Conclusion

The essays in this volume have offered a broad range of perspectives on aesthetic thought and artistic practices that were unleashed in the centuries after the Protestant Reformation. As Kathryn Reklis has pointed out in the introduction, each contribution refutes in its own way the false supposition that Protestantism emerged as an iconophobic “religion of the Word” and remained inferior to the Catholic Church in the production of artistic riches; the essays also, by extension, move beyond scholarship on religious or Christian aesthetics to interrogate their subjects more specifically through a distinctly Protestant lens.¹ But while each contributor argues for a “Protestant” element in their case studies, can one make the case for a general Protestant aesthetic or artistic practice that somehow binds them all together and stands apart from the arts and theological aesthetics of Christianity more generally?²