DESERT HARVEST—Spring 2008
Vol. 16, No. 1

The view through the round window
by Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Director

   THE SECRETS OF SPRINGTIME! There is much excitement in the Division and the Department of History next door, but I can’t tell you about it!  Oh, I can put the cause in a general category for you: a six-member search committee seeking to make the first permanent appointment to the Heiko A. Oberman Chair in Late Medieval and Reformation History has nominated finalists to the History Department, which has voted to bring those finalists to campus for interviews. We are permitted to do this despite the widespread discouragement of hiring anybody at all in the midst of the current dire economic downturn in the State of Arizona. The reason for our privilege is that we raised the money.  To put this fact another way: you have given the money to the Oberman Endowment. Your extraordinary generosity, along with a three-year endowment interest matching grant from the Provost’s office, has made it possible for us to proceed, even as we strive to raise the still-lacking half million dollars to complete this fund. At the moment of completion, the Oberman Research Collection will pass entirely to the UA Libraries.
   When you receive this, and intermittently throughout the month of April, some of the world’s leading scholars in this field will be coming to campus. This is a magnificent spring, one that we and all our donors have yearned for! I cannot reveal more. Yet this armor of confidentiality has its chinks. Those of you who live in Tucson are welcome to come to each candidate’s research presentation. Call 621-1284 to find out when and where each of these will take place.
   Soon, very soon, we shall be able to announce the name of the person appointed to the Oberman Chair—one of two hundred such chairs that President Robert Shelton envisions in the UA’s future.  Ours is about to be reality.

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   It is no secret, however, that Danielle Thu has consented to join the Division’s Board of Advisors. She is the daughter and stepdaughter respectively of the late Ora DeConcini Martin and Morris Martin. Thereby another distinguished member of this illustrious family continues its support of our program. Danielle brings her personal expertise in education and business and her enthusiasm for the UA.

At the feet of visiting scholars
Professor Hartmut Lehmann, Max Planck Institute
by Adam Duker, master's student

   On Thursday, November 28, 2007, the Division was pleased to welcome Professor Hartmut Lehmann to Tucson to explore the Reformations in the light of modern religious history. Professor Lehmann was the founding director of the German Historical Institute in Washington and has published extensively. He is the director emeritus of the Max Planck Institute for History in Göttingen. Professor Lehmann and his wife, Silke, graciously traveled from Berkeley, California, at the invitation of Professor Thomas A. Brady, Jr.  Professor Lehmann had been teaching a Reformation seminar at the University of California, Berkeley, while Professor Brady was busy directing the Division seminar in Tucson as the Visiting Heiko A. Oberman Chair of Late Medieval and Reformation Studies.
   The evening began with a delicious Italian meal and excellent conversation at the home of Professor and Mrs. Eric and Luise Betterton. The Betterton’s beautiful home provided the ideal setting to explore Professor Lehmann’s work while accommodating many distinguished guests. In addition to Professor Brady and his wife, Kathy, Division students were graced with the presence of Professor Susan C. Karant-Nunn, Division director; Professor Peter Foley, UA Religious Studies; Professor Pia Cuneo, UA Art History, Professor Susan Crane, UA History; and Dr. Hester Oberman, daughter of Division founding director, Heiko A. Oberman.
   In preparation for Professor Lehmann’s visit, Division students read two of his articles as well as his book “Martin Luther in the American Imagination” (Munich: W. Fink, 1988). Professor Lehmann explained to us the history of theological, historical, ecclesiastical and cultural understandings of Martin Luther in America. A tension has always existed among Lutheran synods in America between recent German immigrants who desired a confessional Church with a traditional German liturgy, and second and third generation Lutherans who had been influenced by American evangelicalism.  The latter brand of Lutheranism was culturally and theologically incomprehensible to the former group. The American Lutherans felt constrained by the recent immigrants’ Old World confessions and sensibilities. These tensions led to schisms, but also to different conceptions of the person and work of Martin Luther.
   Professor Lehmann explained the origins, theological trajectories, and cultural peculiarities of the Missouri Synod Lutheran Church. He also focused on the differences between American Reformed historical scholarship on Luther (such as the work of Phillip Schaff) and American Lutheran ecclesiological understandings of Luther. Professor Lehmann remarked that nineteenth-century Luther scholarship reveals far more about the theological inclinations of American historians working on the Reformation than it does about the sixteenth-century German Reformer.
   In all, Division students benefited from a remarkable evening with a world-class scholar.

2008 Town and Gown Lecture
Professor David Cressy, Ohio State University
by Paul Buehler, doctoral student     photo

   On Wednesday, February 6, the Division welcomed David Cressy, Humanities Distinguished Professor of History at Ohio State University, for its 22^nd Annual Town and Gown Lecture. Professor Cressy is a social and cultural historian of early modern England who has received numerous professional honors, including the John Ben Snow Prize of the North American Conference on British Studies (1998) and the Philip Schaff Prize of the American Society for Church History (1999). Both were received for his book, “Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England,” first published in 1997. The venue for the lecture was Holsclaw Hall in the UA School of Music.
   The theme of Professor Cressy’s lecture was dangerous, seditious, and undutiful speech in England from the reign of Henry VIII through the onset of the English Civil War under Charles I. His purpose was to point out that, in early modern England, speech that criticized the personal character of the monarchs was believed to threaten political stability by undermining royal authority. Under those conditions, no reported conversation pertaining to the reigning monarch was too trivial for official investigation. While the stringency with which investigators pursued undutiful speech varied from monarch to monarch, Professor Cressy noted the abiding concern of authorities with speech thought treasonable during the entire period under consideration. In this regard, one of Professor Cressy’s more significant observations concerned the frequency with which accused men and women were brought to trial and punished. Not every accused person was tried, and not every person found guilty suffered punishment, which could (and in some instances did) include execution. Royal pardon emphasized the magnanimity of the monarch and thereby reinforced his or her authority. Professor Cressy supported his assertions with references to a remarkable number of documented cases, which provided the opportunity for audience members to eavesdrop on the (sometimes bawdy) conversations of ordinary men and women in a past age. By these means, the lecture attempted to reconstruct the popular political culture of early modern England.
   The themes addressed in the lecture corresponded with Professor Cressy’s professional interest in examining the relationship of those at the center of political power and cultural influence with ordinary people on the margins of society. Division students learned more about the motives for his exploration of the dynamic between popular and elite culture when Professor Cressy visited the Division Seminar on Thursday, February 7. When asked, “What makes you tick as an historian,” he recalled his experience as a student at Cambridge University as formative. He admitted to students that his study of history is, ultimately, autobiographical: his personal experiences shaped his professional interests. The fact that he was the first member of his family to attend university along with his experience as a student during a time of social flux in the 1960s coalesced to form a desire to explore social and cultural history. Professor Cressy’s candor about his motivation for studying history, his advice about devising research questions and writing successfully, and his lively responses to student questions concerning his work made his visit to the seminar one that will influence us in our future work.

M.A. experience at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln
The German Sermons Database Project
by Kory Bajus, doctoral student

   During my time working towards my M.A. at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln, I was Professor Amy Nelson Burnett’s research assistant on the German Sermons Database Project (http://libr.unl.edu/german_sermons/). This project aims to provide a comprehensive online database that catalogs the bibliographic data of all sermons printed in German-speaking lands from 1517 to 1650. We have been working on it since 2005, and presently the bibliography contains nearly all sermons printed from 1601-1621 as well as collections of postils (homilies that were sometimes read aloud), and other large sermon collections printed from 1601-1650.
   To scholars of the early modern era, the value of sermons is tremendous. These oral presentations, whether subsequently published or not, served as a link between the educated elite of society and common people. They were a tool that pastors used to educate and indoctrinate their congregations and in the process to create confessional identity. Sermons were not limited to doctrine. Many were written for specific types of occasions and convey attitudes toward particular aspects of social life.  Wedding sermons, for example, contain ideas about the roles of men and women; sermons attacking magic and witchcraft allow us to examine the perceived relationship between science and the supernatural; and New Year’s sermons provide details about local events. Funeral sermons convey pastoral ideals for both living and dying. Scholars other than historians can profit from the use of these sources. Experts on literature and the fine arts can find in them valuable information on the objects of their own research.
   The German Sermons Database will allow quantitative analysis of sermon printing, which is now a difficult task. It will also permit scholars to search through sermons based on a number of different elements other than title and author, such as topic and keywords. Instead of spending hours sifting through various databases and library catalogs, the research will be able to identify sources on a variety of elements while sitting in one place, and in short order. The database will inform the reader where the physical editions of sermons are located, making it possible to plan in a more orderly way which libraries and archives to visit while in German-speaking countries.
   My contribution to this project has been to search other databases to find the bibliographic data about the sermons. I especially used the “VD-17” (shorthand for the "Verzeichnis der im deutschen Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des XVII. Jahrhunderts" [a listing of all works printed in Germanophone lands in the seventeenth century]) and the Karlsruhe Virtueller Katalog. These two databases gave me access to the library catalogs of many German and Swiss libraries. Using keyword searches, I compiled lists of sermons for each year. Professor Burnett and I worked with several members of the University of Nebraska’s Digital Center, who created a functional database for us to enter additional sermon data. As my language skills improved, Professor Burnett entrusted me with data entry. (Therefore, any mistakes from 1614-1621 are mine and not hers!)
   The time I spent on this research project was invaluable. It exposed me to a new genre of sources. It also removed some of my presuppositions. I discovered that some Reformed clergy did print sermons and that some Catholic sermons were printed in the vernacular, not just in Latin. Working in the languages improved my reading ability, helped build theological vocabulary, and exposed me to the vagaries of spelling in Early New High German. It also introduced me informally to the popular preachers of the time and allowed me to glimpse the shifting preoccupations and popular topics of this era.
   In 2007, Susan Karant-Nunn was named to the board of advisors of this sermon project. She conjectures that I may choose to shape a dissertation topic around materials that are available in this important emerging bibliography.

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