on the former Catholic feast days (352). Certainly this was exceptional, but it stresses the variety of ways in which laypeople responded to changes in the liturgy and religious life in the kingdom, which cannot easily be accounted for in theological texts, church ordinances, royal proclamations, and other textual and material evidence comprising the available sources. Private patronage within parish churches is also difficult to account for in a synthetic survey, since it often reflects the personal, rather than parochial, needs and tastes of the commissioning elite. Jürgensen is well aware of these challenges, however, and does not draw conclusions where none can be drawn.

Even with these limitations, Jürgensen has provided a wealth of information and ideas on the Reformation church in Denmark, distilled from a vast group of monuments and textual sources, most known only to a small group of specialists. I hope that it will also help scholars of the Reformation to recognize the riches for the field that are to be found in Denmark.