This extraordinarily rich and beautifully produced book is a major contribution to the current debate on the nature of early modern religion. For those fortunate enough to have viewed any of the twenty-four volumes of the “Wickiana” in the Zentralbibliothek in Zurich, with their remarkable color illustrations, Mauelshagen’s monograph captures the sheer vivacity, intellectual curiosity, and fascination with human nature of their compiler, the Swiss Protestant minister Johann Jacob Wick (1522–88). What is in these volumes? Just about anything you can imagine. Wick did not write a chronicle or diary but assembled accounts from anywhere he could concerning wonders, miraculous events, and strange stories, as well as political news and quotidian affairs. In Zurich, Wick was at the heart of an extensive information network that stretched across Europe and beyond. His most significant source was the correspondence of the leading reformer Heinrich Bullinger, whose surviving 12,000 letters are but a remainder of what would have been available in the sixteenth century. Among his many achievements in this book, Mauelshagen provides a meticulous reconstruction of Wick’s industry in gathering material, often from some quite unlikely sources. The “Wickiana,” although breathtakingly extensive, was by no means odd or unique: it belonged to a flourishing literary culture in German lands devoted to portents and wonders, and Wick was a member of a network of learned scholars who eagerly assembled and exchanged news.

Mauelshagen focuses on a large early modern collection of material to address some very weighty questions. He explores conceptions of wonders and portents prevalent in Wick’s day, and how subsequent Enlightenment and modern interpretations of both religion and magic have created narratives of the Reformation based on attitudes towards these phenomena. Not surprisingly, the world post Kant and Weber has been largely dismissive of the supernatural, preferring the language of superstition. The point is by no means new, but Mauelshagen takes the reader beyond a few general observations to provide a detailed and carefully prosecuted account of how from the eighteenth century historians, folklorists, and anthropologists (to name only some) have variously interpreted the wondrous in the premodern world. The book, therefore, succeeds as both an exacting and sophisticated examination of Wick and wonder literature in the sixteenth century and as a cultural history of the study of early modern religion.

Central to Mauelshagen’s treatment of Wick is the necessity of understanding historia, and what it meant in the sixteenth century. Prior to the eighteenth century historia for students of natural history meant experience. Failure to grasp this early modern vocabulary leaves us within a post-Enlightenment frame of thought that sees Wick’s efforts as little more than a jumble of stories randomly collected. Wick, however, knew his purpose differently. Through collecting experiences he was proving their verity, demonstrating their factual truth. Experiences teach that portents are harbingers of disaster, something that can be known. Wick, therefore, had no sense that he was dealing with superstition, as later historians would designate such accounts, but rather acted as an interpreter or observer of divine signs in the world.

The simplicity of many of the stories belies the complexity of their role in the life of the Zurich church. They were not merely freak stories for amusement, though there is no doubt they possessed an element of entertainment, but were regarded as integral to the social, political, theological, and pastoral life of the Reformed church community. Mauelshagen carefully reconstructs how Wick’s labors were part of the larger historical project in Zurich, which included the writing of Bullinger’s History of the Reformation, recently analyzed by Christian Moser. Wick understood signs and portents not only as commentary on the current moral state of the Christian world, but also as part of a larger theological view of history: signs of God’s covenantal relationship with humanity.

This is a highly sophisticated book that does not easily permit brief summary, and as a matter of urgency it should be translated into English. Intellectually, this study inhabits the world of German-language debates and scholarship. Its invaluable contribution would only be enhanced by engagement with recent work by, for example, Stuart Clark, Euan Cameron, and Alexandra Walsham.