Der Pietismus in seiner europaischen und aussereuopaischen Ausstrahlung: Suomenkieliset tiivistelmat.

Different in scope and scale as these two volumes are, they both illustrate two important features of the current state of Pietist studies, one welcome and the other less so. There is now, as there has frequently not been in the past, a genuine striving to reach an international perspective on what was certainly an international current of devotion, thought and feeling; and this effort has had the effect of putting the synoptic treatment of even particular periods of Pietist history beyond the competence of individual scholars, however learned. It is not just the mass of material, primary and secondary, which has to be digested; it is that most of the languages of northern Europe are required, including such formidable equipment as Czech, Hungarian and Finnish. The facts that Latin was still in the seventeenth century the technical language of Protestant theology, that Deutschtum was still spreading in central and eastern Europe, and that German is still the commonest currency of Pietist studies, all help to contain the problem, but do not solve it. It is thus a measure of the achievement of Martin Brecht in launching the first volume of a massive four-volume Geschichte des Pietismus, that he avoids …