Mapping the Memory of Luther: Place and Confessional Identity in the Later Reformation

Abstract

In 1571 mapmakers Johannes Mellinger and Tilemann Stella produced a map of the county of Mansfeld, Luther's birthplace. This article considers this map as a complex printed material object: It is far more than a straightforward representation of place as it is covered with historical details, quotations, writing and references to Luther's life, the Reformation and Mansfeld's history. It created a notion of Lutheran space and used this space as a form of memory-making and memorialization at a critical time in Lutheran history. The decades following the death of Luther, in 1546, were a time of crisis, when Lutheranism grieved the loss of the Wittenberg reformer while also inscribing its presence on the confessional map of sixteenth-century Europe. Mellinger and Stella's map of Mansfeld reveals how second-generation Lutherans reconceptualized the landscape to provide an alternative way of writing Luther's life, and how Lutherans could integrate pasts and places which were not specifically Lutheran into a providential narrative. The map addressed the tensions of tradition and novelty with its composite, hybrid form that combined space, events and person, and it historicized and reimagined space. This map demands that we think about how space functioned within a culture which wanted to remember Luther's life and write histories in a way that could validate Lutheranism and its future, and in particular it focuses our attention on how memory-making at this specific point of existential concern shaped the Lutheran Church.