Medieval and Reformation

—> For an extensive list of specifically Lutheran catechesis: see the website: luterhancatechism.com

*Arand, Charles P. That I May Be His Own: An Overview of Luther’s Catechisms. St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2000.

Aune, Michael B. To Move the Heart: Philip Melanchthon’s Rhetorical View of Rite and its Implications for Contemporary Ritual Theory. San Francisco: International Scholars Publications, 1994.

Bast, Robert James. Honor Your Fathers: Catechisms and the Emergence of a Patriarchal Ideology in Germany, 1400–1600. Leiden: Brill, 1997.

Bierma, Lyle D. et al, An Introduction to the Heidelberg Catechism: Sources, History and Theology (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2005).

Boulton, Matthew Myer. Life in God: John Calvin, Practical Formation, and the Future of Protestant Theology. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2011.

Bradley, Robert I. The Roman Catechism in the Catechetical Tradition of the Church: The Structure of the Roman Catechism as Illustrative of the “Classic Catechesis.” Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990.

Calhoun, D. B. “Loving the Westminster Confession and Catechisms.” Presbyterion 32, no. 2 (2006): 65–72.

Carter, Karen E. Creating Catholics: Catechism and Primary Education in Early Modern France. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2011.

Comerford, Kathleen. “Clerical Education, Catechesis, and Catholic Confessionalization: Teaching Religion in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries.” In Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honor of John W. O’Malley, S.J. Edited by Kathleen Comerford and Hilmar M. Pabel, 241-265. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.

Desplenter, Youri, Jürgen Pieters, and Walter Melion, eds., The Ten Commandments in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Intersections 52. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

Drever, Matthew. “Prayer, Self-Examination, and Christian Catechesis in Augustine and Luther.” Dialog: A Journal of Theology 55, no. 2 (Summer 2016): 147–57.

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400-1580. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005.

Fisher, J. D. C. Christian Initiation: Baptism in the Medieval West: A Study in the Disintegration of the Primitive Rite of Initiation. Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2004.

Fisher, J. D. C. Christian Initiation: The Reformation Period. Chicago: Hillenbrand Books, 2007.

Flüchter, Antje, and Rouven Wirbser, eds., Translating Catechisms, Translating Cultures: The Expansion of Catholicism in the Early Modern World. Leiden: Brill, 2017.

Gatch, Milton Mc C. “Basic Christian Education from the Decline of Catechesis to the Rise of the Catechisms.” In A Faithful Church: Issues in the History of Catechesis, edited by John H. Westerhoff III and O.C. Edwards, Jr., 79–108. Wilton, CT: Morehouse-Barlow, 1981.

*Green, Ian. The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England c. 1530–1740. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.

Haemig, Mary Jane. “The Living Voice of the Catechism: German Lutheran Catechetical Preaching 1530-1580: A Thesis.” PhD diss., Harvard University, 1996.

Hains, Todd. Martin Luther and the Rule of Faith: Reading God’s Word for God’s People. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2022.

Hebart, Friedemann. “The Role of the Lord’s Prayer in Luther’s Theology of Prayer.” Lutheran Theological Journal 18 (May 1984): 6–17.

Hendrix, Scott. Recultivating the Vineyard: The Reformation Agendas of Christianization. Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2004.

Hesselink, John. Calvin's First Catechism: A Commentary, trans. Ford Lewis Battles. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1997). 

Huijgen, Arnold, ed. The Spirituality of the Heidelberg Catechism: Papers of the International Conference on the Heidelberg Catechism held in Apeldoorn 2013. Bristol, CT: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2015.

*Janz, Denis. Three Reformation Catechisms: Catholic, Anabaptist, Lutheran, Texts and Studies in Religion 13. Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1982.

*Jensen, Gordon A. “Shaping Piety Through Catechetical Structures: The Importance of Order.” Reformation and Renaissance Review 10, no. 2 (2008): 231–236.

Jungmann, Josef. “Religious Education in Late Medieval Times,” in Shaping the Christian Message: Essays in Religious Education, ed. Gerard Sloyan, 38–62. New York: MacMillan, 1958.

Karant-Nunn, Susan. The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany. New York: Routledge, 1997.

Keane, Drew N. “Let me heare … if thou canst say”: The Utility of the Prayer Book Catechism (1549–1604),” Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 52, no. 1 (2020): 19–56.

Keefe, Susan. “Carolingian Baptismal Expositions: A Handlist of Tracts and Manuscripts.” In Carolingian Essays: Andrew W. Mellon Lectures in Early Christian Studies, edited by Uta-Renate Blumenthal, 169–237. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1983.

*Keefe, Susan. Water and the Word: Baptism and Education of the Clergy in the Carolingian Empire. 2 vols. Publications in Medieval Studies. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2002.

*Kingdon, Robert. "Catechesis in Calvin's Geneva." In Educating People of Faith: Exploring the History of Jewish and Christian Communities, ed. John van Engen, 294–313. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004.

Kolb, Robert. “The Layman’s Bible: The Use of Luther’s Catechisms in the German Late Reformation.” In Luther’s Catechisms—450 Years: Essays Commemorating the Small and Large Catechisms of Dr. Martin Luther, 18–27. Fort Wayne: Concordia Theological Seminary Press, 1979

Kolb, Robert, and Charles P. Arand. The Genius of Luther's Theology: A Wittenberg Way of Thinking for the Contemporary Church. Grand Rapids: Baker , 2008.

*Kolb, Robert, and Timothy Wengert, eds. The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000.

Krodel, Gottfried. “Luther’s Work on the Catechism in the Context of Late Medieval Catechetical Literature,” Concordia Journal 25 (1999): 364–404.

Laetsch, Theodore. “The Catechism in Public Worship.” Concordia Theological Monthly 4, no. 3 (March 1934): 234–241.

Maag, Karin. “Catechisms and Confessions of Faith.” In T&T Clark Companion to Reformation Theology, edited by David Whitford, 197–212. London: T&T Clark, 2012.

Maag, Karin, ed. Lifting Hearts to the Lord: Worship with John Calvin in Sixteenth-Century Geneva. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2015.

Mahon, Katherine. Teach Us to Pray: The Lord’s Prayer, Catechesis, and Ritual Reform in the Sixteenth Century. London: Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, 2019.

Perrot, Charles. “Managing a Country Parish” (1567). In Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1610: A Collection of Documents, translated and edited by Alastair Duke, Gillian Lewis, and Andrew Pettegree, 49–56. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992.

McHugh, John, O.P., and Charles J. Callan, O.P., trans. Catechism of the Council of Trent for Parish Priests. New York: Joseph F. Wagner, Inc., 1923.

Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

Muir, Edward. Ritual in Early Modern Europe. Second Edition. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.

Nestingen, James. “The Lord’s Prayer in Luther’s Catechism.” Word & World 22, no. 1 (2002): 36–48.

Persaud, W. D. “Luther’s Small and Large Catechisms: Defining and Confessing the Christian Faith from the Centre in a Religiously Plural World.” Dialog 46 (2007): 355–62.

Reeves, Andrew. Religious Education in Thirteenth-Century England: The Creed and Articles of Faith. Education and Society in the Middle Ages and Renaissance 50. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Reu, Johann. Dr. Martin Luther’s Small Catechism: A History of Its Origin, Its Distribution, and Its Use. Chicago: Wartburg, 1929.

Ristuccia, Nathan. Christianization and Commonwealth in Early Medieval Europe: A Ritual Interpretation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018 (esp. chap. 5: “Praying Orthodoxy,” 178–209).

Rittgers, Ronald K. The Reformation of the Keys: Confession, Conscience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Germany. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004.

Saak, Erik. Catechesis in the Later Middle Ages I: The “Exposition of the Lord’s Prayer” of Jordan of Quedlinburg, OESA (d. 1380) — Introduction, Text, and Translation. Studies in Medieval and Reformation Traditions 188/6. Leiden: Brill, 2015.

Sloyan, Gerard. “Religious Education: From Early Christianity to Medieval Times,” in Shaping the Christian Message: Essays in Religious Education, ed. Gerard Sloyan, 3–37. New York: MacMillan, 1958.

Simmons, Thomas Frederick and Henry Edward Nolloth, eds. The Lay Folks’ Catechism. London: Early English Texts Society, 1901.

Smith, Lesley J. The Ten Commandments: Interpreting the Bible in the Medieval World. Studies in the History of Christian Traditions. Leiden: Brill, 2014.

Spinks, Bryan D. Reformation and Modern Rituals and Theologies of Baptism: from Luther to Contemporary Practices. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006.

Stock, Brian. The Implications of Literacy: Written Language and Models of Interpretation in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983.

Stortz, Martha. “Practicing Christians: Prayer as Formation.” In The Promise of Lutheran Ethics. 58–59. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998. 

Strauss, Gerald. Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

*Torrance, T. F. The School of Faith: Catechisms of the Reformed Church. 1959. 2nd ed., Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 1996.

Touber, Jetze. “The Culture of Catechesis and Lay Theology: Lay Engagement with the Bible in the Dutch Reformed Church, 1640–1710.” Church History and Religious Culture 98, no. 1 (2018): 31–55.

Turrell, James F. “Catechisms.” In The Oxford Guide to The Book of Common Prayer: A Worldwide Survey. Edited by Charles Hefling and Cynthia Shattuck, 500–508. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006.

Wengert, Timothy. “Luther on Prayer in the Large Catechism.” Lutheran Quarterly 18 (2004): 249–74.

Willis, Jonathan. The Reformation of the Decalogue: Religious Identity and the Ten Commandments in England, c.1485–1625. Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Witte, Jr., John. “Learning the Word in Geneva: John Calvin the Catechist.” In Reading for Faith and Learning: Essays on Scripture, Community, and Libraries in Honor of M. Patrick, ed. Douglas Gragg and John Weaver Graham (Abilene, TX: Abilene Christian University Press, 2017), 115–128.

Zachman, Randall C. John Calvin as Teacher, Pastor and Theologian: The Shape of His Writings and Thought. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2006.