Sacred Souvenirs and Divine Curios—Lutherans, Pilgrimage, Saints and the Holy Land in the Seventeenth Century

Abstract

This article explores the surprisingly positive attitude towards pilgrimage and saints that developed within mainstream Lutheran faith during the Seventeenth Century. To acknowledge this strand in the theology of the 1600s in some ways runs contrary to what is often stated about the period, the heyday of Lutheran Orthodoxy, and to a certain extent incompatible with what is generally perceived as ‘Lutheran’. I aim to show the 1600s as a period with a great curiosity towards the development of new devotional practice, and a time when the search for devotional tools which could help the individual to come closer to Christ led theologians to explore texts and ideas that at least superficially could be seen as belonging to the Catholic side of the confessional divide.

1. Introduction

This article explores the at times forgotten positive attitude towards pilgrimage and saints that developed within mainstream Lutheran faith during the Seventeenth Century. What is to be discussed over the following pages thus in some ways runs contrary to what is often stated about Evangelical confessional culture in the 1600s, the heyday of Lutheran Orthodoxy, and to a certain extent incompatible with what is generally perceived as ‘Lutheran’. I aim to show the 1600s as a period with a great curiosity towards the development of new devotional practice, and a time when the search for devotional tools which could help the individual to come closer to Christ led theologians to explore texts and ideas that at least superficially could be seen as belonging to the Catholic side of the confessional divide. A prime example will prove to be the productive Danish writer and theologian Niels Heldvad, who held a pivotal role in Denmark, when it came to promoting such curiosity and openness.

A good way into this topic is through two boxes, dating from the Seventeenth Century and containing rocks from the Holy Land, that are stored in the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. While depicted several times, the boxes have never been thoroughly discussed and in particular their context, or the milieu into which they came when they were brought from Palestine, invites further exploration. One could for instance ask, why bring boxes of rocks from the Holy Land to Lutheran Denmark during the 1600s? Were they simple souvenirs, or can more be said about them? I think the latter is the case and in what follows I hope to unfold why. As will become apparent, this discussion brings us into touch with the role of saints and pilgrimage in the wake of the Lutheran reformation.

In the attempt to present the theological climate into which these two boxes were introduced, the conclusions reached are rooted in a Danish context and first and foremost refer to developments within seventeenth-century Denmark. However, it will soon be apparent that if we are to understand the Danish context, we need to look at the wider Lutheran world of the period and what is to be presented here in many ways has bearing on attitudes within the larger Lutheran sphere and is thus not solely a Danish matter.

One further caveat should be stated. Certain generalizing statements about Lutheran theology are made in order to keep the focus on matters at hand. While there is a long trajectory for the differentiation between Orthodoxy and Pietism as well as between Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists, these conceptual distinctions are of little use when looking at the materials to be discussed here.

2. Two Boxes Full of Pebbles

In the Danish National Museum two very similar boxes are stored containing sand, pebbles and gravel from the Holy Land (Figure 1 and Figure 2). The dating of them is not entirely certain, as we do not know who brought them to the country or when they arrived. We do know that one of them was part of the royal cabinet of curiosities, the ‘Kunstkammer’, in 1674, when it was listed in the inventory (Bente Gundestrup 1997, p. 190). Today this box is stored in the ethnographical collection of the National Museum. The other box we know almost nothing about, except that it is today a part of the museum’s Renaissance collection. In both boxes the contents are meticulously sorted into labelled compartments with inscriptions in Latin noting from where the bits and pieces were gathered. The boxes themselves are very similar. The first (inv.no. EFa7) measures c. 9.7 × 4.7 cm, while the other (inv.no. 761) measures c. 9.2 × 5 cm. Of roughly the same size, then, and both probably fashioned from olive wood, they also both carry the same decoration on the outside of the lid, where we find so-called ‘Jerusalem crosses’ shaped from nacre inlaid as intarsia into the polished, wooden surface. The description of the contents, written on paper, is in both cases pasted to the interior of the lid, using more or less the same wording to describe what is seen. In the first one (inv.no. EFa7) we find (

Table 1. The description of the content in each separate compartment of box EFa7 (see also Figure 1).

De domo Simonis leprosi.	Vbi Xp̅s. trāsfigurat est	Vbi sustita- uit lazar.	Vbi flenit super Iērusalem	Vbi Xp̅s. ieiuniavit.	Vbi dixit Simonis dor- mis	Vbi Xp̅s captus est
Vbi Xp̅s, docuit ara- re.	Vbi Xps, orabat.	Vbi p ҃dixit Indicium.	Vbi caelos ascendit.	Vbi reliqt. octo Apost	De Villa Belfage.	De agro Sanguinis.
De deserto S. Ioan. Bapt.	Vbi latuit M. V. ia Bethlem.	Vbi Thomas accepit cin- gulum.	De Natatoria Siloe.	De domo Larlaei. [?]	De Torrente Cedrum. [Cedrom?]	Vbi coadit baidans [bardis?] oncsaesam [occasum?]

):

The contents of the second (inv.no. 761) are listed as (

Table 2. The description of the content in each separate compartment of box 761 (see also Figure 2).

1 ubi latuit B.v.m. in Bethlem	4 vbi Angeli ad porte orei	7 vbi M. in Templo	10 vbi obiit B. v. M.	13 vbi Elia Dormiuit
2 De porta Aurea	5 De Domo Dauit	8 De Domo s. ioseph	11 De Domo s. inocenti	14 De Domo s. iacobi
3 De Fonte B. v. M.	6 De Natatoriæ silue	9 vbi M. uizitavit Elizabet	12 De luto surdanis	15 De Decerto s. ioanes

):

We do not know how the boxes came to Denmark, but we may safely assume that they came back with the many Danes visiting the Bible lands during the 1600s. The Lutheran nobleman Henrik Rantzow, the grandson of the Henrik Rantzow mentioned below, for instance brought a small wooden copy of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem (Figure 3) from Palestine, which again ended up in the royal cabinet of curiosities accompanied by the text: ‘It is said to have been brought hither by the unflagging pilgrim Sir Henrico Rantzovio…’.1 We should probably not envision the boxes being carried back together, but rather, that they represent two individual purchases made by different travellers. Despite the similarities, the boxes were in all likelihood produced by different artisans, and their similarity undoubtedly tells us that we ought see them as highly standardized, almost mass produced, objects catering to the market of travellers to the Holy Land looking for mementos to take home.

While the boxes have been mentioned in passing by different scholars, both from the National Museum and from elsewhere, they have never been fully discussed, and the consensus seems to be that they represent curios brought back home to Denmark as souvenirs.2 While this interpretation by no means can be dismissed, it is perhaps a hasty and slightly superficial judgement on the relevance or significance which these boxes might conceivably have for both the traveller who visited the Holy Land and the Lutheran society to which the traveller then returned. Yet, that judgement more or less reflects what Donald R. Howard tells us about the attitudes of Protestants visiting the Holy Land (Howard 1980). In his now classic study, he stressed that one finds no or only little devotional or even religious material in the travel accounts that he researched. To him, the Protestant writers of Northern Europe were first and foremost the curious agents of some sort of proto-enlightenment.3 His work has since its publication been met with severe handling and as will be apparent here, I too would disagree with his assessment. Yet, the question to be answered is of course, what status these collections of pebbles and rocks from biblical sites can be understood to have held. Were they relics, possessing spiritual if not sacred qualities, or did they solely represent mementos from long and presumably successful journeys?

While the boxes under scrutiny here are early modern, the tradition for collections such as these have deep roots in the Early Church. In the Museo Sacro in the Vatican, we find for instance a very similar box stored, although containing not rocks and sand, but the bone fragments of saints from the Holy Land and dated to the Sixth Century.4 Despite the difference in contents the similarity is striking, and the custom of cherishing such relics continued throughout the Middle Ages along with the tradition of collecting such natural souvenirs or material as stones and water from Palestine, as we find documented in the records of the relics amassed in the Danish churches by the end of the medieval period (Sumption 1975, pp. 77–81; Elsner 1997, pp. 117–30; Groves 2012, pp. 681–700). For instance, the Church of Our Lady in Copenhagen around 1520 held among its precious treasures, in a vessel described as ‘the new white silver egg’ (‘ouo albo novo argenteo’), earth from the place irrigated by the blood of Christ, from the Mount of Calvary, from the Holy Sepulchre, from the place of the ascension, from the place of the day of Pentecost, from the pillar by which Christ was whipped, from the river Jordan and from the grave of the Virgin Mary, and more valuable still, wood from the Holy Cross.5 Even in small parish churches we find small rocks and pebbles from Palestine buried along with grains of incense in the high altars, as for instance in the late medieval altar of Sanderum Church on the island of Funen (Danmarks Kirker: Odense amt 1933, p. 2951). The terra sancta thus maintained a strong and physical presence in the medieval churches of the North, and a certain precedence for collecting and bringing back rocks and other memorabilia from the lands of the Bible clearly existed prior to the Danish Evangelical Reformation of 1536.

In the boxes at the National Museum, we do not find bones, but solely pebbles and gravel. Exactly this could be the crucial point of them and in fact, what made them relevant or acceptable to the Lutheran buyer. How that may have come about is a topic to which we shall return below. For now, I wish to stress how carefully the mementos collected in these boxes are curated and almost constitute what we might call a pars pro toto representation of the Holy Land. When reading through the descriptions of the contents and studying what is contained in each of the small compartments a religious world or a biblical landscape emerges to be taken in as a whole, but also to be meditated upon one compartment and sacred site at a time. The combination of such descriptions as ‘De porta Aurea’ (‘The Golden Gate’) and the contents of the box invites the owner to gaze upon the collected mementos, and an inner dialogue between stored knowledge of the Holy Land, the Bible narrative and the beholder very likely is set in motion.6

Such dialectics between devotional objects, or what we perhaps should rather call devotional tools, and the user is well known throughout the medieval period.7 The already mentioned box of relics from the Museo Sacro represents a privileged version of the same thing in so far as it contains specimens of the finite amount of bone surviving from holy men and women. The boxes from the National Museum contrast sharply in so far as they are filled with common rocks and thus represent what was readily available, exactly like images and texts that could also be freely copied and distributed. Nevertheless, in a medieval understanding, rocks and other natural material from holy sites are much closer to the relics of saints in so far as they stem from the vicinity of the sacred manifestation, as do contact relics, and furthermore are not of human creation. The rocks are in this sense pure, and any quality invested in them resides within the beholder because the simple rock, like a splinter of wood or bone, needs an origin story in order to acquire worth, unlike for instance a piece of art. This, I would argue, came to be an important quality for the Protestants and in particular the Lutherans who visited the Holy Land and acquired such collections.

Rather than identifying the two Copenhagen boxes as either souvenirs or relics, I would suggest that they were both, but were perhaps just as importantly tools giving access to the interior, spiritual world of the beholder or possessor. Instead of constituting sacred objects in their own right, like the bones in the box at the Vatican museum, they mediated or paved the way to the sacred without holding any explicit sacredness in themselves. The rocks and pebbles, when presented as a whole, were a portal which beckoned entry, and what we might call mental pilgrimage. The pilgrimage of the mind had been a common theme throughout the Middle Ages, and had in fact been promoted as the ideal mode of spiritual travel by a surprisingly large number of influential medieval theologians, who often wrote about pilgrimage with caution.8 The critical attitude thus already found early expression among the church fathers: Jerome famously in his second letter to Paulinus of Nola stated that going to Jerusalem in itself was a meaningless act in so far as it was how the pilgrim lived, not where the pilgrim went, that mattered. As he put it, ‘The true worshippers worship the Father neither at Jerusalem nor on mount Gerizim; for “God is a spirit, and they that worship Him must worship Him in spirit and in truth. Now the spirit bloweth where it listeth, and the earth is the Lord’s and the fulness thereof.”’9

By the late Middle Ages, then, the notion of mental pilgrimage had a rich precedence within religious culture, as it had been developed within the monastic orders where the urge to go on pilgrimage clearly challenged the stabilitas of the cloistered community.10 When Lutherans started to think about the concept of pilgrimage again after the initial upheavals of the Reformations in the first part of the Sixteenth Century, it was a concept which was soon intertwined with the search for appropriate, evangelical devotional practices.

3. The Lure of the Holy Land

After a period of apparent hesitance during the second half of the Sixteenth Century, Protestants, and among them also Danish Lutherans, began to visit the Holy Land again. The reasons for this resumption have been interpreted differently by scholars with conclusions similar to those concerning the two boxes with relics in the National Museum. Henny Glarbo was the first to produce a survey of this wanderlust among Danes during the late Sixteenth and the Seventeenth Centuries, and she saw the Lutherans travelling to the Bible lands as curious tourists, who at times were almost, but only almost, inclined to believe what their Franciscan guides told them concerning the sites they were shown.11 Most recently Janus Møller Jensen virtually reached the opposite conclusion in an article reexamining the sources presented by Glarbo. To him, these travels were a direct continuation of the medieval practice of pilgrimage and, he argues, ideas of knighthood and crusading in the Holy Land became a political strategy of the Danish king to bolster faith as well as to legitimize national identity (Jensen 2012, pp. 197–231).

The conclusions of Glarbo and Møller Nielsen are relevant, but the fact is that both of them overlook what Lutherans in the Seventeenth Century were actually attempting when they wrote about not only the Holy Land and pilgrimage, but also the veneration of saints. Rather than reading the accounts of travellers such as the Dane Otto Skram, who wrote his memoirs of a journey to the Holy Land in 1661, as a more or less secularized tourist account, or considering such autobiographical texts as a sort of crypto-Catholic survival from the Middle Ages, it is reasonable to assume that these travel accounts as well as descriptions based on secondary sources fed into an ongoing discourse within the Lutheran community.12 To take the passive tone of the travel accounts as an expression of the writer’s own feelings is misleading. Taking a cue from recent studies into early modern tales of travel, I shall try to explain here why that might be.

Beginning surprisingly fast after the Reformations in the 1520s and 30s, evangelical writers in the late Sixteenth Century embarked on an attempt to reclaim or secure their own biblical heritage and come to terms with the devotional practices of the past. Among theologians of the early Reformation period we find a very cautious, if not directly critical, tone, which is also manifest in the Danish Church Ordinance of 1539, where for instance we read that the laity should be encouraged to give to the poor and to Christ what they previously had ‘… given for masses, monks, for the souls, for indulgences, for pilgrimages and other such wild and wrong godly service, indeed mockery of God…’.13 The crucial point of objection here is of course the indulgences, and once these had been abandoned the negotiation of a new path for the devotional practice of the church began. The kernel for this too we find in the Church Ordinance of 1539, which instructs that pastors should preach ‘… how the saints can be honoured without petition and all wrong devotion.’14 This sentiment had already been stated clearly in the Confessio Augustana (article 21) and its Apologia (article 21) as an invitation to rethink the concept of saints and sainthood, and this is exactly what the theologians began to do by the end of the century.

From the early Seventeenth Century, the acceptance of saints and what could be termed pilgrim travel were gradually more confidently endorsed as legitimate elements in devotional practice, if only performed in the right frame of mind. Early exponents of this trend were theologians like the German Andreas Musculus, whose writings from the 1550s clearly begin to embrace pre-Reformation devotional texts and introduce them into his own Evangelical reading (Althaus der Ältere 1927; Frandsen 2006, pp. 117–22). We can also turn to the writings of Martin Moller, active a few decades after Musculus, and find an equally strong preoccupation with what by then might be termed ‘Catholic’ texts and practices, which then again can be followed into the tremendously popular writings of Paul Gerhardt (Axmacher 1989, 2001; Steiger 2007). The books by Musculus and Moller were notably published in several editions as well as translations and their popularizing efforts should be seen as the first steps towards the developments under discussion here. Let me try to illustrate this with some examples.

In 1587 the German Lutheran Heinrich Bünting published his famous Itinerarium Novi Testamenti, das ist, eine Reisebuch uber das Newe Testament in Magdeburg—a book on the world of the Bible and its cultural history. It is an ambitious endeavour, which even attempts a sort of proto-archaeology when he discusses the historical coins of the biblical period (Sundquist 2005, pp. 115–23). His aim is to achieve as much precision and depth in his portrayal as possible. Indeed, Bünting very carefully takes his readers by the hand and leads them into the setting of the Bible narrative to show “Wie es eigentlich gewesen ist”, which is exactly the goal of the book. It is one of the early Lutheran accounts of the Holy Land and it is tinged with staunch hostility towards previous devotional practices, the abandonment of which still was within living memory. Nevertheless, Bünting is opening the conversation about Jerusalem as the scene into which his readers can transpose themselves to engage with the biblical events on a spiritual level. As he states:

But it is even more delightful when one also delves into the New Testament and pays attention to the travels of the Virgin Mary, of the wise men from Orient, of the Lord Jesus Christ and his beloved apostles.15

Reading his thorough descriptions, in other words, becomes a meditation upon the Holy Land:

Is it not an incredible blessing that God has come from Heaven and walks among us in person on Earth and wanders for the sake of us poor humans from one place to another; to Jerusalem, to Canaan in Galilee, to Nazareth, to Capernaum and many other places? In truth, who rightly takes this to heart and studies it will be overwhelmed by a vast love and not be able to wonder enough at such great humility of the divine majesty.16

Bünting is of course careful not to invest anything specifically beneficial in his preoccupation with Jerusalem—his text avoids whatever might smack of indulgences or the belief in a particular efficacy of meditation. Instead, what he offers is to renew the tradition of virtual pilgrimage so well-known from the medieval period: ‘… It is through this work [Bünting’s book] that the reader will find himself a wholly new human being and a true wayfarer in the holy scripture going from one place to another…’17

Bünting does not use the word pilgrimage, and he is probably keenly aware of this fact. Yet, his work is a travel book which takes the discomforts of journeying from his readers, but leaves them to experience the essence of the sights to be seen. The text is as good as a firsthand experience, and to some degree he would even believe it to be better; reading the book renews the reader, and through the prism of Jerusalem sends the reader on the pilgrim’s path to Christ. His cultural history and geography of Palestine in effect aims at presenting a cleansed vision of the Holy Land, free from what Bünting undoubtedly would call ‘popish superstition’. He is thus taking it upon himself to be the eyes and ears of the reader, who through his pages is able to meditate upon the world of Christ, exactly like a pilgrim travelling through these realms.

There is a clear parallel between what Bünting does in his Itinerarium Novi Testamenti and what medieval writers did in their travel books to the Holy Land.18 However, we cannot speak of a clear-cut continuity of a medieval practice—indeed the very ambition of the Itinerarium seems to be to establish something new in line with Bünting’s Evangelical faith, and the similarity with previous texts is first and foremost the fact that they deal with the same sites or materials in an interplay with what we might call the cultural memory of Jerusalem.

As said, Bünting’s work is an early example of what quickly came to be a growing corpus of Lutheran texts on Jerusalem and the Holy Land. His aims with the book are never fully stated, but still seem clear. He is in effect beginning to take an Evangelical ownership over Jerusalem as the spatial setting for the narrative about Christ, in order to let his readers immerse themselves in this landscape and better their understanding of the Bible story. Later writers were much clearer about this purpose and wrote with an increasing daring, when it came to expressing a respect, acceptance or even open support to the idea of the journey as a pilgrimage and an undertaking which could be a very positive experience. The idea that Lutherans rejected pilgrimage as a concept is thus correct in one sense; they completely rejected the intrinsic spiritual efficacy of the ritual and indulgences connected to it as claimed by the pre-Reformation Church. But within a few decades after the Reformations, pilgrimage was creeping back into the conversation and clearly became part of the praxis pietatis of Evangelicals. Not, however, as a direct revival of past practices, but as something new. The fast shift from a cautious to a more open approach can be found in the book of another German written in 1604.

Johann Eger’s Itinerarium, das ist Reisebüchlein, published in Eisleben, is in many ways intended to test the waters, to find a way for the evangelical community to engage with the Holy Land, which he clearly understands to be a sacred territory invested with special meaning. His first step in this is to acknowledge that the Bible is full of references to pilgrims and pilgrimage. Where Bünting guardedly writes about a ‘wayfarer’, Eger goes all the way. He mentions the Old Testament patriarch Jacob, who described himself as a pilgrim to Pharaoh, he mentions King David, who likened his life to a pilgrimage, and continues with other examples illustrating how the idea of pilgrimage in itself is founded on biblical ground. Like Bünting, he stresses how Christ travelled on foot as a pilgrim from place to place in order to spread the gospel:

… we should also keep in mind the big sorrow, burden and trials that he on Earth through manifold dangerous travels here performed by water and by land, among Jews and heathens, in the country, in the cities, all of which was for the benefit of us poor humans.19

According to Eger, there is a correct way and a wrong way to be a pilgrim. For him the wrong way, unsurprisingly, is what is practised among Catholics, and what he defines as empty, meaningless ritual. You could, he states, wander to the end of the world without gaining anything by doing so, whereby he echoes what Paulinus of Nola already had stated in the Fifth Century. To be a pilgrim is not a task or any manner of thing that you do, it is what all humans are. They are not going on pilgrimage, they are pilgrims: ‘In order that we learn that we also are strangers in this world, pilgrims, and poor wayfaring brethren…’.20 Like Bünting Eger himself never visited the Holy Land, but he compiled his text from learned authorities on behalf of his readers ‘… that we also take an example from his [Christ’s] person and follow in his footsteps...’.21 By doing so and for instance knowing the distance in miles between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, or what the biblical sites ‘truly’ looked like, much is achieved: ‘... who diligently reads and contemplates this will only love the Lord Christ even more...’.22

Eger then characterizes all Christians as pilgrims, and to study the Holy Land is a mode of imitatio Christi. This was in itself not a Lutheran concept, but an idea embedded strongly within early modern religion in general. Yet, it featured particularly strongly in Protestant traditions, where for instance we find Arthur Dent’s popular Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven from 1601 and John Bunyan’s influential Pilgrim’s Progress from 1678.23 Within these texts, to ponder the challenges and burdens of travel in Palestine is to ponder the burdens Christ performed in his office on earth, and the reader through this also ideally should begin to see her or his own life as a reflection of the travails of Christ. The step from the use of the descriptive texts in Eger’s Itinerarium to the use of the two boxes from the National Museum as devotional tools is but a small one, and the potential meaning or function to the owner is clear. While the text offered one kind of specific information, the objects gathered in the boxes provided a different tactile experience of the Holy Land which, one might argue, would be as strong a catalyst for this sort of mental pilgrimage as the factual descriptions in the travel books.

Within the last two decades a number of groundbreaking studies have been performed concerning the attitude of Protestants towards the Holy Land, and not least their emotional responses to actually visiting the place and experiencing the biblical lands at first hand.24 The topic is complex, but scholars such as Paris O’Donnel and Sean Eric Clark have shown how nuanced and often self-contradictory these visits were during the Early Modern period, especially to bemused Protestants who found themselves in the hands of Franciscan guides when visiting Jerusalem. However, despite all their precautions and incredulity, Lutherans visiting Jerusalem and the traditional pilgrim sites of Palestine could not help but invest themselves in what they saw, and transform their journey into something which held value and spiritual meaning.

The travel writings of Lutherans and texts about the Holy Land developed over the course of the Seventeenth Century and as Clark has shown, the emphasis on Jerusalem gradually lessened. While a visit to the Holy City was almost inevitable for travellers in the Middle East, the visit slowly turned into a single stop in ever wider travels in the region, rather than being the goal of the tour. The reasons for this slow shift are probably many, but one undoubtedly is the gradual loss of the potency which late medieval indulgences and pilgrim culture had established. Instead, to Protestants, a visit to Jerusalem became what we could call a lived example of the ad fontes dictum. To see Jerusalem was in a sense to see the Bible and gain a deeper understanding of the Gospel narrative.

As Johann Eger states, all Christians were pilgrims, and although Lutherans rarely defined themselves as such when going to Jerusalem, they certainly did identify themselves with the concept. Looking beyond the heated debates about pilgrimage and the cult of saints during the turmoil surrounding the early Reformation period, it is clear that pilgrimage to the Holy Land was recognised in the Seventeenth Century and was a part of the Lutheran praxis pietatis both as an actual journey but especially as a mental exercise. This is often overlooked when discussing the Lutheran Church and its customs. It should be stressed though, that pilgrimage to Jerusalem should be seen as a highly specific venture, and different from say a visit to the shrine of a saint, or for that matter travel to Rome. Jerusalem as a space offered a potential for mnemonic, devotional and affective, intertextual experiences to Lutherans like no other, and in a sense they had to come to terms with the city as part of their biblical heritage in order to explain themselves and their history.

In other words it was specifically the Holy Land which to a certain degree made the development of a pilgrim practice possible to early modern Lutherans. It offered evangelical Protestants a chance to transcend the open understanding of all men and women as pilgrims, as the homo viator, and to see the hardships of life through the metaphor of the long pilgrim road. Jerusalem gave agency and allowed the abstract to turn into what was very real; an experience which was also sought through the reading of text, like these travel accounts, or the boxes with rocks and pebbles discussed here.25

4. Saints and Martyrs

Returning to Denmark, we could rightly ask if all these notions in any way manifested themselves in the Danish, Lutheran sphere. This they certainly did. Note for instance how the abovementioned Henrik Rantzow was described as an ‘unflagging pilgrim’ after his return from the Holy Land; a journey upon which he had embarked in 1623 and later published in his travel accounts of 1669.26 We find another primary expression of this in the work of the popular theologian Niels Heldvad.27 Helvad was closely aligned with the Danish King Christian IV whose reign cultivated what we often characterize today as the Lutheran Orthodoxy. To the devout Christian IV the bolstering of faith and religion among his subjects was a primary goal (Rasmussen 1957–1959, pp. 60–75; Johannsen 2010, pp. 89–115). His motto reads ‘Regna firmat pietas’ and one of the supporters in this endeavour was Niels Heldvad, who was among the first professional writers in Denmark. He took it upon himself to explain to his readers the Evangelical faith, its history and practices in plain language. In the first decades after the Danish Reformation in 1536 similar explanations had been attempted, not least by Peder Palladius, the first evangelical superintendent in the diocese of Zealand (Jacobsen 1925–1926, pp. 1–240). However, Heldvad’s scope was much larger and he wrote with the confidence of a by then one-hundred-year-old Lutheran identity. While at times polemical, especially directing his barbs against Calvinists, Heldvad’s underlying project was to reintegrate the Evangelical Church into the tradition, which also encompassed the medieval period and accordingly what by then had come to be perceived as ‘popish’ history. This was no easy task, but through several books on history, the church building, Lutheran ceremonies, astrology and much more, he carefully cultivated and curated his information to the readers, selecting from history what he found relevant and letting other things slip into obscurity.

In his volume Historiarum sacrarum encolpodion of 1634 Heldvad delves into the issues we have been discussing. The subtitle of the book explains why: ‘A new and useful book on Our Lord Jesus Christ including his holy apostles, the life and deeds of confessors and martyrs and the year, month and day on which everything took place […].28 The book opens with a retelling of the life of Christ with particular emphasis on dates and places, enabling the reader to engage in the Bible story not only through the actions and words, but also through the setting of Palestine: this is a mode we have already encountered.

Heldvad’s text enables the reader to follow in the footsteps of Christ and through the mind’s eye see and sense the places described. His project in other words comes close to the type of text compiled by Johann Eger. However, Heldvad goes deeper into the practices of the Roman Church and addresses the question of saints as well. Already the aforementioned Peder Palladius had in the 1540s written about the cult of saints, which he more or less rejected when it came to liturgical practices. Palladius recommends that the images of saints should be taken down from the altars, thus destroying the direct link between saint and mass.29 The images could, he says, be hung on the walls elsewhere in the church, where the saints would then serve as inspiring examples to the congregation of pious living. While he thus sees some value in the old images of holy men and women, he ultimately finds very little use for them, and one gets the impression that he would prefer to say as little about saints as possible, not an uncommon posture for the early Evangelical reformers, who clearly understood how complicated the issue was.

While early Lutherans like Palladius attempted to distance themselves from the practices of the Church in Rome in order to stabilize their own identity within a still very fragile situation, Heldvad did exactly the opposite. He clearly saw the potential in saints as a company that could play a much more active part in devotional life than decorative images in the backspaces of the church. Moving from the life of Christ and the apostles, Heldvad in his book leads the reader into a lengthy section on the history of the Church in Denmark, from the first missionaries and up until his own lifetime. In this section he discusses the deeds of bishops in each diocese and continues into a long digression on the pious acts of Danish kings, again reaching deep into the Middle Ages. He furthermore includes a somewhat condensed presentation of the history of Lutheran church ceremony, a subject he has dealt with extensively elsewhere (Heldvad 1622). At this stage the reader reaches the final and most remarkable part of the book; Heldvad now brings in a martyrology.

Protestant martyrologies are by no means exceptional and they became fashionable in the late Sixteenth Century as a way to strengthen confessional identity against the other factions of this veritable battleground (Gregory 2001). However, Heldvad’s martyrology is different from for instance John Foxe’s famous Actes and Monuments of 1563, in so far as the specific Protestant or Lutheran identity is somewhat blurred and not a single Protestant martyr is mentioned in the text. On the title page of the calendarium Heldvad states his purpose more or less clearly. It is:

An explanation of the annual calendar which we use within Christendom by which one can see and read what the teachings, life, faith and end of God’s martyrs has been and by what constancy unto death they confirmed their Christian belief. Also in what year, month, day and time they each on their own had fulfilled their suffering and martyrdom.30

By far the largest number of martyrs mentioned in the text are the traditional, universal saints of the Catholic Church; Agatha, Apollonia, Lawrence and Lucius to name but a few. While it is in itself interesting to note that Heldvad saw a worth in describing the life of these saints, or martyrs as he calls them in order to dodge any accusation of blatant Catholicism, it is even more noteworthy to find that he also includes so-called confessors, saints who did not die a martyr’s death. This, in a sense, defies the very purpose of a martyrology, but here Heldvad follows a medieval tradition in defining fervent faith as a sacrifice, and a life completely dedicated to God as a bloodless martyrdom. For instance, we find the Swedish Bridget of Vadstena presented in the month of February with the following words:

Another St. Bridget was a widow from Sweden who prophesied and predicted many incredible things of which many came to pass. One can read her books with great wonder. She died Anno Christi 1390.31

This is just one example of how Heldvad embraces the medieval past as a fund of knowledge, indeed inspiration, as a way to gain a better understanding of faith and ultimately of Christ. He here continues what Peder Palladius had already suggested roughly a hundred years earlier in the 1540s, but with a pronounced difference. What Palladius did, when advocating the removal of the images of saints from their altars and placing them elsewhere, was to strip them of context and most likely of a name, reducing them to simple illustrations of pious men and woman. Of course, local knowledge would carry on the identification of these repositioned altar images for a while, but the effect was most likely a gradual process of anonymization (Jürgensen 2022). Heldvad did the precise opposite; he gave the saints name and identity, he rebuilt their story and provided access to their lives. The difference is striking.

5. Heldvad, Jerusalem and the Church Building

The theme of Jerusalem looms large in Heldvad’s writings in general. This is also true for his Historiarum sacrarum encolpodion, where we find a history of Jerusalem and a thorough account of the destruction of the city. Saints and Jerusalem are in this way thematically linked by Heldvad, whose concept of mental pilgrimage is completely in line with what has been described above. It is furthermore relevant to note how early he begins to develop his openness towards devotional concepts which clearly, at least superficially, held great similarities to Catholic or pre-Reformation practice.

In 1600 he published the hymn ‘A merry star song about the Holy Three Kings, who travelled from the city of Susa in Persia to Jerusalem and Bethlehem in Judea […]’.32 The hymn perfectly illustrates the way that Lutherans came to be preoccupied with Jerusalem at the end of the Sixteenth Century, and the importance the temple gained among learned Lutherans as a symbol of the “true Church” (Jürgensen 2012a, pp. 316–343). In the hymn, Heldvad describes a double movement: on the surface of the text the focus is the journey of the three Magi to the Jesus child in Bethlehem, but the underlying narrative is about the pious Christian’s journey to the adult Christ. In the final part of the hymn we learn that just as the Magi travelled to honour the infant Jesus, the congregation of today should do the same and travel to seek Christ, who can be found, of course, in the local parish church. The end of the hymn thus concludes:

God beckons us to do the same:

Hear and heed his Words.

By this we gain eternal peace:

And to dwell with him.33

The poetic retelling of the Bible narrative in Heldvad’s hymn becomes a picture of the congregation on their way towards God just as the Magi were heading for the Christ child. This journey into the biblical past, which is also a journey into the eschatological future, is as we have seen a construct that Heldvad cultivated in his later writing, and at the core of it we find of course the concept of pilgrimage.

In noting his small booklet Tractatus de septem orbis miraculis from 1598, we again find relevant insights.34 Heldvad here firstly describes the seven wonders of the world. However, this is only a rhetorical introduction to the true topic of the book, which is the temple of Solomon in Jerusalem. He revealingly uses more or less as much space on the description of the temple as he allows to the other wonders altogether, and his point is of course, that the temple is the one true wonder and an achievement from which the pious reader should take his or her lesson. Heldvad accordingly makes a virtue of carefully describing the form, the materials and lavishness of Solomon’s temple: ‘In all, this temple was built most splendidly from fragrant cypress and cedar wood and marble in all manner of colours and with pure silver and gold and gems all over.’35

We may then ask why he finds it appropriate to put so much emphasis on the material abundance and precious decoration of the temple, and he indirectly gives us the answer. Heldvad tells us that the temple is the house of God. The gorgeous structure, he writes, made it shine as if it was fashioned out of the purest gold, so that the building could be seen all over Jerusalem.36 The temple was consequently the heart of the city and, implicitly we understand, the parish church is the same among the Lutherans. Indeed, Heldvad is making this point explicit by telling his readers that new and wondrous temples have been built, such as the church of Our Lady in Strasbourg with its enormous west tower. The citizens of Strasbourg had, in other words, followed the example set by Solomon and raised another—if not the original—temple in their midst.

There is no doubt that when Heldvad wrote about the temple of Solomon as a replica of God’s dwelling and alluded to it as a model for the Lutheran church building, he was buoyed by an ever-increasing self-assurance among Lutheran theologians in general. The initial hesitation of evangelical reformers over the material aspects of church architecture and church furnishing in the mid-Sixteenth Century gradually fell into the background during the latter part of the century, and was quite replaced during the Seventeenth Century, when materials and rich fabric became part of the rhetorical resources by which the church attempted to visualize the heavenly or sacred (Jürgensen 2012b, pp. 163–87). One, perhaps the most important, rhetorical handle to legitimize this positive reappraisal of materiality and visual splendour was by constantly keeping in mind the temple, and Solomon himself as a role model, whereby the Lutherans found everything they needed to legitimize their tolerance of display.

As Heldvad was expressing these ideas, the churches throughout Denmark underwent a modernization in what we today call the style of the Baroque, in which new altarpieces, pulpits and pews were installed, rich in ornament and image, and often with them the monogram of Christian IV on the altar along with his motto ‘Regna firmat pietas’.

6. A New Praxis Pietatis

A number of different trends have been presented here which all, I would argue, point in the same direction. Much of what has been written about the attitudes of early modern Lutherans is embedded in the binary understanding of continuity and break. These are undoubtedly important perspectives, but by insisting on measuring all developments against pre-Reformation conditions and pre-Reformation attitudes, we risk failing to see what such writers as Niels Heldvad were attempting to achieve. It seems to me that he and his contemporaries by no means saw themselves as reinstating either Catholic or medieval practices, when they started to discuss saints (martyrs) and pilgrimage again. Heldvad was not building a bridge to other confessions: rather he wanted to consolidate, to reestablish what he felt was the original import of saints and pilgrimage, before indulgences and idolatry led everyone astray. His and his predecessor’s leeway for doing so was, of course at least partially, due to the adiaphora discourse which had followed the Lutheran church from the Sixteenth Century and into the Early seventeenth century.37

For Heldvad all devotion had to point towards the better understanding of Christ, and he always worked to establish the idea that all true Christians were pilgrims on their way towards him. The Heavenly Jerusalem was the end station of this journey, and to meditate upon that goal was to take steps in the right direction. Mental steps, that is. Heldvad was one of the many Lutheran writers who did not visit the Holy Land but nevertheless published descriptions of the city in order to engage the imagination of readers and invite them to enter into the “gospelscape”. When he published his descriptions of the old martyrs and confessors, his aim was the same, to stir the imagination and through the imagination to spark engagement.

Rather than seeing the efforts of Heldvad and his contemporaries as an attempt at getting closer to medieval practices, we should probably see their interest in Jerusalem, saints and indeed the materiality of the Church as a sincere wish to approach the affective qualities embedded in the use of devotional tools as stepping stones, like for instance the saints or the preoccupation with Jerusalem. In this there is of course an obvious similarity to Catholic practice, and superficially Lutherans and Catholics would find much to agree upon in the writings of Niels Heldvad. Nevertheless, there is a distinct Lutheran quality to his work, which always ensures that his reader knows that the saints he discusses or the sites in the Holy Land he presents are the affective and intellectual medium by which he intends the reader to get closer to Christ. To present the city of Jerusalem or the life and trials of a saint should ideally, through the initial engagement with the information, spur an emotional response, which will then lead to an understanding of how Christ is to be found in this response.

While the writers discussed here are only writers, not a movement or grouping of any kind, their work was clearly part of a trend within Seventeenth-Century Lutheranism which became more and more preoccupied with the emotions and their role in devotion (Steiger 2005; Lentes 2007, pp. 213–40; Karant-Nunn 2010; Rittgers 2015; Mullaney 2015). Because of this the arts gained a new foothold in the form of Lutheran passion music, and visual art was created alongside the texts about Jerusalem and saints. All of this hints at an acceptance of the idea that insights might be gained outside the stern ‘sola scriptura‘ of the early Reformation period. The period of Lutheran Orthodoxy began to embrace whole spheres of material and artistic culture which had been held at arm’s length and passed by, things only halfway acknowledged or employed.38

An early example of experimentation with ‘Evangelical’ devotional tools can for instance be found in the composite devotional image, created by Danish artisan Peder Trellund in 1586, comprised solely of different inscriptions dealing with the sinful nature of humanity, on which the reader was invited to meditate (Figure 4) (Jürgensen 2019, pp. 117–32). Trellund’s text retable, now in the Danish National Museum (Inv.nr. D1210), while an exquisite piece of craftsmanship, is an uneasy combination of text and physical objet d’art, and more traditional tools also quickly found their way back into the Lutheran praxis pietatis. We may thus note how the staunch and learned Lutheran nobleman Henrik Rantzow, grandfather to the previously discussed Rantzow, in his portrait of 1586 in Brahetrolleborg Church on the island of Funen had himself depicted with prayer beads in his hand (Figure 5).39 The feature was repeated in a portrait painted 12 years later in 1598, where he also clutches his prayer beads. Similarly the second-generation German Lutheran reformer Martin Chemnitz also had his portrait painted in 1569 while holding a string of beads. The use of such tools only became more common during the Seventeenth Century, as the search for ways to reach a still deeper fervour and understanding of Christ became a pressing issue among Lutheran religious writers.

Especially mnemonic tools, as we have seen, became a favourite and as a parallel to the descriptions of Jerusalem and the Holy Land put out to encourage mental pilgrimages, we also see a flourishing of devotional books with instructions on for instance the use of the hand as a mental map of the Passion narrative (Figure 6a,b). One could, so to speak, undertake a pilgrimage by the hand, each finger and each joint representing steps in the life of Christ, places in salvation history or dogmas of faith. All this is explained in numerous surviving prints and drawings showing a palm inscribed with words and a picture, telling the reader what each part of the hand is to represent. Here, then we are thrown back on the idea of mental pilgrimages.

Such images are known from as early as the high Middle Ages and regained popularity in the Early Modern period, where they are part of the devotional tools which Protestants and Catholics shared until the early Eighteenth Century. Once the diagrams on pamphlets and in broadsheets had been learned by heart, a method of meditation was available to be employed whenever needed. To travel to the Holy Land and to undertake the same mental journey with the hand as medium is consequently, from an experiential or phenomenological angle, the same action. Each journey evokes a mental space to peruse and reflect upon, where ultimately closeness to the target of devotion can be gained. The medieval precedents for such mental journeys are clear. Daniel K. Connolly has shown the same concerning pilgrim maps, which could serve as practical travel guides, but more likely functioned as objects of private devotion and contemplation (Connolly 1999, 2009), as images on which to meditate and let the mind undertake spiritual journeys to the places named on the maps. The same has also been touched upon by Kathryn Rudy, who demonstrates how nuns within the confines of the convent could employ imagery as vehicles for ‘virtual pilgrimages’, as Rudy defines them.40 Prayer and meditation in front of images or with the help of for instance the hand were in other words considered reliable trappings in the quest for contact with divinity.

The material world in that sense was converted, or perhaps we should say reduced, to helpful signs and tools, enabling the one praying to see through the matter at hand in order to visualize internally the object of devotion. By this means they could enter biblical locations from their place of prayer and be there among those actually present with equal right and to some extent benefit. This is also to say that, theologically speaking, a journey to Jerusalem in the mind through prayer was as important as the actual physical visit. To the devout, everything believed true and pious was already stored inside. All parts of salvation history were present and readily available for those who knew how to unlock them from their heart. While a strong believer would be able to achieve this connection with the divine by means of motionless contemplation, the physical activity would be an important support for most believers in their praxis pietatis.

Sean Eric Clark has in his study demonstrated how Protestant travellers reacted emotionally upon reaching Jerusalem, despite only reluctantly trusting what their Franciscan guides told them about the sights they saw.41 If we should interpret these strong, at times indeed unwanted, emotional reactions to the biblical setting, we might say that the cultural memory of the travellers (and later of their readers) welled forth from the ‘Speichergedächtnis’42 and pulled them into the Bible narrative, where it created the sense of presence and contemporaneity with Christ for which so many religious writers of the early modern period longed.

When Lutheran travellers accordingly had themselves tattooed with motifs commemorating their visit to the Holy City, it was undoubtedly a means to retain a memory of this strong and for some life-changing reaction experienced upon seeing Jerusalem for the first time. The Lutheran Ratge Stubbe, a native of Hamburg, for instance had his arms decorated to mark his visit in 1669; tattoos later featured as an illustration in Johannes Lund’s Die Alten Jüdischen Heiligthümer, Gottesdienste und Gewohnheiten, printed in 1703 at Hamburg (Figure 7).43 Stubbe’s tattoos surely reminded him daily of his time in Jerusalem. Even more intriguing is the tattoos of the Lutheran German nobleman Otto Friedrich von der Groeben, who during his visit had his forearms decorated with an image of Christ carrying the cross on the one arm and a street map of the Via Dolorosa on the other (Figure 8).44 Exactly as with the depictions of palms discussed above, Friedrich von der Gröben could study his arm and in memory relive his own tour through the streets of the Holy City, following in the steps of Christ on his way to the crucifixion.

The efforts of the seventeenth-century theologians were undoubtedly undertaken to fundamentally change the attitude of the Lutheran Church towards the tools and techniques employed in devotion, and along with this to lessen the hostile attitude towards the idea of saints and the practice of pilgrimage. However, all of this ultimately came to almost nothing. Because of the waves of so-called enlightenment which started to fundamentally change the religious landscape during the Eighteenth Century, the attitude among learned theologians towards the ideas discussed here altered radically. Ideals of intellectual rationalism and restraint in devotion, in the place of feelings, pushed the army of saints and such objects as the two boxes of gravel from the Holy Land out of normative Lutheranism, and they became the topic of condemnation and ridicule by prominent writers such as the Danish bishop Erik Pontoppidan. He for instance expressed it in the title of his little 1736 booklet ‘A Broom; To sweep out the old sourdough remaining in the Danish lands and here brought to light relics of heathendom as well as popery’.45 The metaphor of the Christian as a pilgrim on his way to the heavenly Jerusalem was the idea which lasted the longest, but the number of texts produced concerning the Holy City declined rapidly during the Eighteenth Century and the motif dwindled more or less into a convenient, sentimental phrase without the character of a devotional tool that it had gained during the previous century.

7. Conclusions

We can never know the mindset which brought the two boxes with pebbles now in the Danish National Museum from the Holy Land to Denmark, and whether they were mere souvenirs and curios, or held a deeper importance to the owner, is an open question. In fact, all of this may be true at the same time. However, what we can say is that the religious climate of the Lutheran sphere by the late Seventeenth Century was open to the use of such items as the boxes under scrutiny, along with the active contemplation of for instance saints in the praxis pietatis. The milieu into which the boxes came was open to giving them a role within religion and the idea that they served as mere travel mementos becomes rather strained. Indeed, they bear a close similarity to the textual universe created around the Holy Land and in particular Jerusalem by evangelical writers who wished their readers to take it upon themselves to go on virtual pilgrimages in order to get them closer to Christ.

This strand of Lutheran spirituality is often overlooked, as the role of saints and pilgrimage is quickly dismissed as a topic of little relevance to Lutherans and at best an expression of popular survivals within the various communities. Yet, the position of authors such as Niels Heldvad, close to the head of the Danish Church, Christian IV, demonstrates to us how these notions were discussed and expressed by mainstream theologians close to the normative centre of the Church. Indeed, the success of the enlightenment of the Eighteenth Century is probably one of the main reasons why the embracing of concepts from pre-Reformation religion seems so distant and ‘unlutheran’. In this the middle of the Eighteenth Century was much closer to the early Reformation debates of the Sixteenth Century than was the Seventeenth, when it came to expressing radical interpretation of the Lutheran dogmas.

In Denmark a reaction against the attempts at purification set in motion by the agents of enlightenment came during the Nineteenth Century, inter alia by theologian and pastor Nikolai Frederik Severin Grundtvig, who in many ways attempted to place the Danish Church in the same long tradition of church history that Niels Heldvad and his contemporaries tried to achieve. However, the changes set in motion during the Eighteenth Century ultimately had severed the links to the devotional practices which Niels Heldvad and his colleagues worked to establish. It was thus also as a consequence of this rift, that the two boxes from the National Museum for so long could pose something of a mystery as to their function in a Lutheran context: the voices of the Seventeenth Century have been pushed aside, and the topics discussed here are themes which have often been ignored as phenomena on the fringes of what is now believed to be ‘proper’ Lutheranism.