Idols Chambers - Disposal, reinterpretation and prämuseale preservation of pre-Reformation visual culture in Lutheranism (1517-1817)

• Applicant: Dr. Stefan Dornheim
• Subject Area: Early Modern History ; Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology ; Art History
• Term: from 2017 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 325467679

Contrary to the popular conception of an image poor, even iconoclastic Protestantism, the cultural and historical research is confronted with the fact, that in the German-speaking countries, especially in the Lutheran areas, more artifacts of late medieval church furnishings have been preserved to present as in Catholic territories. Often during the Early Modern detached from their original locations and ecclesial significance structure, since the early 19th century, these artifacts often formed the object basis of a politically and nationally historically motivated wave of Museum foundations by bourgeois antiquity associations. The question about the historical transmission of these, suddenly in many places rediscovered, so called German art antiquities, one comes across a culturally remarkable yet unexplored phenomenon and historical concept: the "idol chambers". It is the concealment to store sacred objects (characters, images, relics, etc.), that have become theologically problematic, in particular, more or less inaccessible spaces of the church building. At the same time first pre-museal strategies of conservation and historicizing reveal, which are quite typical for the specific Lutheran memorial culture. The initial study of the evolution of these phenomena on premodern ecclesiastical object and image depots promises important insights into the distinctively Lutheran handling of early church symbol culture, about strategies of reinterpretation and recoding of once central objects of communal or collective belief, and also about memory and representation practices. The scientific ideas of the Iconic Turn and the approach of Material Culture studies are opening up a new perspective on the emergence of confessional cultures, which can be even stronger than regionally to differing and multifarious long process contoured. Pre-modern confessional culture appears readable on dealing with the inherited image objects as a result of cultural recoding processes as desacralization, disenchantment, educational intentions, historicizing and diverse creations of new traditions. Based on Central Germany as the motherland of the Reformation, these phenomena are explored from an interdisciplinary cultural-historical perspective.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Co-Investigator: Professor Dr. Winfried Müller