Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan 2003064041, 9780754637448, 9781315259673

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Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan
 2003064041, 9780754637448, 9781315259673

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Tribute to Bodo Nischan
The Bibliography of Bodo Nischan
Introduction
Dedication
I. Historical Definitions
“Confessionalization: The Career of a Concept”
Confessionalization: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives of a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Paradigm
Problems of the Term and Concept “Second Reformation”: Memories of a 1980s Debate
II. Confessionalization in German Lands
“Founding a New Church …”: The Early Ecclesiology of Martin Luther in the Light of the Debate about Confessionalization
The Braunschweig Resolution: The Corpus Doctrinae Prutenicum of Joachim Mörlin and Martin Chemnitz as an Interpretation of Wittenberg Theology
Johann Pfeffinger’s Treatises of 1550 in Defense of Adiaphora: “High Church” Lutheranism and Confessionalization in Albertine Saxony
“Christians’ Mourning and Lament Should not Be Like the Heathens’”: The Suppression of Religious Emotion in the Reformation
Astrology and the Confessions in the Empire, c. 1550–1620
Confessionalization and the Campaign against Prenuptial Coitus in Sixteenth-Century Germany
“The Queen of Evidence”: The Witchcraft Confession in the Age of Confessionalism
“The Second Bucer”: John Dury’s Mission to the Swiss Reformed Churches in 1654–55 and the Search for Confessional Unity
Catholic Confessionalism in Germany after 1650
III. Confessionalization beyond the Germanies
Fashioning Reformed Identity in Early Modern France
Confessionalization beyond the Germanies: The Case of France
Reconstructing the Context for Confessionalization in Late Tudor England: Perceptions of Reception, Then and Now
The Formation of the Pious Soul: Trans-alpine Demand for Jesuit Devotional Texts, 1548–1615
IV. Toward the Dismantling of Confessionalization
Political Unity and Religious Diversity: Hermann Conring’s Confessional Writings and the Preface to Aristotle’s Politics of 1637
Thomas More’s Horrific Vision: The Advent of Constituted Dissent
Index

Citation preview

CONFESSIONALIZATION IN EUROPE, 1555–1700

Professor Bodo Nischan

Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700 Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan

Edited by John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand and Anthony J. Papalas

First published 2004 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © The contributors, 2004 John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand and Anthony J. Papalas have asserted their moral right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editors of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan. 1. Confession—History—16th century. 2. Confession—History—17th century. 3. Reformation. 4. Reformation—Germany. 5. Europe—Church history—16th century. 6. Europe—Church history—17th century. 7. Germany—Church history—16th century. 8. Germany—Church history—17th century. 9. Europe—Social conditions—16th century. 10. Europe—Social conditions—17th century. I. Headley, John M., 1929– . II. Hillerbrand, Hans Joachim. III. Anthony J. Papalas. IV. Nischan, Bodo. 270.6 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan/ edited by John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand and Anthony J. Papalas. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. 1. Reformation—Europe. 2. Nischan, Bodo—Bibliography. I. Nischan, Bodo. II. Headley, John M. III. Hillerbrand, Hans Joachim. IV. Papalas, Anthony J. BR305.3.C66 2004 274’.06–dc22 2003064041 ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-3744-8 (hbk)

Contents Acknowledgments

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Tribute to Bodo Nischan Anthony J. Papalas

ix

The Bibliography of Bodo Nischan Anthony J. Papalas

xiii

Introduction John M. Headley

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I. Historical Definitions “Confessionalization: The Career of a Concept” Thomas A. Brady, Jr. Confessionalization: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives of a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Paradigm Heinz Schilling Problems of the Term and Concept “Second Reformation”: Memories of a 1980s Debate Harm Klueting

1 21 37

II. Confessionalization in German Lands “Founding a New Church …”: The Early Ecclesiology of Martin Luther in the Light of the Debate about Confessionalization Markus Wriedt The Braunschweig Resolution: The Corpus Doctrinae Prutenicum of Joachim Mörlin and Martin Chemnitz as an Interpretation of Wittenberg Theology Robert Kolb Johann Pfeffinger’s Treatises of 1550 in Defense of Adiaphora: “High Church” Lutheranism and Confessionalization in Albertine Saxony Luther D. Peterson

51

67 91

vi

Contents

“Christians’ Mourning and Lament Should not Be Like the Heathens’”: The Suppression of Religious Emotion in the Reformation Susan C. Karant-Nunn Astrology and the Confessions in the Empire, c. 1550–1620 Robin B. Barnes Confessionalization and the Campaign against Prenuptial Coitus in Sixteenth-Century Germany Terence McIntosh “The Queen of Evidence”: The Witchcraft Confession in the Age of Confessionalism Thomas Robisheaux “The Second Bucer”: John Dury’s Mission to the Swiss Reformed Churches in 1654–55 and the Search for Confessional Unity Bruce Gordon Catholic Confessionalism in Germany after 1650 Marc Forster

107 131 155 175 207 227

III. Confessionalization beyond the Germanies Fashioning Reformed Identity in Early Modern France Raymond A. Mentzer Confessionalization beyond the Germanies: The Case of France Mack P. Holt Reconstructing the Context for Confessionalization in Late Tudor England: Perceptions of Reception, Then and Now Peter Iver Kaufman The Formation of the Pious Soul: Trans-alpine Demand for Jesuit Devotional Texts, 1548–1615 Lance Lazar

243 257 275 289

IV. Toward the Dismantling of Confessionalization Political Unity and Religious Diversity: Hermann Conring’s Confessional Writings and the Preface to Aristotle’s Politics of 1637 Constantin Fasolt Thomas More’s Horrific Vision: The Advent of Constituted Dissent John M. Headley Index

319 347 359

Acknowledgments In making possible the composition and realization of this memorial volume to Professor Bodo Nischan the editors wish to express their gratitude first to Dean W. Keats Sparrow and the College of Arts and Sciences, East Carolina University for a generous grant that served to reduce significantly the cost of production. In its early stages of organization the editors benefited from the advice and cooperation of Thomas A. Brady, Jr. and David Steinmetz. To the several contributors the editors wish to recognize their cooperation and their apparent capacity to endure and survive the constant editorial hectoring, exhortations, and admonitions. To John Smedley of Ashgate the editors feel grateful for his advice, interest, and support throughout. To A. “Zab” Jastrzab, who prepared the many articles for final submission, the editors affirm their profound gratitude and appreciation, for without her computer skills and patient care nothing would have moved forward. Finally Gerda Nischan showed enthusiastic encouragement from the beginning, making available to the present enterprise the Nachlass of her late husband. To her the volume is dedicated.

Tribute to Bodo Nischan Bodo Nischan began his teaching career at East Carolina University in 1969. I arrived the following year and for the next thirty years was his colleague. Bodo was born in Berlin in 1939. His father, Karl Nischan, was an eminent engineer and his mother came from a large land-owning family. Bodo’s early memories were of war and devastation, of Nazi agents searching for his father, of eluding an allied bombing raid as a passenger on the back of his grandmother’s bicycle, and finally fleeing Russian troops with his parents and his baby brother Hans Ulrich, who was born in 1945. In the desolation of the post-war years, he began his education, and through primary school displayed an aptitude for science, history, and languages, achieving proficiency in English and especially French. When his family made plans to emigrate to the United States in 1956, his friends feigned surprise that he was not going to France, a country whose language he had mastered. But Bodo was not inept in English. In New Haven, he was placed in the senior class of the local high school, and wrote better essays in English literature classes than most of his new classmates, and he knew more American history than anyone on campus. He breezed through his only year of American high school. He matriculated at Yale because it was the hometown university, and only later discovered that it was one of the most prestigious educational institutions in America. He spent his first two summer vacations from Yale as an apprentice to a lens maker, earning what he considered was a princely sum of 50 cents an hour. His father persuaded Bodo to follow in his footsteps. Bodo distinguished himself in the engineering program, showing the same meticulousness for detail and intelligence for complex problems that he later displayed as a historian, but after two years he switched to the humanities and received his B.A. in 1961 from Yale. In addition to engineers there were notable theologians in the family tree, and Bodo considered the ministry. He completed a three-year program at the Lutheran Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, receiving his degree of divinity in 1965. There he acquired a solid foundation in Greek and Latin, and in the key theological and political issues of the sixteenth century. The thorough training in philology and theology, however, did not lead to the clergy but to an academic career. In 1966 he enrolled in the Ph.D program at the University of Pennsylvania, earning his degree in Renaissance and Reformation history. In 1967 he met Gerda, who had been in America only a week as a secretary in the

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German consulate in Philadelphia. They were married the following year, and shortly thereafter Bodo received an offer to teach at East Carolina University in Greenville, NC. Bodo drove from Philadelphia to Greenville in August 1969 guided by a map which did not acknowledge the existence of Greenville. Two months later Gerda gave birth to Michael. Bodo arrived just as East Carolina University achieved university status, but much of old ECTC, East Carolina Teachers College, was still in place. Professors taught three and sometimes four hours each day. The history requirement was broader then, and survey classes were immense. Furthermore, Greenville was a small town. Tobacco fields seemed to loom just beyond the corner of Fifth and Elm. Bodo plunged into his new life with his characteristic verve and energy, which were so conspicuous in a small, peaceful southern university. With his long stride and determined look he was a very prominent presence on campus. He enjoyed teaching at all levels and was voted outstanding undergraduate teacher in 1977. Sometimes such awards go to professors who seek popularity, and who have no interest in the intellectual development of their students. In this case the award was well merited. He was perhaps even more successful at the graduate level, directing eleven respectable theses in Reformation and Renaissance history. In a department which specialized in American studies, and where few students were willing to deal with the complexities of research in European history, this was an impressive achievement. While he had never lived in a provincial area, as Greenville was then, he fell in love with the eastern part of North Carolina. With his family he explored the various sites between Greenville and the coast, and became an expert on ferry boat schedules, charming features of state parks, and the labyrinthine secondary roads that wove through tobacco farms and hamlets. He knew the Outer Banks like the back of his hand, and enjoyed taking friends and relatives to unspoiled areas where they might stir up a bear. Once he took his wife’s uncle to Cape Hatteras to show off the lighthouse. Unbeknownst to Bodo, Uncle Herman had served on a German sub off the Carolina coast and was very familiar with the structure. “It hasn’t changed. It looks the same from this side as it did from the other,” he told his astonished nephew. Bodo’s favorite Outerbank spot was Buxton. For many years his parents would join him there for a summer vacation. It was here that Michael, speaking to his grandparents, perfected his German. Michael, who would graduate from Lenoir Rhyne, inherited his grandfather’s engineering skills. During his first decade in Greenville, Bodo either spent his summers in New Haven using the Yale library, or went to Germany to continue his work on the Reformation in Brandenburg. His research trips to Germany were in part supported by various stipends from the American Philosophical Society, Fulbright Grants, German Exchange Grants, Herzog August Bibliotek,

Tribute to Bodo Nischan

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American Council of Learned Society, and NEH summer stipends. For his research there were essential documents in Merseburg, East Germany, which was then in the communist sphere. Bureaucracy was enormous, research facilities minimal and amenities non-existent. Bodo put at the disposal of an inept hotel manager his organizational skills and industry to help exterminate a pesky rat population, and improve the inefficient operations in the hotel. After several weeks the establishment was in good running order, and the grateful manager provided Bodo with bed sheets, a pillow, and bed cover, all of which were in short supply. While at the Merseburg archives he examined documents which, according to the register, were last used a century before by the great Leopold von Ranke, a historian who would have applauded Bodo’s scrupulous method. Bodo considered limiting his archival research, cutting his trips to Germany, wrapping up his study rapidly, and turning to other less demanding projects. Such a notion was tempting because he practiced in an environment which tended to judge publications by quantity rather than quality. In 1993, refusing to take short cuts and aiming at work that would be useful to the scholarly community, he completed Prince, People and Confessions: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994). While Bodo was completing research on his next major project, “Confessionalization and Popular Piety in the Late Reformation Germany,” he published many journal articles, several in the prestigious Sixteenth Century Journal, chapters in books, numerous book reviews, and presented many conference papers. Some of this work, as well as new essays, were published under the title Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism in 1999. Bodo served on many committees in the department and throughout the university. He was especially effective in his role as director of the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Program, instrumental in establishing ties between ECU and the University of Ferrara in Italy, and arranging two series of conferences between the universities. In 1998 the administration of ECU invited him to chair the department of history. He agreed to do so but for only one year. He set high standards for instruction and scholarship, standards that he always upheld in his own work. Bodo was stricken with his illness in April 2001. Hours after a biopsy, to the amazement of his doctor, he completed reading term papers. Remembering some of the excuses for overdue assignments he encountered both as professor and administrator, he was not going to allow a brain tumor to prevent him from meeting deadlines, and turning in final grades. During his illness his standard reply to inquiries of his health was, “I feel fine.” He never once complained even during the grueling chemo and radiation treatments. Perhaps the only time he displayed frustration was when he realized he could not accept the NEH research grant, awarded to him for the academic

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year 2001/02, to complete “Confessionalization and Popular Piety in Late Reformation Germany.” His fascination with and admiration of America began as a boy when he read westerns in Germany, and while this country proved to be very different from Karl Mays’ fictional accounts, he revered his new homeland and considered himself a North Carolinian. Like any good Tarheel he enjoyed fishing and the outdoor life. He played tennis, relished long distance running, and followed local baseball and football. He was a knowledgeable philatelist, and preferred fine wine to beer. He devoured newspapers regularly, polishing off the Sunday New York Times and Die Zeit in an afternoon. He was an excellent conversationalist, savoring discussions on architecture, classical music, literature, and contemporary European and Balkan politics. He had many achievements and talents, but for those who knew him well his greatest gift was that of friendship. Anthony J. Papalas

The Bibliography of Bodo Nischan Books Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 366 pp. Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism, Variorum Collected Studies (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1999). Article and Book Chapters “Reformed Irenicism and the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631,” Central European History 9 (1976): 3–26. “Propaganda in an Age of Ideological Division: The Case of Saxony in the Thirty Years War,” Journalism History 4/1 (1977): 23–9. “Brandenburg’s Reformed Räte and the Leipzig Manifesto of 1631,” Journal of Religious History 10 (1979): 365–80. “John Bergius: Irenicism and the Beginning of Official Religious Toleration in Brandenburg-Prussia,” Church History 51 (1982): 389–404. “The Second Reformation in Brandenburg: Aims and Goals,” Sixteenth Century Journal 14 (1983): 173–87. “Calvinism, the Thirty Years War, and the Beginning of Absolutism in Brandenburg: The Political Thought of John Bergius,” Central European History 15 (1982): 203–23. “The ‘Fractio Panis’: A Reformed Communion Practice in Late Reformation Germany,” Church History 53 (1984): 17–29. “On the Edge of the Abyss,” in Geoffrey Parker, The Thirty Years’ War (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984), 111–20; published in German as “Totaler Krieg: Am Rande des Abgrundes,” in Der Dreissigjährige Krieg (Frankfurt/M: Campus, 1987), 187–99. “Reformation or Deformation? Lutheran and Reformed Views of Martin Luther in Brandenburg’s ‘Second Reformation’,” in Pietas et Societas: New Trends in Reformation Social History, ed. K. Sessions and P. Bebb (Kirksville, MO: SCJ Publ, 1985), 202–15. “The Palatinate and Brandenburg’s ‘Second Reformation’,” in Controversy and

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Conciliation: The Reformation and the Palatinate 1559–1583, ed. Derk Visser (Allison Park, PA: Pickwick, 1986), 155–73. “The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism in the Late Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 31–51. “The Schools of Brandenburg and the ‘Second Reformation’: Examples of Calvinist Learning and Propaganda,” in Calviniana: Ideas and Influence of Jean Calvin, ed. Robert V. Schnucker (Kirksville, MO: SCJ Publ, 1988), 215–33. “Johann Peter Bergius,” in Berlinische Lebensbilder: Theologen, ed. Gerd Heinrich (Berlin: Colloquium Verlag, 1990), 35–60. “Kontinuität und Wandel im Zeitalter des Konfessionalismus. Die Zweite Reformation in Brandenburg,” Jahrbuch für Berlin-Brandenburgische Kirchengeschichte 58 (1991): 87–133. “Confessionalism and Absolutism: The Case of Brandenburg,” in Calvinism in Europe 1540–1620, ed. Andrew Pettegree et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 181–204. “Ritual and Protestant Identity in Late-Reformation Germany,” in Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon, 2 vols (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1996), 2: 142–58. “Demarcating Boundaries: Lutheran Pericopic Sermons in the Age of Confessionalization,” Archive for Reformation History, 88 (1997): 199–216. “Germany after 1550,” in The Reformation World, ed. Andrew Pettegree (London: Routledge, 2000), 387–409. “International Diplomacy in the Age of Patrizzi: The German Heretic who Got Caught,” in The Age of Patrizzi, ed. Patrizia Castelli (Florence: Olschki, 2002): 301–14. Encyclopedia Entries The Holy Roman Empire: A Dictionary Handbook, ed. Jonathan W. Zophy (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980): “Aldringer, John von; Arnim, Hans Georg von; Bernhard, Duke of Saxe-Weimar; Catholic League, Defenestration of Prague; Ecclesiastical Reservation; Edict of Restitution; Frederick V, Elector of the Palatinate; Frederick William, Elector of Brandenburg; John George I, Elector of Saxony; George William,. Elector of Brandenburg; Leipzig, Convention of; Mansfeld, Ernest von; Maximilian I, Duke of Bavaria; Münster, Treaty of; Osnabrück, Treaty of; Pappenheim, Gottfried Henry; Piccolomini, Ottavio; Thirty Years War; Tilly, John Tserclaes von, Trauttmansdorff, Maximilian; Wallenstein, Albert von; Wallenstein, Isabella von; Westphalia, Peace of; William V, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel.”

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Encyclopedia of the Reformation, ed. Hans J. Hillerbrand (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): “Albert of Brandenburg; Brandenburg; Johann Briesmann, Frederick III of the Palatinate; Lucas II Osiander; Prussia.” Die Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edn (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1998), v. 1: “Bergius, Johann.” Encyclopedia of the Renaissance, ed. Erika Rummel and Paul Grendler, 6 vols (New York: Charles Scribner, 2000): “Brandenburg” (1:283–4) and “Saxony” (5:410–12). Reviews 44 book reviews and/or review essays in American Historical Review, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, Church History, German History, History: Reviews of New Books, Fides et Historia, The Lutheran Quarterly, Sixteenth Century Journal. Papers at Scholarly Conferences (since 1992): “Calvinism and the Emergence of Political Absolutism in Brandenburg,” Conference on International Calvinism, at St. Anne’s College, Oxford University, UK, September 1992. “Political Theory in the Age of Confessionalism in Brandenburg,” at The Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Atlanta, GA, October 1992. “Second Generation Protestantism,” at the Southeastern Regional Meeting of the American Academy of Religion, Charleston, SC, March 1993. “Popular Piety in the Age of Confessionalism: The Case of Brandenburg,” European Reformation Research Group, St. Andrews University, Scotland, August 1994. “Ritual and Confession Building in the Post-Reformation Period,” at The Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Toronto, Canada, October 1994. “Jean Calvin and Renaissance Ferrrara,” at L’ideale classico a Ferrara e in Italia nel Rinascimento (joint conference of East Carolina University and the University of Ferrara), Ferrara, Italy, March 1995. “Preaching and Popular Piety in the Age of Confessionalism,” Frühe Neuzeit Interdiziplinär, international congress at Duke University, Durham, NC, April 1995. “The Heretic Who Got Caught,” Ferrara Conference, March 1997. “The Devil’s Minions in Late Reformation Lutheran Sermonology,” The Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Atlanta, GA, October 1997. Revision of Above, Mid-Atlantic Renaissance and Reformation Seminar, University of Virgiania, Charlottesville, VA, March 1998.

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“The Elevation of the Host in the Age of Confessionalism: Adiaphoron or Ritual Demarcation,” Society for Reformation Research, Toronto, 24 October 1998. “Religious Polemics and Ritual in Early Modern Germany,” Conference on Religious Polemics in Context, University of Leiden, the Netherlands, 27 April 2000. “The ‘Altar Controversy’ in Late Reformation Germany,” Symposium on Worship in Early Modern Europe, Calvin College, Grand Rapids, MI, 4 August 2000. “Konfessionelle Identität und Widerstand: Die Interimskrise in Brandenburg,” Das Interim 1548/50: Herrschaftskrise und Glaubenskonflikt, Symposium des VRG, Wittenberg, Germany, 3–6 October 2001. Forthcoming Articles “Becoming Protestants: Lutheran Altars or Reformed Communion Tables” in Worship in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Change and Continuity in Religious Practice, Karin Maag and John Witvliet, eds (Notre Dame, 2003). “Religious Polemics and Ritual in Early Modern Germany” in Religious Polemics in Context. Papers presented to the Second International Conference of the Leiden Institute for the Study of Religions held at Leiden 27–8 April, 2000. T.L. Hettema and A. van der Kooij, eds (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2003). “Konfessionelle Identität und Widerstand: Die Interimkrise in Brandenburg” in Das Interim 1548/50: Herrschaftskrise und Glaubenskonflikt, Luise Schorn-Schütte, ed., Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, Vol. 203 (Gütersloh, 2004).

Introduction In the increasing effort of historians to understand how and to what extent the Protestant Reformation affected and engaged the life of the people, the concept of confessionalization has been advanced especially by Professors Heinz Schilling (Berlin) and Wolfgang Reinhard (Freiburg) as the practice of “confession building”; in relation to that of “social disciplining” the two interrelated processes contribute decisively to the formation of confessional churches, greater social cohesion, and the emergence of the early modern absolute state. In his own work on Brandenburg, manifest in his Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg and the collection of his chief articles in Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism Professor Nischan was emerging as one of the leading exponents in the examination of this historical problem. In a further study of the subject at the time of his death he was moving to achieve greater precision and definition of the popular engagement of the Reformation by focusing more deeply on liturgical, ritual, and ceremonial practices. For it is in ritual and worship itself that popular piety and religion reveal themselves. Among other items his Nachlass most prominently included four chapters of the work he had planned to complete during his forthcoming leave. Although drafts, they incorporate new evidence and perspectives which recommend them for serious consideration to later publication. Professor Nischan’s prospective study sought the systematic analysis of the actual process of creating confessional identities through a closer examination of ritual and ceremonies. At a time when the treatment of confessionalization threatened to become overly politicized and sociological in its historical understanding, Nischan was working to restore and accent its essentially religious basis. Extending the scope of his study to Anhalt, Hesse-Kassel, the Palatinate, Prussia and Saxony, as well as Brandenburg, he intended according to his own prospectus “to show how and why the emerging Protestant state churches in early modern Germany treated certain religious practices as marks of denominational identity and how ecclesiastical and civil authorities used these to promote social and religious cohesion.” Many religious practices, earlier considered as adiaphora (indifferent matters), now became treated as marks of demarcation between the emerging Protestant confessional churches and at the same time were politicized as the early modern state sought to impose greater social control.

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In the course of the subsequent articles Confessionalization as a historical process that has decisively shifted the attention of Reformation scholars away from the beginning of the sixteenth century to the latter part of the century and the following decades will receive ample definition and treatment. There would thus seem to be no need to linger over this concept neither as a historiographical issue nor as a historical phenomenon. Nevertheless since none of the present articles have chosen to mention a most fundamental and early definition of the subject as advanced by one of its two progenitors, it may prove useful to cite and briefly exploit here this article by Wolfgang Reinhard: “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters”, Zeitschrift f ~ ur historische Forschung, 10 (1983): 257–77. According to its first thesis the so-called Reformation and Counter Reformation are seen as comparable rather than different in the respective features of their parallel developments. The second thesis posits a methodical procedure for the assessment of these closed groups, the confessions, a procedure which is particularly useful for understanding the material of the present volume: 1) Assertion of a clear, theoretical statement by means of the “Confessio” itself; 2) Dissemination and enforcement of new norms; 3) Propaganda and the prevention of counter-propaganda; 4) Internalization of the new order through education; 5) In its narrower sense the disciplining of adherents; 6) Application of rites; and 7) Impact upon language in recourse for first names to those of the Old Testament or to the saints. The third thesis refers to the confessionalizing process in the service of political growth: 1) the inward as well as outward strengthening of its national or territorial identity; 2) the State’s extension of its power over the church and especially its resources; 3) the disciplining and homogenizing of its subjects. Such a bald listing here of the features of Confessionalization serves to convey the vast, yet intense sweep of a historical movement, both penetrating and encompassing that decisively shapes Europe in the period 1555–1648 and even, with diminishing effect, beyond the seventeenth century. The first part of our volume concerns itself with historiographical issues and the defining of the subject, confessionalization. Thomas A. Brady, Jr. leads off with a comprehensive conspectus of the origins and development of confessionalization as an organizational principle for early modern as well as modern European history. For Brady’s treatment goes well beyond the two architects of this movements – Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard – to extend the subject and the influence of this school of interpretation both in space, as far as Ireland and Eastern Europe, and in time, to the foothills of the present. Thus implicitly he engages that very problem for our volume evident in the title itself – to what extent is confessionalization a more than German but in fact a European phenomenon. Especially valuable for our understanding of the complexity of the issues involved regarding religion,

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culture and church history is a distinction recovered from Schilling himself, who has observed that while Reinhard’s emphasis falls upon a confessionalization of the churches, his own amounts to a confessionalization of society. If Brady’s contribution can be considered to be outwardly oriented, that of Heinz Schilling proves more inward in its effort to develop the structures, resonances and potentialities of the concept of confessionalization for the refashioning of the historical enterprise in this period of Europe’s development. As an appropriate conclusion to this stage of the present inquiry as one of historiographical definition and clarification, Harm Klueting, in a taut analysis of the fortuna of the idea, the Second Reformation, deftly disposes of it. The main body of our volume begins with the horrendous recognition of Cardinal Cajetan’s in 1518 that Luther has created a new church. His pronouncement of a novam ecclesiam, given the long standing notion that there can be only one church, serves as the appropriate curtain raiser to our study in that its reality will torque the Western ecclesiastical world into hostile confessional camps. Markus Wriedt continues by reviewing historiographical issues that have now become institutional and properly ecclesiastical, thereby carrying the weight of Part I forward into the main body of this volume. Hard upon Wriedt’s dramatic highlighting the new, dire issues produced by the Reformation’s introduction of a plurality of churches, Robert Kolb addresses the resulting formation of confessions in their necessary centrality and theological intricacy. By studying the remarkably enduring partnership of Joachim Mörlin and Martin Chemnitz as they formulated a Brunswick interpretation of Wittenberg theology, the article points toward the later, definitive Formula of Concord, thus spanning these formative doctrinal decades. Luther Peterson’s contribution serves several purposes. It is placed here, following upon Kolb’s treatment of confession building, to awaken us to another dimension of the issue’s ecclesiastical aspect and one to which Professor Nischan was increasingly drawn: namely, the ritual and ceremonial aspects of the church’s life. Again we are confronted with the problem of interpreting Luther and the Wittenburg legacy that takes us to Albertine Saxony and that part of the ramifying Adiaphora controversy. The chief agent, Johann Pfeffinger, presents an ambivalent position with respect to confessionalization: on the one hand he heightens the authority of the Prince to intervene in the life of the church; but he does so in order to achieve a flexibility that would reduce points of controversy. Thus this very irenic purpose would seem to run counter to the interests of realizing a hard definitive confessionalism. Several of our contributors deal meaningfully with topics and specific

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aspects of the age’s spiritual/religious life. Robin Barnes asks whether there were “astrological dimensions to confessional identities and conflicts.” Lutheranism alone among the confessions evinced a broad acceptance as manifested in the presence of practicas and made possible by the immense authority of Philip Melanchthon. The heavens as with all of nature were but another aspect of an all-powerful God. The celestial signs conveyed messages of natural order and universal breakdown. Not only does this astrological preoccupation distinguish Lutheran confessionalism at least to the end of the sixteenth century but it is seen as essentially anti-clerical in arguing for a direct reading of the text provided by nature, freed from the new Calvinist as well as the old Catholic clergy. The widespread astrological discourse within German Lutheranism worked to secure a distinct confessional identity and affect the formation of a Lutheran confessional culture. Barnes ends on a Troeltschian note of Lutheran conservatism and reluctance to promote state building. Susan Karant-Nunn analyzes the quality of Protestant piety diverging from the traditional medieval religion. Through a simplification evinced in ritual and church decoration the new form of religion announced the end of an emotion-oriented piety characterizing the earlier faith. This quiet submission to the new requirements is traced through the traditional seven sacraments, leading to a reduction in the physicality of the divine. That the Catholic church took the opposite tack, using an effective, emotional piety as a means of consolidating its faithful, served to distinguish the confessional divide. Terence McIntosh’s study of a virtual campaign against prenuptial coitus traces this important social issue from Luther, who strongly opposed clandestine marriages and made public betrothal rather than the wedding ceremony itself decisive, to the more explicit legal treatments in the marriage court ordinances of cities and territories. Here Zurich provides the first case with the duchy of Württemberg, the first princely territory. Yet by 1555 only Geneva, Zurich, and Augsburg along with Württemberg had criminalized prenuptial coitus. The prohibitions in Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach in 1565 and again in 1573 marked the most effective and decisive resumption of the campaign, leading to similar decrees elsewhere especially in Franconia and the Upper Palatinate. Only this late did the campaign gain considerable momentum, being advanced now by the processes of confessionalization within German Lutheranism. McIntosh goes on to conjecture the additional support effected by the notable intersection of Saxon, Franconian, Upper Palatinate and Württemberg church politics in the work of Jacob Andreae, whose missions against clandestine marriage strengthened the campaign against prenuptial coitus. Thomas Robisheaux addresses the complex issue of confession – its functions and meanings in their legal, ritual and narrative dimensions. Apart from the extreme complexity of the problem as it pertains to witchcraft trials,

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what more appropriate, even intrinsic and essential, for a volume on confessionalization? In witchcraft trials the words of a confession represented the most powerful speech-act in the entire legal process. With the law code of the Carolina the confession, if important, was also recognized as precarious and corruptible, yet better than other evidence. Early modern jurists and theologians distinguished the juridical confession from the religious rite of auricular confession, although in practice the two different confessions tended to merge. For the juridical confession is seen here as embedded in the much wider social and religious culture of confession in general at the turn of the late sixteenth century. For both religions, Lutheranism and Catholicism, endowed confession with religious and social significance. Both are seen as making it more routine in maintaining the juridical quality of the confession. While Lutheranism rejected confession as a sacrament, it made confession obligatory, coupling it with the sacrament of communion. Both religions saw sin as objective social acts endangering the entire community. The very public nature of confession enhanced its juridical qualities, while promoting the theological. The special role of both priests and pastors at trials reveals how religious confession had become intimately associated with juridical confession. Judges and confessors worked closely together, while pastors and priests became implicated in the coercion of false confessions. The fear of such confessions indeed led to a greater emphasis upon meticulous procedure, as if a prophylactic, assuring the veracity of the confession and insuring the sanctity of confession at the heart of the inquisitorial process. Bruce Gordon’s article appears toward the end of Part II not so much on account of its action occurring later than most of the others but rather more as a reminder regarding the perduring hold of the confessional element despite the efforts of an irenicist toward church union and concord across confessional barriers. Gordon investigates the intricate diplomacy pursued by John Dury in the interests of Oliver Cromwell to consolidate the Protestant states of Europe under England’s leadership. The balloon of millennial aspiration would be punctured by the failure to understand and successfully contend with the real differences between the continental Reformed and Lutheran churches. While Heinz Schilling has authoritatively defined the Confessional Age’s terminus to 1650, we have deliberately aspired in the present volume to explore at least its declining continuence and slow weakening down to 1700. Thus it is only suitable that Part II concludes with Marc Forster’s study of Catholic confessionalization in the empire after 1650. The state-sponsored confessionalization of the earlier period becomes less prominent. The ceremonial and religious assume a more bureaucratic and routinized character. Fears of Protestant gains fade and with them any sense of crisis or challenge to the Catholic leadership. The emerging Baroque Catholicism will manifest

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an effective churchliness that suggests a confessionalization from below with the former policies of social disciplining giving way to methods of persuasion, propaganda and representation. The interest in buildings and the decoration of churches is read as being a certain fulfillment and completion to the process of confessionalization. Moving away from the German scene, Raymond Mentzer examines the difficulties of Huguenots living in close association with Catholics by analyzing two local cases at Dieulefit in Dauphiné and Aubenas in Languedoc. The collaboration of a Protestant widow with a Catholic curé, cases of intermarriage, the children of such mixed marriages probably being raised and educated as Catholics, the difficulty of eradicating deeply involved guild customs having religious implications all come up for review. Mack Holt also appreciates the heavy tug of the traditional religious context, while emphasizing the relatively peaceful coexistence between Catholics and Protestants, suggesting an interconfessional sociability. He focuses on Dijon’s population in the sixteenth century where the magistracy was able to enforce the formula of vivre catholiquement, namely, the avoiding of scandalous acts, seditious behaviour, or any threat to public order, while observing loyalty to the king. Following the St. Bartholomew’s massacre and in fear of the world’s end, the Huguenots here rejoined the community. This adherence of the entire community to ‘living Catholically’ suggests no rift between an elite and a popular religious culture. The opposition of the Catholic authorities to the Reformation certainly infused the process of confessionalization, but for Holt it was a process that lacked any program of state building. Peter Kaufman, in search of determining and assessing lay participation in the English Reformation and the effectiveness of initiatives from the bottom up, helps to redefine and broaden onto the national scale this picture of formative pressures often subtly shaping something that might be called confessionalization. Again the operative force is less the state but rather those deep-seated attitudes to public order: on the one hand reform is conceived as a measurable departure from Rome, affecting life and conduct; on the other the fear, particularly on the part of the hierarchy, of excessive lay participation and its promotion of participating regimes that raise the spectre of Anabaptist radicalism. For England confessionalization expressed itself in “a worshipful acquiescence rather than any doctrinal consensus or consolidation.” Lance Lazar’s ambitious study examines the huge program of devotional literature produced by the Jesuits for Italy, the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire, a program that includes beyond the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius himself, catechisms, spiritual biographies, polemics, devotional and meditative treatises and finally, fifthly, supplementary literature for confraternities and sodalities. Since this program operates within the framework and self-representation of the unique, traditional church that

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claims for itself sole universality and recognizes the existence of no other religion or church as such, a certain ambiguity emerges: both the Catholic church and, as we have come to learn, from John O’Malley, SJ, the Society of Jesus extend beyond the narrowing conflict of confessional strife but at the same time must face up to the immediate reality of such hostility, while claiming and addressing a larger purpose. The present article maps out the distinct literatures of religious life and devotion that serve to build confessional identities. In the penultimate article, leading the reader toward the dismantlement of Confessionalization, Constantin Fasolt sets himself the apparently modest task of elucidating the hitherto concealed, obscure theological heart of a relatively unknown seventeenth-century jurist’s undisclosed and deliberately obscured religious ideas. For Hermann Conring is hardly a household word even among European historians. Furthermore we are reminded that the age itself is necessarily given to masks and dissimulation. Indeed Paolo Sarpi tells us: “like a Chameleon I imitate the behaviour of those among whom I find myself … I am compelled to wear a mask. Perhaps there is nobody who can survive in Italy without one.”1 As portal to Fasolt’s study stands Hobbes’ distinction between the self and the mask worn, between intent and words, between art and self representation. While such an exercise may seem both daunting and yet not to augur well for clarity and import, we are reminded of Robert Darnton’s challenging observation that a text is often best attacked at its most enigmatic point.2 Conring’s own religious position warrants such a test of opacity, but more largely here it is the very structure of the late medieval ordering that qualifies as the text. For Fasolt’s study manages to get at the very guts of the age: the relation of one’s identity and one’s belief, between word and act, between Church and State. The immediate text for analysis is Conring’s preface to his 1637 edition of the Politics of Aristotle. Conring proceeds by disclosing that politics itself, now seen as political science, has not been properly understood but allowed to deteriorate and that the world currently and specifically ‘Germany’ are being subverted by partisan religious zeals that inflame internal divisions. A true political science is needed to redress the situation by effecting a veritable transvaluation of values. Religious belief must be separated as private opinion from the peace and concord of the political community. Religious diversity should not affect political unity. Heresy now becomes redefined as mindless superstition obdurately held to the destruction of political order. Confessional belief needs to become an independent variable, a private matter “without any 1 Quoted in David Wootton, Paolo Sarpi: Between Renaissance and Enlightenment (Cambridge, 1983), 119. 2 Darnton, The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History (New York, 1984), 5.

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necessary danger to the integrity of the person or his participation in the commonwealth.” Which necessitates a return to the masks of the age where we began: to be a person one must have a persona, a mask; one’s true identity, one’s self is masked from all but God. The article thus addresses what amounts to being the great odyssey of European civilization since the Middle Ages, coming out of the Renaissance and Reformation with its subsequent bitter fruits of religious zeal: the uncoupling of the traditional verities constituted a thousand years earlier in political Augustinianism, the snapping of the essential link between religious conformity and political community. In a new, more unfettered use of force the gradually attained liberation would prove not to be without its own problems, its special burdens, excesses and new injustices. Fasolt’s article possesses an elegant finality almost making the subsequent and last contribution unnecessary. Yet in two respects a certain complementarity prevails: first, both authors have arrived independently at their key text – that of Salvian on different hostile, yet coexisting, forms of Christianity, as if to confirm the currency of this text during the period; secondly, while the weight of the earlier article falls upon the internal aspect of the problem – the relationship of the individual self, action, and belief to political community, the second emphasizes the more obvious, external relationship of political order now to a plurality of confessional churches and the gradual dissolution of the old order. Regarding the challenge posed by the title of this book – does Confessionalization as a coherent historical process developing in the latter half of the sixteenth century apply generally to all of early modern Europe? Our results are ambiguous; if at all, such confessionalization pertains unequally to the case of Europe outside the Germanies. In the present conspectus it was unfortunate not to be able to include Spain and Eastern Europe, although Brady hinted at their relevance in current historical consideration. Nevertheless enough of extra-Germanic Europe comes here under examination to afford a provisional answer to the issue. Perhaps we can here avail ourselves of the distinction made by Philip Benedict between a strong and a weak rendering of the theory in treating this problem for France.3 He warns against the danger of all too readily coopting a concept developed properly in another field and attempting to impose it on one’s own. A strong version of the concept, involving a hard linkage of confessionalization with social discipline and state building has little promise for France as Holt himself suggests. Benedict posits an initial period of confessional polarization, followed by a more conciliatory period of ordinary interaction. And in fact in Dauphiné and Aquitaine a fairly casual coexistence amounting to a sort of stable convivencia prevailed from the Edict of Nantes. Yet in his own more 3 Benedict, “Confessionalization in France? Critical Reflections and New Evidence” in his The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, 1600–85 (Aldershot, 2001), 309–26 at 312–17.

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detailed study of Montpellier during the seventeenth century it is more a barely discernible separation that comes to prevail over an interconfessional cooperation.4 Thus, if confessionalization, then only a weak theory seems to apply best to France. It would therefore appear that the Germanies of the Holy Roman Empire provide something of a unique soil for our understanding of Confessionalization in its strong, hard form. That soil has been conditioned by the structure of the empire itself and that filter of the Augsburg settlement through which the fragmentizing forces of the Reformation had been pushed. For where else do we find a congeries of differing established churches, state churches living cheek by jowl to one another, defiantly shaped by opposing confessions? If a hard confessionalization was unique to the German scene, while the rest of Europe experienced varying degrees of restraint exercised by an established church, the oppressive emotional realities of confessionalization as a system of mutually hostile religious camps hovered over the entirety of the European scene. Indeed it fell to an English medical doctor to best express the mental impact, both intellectual and spiritual, of this confessionalized world. Writing in the late 1630s at the very peak of the destructive forces endemic to confessionalism, Sir Thomas Browne observed: ‘Tis true we all hold there is a number of elect, and many to be saved; yet take our opinions together, and from the confusion thereof there will be no such thing as salvation, nor shall anyone be saved: for first the Church of Rome condemneth us, we likewise them; the sub-reformists and sectaries sentence the doctrine of our Church as damnable; the Atomist or Familist reprobates all these – and all these them again. Thus, whilst the mercies of God do promise us heaven, our conceits and opinions exclude us from that place. There must be therefore more than one Saint Peter; particular churches and sects usurp the gates of heaven, and turn the key against each other: and thus we go to heaven against each other’s wills, conceits and opinions, and with as much uncharity as ignorance do err, I fear, in points not only of our own, but one another’s salvation.5

Yet this uncharitable world of hostile confessional groups “usurp[ing] the gates of heaven and turn[ing] the key against each other” was now on the wane. The future would belong to a softening of the contours of those state churches and their religious/moral systems.

4 5

Benedict, “Confessionalization”, 325. Browne, Religio Medici, R. H. A. Robbins, ed. (Oxford, 1972), Sect. 56.

For Gerda

“Confessionalization – The Career of a Concept” Thomas A. Brady, Jr.

1 Like the great trees of an ancient forest, the big stories we tell about history, the grand narratives we call them, are sooner or later toppled by history itself. One has only to reflect on how the twentieth century’s terrible events have undermined confidence in the narrative of Western Civilization and its long, progressive climb – Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome; Middle Ages to Renaissance and Reformation; Enlightenment and Revolution to the nation-state built upon industrial capitalism and nourished by science – to appreciate how corrosively history destroys our stories about it. And yet, just as surely as history will disempower every narrative, the historians, like ants repairing a disturbed nest, will soon begin to fill the gaps and tackle the gaps of comprehensibility left by broken narratives. In the debris they discover, or rediscover, events, processes, persons, groups, places, practices, and institutions the old narratives had dimly perceived or simply ignored. Along such ways, historians have been at work at restoring comprehensibility to the most radically disrupted of modern European narratives, the story of Germany and its place in Europe. For more than a hundred years this story had featured either the state, which had in 1918 and again in 1945 proved too fragile to carry this weight, or the nation, which had been utterly discredited by radical racialist nationalism. In 1947 the Allies obliterated Prussia – whose rise had traditionally formed the bridge between the end of the medieval order in the Thirty Years’ War and the birth of the new German state in 1871 – from the map of Europe. By the 1960s, historians in both German states were fashioning new narratives of Germany’s passage from the Middle Ages to the modern era. Each successive thesis grappled with the problem of alleged German backwardness by European standards, and each sought to re-integrate Germany into general European history. In East Germany the Marxist historians constructed a thesis of the German Reformation as an “early bourgeois revolution,” the first in the series

2

Historical Definitions

of social upheavals that eventually transformed feudal into bourgeois Europe.1 This thesis confirmed the position of the Protestant Reformation at the traditional turning point between medieval and modern German and European history and affirmed Germany’s vanguard role in the transition from feudal to capitalist Europe. In West Germany at the same time, young historians were also turning their hands to fashioning an intelligible link between the recent and the deeper. Three major arguments – new ways of configuring the interim – emerged during the 1960s and 1970s: communalism, proto-industrialization, and confessionalization. The first, communalism, attacked the problem of German political backwardness. It holds that alongside the authoritarian state had grown communal forms of self-government in late medieval Germany, which though subsequently constrained and marginalized, had sustained a proto-democratic political culture valuable to a modern, democratic Germany.2 The second thesis, proto-industrialization, argues for a regional growth of market-oriented rural industry and contemporaneous agricultural growth in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during the decades that preceded the Industrial Revolution.3 While its connections to the Industrial Revolution are disputed, proto-industrialization is recognized as a general European process, the existence of which helps to explain the long gestation period of industrial capitalism between the sixteenth and the nineteenth century. 2 The third thesis, confessionalization, is today incomparably the most widely discussed and debated idea about early modern European history to have been

1 Max Steinmetz, “Die frühbürgerliche Revolution Deutschland 1476 bis 1535. Thesen zur Vorbereitung der wissenschaftlichen Konferenz in Wernigerode vom 21. bis 24 Januar 1960,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 8 (1960): 113–24; also in Max Steinmetz, ed., Die frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland. Referat und Diskussion zum Thema Probleme der frühbürgerliche Revolution in Deutschland 1476–1535, edited by Max Steinmetz (Berlin, 1961), 38–48. There is an English translation in The German Peasant War of 1525 – New Viewpoints, edited by Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke (London, 1979), 9–18. See Andreas Dorpalen, German History in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, 1985), chap. 3. For the larger context, see Peter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Capitalists: European and the World Economy, 1500–1800, translated by V. R. Berghahn (Cambridge, 1983). 2 The entire argument is presented in Peter Blickle, Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal, translated by Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997). See also Peter Blickle, Kommunalismus. Skizzen einer gesellschaftlichen Organisationsform, 2 vols (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 2000). 3 Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, eds, European Proto-industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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3

formulated in Germany since 1960. It is an argument about the role of religious communities called “confessions” in the post-Reformation passage of Europe from the Middle Ages to modernity. A “confession” is, in the first place, an individual or collective – often normative – testimony of belief. It can be biographical (St. Augustine) or ecclesiastical (the Lutheran Confession of Augsburg). During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the term extended itself from normative statements of faith to the churches and communities which held or “confessed” them. This usage is proper, though not exclusive, to the German-speaking world, where since the middle decades of the sixteenth century churches of different confessions confronted one another. This situation produced a modern Germany which possessed not one but two national religions, Protestant and Catholic, and made confessional identity a central protocol of German social and cultural life. There is thus no mystery in the fact that attention to confessions as historical formations has always been strongest in the German-speaking world. This, in itself, does not explain the rise of the confessionalization thesis, for until well into the twentieth century, a well established tradition found the history of confessions unproblematical. Catholicism was held to be simply backward, and between the two Protestant confessions, Lutheranism and Calvinism, the latter was considered more progressive and, therefore, more modern than the former. This view found a classic expression in Ernst Troeltsch’s essay of 1912, Protestantism and Progress.4 Troeltsch identified the two Protestant confessions, Lutheranism and Reformed (“Calvinist”), as respectively less and more progressive, based on their respectively more and less feudal social bases, and the differences emerge with notably clarity in the contrast between Lutheran and Calvinist politics. Lutheranism, Troeltsch argued, had a thoroughly conservative idea of the law of nature based on its complete confidence in divine providence. It is thus “favorable to absolutism, but, on the whole, … essentially conservative and politically neutral.” Calvinism, by contrast, preferred a “modified aristocracy,” which gave it a “tendency towards progress, an impulse to reorganise governmental conditions when these were of an ‘ungodly’ character.” This impulse led Calvinism to the contract theory of the state.5 The world changed profoundly during the middle third of the twentieth century, and the confessionalization thesis was born of a recognition that the 4 Ernst Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress: The Significance of Protestantism for the Rise of the Modern World (London: Williams & Norgate; New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1912). For the present state of discussion of his ideas, see Luise Schorn-Schütte, “Ernst Troeltschs ‘Soziallehren’ und die gegenwärtige Frühneuzeitforschung. Zur Diskussion um die Bedeutung von Luthertum und Calvinismus für die Entstehung der modernen Welt,” in Ernst Troeltschs Soziallehren. Studien zu ihrer Interpretation, edited by Friedrich Wilhelm Graf and Trutz Rendtorff (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1993), 133–52. 5 Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 63–4.

4

Historical Definitions

Troeltschian position no longer held water. In the later 1970s, Heinz Schilling (now of Berlin) devoted his second dissertation (Habilitationsschrift) to a subject which seemed to contradict this interpretation of the historical relationship between the two Protestant confessions. In northwestern Germany, Schilling discovered a Calvinist prince, the count of Lippe, who used religious conformity as a means of suppressing the communal liberties of the town of Lemgo’s Lutheran burghers.6 Today, one might argue that in this situation, absolutist rule was more “modern” than traditional communal liberties, but Schilling’s conclusion was quite different. He found that the association of the two Protestant confessions with more authoritarian or more libertarian politics – Lutheranism and Calvinism respectively – was a coincidental, in which case the classic association of Calvinism with democracy had to be revised. From this finding Schilling deduced that the two Protestant confessions related to one another not as less or more modern, but as two communities guided by parallel versions of the same program of religious renewal and social discipline, which played roughly comparable roles in the modernization of society and the state between 1550 and 1650. Schilling eventually formulated his idea as a “confessionalization paradigm.”7 Confessionalization, in his view, “is a fundamental social transformation that includes ecclesiastical-religious and psychological-cultural changes as well as political and social ones.” It includes “the rise of early modern confessional churches as institutions, … the ‘formation of confessions’ in the sense of a prominence accorded to religious-cultural systems that can be clearly distinguished from one another by their doctrine, ceremonies, spirituality, and … the everyday culture of their people.” Confessionalization is thus “a fundamental social process which largely coincided, but sometimes conflicted with, the formation of the early modern State and the shaping of its modern, disciplined society of subjects.” Furthermore, “the process also ran parallel to the rise of the modern, capitalist economy, which deeply transformed both public and private life in Europe.” In the long view, therefore, “confessionalization belongs to the driving elements of the early modern process of transformation, which reshaped the 6 Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung. Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 48 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Mohn, 1981). Schilling summarized his findings in “Between the Territorial State and Urban Liberty: Lutheranism and Calvinism in the County of Lippe,” in The German People and the Reformation, edited by R. Po-chia Hsia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 263–83. 7 Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft – Profil, Leistung, Defizite und Perspektiven eines geschichtswissenschaftlichen Paradigmas,” in Die katholische Konfessionalisierung. Akten eines von Corpus Catholicorum und Verein für Reformationsgeschichte veranstalteten Symposions, Augsburg, 1993, edited by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (Gütersloh; Münster, 1995), 11–49.

The Career of a Concept

5

status-structured social world of old Europe into modern democratic, industrial society.” From the first, the confessionalization paradigm aimed to “produce a globally systematic or social-historical analysis. It is based on European comparisons formed within a universal historical perspective,” for it seeks to understand the combination of forces that “enabled Europe to overcome the ‘traditional’ and ‘feudal’ social system and to emerge as the modern society characterized by citizens and economic activity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.” In this version the paradigm is thus a variety of modernization theory, in which the sociology of religion supplies “the modification necessary to its application to the early modern era.” The space it insists on for religion is determined by the point of view: “religious change is always conceived as social change.” Schilling’s confessonalization paradigm thus seeks to repair the gap created by the demotion of the Protestant Reformation as the birth of the modern era by 1 pushing modernity’s pre-natal8 moment forward into the immediate postReformation era, where it can employ “confessions” in the sense of doctrinal statements as markers for “confessions” in the sense of distinct religious communities; 2 insisting that religion, defined by its social forms and consequences rather than by its theological assertions, formed an essential force in the history of Europe between 1550 and 1660; 3 abandoning the idea, canonized by Hegel, of the evolutionary supersession of Catholicism by Protestantism as the normative form of modern Christianity; and 4 arguing for the overwhelming likeness of the process of confessionalization in the German lands of the Holy Roman Empire and in Europe as a whole,9 and thus for the relatively lesser significance of the differences, on which theories of German “deviations” (Sonderwege) from the path of the West have always rested.10 8 This translates the term “Vorsattelzeit,” which Schilling borrows from Reinhard Koselleck. Schilling, “Konfessionalisierung von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft,” 5. 9 Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich. Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620, Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1–45; English: “Confessionalization in the Empire: Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555 and 1620,” in Heinz Schilling, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society. Essays in German and Dutch History, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 50 (Leiden, 1992), 205–46. He expanded the model from Germany to Europe in Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600. Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, 2 vols (Leiden, 1994–95), vol. 2: 641–82. 10 Prominent examples: Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans”, Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–1949 (Washington, D.C., 1963); Louis Dumont, German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back (Chicago, 1994).

6

Historical Definitions

Like most large arguments about history, the confessionalization thesis required a shift from understanding – how contemporary witnesses saw their situations – to explanation – how the situations are to be understood in the hindsight of history. In this case, the shift transformed the several churches and religious communities – the Reformation’s most obvious products – from mutually exclusive, even hostile, bodies teaching mutually incompatible world views into similarly constructed bodies moving on parallel paths toward modernity. Multiple confessions thus resemble trains headed on parallel tracks for the same destination – modernity – on offset schedules. Their common destination and their common relationship to modern culture confirm their common historical character, whatever their spokespersons might have thought at the time. Once formulated, this idea had to be debated. This happened at two conferences, one on “Reformed confessionalization” organized by Heinz Schilling in 1985, the other on “Lutheran confessionalization” organized by the Tübingen historian Hans-Christoph Rublack in 1988.11 While the debates revealed a receptiveness on the part of many historians and theologians to the confessionalization thesis as a new paradigm, there were also those who defended the distinctiveness of doctrine and practice in the two confessions as essential to understanding their histories. At both conferences, the central debates turned on the issue of comparability vs. uniqueness. The concept of the Reformed confession as representing a “Second Reformation,” following the “First Reformation” of the Lutherans, seemed particularly unconvincing to those who saw it as reductive of the historical integrity of the Calvinist faith.12 By this time, the notion of a “confessional age” was already well established. In the early 1980s the concept of confession was imported into Marxist historiography in East Germany, and in West Germany the concept was being employed to label a “confessional age.”13 Some years later appeared the first 11 Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland. Das Problem der “Zweiten Reformation”: Wissenschaftliches Symposion des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1985, edited by Heinz Schilling, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 195 (Gütersloh : Gütersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1986); Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland: Wissenschaftliches Symposion des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1988, edited by Hans-Christoph Rublack, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 197 (Gütersloh, 1992). 12 For example, Wilhelm H. Neuser, “Die Erforschung der ‘Zweiten Reformation’ – eine wissenschaftliche Fehlentwicklung,” in Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland, 379–86. 13 Herbert Langer, “Religion, Konfession und Kirche in der Epoche des Übergangs vom Feudalismus zum Kapitalismus,” Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 32 (1984): 110–24; Martin Heckel, Deutschland im konfessionellen Zeitalter, Kleine Vandenhoeck Reihe, no. 1490, vol. 5 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983). See the similar usage by Harm Klueting, Das konfessionelle Zeitalter 1525–1648 (Stuttgart: Ulmer Verlag, 1989), who, however, incorporates the Reformation into the confessional age.

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English work on confessionalization as “social discipline” and confessionalism as a culture, joined several years later by the first overview of confessionalization as a process in the German lands.14 3 The confessionalization thesis, or “paradigm,” as Schilling has come to call it, arose, spread, and articulated itself in studies of Protestant Germany, where the fundamental comparability of the two confessions, Lutheran and Reformed, was assured by the use of common name “Protestant” and by the long series of unions, convergences, and mergers since 1800. To fit the Roman Catholic Church into this paradigm, which its acceptance outside Protestant Germany clearly required, proved a much tougher task. The model’s utility rested on comparability, and there was no possibility of treating medieval Catholicism as a confession. Not only could it not be understood in terms of confessionalization’s central marker – confessions, that is, elaborate statements of doctrine considered binding on all believers – it already possessed wellestablished comparators in Orthodox Christendom and Islam. The application of the confessionalization thesis to Catholicism, therefore, depended on its utility for the interpretation of the reformed Catholicism that began to spread through Europe since the Council of Trent, that is, in the last third of the sixteenth century. What made the task so daunting was that hardly any of post-Tridentine Catholicism’s markers – enhanced separateness of the clergy, strengthening of the episcopal office, the new religious orders, the revitalization of pilgrimages, confraternities, and Marian devotion, and the flowering of a new ecclesiastical style, the Baroque – possessed any obvious analogues in the Protestant confessions. On the other hand, the inability of historians of early modern Catholicism to agree on a defining concept – either “Counterreformation,” which emphasized the defense against Protestantism, or “Catholic Reformation,” which emphasized Catholic renewal – created an opening for a new paradigm.15 The fashioning of a version of the confessionalization thesis useful for comprehending Roman Catholicism was chiefly the work of the Augsburg (then Freiburg) historian Wolfgang Reinhard. His concepts arose not from study of the German territories, Schilling’s bailiwick, but – appropriate to his

14 R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550–1750 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Konfessionalisierung im 16. Jahrhundert, Enzyklopadie deutscher Geschichte, vol. 12 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1992). 15 Robert Bireley, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter Reformation (Washington, D.C., 1999); R. Po-chia Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540–1770, New approaches to European history, vol. 12 (Cambridge, 1998).

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subject – from his work on the reformed papacy and the broadly international world of early modern Catholicism. They led him to fashion, independently of Schilling, a new view of reformed Catholicism, which in 1977 he framed programmatically in four points:16 1 the concepts of “Counterreformation” and “Catholic Reform” are inadequate to designate an entire epoch of either German or European history, because they promote a false derivation of all historical processes from ecclesiastical history; 2 the conventional pseudo-dialectical antithesis of the supersession thesis – a progressive Reformation bound to supplant a reactionary Catholicism – cannot be justified historically, whether applied to the religious movements or to an entire epoch; 3 the movement of the Counterreformation proceeded parallel to and frequently in competition with the Reformation in the modernization of European society; and 4 the term “Confessional Age” is to be preferred for this era, because it supplants a chronologically based confessional antithesis with the idea of a parallel development, which makes it possible to understand the contemporary concept of “confession” in terms appropriate both to ecclesiastical-history and to social history. The convergence of their concepts led to a collaboration of Reinhard and Schilling in organizing yet a third conference, on “Catholic confessionalization,” at Augsburg in September 1993. A notable feature of this meeting was its joint sponsorship by the Society for the Edition of the Corpus Catholicorum and the Society for Reformation History, respectively the principal Catholic and Protestant learned societies devoted to the history of this era.17 It was not to be expected that this convergence of thinking about confessions and the confessional era would produce a model entirely acceptable to students of all confessions. Schilling recognized this in his introduction to the Augsburg volume. Reinhard’s concept, he pointed out, “can be entitled ‘confessionalization of the churches’ and mine ‘confessionalization of society.’”18 The difference fitted the respective milieus of origin, given the greater independence, deeper traditions, and international 16 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–52. 17 Die katholische Konfessionalisierung. Wissenschaftliches Symposion der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, edited by Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte, vol. 145 (Münster, 1995). 18 Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft,” 3–4.

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engagement and claims of the Roman Catholic Church. In his conclusion to the Augsburg volume, Reinhard agreed with this assessment and refined the model he had presented some years before.19 He acknowledged the objection that “the concept of confessionalization leveled the real differences among the confessions, between country, and, finally, between individual cases,” which could be met only by affirming that “the accumulated knowledge about the overall process of confessionalization can make comprehension of confessional differences themselves much more extensive and more fundamental than before.”20 The Munich historian Walter Ziegler had disagreed and suggested that the absence of a break in theology and religious life made the question of a Catholic confessionalization pointless in principle.21 Reinhard replied that since the historian must affirm that all things change, so strong an assertion of continuity cannot be accepted, no more than can the assertion of a plurality of Catholicisms. The very possibility of applying the term “confession” to the Catholic Church, Reinhard saw, depended on recognizing the unique character of the post-medieval Church – a fact Leopold von Ranke had discovered in the late 1820s, more than 165 years before.22 Reinhard’s quite imaginative concept of a confessionalization of the Church rather than of society preserved space for the “stresses and idiosyncrasies” of Catholicism that resisted generalization into an abstract model of confessionalization. His catalogue of these “propria,” as confessional peculiarities are known in the discourse of confessionalization, includes23 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

the binding of faith to the institution; the binding of faith and religious life to tradition; extensive capacities – the parish net, religious orders, collegial bodies, the hierarchy capped by the pope, and the continuity of canon law; a clergy constituted as a legal estate; the religious orders as agents of education and mission; the mobilization of women for religious reform and charitable tasks; the use of Latin as a liturgical language; a superior international organization; the ability to maintain a distinction between church and state;

19 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383–404. 20 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Was ist katholische Konfessionalisierung?” in Die katholische Konfessionalisierung, 419–52, here at 436–7. 21 Walter Ziegler, “Typen der Konfessionalisierung in katholischen Territorien Deutschlands,” in Die katholische Konfessionalisierung, 405–18, here at 417. 22 Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “Ranke, Rom und die Reformation: Leopold von Rankes Entdeckung des Katholizismus,” Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollegs, 1999, 43–60. 23 Reinhard, “Was ist katholische Konfessionalisierung?” 439–48.

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10 extra-European missions, which had no Protestant parallels until the eighteenth century; and 11 a preservation and enhancement of traditional popular religion with its sensual attractions and emphasis on good works. This very long list includes some of the most fundamental markers of the Roman Catholic Church, the relegation of which to “peculiarities” limits fairly drastically its capacity for comprehension in a general model of confessionalized Christianity. These differences lose some significance, however, the further the historians move away from the history of theology, doctrine and ritual and toward social history. Schilling, quite aware of this problem, tried to reduce one of the propria, Catholicism’s supranational character, by internationalizing the entire thesis. Around 1990 he began to argue for confessionalization as a phenomenon not only of the internal articulation and strengthening of states and disciplining of societies, but also of the European system of international politics. Religion and confession, he concedes, contributed one “if an especially powerful factor in a multi-layered and multi-causal historical event” – the early formation of Europe’s system of power politics, diplomacy, alliances, and war.24 The problem of the seeming irreducibility of the Catholic propria nonetheless remained, and it has colored the reception of the confessionalization thesis with respect to Catholic history. At first, the idea of an early modern parallelism among the confessions met with a warm response among some historians of early modern Catholicism, though it was always dogged by considerable skepticism. John Bossy made an opening with Christianity in the West, 1499–1700 (1985), in which he portrayed postmedieval Christianity as a single, if variegated, successor to medieval religion.25 During this era, he argued, the practical, affective, corporately social religion of medieval Catholicism gave way after 1400 to a more theorized, spiritualized, and individual Christianity, of which Protestantism and Catholicism represented two different but similar streams. Bossy expressed extreme wariness, however, about identifying the causes of this change, if any were to be sought outside religion itself. The migrations of holiness to the State, to music, and to texts, he concludes, may be envisaged as “signs of transition from an ethics of solidarity to one of civility. If we believe that a 24 Heinz Schilling, “Konfessionalisierung und Formierung eines internationalen Systems während der frühen Neuzeit,” in Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europe: Interpretationen und Debatten / The Reformation in Germany and Europe: Interpretations and Issues, edited by Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried Krodel (Gütersloh, 1993), 591–613, here at 591–2. For the further development of this idea, see Holger Thomas Gräf, Konfession und internationales System. Die Außenpolitik Hessen-Kassels im konfessionellen Zeitalter, Quellen und Forschungen zur hessischen Geschichte 94 (Darmstadt and Marburg, 1993). 25 John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985).

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change in Christianity must be an effect of some other change thought to be closer to the bone of human experience, we can point to the objectifying and delimiting process as having eventuated, within this period, in modern conceptions of property and the State; or, if we prefer, in a Holy Family which excluded such non-resident kin as John the Baptist.”26 Except for the state and state-building, however, these changes “do not seem to evoke any convincing motor event in the world of things: few, I guess, will be prepared to swallow the proposal that the emergence of ‘market society’ was such an event.”27 Fifteen years later, John W. O’Malley expressed a more skeptical attitude toward the confessionalization thesis’ adequacy to post-medieval Catholic history. In Trent and All That (2000), he concluded from a review of the national and ecclesiastical historiographies that neither “Catholic Counterreformation” nor “Catholic Reformation” had proved adequate to express the great range of Catholic history in the early modern era. More promising, he thought, is the confessonalization thesis, which “has brilliantly captured and called our attention to the obsession gripping Western culture to define ‘who’s in, who’s out.’”28 He commended Wolfgang Reinhard for pointing some of the thesis’ limitations: its top-down bias, its obscuring of continuities, and its minimization of differences. Yet fixing the thesis in the century between 1550 and 1650 missed the critical era for defining Catholic identity, notably in Germany, while the connection with state-building left out the vast areas of the empire, mainly Catholic, which lacked centralizing states. O’Malley’s most severe criticism, however, was that the model’s net allowed to escape the one thing that distinguished confessions in the first place – religion.29 This deficit led him to prefer the admittedly “bland and “faceless” but more capacious name of “early modern Catholicism” to all competing terms.30 Not only more inclusive and less eurocentric, it makes space for “history from below,” the religious practice and mentalities of the common people, whom the confessionalization thesis had treated chiefly as an object of the disciplinary process. O’Malley’s thesis hits the nail on the head, and, as Mark R. Forster has observed, “his methods and concerns, particularly his effort to grasp the meaning of religious practices and rituals for the common people, need to be better incorporated into the study of German Catholicism” in particular.31 Bossy, Christianity in the West, 169. Bossy, Christianity in the West, 170. 28 John W. O’Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicism in the Early Modern Era (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 137. 29 O’Malley, Trent and All That, 138–9. 30 O’Malley, Trent and All That, 140. 31 Marc R. Forster, “John Bossy and the History of German Catholicism,” paper delivered to the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 2002. The study of confessionalization and the religious orders is a most pressing need, because of their role as agents of diffusion among the 26 27

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Historical Definitions

Ironically, the inability to comprehend religion, the chief marker of confessionalization, as a set of coherent practices has proved the Achilles heel of the confessionalization thesis, particularly in its original version. Perhaps one could have listened more carefully to Ernst Walter Zeeden, whose studies of enduring Catholic elements in the religious life of German Protestants after the Reformation helped him to bring the very concept of “confessional formation” (Konfessionsbildung) into the historians’ vocabulary.32 His untheorized exploration of religious culture, his appreciation of the significance of visitation records for the study of religious change, and, above all, his sense for the necessity of a comparative history of the confessions pioneered the entire approach that led to the comparative study of confessions as religious formations. He thereby found for the post-Reformation era a counterpart to the sociologically oriented approach that has long dominated studies on the German reformation in its early, explosive phase. Whereas practitioners of the confessionalization thesis have always worked from the elites downward, those of the new religious anthropology searched for the traditional and innovative elements in the religion of the common people, which meant practice rather than theology and doctrine. During the years when the confessionalization thesis was coming to maturity, the 1970s to the 1990s, the outstanding scholar of this alternative approach was the Australian Robert W. (“Bob”) Scribner, whose premature death robbed the field of one of its brightest lights.33 Although he began to study the Reformation in terms of social movements, in the 1970s he turned away from all narratives, national, confessional, and social – all of which tried to fit the Protestant Reformation into the genealogy of the Enlightenment and modernity – and sought to understand why ordinary people had acted in ordinary ways to extraordinary effect. From data he turned to images, and one after the other he rediscovered the acts in which popular mentalities found expression – sacraments, magical practices, folkloric rituals, insult and shame, and rituals of violence. He explored, too, religious cosmologies, the great logics that bound these elements various sectors of Catholicism. See Hillard von Thiessen, Die Kapuziner zwischen Konfessionalisierung und Alltagskultur. Vergleichende Fallstudie am Beispiel Freiburgs und Hildesheims 1599–1750 (Freiburg, 2002). 32 Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen. Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich and Vienna, 1965). See also his Konfessionsbildung: Studien zur Reformation, Gegenreformation und katholischen Reform, Spätmittelalter und frühe Neuzeit, vol. 15 (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1985). To read Zeeden’s writings today is to discover why the confessionalization thesis arose in Germany, with its living confessional cultures, and why could do so only after confessionalism – the competition between Protestant and Catholic confessions – had come to an end in that country. 33 On Scribner’s work in its historiographical context, see Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “Robert W. Scribner, A Historian of the German Reformation,” in R. W. Scribner, Religion and Culture in Germany (1400–1800), edited by Lyndal Roper, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 81 (Leiden, 2001), 9–28.

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together, and came to understand how misleading was the conventional distinction between the mental worlds of the common people and their social superiors. The more Scribner explored this world with anthropological concepts, the less respect he felt for the grand narratives based on discriminations, and the more he appreciated the workings of the acts, images, and words that bound social worlds together. To Scribner, religion became not an aspect, a factor, or a function, it was the central subject of human history. From this perspective, the centrality of religion and religious culture to premodern peoples, the confessionalization thesis truncated its story by closing an era just as its defining category, confessional religion, was approaching its great age. According to the thesis, religion should have become less important under the impact of secularization after 1650, whereas the reverse was more nearly the case.34 Not the sixteenth nor the seventeenth century, writes Etienne François in his study of the confessions in Augsburg, but the eighteenth century witnessed an acceleration of “the processes of differentiation, discrimination, and internalization, which anchored the respective confessional identities so deeply in patterns of mentality and behavior,” thus creating social and cultural dimensions “which expanded far beyond the religious sphere proper and explain its continuity down to our own day.”35 It is now being recognized that, in the German lands at least, the real peak of confessional cultures and their impact on public life probably fell during the nineteenth century, and it is becoming fashionable to refer to that century as a “second confessional age.”36 If in Germany, perhaps elsewhere, for the obvious features of German confessionalism represent but one configuration of the elements from which in other European countries the modern civil religions were fashioned. Indeed, Europe’s “confessional age” may well have lasted from 1550 to 1870 – or even 1950!37

Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen, 181, already recognized this point. Etienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806, Abhandlungen zur Geschichte der Stadt Augsburg, vol. 33 (Sigmaringen, 1991), 12. 36 Helmut Walser Smith and Christ Clark, “The Fate of Nathan,” in Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914, edited by Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford and New York, 2002), 3–32; Konfessionen im Konflikt, edited by Olaf Blaschke (Göttingen, 2002). 37 See the review article by Joel F. Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870,” The Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77–101. Outside of German history, it is rare to find the term “confession” used as more than a descriptor without conceptual content. Such usage makes religion merely a traditional marker to be replaced in the modernization process by a more modern marker such as ethnicity or race. See, for an interesting example, Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodoxy: Mission Governance, and Confessional Politics in Russia’s Volga-Kama Region, 1827–1905 (Ithaca, 2002). 34 35

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4 These doubts, qualifications, and extensions hardly diminish the place the confessionalization thesis now occupies in the study of post-Reformation Germany and Europe.38 The thesis remains least problematic in the context – Zeeden’s and Schilling’s original field of study – of the German lands, which have been covered superbly by a seven-volume, region-by-region, territory-byterritory survey (with invaluable maps) edited by Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler.39 Volumes have appeared, too, on confessonalization as a regional phenomenon.40 Conceptually more innovative than any of these is Ulrike Strasser’s book on Bavaria, which takes the confessionalization paradigm into Catholic Bavaria, where she cleanses it from the remnants of secularization by demonstrating how central religious practice – from the piety of cloistered and married women up to the official cult of the Virgin Mary as patroness of Bavaria – was to the centralization of this most precocious of German territorial states.41 Perhaps the most demonstrative sign of the confessionalization thesis’ now established historiographical position is its use as a periodizing concept for German history in the tenth edition of Bruno Gebhardt’s venerable Handbook of German History.42 Yet hard-boiled skeptics remain, even among historians of the German territorial states, who cultivate the thesis’ original seedbed. Ernst Schubert of Göttingen, a leading scholar of the territories, holds that the territorial laws of this time, the crucial phase in the transformation of the old patrimonial principality into the territorial state, simply do not bear a confessional stamp. “Once the problem [of the rise of the territorial state] is untangled,” he writes, “there remains, astonishingly, no strand which can be catalogued under the name of ‘confessionalization.’”43 From the other 38 See Heinz Schilling’s own assessment in “Konfessionsbildung,’ ‘Konfessionalisierung’ ein Literaturbericht,’” Die Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 42 (1991): 441–63, 779–94. 39 Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung: Land und Konfession 1500–1650, edited by Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler, 7 vols, Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitalter der Glaubensspaltung, vols 49–52, 56–7 (Münster, 1991–97). 40 Konfessonalisierung und Region, ed. Peer Friess and Rolf Kiessling, Forum Suevicum. Beiträge zur Geschichte Ostschwabens und der benachbarten Regionen, vol. 3 (Constance, 1999). 41 Ulrike Strasser, State of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Politics in an Early Modern Catholic State (Ann Arbor, 2003). 42 Maximilian Lanzinner, “Konfessionelles Zeitalter 1555–1618,” in Gebhardt. Handbuch der deutschen Geschichte, 10th ed., vol. 10 (Stuttgart, 2001), ed. Wolfgang Reinhard, 1–203. 43 Ernst Schubert, “Von Gebot zur Landesordnung. Der Wandel fürstlicher Herrschaft vom 15. zum 16. Jahrhundert,” in Die deutsche Reformation zwischen Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit, edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Schriften des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien, vol. 50 (Munich, 2001), 19–62, here at 21.

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direction, too, the connection between confessionalization and state-building has been challenged, notably by Marc Forster, who finds the growth of a Catholic confession in the politically luxuriant landscapes of southwestern Germany relatively untouched by the formation of strong states.44 Other studies, too, suggest that Catholic confessionalization had very little to do with either political or social modernization in the ecclesiastical states.45 The extension of the confessionalization thesis to new groups and new lands in- and outside the German-speaking world has required – just as did its adaptation to Catholicism – a loosening of the tie to state-development, a stronger emphasis on religion, and a questioning of the appropriateness of its dependence on modernization theory. In France confessionalization has become part of the historians’ vocabulary not only for early modern religious history but also as a term of periodization, but this has not altered the standard view of French social and political history.46 Much more surprising is an attempt to treat North German Mennonites – excluded as “nonconfessional” by Schilling – as a confessionalized community.47 The original confessionalization thesis held that Mennonites and other sectarian groups were “non-confessional,” because, tolerated or not, they lay outside the crucial alliance between church and state. Once that link is set aside, confessionalization displays its full inherent power to become a descriptor for all Christian religious communities in early modern Europe. The ideal forum for studying confessionalization in this non-political sense is the Dutch Republic, where both ecclesiastical establishment and state repression tended to be far weaker than in the German lands, France, or the British kingdoms. Benjamin Kaplan, in a study of Utrecht, writes that the “rise of confessionalism” had three aspects: the rebuilding of “ecclesiastical structures of religious life”; fierce competition for the doubters and unaffiliated; and the religious disciplining of congregations. All five of Utrecht’s churches – Calvinist, Remonstrant, Mennonite, Lutheran, and Catholic – “experienced the rise of confessionalism in its three aspects, and in 44 Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge and New York, 2001). 45 Alexander Jendorff, Reformatio Catholica. Gesellschaftliche Handlungsspielräume kirchlichen Wandels im Erzstift Mainz 1514–1630, Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte, vol. 142 (Münster, 2000). Stephan Laux, Reformationsversuche in Kurköln (1542–1548). Fallstudien zu einer Strukturgeschichte landstädtischer Reformation (Neuss, Kempen, Andernach, Linz, Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte, vol. 143 (Münster, 2001), contains suggestions in the same direction, though the period treated is too brief to be conclusive. 46 Le Temps des confessions: 1530–1620/30, ed. Marc Venard, Histoire du christianisme des origines à nos jours, vol. 8 (Paris, 1992). For a special study, see Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Pennsylvania, 1993). 47 Michael D. Driedger, Obedient Heretics. Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age (Aldershot and Burlington, 2002).

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this sense their development between 1600 and 1650 ran in parallel,” though in other respects “the churches had divergent histories.”48 The importation of the confessionalization thesis into East Central Europe has also been fraught with difficulties. At a conference held at Leipzig in 1997 to address the applicability of the thesis in its German form to the lands of East Central Europe, the weight of opinion fell definitely against the thesis, at least in its German form.49 There seemed, in the view of one participant, little belief in the comparability of the ecclesiastical and political structures of West and East Central Europe and even less interest in exploring interrelations between the everyday lives of the religious communities. Against this negative yield, however, Serhii Plokhy has attempted in a rich, provocative book to apply the confessionalization thesis to late sixteenth and seventeenth-century Ruthenian/Ukrainian religious history.50 This requires particularly strenuous adaptation, for the Ruthenians practiced the same religion in two different churches, Greek Catholic and Orthodox, and were divided politically between the Cossacks and the subjects of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Plokhy argues that confessionalization, as a phenomenon associated with the Reformation in Western Europe, also had a notable influence on the Orthodox lands of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth.”51 Responding to the challenge of the reformations in the west, “the Kyivan metropolitanate, which split into Uniate [Greek Catholic] and Orthodox branches, embarked on its own project of confessionalization.” This was marked in both churches by greater dependence on the state, an expansion of hierarchical authority over discipline and faith, a new type of parish and monastic clergy educated abroad or in foreign-influenced schools, and a growing role for the laity elites in church affairs. Although Plokhy cites several of Schilling studies (plus some more general works), he might have preferred Reinhard’s church-centered version of the confessionalization thesis, because the initiative came entirely from the church at Kyiv/Kiev, where the metropolitan, Petro Mohyla (1596–1647), “was clearly intent on claiming the leadership of Ruthenian society and taking on a number of functions pertaining to the representation of the Ruthenian world that had earlier been carried out by the princely

48 Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Confessionalism and Its Limits: Religion in Utrecht, 1600–1650,” in Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Utrecht during the Golden Age, edited by Joaneath A. Spicer and Lynn Federle Orr (New Haven, 1997), 60–71, here at 61. 49 Bruce Gordon, “Konfessionalisierung, Stände und Staat in Ostmitteleuropa (1550–1650),” German History 17 (1999): 90–4. 50 Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford and New York, 2002). Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, Mass., 2001), who examines much of the same history primarily from the Greek Catholic, rather than the Orthodox, side, does not employ the concept of confessionalization, much less the thesis. 51 Plokhy, Cossacks and Religion, 11.

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stratum.”52 If this opening proves successful, it may produce a salutary revision to the structuralist overburden of the confessionalization thesis. Something similar can be said of another newly invaded field, seventeenthcentury Ireland. Ute Lotz-Heumann and Karl S. Bottigheimer have argued for the existence of a “double confessionalization,” Anglican and Roman Catholic, during the era of the War of the Three Kingdoms (1641–50). The Catholics, Irish and Old English (old-stock Anglo-Irish) fiercely resisted the English monarch’s military power and his established church, and did so with the help of their own church, whose agents introduced Tridentine Catholicism in Ireland.53 Of course, the confessionalization was not symmetrical, for the Irish Confederation of Kilkenny was by no stretch of the imagination a state, and the presence of Jesuits, a prime marker for LotzHeumann and Bottigheimer, and other priests trained on the continent did not prevent the Catholic Reformation from becoming “defined in terms of an ethnic tradition … and transmitted through forms of religious expression which had their origins in the medieval Gaelic past.”54 The Irish case is nonetheless an interesting one, for while the confessionalization thesis in Schilling’s more state-centered version fits well the English state and the Anglican confessions, the Irish side conforms much better to Reinhard’s more church-centered argument, which allows for confessionalization without a disciplining state. 5 The general impact of the confessionalization thesis may be judged by its significance for conceptualizing the relationship of early modern to modern European history. No theorist has taken the thesis more seriously than has the American sociologist Philip Gorski. The thesis in its early stages contained a positive and a negative attitude to the theories of Max Weber: positive in its affirmation that modernization of society and the state was promoted ultimately by secularization; negative in its view that the Reformation promoted a necessary if temporary re-sacralization of state and society and fostered an ethic based on social discipline rather than on individual psychology. Gorski exploits Plokhy, Cossacks and Religion, 240. Ute Lotz-Heumann and Karl S. Bottigheimer, “The Irish Reformation in European Perspective,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 87 (1998): 268–309; Ute Lotz-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland: Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. und in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts, Spätmittelalter und Reformation, new series, vol. 13 (Tübingen, 2000). 54 Samantha A. Meigs, The Reformations in Ireland: Tradition and Confessionalism, 1400–1690 (Houndsmill, Basingstoke, and New York, 1997), 3. One might even argue that confessionalized Catholicism in the continental sense did not establish itself in Ireland much before 1850, when Paul Cullen (1803–78) came from Rome to assume the primatial office. 52 53

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the confessionalization thesis (along with other cultural concepts) in a most important revision of the Marxist and Weberian theories of European state development that dominated the literature from the 1960s through the 1980s. “The formation of national states in early modern Europe (1517–1789),” he proposes, “was not solely the product of an administrative revolution driven by absolutist princes. It was equally the result of a disciplinary revolution sparked by ascetic religious movements, the most important of which was Calvinism.”55 Gorski believes that a skeptical attitude is warranted toward theories that focus solely on elites, formal organization, or threats of coercion. He rejects the confessionalization thesis’ corollary that the confessions were somewhat differently configured bundles of the same set of religious ideologies, social movements, and political agendas, for he believes that the inter-confessional conflicts, not the common process of confessionalization, formed a “driving force” behind religious, social, and political development.56 In this he agrees with those, including many historians of Catholicism (and Anglicanism) who insist on the confessions’ “propria,” not their similarities, as the keys to understanding the historical significance of confessionalization. His object, however, is different. It is to preserve more of the thesis, which descends from Max Weber and Otto Hintze, that there are characteristic differences among the politics associated with the several confessions. The differential disciplining powers of the confessions, in fact, stand at the heart of Gorski’s theory of state development in early modern Europe. He distinguishes two sectors of Europe, a highly urbanized Atlantic zone in the west and a sparsely settled agrarian region of central and eastern Europe. They are represented in his work respectively by the Dutch Republic from 1560 to 1650 and Prussia from 1640 to 1720.57 His selection is important, because Calvinism, the confession he believes – against Schilling – to have been most disciplining and most associated with revolution, or Pietism, which he holds to be an equivalent, became established in both states. But with quite different political consequence, because, so runs Gorski’s argument, “the successful disciplinary revolution led to the formation of republican states in the core region and made possible the construction of strong, centralized, monarchical states in the semiperiphery.”58 Of both types of political development, “the disciplinary revolution was a necessary condition.”59 Gorski thus attributes “a 55 Philip S. Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisited: Disciplinary Revolution and State Formation in Holland and Prussia,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1993): 265–316, here at 266. 56 Philip S. Gorski, “Beyond Marx and Hintze? Third-Wave Theorists of Early Modern State Formation,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (2001): 851–61, here at 858–9. 57 Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003). 58 Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisited,” 267. 59 Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisited,” 283.

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decisive causal import … to Calvinism and ascetic Protestantism” in early modern social and political modernization.60 Their revolutionary political impact derived from a combination of a radical ethic of social discipline and an effective strategy of collective organization. “[T]he Calvinist movement,” Gorski revises Weber, “provided the channel through which the discipline of the monastery entered the political world.”61 That discipline was less individual than social, of course, and so was its confessionalized version. 6 The division of labor between the sociologist and the historian is a useful and salutary one. The sociologist aims primarily to construct a theory that is conceptually coherent and fits the data as well as may be; the historian aims primarily to understand what the sources have to tell and to explain it in terms which may be partial, so long as they fit the sources. Consistency on the one side, authenticity on the other.62 The sociologist looks upon the concepts in terms of their logic, the historian in terms of their utility. It is appropriate to end by looking at a historian’s work of fine utility. The chief study by the late Bodo Nischan, to whose memory this volume is dedicated, is his Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg.63 It is the story of how the Lutheran reformation came to Brandenburg under Elector Joachim II in the 1540s, and how a second, Reformed (Calvinist) reformation failed to succeed it in a struggle unleashed by the decision of his great-grandson, Elector Johann Sigismund to announce himself a Calvinist in 1613. It is set, therefore, in the very cockpit of the world, the interface between the two Protestant confessions, out of which one version of the confessionalization thesis arose. Nischan pays homage to the confessionalization thesis as Heinz Schilling framed it and acknowledges the term “Second Reformation” as “a proper synonym specifically for ‘Reformed confessonalization.’”64 Yet Nischan chooses a somewhat divergent way, for he holds that “religion – how people worshiped and how they lived their faith, the history of the church – played a central role in these events and hence provides a key to our understanding of this period.”65 Stripped of the teleological tendency that the confessionalization thesis borrowed from modernization theory, religion rises into the foreground of the story – much Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisited,” 305. Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisited,” 306. 62 I allude here to what Max Weber called “sinngerecht” and “sachgerecht” respectively. 63 Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994). 64 Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession, 2. 65 Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession, 1. 60 61

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as historians of early modern Catholicism have insisted it must. “I have tried to show,” Nischan writes, “how church ritual and ceremony – especially the communion liturgy – provide a handy litmus test for the mentality of both princes and people involved in these confessional confrontations.”66 From such an approach the history of the confessions must unfold not as a story of isomorphic programs and parallel development, but as one of confrontation, discrimination, and struggle. But Nischan does not recreate a straight fight between the two Protestant confessions, for resurgent Catholicism arrives on this northern landscape to provoke not a lessening but a sharpening of the conflicts between the Reformed and Lutheran confessions. “During the Second Reformation,” Nischan relates, “with the Calvinist court trying to give the Mark [of Brandenburg] a clearer, more Protestant identity to steel it in its struggle against the resurgent Catholic church, the old ritual and ceremonial were repudiated as leftover ‘papal dung,’ but … defended by the country’s Lutherans as a sign of true evangelical orthodoxy.” It was Bodo Nischan’s achievement to restore the taste of religious fealty and combative stalwartness to the story of a major engagement among the three confessions. The tale is true to the sources,67 but it does not say how these events might be significant for our understanding of what came after. That is roughly what Philip Gorski has in mind, and we can wish that future historians will at least meet him halfway. Yet it is difficult to imagine that the two duties – explanation and understanding – can be equally well served. “Subjects which do not admit of such a relation to the present,” Ernst Troeltsch once wrote, “belong [merely] to the antiquarian.”68 History without explanation may please, but it has no utility. But how valuable can an explanation be which is not rooted in understanding? We historians want to speak, wrote Arthur J. Quinn, to these shades from time gone, some demanding our attention, some reluctant to have it, some long thwarted into abject silence, … yet all there somehow, geniuses of a certain time and a certain place, and all strangely requiring only a little of our blood to return to fleeting life, to speak to and through us. For they do wait for us, you know, not as the faint spoor of long-vanished existence, but as real persons, real yet speechless until some questioning voice dissolves the spell of their silence.69

Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession, 2. The sources, however, do not really support his contention that “the people” played a central role in the failure of the Reformed Reformation in Brandenburg. 68 Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 17. 69 Arthur Quinn, A New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec (Boston, 1994), 2. 66 67

Confessionalization: Historical and Scholarly Perspectives of a Comparative and Interdisciplinary Paradigm Heinz Schilling

The focus of Bodo Nischan’s scholarship was the religious and intellectual history of Brandenburg in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. From the beginning he paid attention to the broader political and societal connections, making his early publications contributions to the topic of confessionalization avant la lettre. Later, his impressive monograph Prince, People and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg, of 1994, offered a synthesis which equaled in its interpretative power Hans Rosenberg’s study Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy, which in the 1960s and 1970s had been most influential in Germany. Nischan’s book splendidly corrected many one-sided judgments, which characterize the picture of Prussia to this day. At the same time, his book offered important impulses for the scholarship of confessionalization, especially with its methodologically fruitful, dual perspective of confessionalization and historical anthropology.1 It is, therefore, appropriate to dedicate a contribution which deals with the historiographical origins and scholarly perspectives of the confessionalization paradigm to this memorial volume for Bodo Nischan.2 This is to be done in four parts: 1) the circumstances of the formulation and the reception of the paradigm; 2) the 1 Cf. here my research note “Nochmals, ‘Zweite Reformation in Deutschland,’” Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 23 (1996): 501–24, esp. 511 ff., 513 ff. – Bodo Nischan had conceptualized a major project on “Confessionalization and Popular Religion in LateReformation Brandenburg,” which intended to throw light on precisely that aspect of confessionalization. See his collection of essays: Bodo Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot, 1999). 2 This essay is based on public lectures on the topic which I gave during the past several years at various places, such as Berkeley, Durham, Munich, and the Faculté d’Études Germaniques at the Sorbonne in Paris (cf. the report in: Études Germaniques. Revue de la Société des Études Germaniques 57 (2002): 401–20). I hope for understanding that in the following historiographical analysis I will have to refer repeatedly to my own publications. Once again I should like to thank Ute Lotz-Heumann for advice – not only with regard to transforming the German text into passable English!

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macro-historical and theoretical foundations, which need to be reflected upon, I believe, especially in a time of little interest in theory in the historical profession; 3) a brief survey of the content of the confessionalization paradigm; and 4) specifically, its relationship to cultural history. I. Historiography: Against the primacy of socio-economic factors in German historiography of the 1970s Discussing the historiography of the paradigm “confessionalization” has to start with the conditions of its origins and the basic notions of its reception. The paradigm “confessionalization,” developed by Wolfgang Reinhard mainly from Catholic, and by myself from Lutheran and Reformed examples, is an outgrowth of a confrontation with the postulate of the socio-economic primacy in German historical scholarship in the 1970s, but at the same time an adaptation of the social science methodology introduced by it. At that time religion or ecclesiastical history were not at all at the center of German historiography on early modern and modern history, though Ernst Walter Zeeden had already emphasized during the 1950s and 1960s the importance of the confessional factor in German history from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. But in the 1970s the approach of Zeeden and his Tübingen school was no longer part of German mainstream historiography as historiographical tradition as well as tradition in general had been interrupted by the 1968 movement. Zeeden’s preoccupation with confessional cultures was informed, as is always the case in sound historical scholarship, by its time, namely the late confessionalism of the time of the German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. At issue were – as Zeeden himself formulated – “problematic and painful issues, which … continue to be relevant to this very hour” and in which the interpretation of the past is influenced “by a certain treasure of opinions and judgments derived from connections that have nothing to do with scholarship … of which a scholar, as an individual, cannot be free and perhaps should not be.”3 This unmistakably existential and traditionalist perspective – the confessional element of the sixteenth century continued to form him in the Adenauer Republic of the 1950s and 1960s – took Zeeden to a methodologically most fruitful starting point, which was aided by his intimate familiarity with the two religions of Catholicism and Protestantism, he 3 For example, in the chapter “Das konfessionelle Zeitalter und wir,” in Ernst Walter Zeeden, Konfessionsbildung. Studien zur Reformation, Gegenreformation und katholischen Reform (Stuttgart, 1985). Spätmittelalter und Frühe Neuzeit. Tübinger Beiträge zur Geschichtsforschung, vol. 15: 284.

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himself being a convert to Catholicism. Formally, his point of departure was the essential equality of the three large churches. For the historical exploration of the confessional factor this opened up comparative approaches hitherto unknown – not so much with regard to society as a whole, but with regard to religious and ecclesiastical manifestations in a narrower sense, because Zeeden and his students in Tübingen saw their approach primarily in an ecumenical and not so much in a scientific and analytical perspective. Zeeden’s paradigm, found since the mid-1950s in several publications of his as well as those of his students, was “formation of the confessions” (“Konfessionsbildung”), understood as “process, which did not merely touch the ecclesiastical realm but also the realms of politics and culture, and which indeed engulfed both the public and the private spheres.”4 This “formation of the confessions” was “the intellectual and organizational solidification of the several Christian churches, which had been separated ever since the Reformation, to reasonably stable ecclesiastical organisms regarding doctrine, church order, and the religious-moral life. At the same time, the process involved their expansion into the Christian world of early modern Europe; their defense against challenges from the outside through the means of diplomacy and politics, but also their formation through extra-ecclesiastical forces, especially the power of the state.”5 One can understand that the breadth of this frame of reference was conducive to the identification of one of the major moving forces of modernity as a fruitful paradigm for historical scholarship, and at the same time define the epoch, in which this paradigm dominated, as the “Age of Confessional Controversies” (“Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe”). The predilection of historical scholarship for the social sciences, which powerfully characterized German scholarship in the 1970s, meant an ambivalent reaction to Zeeden. On the one hand, the emergence of cultural, social, mentality history, eventually also popular history, entailed an emphasis on the same spheres of public and private life, to which Zeeden, on the basis of quite different assumptions, had directed the attention of historians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This meant a strengthening of Zeeden’s notions. On the other hand it was quite evident that “Konfessionsbildung” (“formation of the confessions”) and the Tübingen approach on religion in general did not match with the sharpened methodological consciousness of the 1970s and the theories and instruments of the social sciences. In the work of Zeeden and most of his students the preoccupation with the formation of

4 “Grundlagen und Wege der Konfessionsbildung in Deutschland im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe”, a presentation at the Ulmer Historikertag in 1956, published for the first time in 1958 in the Historische Zeitschrift. Also, “Zur Periodisierung und Terminologie des Zeitalters der Reformation und Gegenreformation”, first published in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 7 (1956): 67. 5 “Grundlagen”, 69.

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the confessions was primarily traditional history – guided less by analytical than by subjective interests in those religious, institutional, and political traditions at the end of which stood their own contemporary Christianconfessional existence. This primary epistemological interest entailed the shaping of problems and research narrowly to the religious and ecclesiastical spheres, while the political, social, and general intellectual connections were seen as their marginal ramifications or consequences, and secular structures and developments remained in the background. The changes in German historical scholarship meant that the traditionally defined interests in religion, as Zeeden saw them, were increasingly ignored. The result was a qualitative modification of the traditional historical point of departure – the “formation of confessions” – in the direction of the scientific, methodological-theoretical societal paradigm “confessionalization.” Whereas the paradigm “formation of the confessions” focused narrowly on religious and ecclesiastical phenomena and considered political and social as well as general intellectual connections rather as marginal, the paradigm “confessionalization” embraces a universal perspective that encompasses all of society. It understands the confessional element as the leading category of early modern socialization and thereby as the essential element in research on early modern society, no matter along which lines of substantive or thematic orientation. Thus it includes not only early modern church history but also political, social and legal history as well as cultural history in general and the history of literature and art in particular. Scholarship on confessionalization focuses on long, historically coherent structures or functions and developmental tendencies. Confessional phenomena and their consequences attain their impulses no longer from one’s own, confessionally framed Christian existence. What are relevant primarily are the cultural, social, and political functions of the process of confessionalization within the emerging societal system of early modern Europe. Moreover, the paradigm focuses on the impulses and the hindrances, which stemmed from the confessional dynamic of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in the direction of the further development of the modern era. This shift in focus had the terminological consequence that in this structural historical interpretation the term used is no longer “formation of the confessions” but “confessionalization”. I must emphasize this point since occasionally there exists terminological confusion, at times quite consciously so.6

6 Cf. the contribution of Helga Schnabel-Schüle, “Vierzig Jahre Konfessionalisierungsforschung. Eine Standortbestimmung,” in Peter Frieß/Rolf Kießling, eds, Konfessionalisierung und Region (Konstanz, 1999). Forum Suevicum, vol. 3: 23–40. In contrast to this terminological confusion and inaccurate rendering of the historiographical situation Harm Klueting has pointed out: “Von Ernst Walter Zeeden gab es keine direkte Verbindung zu Heinz Schilling und somit keine direkte Verbindung von Zeedens ‘Konfessionsbildung’ zu Schillings

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Several observations may be made about the scholarly sea change that occurred in Freiburg and Bielefeld in the late 1970s. First, Wolfgang Reinhard’s 1977 essay in the Archive for Reformation History, “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung,” used modernization theory to explain the capacity for formation and change of the Catholic Counter Reformation (to use his own conventional terminology). Thus he cited Weber as witness for an anti-Weberian interpretation in the sense that he rejected Calvinism’s modernization monopoly, crediting Tridentine Catholicism with the same capacity to change.7 Secondly, my own monograph Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung, finished in the late 1970s and published in 1981, employed “Konfession” and “Konfessionalisierung” as the principal categories of early modern scholarship, derived from the notion of the political in pre-modern Europe. In contrast to the concept of the political since the Enlightenment, this earlier concept did not exclude but rather included religion. I sharpened these connections in the synthesis Aufbruch und Krise (Beginnings and Crisis) by defining – following Reinhard Kosellek – confessionalization as the “Vorsattelzeit der Moderne”, the preliminary stage of modernity.8 Thirdly, my own pointed identification of “confessionalization” as key category of early modern society occurred in the context of heated but fruitful controversies at the “Fakultät für Geschichtswissenschaften” at the University of Bielefeld with a historiography which was characterized by nineteenth and twentieth century conceptualizations and theoretical and methodological notions of the primacy of socio-economic categories. Fourthly, the confessionalization paradigm is a particular product of German historiography of the 1970s, formulated in distinct opposition to the primacy of socio-economic forces. It is at the same time a product of German history, since the confessional factor which molded all European societies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries became nowhere so effective as in ‘Konfessionalisierung’” (Harm Klueting, “Die Reformierten im Deutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts und die Konfessionalisierungsdebatte der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft seit ca. 1980”, in Matthias Freudenberger, ed., Profile des reformierten Protestantismus aus vier Jahrhunderten (Wuppertal, 1999) 17–47, here 26). ‘Winfried Schulze has also warned of an unscholarly use of the two terms: Burkhard Dietz/Stefan Ehrenpreis, eds, Drei Konfessionen in einer Region. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Konfessionalisierung im Herzogtum Berg vom 16. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert (Köln, 1999). Schriftenreihe des Vereins für Rheinische Kirchengeschichte 136: 15–30. 7 Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1997): 226–52. 8 Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung. Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh, 1981); also in Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, hg. im Auftrag des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte von G. A. Benrath, vol. 48: 15–53 (Konfession als Leitkategorie der Moderne, Opposition was voiced by Winfried Schulze in his review of the book in the Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung 12 (1985): 104–7. Heinz Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise. Deutsche Geschichte von 1517 bis 1648 (Berlin, 1988), Siedler Deutsche Geschichte, vol. 4. (2nd edn, 1994); Italian translation: Ascesa e crisi (Bologna, 1997).

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Germany, where the Reformation and multi-confessionalism had their beginnings. Fifthly, notwithstanding the embeddedness of the paradigm “confessionalization” in German history and historiography, the paradigm had from the beginning a European-comparative perspective. This grew out of the subject matter itself, since the confessional churches made their appearances both as institutions and as confessional cultures in all countries and regions of Latin Europe. Of course, this does not mean – as sometimes seems to be argued by critics9 – that uniform structures and processes should be posited for all these countries. Quite the contrary, as in all historical comparisons, the comparative approach to confessionalization identifies similarities as well as differences.10 Sixthly, as regards its origin, conceptualization, and dynamics, the confessionalization paradigm has a macro-historical point of departure. In my opinion, this entails two advantages. On the one hand, this offers – at the point when historiography can no longer avoid the danger of culturehistorical arbitrariness – the possibility of a comprehensive interpretative scheme, or, as Americans are fond of saying, of a “grand narrative” which allows specific issues to be addressed. It is very important that this occurs both positively and negatively, affirming the interpretative scheme or modifying or criticizing it. On the other hand, this interpretative frame of reference is able both in its intentionality and especially its content to appropriate microhistorical points of departure, embracing a broad spectrum of topics – politics and institutions as much as society and social configurations, mentalities and identities as much as daily life, art and culture in the broadest sense, high culture as well as popular culture. Such expansiveness and flexibility are

9 For example, Andrew Pettegree, “Confessionalization in North Western Europe”, in Joachim Bahlcke and Arno Strohmeyer, eds, Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa. Wirkungen des religiösen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart, 1999), = Forschungen zur Geschichte und Kultur des östlichen Mitteleuropa, vol. 7: 105–20; Along the same lines also Olaf Mörke, “Konfessionalisierung als politisch-soziales Strukturprinzip? Das Verhältnis von Religion und Staatsbildung in der Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Tijdschrift voor Sociale Geschiedenis 16 (1990): 31–60, and “Die politische Bedeutung des Konfessionellen im Deutschen Reich und in der Republik der Vereinigten Niederlande,” in Ronald G. Asch and Heinz Duchhardt, eds, Der Absolutismus – ein Mythos? (Cologne, 1996), 125–64. 10 This means that the scholarship on confessionalization is particularly able to offer, from the perspective of early modern Europe, a contribution to comparative societal studies which generally is done only by historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. See Hartmut Kaelble and Jürgen Schriewer, eds, Vergleich und Transfer. Komparatistik in den Sozial-, Geschichts- und Kulturwissenschaften (Frankfurt/Main, 2002); Heinz Schilling and MarieAntoinette Gross, eds, “Minderheiten” und “Erziehung” im Spannungsfeld von Staat und Kirche (Berlin, 2003); also in Zeitschrift für Historische Forschung Beiheft 31. – A paradigmatic example for the comparative European application of the confessionalization paradigm is Ute LotzHeumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland. Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. und in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 2000). Spätmittelalter und Reformation Neue Reihe 13.

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inherent in the subject matter itself, since in old Europe religion was relevant for the individual and for society, for politics and institutions as much as for science, culture, indeed for the economic and commercial spheres. II. The macro-historical foundations: Europe as a specific socioreligious type of civilization The comparative approach to confessionalization includes both an intra- as well as an inter-cultural comparison; it is both synchronistic and diachronistic. The intra-cultural comparison, however, has stood in the foreground of scholarship. This led to the comparative exploration and systematic parallelization of Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic confessionalization in the European context. Since Islamic, Asian, and African studies are poorly developed in Germany, and are pursued in isolation rather than in interdisciplinary fashion, the inter-cultural comparison has hardly played a role in the confessionalization scholarship. In terms of methodology and theory, the inter-cultural comparison is, however, of enormous importance. Such a comparative perspective will, on the one hand, sharpen the understanding of the special role of early modern confessionalization in European cultural typology, while on the other hand it will prompt an understanding for the historical political preconditions for a fruitful collaboration between different cultures in a world that is steadily growing together. Regrettably, 11 September 2001 and its aftermath have caused these notions, emerging from the scholarly discourse, to attain universal contemporary relevance. In terms of this inter-cultural comparative perspective, the European confessionalization of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries appears as the system-inherent consequence of the cultural type “Europe.”11 Formed in the earliest years of the amalgamation of classical, Christian, and also Germanic elements, the profile of Europe, in terms of sociology of religion, was determined by the fact that religion and society, or rather the ecclesiastical and secular-political order, were – in contrast to the modern world of the nineteenth and twentieth century – not divided into separate spheres, but were structurally connected and functionally related. The sacred and the secular were related to each other, without entering, however, into an indiscernible unity. The paradigm of old Europe was based, as regards 11 About the following see Heinz Schilling, Die neue Zeit. Vom Christenheitseuropa zum Europa der Staaten. 1250 bis 1750 (Berlin, 1999). Siedler Geschichte Europas, vol. 3: 457ff; “L’Europe des églises et confessions,” in: Europa. L ‘idée et l’identité européennes, de 1 ‘Antiquité grecque au XXIe siècle, in Eric Bussière, Michel Dumoulin, Gilbert Trausch, eds. (Antwerp, 2001), 79–108.

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sociology of religion, neither on an essential separation nor an amalgamation of secular and religious affairs. It was not a monism but a dualism, in which the sacred and the secular were intimately interrelated. Each sphere retained its independence and distinctiveness. This distinguished Europe from monistic or fundamentalist societies, which do not know this independence and differentiation, with all the cultural, intellectual, social, and political consequences, which become explicit for Europeans especially in the encounter with Muslim Fundamentalism in all its otherness and difference. More specifically, this dualism of religion and society, of church and state is applicable only to “Western”, better “Latin” Christendom, since GreekOrthodox countries have proceeded since the Middle Ages doctrinally along their own paths, especially regarding the basic principles of the relationship between the sacred and the secular, between church and state. In the final analysis, these religious and sociological differences allowed, ever since the late Middle Ages, the Greek-Byzantine and Roman-Latin cultures of Europe to go their separate ways. Only the tension between the spiritual and the secular empowered the societal and cultural dynamic characteristic of Latin Europe. Only the basically dualistic structure of the sacred and the secular guarantees for both sides the possibility of independent action. Only this configuration allowed balancing power and control. Only this configuration allowed the secular and the ecclesiastical realms, each of which would have preferred absolute power, to remain in balance. And only the resulting relativizing of societal and political claims by both church and state made freedom possible. Only on this basis could a way be found to autonomy – autonomy both of the political and the sacred, which became a matter for the individual, independent of state and society. In retrospect one might say that Europe was “programmed” to secularization and to intellectual as well as political autonomy, or – to use the terms of Max Weber – to rationality and modernity. This secularization, out of which emerged the modern state completely independent of ecclesiasticalreligious forces, and also the similarly autonomous modern society, did not take place in a linear process, but in waves. Periods of accelerating secularization were followed by periods in which the connection was more intimate and an alliance stood in the foreground. Indeed, secularization did not become dominant as anti-religious and anticlerical movement but – as is basic especially for the history of literature and art – took place in intimate relationship to the religious-ecclesiastical traditions. This process transferred important energies, dispositions, and paradigms of the religious and ecclesiastical system into the secular realm and thereby also molded state and society even in the phase of autonomous secularization.

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III. Content and main research areas on confessionalization This process, characteristic of European religion, reached a decisive climax in the second half of the sixteenth century in a syndrome of ecclesio-religious, political, social and cultural concentration and dynamics, which has been labeled by Wolfgang Reinhard and myself “confessionalization.” Parallel and in succession to the if not anti-religious then a-religious Renaissance, certain religious and ecclesiastical structures and functions had appeared again in the foreground in the late Middle Ages and the Reformation narrowly defined, though in the various European countries with a different chronological rhythm. The connection with political and societal processes had become more intimate. It was on this basis that European societies underwent from the middle of the sixteenth century onward a process of confessionalization, which meant, along the lines of the most frequently used definition, a “fundamental process of society which had far-reaching effects upon the public and private life of individual European societies” embracing changes in the ecclesiastical, religious, and cultural spheres every bit as much as in the political and social.12 Research on confessionalization, therefore, is not only concerned with the formation of the modern confessional churches as institutions or with the confessions as religious cultural systems, clearly distinct in doctrine, spirituality, ritual, and popular culture. Rather, at issue is a process of change and formation, directed by religious and ecclesiastical forces, which embraced all areas of public and private life and which fundamentally molded the profile of modern Europe. The religious and ecclesiastical processes and structures of emerging modernity from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century appear from this perspective no longer as an obstacle to social change but on the contrary as one of its engines. However, contrary to the longstanding claims of Max Weber’s Calvinism thesis this process occurred not only in the allegedly progressive Calvinist-Reformed Protestantism and in Protestant dissent but also, in strict systematic and conceptual parallel, in Lutheran and Catholic confessionalization. The age of confessionalization can, therefore, analogous to Reinhard Koselleck’s Sattelzeit between 1750 and 1850, be identified as “Vorsattelzeit der Moderne” (Schilling), the preliminary stage of modernity. 12 Heinz Schilling, “Confessionalization in the Empire: Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555 and 1620”, in Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Durch History (Leiden, New York, Cologne, 1992), 205–45, here 209; the German original is: Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich – Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1–45, esp. 6; cf. also the collection of essays: Heinz Schilling, Ausgewählte Abhandlungen zur europäischen Reformations- und Konfessionalisierungsgeschichte (Berlin, 2002).

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The substance of confessionalization and its consequences for European societies and individuals – in the short run in the confessional age itself and in the long run for the formation of modern Europe until the present – have been explored in detailed studies and numerous debates. I confine myself to citing the symposium of the Verein für Reformationsgeschichte (VRG/SRR) and the Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum (CC); the literature surveys dealing with confessionalization in Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterrricht; the most important critical assessments of Joel Harrington, Helmut Walser Smith, Thomas Kaufmann, Olaf Mörke, Winfried Eberhard, and Philip Benedict (with relation to the Netherlands, Bohemia and France respectively);13 the three recent collections of essays on the topic edited by Bahlcke/Strohmeyer, Dietz/Ehrenpreis and Frieß/Kießling;14 and finally articles of William Monter and Robert von Friedeburg, as examples for the implicit or explicit use of the concept.15 Most recently a discussion began as to whether the concept can also be applied to German history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.16 The result of these debates, which are by no means concluded and which cannot be elaborated in detail, is that despite numerous substantive 13 Joel F. Harrington and Helmut W. Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870,” Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77–101; Thomas Kaufmann, Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche und Gesellschaft, in: Theologische Literaturzeitung 121 (1996): 1008–25; 1113–21; Olaf Mörke (n. 9); Winfried Eberhard, “Voraussetzungen und strukturelle Grundlagen der Konfessionalisierung in Ostmittelauropa,” in: Bahlcke and Strohmeyer, eds, Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa. Wirkungen des religiösen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart 1999), 89–103; Winfried Eberhard, Zur reformatorischen Qualität und Konfessionalisierung des nachrevolutionären Hussitismus, in: Framtis˘ek S˘mahel, ed., Häresie und vorzeitige Reformation im Spätmittelalter (Munich 1998), 213–238; Philip Benedict, “Confessionalization in France? Critical Reflections and New Evidence,” in Philip Benedict, The Faith and Fortune of France’s Huguenots, 1600–85 (Aldershot, 2001), 309–25. – An interesting comparative approach with regard to Russia: Daniel Clarke Waugh, “We Have Never Been Modern: Approaches to the Study of Russia in the Age of Peter the Great,” Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49 (2001): 321–45, 341, n. 95. 14 Bahlcke/Strohmeyer, eds, Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa; Dietz/Ehrenpreis, eds, Drei Konfessionen in einer Region; Frieß/Kießling, eds, Konfessionalisierung und Region. 15 Robert von Friedeburg applies the concept on a variety of historical contexts and on different epochs, cf. for example Robert von Friedeburg, “The Public of Confessional Identity: Territorial Church and Church Discipline in Eighteenth Century Hesse,” in: James van Horn Melton, ed., Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment (Aldershot, 2002), 104–18, esp. 118. William Monter, “The Fate of the English and French Reformations, 1554–1563,” Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance 64 (2002): 7–19, p. 7 “Borrowing from German scholarship a conceptual tool – confessionalism – seldom used by either British or French historians”. 16 Olaf Blaschke, ed., Konfessionen im Konflikt. Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970: ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen, 2002); Carsten Kretschmann and Henning Pahl, “Ein ‘Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter’? – Vom Nutzen und Nachteil einer neuen Epochensignatur,” Historische Zeitschrift 276 (2003): 369–92.

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geographic and chronological modifications as well as theoretical and methodological differentiation,17 which have shaped the paradigm and thereby made it more conducive for further research, the confessionalization paradigm can anticipate productive future years. This is especially a consequence of the fact that the paradigm, on the one hand opens substantive broad areas of research, which have not been at all addressed, while on the other hand it calls for comparative and interdisciplinary studies. As regards the breadth of scholarship,18 confessionalization research has focused on the intra-ecclesiastical and religious connections (inter alia the modern definition of its dogmatic foundation, bureaucratization, institutionalization, and professionalization of the clergy); on questions of the formation of mentality and behavior (social discipline and church discipline); on the political, legal and institutional problems of modern state building, including the role of the confessional element in foreign diplomacy and in the formation of an international system of power politics, including international relations at the highest level; on the uniform modern society of subjects, including the modern forms of marriage, family, education and culture, the role of women in the domestic and public spheres; on the changes in the thinking, feeling and behavior of individuals, the emergence of modern bourgeois mentality with such qualities as industriousness, order, cleanliness; on the formation of collective identities on a socio-confessional basis frequently combined with regional and even early national structures; and last but by no means least, the appropriation and identification of cultural structures and changes both in elite and popular culture. Given this breadth of fields of investigation interdisciplinarity is an important mandate. Furthermore, neighboring disciplines have increasingly accepted the confessionalization paradigm as a possibility of dialogue with historians. This has been the case as regards theologians and church historians from the beginning even though this dialogue was – to use a qualification currently popular in Germany – one of critical solidarity. Happily, scholars of German literature have never hesitated to cooperate with historians of early modern Europe. This is expressed in the work of Jean-MarieValentine on the Counter Reformation and literature as well as on the Jesuit theatre, and 17 For an overview of the historiographical discussions on the concept “confessionalization” see Stefan Ehrenpreis and Ute Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter (Darmstadt 2001). Kontroversen um die Geschichte, 62–79; see also Ute Lotz-Heumann, “The Concept of ‘Confessionalization’: a Historiographical Paradigm in Dispute”, Memoria y Civilización: Anuario de Historia 4 (2001): 93–114. For a European comparative case study see Ute Lotz-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland (n. 10). 18 For a detailed exposition, I refer the reader to my essay “Confessional Europe: Bureaucrats, La Bonne Police, Civilizations”, in Thomas A. Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds, Handbook of European History 1400–1600. Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, vol. II (Leiden, 1995): 641–81.

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similar research of Dieter Breuer and Klaus Garber.19 More difficult is the cooperation with art history not the least because that field is often preoccupied with its own esoteric theoretical discourse. At any rate, the field for an interdisciplinary cooperation on the basis of the confessionalization paradigm has been opened recently by the Archive for Reformation History.20 The last section of this essay will focus on a case study in interdisciplinary analysis of confessional cultures, specifically of urban architecture and planning in European cities of the confessional era. IV. The possibility of the confessionalization paradigm for cultural history Though admittedly for a long time political-institutional as well as social and societal relationships have stood in the foreground of research in confessionalization, the confessionalization paradigm never had an exclusive political or societal orientation. That was not possible since it was – especially in its Bielefeld origins – deliberately developed in opposition to the narrowness of the socio-economic approach. It emphatically focused on religion, and thereby on culture, as the primary effective force alongside politics, economics, social stratification, and demography. Early on, the ambivalence and essential openness of this scholarly orientation was noted, for example with respect to the stabilization or revolutionizing of the political and societal order. It was pointed out that confessionalization assumed strikingly different forms and chronological 19 Jean-Marie Valentin, ed., Gegenreformation und Literatur. Beiträge zur interdisziplinären Erforschung der katholischen Reformbewegung (Amsterdam, 1979); Dieter Breuer, Oberdeutsche Literatur 1565–1650. Deutsche Literaturgeschichte und Territorialgeschichte in frühabsolutistischer Zeit (Munich, 1979); “Deutsche Nationalliteratur und katholischer Kulturkreis”, in Klaus Garber, ed., Nation und Literatur der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen, 1989), 701–15. On the Jesuit theatre see Jean-Marie Valentin, Le Théâtre des Jésuites dans les pays de la langue allemande (1554–1680). Salut des âmes et ordres des cites, vol. 1–3 (Bern, 1978); “Gegenreformation und Literatur. Das Jesuitendrama im Dienste der religiösen und moralischen Erziehung”, Historisches Jahrbuch 100 (1980): 240–56; Le Théatre des Jésuites dans les pays de la langue allemande. Repertoire chronologique des pièces représentatées et des documents conserves (1553–1773), vol. 1–2, ed. by Jean-Marie Valentin (Stuttgart, 1983–1984). For two historians’ view of the relationship between confessionalization and literature see the forthcoming article by Ute Lotz-Heumann and Matthias Pohlig “Confessionalization and German Literature,” in Max Reinhart, ed., Camden House History of German Literature, vol. 4: Early Modern German Literature. 20 Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 93 (2002) with contributions by Siegfried Müller/Annelore Rieke-Müller, Michael Scholz-Hänsel, Thomas Packeiser (with extensive literature on the role of the confessionalization paradigm in recent publications in art history. Cf. also Heinz Schilling, “Das konfessionelle Europa”, in Bahlcke and Strohmeyer, eds, Konfessionalisierung, 55–6.

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rhythms in the different countries and regions of Europe. The same must be said about its inner and outer limitations, both with respect to the success and the permeation of a given society and the significance of anti-confessional forces and the inability of certain principal structures of the old European social system to be confessionalized, such as law, dynasty, and other societal aspects.21 In recent years this cultural component of the paradigm, which early on was rather indirect, has began to move into the foreground. I mention the longstanding collaboration with literary historians of the Baroque study group in Wolfenbüttel, which produced two volumes of proceedings,22 and a number of monographs in art history.23 In Berlin projects in cultural history are currently under way that deal with the role of religion and confession in the European cultural exchange and transfer. The focus is on ceremonies and ritual as well as on urban architecture. There is also a project on symbolic structures, which were extremely relevant both in confessionalization and other connections since they secured the consistency, stability as well as dynamic of a society. Finally, there is a project dealing with the increase of interest in education and pedagogy, their specifically confessional orientation, a project that incorporates both pictures and literary texts on education and therefore may be seen as an interdisciplinary project.24 In conclusion, I should like to summarize briefly the initial findings of a project dealing with the architecture of confessionalized towns.25 The juxtaposition of Protestant and Catholic towns during confessionalization shows that, contrary to previous opinion, topography and architecture were static and underwent little change in Protestant cities, whereas urban topography and urban architecture took on decisively modern features 21 Schilling, “Reich”, 6; also in Bahlcke and Strohmeyer, eds, Konfessionalisierung: 57–62; Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, eds, Katholische Konfessionalisierung. Wissenschaftliches Symposion der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte (Gütersloh/Münster, 1995), 16–40. 22 Dieter Breuer, Barbara Becker-Cantarino, Heinz Schilling, and Walter Spain, eds, Religion und Religiösität im Zeitalter des Barock, 2 vols (Wiesbaden, 1995). 23 Cf. the relevant references in my note cited in footnote 1, “Nochmals ‘Zweite Reformation’,” 517ff, as well as my literature survey in the journal Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht 42 (1991), 48 (1997) and 52 (2001), 53 (2002), and the focus cited in footnote 15, ARG 93 (2002). 24 Stefan Ehrenpreis and Heinz Schilling, eds. Reformierte Bildung im frühneuzeitlichen Europa im interkonfessionellen Vergleich – Schulwesen, Lesekultur und Wissenschaft (Göttingen, 2004); Heinz Schilling and Istvan Toth (eds), Religion and Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2005), vol I of a four-volume European Science Foundation (ESF) series edited by Robert Muchembled and William Monter on “Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe.” 25 Extensively, with citations, Heinz Schilling, “Urban Architecture and Ritual in Confessional Europe,” in Jose Paiva, ed., Religious Ceremonials and Images. Power and Social Meaning 1400–1750 (Coimbra, 2002), 7–25.

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through the influence of Catholic confessionalization. Admittedly ecclesiastical institutions retained their insular character, even though the scope and character of special privileges were restricted. But, more important, Catholic towns experienced an extensive construction boom, which fundamentally changed them. Everywhere new buildings in the Renaissance or Baroque style were erected, impressive Jesuit churches together with parochial, court, or triumphalist churches, such as the Karlskirche in Vienna, which memorialized San Carlo Borromeo’s triumph over heresy in a remarkable urban monument. In addition there were new monastic buildings, schools and hospitals as well as the comprehensive stylistic modernization of the interiors of existing buildings. Gothic and Romanesque cathedrals no less than parochial churches were transformed into Renaissance and Baroque churches, as for example, Sint Paulus of the Dominicans in Antwerp, Sint Jans and the Cathedral of Our Lady or St. Pantheloen in Cologne. This unbroken ecclesiastical construction effort of Catholic confessionalization made the church increasingly visible. Maria Bogucka’s observation on Polish cities of the seventeenth century, where “topography and architecture changed the accent from the city hall to the church and the urban palaces of the magnets” also applies to Europe at large, at least with regard to the visibility of churches. Such, however, also meant that the early modern Catholic town was far less medieval in appearance than its Protestant counterpart unless ecclesiastical orientation as such is characterized as not modern, a fatal if a frequent mistake. In the context of late Catholic confessionalization, the towns of Eastern Central Europe – Prague after the Battle of the White Mountain, the Hungarian towns after the expulsion of the Turks – received (much like the towns of southern and western Europe) a new modern appearance, which was formed by an all-embracing ecclesiastical presence. How significantly the buildings of the Jesuits with their characteristic architecture changed the medieval picture of cities can be still seen today in an impressive fashion in their convent built in Antwerp between 1615 and 1621. The St. Carolus Church, the residential buildings of the convent and its famous schools are close to the center of town in an area of several thousand square yards. They represent the modernity of early modern urbanism in the midst of a medieval context. Significant is also the interior of this early Jesuit church. With its long rectangular nave and great side aisles it was as well equipped for the needs of the modern burghers for sermon and proclamation of the Word as were the Calvinist churches of neighboring Holland. Thirteen impressive double confessionals, each with a long bench for the waiting faithful meant that the church was conducive to pastoral care and the interaction between the clergy and the laity. The same may be said about the already mentioned modernized Church of Sint Paulus of the Dominican Order located in the neighborhood

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close to the busy harbor district. Even today, both churches and their new interiors are visible proof that the education for bourgeois disciplined thinking and acting can be found also in Catholic confessionalized towns. In light of the research on confessionalization it is therefore more and more questionable to associate change and modernity exclusively or even primarily with Protestant towns and their citizens. Counter proof is the extensive building program which assured Catholic towns during the span of a generation of security a topographical and urban architectural primacy in comparison to most Protestant towns, not to mention the simultaneous Jesuit initiatives in the areas of education and pedagogy, together with their Marian congregations, or the programs for the sick and the needy of the John of God and John Grande of the Order of the Brothers of Mercy. The corresponding activities of urban corporations were not all that different from those in Protestant towns. This reality is beautifully expressed in testimonies of art, such as the image type “works of mercy,” widely found in Catholic Flanders, Brabant, and northern France centering on the same merchant and burgher class as is the case in the well-known portraits of Calvinist deacons and deaconesses of houses for the poor and orphans in northern Dutch and North German cities. On the basis of completely different pictorial evidence such as the beggars’ portraits of the Spanish Neapolitan painter Jusepe de Ribera, the art historian Michael Scholz-Hänsel arrived at similar results.26 Thus, a preliminary comparison of Protestant and Catholic confessionalized towns shows with some certainty that people in cities like Antwerp or Munich in the early seventeenth century would have found altogether ridiculous the thesis of modern sociologists of religion that they were living in an antiquated, static, and unchanging society.

26

As in note 19.

Problems of the Term and Concept “Second Reformation”: Memories of a 1980s Debate Harm Klueting

IT WAS IN 1983 when I first heard the name Bodo Nischan. Since July 12, 1983, I had been preparing my inaugural lecture on “‘Second Reformation’ or Melanchthonian-Calvinist Reform? Politics and Religion in the Age of Confessionalization” (“‘Zweite Reformation’ oder melanchthonischcalvinistische Reform? Zum Problem von Politik und Religion im Konfessionellen Zeitalter”), which I gave to the members of the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Cologne on January 11, 1984.1 This was my demonstration lecture in the oral examination for habilitation, which we have to pass at the universities in the German-speaking countries after the acceptance of our habilitation thesis2 as part of the post-doctoral qualification showing ability to lecture and do research as Privatdozent at professorial level. As is customary I suggested three topics to the faculty for this lecture in the hope that the faculty would make a good choice. Therefore I had to prepare three lectures during the summer of 1983.3 The year 1983 was celebrated in Germany as the “Martin Luther Year” because of the five hundredth

1 See the published version: Harm Klueting, “Gab es eine ‘Zweite Reformation’? Ein Beitrag zur Terminologie des Konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 38 (1987): 261–79. See also Klueting, “‘Zweite Reformation’ oder reformierte Konfessions- und Kirchenbildung? Zum Problem von Politik und Religion im Konfessionellen Zeitalter,” Monatshefte für evangelische Kirchengeschichte des Rheinlandes, 34 (1985): 19–40. 2 Harm Klueting, Die Lehre von der Macht der Staaten. Das aussenpolitische Machtproblem in der ‘politischen Wissenschaft’ und in der praktischen Politik im 18. Jahrhundert (Berlin, 1986). 3 The two other subjects were “The Jülich-Cleves inheritance and the Prussian History” (unpublished but used for Harm Klueting, Geschichte Westfalens. Das Land zwischen Rhein und Weser vom 8. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert [Paderborn, 1998], chapter 5.1) and “Friedrich Meinecke and the Weimar Republic,” see the published version: Harm Klueting, “‘Vernunftrepublikanismus’ und ‘Vertrauensdiktatur’: Friedrich Meinecke in der Weimarer Republik,” Historische Zeitschrift, 242 (1986): 69–98.

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anniversary of Luther’s birth in 1483. For that reason the University of Münster organized a university lecture series. One of these lectures was given in the auditorium on December 8, 1983, by Wilhelm H. Neuser, professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Protestant Faculty of Theology of Münster University and a well-known scholar on Calvin and Calvinism. Professor Neuser spoke about Luther’s importance for the entirety of Protestantism.4 He mentioned Bodo Nischan’s just recently published articles on Johann Bergius5 and on the “Second Reformation” in Brandenburg.6 He made critical comments on Nischan’s use of the term “Second Reformation”. Sitting in the audience I felt compelled by this critique to present my own view on “Second Reformation” in my just finished manuscript for my Cologne lecture. On December 9, 1983, I wrote a letter to Professor Neuser in which I said that his remarks had been a “welcome confirmation” for me.7 About my own way to this subject I told him in this letter of my articles on the estates in the territories of the counts of Bentheim8 in Germany, which provided some of the settings of the so-called “Second Reformation”, and of Heinz Schilling’s book on the county of Lippe.9 4 Obviously unpublished, see Peter De Klerk, “Bibliography of Wilhelm Heinrich Neuser,” in Willem van’t Spijker, ed., Calvin. Erbe und Auftrag. Festschrift für Wilhelm Heinrich Neuser zum 65. Geburtstag Neuser on his 65th birthday (Kampen, The Netherlands, 1991), 411–28; Andreas Biermann and Jürgen Kampmann, “Bibliographie Wilhelm Heinrich Neuser 1990–1995,” in Jürgen Kampmann, ed., Aus dem Lande der Synoden. Festgabe für W. H. Neuser zum 70. Geburtstag (Lübbecke, 1996), 443–52. 5 Bodo Nischan, “Calvinism, the Thirty Years’ War, and the Beginning of Absolutism in Brandenburg: The Political Thought of John Bergius,” Central European History, 15 (1982): 203–23. 6 Bodo Nischan, “The Second Reformation in Brandenburg: Aims and Goals,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 14 (1983): 173–87. Both articles were preliminary studies on Nischan’s not yet published work Prince, People, and Confession. The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, Pa., 1994). 7 “In Ihrem Vortrag sind mir vor allem Ihre Ausführungen zu dem (…) Begriff ‘Zweite Reformation’ von höchstem Interesse gewesen, weil ich zur Zeit als Historiker mit dem gleichen Problem beschäftigt bin und den Begriff ‘Zweite Reformation’ aus der Sicht des Profanhistorikers ebenso zurückweisen möchte wie Sie als Theologe und Kirchenhistoriker. Ihre Bemerkungen waren daher für mich eine willkommene Bestätigung durch einen Theologen, worüber ich mich sehr gefreut habe” (letter to Prof. Neuser, on December 9, 1983). 8 Harm Klueting, “Die Landstände der Herrschaft Rheda,” Westfälische Forschungen, 27 (1975): 418–21; “Ständewesen und Ständevertretung in der westfälischen Grafschaft Limburg im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Ein Beitrag zur territorialen Verfassungsgeschichte Deutschlands in der Frühneuzeit,” Beiträge zur Geschichte Dortmunds und der Grafschaft Mark, 70 (1976): 109–201; “Ständebildung ohne Ritterschaft. Die Klöster Marienfeld, Clarholz und Herzebrock als Landstände der Herrschaft Rheda,” in Johannes Meier, ed., Clarholtensis Ecclesia. Forschungen zur Geschichte der Prämonstratenser in Clarholz und Lette, 1133–1803 (Paderborn, 1983), 235–56. 9 Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung. Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh, 1981). See also my review of Schilling’s book, Historische Zeitschrift, 236 (1983): 170–71.

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While Nischan in the first article did not use the term “Second Reformation” he emphasised this term in the second. In the first article on the Brandenburg electoral court preacher Bergius10 Nischan made clear that “the general consensus among modern historians has been that the introduction of Calvinism had profound religious and political implications.”11 But he pointed out that “the doctrine of faith of the Mark’s young Reformed Church … the Confessio Sigismundi12 which the elector published in the spring of 1614 … called the introduction of Calvinism in Brandenburg not a new reformation but simply a continuation and completion of the earlier Lutheran reformation.”13 In his second article Nischan wrote: The concept of the “second reformation” originated within this circle, now sharply delineated and repudiated by orthodox Lutheranism. Simply put, the followers of the Swiss reformers and many Philippists in Germany believed that another reformation was needed in order to continue and complete the work begun by Martin Luther in the early sixteenth century. Where the second reformation succeeded, Reformed or Calvinist churches were established. This had happened first in the Palatinate (1560), then in Nassau (1578), Bremen (1581), Lippe, Hesse, and finally in 1613 also in Brandenburg.14

In the footnote he continued: “Contemporaries spoke of a ‘Weiterführung’ [continuation] or ‘Vollendung’ [completion] of Luther’s work through an ‘ander’ [another] Reformation. In modern scholarship the use of the term ‘second reformation’ has been popular since the publication of Jürgen Moltmann’s study of Christoph Pezel some 25 years ago.”15 In addition to 10 See also Bodo Nischan, “Johann Bergius,” Religion in Geschichte und Gegenwart, 4th edition, vol. 1 (Tübingen, 1998), 1309. 11 Nischan, “Calvinism, the Thirty Years’ War”, 203. 12 Ernst Friedrich Karl Müller, ed., Die Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche (Leipzig, 1903; Reprint Zurich, 1987), 835–43. 13 Ibid. 212. See the same remark in Nischan, “Second Reformation” (1983), 179. See also the Confessio Sigismundi: “(…) weil doch Gott der Allmechtige die Könige zu Pflegern (…) seiner lieben Kirchen verordnet (…) dahin zu trachten, damit das reine klare wort Gottes allein (…) in Kirchen und Schulen möge gelert und gepredigt (…) und also der wahre Gottesdienst recht und wol allein nach Form und Norm der Göttlichen heiligen Schrifft möge bestellet (…) werden. Und über das S(eine) Churf(ürstliche) Gn(aden) bey sich gnedigst betrachtet, wie (…) Gott (…) S. Churf. Gn. so viel Fürstenthümer, Landt und Leut untergeben (…), damit dieselbe (…) das gepredigte reine Wort Gottes und rechten seeligen Brauch der H(eiligen) Sacramenten (…) erlangen und behalten mögen. Als haben demnach S. Churf. G. (…) was noch etwan von Papistischer Superstition oder anderer menschlichen ungebottenen devotion in Kirchen und Schulen übrig verblieben, folgends gemächlich abgethan (…). Und damit jo niemands zugedancken ziehe, oder von wiederwertigen und friedhässigen sich einbilden lasse, als wenn ihr Churf. Gn. etwas neues (…) anzuordnen (…) entschlossen.” See Müller, ed., Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, 835–36. 14 Nischan, “Second Reformation” (1983), 173–4. 15 Ibid. 173, note 1.

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Moltmann16 he mentioned in this footnote Thomas Klein17 and Heinz Schilling.18 Reading the article after twenty years it seems that Nischan added the term “Second Reformation” later to his concept of the political implications of the introduction of Calvinism in Lutheran territories which is to be found in his earlier article on Bergius though without using this term. The concept and the idea of the “Second Reformation” article could survive without this term. Possibly he learned this term during his research in Germany at Wolfenbüttel’s Herzog August Bibliothek in the summer of 1981, for he is thinking of it in a prologue to his footnotes.19 However he wrote in this article: “Not only did the Reformed argue that they were preserving Luther’s true heritage; they also claimed that they were completing the work he had begun. It is in this context that the meaning of the term ‘second reformation’ becomes particularly evident.”20 Nischan did not quote any modern author who used the term “Second Reformation” but quoted, for instance, Adam Christian Agricola that “the Lutheran church and religion itself needed another reformation.”21 But Agricola was an author of the seventeenth century and not a contemporary of Christoph Pezel, who was Moltmann’s chief witness for the term “Second Reformation”. The Reformed theologian Agricola, who became a Brandenburg electoral court preacher in 1629, was born in 1593 and died in 1645.22 His book, which Nischan quoted ‘sine anno’ was published in 1628.23 This was the time during the Thirty Years’ War when the Lutheran Johann Arndt’s (1555–1621) devotional book “Vier Bücher vom wahren Christentum” was very popular and not long before the Lutheran preacher of penitence Johann Jacob Fabricius (1618/20–1673) asked for a “Reformation of Life” to complete Luther’s “Reformation of Doctrine”. This pre-pietistic context was the real background of the contemporary idea of “Second Reformation”.24 The 1980’s German debate on the term “Second Reformation” did not 16 Jürgen Moltmann, Christoph Pezel (1539–1604) und der Calvinismus in Bremen (Bremen, 1958). 17 Thomas Klein, Der Kampf um die Zweite Reformation in Kursachsen 1586–1591 (Cologne and Graz, 1962). 18 Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung. 19 Nischan,”Second Reformation” (1983), 173. 20 Nischan, “Second Reformation” (1983), 179. 21 Nischan, “Second Reformation” (1983), 179. See also note 24. 22 Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexicon. Fortsetzung und Ergänzung by Johann Christoph Adelung, vol. 1 (Leipzig, 1784; Reprint Hildesheim 1960), 320f. 23 Adam Christian Agricola, Widerlegung der Schlussreden D. Lucae Bacmeisters … Die er auss der also genanten Reformirten Lehrer … Zeugniss von der Lutherischen Lehre … gezogen (n. p., n. d. = 1628). There are two copies of this book to be found in the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel: Tm 235 or 1244.7.Theol (2). 24 See Harm Klueting, “Reformatio vitae”. Johann Jakob Fabricius (1618/20–1673). Ein Beitrag zu Konfessionalisierung und Sozialdisziplinierung im Luthertum des 17. Jahrhunderts (Münster, 2003).

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begin with Bodo Nischan but with Heinz Schilling. In 1981 Schilling published his habilitation thesis on the city of Lemgo and the county of Lippe.25 The subject was the early seventeenth-century conflict between the Lutheran town and the Reformed count Simon VI of Lippe, who tried to establish a Reformed church in the Lutheran county of Lippe of which Lemgo was a part. In his book Schilling emphasized “confession” (in the meaning of “denomination”) as a fundamental category for understanding early modern society and its power of change.26 He did not deny the religious profiles of Lutheranism and Calvinism but he understood both as potencies in the socialpolitical transformation from the late medieval territorial rule to the early modern state.27 In particular, he saw a real influence of Calvinism on this change, and he called the establishment of Calvinism instead of Lutheranism the “Second Reformation”.28 For the county of Lippe he spoke of the Lutheran Reformation as “the first stage of the renewal of the church”29 and the introduction of a variant of Calvinism as the “Second Reformation”.30 He related this “Second Reformation” in Lippe to the formation of the early modern state.31 First this “Second Reformation” effected in Lippe the appropriation of the new church by the territorial state (“Aneignung der neuen Kirche durch den Territorialstaat”).32 This thesis was the fundamental idea of the conference on “Second Reformation”33 which took place under Schilling’s chairmanship in Reinhausen near Göttingen in October 1985. Before the Reinhausen meeting Schilling sent a paper to all participants34 as preparatory to the conference.35 In these guidelines the participants found the thesis of the internal (close) interrelation between Second Reformation and formation of territorial states.36 The 1985 conference became the occasion of a critical disagreement not about the concept but about the term “Second Reformation”. Criticism of 25 Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung. See also by the same author the older article “Konfessionskonflikt und hansestädtische Freiheit im 16. und frühen 17. Jahrhundert. Der Fall Lemgo contra Lippe,” Hansische Geschichtsblätter, 97 (1979): 36–59. 26 Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung, 22. 27 Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung, 365. 28 See in his book the part “Zweite Reformation und frühmoderner Territorialstaat” (151–364). 29 Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung, 368. 30 Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung, 368. 31 Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung, 369. 32 Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung, 368. 33 The papers were published under different title, see Heinz Schilling, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland – Das Problem der ‘Zweiten Reformation’ (Gütersloh, 1986). 34 The author was among them. 35 See Heinz Schilling, “Die ‘Zweite Reformation’ als Kategorie der Geschichtswissenschaft,” in Schilling, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung, 387–437. 36 Schilling, “Die ‘Zweite Reformation’ als Kategorie’der Geschichtswissenschaft,” 435.

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this term was much older. Already in 1964 Ernst Walter Zeeden37 and Franz Lau38 had criticized the term. Zeeden wrote: “To call Calvinism ‘Second Reformation’ (after the first one of Lutheranism) opens the door to dozens of misunderstandings. For example, in Switzerland only a second Reformation would have taken place.”39 In 1985 critical comments about the term were formulated by Wilhelm H. Neuser40 and by myself, but also – for other reasons – by Martin Heckel.41 In two papers of 198542 and 198743 I cited two reasons against the term “Second Reformation”.44 First I furnished proof of the absence of the term in contemporary German Reformed sources and especially in Christoph Pezel. Secondly, I pointed out that the term does not have the quality of a modern research concept but of a misconception, because of its inability to explain the historical phenomena.45 There is no doubt that in 1578 Christoph Pezel46 called the movement

37 Ernst Walter Zeeden (review of Klein, Der Kampf um die Zweite Reformation), Geschichte in Wissenschaft und Unterricht, 15 (1964): 186. 38 Franz Lau, “Die Zweite Reformation in Kursachen. Neue Forschungen zum sogenannten sächsischen Kryptocalvinismus,” in Verantwortung. Festschrift für Gottfried Noth (Berlin, 1964), 137–54, see 142. 39 Zeeden’s review of Klein, Der Kampf um die Zweite Reformation. See note 37. 40 Wilhelm Heinrich Neuser, “Die Erforschung der ‘Zweiten Reformation’ – eine wissenschaftliche Fehlentwicklung,” in Schilling, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung, 379–86. 41 Martin Heckel, “Reichsrecht und ‘Zweite Reformation’. Theologisch-juristische Probleme der reformierten Konfessionalisierung,” in Schilling, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung, 11–43, see 11, note 1. 42 Klueting, “‘Zweite Reformation’ oder reformierte Konfessions- und Kirchenbildung?”. 43 Klueting, “Gab es eine ‘Zweite Reformation’?”. This article was published in spring 1985, half a year before the conference on “Second Reformation”. Like Schilling’s preparatory paper it was sent to some participants before the conference. 44 See also Harm Klueting, Das Konfessionelle Zeitalter, 1525–1648 (Stuttgart, 1989), 224f. 45 J. F. Gerhard Goeters, professor of Ecclesiastical History at the Protestant Faculty of Theology of the University of Bonn and a well-known scholar of Reformed church history, wrote in a handwritten letter of 17 June, 1987, to me: “Im Rückblick kann man nur sagen, dass man eigentlich Ihnen das Hauptwort zu Schillings Thesen hätte geben müssen. Mir war das schon ‘ante festum’ klar. Aber es sollte damals [at the conference on “Second Reformation” in 1985] die Kirchengeschichte nicht aus dem Rennen geworfen werden, am wenigsten Neuser. Sie aber haben nun aber alles zur Sache in Ihren Aufsätzen gesagt”. Professor Goeters died in 1996. 46 Moltmann, Christoph Pezel, Richard Wetzel, “Christoph Pezel (1539–1604). Die Vorreden zu seinen Melanchthon-Editionen als Propagandatexte der ‘Zweiten Reformation’,” in Heinz Scheible, ed., Melanchthon in seinen Schülern (Wiesbaden, 1997), 465–566; Harm Klueting, “‘Wittenberger Katechismus’ (1571) und ‘Wittenberger Fragstücke’ (1571): Christoph Pezel (1539–1604) und die Wittenberger Theologie,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 112 (2001): 1–43. See also by the same author “Christoph Pezel(ius) (Pezolt, Bezetus),” in Neue Deutsche Biographie, 20 (Berlin, 2001), 287f.

Problems of the term and concept “Second Reformation”

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unleashed, led and represented by Luther “First Reformation”.47 From that some historians deduced the term (and the concept) “Second Reformation”. But Pezel’s term “First Reformation” meant only the beginning or the first step of a reformation – not the Reformation. This is a reformatio in its broad medieval sense of “change”, “transformation”, or “conversion”.48 The term “Second Reformation” did not occur in Pezel, neither explicitly nor implicitly. Karl Wolf, a local historian of the Nassau region in Germany, was the first who spoke about “Second Reformation” in the sense of a transformation of Lutheran territories to Calvinism. He used “Second Reformation” in studies on Christoph Pezel and Count Johann the Elder of Nassau-Dillenburg, the elder brother of William of Orange, first in 193649 and again in 1955.50 After that Jürgen Moltmann introduced the term to scholarly discourse with his book on Christoph Pezel,51 his habilitation thesis in Systematic Theology. He quoted Karl Wolf ’s paper of 1955. Erroneously Moltmann presented “Second Reformation” as a term found in Christoph Pezel. But Gerhard Oestreich, the spiritual father of the concept “Social Discipline” (“Sozialdisziplinierung”)52 and interested in Nassau history, appropriated the term “Second Reformation”,53 before Thomas Klein did the same in his 1962 dissertation54 written under Oestrich’s supervision. Hence the term and notion “Second Reformation”, which Bodo Nischan called “popular” in 1983, was born. The term was also used by Roman Catholic church historians, since Benno Gassmann’s dissertation in 1968.55 His supervisor was Hans Küng at the University of Tübingen. Erwin Iserloh, chair of Ecclesiastical History at the Catholic Faculty of Theology at the University of Münster, believed in Moltmann’s notion that Pezel and his generation of Reformed theologians had seen their way from Lutheranism to Calvinism as “Second 47 In his Nassovian Confession of 1578, see Müller, ed., Bekenntnisschriften der reformierten Kirche, 737, line 39. 48 See Eike Wolgast, “Reform, Reformation,” in Otto Brunner, Werner Conze and Reinhart Koselleck, eds, Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe. Ein Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache 5 (Stuttgart, 1984), 313–60, in particular 316–31. 49 Karl Wolf, “Aus dem Briefwechsel Christoph Pezels mit Graf Johann dem Älteren von Nassau-Dillenburg,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 34 (1937): 177–234, see 182. 50 Karl Wolf, “Zur Einführung des reformierten Bekenntnisses in Nassau-Dillenburg,” Nassauische Annalen, 66 (1955): 160–93, see 160. 51 Moltmann, Christoph Pezel. 52 Gerhard Oestreich, “Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus,” in Oestreich, Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates. Ausgewählte Aufsätze (Berlin, 1969), 179–97. 53 Gerhard Oestreich, “Grafschaft und Dynastie Nassau im Zeitalter der konfessionellen Kriege,” Blätter für deutsche Landesgeschichte, 96 (1960): 22–49, see 23, 31, 44, 45, and 46. 54 Klein, Der Kampf um die Zweite Reformation in Kursachsen. 55 Benno Gassmann, Ecclesia Reformata. Die Kirche in den reformierten Bekenntnisschriften (Freiburg, 1968), see 231–68, chapter 6: A “second Reformation”.

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Reformation”.56 Alois Schröer, another Catholic professor of Ecclesiastical History at Münster University and a close colleague of Iserloh, quoted Karl Wolf and Rolf Glawischnig,57 a former student of Gerhard Oestreich, in accepting the term. A chapter in his book “The Reformation in Westphalia”58 is titled “The Second Reformation”.59 “Second Reformation” is not to be found verbatim in the sources, that is in Christoph Pezel and in the Reformed theologians of his generation, in the sense of a change from Lutheranism to Calvinism. But could “Second Reformation” be a modern notion for historians and theologians to understand the introduction of Calvinism in Lutheran territories with its political and social consequences? Therefore, the postulating of a second Reformation as “another” or a “new” Reformation must be found in these Reformed theologians of Pezel’s generation and in Pezel himself as Moltmann’s chief witness. That is not the case. Pezel did not intend a “Reformation of life” like Johann Arndt or Johann Jacob Fabricius in the seventeenth century, although Moltmann thought so. Pezel only wanted to purify Lutheranism and Lutheran worship of Catholic remains in liturgy (in Latin: “emendare”, “emendatio”).60 That has nothing to do with “Reformation of life”;61 that was “negative Counter-Reformation”62 or resistance to Counter-Reformation. It is easy to prove connections in simultaneity and causality between the introduction of Calvinism in Lutheran territories and the Counter-Reformation in neighboring territories – or between Reformed and Catholic confessionalization.63 Pezel was afraid the Catholics could bring the people in Lutheran territories back to the Roman Catholic church by introducing “uniformity in many external ceremonies” (“Gleichförmigkeit in vielen äusserlichen Ceremonien”) in contemporary Lutheran and Roman Catholic worships.64 To make the people immune to

56 Erwin Iserloh, “Die deutsche Fürstenreformation,” in Hubert Jedin, ed., Handbuch der Kirchengeschichte, 4 (Freiburg, 3rd ed. 1979), 217–446, see 427; by the same author: Geschichte und Theologie der Reformation im Grundriss (Paderborn, 1980), 160. 57 Rolf Glawischnig, Niederlande, Kalvinismus und Reichsgrafenstand, 1559–1584. NassauDillenburg unter Graf Johann VI (Marburg, 1973). 58 Alois Schröer, Die Reformation in Westfalen, 1 (Münster, 1979). 59 Chapter 4: 428–80, notes 678–91. See also Harm Klueting, “Zur reformierten Konfessionalisierung des 16. Jahrhunderts in Westfalen,” in Reimund Haas and Reinhard Jüstel, eds, Kirche und Frömmigkeit in Westfalen. Alois Schröer Memorial Volume (Münster, 2002), 130–54, see 144. 60 Harm Klueting, “Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung als ‘negative Gegenreformation’: Zum kirchlichen Profil des Reformiertentums im Deutschland des 16. Jahrhunderts,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 109 (1998), 167–99 and 306–27, see 312–19. 61 See note 24. 62 See note 60. 63 Klueting, “Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung als ‘negative Gegenreformation,’” 308–12. 64 See ibid. 310, note 273.

Problems of the term and concept “Second Reformation”

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Catholicism was the aim of Pezel and his generation of Reformed theologians in Germany, not “Reformation of life”. For political reasons this was also the aim of some Lutheran territorial rulers. There is still a third reason against using the term “Second Reformation”. This was the inflationary use of the term in early modern history and church history. In 1985 and 1987 I offered the following examples: the Polish philosopher Leszek Kolakowski used in French publications “la seconde Réforme” for some seventeenth-century heretical movements.65 In 1961 the Dutch historian H. A. Enno van Gelder distinguished between “two Reformations in the 16th Century”.66 The first one was “the minor Reformation” which included Luther and Calvin, the second one “the major Reformation” of late Humanism. In 1976 the British historian Arthur Geoffrey Dickens called the German “Reformation by the princes” (Fürstenreformation) “second Reformation” after the first “Reformation by the people”.67 In 1975 the French historian Pierre Chaunu knew four Reformations: “la prémiere Réforme” (thirteenth century), “la Réforme protestante” (Lutheranism and Calvinism), “la Réforme catholique”, and “la quatrième Réforme” (heterodox movements).68 The list may be lenghtened: in 1980 the Czech church historian Amedeo Molnár had called the fifteenthcentury Hussite movement “first Reformation”.69 In this context Lutheranism was the “Second Reformation”. Under Molnár’s influence the “Sixth Meeting” of the “Prague Consultations” with the Geneva based World Alliance of Reformed Churches, organized since 1986, took place in Strasbourg under the title “Consultation on the first, the radical, and the second Reformation”. “First Reformation” meant the Waldenses, the Bohemian Brethren, the Moravian “Unitas Fratrum”, and the Hussites. “Radical Reformation” meant in Strasbourg the “Historical Peace Churches”, i. e. the Mennonites and the Anabaptists in the tradition of Jacob Huter. “Second Reformation” included at the Strasbourg meeting Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism.70 In 1993 Joel R. Beeke called the Dutch “Nadere Reformatie”, which was similar to German pietism and English 65 Leszek Kolakowski, Chrétiens sans Église. La conscience religieuse et le lien confessionnel au XVIIe siècle (Paris, 1969, first published in Polish, Warsaw, 1965). 66 H. A. Enno van Gelder, The Two Reformations in the 16th Century. A Study of the Religious Aspects and Consequences of Renaissance and Humanism (The Hague, 1961). 67 Arthur Geoffrey Dickens, The German Nation and Martin Luther (London, 2nd ed. 1976). 68 Pierre Chaunu, Le temps des Réformes. Histoire religieuse et système de civilisation. La crise de la Chrétienté, l’éclatement, 1250–1550 (Paris, 1975). 69 Amedeo Molnár, Die Waldenser. Geschichte und europäisches Ausmass einer Ketzerbewegung (Göttingen, 1980), see 326. 70 “Prague 6: Neues Leben in Christus,” Update 1.2000. Eine Veröffentlichung des Reformierten Weltbundes, 10, 1 (March 2000), 9f. Supplement to Reformierte Kirchenzeitung, 41 (2000).

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puritanism, “Second Reformation”.71 Moreover the term “Second Reformation” was used not only for early modern religious movements but also for the Second Vatican Council.72 Finally, the Nazi ideologist Alfred Rosenberg called the foundation of a racist religion, conceived beyond and against Christianity, “Second Reformation”.73 Obviously by this confusion of concepts the notion “Second Reformation” loses all its power for knowledge although Heinz Schilling recommended its restitution again during the 1990s – apparently supported by Bodo Nischan.74 More important than this reentry into a finished discussion was the fact that Schilling did withdraw the term “Second Reformation” after the 1985 conference and as a result of the criticism offered. While the conference organized by Schilling had the title “Second Reformation” (“Zweite Reformation”) Schilling published the papers of this conference under the title “Reformed Confessionalization” (“Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland – Das Problem der ‘Zweiten Reformation’).75 That was the right way because “Second Reformation” proved to be inappropriate as “Counter-Reformation” turned out to be outdated. Both were superseded by “Confessionalization”.76 The term “Second Reformation” is the one matter, the concept “Second Reformation” is another. The concept, focusing on the relationship between

71 Joel R. Beeke, “The Dutch Second Reformation (Nadere Reformatie),” Calvin Theological Journal, 28 (1993): 209–327. 72 Xavier Rynne, Die zweite Reformation. Die erste Sitzungsperiode des Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzils. Entstehung und Verlauf (Cologne/Berlin, 1965). The original English title was: Letters from Vatican City. 73 Gerhard Besier, “Der Nationalsozialismus als Säkularreligion,” in Besier and Eckhard Lessing, eds, Trennung von Staat und Kirche. Kirchlich-politische Krisen. Erneuerung kirchlicher Gemeinschaft, 1918–1992. (Die Geschichte der Evangelischen Kirche der Union 3) (Leipzig, 1999), 445–78, see 468. 74 Heinz Schilling, “Nochmals ‘Zweite Reformation’ in Deutschland. Der Fall Brandenburg in mehrperspektivischer Sicht von Konfessionalisierungsforschung, historischer Anthropologie und Kunstgeschichte,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 23 (1996), 501–24. 75 Schilling, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung. 76 Harm Klueting, “Die Reformierten im Deutschland des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts und die Konfessionalisierungsdebatte der deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft seit ca. 1980,” in Matthias Freudenberg, ed., Profile des reformierten Protestantismus aus vier Jahrhunderten (Wuppertal, 1999), 17–47; Klueting, “‘Zweite Reformation’ – Konfessionsbildung – Konfessionalisierung. Zwanzig Jahre Kontroversen und Ergebnisse nach zwanzig Jahren,” Historische Zeitschrift, 276 (2003), 309–41; see also Wolfgang Reinhard, “Sozialdisziplinierung – Konfessionalisierung – Modernisierung. Ein historiographischer Diskurs,” in Nada Boshkovska Leimgruber, ed., Die Frühe Neuzeit in der Geschichtswissenschaft. Forschungstendenzen und Forschungserträge (Paderborn, 1997), 39–55; Anton Schindling, “Konfessionalisierung und Grenzen der Konfessionalisierbarkeit,” in Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler, eds, Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung. Land und Konfession, 1500–1650, vol. 7 (Münster, 1997), 9–44.

Problems of the term and concept “Second Reformation”

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the introduction of Calvinism and the formation of early modern state, was relativized when Wolfgang Reinhard showed that this relation was not peculiar to the Reformed but also a Roman Catholic characteristic.77 In his view Confessionalization with its political and social results took place almost at the same time and in the same way in Calvinism, Lutheranism, and Roman Catholicism.78 This knowledge of a multi-denominational phenomenon suggested organizing two conferences on “Lutheran Confessionalization” in 198879 and on “Roman Catholic Confessionalization” in 1993.80 During the 1990s not only moderate critical voices against the concept “Confessionalization” appeared81 but also fundamental rejections of both concepts – “Confessionalization” and in the background “Second Reformation”. That took place first by the Protestant church historian Thomas Kaufmann,82 who criticized Schilling from a theological point of view because of his perspective of a social historian and his disregard of religion as faith. After that the Swiss historian Heinrich Richard Schmidt published a sharp criticism of Schilling and Reinhard.83 He rejected the “etatism” of the concept “Confessionalization”, and indirectly of “Second Reformation”; he criticized the relation between Confessionalization and the formation of the early modern state. This was a heavy attack on the basic idea of the concepts “Confessionalization” and “Second Reformation”. Today the concept “Second Reformation” seems to be superseded by the concept “Confessionalization”. But “Confessionalization” is now to be seen in 77 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung, 10 (1983): 257–76; see also by the same author “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 68 (1977): 226–51; “Konfession und Konfessionalisierung in Europa,” in Reinhard, ed., Bekenntnis und Geschichte. Die Confessio Augustana im historischen Zusammenhang (Munich, 1981), 165–89. 78 Reinhard, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung?”, 259. 79 Hans-Christoph Rublack, ed., Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gütersloh, 1992). 80 Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, eds, Die katholische Konfessionalisierung (Gütersloh/Münster, 1995). 81 Peter Hersche, “‘Klassizistischer’ Katholizismus. Der konfessionsgeschichtliche Sonderfall Frankreich,” Historische Zeitschrift, 262 (1996): 357–89; Walter Ziegler, “Typen der Konfessionalisierung in kathoischen Territorien Deutschlands,” in Reinhard and Schilling, eds, Katholische Konfessionalisierung, 405–18, see 417; Johannes Merz, “Calvinismus im Territorialstaat? Zur Begriffs- und Traditionsbildung in der deutschen Historiographie,” Zeitschrift für bayerische Landesgeschichte, 57 (1994): 45–68. 82 Thomas Kaufmann, “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche und Gesellschaft. Sammelbericht über eine Forschungsdebatte,” Theologische Literaturzeitung, 121 (1996): 1008–1025. 83 Heinrich Richard Schmidt, “Sozialdisziplinierung? Ein Plädoyer für das Ende des Etatismus in der Konfessionalisierungsforschung,” Historische Zeitschrift, 265 (1997): 639–82.

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a wide range of early modern phenomena.84 Confessionalization in relationship with the formation of the early modern state is only a part of these phenomena, especially in the small German territories. On the other hand, the relationship between confessionalization and social discipline is not controversial. But social discipline is to be understood in a wider sense and must include integration of social groups, in the sense of the formation of the early modern society or societies. Everywhere in Europe Confessionalization entailed integration. In the small German territories this was the integration into a territorial society. In Scotland the Reformed Confessionalization became very important for the Scottish national unity under the personal union with England by James VI’s accession to the English throne in 1603 and after the Union of 1707. This was Confessionalization as national integration. Reformed Confessionalization could be integration for keeping urban autonomy as in the case of Gdansk;85 or Confessionalization could be ethnic integration as in Transylvania where Confessionalization strengthened the separation between German-speaking Lutherans and Hungarian-speaking Calvinists.86 The Transylvanian ethnic integration was the opposite of Schilling’s integration into a territorial society as part of the formation of the early modern state. Therefore Krista Zach speakes about Transylvania as an “Anti-Model” of Confessionalization.87 Ireland presents an “Anti-Model” to the concept of Confessionalization in an all too close relationship with the formation of early modern state. Ute Lotz-Heumann has shown in her dissertation88 the Irish Confessionalization as a “double Confessionalization”89 with the Protestant Confessionalization

84 See also the concept “Culture of Denominations” (“Konfessionskultur”) in Thomas Kaufmann, Dreissigjähriger Krieg und Westfälischer Friede. Kirchengeschichtliche Studien zur lutherischen Konfessionskultur (Tübingen, 1998), 7. 85 Michael G. Müller, Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preussen. Danzig, Elbing und Thorn in der Epoche der Konfessionalisierung, 1557–1660 (Berlin, 1997); “Zur Frage der Zweiten Reformation in Danzig, Elbing und Thorn,” in Schilling, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung, 251–65; “Unionsstaat und Region in der Konfessionalisierung: Polen-Litauen und die grossen Städte des Königlichen Preussen,” in Joachim Bahlcke and Arno Strohmeyer, eds, Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa. Wirkungen des religiösen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur (Stuttgart, 1999), 123–37. 86 Krista Zach, “Stände, Grundherrschaft und Konfessionalisierung in Siebenbürgen. Überlegungen zur Sozialdisziplinierung, 1550–1650,” in Bahlcke and Strohmeyer, eds, Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa, 367–91; “Religiöse Toleranz und Stereotypenbildung in einer multikulturellen Region. Volkskirchen in Siebenbürgen,” in Konrad Gündisch, ed., Das Bild des Anderen in Siebenbürgen. Stereotypen in einer multiethnischen Region (Cologne/Weimar/ Vienna, 1997), 109–54. 87 Zach, “Stände, Grundherrschaft und Konfessionalisierung,” 391. 88 Written under Heinz Schilling’s supervision. 89 Ute Lotz-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland. Konflikt und Koexistenz im 16. und in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 2000).

Problems of the term and concept “Second Reformation”

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“from above” in alliance with the state authority and the Roman Catholic Confessionalization “from below” in opposition to the state authority. But integration could also be Christianization. In Andreas Holzem’s book on the bishopric of Münster one learns that Confessionalization and social discipline had more importance in Germany’s ecclesiastical territories for the formation of post-Tridentine Christianity than for the formation of the early modern state.90 The same is to be found in the seventeenth-century German prepietistic Lutheranism: Confessionalization and social discipline as Christianization instead of nationalization or (in Germany) territorialization.91 Holzem questions the usual dating of Confessionalization as culminating in the 1570s and 1580s and emphasizes that Confessionalization as Christianization in Roman Catholic context also took place in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Therefore, the relation between Catholic Confessionalization and Catholic Enlightenment92 comes into view.93 We owe Bodo Nischan a debt of gratitude that he contributed to this discussion and to the understanding of the role of confessions, or churches, in early modern European societies.

90 Andreas Holzem, Religion und Lebensformen. Katholische Konfessionalisierung im Sendgericht des Fürstbistum Münster, 1570–1800 (Paderborn, 2000); “Die Konfessionsgesellschaft. Christenleben zwischen staatlichem Bekenntniszwang und religiöser Heilshoffnung,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 110 (1999): 53–85. 91 See note 24. 92 Harm Klueting, ed., Katholische Aufklärung – Aufklärung im katholischen Deutschland (Hamburg, 1993). 93 See also Harm Klueting, “Der Calvinismus im Reich und in Europa,” in Udo Wennemuth, ed., Reformierte Spuren in Baden (Karlsruhe, 2001), 10–39; “Reformierte Konfessionalisierung in West- und Ostmitteleuropa,” in Volker Leppin and Ulrich A. Wien, eds, Konfessionalisierung. Geistes- und Kulturgeschichte des 16. Jahrhunderts in Siebenbürgen (Stuttgart, 2004), forthcoming.

“Founding a New Church …” The Early Ecclesiology of Martin Luther in the Light of the Debate about Confessionalization* Markus Wriedt

1 Introduction The turning point of Luther’s way to become the reformer of Christianity in Germany was his struggle with the theological tradition – theology as much as its practical consequence in piety and church – of his time. In his view these developments culminated in the question of a merciful God.1 Luther had received answers to this and other related questions, which did not satisfy his existential search for eternal security.2 Traditional theology and pastoral care guided those searching Christ to the church. The Holy Catholic Church acted as mediator and guarantee of God’s eternal will to redeem the sinner and to guarantee atonement through the sacrament of penance. Even though throughout the middle ages ecclesiology was never in question, at the end of the fifteenth century some reform-oriented theologians turned away from the unquestioned conviction of the church

* This essay is dedicated to the memory of Bodo Nischan with whom I discussed the interrelation between history and theology several times. His stimulating questions, his sharp critique, his great support and finally the overwhelming hospitality in his house in Greenville, NC, influenced and improved my research and intellectual development more than words can say. His early death hindered the fulfilment of a long-discussed plan for a book on Lutheran piety and mentality in the sixteenth century which we discussed during my last visit to his house. Parts of our discussion can be found now within this essay. Thus, even though the subject of the article exceeds the limits of the collection of essays in this book it is an important part of the academic relation which ties Bodo’s and my work together. I appreciate the editors’ patience in including the article in this book. 1 Martin Brecht: Martin Luther, translated by James M. Schaaf 3 vols. (Minneapolis, 1985). 2 Heiko Oberman once characterized the late medieval time as a “search for security”; cf. Werden und Wertung der Reformation (Tübingen, 1979).

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and its offered sacraments as the one and only way to heaven. One of them was John of Staupitz.3 He was the general vicar of the observant branch of the Order of the Augustinian Hermits and for some time a close friend of the younger brother. He showed the merciful God and Christ’s atonement on behalf of man through his life, suffering and death to Luther. Staupitz took Luther out of a circle of never-ending questions about eternal grace and his personal salvation. Staupitz pointed to the suffering Christ who reveals the love and mercy of God instead of the common pastoral advice of the church regarding the sacrament of penance. In front of the picture of Christ as mediator of salvation the question of individual salvation, of election or condemnation, became less important. Staupitz asked Luther to look for the love and mercy of God instead of tempting himself by questions about his own dignity and salvation or the value of the ecclesiastically offered mediation of God’s grace. For Luther the integer and pious words of Staupitz opened a new dimension of pastoral care. Later he remembered: “Staupitz lighted the flame of the gospel for me. … Without Staupitz I would be rather in hell than in heaven. I would have been drowned by the questions of eternal election and salvation. … Staupitz’s word stuck in my heart like the arrow of an archer.”4 Thus Luther started to read Scripture again. And he found the passive meaning of “righteousness of God”.5 That term became – according to his biographical report from 15456 – the key to Scripture for Luther. Righteousness is the nature of God and his acts – not the merit of man. From this point of view Luther started to criticize the sacrament of penance and especially the praxis of indulgence-letters. For Luther these doctrines and especially the false legitimation of its exercise deceive Christians: it shows false security and guaranties salvation on uncertain ground.7 During the increasing dispute,8 which was multiplied by the new technique of printing all over Germany, it became more and more obvious that Luther’s attempt to discuss the theological legitimation of the praxis of indulgence 3 Cf. Markus Wriedt, Gnade und Erwählung. Eine Untersuchung zu Martin Luther und Johann von Staupitz (Mainz, 1991); Franz Posset, The Front-runner of the Catholic Reformation: the Life and Works of Johann von Staupitz (Aldershot, 2002). 4 WA TR 1, 86, 6–7; 245, 10; WABr 9, 627, 21–25; WA 1, 525,15. 5 Cf. for the following Martin Brecht, “Iustitita Christi. Die Entdeckung Martin Luthers”, in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 74 (1977), 179–233; and “Der rechtfertigungede Glaube an das Evangelium von Jesus Christus als Mitte von Luthers Theologie”, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 89 (1978), 45–77. 6 Cf. Luther’s foreword to the edition of his Latin writings of 1545, WA 54, 179–187 = LW 34, 323–38. 7 WA 1, 233 – 238 = LW 31, 17–31. 8 For the following cf. Dokumente zur Causa Lutheri (1517–1521) edited and commented upon by Peter Fabisch and Erwin Iserloh, 2 vols (Münster, 1991).

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leads to a more general problem: the question of the last authority in the church.9 As a consequence ecclesiology became the center of Luther’s polemics and his reformation attempts.10 To many later theologians the question of justification became the focus of a merely systematic approach to Luther’s theology. But one has to see that ecclesiology, as the focus of the question of authority, is still the center of all disputes, either in the sixteenth century or in contemporary ecumenical discussion. In his first years Luther did not see the dimensions of his argument. While he had finished his lecture on the Romans and worked out guidelines for the reform of theological studies in Wittenberg in the year 1517/18 he found out that his question touched the basics of the Roman Church and curial theology. He did not discuss the question of what possibilities the church had 9 Cf. Kurt Victor Selge, Normen der Christenheit, Typed Script (Habilitation) Heidelberg, 1968; in an abbreviated form published as: “Das Autoritätengefüge der westlichen Christenheit im Lutherkonflikt (1517–1521)”, Historische Zeitschrift 223 (1976), 591–661. 10 Even though Luther’s statement was mostly clear the research on Luther’s ecclesiology appears in diversity and multiformity. Just to give a survey on the main books consulted for this essay I will mention Carl Axel Aurelius, Verborgene Kirche. Luthers Kirchenverständnis aufgrund seiner Streitschriften und Exegese 1519–1521 (Hannover, 1983); S.J. Barnett, “Where was your Church before Luther? Claims for the Antiquity of Protestantism Examined”, Church History 68:1 (1999), 14–41; Michael Beyer, “Luthers Ekklesiologie”, in: Helmar Junghans (ed.), Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526–1546 (Berlin[Ost]/Göttingen, 1983), 93–117.755–65; Martin Brecht (ed.), Martin Luther und das Bischofsamt (Stuttgart, 1990); Robert J. Goeser, “Word of God, Church, and Ministry”, Dialog 29 (1990), 195–206; Konrad Hammann, Ecclesia spiritualis. Luthers Kirchenverständnis in den Kontroversen mit Augustin von Alveldt und Ambrosius Catharinus (Göttingen, 1989); Scott H. Hendrix, Luther and the Papacy (Philadelphia, 1981); Eilert Herms, Luthers Auslegung des dritten Artikels (Tübingen, 1987); Wolfgang Höhne, Luthers Anschauungen über die Kontinuität der Kirche (Berlin, 1963); Friedrich Wilhelm Kantzenbach, “Jesus Christus Haupt der Kirche. Erwägungen zu Ansatz und Einheit der Kirchenanschauungen Martin Luthers”, Lutherjahrbuch 41 (1974), 7–44; Ulrich Kühn, Kirche (Gütersloh, 1980); Volker Leppin, “Luthers Antichristverständnis vor dem Hintergrund der mittelalterlichen Konzeption”, Kerygma und Dogma 45 (1999), 48–63; Hellmut Lieberg, Amt und Ordination bei Luther und Melanchthon (Göttingen, 1962); Jürgen Lutz, Unio und Communio. Zum Verhältnis von Rechtfertigungslehre und Kirchenverständnis bei Martin Luther. Eine Untersuchung zu ekklesiologisch relevanten Texten der Jahre 1519–1528 (Paderborn, 1990); Gudrun Neebe, Apostolische Kirche. Grundunterscheidungen an Luthers Kirchenbegriff unter besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Lehre von den notae ecclesiae (Berlin, 1997); Todd Nichol and Marc Kolden, Called and ordained. Lutheran perspectives on the Office of Ministry (Minneapolis, 1990); Tarald Rasmussen, Inimici ecclesiae. Das ekklesiologische Feindbild in Luthers Dictata super Psalterium 1513–1515 im Horizont der theologischen Tradition (Leiden, 1989); Wolfgang Stein, Das kirchliche Amt bei Luther (Wiesbaden, 1974); Jos Vercruysse, Fidelis Populus. Eine Untersuchung über die Ekklesiologie in Martin Luthers Dictata super psalterium (Wiesbaden, 1968); Jared Wicks, “Heiliger Geist – Kirche – Heiligung. Einsichten aus Luthers Glaubensunterricht”, Cath (M) 45 (1991), 79–110.

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to replace temporary penalties through other penalties like money or pious works, but he asked for what reason the church developed the doctrine of eternal purgatory and how the priest was legitimized to forgive sin and why he could influence the eternal judgment of God. Luther started the dispute by emphasizing the authority of Scripture above any other authority. Scripture alone is the rule of any ecclesiastical praxis. On the contrary Alexander Prierias – the Dominican from Rome who formulated the accusation of Luther – pointed out: “Who says about the indulgence praxis, that the church is not able or allowed to do what it does is a heretic.”11 With this the positions became clear: Luther’s request had touched the foundations of the church.12 One of the few Roman theologians who realized the dimensions of Luther’s request and their explosive potentials quite early was the cardinal legate Thomas de Vio Cajetanus.13 He had written a book about the theological foundation of the praxis of the indulgence letter which later on gave birth to the suspicion of a certain sympathy for Luther and his theology.14 Reflecting the colloquy in Augsburg in 1518 Cajetan prophetically envisioned that Luther’s reform attempts if they ever would be realized meant ‘to found a new church’.15 Obviously the Roman theologian had recognized the groundbreaking power of Luther’s request for a final and invincible authority16 within church and state, for piety and mentality, for family and society, for culture and law. Even though Cajetan did not follow this argument – and unfortunately Luther did not either – he felt the dawn of a new epoch. This new epoch would spoil the inner relation between imperium et sacerdotium: religio est vinculum societatis. New and probably competing authorities will occur. The development towards more individuality and an individual 11 “Qui circa indulgentias dicit, ecclesiam Romanam non posse facere id quod de facto facit, hereticus est.” Silvester Prierias OP, Dialogus de potestate papae (1518), in Dokumente zur Causa Lutheri (1517–1521), edited and commented upon by Peter Fabisch and Erwin Iserloh, 2 vols (Münster, 1991), I, 56. 12 Automatically the papacy came into the focus for it represents the church and is responsible for everything that happened. Thus it became the center of the discussion. Nevertheless it lasted some years until Luther came to his thesis, that the papacy no longer represents the true church but the church of the antichrist and later, even more pointedly, the papacy is the antichrist; cf. WA 6, 597–629. 13 Jared Wicks, Cajetan und die Anfänge der Reformation (Münster, 1983). 14 Cf. Bernhard Alfred R. Felmberg, Die Ablasstheologie Kardinal Cajetans (1469–1534) (Leiden, 1998). 15 Hoc es novam construere ecclesiam, in: Opuscula omnia 1 (Lyon, 1581), 111a, 8; cf. Otto Hermann Pesch, “Das heisst eine neue Kirche bauen”. Luther und Cajetan in Augsburg, in Begegnung. Beiträge zu einer Hermeneutik des theologischen Gesprächs edited by Max Seckler, Otto H. Pesch, Johannes Brosseder and Wolfhart Pannenberg, Graz, 1972), 645–61. 16 Cf. John Headley’s interpretation of scriptural authority in his Luther’s View of Church History (New Haven, 1963).

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conscience cannot be overseen. This matches with historical processes of particularization, territorialization, communalism, the stronger impact of imperial cities and their citizens on politics, culture and society, and several more developments within the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.17 Luther must be seen, as part of this historical process, as both continuing and competing with the medieval precedent; as both a conservative reformer leading back to the origins of the Christian church and doctrine, and against his own intentions as an innovative modernizer secularizing and disciplining society in early modern times. To acknowledge this particular blend neither reduces the importance nor the quality of his reform ideas. The tension between tradition and innovation not only characterizes Luther and his reform attempts; it seems to be the proprium of the century in total. Thus a question arises, which was intensively discussed in the last decades of early modern historiography: how much is Luther and his initiation of the Reformation the doorway to a new age of Reformation and CounterReformation? What – if not Luther and the Reformation in particular – qualifies the sixteenth century as a new epoch? 2 Confessionalization as the paradigm for a new epoch The concept of confessionalization was developed to answer this question. Over the years a growing number of historians and theologians have broadly discussed the historiographical invention of Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling.18 Rather quickly it became inextricably linked to the problem of 17 Reformation Europe: a guide to research, edited by Steven Ozment (St. Louis, 1982); Handbook of European history: 1400 – 1600; Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, edited by Thomas A. Brady, 2 vols (Leiden, 1994–95); The German Reformation: the essential readings, edited by C. Scott Dixon (Oxford, 1999). 18 While Ernst Walter Zeeden in his Die Enstehung der Konfessionen (München, 1965) defines confessions on the basis of formulated and written documents – ‘keine Konfessionalisierung ohne Konfession’; cf. also Konfessionsbildung (Stuttgart, 1985) – the new research in books and articles discusses his idea as a new paradigm: cf. Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation and the early modern State. A Reassessment”, The Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989), 383–404; Heinz Schilling (ed.), Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland – das Problem der “Zweiten Reformation” (Gütersloh, 1986); Hans-Christoph Rublack (ed.]), Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland (Gütersloh, 1992); Heinz Schilling, Religion, political culture, and the emergence of early modern society (New York, 1992); Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling (eds), Die katholische Konfessionalisierung (Gütersloh, 1995); Thomas Kaufmann, “Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche und Gesellschaft”, Theologische Literaturzeitung 121 (Leipzig, 1996), 1008–25.1112–21; Wolfgang Reinhard, Ausgewählte Abhandlungen (Berlin, 1997), 77–147; Heinz Schilling, Ausgewählte Abhandlungen zur europäischen Reformations- und Konfessionsgeschichte, edited by

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whether the reformation is a unique phenomenon. If so we have to ask again about its character: was the reformation merely a theological dispute with fatal consequences for the unity of the church? Could the process in total better be understood as a wide-ranging incident which touched all dimensions of life, politics, economy, culture, and religion? Following the latter the theological question is only a part of the whole and cannot be used to understand the full meaning of what has happened between 1517 and … when does this process come to an end: 1555 with the diet of Augsburg, 1580 with the book of concord, 1648 with the peace of Osnabrück, or even later? Let us briefly recall the results of an intensive dispute in history and theology: the discussion started with the question of periodization of early modern history in Europe. Traditionally, German, and to a certain extent European early modern history as well, is divided into three periods: the “Reformation” 1517–55, the “Counter-Reformation” 1555–1648, and the “Age of Absolutism” 1648–1789. This division has become almost indestructible because of the simple dialectical pattern it is based upon: a progressive movement, the “Reformation”, as thesis, evokes a reaction, the reactionary “Counter-Reformation”, as antithesis; their contradiction leads to extremely destructive armed conflicts, until Europe is saved by the strong hand of the absolutist early modern state, which because of its neutrality in the religious conflict is considered the synthesis. This view of history is wonderfully convincing, but quite incorrect. The labels “progressive Reformation” and “reactionary Counter-Reformation” are no longer viable; neither as dialectic contradictions nor as successive periods of history, because they are in no sense mutually exclusive. In particular the so-called “Counter-Reformation period” is at least as much characterized by the “second Reformation”, the expansion of Calvinism, as by increasing Catholic activity in society, culture and church. Since in the second half of the sixteenth century Calvinism proves much stronger than Lutheranism, the Protestant “Reformation” reached its culmination at the very moment when traditional historiography placed the “Counter-Reformation” in ascendancy. Even though the “Reformation” and the “Counter-Reformation” are closely connected by their origin and background in the late medieval reformmovements, the early “evangelical movement” initiated by Luther remains something particular, since it proved an innovative force of modernizing tendency. However, as soon as the princes took over in the 1520s after the Peasants War, the movement became “Reformation”, that is, a process of religious change organized by conservative authorities in their legal terms. Empirical research leads several historians to the conclusion that it would

Luise Schorn-Schütte and Olaf Mörke (Berlin, 2002), 433–699; Stefan Ehrenpreis and Ute Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter (Darmstadt, 2002).

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be more appropriate to separate a comparatively short-lived spontaneous “Evangelical Movement” from 1517–25 from these two almost parallel organized processes of “Reformation” and “Counter-Reformation”, which both began in the early 1520s and lasted two centuries. According to the sources, both could be defined as rather conservative operations with authorities in the lead and legal devices predominating. In this regard, Calvinists, Catholics, Lutherans, and to a certain extent even Anglicans, all acted in remarkably similar ways. No wonder: each faced the same problem. Under the pressure of mutual competition the religious groups had no choice but to establish themselves as “churches”, i.e. stable organizations with welldefined membership. These new “churches” had to be more rigid than the old pre-Reformation Church, where membership was self-evident and required no careful preservation. Particular confessions of faith served to distinguish these separate religious communities from each other. And since the German word “Konfession” covers both the confessions of faith and the respective communities, Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling decided to call the formation of the new churches Konfessionalisierung (confessionalization). To the older concept this process began with the first Lutheran visitations and some tentative measures on the Roman Church side in the 1520s and ended after the late seventeenth century; when France re-established religious unity by force (1685), when England secured the protestant character of its monarchy (1688–1707), and when the Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg expelled the Protestants from his country (1731). Obviously “Church” and “State” collaborated everywhere to cut autonomous parts out of the body of one single Christian community by establishing a particular group conformity of religious doctrine and practice among their members. However, the instruments used, and the institutions and personnel employed to handle them, deserve a closer look, just to demonstrate once again how closely they corresponded to each other in all communities, in spite of theological differences: 1 As already mentioned, the basic procedure consisted in the establishment of the respective pure doctrine and its handy formulation in a confession of faith, which could be used to measure everybody’s orthodoxy. The Lutherans took the first step in this direction with their “Augsburg Confession” of 1530. But the decisive years were the late 1550s and early 1560s, when various Calvinist confessions were followed by the Catholic Professio Fidei Tridentina. Then in 1577, the majority of German Lutherans agreed to the Formula Concordia and finally signed the Book of Concord (1580). 2 A complementary measure to this establishment of pure doctrine was the extinction of possible sources of confusion, which might lead the faithful astray: double confessional duties of priests, the lay chalice, and so on.

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3 The new rules had to be spread widely in the territory and, if necessary, enforced. Propaganda might be the first instrument to that purpose. The invention of printing had made Luther’s initial success possible; the calculated use of the printing press now became essential for indoctrination as for fighting the enemy. Censorship was the negative complement of propaganda, keeping away competitors.19 4 Theology under those conditions deteriorated from lofty speculations to continuous battles and almost by definition became controversial.20 On a lower level, the education and even indoctrination of simple believers developed into an elaborate technique, employing a broad range of instruments: catechisms, sermons, church music, more popular spectacles as religious processions, pilgrimages, and the veneration of saints and their relics. 5 It was of great importance to secure the orthodoxy of persons in strategic positions, such as people responsible for teaching or preaching or able to intervene at the decisive times of human life. Theologians, priests, ministers, teachers, doctors, midwives, and sometimes even secular officials in general were examined on their orthodoxy and made to swear to the respective confession of faith. 6 Each church tried to win the future by expanding and streamlining its educational system so as to safeguard the “right” alignment of its children. New school ordinances mushroomed, stressing religious education and exercises together with the control of religious and moral behavior. If necessary, new orthodox educational institutions had to be created to prevent future elites from studying abroad, where they might be exposed to dangerous influences. 7 The new groups should become as homogeneous as possible. Minorities, which could not be amalgamated, either emigrated or were expelled. Furthermore, discipline was applied to group members in an active way through the vehicle of visitation, when ecclesiastical superiors or, more often than not, mixed commissions of clerical and secular officials arrived to investigate in minute detail the religious and moral life of the parish. Finally, the churches established control of that participation by careful record-keeping on baptisms, marriages, the Lord’s Supper, and burials. Moreover, they stressed, and sometimes even overstressed, those rites, which were particularly useful in distinguishing them from their 19 Cf. Elisabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1991); Adrian Johns, The Nature of the Book (Chicago, 1998). Hans Peter Hasse, Zensur theologischer Bücher in Kur-Sachsen im konfesionellen Zeitalter (Leipzig, 2000). 20 In the light of that interpretation the colloquies between theologians of different observance (Religionsgespräche) can no longer be interpreted as serious attempts at reunification, but tended to become ritualized exchanges of arguments to demonstrate the strength of irreconciliably antagonistic positions.

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competitors, even if their theology did not demand such practices.21 Even performances with almost no religious significance were considered confessional property, and therefore became unacceptable to others in spite of obvious advantages (calendar reform, for example). Even language did not escape confessional regulation. Of course, churches tried to secure an adequate name for themselves. The Roman Church somehow managed to reserve for herself the venerable designation “Catholic”, whereas the new churches were called after their leading reformers. The Lutherans reluctantly accepted this labeling: Calvinists, however, dislike it to the present day. 9 Because of the shortage of institutions and personnel, all churches had to rely to a lesser or greater extent on the support of secular power. Often secular authorities of cities and states stepped in instead.22 This became a fact of far-reaching consequences, even if solutions greatly differ from case to case according to local conditions. Therefore, we have to keep the crucial role of the State in mind when we examine the results of “confessionalization”: Without doubt, in the long run the churches succeeded in “confessionalizing” their members to a remarkable extent. However, in reaching the goal they had in mind, they produced several unintended results! a) Society after “confessionalization” was certainly more “modern” than before: education was improved and more widespread, and the first media revolution in history had taken place, the victory of printing. By these means, and by their demand for a much higher degree of religious 21 For example, the adoration of the sacrament of the altar, and the veneration of saints and relics became exlusively characteristic features of Catholicism, wheras practising the lay chalice from now on automatically implied Protestant inclinations. The doxology of the Lord’s Prayer became also a “shibboleth” of distinguishing Protestants – praying with – from catholics – praying without. The question of identification by practices was a tempting subject for discussion between myself and Bodo Nischan. His sudden death ended abruptedly the plan for a book on confessional tolerance and intolerance with special attention to certain identified practices. For some first ideas which should be worked out in more detail see some of the articles collected in his Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot, 1999), esp. II-V. On the background of developments to more or less identical religious practices confessional indifference seems a quite important phenomenon to specifiy the pattern of confessionalization; cf. Anne Conrad, “Bald papistisch, bald lutherich, bald schwenckfeldisch”. Konfessionalisierung und konfessioneller Eklektizismus, Jahrbuch für Schlesische Kirchengeshichte 76/77 (1997/98), 1–25. 22 cf. Hans-Walter Krummwiede, Zur Entstehung des landesherrlichen Kirchenregimentes in Kursachsen und Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (Göttingen, 1968); James L. Schaaf, “Der Landesherr als Notbischofsamt”, in Martin Brecht, ed., Luther und das Bischofsamt (Stuttgart, 1990), 105–8.

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consciousness, churches had contributed to the further development of rationality. At the same time, they had trained their members in discipline and made them accustomed to being objects of bureaucratic administration – both essential preconditions of modern industrial societies. b) The constant pressure the churches and their secular allies exercised on the people must have created stress and a potential of latent aggressiveness. Thus Reinhard interprets the notorious witch-craze of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as nothing else but an unconscious collective expurgation of these aggressions at the expense of victims provided by traditional superstition.23 c) “Confessionalization” made an important contribution to the growth of the modern state in Europe. Not that the churches intended to do so; more often than not it was quite the opposite. However, they all needed the help of secular authorities, a help that was granted willingly, but not free of charge. The churches had to pay for it. Early modern state-builder, on the other hand, knew very well that joining the process of “confessionalization” would provide them with three decisive competitive advantages: enforcement of the political identity, extension of a monopoly of power, and disciplining of their subjects. Therefore, it was obvious that a policy of religious toleration would not pay at the stage of state-building. The theory of “Confessionalization” serves not as an alternative to the traditional interpretation of the Reformation and the century after, but rather it substitutes the former attempts of research with an even wider range of understanding the particular events. Therefore we have to ask finally for the concrete relationship between religion and political identity. When medieval “Christianity” broke down into different churches, national and territorial states, these new entities still maintained the traditional claim of total commitment. Society was still not split up into more or less autonomous subsystems, as it is the case today. Under such conditions, the development of the early modern state could not take place without regard to “Confession”, but only based upon fundamental consent on religion, church, and culture, shared by authorities and subjects. 23 It cannot be mere coincidence that the witch-craze reached its climax in time and space precisely where “Confessionalization” was practised with particular intensity, but nevertheless very rarely identified witches directly with the “confessional” enemy. This suggestion appeared obvious after studying a large number of regional studies on witchhunting in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Cf. the six-volume collection of recent research on witch-hunting edited by Brian P. Levack: New Perspectives on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology (New York and London, 2001). Interestingly Reinhard’s idea of a relation between witch crazes and confessionalism has – to my knowledge – not provoked any further research in more detail.

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In the case of German territorial states, the appeal to religious differences is essential, because these principalities lacked a “national” culture to legitimize their political independence. Sometimes there were not even different dynasties to draw clear lines of demarcation between territories, but just rival branches of the same noble house. It cannot be mere coincidence that in such cases the individual lines preferred different “confessions”.24 Even princes of the same religion carefully separated their respective territorial churches from each other, and if they were Catholic, they tried at least to establish an exclusively territorial bishopric in their country. Closed borders, limited mobility, and the legal persecution of intermarriage to prevent religious contamination also served to enforce political group identity. Religious obedience to authorities outside the state was considered treacherous. However, political identity is enforced not only by isolation of the population, but also by a thorough “confessionalization” of the subjects. From 1615 to 1628 Duke Maximilian of Bavaria had a “Bavaria Sancta” published. In his preface the Jesuit Matthew Rader explained what the book wanted to demonstrate: “Cities, castles, market towns, counties, villages, fields, forests, mountains and valleys all breathe and demonstrate Bavaria’s Catholic religion … because the whole religion is nothing but religion and one common church of its people”.25 Tota regio nil nisi religio is much more than just playing with the words of the famous formula cuius regio eius religio. This was the program of Maximilian’s reign, and he proved so successful in its implementation that still today “Bavarian” and “Catholic” remain almost synonyms. This kind of close affinity between religion and politics made it much easier to overcome the traditional Christian dualism of the spiritual and the secular spheres, just re-established by Luther in the most radical way, in favor of a unitary regime, this time, however, with the secular authority in the lead, and not the ecclesiastical, as once in the Middle Ages: “Your Grace shall be our pope and emperor”, some peasants wrote to Philipp of Hesse, as early as 1523. “Confessionalization” meant gains of power for the State, because the Church became a part of the State in theory as well as in practice. Church government by the state and abolition of clerical privilege as practiced by both Protestant and Catholic rulers was a decisive step in the direction of a general leveling of their subjects, toward a modern equality not so much of rights as of their loss. In this respect, the Protestant “Reformation” proved a particularly strong promoter of the state power. Both the 24 Wittenberg: Lutheranism – Leipzig: Catholicism; Kassel: Calvinism – Darmstadt: Lutheranism; Munich: Catholicism – Heidelberg: Lutheranism, later Calvinism. 25 Quoted in Reinhard, pp. 400f.; cf. Peter Bernhard Steiner, Der gottselige Fürst und die Konfessionalisierung Altbayerns, Um Glauben und Reich. Kurfürst Maximilian I (München, 1980), 252–3.

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Reformation and the Council of Trent modernized church administration on bureaucratic lines. By joint efforts of church and state subjects became accustomed to a stricter discipline of life. And where the state still lacked a well-organized bureaucracy able to reach every single subject in the countryside, the church stepped in with its parish ministers. This alliance of Church and State during the process of confessionalzation reached its culmination in the field of ideas and emotions, where it secured the consent of the subjects to their own subjugation: No law is more favorable to princes than the Christian one, because it submits to them not only the bodies and means of the subjects, but their souls and consciences, too, and it binds not only the hands, but also the feelings and thoughts.26

3 Luther’s ecclesiology as dawn of a new epoch? The ecclesiology of Luther as seen in his early writings seems to match with several of the above mentioned characteristics of confessionalization: To establish pure doctrine and give a handy formulation of evangelical faith Luther reduced the question about authorities to the question of the last and final authority: Holy Scripture. Even a confession as given in the small, and later in the great, catechism was understood by him as summary and abbreviation of Scripture.27 Thus his catechism should not contain any item which was not revealed and confirmed by Scripture. With this reduction he simultaneously excluded possible sources of confusion as, for example, the tradition of the church, books of doctores ecclesiae, the canon law and so on. All these authorities have to be measured through Scripture. This conviction was theologically supported by Luther’s doctrine of claritas scripturae and the hermeneutical rule that Scripture interprets itself by itself.28 Thus there is no need for explanation of Scripture beside the authority of Scripture and with it censorship is needed for those only who deny the clarity of Scripture – heterodox and heretics. To spread this knowledge out into the land Luther used the new technique of book printing extensively and extremely 26 Quoted in Reinhard, p. 403, with reference to Giovanni Botero, Della ragione de Stato, ed. Luigi Firpo (Turin, 1948), 137. 27 Cf. Albrecht Peters, Kommentar zu Luthers Katechismen, 5 vols, edited by Gottfried Seebaß (Göttingen, 1990–94). 28 Cf. Friedrich Kropatscheck, Das Schriftprinzip der Lutherischen Kirche (Leipzig, 1904); Sola scriptura: das reformatorische Schriftprinzip in der säkularen Welt, edited by Hans Heinrich Schmid (Gütersloh, 1991); W. Robert Godfrey et al., Sola Scriptura! The Protestant position on the Bible (Morgan PA, 1995); Walter Mostert, Glaube und Hermeneutik: Collected essays edited by Pierre Bühler (Tübingen, 1998).

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creatively.29 Luther used the printing press as the instrument of preaching and teaching, as can be shown in his conflict about ecclesiology with Hieronymus Emser. The Leipzig Franciscan felt so provoked by Luther’s books and pamphlets that he installed a printing press in his own house in Leipzig to print answers and other controversial literature immediately as a response to the Wittenberg releases.30 Beside the use of this technique even in his early years Luther developed new genres of controversial literature and polemics against his theological opponents: for example, he reprinted some pamphlets of Emser or Prierias to make public their stupidity and errors, introduced by a sharp and ironical preface. Luther invented a new style for lecturing – the continuing commentary to Scripture – at the University of Wittenberg, using the printing press to provide students with texts and other necessary information. Even the style of biblical commentaries changed under the influence of the extensive use of the printing press by Luther and other Wittenberg professors to a continuous explanation as lectio continua. As mentioned already the controversial genre within theology was expanded while the essayistic and speculative genre declined. Theology became either commenting on the Scriptures or the controversial explanation of the evangelical truth against its opponents. Even education on a lower level in schools, sexton classes, or elsewhere was not free of these controversial potentials: even though Luther and Melanchthon focused on teaching the gospel and its truth, in fact even in the early years catechism lessons taught the Wittenberg Theology and the reformation confession.31 In his early writings Luther seemed to be convinced that there was no need for the installation of new ministers, sextons, or bishops. But under the circumstances after the Wittenberg riots and facing the Peasants’ War and other revolts, on May 14, 1525 he started with the ordination of Georg Röhrer as minister in Wittenberg. He designed a formula for the ordination32 and an examination for the candidates. Luther still hoped that these activities which were the first steps in the separation of the churches might serve provisionally to solve immediate problems in the shortage of ministers. But as the reformation in imperial Saxony proceeded forward a continuation of the establishment of institutional services had to be worked out. In the context of our argument it seems of importance that the first ordination took place long before a formal confession was written and published. For Luther’s impact on the reformation of schools and educational institutions Cf. Mark U. Edwards, Printing, propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley, 1994). Cf. Heribert Smolinsky, Augustin von Alveldt und Hieronymus Emser (Münster, 1983); Frank Aurich, Die Anfänge des Buchdrucks in Dresden (Dresden, 2000). 31 Cf. Hans-Jürgen Fraas, Katechismustradition. Luthers kleiner Katechismus in Kirche und Schule (Göttingen, 1971). 32 WA 38, 423–33 = LW 53, 122–6; cf. WA Br. V, N° 1618 (Suppl.) and WA 41, 454–9; 762–3. 29

30

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his tract to the mayors and councilmen of all German cities to establish schools from 1524 is of greatest significance.33 Since the stimulating book of Gerald Strauss there is an ongoing discussion how much the process of reformation was combined with the “indoctrination of the youth” and whether there was a success or even more a “failure”.34 While Strauss focused in his research on the decline of schools and more or less the failure of the Reformation I would argue that his judgment reproduces Erasmus’ conviction that wherever the Reformation takes ground schools and education decline. In the contrary we must consider that the decline of schools and universities in the 1520s and 1530s is a phenomenon that cannot be reduced to ‘evangelical’ territories only. Without doubt either the engagement with or the reluctance to schools reformation can be found in all territories. Thus the ambiguous engagement for schooling and education is a phenomenon of the age of confessionalization, reflected in the earliest writings of the reformers of any confession. Finally Luther stressed the means of visitations as the main duty of the bishop.35 Even though the visitation in Saxony started under secular supervision in 1527 Luther had argued even earlier that bishops should visit parishes, schools, and other institutions in their dioceses. Even more for Luther the bishop’s ministry is mainly defined by pastoral care and visitation, as can be clearly seen in the use of the title “bishop, episcopus, superintendent” for non-bishops within his correspondence. He found this view confirmed by historical knowledge about bishops in the ancient church, who were, in fact, the main ministers in a city. Did Luther, with his view into the early church in the apostolic age, invent a new church? Did he open the gates for a new age? Without doubt one can accept Reinhard’s and Schilling’s main characteristics of confessionalization as characteristics of the reformation in Wittenberg and related territories and cities in consequence of Luther’s writings as modernization, the need for stronger discipline, and finally the creation of modern administration and politics which actually provoked a kind of supervision of secular authorities. This led in some respects to an early secularization and the decline of theological and/or ecclesiastical authority. 33 WA 15, 27–53 = LW 45, 339–78; cf. my article, “Zur theologischen Begründung der Bildungsreform bei Luther und Melanchthon”, in Humanismus und Wittenberger Reformation. Festgabe anläßlich des 500. Geburtstags des Praeceptor Germaniae Philipp Melanchthon am 16. Februar 1997, edited by Michael Beyer and Günther Wartenberg assisted by Hans-Peter Hasse (Leipzig, 1997), 155–84; see also Luther and Learing. The Wittenberg University Luther Symposion, edited by Marilyn J. Harran (Selingsgrove, 1985) and Marilyn Harran, Martin Luther. Learning for life (St. Louis MO, 1997). 34 Gerald Strauss, Luther’s house of Learning. Indoctrination of the Youth in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978), cf. Matthias Asche, “Frequenzeinbrüche und Reformen”, in Walter Ludwig, ed., Die Musen im Reformationszeitalter. (Leipzig, 2001), 53–96. 35 Cf. for the following, Martin Brecht, ed., Martin Luther und das Bischofsamt (Suttgart, 1990), 73–108.

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Thus we have to consider that tradition and its preservation, as much as innovation and critique of the tradition, are balanced in Luther’s reform attempt. His intentions were certainly conservative, to lead back to the apostolic age and the times of the Early Church in the first five centuries. This can be seen very clearly in his attempts to reform the church. His ecclesiology – especially as expressed in his early writings – has a certain spiritualistic approach that allows taking over structures and ideas of the apostolic age without fear of the gap of nearly 1,500 years. This attempt is – as much as other reform ideas of the Wittenberg theologian – related back to the main question for the last authority within the church and through the church within society, culture, and politics. Interpreting the reformation in the intentions of Luther we have to consider its principal conservative orientation. Counting these characteristics we have to see Luther as part of the early reformation, as a focus of the evangelical movement in its early years, but not as the stimulating force of the confessional reformation. Do we have to label Luther a “forerunner of the Reformation”?36 Looking to the development of the reformation as a result of Luther’s writings we have to consider the opposite. Luther’s writings were used within a larger process to improve reform attempts, which served several ideas and interests. Luther had tried to accentuate the one and only authority of Scripture. In fact his idea provoked the competition of several authorities: papacy, imperial and secular authorities, individual conscience, and so on. So Luther’s religious intention finally worked out a secularization of authority and power. What he had not intended became reality and with that a major contribution to European history: the modernization and the secular development of early modern society and state. This conclusion misinterprets Luther and his work from an anachronistic perspective. This interpretation excludes the deep theological foundation of Luther’s reformation ideas and theology. Even though the question of a last authority was finally decided without too much regard to the religious question of truth, it still bears this dimension: where Scripture has been seen as the last authority the question as to the inner ground of this authority arose. Even though Scripture became not the last authority of state and church, even though theology was replaced by the law as framework for the future dialogue, even though Luther departed from the center of the reformation to its margins – was the Reformation in its early development a failure? One should not misjudge the Reformation in that way, because it would be morally wrong and anachronistic to do so. This approach would judge a holistic movement from one particular view: that of a dogmatic understanding of 36 Heiko A. Oberman, “Martin Luther: Vorläufer der Reformation”, in Verifikationen. Festschrift für Gerhard Ebeling zum 70. Geburtstag, edited by Eberhard Jüngel, Johannes Wallmann, and Wilfrid Werbeck (Tübingen, 1982), 91–119.

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what is true evangelical doctrine and life. Even though the question of truth and pure doctrine cannot be put aside, a one-sided theological view of the reformation and its consequences is no longer adequate. Thus the theory of confessionalization on the one hand gives a proper interpretation of the whole epoch and leads on the other hand to a new and more historical interpretation of the life and work of Martin Luther. Focusing on his early ecclesiology one might say that Luther is neither a saint nor the founder of a new early modern religion but a very important and influential theologian; he is not a national hero but a man with a lot of interesting ideas for the development of society and state; he is not a heretic but a deep minded searcher for truth; he is neither the founder of the early modern state, nor the pathfinder for the way to tolerance, humanity and democracy, the first who detected the individual conscience; but he opened theology and pastoral care for the problems of people on their way into another epoch. As much as in his theological as in his personal development Luther carries the burden of a man “between the times”. He is both: a late medieval theologian who initiated, mostly against his own intentions, processes and structures which lead into a new epoch: the time of early modernity. His conservative reform of the church back to its apostolic roots turned out to became a long-lasting foundation of a new church.37

37 This church was later named after him; again against his expressed order. Cf. WA Br 9 N° 3699.

The Braunschweig Resolution The Corpus Doctrinae Prutenicum of Joachim Mörlin and Martin Chemnitz as an Interpretation of Wittenberg Theology Robert Kolb

Without teams and teamwork no Reformation would have taken place. Heinz Scheible has argued against labeling the relationship between Luther and Melanchthon a “friendship,”1 but they certainly formed a team. In fact, the entire collegium in Wittenberg, including Johannes Bugenhagen, Justus Jonas, Caspar Cruciger, and others formed a partnership as they led, directed, and modeled the development of Lutheran teaching and ecclesiastical practice, introducing Wittenberg thought, method, and procedures throughout Germany and beyond.2 Such partnerships developed often as the Reformation spread. In the next generation teams such as Matthias Flacius and Nikolaus Gallus, or the working group that produced the Magdeburg Centuries, dotted the Reformation landscape. For Lutheran Confessionalization, one of the key partnerships in consolidating and clarifying the Wittenberg legacy was that which led the church of the city of Braunschweig in the 1550s and 1560s, Joachim Mörlin (1514–70) and Martin Chemnitz (1522–86). Their collaboration in implementing policies relating to public teaching and church life across Lower Saxony decisively determined the precise shape of the resolution of the divisions within the Lutheran churches in the second generation of the Reformation. All later Lutheran teaching bears definite marks of this Braunschweig resolution of the Wittenberg legacy. Their teamwork climaxed in 1567 as they composed the Corpus doctrinae Heinz Scheible, “Luther and Melanchthon,” Lutheran Quarterly 4 (1990): 317–39. Hans-Günter Leder suggests that these five plus Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Johann Agricola, and Georg Rörer formed an inner circle directing reform, in “Luthers Beziehungen zu seinen Wittenberger Freunden,” in Helmar Junghans, ed., Leben und Werk Martin Luthers von 1526 bis 1546, Festgabe zu seinem 500. Geburtstag (Berlin, 1983), 1: 419–40. 1 2

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Prutenicum, a summary of public teaching for the dukedom of Prussia. It provided a model for Chemnitz’s further efforts on behalf of Lutheran concord. This team’s roots lie in the cauldron of controversy over Andreas Osiander’s views on justification by faith in Königsberg 1551–53; the partnership blossomed in Braunschweig, where they served together as leaders of the city’s ministerium, and it came to fruition as the two were called back to Prussia in 1567 to settle the troubled waters of church life there. The younger, Chemnitz, figures more prominently in accounts of the period because his Examination of the Council of Trent delineated the critical differences between Lutheran and Roman Catholic theologies, and his works on the Lord’s Supper and christology made clear the differences between his own way of thinking and that of “Reformed” theologians.3 His work on the Formula of Concord and his commentary on Melanchthon’s Loci communes4 served as a model for later Lutheran dogmatics. Nevertheless, his own theological maturation depended as much upon Joachim Mörlin as it did upon his relatively brief formal theological training in Wittenberg and his extensive private study of Peter Lombard, Luther, and a host of other Christian thinkers. A year after Chemnitz’s death their colleague Johann Gasmer wrote of them that Braunschweig’s church had never enjoyed “a more blessed time than under the two pillars Mörlin and Chemnitz, when they were governing this church as one.” He compared them to Luther and Melanchthon, in complete agreement, Mörlin filled with zeal, Chemnitz more moderate, “together safeguarding that most beneficial golden mean in the church of Christ.”5 The yeasty, exhilarating air of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s Wittenberg infected both men. Martin Stupperich’s objection to Emanuel Hirsch’s labeling Mörlin simply a disciple of Melanchthon is well-founded, but the fact that “he later found himself in the camp of the Gnesio-Lutherans”6 does not rule out his being Melanchthon’s disciple. Mörlin and Chemnitz belonged to that sizable contingent of Wittenberg alumni whose thought incorporated and synthesized insights from both professors and who believed that in their fundamental teaching the two had agreed. 3 Examen decretorvm concilii Tridentini…., 4 vols (Frankfurt, 1566–73); Repetitio sanae doctrinae de vera praesentia corporis et sangvinis Domini in Coena (Leipzig, 1561) and De dvabvs natvris in Christo. De hypostatica earvm vnione: de commvnicatione Idiomatum … (Jena, 1570). 4 Loci theologici . . . qvibvs et loci commvnes D. Philippi Melanthonis perspicuè explicantur … 2 vols (Frankfurt, 1591). The Formula of Concord is found in Die Bekenntnisschriften der evangelisch-lutherischen Kirche (11th edn; Göttingen, 1992 [henceforth BSLK]), 767–1100; Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds, The Book of Concord (Minneapolis, 2000), 481–660. 5 Johann Gasmer, Oratio de vita, stvdiis, et obitv Reverendi, et clarissimi viri, D. Martini Chemnitii … (n.p., 1587), D1a. 6 Martin Stupperich, Osiander in Preussen 1549–1552 (Berlin, 1973), 363.

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Mörlin was a native Wittenberger, son of an arts professor, Jodocus, who left the University to become a pastor. Family finances forced Joachim to abandon his studies and learn to be a potter, just as Chemnitz’s formal education was interrupted by an apprenticeship in clothmaking.7 In 1532 Mörlin returned to Wittenberg as a student, became Luther’s spiritual counselor in 1539, and completed his doctorate in September 1540. Within weeks he assumed the superintendency of the church of Arnstadt. His sharp criticism of public immorality earned him dismissal in 1543; in 1544 Göttingen called him to be its ecclesiastical superintendent. His preaching there cultivated proper Lutheran teaching and moral living in the same fervent manner8 until Duke Erich of Braunschweig-Calenberg pressured the Göttingen council to send him into exile in 1549 because of his strident criticism of the Augsburg Interim, which Erich had accepted. He then received a position as pastor in KönigsbergKneiphof at the instigation of Duke Albrecht of Prussia (September 1550), whose librarian Chemnitz had become earlier that year. Chemnitz was largely an autodidact, having spent brief periods in Wittenberg when he had sufficient funds. Melanchthon had recommended him to Albrecht. Chemnitz’s reading during this time gave him an extraordinary command of Luther’s thought and of the ancient church fathers, mediated first through Lombard and then through recent editions of patristic works. Mörlin and Chemnitz became comrades in controversy because of a colleague who like Mörlin had fled the enforcement of the Augsburg Interim, Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg, whose preaching had converted Albrecht to the Reformation a quarter century earlier. Osiander had actively propagated the Lutheran Reformation and taken part in the Marburg colloquy (1529) and the conference at Smalcald (1537). In Königsberg, however, his early training in neoplatonic thought (Pico and the Kabala) became apparent in his writings on the doctrines of God and justification by faith.9 He did not grasp Luther’s nominalist conviction that God’s Word creates reality and sought instead to anchor the reality of salvation in the gift of the indwelling divine essence of Christ.10 The layman Chemnitz was among the first to challenge 7 Brief biographical overviews can be found, of Mörlin, in Julius August Wagenmann, Art. Mörlin, Realencyklopädie für Theologie und Kirche 13 (Leipzig, 1903): 237–47; of Chemnitz, in Robert Kolb, “Martin Chemnitz,” in Carter Lindberg, ed., The Reformation Theologians, an Introduction to Theology in the Early Modern Period (Oxford, 2002), 140–53. See also Philipp Julius Rehtmeyer, Historiae ecclesiasticae inclytae urbis Brunsvigae Pars III. Oder: Der beru[e]hmten Stadt Braunschweig Kirchen-Historie Dritter Theil … (Braunschweig, 1710), 207–345. 8 Notes from sermons in this period and later were gathered by his son Hieronymus into Postilla: Oder Summarische Erinnerung bey den sonteglichen Jahrs euangelien und Catechismi. D. Ioachimi Morlini … (Erfurt, 1587). 9 Emanuel Hirsch, Die Theologie des Andreas Osiander und ihre geschichtlichen Voraussetzungen (Göttingen, 1919), 170. 10 Correspondence and publications related to the controversy are found in Gerhard

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Osiander’s divergence from what he had learned from Melanchthon and read in Luther; Mörlin initially displayed sympathy for his fellow exile and attempted to mediate between Osiander and other colleagues at the university and in the Prussian ministerium. However, Mörlin, too, became convinced that Osiander’s spiritualizing ontology deviated significantly from the Wittenberg understanding of Christ’s person and work; he formulated a sharp critique, arousing Osiander’s bitter rejoinder and the duke’s wrath. For Mörlin perceived what Chemnitz had sensed. Osiander’s neoplatonic moorings had led him to discount the significance of Christ’s historical suffering and death for the redemption of sinners from their sinfulness; he was chiefly concerned with the act of justification, which came through the faith that caused Christ’s divine nature to dwell in believers. Instead of focusing on Christ’s cross, he contended that justification by faith completes a humanity that was not fully perfect at creation; he solved the problem of humanity’s unrighteousness by contending that Christ’s indwelling divine nature, not God’s re-creating pronouncement of forgiveness, justifies. Mörlin insisted that salvation comes through the substitutionary sacrifice of Christ in obedience to God the Father’s plan for redeeming sinners. God’s Word of forgiveness in Christ actually effects a change in the reality of the lives and status of believers; rendering them righteous through his Word determines reality and truth. Justification, Mörlin insisted, is inextricably linked to the historical act of redemption, which dare not be deemphasized as Osiander did. At the same time Mörlin also recognized that Osiander had abandoned Luther’s emphasis on the ancient doctrine of the “communicatio idiomatum,” by which Luther confessed that the two natures of Christ share their characteristics even though neither loses its integrity as divine or human and each retains its characteristics as its own.11 Even though his position commanded the support of most Prussian theologians and his cause aroused public demonstrations in his behalf among the populace, Mörlin had lost the one critical vote, the duke’s, and found himself driven from his home, parish, pregnant wife, and children in February 1553. He chose to accept a call to the superintendency of Braunschweig’s church over one from Lübeck. Soon thereafter Chemnitz resigned his position and returned to Wittenberg for further study.12 Chemnitz was one of several gifted students whose potential Melanchthon Müller and Gottfried Seebaß, eds, Andreas Osiander Gesamtausgabe Band 9 and Band 10 (Gütersloh, 1994, 1997). 11 Mörlin’s Von der Rechtfertigung des glaubens: gründtlicher warhafftiger bericht/ auss Gottes Wort (with Georg von Venediger) (Königsberg, 1552) and Historia Welcher gestalt sich die Osiandrische schwermerey im lande zu Preussen erhaben/ vnd wie dieselbige verhandelt ist … (Magdeburg, 1554). Cf. Erich Roth, “Ein Braunschweiger Theologe des 16. Jahrhunderts: Mörlin und seine Rechtfertigungslehre,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für niedersächsische Kirchengeschichte 50 (1952): 59–81. 12 Stupperich, Osiander, 110–367.

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recognized and cultivated. The preceptor asked his student to accompany him to a diet of Evangelical princes in Naumburg in early 1554 and entrusted lectures on his own Loci communes to Chemnitz, in addition to his lectures in the arts faculty. Only with great reluctance did Melanchthon allow Chemnitz to leave Wittenberg in December 1554 to accept Braunschweig’s call to become Mörlin’s coadjutor. Thus began more than twelve years of a close association that not only administered the church in Braunschweig but also inescapably thrust them into leadership within the closely-linked ministeria of the cities of Lower Saxony. Since Johannes Bugenhagen had helped introduce the Reformation to the city in 1528, Braunschweig had assumed a leading position among the Lower Saxon cities under superintendents Martin Görlitz and Nikolaus Medler.13 As Mörlin and Chemnitz expanded Braunschweig’s role, formulating and pursuing a wider ecclesiastical policy in the Lower Saxon Circle, they were engaged in creating an interpretation of the Wittenberg legacy that ultimately shaped the way most Lutheran churches defined Luther’s and Melanchthon’s thought. For many of the common concerns of those ministeria revolved around determining precisely how to adopt, define, and apply Wittenberg theology to the demands and disputes of their own time. Many of those disputes had to do with Melanchthon, whom both Mörlin and Chemnitz regarded as their beloved preceptor. His attempt to safeguard Lutheran pulpits for Lutheran pastors in the crisis after the Evangelical defeat in the Smalcald War, particularly through the so-called “Leipzig Interim,” and his formulation of positions on specific doctrinal problems alienated many of his students. They felt betrayed by him. Their bitterness evoked in the preceptor a similar sense of betrayal; he could not understand why they had not trusted him and recognized his good will in trying to save his university and his church when Emperor Charles threatened to eradicate both. Bitterness and betrayal make an ugly mix, and the Wittenberg circle found itself locked in acrimonious dispute between Melanchthon’s advocates, centered in Wittenberg, and his critics, mostly former students, centered in Magdeburg, led by Matthias Flacius. The former group has been designated the “Philippists,” their adversaries the “Gnesio-Lutherans.” Both groups were heavily indebted to Melanchthon, but the former defended some later convictions of the preceptor that the Gnesio-Lutherans believed undermined some of Luther’s most important insights.14 When he arrived in Braunschweig, Chemnitz had had relatively little contact with Mörlin’s friends in the GnesioLutheran camp. He could have formulated his own concept of Wittenberg Rehtmeyer, 70–207. On these groups see Robert Kolb, “Dynamics of Party Conflict in the Saxon Late Reformation, Gnesio-Lutherans vs. Philippists,” The Journal of Modern History 49 (1977): D1289–305. 13 14

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theology out of his reading of Luther’s writings and his recollections of Melanchthon’s lectures. In fact, Mörlin’s thought profoundly influenced his own way of thinking along the lines shared with other Gnesio-Lutheran leaders including Johannes Wigand, Tileman Heshusius, Joachim Westphal, and Simon Musaeus. The theological discord following Luther’s death was as disconcerting to Lutheran princes as to their theologians, for it threatened the credibility and political integrity of the Reformation. Some of the princes tried to restore harmony; the Naumburg meeting that Chemnitz had attended in 1554 had sought that goal. Theologians tried as well. Mörlin and Chemnitz lent leadership to a group from the Lower Saxon ministeria that organized an approach to establish concord between Flacius and Melanchthon in June 1557. Mörlin traveled between Coswig, where Flacius and some of his supporters had come, and Wittenberg, while Chemnitz represented the group by remaining at Melanchthon’s side in Wittenberg. Melanchthon’s fears and bitterness were fed by Flacius’ insistence that the preceptor admit that he had made grave mistakes and misrepresented Luther’s teaching after the Smalcald War. Mörlin, Chemnitz, and the other negotiators from Hamburg, Lüneburg, and Lübeck were unable to overcome his rage against the students he believed were maliciously criticizing him and desiring to take his life.15 The relationship between the Braunschweig theologians and their mentor was cooling. It did not improve at their next encounter. Emperor Ferdinand called a colloquy between Evangelical and Roman Catholic theologians for Worms in September 1557. Mörlin was among those nominated to represent the Evangelical side, and he brought Chemnitz with him. Tensions ran high within the Wittenberg bloc because Duke Johann Friedrich of Ernstine Saxony, under Flacius’s influence, instructed his delegates, Viktorin Strigel and Erhard Schnepf, to create a united front among the Evangelicals by having all condemn certain false teachings, among them positions of Melanchthon. Two others sided with them, Erasmus Sarcerius of Mansfeld, and Mörlin. When Evangelical disunity could not be bridged, the ducal Saxon delegation left Worms, accompanied by Sarcerius, Mörlin, and Chemnitz.16 Johann Friedrich’s government decided to resolve the disputes among the Lutheran theologians by issuing a new form of confession, a Book of Confutation. It set out to resolve disputes by analyzing and repudiating error. Strigel prepared a draft, but his rival on the faculty at Jena, Flacius, and his 15 See the reports of the Coswig Colloquy in C. G. Bretschneider and H. E. Bindweil, eds, Corpus Reformatorum. Philippi Melanthonis Opera quae supersunt omnia (Halle and Braunschweig, 1834–60; [henceforth CR]), 9: 23–107. See also Oliver K. Olson, Matthias Flacius and the Survival of Luther’s Reform (Wiesbaden, 2002), 309–17. 16 Benno von Bundschuh: Das Wormser Religionsgespräch von 1557 unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der kaiserlichen Religionspolitik (Münster, 1988), esp. 399, 411–12, 421, 453, 459.

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supporters arranged for a thorough revision. Mörlin learned the art of confutation when he, with Sarcerius and several ducal Saxon theologians, including Mörlin’s brother Maximilian, was called to review its final form in December 1558.17 The published version reflected Flacius’s positions, which Mörlin shared. In 1560 he also supported an attempt by Flacius and his colleagues to reconcile the disputing Lutheran parties, on Flacian terms.18 Mörlin and Chemnitz were also drawn by geography and their Wittenberg instruction into the debate over the definition of the presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper. Long an issue between Wittenberg and the Swiss and Strasbourg churches, this definition also became a matter of rising tensions within Lutheran churches around 1560. In 1559 Melanchthon himself had lent support to a citizen of Braunschweig, Henning Kloth, who held what Mörlin and Chemnitz believed were Calvinistic views of the Lord’s Supper.19 Much more serious was the dispute between Melanchthon’s close friend Albert Hardenberg, pastor in Bremen, and his Lutheran colleagues. Mörlin and Chemnitz played a leading role in the discussion of Hardenberg’s views and the efforts of the Lower Saxon ministeria to deal with his position both theologically and politically. This clash also pitted Melanchthon against Mörlin and Chemnitz, who sought to maintain what they believed to be Luther’s and Melanchthon’s common proper teaching that both had earlier held. The Braunschweig theologians used both diplomatic and theological means to address Hardenberg’s spiritualizing definition of Christ’s presence, based largely on his reading of Martin Bucer’s work, and his vehement rejection of the christological support for a Lutheran position advanced by his colleague in Bremen, Johannes Timann, and the Hamburg pastor Johann Bötker.20 Mörlin visited Bremen in late 1556 to negotiate with the parties; he joined Flacius, Joachim Westphal, pastor in Hamburg, and others in a delegation that presented concerns of the Lower Saxon ministeria to Elector August of Saxony and King Christian III of Denmark in 1557. The Bremen city council consulted Mörlin regarding the calling of a new superintendent in late 1559 and followed his advice, placing Tileman Heshusius in that 17 Des Durchleuchtigen … Herrn Johans Friderichen des Mittlern … in Gottes wort/ Prophetischer vnd Apostolischer schrifft/ gegru[e]ndete Confutationes/ Widerlegungen vnd verdammung etlicher . . . Corruptelen/ Secten vnd Irrthumen … (Jena, 1559); Illvstrissimi principis … Iohannis Friderici secvndi … sumpta Confutatio & condemnatio praecipuarum Corruptelarum, Sectarum, & errorum … (Jena, 1559). 18 Supplicatorii libelli quorundam Christi ministrorum de Synode propter controversias gravissimas congreganda … (Ursel, 1561). 19 Jürgen Diestelmann, “Joachim Mörlin und Philipp Melanchthon, Ihr Verhältnis zueinander in den Jahren 1555–1557,” in Jürgen Diestelmann and Wolfgang Schillhahn, eds, Einträchtig Lehren, Festschrift für Bischof Dr. Jobst Schöne (Gross Oesingen, 1997), 96–100. 20 Theodor Mahlmann, Das neue Dogma der lutherischen Christologie (Gütersloh, 1969), esp. 44–61, and Wim Janse, Albert Hardenberg als Theologe, Profil eines Bucer-Schülers (Leiden, 1994).

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office.21 At a meeting of the Lower Saxon pastors in Braunschweig February 3, 1561, the Braunschweig theologians laid a series of their own writings before their colleagues, which strengthened their common opposition to Hardenberg.22 When the Lower Saxon ministeria met in Lüneburg in July 1561, Mörlin composed their common “Declaration,” a brief summary of the faith that supported the deposition of Hardenberg and presented GnesioLutheran positions on other issues.23 Mörlin’s concerns regarding this issue went beyond Lower Saxony. In 1565 he countered the claim of Heidelberg theologians that Luther had himself rejected his early insistence on the presence of Christ’s body and blood in the sacrament.24 Yet Mörlin and Chemnitz did not blindly support Flacius or any other Gnesio-Lutheran critic of Melanchthon and his Philippist supporters. Both Mörlin and Chemnitz accepted Melanchthon’s view of the role of the law in the Christian life and opposed Gnesio-Lutherans who rejected the preceptor’s understanding of the “third use of the law,” namely, its use in the Christian life for moral instruction. As a trusted advisor of the ducal Saxon court, Mörlin attended a conference in Eisenach in August 1556 to adjudicate the case of Justus Menius, whose attempts to mediate the dispute over the necessity of good works for salvation between Wittenberg professor Georg Major and his Gnesio-Lutheran critics had aroused suspicion among his ducal Saxon colleagues.25 The decision of this conference that theoretically good works could merit salvation for those who perfectly kept God’s law evoked a largely private but passionate dispute among Gnesio-Lutherans. At stake was Luther’s concept of the righteousness of faith; the reformer had held that no performance of the law, perfect or not, could win the salvation or the perfect relationship with God that God as Creator gives freely apart from all human merit. Mörlin, however, saw the question differently, for he believed that the moral order of society demanded a theoretical presupposition that perfect obedience to the law could merit the gift of salvation. He pursued his point, learned from Melanchthon, in an exchange with Andreas Poach, pastor in Erfurt.26 Poach insisted on proclaiming the condemning use of the law to believers in their struggle against sin but also contended that believers were

Ibid., 74, 78–80, and Rehtmeyer, 238–9. Chemnitz’s Anatomie propositionvm Alberti Hardenbergii de coena Domini … (Eisleben, 1561), Mörlin’s Contra Sacramentarios. Disputationes dvae, prima de coena Domini, Alter de communicatione Idiomatum … (Eisleben, 1561). 23 Erklerung aus Gottes Wort/ vnd kurtzer bericht/ der Herren Theologen/ Welchen sie der Erbarn Sechsischen Stedten Gesandten/ auff den Tag zu Lu[e]nburgk/ im Julio dieses 61. Jahrs gehalten/ fu[e]rnemlich auff drey Artickel gethan haben… . (Jena, 1561). 24 Wider die Landlu[e]gen/ der Heidelbergischen Theologen (Eisleben, 1565). 25 Matthias Richter, Gesetz und Heil: Eine Untersuchung zur Vorgeschichte und zum Verlauf des sogenannten Zweiten Antinomistischen Streits (Göttingen, 1996), 139–51. 26 Ibid., 170–207. 21 22

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free from that accusation in so far as they lived and trusted in Christ. Church leaders in Nordhausen shared this view, and municipal officials there sought the advice of the Braunschweig theologians in discussions on the issue in December 1564 and again the following year; Mörlin followed up private memoranda with a published defense of his position.27 Mörlin and Chemnitz were also among the large group of former comrades – including Tileman Heshusius and Johannes Wigand – who abandoned Flacius when he defended his definition of original sin as the (Aristotelian) substance of the fallen human creature and asserted Luther’s view that the sinner had fallen into the image of “Satan.” The conflict within the GnesioLutheran camp over Flacius’ definition of original sin developed in the 1560s; by 1567, when Mörlin bade Braunschweig farewell, it was clear that he and Chemnitz had rejected their friend’s position and were influencing other Gnesio-Lutherans to do the same.28 On December 1, 1567, Mörlin warned his fellow pastors against Flacius’ corruptions of the truth. He addressed several issues which Flacius and other Gnesio-Lutherans had raised in their criticism of Melanchthon. He did not abandon his earlier critique of his preceptor; but he did reject errors he found in the positions of GnesioLutheran friends, and he repudiated certain instances of what he considered their unfair treatment of Melanchthon. Mörlin rejected those who opposed the third use of the law, such as Andreas Musculus and Anton Otto. He dismissed Nikolaus von Amsdorf ’s revival of Luther’s phrase, “good works are detrimental to salvation” (without acknowledging its origin in Luther’s writings). He spurned the idea that original sin is the substance of fallen human creatures. He also criticized Flacius for unfairly interpreting Melanchthon’s explanation of the concept of Christ as Logos, and for his oversimplification of the preceptor’s definition of the gospel as both repentance and the forgiveness of sins (a definition Flacius found obscured God’s pure grace preached in the gospel). Flacius’ rejection of the use of the words “regeneration” and “vivification” as synonyms for “justification” also seemed to Mörlin hypercritical. Flacius’s description of the action of the will in conversion as “coerced” offended Mörlin as well, as did his refusal to acknowledge any natural knowledge of God. Just as friendship with Melanchthon did not prevent the Braunschweig theologians from criticizing their preceptor, so it dare not keep them from confuting the false teachings of their friend Flacius.29 Chemnitz and Mörlin had their own memories of Wittenberg, their own conception of Luther’s and Melanchthon’s teaching, and a sense of independence both from their beloved preceptor and from their 27 Ibid., 253, 275–6, and 325–9. Mörlin’s Dispvtationes tres. Pro tertio vsv legis contra fanaticos (n.p., n.d.) appeared in or about 1566; see Richter, 325–9. 28 Wilhelm Preger, Matthias Flacius Illyricus (Erlangen, 1859–61) 2: 328–32. 29 Rehtmeyer, Beilagen, 111–16.

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friends who criticized him. Yet it cannot be said that Chemnitz had organized a “center party” among the contending groups within the Wittenberg circle.30 Like many other Gnesio-Lutherans who had found Flacius’ views on original sin and the rejection of the third use of the law by Otto and Poach unacceptable, Mörlin and Chemnitz did not deviate from the positions they had taken on the side of Flacius in the 1550s in regard to most of the controverted issues within the Wittenberg circle. It was not a compromise seeking a via media but a determined confession bound politically to neither older friends nor younger that created the Braunschweig resolution of these controversies. Through Chemnitz’s leadership in 1574–77 this confession largely determined the content and approach of the Formula of Concord, the final official expression of Lutheran dogma in the sixteenth century.31 Since Osiander’s death October 17, 1552, and the subsequent exile of Mörlin and other opponents of Duke Albrecht’s favorite, the duke had unrelentingly supported a small band of Osiander’s supporters who maintained control of the Prussian ministerium, but the resistance to his teaching from external and internal critics never ceased.32 Mörlin himself criticized attempts by his successor in Kneiphof, Matthaeus Vogel, to forge a compromise settlement.33 As Albrecht felt death approaching in early 1567 (he died in 1568), he sought one last time to bring peace and proper teaching to his lands, and he turned to the Braunschweig team of Mörlin and Chemnitz to resolve the difficulties plaguing his church. The Braunschweig city council wished to give up neither of the two, but a compromise was reached. Mörlin accepted a call to head the church in Prussia, and Chemnitz succeeded to the superintendency of the church in Braunschweig. Before these developments took place, both of them had journeyed to Königsberg and there fashioned a “body of doctrine” for the Prussian church that was designed to restore doctrinal harmony, a goal it actually accomplished. This “corpus doctrinae” contained Mörlin’s and Chemnitz’s own statement of resolution of disputed issues plus three Lutheran confessions already widely used to define public teaching in lands reformed by the Wittenberg circle: Melanchthon’s Augsburg Confession of 1530 and the Apology he wrote the following year in

30 As asserted by Friedrich Bente, Historical Introductions to the Symbolical Books of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Saint Louis, 1921), 102–3. 31 Jobst Ebel, “Die Herkunft des Konzeptes der Konkordienformel, Die Funktionen der fünf Verfasser neben Andreae beim Zustandekommen der Formel,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 91 (1980): 237–54. 32 Jörg Rainer Fligge, “Herzog Albrecht von Preussen und der Osiandrismus, 1522–1568,” Th.D. dissertation, University of Bonn, 1972. 33 See his Trewliche warnung vnd trost an die Kirchen In Preussen (Magdeburg, 1555), Ein Sendtbrieff … an den Vogel … (n.p., 1556), Apologia Auff die vermeinte widerlegung des Osiandrischen Schwermers in Preussen/ M. Vogels (n.p., 1558), Wieder die Antwort des Osiandrischen Schwermers in Preussen/ M. Vogels/ Auff meine Apologiam … (n.p., 1559).

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its defense, and Luther’s Smalcald Articles.34 “Corpus doctrinae” had become the common title for such collections of texts that had attained official status in delineating what could and should be taught in Lutheran lands during the 1560s. The term had been used in Wittenberg for more than three decades as a synonym for the “analogia fidei” or “regula fidei” (rule of faith), the summary of acceptable biblical teaching. By the 1550s Wittenberg theologians were using the term informally to designate a list of documents that contained this summary. In 1560 Melanchthon cooperated in publishing a “Corpus doctrinae” drawn only from his writings, as a summary of what ought to be confessed and taught.35 Mörlin and Chemnitz called their own statement “a repetition of the chief ideas and content of the true universal Christian church’s teaching as it is comprehended in the Augsburg Confession, the Apology, and the Smalcald Articles.”36 “Repetitio” designated a confession that sought to reiterate the teaching of the Augsburg Confession since Melanchthon had used it in entitling his Saxon Confession” of 1551 a “Repetition.”37 In his closing words to the Braunschweig ministerium Mörlin mentioned that he had written the Corpus doctrinae Prutenicum,38 yet it also reflects Chemnitz’s distinctive contributions, particularly in writings on the Lord’s Supper and in his review of the controversies afflicting the Lutheran churches, drafted in 1561.39 The Corpus doctrinae Prutenicum summarizes the common efforts of the two to resolve controversies troubling Lutheran churches in Lower Saxony and beyond for more than a decade. They treated the topics of God, the two natures of Christ, the law, original sin and free will, justification by faith, good works, the sacraments in general, the Lord’s Supper, and the pastoral office. They offered brief summaries of the teaching they held correct on 34 See Walther Hubatsch, Geschichte der Evangelischen Kirche Ostpreussens 1 (Göttingen, 1968), 108–14. 35 Corpus Doctrinae Christianae, das ist, gantze Summa der rechten wahren Christlichen Lehre des heiligen Evangelii … (Leipzig, 1560); the Latin version followed shortly thereafter. See Irene Dingel, “Melanchthon und die Normierung des Bekenntnisses,” in Günter Frank, ed., Der Theologe Melanchthon (Stuttgart, 2000), 195–211. 36 It was published with these other documents and separately, as Repetitio corporis doctrinae ecclesiasticae Oder Widerholung der Summa vnd Inhalt der rechten/ allgemeinen Christlichen/ Kirchen Lehre wie dieselbige aus Gottes Wort/ in der Augspurgischen Confession/ Apologia/ vnd Schmalkaldischen Artickeln begriffen/ Vnd von Fu[e]rstlicher Durchleuchtigkeit zu Preussen etc. Auch allen derselbigen Getrewen Landtstenden vnd Vnterthanen/ Geistlichen vnd Weltlichen/ im Hertzogthumb Preussen/ Einhellig vnd bestendiglichen/ gewilliget vnd angenomen/ Ku[e]rtzlich zusammen verfasset (Eisleben, 1567, published with the other confessions, Königsberg, 1567). 37 CR 28: 339–568. 38 Rehtmeyer and Beilagen, 113. 39 Published posthumously, Polycarp Leyser, ed., De controversiis quibusdam, quae superiori tempore, circa quosdam Augustanae Confessionis Articulos, motae et agitatae sunt; Iudicium (Wittenberg, 1594).

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fundamental and disputed aspects of these topics, often explicitly or implicitly confuting opponents or opposing positions in the manner of the Flacianducal Saxon Book of Confutation, on which Mörlin had worked. The practice that Mörlin and Chemnitz had gotten in their diplomatic and theological activity in the service of the Braunschweig council and ministerium during the preceding dozen years had well prepared them to frame a resolution of controversies that potentially or actually threatened to disrupt Prussian church life. Their composition of the Repetitio served Chemnitz as a rehearsal for future tasks, both in the construction of a similar statement for BraunschweigWolfenbüttel two years later40 and in the drafting and directing of the framing of the Formula of Concord a decade later.41 Albrecht’s preface, dated June 9, 1567, probably prepared for him by his advisors from Braunschweig, announces his desire “to end divisions and misunderstandings among teachers and parishioners.” He intended to restore “the teaching of the holy gospel, pure, clear, and unadulterated, in peace and quiet,” because of his “Christian eagerness,” born of fatherly concern, to leave his son a land free of strife, “before our departure from this transient world.” The “Repetitio” represented, Albrecht asserted, the teaching of the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures, the Augsburg Confession, its Apology, the Smalcald Articles, and Luther’s writings, freed from corruption and error, including that of people who wanted to cover their false teaching with the claim that they adhered to the Augsburg Confession (a reference to Osiander and his followers).42 The rejection of Osiander’s thought in the Corpus doctrinae Prutenicum embodied a complete reversal of Albrecht’s ecclesiastical policy. In 1561 Chemnitz had felt compelled to begin his treatment of several controversies riling the Wittenberg circle by explaining to readers the process or method for resolving such disputes. He and Mörlin followed this practice in 1567. In his confessional statements and the second and third editions of his Loci communes theologici Melanchthon had begun his reviews of Christian teaching with the topic “God,” following the model of John of Damascus and Peter Lombard.43 His disciples had learned the necessity of providing an orientation to the task of formulating public teaching from the controversies into which they had fallen. In their introduction to the Repetitio the two from Braunschweig expressed their goal as the restoration of God’s gift of peace and 40 Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, 6, 1 (Tübingen, 1955): 92–139. 41 In Book of Concord, Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, 524–660, the paragraphs stemming from Chemnitz’s pen are marked “c”. His earlier association with Jakob Andreae and Nikolaus Selnecker had also shaped their thinking, and thus his influence is broader and deeper than is indicated by singling out the elements he actually authored. 42 Repetitio, A2a–A3b. 43 Robert Kolb, “The Ordering of the Loci Communes Theologici: The Structuring of the Melanchthonian Dogmatic Tradition,” Concordia Journal 23 (1997): 317–37.

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unity in the church, which Satan continually tries to destroy. True peace and unity can be grounded alone on God’s Word, as the Braunschweig theologians not only asserted but tried to demonstrate with frequent biblical glosses to their argument, supplemented by occasional references from ancient church fathers. They had called the Holy Scripture their canon, that is “a certain rule and guiding principle, according to which all religion and teaching is to be judged and determined, as [the fathers] subjected their own writings to it; none desired to be accepted by us or to be regarded as an authority worthy of respect unless they agreed with the Holy Scripture,” as, the Repetitio noted, Augustine had taught.44 The Wittenberg orientation of the Braunschweig understanding of how to use Scripture was clear: Scripture was written that “we may believe in Christ and through this faith have eternal life in his name” (John 20:31). “Scripture is useful for cultivating proper teaching, comfort, and patience,” for warning sinners, and for their reproof, correction, and training in righteousness, so that God’s people may become perfect, equipped for all good works (Rom. 15:4, 1 Cor. 10:11, and 2 Tim. 3:16–17). The Repetitio condemned the “papistic religion,” reflecting Chemnitz’s critique of the Council of Trent,45 accusing Roman Catholic opponents of following humanly invented regulations for the faith. Mörlin and Chemnitz also rejected and condemned Caspar von Schwenckfeld “and other fanatics” (Schwärmer) for not relying on Scripture but searching for God through special revelations, apart from Christ.46 Because they had learned that Scripture passages could be quoted against each other, and because they followed in the catholic tradition of the church, Mörlin and Chemnitz recognized the necessity of designating secondary authorities, subject to Scripture and derived from it, to adjudicate disputes over the teaching of Scripture, their primary authority. They anchored this secondary authority in the Apostles creed, supplemented by the Nicene Creed, the Athanasian Creed, and the creeds of Ambrose and Augustine47 (the latter two rarely cited as secondary authorities among sixteenth-century Lutherans). Because, the Repetitio continues, the papacy had brought such false teaching and confusion to the church, it was necessary to issue the Augsburg Confession, which provided Mörlin and Chemnitz with their fundamental interpretation of Scripture and the earlier Christian tradition. But Osiander had claimed the Augsburg Confession as his own and under its cover taught his false understanding of the doctrine of justification. Therefore, Mörlin and Chemnitz insisted that the Augsburg Confession in turn should Repetitio, B1a–B3a. Chemnitz had already published his critique of Trent’s doctrine of justification in Examen, volume 1. 46 Repetitio, B3a–B4a. 47 J. N. D. Kelly, Early Christian Creeds (New York, 1960), 172–4. 44 45

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be understood as it is explained in the Apology, the Smalcald Articles, and Luther’s writings, all of which served as secondary authorities because they faithfully repeated the biblical truth.48 The introductory hermeneutical section of the Formula of Concord reproduced the general outline of this section of the Repetitio.49 Most documents Lutherans composed to address the controversies of the time began by laying a foundation for teaching where Melanchthon’s later Loci communes theologici had, namely, with the topic of God. This topic took on special importance for Lutherans in Prussia because the dukedom lay within the Polish cultural realm (Albrecht held his duchy as a fiefdom bestowed by the king of Poland). Much more than in other Lutheran areas, Antitrinitarian groups were gaining strength in Poland at the time. The Repetitio affirmed the doctrine of the Trinity, on the basis of copious Bible passages, that demonstrated the catholicity of the Prussian church and refuted not only ancient heretics but also Michael Servetus and Johannes Campanus, symbols for the Wittenberg circle of contemporary Antitrinitarianism. The locus closed with Luther’s advice from his disputation on the two natures in Christ, “To teach properly in this matter it is good to hold to the terminology used in Scripture and the ancient fathers.”50 The second locus of the Repetitio treated the union of the two natures in Christ and the “communication of attributes,” a topic vital for the refutation of Osiander’s Christology but also crucial in the Lower Saxon debate on the Lord’s Supper. Chemnitz and Mörlin had repudiated Hardenberg’s refusal to recognize Timann’s and Bötker’s argument that the body and blood of Christ can be present in the Lord’s Supper because his human nature shares divine characteristics through the hypostatic [personal] union of the natures, the ancient teaching regarding the “communicatio idiomatum.” This locus reflects Chemnitz’s critique of Hardenberg and Mörlin’s of Osiander.51 Against

48 Repetitio, B4a–C1a; cf. E2b, G1a, G3b, N2a. On the development of secondary authorities in this period, see Irene Dingel, “Bekenntnis und Geschichte. Funktion und Entwicklung des reformatorischen Bekenntnisses im 16. Jahrhundert,” in Johanna Loehr, ed., Dona Melanchthoniana. Festgabe für Heinz Scheible zum 70. Geburtstag (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt, 2001), 61–81. On the use of Luther’s writing as a secondary authority in this period, see Robert Kolb, Martin Luther as Prophet, Teacher, and Hero. Images of the Reformer, 1520–1620 (Grand Rapids, 1999). In Chemnitz’s Iudicium, B1a–B5a, he had not included Luther’s writings as a secondary authority. 49 BSLK 829–43, Book of Concord, 524–31. 50 Repetitio, C1b–C4a. Luther’s words are found in Dr. Martin Luthers Werke (Weimar, 1883–1993 [henceforth WA]), 39, 2: 94, thesis 15 of his “Disputatio de divinitate et humanitate Christi,” 1540. On Polish Antitrinitarianism, see George Hunston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Kirksville, 1992), 991–1050, 1135–75; on Servetus, ibid., esp. 52–8; on Campanus, ibid. esp. 404–5, 1256–7. 51 Repetitio, C4b–E2a. Cf. Chemnitz’s Anatome and De coena Domini and Mörlin’s Contra Sacramentarios.

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Caspar Schwenckfeld and, implicitly, against critics like Hardenberg who charged that Lutherans also held that the human nature of Christ in effect disappears in Christ’s incarnation, the Braunschweig theologians insisted that clear teaching regarding the salvation of sinners depends upon keeping the two natures distinct. They rejected the ancient Eutychian heresy that the human nature is subsumed into the divine essence, a view approximated by Schwenckfeld and some Anabaptists;52 they rebutted the denial that Christ’s divine nature plays a role in salvation, a position held by Francesco Stancaro, who had stood with them against Osiander fifteen years earlier, while an instructor at the University of Königsberg.53 They repeated the dictum of the Council of Chalcedon that “neither nature is transformed into the other, nor are they mixed together or blended, but remain perfect and distinct, each retaining its own characteristics,” and they buttressed the Chalcedonian formulation with a paraphrase of the decision of the third Council of Constantinople, “to the single indivisible person, God and human creature, are attributed whatever the person as a whole does and what is said about it, so the natures are not torn apart, as if the characteristics of the human nature are only to be applied to the human Christ and not also to Christ as true God, as Nestorius did, but instead, what is said of him we are to understand of his entire person …”54 The Braunschweig theologians reinforced their explanation with numerous biblical citations and texts from Athanasius, Basil, Augustine, Leo, and Cyril.55 Both the refutation of Osiander and the rejection of Hardenberg and the Calvinists required this detailed exposition. Chemnitz repeated and expanded this treatment of Christology extensively in the Formula of Concord.56 The third topic, “on the law,” addressed several controversies among the Wittenberg heirs, first acknowledging the necessity of distinguishing law and gospel: God’s law reveals sins and delivers condemnation and death; the gospel proclaims the righteousness that God gives in restoring sinners to eternal life. Law and gospel dare not be confused. The Repetitio rejected antinomianism, describing the teaching of Johann Agricola, Luther’s and Melanchthon’s student who held that the law played no part in Christian living and that the gospel alone induces the believer’s repentance. Luther and Melanchthon believed that the gospel describes and delivers what God does in behalf of sinners and that the law describes the responsibilities given to human creatures Williams, Radical Reformation, 494–6, 690, 1217. Ibid., 854–5, 883–5, 999, 1106. 54 Repetitio, D1b–D2a. See Norman J. Tanner, S.J., ed., Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils, (London/Washington, 1990), 83–4 (Chalcedon) and 127–8 (Constantinople III), and Jaroslav Pelikan, The Christian Tradition, a History of the Development of Doctrine 1 (Chicago, 1971), 226–77. 55 Repetitio, D2b–E2a. 56 BSLK 1017–49, Book of Concord, 616–34. 52 53

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by their Creator, a message that serves to condemn them when they sin.57 Citing Scripture, Luther, and the Apology of the Augsburg Confession the Repetitio presented the necessity of using law and gospel in daily repentance as had Luther and Melanchthon, applying the call to forsake sin and trust in Christ very directly to hearers of God’s Word. “The prophets, Christ, and the apostles, direct their words to the individuals, not just to the sin and vice…. For in the political realm the thief is hanged, not thievery, and in the realm of the household the father spanks the child, not what he did wrong. A physician gives the person, not the illness, the medicine.”58 The Repetitio condemned the position of Gnesio-Lutherans who rejected the third use of the law. Mörlin and Chemnitz believed that the Holy Spirit produces the motivation of new obedience through the gospel but that the law provides guidance for believers, who dare not invent their own ways of expressing their holiness but must follow God’s plan, set down in his law, to define true service to him.59 Articles V and VI of the Formula of Concord were largely written by Jakob Andreae and other committee members, but their analysis of law and gospel reflects Mörlin’s and Chemnitz’s convictions in the Repetitio.60 The Repetitio’s fourth topic, “original sin and free will, or the capability and powers of the human creature,” began with a definition of original sin Melanchthon had set forth in the Apology of the Augsburg Confession: the inability to recognize the grandeur of Christ’s favor, or his benefits.61 When this doctrine is misunderstood, the Braunschweig theologians contended, the chief articles of faith are all distorted. Thus, they opposed the “synergists,” who, in defending the continued functioning of rational understanding and an active will, minimized the effects of Adam’s fall upon human powers. They taught that these powers were damaged but not completely extinguished and lost, thus concluding that sinners could stop resisting God and themselves make it possible for the Holy Spirit to begin the conversion. This approximated the views of Melanchthon and some of his followers.62 Chemnitz and Mörlin regarded even this small concession to human powers as an offense to the biblical concept of God’s grace, and they cited Augustine to support their judgment.63 Flacius’ arguments against synergism had led him to define original sin as 57 On Agricola and his professors, see Timothy J. Wengert, Law and Gospel, Philip Melanchthon’s Debate with John Agricola of Eisleben over Poenitentia (Grand Rapids, 1997), 77–210. 58 Repetitio, E2b–F2a. 59 Repetitio, F2a–b. 60 BSLK, 951–69, Book of Concord, 581–91. 61 BSLK 157, Book of Concord, 120. 62 See Robert Kolb, “Nikolaus Gallus’ Critique of Philip Melanchthon’s Teaching on the Freedom of the Will,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 91 (2000): 87–110. 63 Repetitio, F3a–F4b.

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the substance of the fallen human creature, so it was appropriate that Chemnitz and Mörlin placed their appraisal of that definition in their article on the powers of the human will. This critique was somewhat more detailed than their rejection of synergism. They contended that calling original sin the very essence of the sinner denies the Creed’s definition of human beings, even after the fall, as God’s creatures. Instead, they argued, “though sin has not altered the essence that God created, it is a terrible poison through which God’s creation in us, body and soul, has been spoiled and turned to the devil, to hostility against God, … and that this poisonous perversion is received at conception,” with support from Romans 5:12–14, Psalm 51:10, and Ephesians 2:1–3. Chemnitz and Mörlin reminded readers that the perverted will of sinners has not been deprived of its ability to make decisions regarding temporal matters; it is indeed neither rock nor block of wood nor irrational animal – language Luther used but many of his disciples discarded. Furthermore, less against Flacius than against those who had misrepresented his views, the Repetitio observed, the Holy Spirit does effect changes in sinners, a genuine renewal of their reason, will and heart, when the Spirit converts them to faith in Christ. Therefore, Mörlin and Chemnitz taught that the sinner has no aptitude or capacity to cease resisting the Word of God and to accept that Word until the Holy Spirit turns heart and mind in true repentance to trust in Christ. The Braunschweig theologians also anchored the Holy Spirit’s work in his use of the means of grace, the Word of God in its oral and sacramental forms. They believed that the Holy Spirit does all this not in some extraordinary way, through a secret revelation and an infusion from heaven, but through the spoken Word and the holy sacraments, as means ordained by God, through which he calls people, enlightens them with his gifts, and sanctifies and preserves them in true faith: thus it paraphrased Luther’s Small Catechism. This motivation and re-creation by the Holy Spirit involves no coercion of the sinner but rather the movement and turning of will and mind.64 In the Formula of Concord Chemnitz led the way in reproducing the positions enunciated here. The Formula rejected Flacius’ definition of original sin and, while acknowledging Philippist concerns behind the insistence that the will is active in conversion, it strictly maintained that the will’s activities oppose God until the Holy Spirit turns and re-creates them, exclusively through the means of grace.65 The most critical issue for Prussian pastors remained the proper definition of justification by faith. The confusion wrought by attempted compromises regarding Osiander’s doctrine formulated by Albrecht’s establishment demanded a clear resolution. Initially, the Repetitio repudiated the error of the Council of Trent and Roman Catholic church 64 65

Repetitio, F4b–G3a. Repetitio, G3b; cf. BSLK, 843–912, Book of Concord, 531–62.

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that attributed the justification of the sinner not only to Christ’s redemption and the forgiveness of sins but also to the sanctification and renewal of the inner person, thus defining righteousness before God as an infused ability to be pious and do good works.66 Chemnitz and Mörlin rejected the Augsburg Interim’s definition of righteousness as faith working itself out in love, creating an “inherent righteousness.”67 Alongside these positions the Braunschweig theologians renounced the view of their former Wittenberg associate Georg Major that good works are necessary for salvation.68 The Repetitio concentrated its criticism on Osiander’s view of justification. In introducing its case it condemned those who attempt to silence faithful servants of Christ by forcing them to abandon their obligation to reject false teaching and by labeling such criticism “wars over words.” This amounted to a direct censure of Duke Albrecht’s treatment of Mörlin and his colleagues fourteen years earlier; the Repetitio labeled it “a significant, great, and burdensome sin for us in this land.”69 Mörlin and Chemnitz documented their case with page references to Osiander’s treatises as they set forth their critique. They held that his position lacked all biblical support and rejected several propositions he had advanced: that righteousness in God’s sight is not granted imputatively and by grace, that it is not seen as fulfillment of the law (Christ’s fulfillment in the stead of sinners’), that it is not the forgiveness of sins and gracious acceptance of unworthy, lost sinners for Christ’s sake.70 Osiander had erred by teaching that only the divine righteousness of God, or the divine nature of Christ, indwelling in the sinner, can make that sinner righteous. Osiander had failed to recognize the power of God’s Word in pronouncing the sinner free of sin for Christ’s sake, holding that a merely verbal announcement would make God a liar, calling the sinner righteous. His failure to grasp Luther’s understanding of the power of God’s Word alienated Osiander from those who had experienced Luther’s own teaching.71 Mörlin and Chemnitz presented their own doctrine of justification. God created human creatures in genuine uprightness or righteousness and holiness, expressed in his holy law, the ten commandments. In contradiction to Luther’s understanding of passive righteousness, righteousness in God’s Repetitio, G4a–b; Examen, I, locus 8, section III, Articles 1–2. Repetitio, G4b; Joachim Mehlhausen, ed. Das Augsburger Interim von 1548 (Neukirchen, 1970), 42–5. 68 Repetitio, G4b; Timothy J. Wengert, “Georg Major (1502–1574), Defender of Wittenberg’s Faith and Melanchthonian Exegete,” in Melanchthon in seinen Schüler, ed. Heinz Scheible (Wiesbaden, 1997), 129–56; Robert Kolb, “Georg Major as Controversialist: Polemics in the Late Reformation,” Church History 45 (1976): 455–68. 69 Repetitio, H1a. Cf. Stupperich, Osiander, 271–85. 70 Repetitio, H1a–H2b. 71 Repetitio, H2b–H3b. 66 67

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sight,72 but in accord with Melanchthon’s terminology, the Repetitio stated, they were “righteous on the basis of the law.” After Adam’s fall all human beings sin, not simply in imitation of Adam, but according to their sinful nature, which places them under the law’s judgment and God’s wrath and everlasting curse. God became flesh, by the Virgin Mary, came under the law and became sin for sinners (2 Cor. 5:21), an innocent sacrifice bearing the sins of the world (Isa. 53:10). This has fulfilled the law’s demands for righteousness (Rom. 8:4). Christ’s obedience, in both his human and his divine natures, his submission to the law, won redemption for his people. It is given to them through faith (Rom. 3:22). Therefore, not because of works, nor because of the indwelling divine nature, but only through the redemption won by Christ are sinners restored to being God’s righteous people.73 In the Wittenberg circle the topic of justification led directly to that on good works. Mörlin and Chemnitz repudiated the position of the GnesioLutheran Andreas Musculus, who held that good works dare not be called necessary for the Christian because he believed that good works are not coerced from the faithful but done with a free and joyous spirit. The Repetitio taught that believers do produce good works spontaneously, as fruits of faith, but that these good works can be called a necessary part of Christian living in accord with God’s design and command74 even though Major erred in asserting that good works are necessary for salvation. The Repetitio did not, however, ignore the concern for moral living and demanded the defeat of “ruling sins” in the believer’s life. With five lines of afterthought Mörlin and Chemnitz repudiated Amsdorf ’s counter-proposition, “good works are detrimental to salvation” as dangerous unless understood as Paul expresses it in Philippians 3:7–9.75 Most of the points made in the Repetitio concerning justification and good works appear in articles III and IV of the Formula of Concord, many composed by Chemnitz himself.76 The seventh locus of the Repetitio treated “the sacraments in general and baptism,” hailing Luther’s renewal of biblical thinking on the subject, 72 Robert Kolb, “Luther on the Two Kinds of Righteousness. Reflections on His TwoDimensional Definition of Humanity at the Heart of His Theology,” Lutheran Quarterly 13 (1999): 449–66. On Chemnitz’s use of satisfaction theory that did not match his emphasis on the righteousness of faith as passive righteousness, see Robert Kolb, “‘Not Without the Satisfaction of God’s Righteousness,’ The Atonement and the Generation Gap between Luther and His Students,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte: Sonderband: Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa, Interpretation und Debatten, ed. Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel (Gütersloh, 1993), 136–56. 73 Repetitio, H3b–I2a. 74 Repetitio, I2a–I3b. On Musculus, see Richter, Gesetz und Heil, 208–50. 75 Repetitio, I4a–K3a. Cf. Robert Kolb, “Good Works are Detrimental to Salvation, Amsdorf ’s Use of Luther’s Words in Controversy,” Renaissance and Reformation/Renaissance et Réforme IV (O.S. XVI) (1980), 136–51. 76 BSLK 913–50, Book of Concord, 562–81.

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establishing the teaching on and practice of the sacraments on God’s Word, freeing them from “vain, useless superstitious fables and ceremonies” that had obscured them and perverted their proper use. Mörlin and Chemnitz may have been thinking of remnants of pre-Reformation popular piety in the Prussian countryside. They expressly thought of the devil’s attacks on the immeasurably rich treasure that God had given in the sacraments through the Anabaptists and Ulrich Zwingli. There were subtler versions of Zwingli’s reduction of the sacraments to mere outward, visible signs of God’s grace, while rejecting their power to convey that grace. This subtle view affirmed that grace and the forgiveness of sins are distributed and bestowed with the sacraments but separate this grace of God from the external actions and elements. Whether Mörlin and Chemnitz already sensed the spiritualizing direction of Melanchthon’s successors in Wittenberg, or whether they meant only theologians such as Hardenberg and Calvin, is impossible to tell. The Braunschweig theologians affirmed with Luther’s Small Catechism that water is simple water and bread simple bread if not joined to God’s Word. In his sacramental Word lies God’s power that bestows the benefits of Christ upon the faithful who receive the sacraments. The sacraments are not “merely signs of grace that is received and not only activities by which God lets us know in his own special way of his grace and the forgiveness of sins that are comprehended apart from the external element in his Word. Instead, what he does in the sacraments is done through the elements, comprehended in the Word, by which, through the power of Jesus Christ, he offers and bestows all the blessings and heavenly treasures in which we truly participate, when we use the sacraments according to his institution, grasping his promise with complete trust.”77 Regarding baptism Mörlin and Chemnitz rejected Calvin’s view that the children of believing parents are members of Christ, in God’s kingdom and the covenant of grace, apart from baptism, and repudiated the Calvinist rejection of baptismal exorcism, for it diminishes the harm caused by original sin and the power of God’s word in baptism.78 The Osiandrian sympathizer Johannes Aurifaber of Breslau had eliminated exorcism from the official practice of the Prussian church in 1558,79 so this call for its reinstitution formed part of the Braunschweig theologians’ anti-Osiandrian program. In their eighth locus Mörlin and Chemnitz considered the Lord’s Supper, beginning with Luther’s definition of that sacrament as Christ’s testament, in which the God-man bestows his goods and heavenly treasures on his faithful Repetitio, K3b–L1a; cf. Luther’s Small Catechism, BSLK, 516, Book of Concord, 359. Repetitio, L1a–L2b. 79 Bodo Nischan, “The Exorcism Controversy and Baptism in the Late Reformation,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 36, reprinted in idem, Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot, 1999), III. 77 78

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friends and guarantees them redemption. In this locus the Braunschweig theologians criticized Roman Catholic teaching on the Lord’s Supper as a human work, which offers a sacrifice to God, and condemned the denial of the chalice to the laity. Even when the chalice was conceded to the laity, papal theologians claimed that this practice was a concession of the pope, not the Lord’s institution.80 The focal point of this locus, however, aimed at assessing the views of the sacrament held by Zwingli, Calvin, Peter Martyr Vermigli, and like-minded theologians, although their own bête noir, Hardenberg, was not mentioned by name. The Repetitio recognizes the difference between Zwingli’s and Calvin’s positions on the presence of Christ in the sacrament but also pointed out that Calvin’s teaching that the essential body of Christ is in the Lord’s Supper but only in its power and effect. As Chemnitz had done in writing against Hardenberg, he and Mörlin here affirmed the spiritual reception of Christ’s body and blood, but distinguished that spiritual eating and drinking from the sacramental reception of the essential body of Christ. They grounded it upon the reliability of the words of Christ’s testament, “this is my body; this is my blood,” by which he promised to convey his benefits, including the forgiveness of sins in connection with the oral reception of his body and blood in the read and wine. This position they reinforced with biblical and patristic citations but without recourse of the christological underpinnings they used elsewhere.81 The Repetitio addressed the opponents’ argument that Christ’s body is far from the bread received in the sacrament and therefore only its power and effect are found in the Lord’s Supper. Christ did not say, “eat this bread, it is the power of my body,” the Braunschweig theologians replied. They based their own position on the reliability of Christ’s words rather than on the christological line of reasoning for which the second locus of the Repetitio had in fact paved the way. In fact, they turned to the christological argument at the end of this locus. In its chief line of argument, however, this locus maintained that neither a figurative interpretation of Christ’s words of institution nor a theory of transubstantiation corresponds to Christ’s intention in the words of institution of the Supper. “We truly eat his body with the mouth, not in capernaitic fashion, tearing it with our teeth, but receiving it through the mouth in a supernatural way, as the words and the institution [of Christ] indicate.” The Repetitio also employed the Lutheran test for proper understanding of Christ’s presence, the reception of his body and blood by the unworthy and unbelievers as well as the worthy and believing, explaining that the power of God’s word creates the presence, faith alone receives the benefit.82 The final paragraphs of the locus on the Lord’s Supper addressed Zwingli’s 80 81 82

Repetitio, L3a–L4b. Repetitio, L4b–M3a. Repetitio, M3b–M4b.

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contention that Christ’s body and blood could not be present on the altar of the sacrament because his human nature cannot be anywhere but in heaven, to which he ascended. The ascension did not place Christ’s body in some spatially limited place but at the right hand of the heavenly Father, that is, in full possession of divine characteristics within the personal union of the two natures. Mörlin and Chemnitz had returned to their central argument against Hardenberg.83 The presentation of the teaching on the Lord’s Supper in the Formula of Concord, article VII, came largely from David Chytraeus, but it reflects the position of the Repetitio.84 The final locus, on the pastoral office (a topic seldom found in Lutheran confessions of this period) maintained that pastors dare not be treated as hirelings but as good shepherds who serve God by teaching the biblical message correctly. Thus, this last chapter served to instruct and remind pastors regarding the proper conduct of their office. Implicitly, it also warned princes to respect the office of pastor and not to harass others as Albrecht had harassed Mörlin.85 An appendix followed the names of those pastors who had subscribed to the Repetitio. It contained answers to questions that members of the Prussian ministerium had posed to the theologians from Braunschweig in an assembly held in 1567 at Albrecht’s behest. The questions were checking the stance of Mörlin and Chemnitz over against the Wittenberg faculty on issues related to the freedom of the will and good works and were pressing them on issues related to the sacraments. The answers, the authors apparently presumed, should have satisfied the questioners.86 Mörlin and Chemnitz had brought outward peace, an official resolution, to the ecclesiastical unrest in the duchy of Prussia. Strife continued, however, in Lutheran Germany at large, for another decade. By 1577, when Chemnitz provided the theological leadership that completed the Formula of Concord, which resolved the chief controversies among the theologians of the Augsburg Confession, Joachim Mörlin had died, in 1570. Criticism of the interpretation of the Wittenberg legacy put forth in the Formula by Chemnitz and his colleagues continued,87 but some two-thirds of German Evangelical churches had accepted their restatement of the Braunschweig resolution upon which Mörlin and Chemnitz had worked for two decades as the basis for public teaching. Gasmer’s words about their role in Braunschweig depict their larger role in German Lutheranism. The two pillars of the Braunschweig church had led the Lutheran churches in their direction as they attempted to

Repetitio, N1a–N2a. BSLK 970–1016, Book of Concord, 591–615. 85 Repetitio, N2a–N4a. 86 Repetitio, O2a–O4a. 87 Irene Dingel, Concordia controversa, Die öffentlichen Diskussionen um das lutherische Konkordienwerk am Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts (Gütersloh, 1996). 83 84

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safeguard “that most beneficial golden mean in the church of Christ.” Confessional documents and formulations provided the ideological nervous system not only for the churches but also for the societies of early modern central Europe. Through their theological and diplomatic efforts Mörlin and Chemnitz contributed in a very specific way to the stabilization of both church and society in Lutheran lands.

Johann Pfeffinger’s Treatises of 1550 in Defense of Adiaphora: “High Church” Lutheranism and Confessionalization in Albertine Saxony Luther D. Peterson

Changes in the political and religious landscape of Germany were bound to ensue from Lutheran defeat in the Schmalkaldic War (1546–47). Politically, Emperor Charles V had scores to settle and allies to reward, and since the early days of the Reformation he had promised to end the Protestant schism within the Holy Roman Empire. With regard to the lands of Saxony, divided since 1485, he wrested away most of the lands and the prestigious electoral title of Johann Friedrich of Ernestine Saxony to reward the latter’s cousin, but his ally in the war, Moritz of Albertine Saxony. In May 1548, at the close of the Reichstag held in Augsburg, he issued his Augsburg Interim to reimpose Catholic religion on the Protestants, with exception of a statement on justification, intended in vain to satisfy both Catholics and Lutherans, and tolerance of a married clergy and distribution of both bread and wine to the laity, subject to a dispensation from the pope.1 For his part Elector Moritz recognized that his own Protestant populace would not accept that Interim, especially since his lands now included the previously Ernestine city and Reformation headwaters, Wittenberg, and he sought to forge a further religious compromise that would calm his people without provoking imperial fury. The result, the Leipzig Interim – so labeled by the emerging ‘Gnesio (‘true’)-Lutheran’ party that rejected any concessions to Catholicism – and its Excerpt (Auszug), provided the context for several of the bitter controversies that split Lutheranism for the following three decades and even beyond.2 In the first decade or more, Gnesio-Lutherans, principally Matthias Flacius 1 The critical edition is Joachim Mehlhausen, ed., Das Augsburger Interim von 1548: Nach den Reichstagsakten deutsch und lateinisch (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukichner Verlag, 1970). 2 The Leipzig Interim text is CR 7: 258–64, with additions from cols. 51–64, 217, 219–20. The Excerpt (Auszug) is in Albert Chalybaeus, Die Durchführung des Leipziger Interims (Chemnitz: F. H. Oehme, 1905), 73–6.

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Illyricus, Nikolaus von Amsdorf and Nikolaus Gallus, opposed Philip Melanchthon and his ‘Philippist’ colleagues as too willing to yield to Catholics on matters of faith, worship and ecclesiology. The first and probably foremost of these struggles was the Adiaphora Controversy: under the present circumstances could Lutherans accept Roman liturgical and sacramental practices, and if so, which? Melanchthon distinguished crucial matters of belief, especially justification by faith, which could not be compromised, from indifferent matters (‘adiaphora’) that could be yielded to the imperial-papal victors for the sake of peace and unity. Although he and his fellow Wittenberg theologians were involved in the writing of the Leipzig Interim, they were uncomfortable with the actual compromises that finally emerged from the negotiations; Melanchthon could only call them ‘tolerable.’3 What has not been generally recognized is that this contrasts markedly from the stance of two Philippists who had been a part of the Albertine Reformation from before the war, Dr Johann Pfeffinger and Prince Georg III von Anhalt. They too had been party to the negotiations drawing up this Interim, and Anhalt wrote the ‘Interim Agenda,’ which was intended to accompany, fill in details in liturgy and practice, and (perhaps) sanitize the Interim for local consumption. Both strongly favored the kind of church and church practices of this Interim and ‘Interim Agenda.’ In 1550 Pfeffinger authored two books as an apologia for these practices as well as for the Philippists involved in the writing of the Interim, defending them against very vocal, blunt and personal attacks from Flacius, Amsdorf and Gallus. My objective in this essay is to describe Pfeffinger’s defense, which involved two arguments: the practices were not a betrayal of Lutheranism, and the temporal authority has the right to decide church usages and practices. The first depends upon the peculiar character of the Albertine church since its Reformation in 1539, notable for its ‘high church’ liturgical forms; the second may be seen as a significant early step – and from the side of a church official, remarkably, welcoming state control – in the process of confessionalization that swept through central Europe over the following century. I: Johann Pfeffinger Since he is little known, a brief biography of Pfeffinger may be in order. Born

3 CR 7:362. Melanchthon was referring to the ‘Interim Agenda,’ discussed below. This should have been more acceptable to him than the bare provisions of the Leipzig Interim. It should be noted that Melanchthon used the adiaphora concept earlier, e.g. in the Augsburg Confession, see Articles XV, 1–3, XXVI, 40–43, XXVIII, 55–6, in Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds., The Book of Concord: The Confessions of the Evangelical Lutheran Church (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000) 48–9, 80–81, 98–101.

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in 1493 and raised in southern Bavaria, he was tracked to a clerical life from his early days and ordained in 1518 or 1519. Within two years he was a priest (Stiftsprediger) in Passau, where he quickly achieved recognition for his preaching and soon was suspected by church authorities for Lutheran tendencies. He fled to Wittenberg in 1523, where he studied under Luther, Melanchthon and Johann Bugenhagen. In 1527 he took a pastorate within the diocese of Meissen, where he remained for three years until hounded out by the bishop. The next two years he began his long relationship with Leipzig, preaching to large numbers of its inhabitants in a nearby monastery that was under Ernestine Saxon control. Then followed seven years in Belgern, another Ernestine community. When in 1539 Heinrich succeeded his brother Georg the Bearded as duke in the Albertine Saxon lands and brought the territory over to the Reformation, Pfeffinger was a prominent member of the clerical team involved. He joined the festive introduction of Lutheran worship in Leipzig. In 1540 he was made the first Superintendent of the Leipzig church, which position he held for the rest of his life. His star continued to rise after Moritz succeeded his father Heinrich as ruler in 1541, even after he authored a condemnation of Moritz’s developing alignment to the imperial camp early in the Schmalkaldic War.4 In October 1543 he became the first Protestant to be promoted to doctor of theology at Leipzig University, and a few months later he began his professorship there. Seven times he was dean of the theological faculty, twice vice-chancellor. In 1548 he was also appointed a canon of the Meissen cathedral. Besides his role in the Adiaphora Controversy, he precipitated another, the Synergistic Controversy, with a publication in 1555.5 He died on 1 January 1573. Until the appearance of volume 16 of the monumental Verzeichnis der im deutscher Sprachbereich erschienenen Drucke des XVI. Jahrhunderts in 1990, the only attempt at a complete bibliography of his works dated from 1816, and among these only a vague reference to one, the first, of the two works to be discussed in this essay.6 I may be correct in stating that prior to my dissertation 4 Warhafftige Copey einer Schrifft/ so die Ehrwirdigen Herrn Predicanten zu Leiptzig/ an hertzog Moritzen zu Sachsen gethan etc. Des gleichen eine andere Copeyschrifft/ des hochwirdigen Herrn Nicolai Amszdorff/ von Gott bestetigten Bischoff zur Neumburg/ an den Bischoff zu Merszburg etc. (n.p., n. pub., 1547). Amsdorf published this probably without Pfeffinger’s knowledge. The sole modern biography of Pfeffinger is Friedrich Seifert, ‘Johann Pfeffinger, der erste lutherische Pastor zu St. Nickolai und Superintendent in Leipzig,’ Beiträge zur Sächsischen Kirchengeschichte, IV (1888), 33–162. See also G. Müller, ‘Johann Pfeffinger,’ Realencyklopädie für Protestantische Theologie und Kirche, 3rd ed., 15: 252–4. 5 De libertate voluntatis humanae, quaestiones quinque. (Leipzig: Hantzsch, 1555), 6 Verzeichnis (Stuttgart: Hiersemann, 1983–) 16: 29–33, items P 2322–57. Christian Gottlieb Jöcher, Allgemeines Gelehrten-Lexikon. Ergänzungband, vol. 5 (Bremen, 1816), cols. 2183–4.

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only once had the volumes been used in scholarship, and that only in a limited way, by Hans Christoph von Hase in his 1940 study of Flacius’ opposition to the Interims.7 They were, however, very important at the time of their writing, as indicated in the fact that his name appears in the titles of three of Flacius’ and one of Gallus’ treatises attacking their ‘Adiaphorist’ enemies.8 II: Adiaphora and Lutheran Church Practices The two treatises to be examined are Concerning Traditions, Ceremonies, or Indifferent Things: A True, Christian Report, [Which] All Dear Christians in these Last and Dangerous Times [must] Necessarily Know, dated January 25, 1550, and 222 octavo pages in length, and Fundamental and True Report of the Previous and Present Transactions Before and After the War Regarding Adiaphora or Indifferent Matters, Together with a Brief Christian Answer of Dr. Johann Pfeffinger, which probably appeared during the Fall of the year and is 182 pages in octavo.9 In the three years or so during which the Adiaphora Controversy took front seat in the struggle between Gnesio– Lutherans and Philippists, Pfeffinger’s were the only books that appeared in defense of adiaphora. Thus it would have appeared to others that he was defending the Leipzig Interim and innovations imposed on that church by the Interim. It lies at the heart of Pfeffinger’s argument, however, that with very few exceptions those structures and rites stipulated in the Leipzig Interim, its Excerpt, and the ‘Interim Agenda,’ were the same as those which had emerged there in the years from the beginning of its religious reform in 1539 through to 1545, and to which Luther had expressed approval in those years. For this argument of Pfeffinger’s a bit of background may be necessary, 7 Hase, Die Gestalt der Kirche Luthers: Der casus confessionis im Kampf des Matthias Flacius gegen das Interim von 1548 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1940), 54, 83. Peterson, ‘The Philippist Theologians and the Interims of 1548: Soteriological, Ecclesiastical, and Liturgical Compromises and Controversies Within German Lutheranism,’ Ph. D. diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974, chap. 5, especially 377–407. 8 Flacius, Gründliche verlegung aller Sophisterey/ so D. Pfeffinger mit den andern Adiaphoristen/ das Leiptzigsche Interim zubeschönen/ gebraucht (1551). Gründliche verlegung aller Sophisterey/ so Juncker Isleib/ D. Interim/ Morus/ Pfeffinger/ D. Geitz in seinem gründlichen bericht vnd jhre gesellen/ die andere Adiaphoristen/ das Leipsische Jnterim zu beschönen/ gebrauchen [1551]. Widder die newe Reformation d. Pfeffingers/ des Meisnichen Thumbherrn (1550). Gallus, Gegenbericht auff D. Pfeffingers vnd der Adiaphoristen gesuchte glosen vber jhr Leiptzigsch Jnterim/ mit einer trewen warnung an alle Christen (1550). 9 Von den TRADITIONIBVS, CEREMONIIS. Oder Mitteldingen/ Christlicher warer bericht/ allen lieben Christen in disen letzten vnd gefehrlichen zeiten/ nützlich zu wissen (Leipzig: Wolrab, 1550). Grüntlicher vnd Warhafftiger Bericht der vorigen vnd jetzigen/ für vnd nach dem Kriege ergangen Handlungen/ von den Adiaphoris oder Mitteldingen. Sampt eine Christlichen kurtzen verantwortung/ Doctoris Johannis Pfeffinger. Allen lieben Christen nützlich vnd tröstlich zu wissen (Leipzig: Bapst, 1550).

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outlining briefly what an unusual form of Lutheranism had emerged in Albertine Saxony between 1539 and the outbreak of war in 1546. Here Melanchthon’s idea of adiaphora found full flower. Since justification by faith alone was the sum of Scriptures and Christian doctrine for the Lutherans, the idea of adiaphora for them centered on whether they could choose to abide by or reject those religious rites and rules that had grown up over the history of the church which were neither commanded nor forbidden by Scriptures. In its formative church ordinance, known as the Heinrichsagenda, the Albertine church was inclined toward maintaining inherited practices.10 When Anhalt became bishop of Merseburg in 1544, this direction intensified, as may be measured from memoranda of conferences in that and the following year.11 Anhalt was among the early Lutherans, the one most strongly attached to the testimony of the church, the consensus catholicae ecclesiae. He held to justification by faith, believing that to have expressed the pristine Christian soteriology, and otherwise sought to preserve the episcopal structure and as much as possible of the old customs and ceremonies.12 So this Albertine church preserved alongside baptism and the Lord’s Supper the five other Catholic sacraments, only carefully referring to them only as rites and removing from them whatever they found un-Lutheran.13 Baptism was performed according to Luther’s service of 1526, maintaining a simple exorcism and eliminating the threefold exorcism of the child, and use of salt and the chrism.14 Confirmation was continued, but with the rationale that it serve as a vehicle for instruction and examination of youth in religious teachings, and use of the chrism was eliminated in the ceremony.15 They 10 Agenda, Das ist, Kyrckenordnung/ wie sich die Pfarrherrn vnd Seelsorger in jren Ampten vnd diensten halten sollen/ fur die Diener der Kyrcken in Herzog Heinrichen zu Sachsen V. G. H. Fürstenthumb gestellet (Leipzig: Wolrab, 1540). This is to be preferred to a 1539 edition, because it has additions, especially the list of festivals. The 1539 is reprinted in Aemilius Ludwig Richter, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts. Urkunden und regesten zur Geschichte des Rechts und der Verfassung der evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, new ed. (Leipzig: Günther, 1871) 1: 307–15. See my ‘Philippist Theologians,’ 328–32, for a description of this agenda. 11 The resolutions of these conferences are printed as appendices to Emil Sehling, Die Kirchengesetzgebung unter Moritz von Sachsen 1544–1549 und Georg von Anhalt (Leipzig: Deichert, 1899), 121–92. See also Peterson, ‘Philippist Theologians,’ 334–46. 12 For Anhalt, see Franz Lau, ‘Georg III. von Anhalt (1507–1553), erster evangelischer ‘Bischof ’ von Merseburg: Seine Theologie und seine Bedeutung für die Geschichte der Reformation in Deutschland,’ Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Karl-Marx-Universität Leipzig, III (1953–54), Gesellschafts- und Sprachwissenschaftliche Reihe, 2/3, 139–52. 13 The following practices of the Heinrichsagenda are in Richter, Kirchenordnungen, 312–13. 14 Richter, Kirchenordnungen, 309. Luther’s 1526 baptismal ceremony is in LW, 53: 106–9. 15 Decision of the Laetare Sunday, 1544, conference; see Sehling, Kirchengesetzgebung, 137–8. This may have been the first time the Evangelicals called for use of the old confirmation ceremony for purposes of instruction and preparation for the Lord’s Supper. Brandenburg’s 1540 church ordinance retained the rite, but in the traditional Catholic sense of an initiation

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maintained confession with the justification that this was an opportunity to instruct the people about the Ten Commandments, leading them to repentant hearts and a desire to confess. The church ordinances rejected in principle the last part of Catholic penance, the system of satisfactions, while nevertheless recommending fasting, a traditional satisfaction, as beneficial to individuals at such times as war or great sin. While they opposed anointment with oil, the centerpiece of the Catholic sacrament of unction, they identified and supported a practice called ‘visiting the sick’ and recommended celebrating communion while there, an obvious replacement for unction. Wherever possible, ordination and confirmation should be performed by bishops, but using the example of emergency baptism the documents added that these rites too were fully valid when done by others. In summary, we see here a territorial Lutheran church preserving in some fashion the Catholic sacramental system, and it is interesting to observe in this both the effort expended to remove from it those things objectionable from the standpoint of Lutheran theology and the belabored and often rather far-fetched rationalizations forwarded to justify use of the (sanitized) rites. Not surprisingly in view of the above, worship in Albertine Saxony took on a decidedly ‘high church’ flavor. Matins, vespers, and the name ‘Mass’ were maintained in some other territorial churches as well as here, but nowhere else, perhaps excepting Brandenburg,16 does one find so much apparent conformity in worship with the Roman rite. So in these pre-war ordinances one encounters prescriptions for some urban worship services in Latin, except for use of German for Scripture readings, creed, sermon, words of institution (verba testamenti), Lord’s Prayer, and prayers. From Catholic liturgy only the confiteor prayer at the beginning of the service was dropped, and the canon of the Mass, which Lutherans rejected because of its invocation of saints and sacrificial claim, was replaced by the simple words of institution. The churches of the diocese of Merseburg had maintained the practice of elevating the host in the communion and the wearing of clerical vestments, particularly the surplice. These had early on fallen out of use in the other diocese, Meissen. Over the protests of some Meissen area superintendents, a conference of December 1544 urged the wearing of vestments, and Moritz (with Anhalt’s encouragement) two months later ordered the practice of the elevation everywhere.17 The Albertine church also observed a number of the traditional rite. The other Lutherans had rejected this sense and therefore had discontinued the rite. The first printed ordinance instituting confirmation for instructional purposes that I have found is that of Wittenberg, 1545; see Richter, Kirchenordnungen, 2: 83. 16 For this ‘middle way’ reform effort, see Nikolaus Müller, ‘Beziehungen zwischen den Kürfürsten Joachim I. und II. von Brandenburg und dem Fürsten Georg III. von Anhalt in den Jahren 1534–1540,’ Jahrbuch für Brandenburgische Kirchengeschichte, 4 (1907): 127–74. 17 Recommendation of the surplice came at the Zella conference, December 1544; see Sehling, Kirchengesetzgebung, 174–91. Luther approved the Zella ordinance in a letter of July

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festivals, including those of Christ (Christmas, Epiphany, Presentation in the Temple, Easter and Ascension), Mary, the apostles and other New Testament saints and events. At this point war and the Augsburg Interim entered the picture. To write the Leipzig Interim, Elector Moritz summoned his theologians, Albertiners Anhalt and Pfeffinger and Wittenbergers Melanchthon and Georg Major and others, to deliberate with his court lawyers and the newly-appointed (by imperial mandate) Catholic bishops of Naumburg and Meissen, Julius Pflug and Johann von Maltitz. It should be noted that Pflug was also the principal author of the Augsburg Interim, and with imperial support was vigilant to retain the character of that document in the negotiations. They met at Meissen (in July), Pegau (August), Torgau (October) and Altzella (November); the final product was unveiled at a Landtag in Leipzig, Christmas 1548. What emerged was a church order that differed from the pre-war situation only in three provisions: (1) to the list of festivals was added that of Corpus Christi; (2) the practice the Albertiners had been calling ‘visiting the sick’ was now called by the Catholic name ‘unction’ (but as always regarding the five disputed Catholic sacraments, without using the word ‘sacrament’), and was to include anointment with oil; and (3) the worship services were to begin with the confiteor, which Protestants had rejected because the traditional prayer involved confession of sins to saints as well as to God.18 These three additions were then watered down in Anhalt’s ‘Interim Agenda.’19 In other words, if the political reality forced the Albertiners to incorporate a few new practices in a document to satisfy the emperor, i.e. the Leipzig Interim, for the actual religious situation they had no intention of making any substantive changes from the form of their pre-war church. 22, 1545; see WA Br, 11:145. For Moritz’s order to use the elevation, see Sehling, 41. At least twice Luther wrote that the elevation was an unimportant matter and could be accepted or rejected in freedom (WA Br, 8: 625–6, 11: 200); the Wittenberg churches did not discontinue the elevation until 1542. 18 See Sources and Context of the Book of Concord, ed. R. Kolb and J. Nestingen (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001), 193–5. The theologians in their first statement at the Leipzig Landtag indicated the continuity between the Interim and Albertine practice, stating that private confession had been maintained and that in the Mass all the substantialia together with customary songs, lectionary, and vestments (CR 7: 256). In 1559 the Wittenberg theologians wrote that only ‘three or four’ rites were actually introduced by the Interim: the surplice, confirmation, Corpus Christi, and unction; see Otto Ritschl, Dogmengeschichte des Protestantismus, vol. 2 (Leipzig: Hinrichs, 1912), 344. This suggests that they knew little had changed, but that they were not fully aware of the Albertine situation. 19 Anhalt presented the ‘Interim Agenda,’ some three hundred manuscript pages in length, to Moritz in March 1549, but the elector shelved plans to introduce it. It was first published in abbreviated form by Emil Friedberg, Agenda wie es in des Churfursten zu Sachsen landen in den Kirchen gehalten wirdt: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des Interim (Halle: Waisenhauses, 1869). See 48–9, 51–2, and 66–71 for the three issues considered new in the Interim; whereas the Interim was a skeleton ordinance, the ‘Interim Agenda’ was detailed.

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Although a few printed copies still exist, the Leipzig Interim was not officially promulgated, and the ‘Interim Agenda’ was only distributed in manuscript copies to some superintendents. In July 1549 copies of the brief Excerpt (Auszug) were printed; a few months later they were sent to some superintendents and pastors.20 Its provisions were never instituted in Wittenberg, nor in most of the Albertine lands outside of the Merseburg diocese.21 Meanwhile, the rest of Lutheran Germany learned of the Excerpt, just as they had the Leipzig Interim, thanks to Flacius. Having broken much more thoroughly with Catholic practices, they were bound to see these ecclesiological and liturgical changes as a major blow to the Lutheran movement. South German and Rhineland cities were at that moment suffering forced reintroduction of Catholic worship, and many clergy and faithful lay people had the choice only of flight or suffering. Firm-willed Lutherans everywhere were inclined to regard the events in the Albertine lands as surrendering the faith to the enemy. Some were calling Moritz the ‘Judas of Meissen’ for betrayal of his Lutheran faith and his cousin Johann Friedrich. They were listening to the Gnesio-Lutherans. The issues here were twofold: whether these practices of the Leipzig Interim were truly indifferent things, and whether in times of defeat such as this anything could be yielded to the enemy, lest the common people loose sight of the true doctrines (here the Gnesio-Lutheran slogan: nihil est adiaphora in casu confessionis et scandali).22 The Wittenbergers pleaded in reply that in such times as these the choice is between compromise and eviction, leaving congregations without clergy. They had presented the idea of adiaphora, believed the adiaphora concessions to be the lesser of two evils, but now wished the issue would disappear. On the other hand, Gnesio-Lutherans accepted adiaphora in principle, but for them no changes could be tolerable at this time that might look like a return to Rome. They focussed their attacks on those old practices that had been removed almost everywhere and that, if restored, the common people would immediately notice, especially the clergy donning again the surplice (Chorrock), but also such practices in the Mass as the confiteor and elevation of the host, and the feast days.23 Moreover, for them the situation took on the 20 See Chalybaeus, Durchführung, 7–9, and Heinz Scheible, Melanchthons Briefwechsel. Regesten, vol. 5 (Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1987), no. 5387, 400–401. 21 Chalybaeus, Durchführung, 14–58. 22 ‘Nothing is adiaphora in the situation of confession and scandal.’ See Hase, Gestalt, 59–63, and especially 61, n. 64. 23 Joachim Mehlhausen, ‘Der Streit um die Adiaphora,’ in Bekenntnis und Einheit der Kirche: Studien zum Konkordienbuch, ed. by M. Brecht and R. Schwarz (Stuttgart: Calwer, 1980), 121. One need go no further than the titles to see the attack on the Chorrock; e. g. Gallus and Flacius, Antwort Galli vnd Illyrici auff den brieff etlicher Prediger in Meissen/ von der frage/ Ob sie lieber weichen, den den Chorrock anzihen sollen, and Flacius’ Wider den Evangelisten des heiligen Chorrocks, D. Geitz Maior. See also the broadsheet, ‘Der vnschuldigen Adiaphoristen Chorrock/ darüber sich die vnrugige vnd Störrische Stoici mit ihnen zancken,’

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proportions of the eschatological struggle with the Antichrist, and therefore there could be no compromise, only continued resistance.24 Pfeffinger not only supported the idea of adiaphora, but also endorsed with enthusiasm both the Albertine Saxon church’s use of them and their propriety at this time of crisis. He explicitly rejected the Flacian apocalyptic opposition to all things Catholic, and his reasons for that reveal a deep reverence for that consensus catholicae ecclesiae which also informed Anhalt. For him the work of the church was the preservation and handing on of tradition. There were two kinds of tradition – those instituted by God and could not be changed, by which he meant doctrine, and those instituted within the church and therefore changeable. Among these latter traditions he distinguished adiaphora from ‘impieties’ that were against God’s Word and even often bound consciences with the claim of being necessary for worship of God and salvation.25 Adiaphora were those traditions of the church which did not oppose God’s Word, and instead of being necessary for salvation were useful to virtue, uniformity, and order, and might be maintained out of love for the sake of peace among the churches or for the sake of remembrance and adornment (e.g., Tr: C7a, E5a; Gr: B1a, G7b–8a). Adiaphora were practices that could be accepted or rejected in freedom. (We along with the GnesioLutherans have to wonder how much freedom Moritz would have allowed to reject adiaphora that were useful to his alliance with the emperor.) Of course Pfeffinger said at stake now were old practices still much used in the Albertine churches. In this minimizing spirit he wrote that they were ‘some external uses and ceremonies’ and ‘old blameless uses,’ which neither bound consciences nor satisfied the pope (Gr: A4a, E6a–b, F2a). Since he viewed the practices as benign, he understandably wrote that one should not jeopardize the lives and safety of wife and children, given the emperor’s power, by opposing them (Gr: C8a). Indeed the correct posture of Christians must involve a spirit of cooperation, and by accepting the adiaphora the Albertiners were, he believed, showing this in their relationship to the emperor. If Charles V should not be satisfied with them, he continued, they would have the quiet conscience of having tried to meet the other side half-way (Gr: C8a, D4b–5a). Such an attitude on ceremonies, Pfeffinger proposed, could have rewards reproduced in Oliver K. Olson, Matthias Flacius and the Survival of Luther’s Reform. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 136–7. 24 Again titles of treatises may demonstrate their mindset; so e. g. one of Flacius’ tracts begins, Bulla des Antichrists/ dadurch er das volck Gottes widderumb inn den eisern ofen der Egiptischen gefengknis denckt zuziehen. For Amsdorf ’s conviction that the Interims were marks of the endtimes, see Robert Kolb, Nikolaus von Amsdorf (1483–1565): Popular Polemics in the Preservation of Luther’s Legacy (Nieuwkoop: de Graaf, 1978), 81, 99–100. 25 For divinely instituted traditions, see Traditionibus, sigs. C6a–b; for those of the church, ibid., sigs. D1a–b, and Grüntlicher, sigs. J7a–b, K1a. (Following in text citations indicated Tr and Gr.)

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beyond the easily perceived present advantages. First, foreign churches observing the agreeableness of the Lutherans in all proper and possible things would be more attracted to their side and to remaining with them. In fact, he argued, some of these had wanted to align with their doctrines, but had been appalled by their divisiveness (Gr: C8b, D2a, 5a). Secondly, by means of the adiaphora the Evangelicals would have established good order and ordinances for their posterity, rather than the disunity and confusion of many and varied practices. Therefore, the Saxons had decided to provide a form of unity before the deaths of the present theologians (Gr: D2a). Thirdly, through the concessions he hoped that the Roman party would return to the chief doctrines of Christianity, or at least that they would tolerate and not attack the Protestants (Gr: E7a–b). Finally, the ceremonies would help maintain pure doctrine (Gr: D2a, 5a), probably, we may surmise, because of the order and form they would provide for worship. Pfeffinger not surprisingly devoted much space to defending the specific practices of the church in Albertine Saxony, always with the view that they were true adiaphora. His arguments in favor of using the controverted Catholic sacraments as rites did not differ from those arguments given in earlier ordinances and memoranda, some highlights of which we have seen in looking at the pre-war church. And he emphasized that the Albertine church had removed the objectionable parts of those rites, forcefully attacking them as Catholic errors. Since these treatises, unlike the ‘Interim Agenda,’ were printed, here fellow Lutherans learned that the Albertiners despite the Interim were not anointing with oil those sick people they visited, a practice he labeled ‘untrue and idolatrous’ (Tr: H5a–8b; Gr: F7b–8a). They could read the Albertine confiteor prayer in which they had excised the saints (Tr: E5b–6a) – use of the prayer he defended as a means to insure that the Priester steps to the altar with reverence (Gr: G1a). And they found – and this is indeed quite remarkable – a defense of celebrating the Corpus Christi festival. Regarding this last matter Pfeffinger wrote that they prohibited the processions associated with the feast, to which Lutherans objected, so that it was to be observed solely with a sermon and communion, and he noted that once Luther had preached at Corpus Christi in Dessau.26 Flacius and company attacked the Albertine practices item by item, and he replied at length in defense. He was particularly provoked about ‘an unashamed lie’ that the Albertine church with the prescribed ‘consecratio’ intended to reinstate the canon of the mass. The word refers solely to the words of institution, as usage by both the Roman church and Luther demonstrated (Gr: G3a). What about 26 Grüntlicher., sigs. G6b–7a. Anhalt gave a Corpus Christi sermon in Merseburg in 1550; see Chalybaeus, Durchführung, 30; Lau called that sermon a ‘Reformation curiosity’; see ‘Georg III,’ 148. Chalybaeus, Durchführung, 27, stated that Corpus Christi was still celebrated in Chemnitz in l578.

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wearing the surplice and elevation of the host? The surplice was an unblameable custom that maintained propriety (Gr: H1a), and the elevation brought unity to their churches. He added here a quote from Luther to the effect that one could elevate or not in freedom (Gr: H3b–4a). As we have seen, the bulk of Pfeffinger’s defense revolved around the question whether this or that specific practice may be judged an indifferent matter, which one may accept without injury. He had little to say about the other question – whether any adiaphora may be accepted in a time of crisis. Essentially his only reply to this issue – appearing in both books, by the way, and in such a manner that showed he was quite pleased with himself – revolved around a Luther citation. Flacius had produced a pamphlet of Luther quotations in 1548 suggesting the reformer’s opposition to compromises with the Catholics. Among the quotations was a memorandum Luther sent from the Coburg to the Protestants at the Augsburg Diet in 1530. But Flacius deleted from it a part in which Luther posed the question whether the Evangelicals might yield to the Roman party in unimportant external matters even if there was no unity in necessary doctrinal issues, or whether they had to hold firmly to Christian freedom. Pfeffinger displayed Luther’s answer as support for his side in the present controversy over adiaphora: ‘In this they cannot think we would be stubborn, although the main things remain opposed, for I for my part am willing and ready to accept all such external matters for the sake of peace, so far as my conscience is not injured thereby,’ and then pointedly commented, ‘Note. There also similarly the main things remained opposed, and yet he would accept the external things. With whom had one dealt at that time? Against whom and why had such an offer been made? Do we not today have the same situation and more cause?’27 III: Adiaphora and the State As traditions instituted by the church, adiaphora stand within the purview of the church. Pfeffinger insisted in these treatises that they were within the jurisdiction of the temporal authorities (Obrigkeiten) as well. Anhalt had included in the ‘Interim Agenda’ a section entitled, ‘Concerning Temporal Authority.’ Here in the spirit of Luther’s teaching on the two kingdoms he found regiment, governmental authority from the Hausvater to magistrate to prince to emperor, to have been confirmed in the fourth commandment and 27 Tr: D1a; Gr: B3b–42. The letter is printed WA Br, 5: 614–18; the quote is from 616. The Flacius pamphlet is Bedencken Doctoris Martini Lutheri/ Auff dem Reichstage zu Augspurgk im XXX. yare gestellet. Item ein ander Bedencken auff den tag zu Schmalkalden des Ersten Martij des 40. yars. . . .Zu diesen ferlichen zeiten nützlich vnd von nöten zu lesen. . . ([Magdeburg: Lotter], 1548).

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a gift of God to prevent the destruction of mankind.28 Gnesio-Lutherans wanted the Albertine clergy to threaten rebellion by their parishioners for the sake of a church free of governmental interference. Anhalt replied in a speech of October 1549, ‘But it is not our intent to cause mutiny and to arouse the common man against his ordained Obrigkeit.’29 In his first book of 1550, Pfeffinger wrote that no one should oppose a Christian magistrate who introduced adiaphora for the sake of uniformity of ceremonies, since the true Christian life involved obeying parents and temporal authorities (Tr: C7b). Gallus in his attack on that first book rejected any role for a magistrate in the church other than that of protection,30 and so Pfeffinger’s second book treated extensively the relation of subject and ruler and of the latter to the churches of his territory. Again he wrote that he would not oppose a Christian Obrigkeit who wanted uniformity of ceremonies, and identified this with Moritz’s purposes (Gr: J8a, K5a, 8b). He added that as long as the doctrine and both sacraments remained pure and ceremonies were not held to be necessary, he would accept external things practiced elsewhere and desired by the magistrate for the sake of unity (Gr: J8a–b). Pfeffinger was even stronger in his statement: subjects were obliged to obey the Obrigkeit in all that was not against conscience and God’s Word (Gr: D5b, J8a–b). In this sense he spoke both of erbieten (to show willingness to oblige, to cooperate with) and einreumen (to concede to) in one’s relation to the authorities, suggesting with the latter term that one may at times be obliged to accept more than one would like (Gr: C8b, E7a–8a, F1a). And he specifically included the emperor as the highest Obrigkeit, asking in one place that if adiaphora were not impious, ‘why then should one not please the emperor in these things?’ (Gr: L8a) Pfeffinger had a number of reasons for the obligation of obedience. He defended it on the basis of Romans 13: 1–7 and I Peter 2: 13–14 (Gr: E7b–8a, K2a–3a), and also on practical grounds: Without this [willingness to follow the Obrigkeit], there would be unnecessary unpardonable stubbornness, and since then out of that difficulties result (which succeeds more in demolishing of Christian doctrine and destruction of churches and schools), there would be much more evil to account for. The conscience and soul would suffer because of this (Gr: D5b).

Friedberg, Agenda, 25. The text of this speech appeared in Gründlicher vnd warhafftiger Bericht aller Rathschleg vnd antwort/ so die Theologen zu Wittemberg/ vnd andere darzu erforderte … nach dem Krieg/wider die dazumal newen Reformation des Augspurgischen Buchs INTERIM genant/ zur widerlegung desselbigen/ gestelt/ Auch was sie nachmals in Mitteldingen vnd aus was vrsachen gerahten/ verwilligt vnd nachgegeben haben (Wittenberg: Rhau, 1559), 19b–26a; the quote is 22b. Hase, Gestalt, 55, mistakenly attributes this to Pfeffinger. 30 Gegenbericht auff D. Pfeffingers, sig. B1a. 28 29

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In addition he utilized in defense Jesus’ pronouncement, ‘Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and to God the things that are God’s,’ (Luke 20:25), suggesting even that adiaphora were among the things one was obliged to render to Caesar (Gr: C7a, K2a). Pfeffinger felt his opponents thought only in terms of simple acceptance or rejection of the magistrate’s place within the church and thus erred in not seeing this distinction even here of Caesar’s things and God’s things. Since subjects were to obey the Obrigkeit only in those things not against God and his Word, he added that obedience could not further papal misuses (Gr: K8a). He had one more, certainly less important, defense of his posture of obedience: citing Roman 15:2 that one please another for his improvement, and I Cor. 9:20, ‘To the Jews I became as a Jew, in order to win Jews,’ he argued that in approving of our example of a proper submission to the Obrigkeit others might be won to the Protestant cause (Gr: E7b). To Pfeffinger’s thinking the consequence of opposition to the emperor would have been war and suffering among the people. Therefore the emperor’s subjects must, he believed, choose their battles, so that they were very certain that they did not bring war and its suffering upon the people unnecessarily. Those who caused this suffering for the sake of issues that were not important deserved punishment, and any suffering they experienced could not be considered martyrdom (Gr: C4a, 7b–8a, K2b–3a). Yet man must be more obedient to God than to man. When the Obrigkeit wanted to change those traditions instituted by God, or taught that human ordinances were necessary to salvation, his subjects could not obey him. The subjects’ only recourse was to suffer (Gr: D7b, E8a). Were God’s and Caesar’s ordinances in conflict in 1550, as Flacius and Gallus claimed? Pfeffinger did not think so; in fact more Catholic ceremonies could be imposed without reaching that point: ‘If the Imperial Majesty will impose on us something harsher, which yet does not injure the conscience, we should not deny our fitting obedience’ (Gr: E8a). He offered examples of temporal authorities properly changing and regulating the church. He observed that ‘many praiseworthy kings of Judah’ changed idolatrous ceremonies. Emperor Constantine made sure that the church declared and maintained true doctrine against the Arians, and decreed on a number of human ordinances, such as settling the date for Easter. David and Solomon also insured the maintenance of God-ordained traditions, and also made adiaphora decisions such as when the priests should serve in the temple. In our day, he added, the king of Denmark, the elector of Brandenburg, and the city council of Nuremberg have issued praiseworthy church ordinances. Since they were to insure harmony and unity within the churches of their territories, it was quite correct for authorities to restrain those who would introduce changes in worship from their own fancy – indeed would not the city council

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of Magdeburg do the same within its territory? So it was correct also for the Obrigkeit to join with his superintendents and pastors and establish a Christian ordinance for ceremonies, using adiaphora, in his lands or city (Gr: D5b, K5b–7b). This essay introduces Johann Pfeffinger, a major player in the little studied Reformation in Albertine Saxony. It examines his treatises in the Adiaphora Controversy, in which he was the major figure in an unenviable role of defending adiaphora in the face of the uproar caused by the Leipzig Interim. With his argument that ecclesiastical and liturgical practice were adiaphora, he defended a right to ‘high church’ forms within the Lutheran constellation. It may be of interest to the reader that many of the liturgical practices of the Albertine churches, such as use of the surplice, continued to exist (uniquely within the German Evangelical Churches) in some parts of that former land down to the twentieth century.31 Pfeffinger’s arguments for obedience to temporal authority in the two books we examined are somewhat surprising in the light of his activities four years earlier at the beginning of the Schmalkaldic War. As briefly mentioned above, Pfeffinger authored a strongly worded letter to Duke Moritz, opposing his growing involvement with the emperor; what is remarkable to note here is that the treatise went so far as to call for active resistance to Moritz by his people if he did not desist.32 Why Pfeffinger would change so quickly is beyond our purposes in this essay, and perhaps are stated satisfactorily for his case in the arguments for obedience that he offered in the two treatises. But his association of adiaphora after the war with the proper activities of temporal authority within the church is important, and raises the possibility of a connection between the Adiaphora Controversy and current study of the confessionalization process in early modern Europe. The confessionalization thesis is a fruitful instrument in explaining the transformation of medieval feudal monarchies into modern states, in particular how the new states changed their inhabitants into disciplined, obedient and united subjects. According to the thesis, a key factor in that change is the establishment of religious uniformity in the state: the populace was taught a religious identity – Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist – through doctrinal statements (confessions and catechisms) and liturgical practices. This distinguished ‘us’ as a religious and political community from ‘other,’ 31 Writing in 1903, Chalybaeus noted that Anhalt’s worship forms remained ‘partly unchanged’ in his own Merseburg diocese; see Durchführung, 33. As of 1953, according to Lau, pastors in Leipzig still wore the Chorrock while preaching; see ‘Georg III,’ 152. 32 For his call to support the Schmalkaldic League against Moritz and the emperor, see Warhafftige Copey, sigs. A3a–B1a, B2a.

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often neighboring, religious-political societies. The ruler was sacralized as the defender and – in Protestant lands – leader of the church, rightfully overseeing the church of his land. These state-led churches also aided state development by imposing moral discipline on the communities. While that last step was not an objective of Pfeffinger’s treatises, and they do not display the more typically unrelenting denominational antagonisms towards other denominations, in this case towards Catholicism, other elements of confessionalization are displayed here. We observe in them an attempt at standardizing of liturgical practice for the community of Albertine Saxony. Doctrine and liturgy were painstakingly distinguished from those of both Catholics and Gnesio-Lutherans. And, most significantly, the right of the ruler to dictate church practice was a predominant theme of the treatises. Therefore, it seems to me, his books were indeed an important early step preparing the way to ever greater control by princes and magistrates in the territorial churches in the second half of the sixteenth century. Therefore, I suggest Pfeffinger’s books may merit attention by those scholars who are tracing the process of confessionalization in post-Reformation central Europe.

“Christians’ Mourning and Lament Should not Be Like the Heathens’”: The Suppression of Religious Emotion in the Reformation1 Susan C. Karant-Nunn

1. Affective Piety This chapter examines a somewhat neglected aspect of those religious practices against which Luther and his reform-minded cohorts turned. Their campaign for the purification of the rituals of the Roman Church took aim, too, at the expression of religious feeling. In Luther’s own words, it was a matter of the cohesion of “thoughts, feeling, and sensibility.”2 The goal was to reduce the intensity of some forms of expression, to suppress others entirely, and to shape appropriately still other approved types of feeling. The incentive to take account of these activities comes from three directions: first of all, from recent historical research into the piety of the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries; secondly, from two- to three-decades-old 1 A German-language version appeared as “‘Gedanken, Herz und Sinn’: Die Unterdrückung der religiösen Emotionen,” in Bernhard Jussen and Craig Koslofsky, eds, Kulturelle Reformation: Sinnformationen im Umbruch 1400–1600 (Göttingen, 1999), 69–95. 2 The excerpt in the title as well as this phrase are drawn from Luther’s message to the magnates and other mourners who were gathered at the funeral of Elector Frederick the Wise of Saxony on 10 May, 1525 (see D. Martin Luthers Werke [Weimar, 1883–1995], hereafter WA for Weimarer Ausgabe, 17: 204): “So solt jr, die jr andere gedancken, hertz und sinn habet, denn die Heiden und eins andern und ewigen lebens jnn jner welt erwartet, nicht trauren, Sondern gewis sein, das ewre verstorbene Freunde … nicht tod sind, sondern schlaffen jnn süsser, lieblicher ruge und am Jungstentage gewis wider aufferstehen werden und ein Leib haben, der liechter und heller sein wird denn die Sonne. Es thut wol hertzlich wehe, wenn uns unsere beste und liebste Freunde, weib, kind etc. frome, friedsame Herrn und Fürsten mit tod abgehen. … Doch gleichwol sol des trawrens und klagens ein mas sein, Und der trost, den uns S. Paul hie furhelt, den Sieg behalten, Das ein Christlich trawren und klagen sey, nicht wie die Heiden pflegen zu trawren, die nicht weiter sehen denn, wie jre Freunde gestorben und begraben sind, und nicht ander wissen, denn alle hoffnung sey nu mit jnen aus etc.”

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theories concerning the unsatisfying nature of late medieval religious practices; and finally, from examinations of the causes, course, and significance of iconoclastic outbursts in the 1520s. Above all, this chapter takes up the altered system of signs in the cleansed interiors of churches and in ecclesiastical ritual, both of which were presented to the newly reformed laity at each religious service.3 In her famous work about the piety of the twelfth century, Carolyn Walker Bynum repeatedly uses the expression affective piety and synonyms for it in describing a pattern of religious expression that became a model inside and outside the Cistercian monastery. Taking up themes that were originally treated by André Vauchez and André Wilmart, Bynum pursues, more pointedly than they, specifically the emphasis upon feeling that rose to prominence not only through the writings of Cistercians but also of Franciscans, and that underwent elaboration in the worship of communities of Beguines and nuns. Affective piety accompanied, according to Bynum, a twelfth-century shift from a conception of the Deity as harsh judge to one of Christ as human being.4 The ordinary Christian could intensely empathize with His suffering and, via the Eucharist, be transitorily joined to His divinity. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the cult of the Passion, Christ’s Wounds, and the Eucharist grew apace.5 In another of her extraordinary works, Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women, Bynum explores the relationship between piety, especially focused upon the eucharistic meal and 3 My thoughts have also been stimulated by such anthropological works as A. R. RadcliffeBrown, The Andaman Islanders (New York, 1964); and Peter Metcalf and Richard Huntington, The Celebration of Death: The Anthropology of Mortuary Ritual (Cambridge and New York, 1991). These scholars have investigated the relationship between ritual and emotion above all in death and burial ceremonies, in which one might expect that feeling would play a prominent role. More useful still for my purposes have been the more universally applicable theories of Maurice Bloch (“The Ritual of the Royal Bath,” in David Cannadine and Simon Price, eds, Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies [Cambridge, 1987], 271–97), and Catherine Bell (Ritual Theory, Ritual Practice [New York and Oxford, 1992], especially chapter 9, “The Power of Ritualization, 197–223. 4 Carolyn Walker Bynum, Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages (Berkeley, 1982), especially 3–21, 77–81, 105–9, 129–35, chapter 4, “Jesus as Mother and Abbot as Mother: Some Themes in Twelfth-Century Cistercian Writing,” 110–69; and 264–5. When I inquired of Professor Bynum if she regarded herself as the “discoverer” of the concept of affective piety, she answered that one should probably seek the roots of the notion in such works as André Wilmart, Auteurs spirituels et textes dévots du moyen âge latin: Études d’histoire littèraire (Paris, 1932); Louis Gougaud, Devotional and Ascetic Practices in the Middle Ages (London, 1927); Marie Dominique Chenu, La théologie au douzième siècle, Études de philosophie médiévale 45 (Paris, 1957); and André Vauchez, Le spiritualité au moyen âge occidental: VIIIe–XIIe siècles (Paris, 1975). 5 Miri Rubin, Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture (Cambridge, 1991); Peter Browe, Die Verehrung der Eucharistie im Mittelalter (Munich, 1933); idem, Die eucharistischen Wunder des Mittelalters (Munich, 1938).

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fasting, and physicality among high medieval religious women. Among other things, abstinence from food lent these women a control over their lives that they would hardly have possessed in society at large.6 Although this was not the intention of her book, reading it and Bynum’s further essays on gender and the human body have caused me to reflect on the emotionality and the physicality of much German popular devotion in the late Middle Ages, from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. It would appear that during the late fifteenth century, bodiliness as a provider of access to divinity was characteristic of male as of female religious expression.7 Sacred objects, both representing and containing divine power, were the meditative points that facilitated the recollection of the devout and that elicited their affective response. They often expressed this emotion in bodily ways. Of course, it was this very connection between physicality and fervor – more bluntly expressed, the inherent claim that God interacted with his children via the material world and that people could manipulate sacral artefacts and influence God to grant them favors – that moved the Reformers to condemn the artefacts and their veneration as idolatry. Bynum herself notes that recent scholarship stresses “continuities between twelfth- and fifteenth-century piety.”8 Undoubtedly, people’s environment and outlook having changed, the meanings of feeling-laden devotion on the eve of the Reformation were different from those of a century or three earlier. Nevertheless, recent scholarship on pre-Reformation religiosity has perceived the widespread manifestation of fervor as an ideal expression, and it has sometimes adopted the specific phrase, affective piety, to describe the practice and the ideal.9 The researcher in archival materials, the primary and secondary literature, and the art of the period, can find every indication that in Germanspeaking lands, emotive, somatically engaged forms of devotion that would Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast, Berkeley, California, 1987, esp. 219–76. Caroline Walker Bynum, “The Female Body and Religious Practice in the later Middle Ages,” in idem, Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion (New York, 1992), 181–238, here at 186. See also Eamon Duffy, “Devotion to the Crucifix on the Eve of the Reformation,” in Bob Scribner, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm in Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 46 (Wiesbaden, 1990), 21–36. 8 Bynum, Jesus as Mother, 108. She cites Charles Trinkaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols (Chicago, 1970); and Giles Constable, “Twelfth-Century Spirituality and the Late Middle Ages,” in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 5: Proceedings of the Southern Institute of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, Summer 1969 (1971), 27–60; reprinted in idem, Religious Life and Thought (11th–12th Centuries), 2 vols. (London, 1979). 9 Charles Zika, “Hosts, Processions and Pilgrimages in Fifteenth-Century Germany,” Past and Present 118 (1988), 25–64; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England 1400–1580 (New Haven, 1992), 11, here apropos of affective piety in the late medieval English observance, esp. 11–52 and 231–65; also Duffy, “Devotion to the Crucifix,” 21–36. 6 7

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have been recognizable to Elisabeth of Schönau and Mechthild of Magdeburg were widespread among the people when the Reformation began. These forms were closely tied to holy icons, places, and the accoutrements of the Mass; they were generated by the ubiquitous tangible symbols of God’s present action among His followers. In his pathbreaking article of the mid-1960s, Bernd Moeller describes as “intense” and “ardent” and as characterized by “passion,” “forcefulness,” and “fervor” the devotion of the German people around 1500. The institutional Church, however, failed to match their fever and left the faithful longing for something deeper, Moeller thinks.10 The inference to be drawn from this wellknown article is that the Reformation met the genuine – the spiritual – needs of the populace, as distinct from the artificial needs created by a system of elaborate sacramental ritual acts, a self-promoting clergy, and a theology of works. Ardor, in Moeller’s terms, may be seen as a code word for exteriority and vacuousness, resulting, in some desperate quarters, in the effort to find relief in mysticism as well as excessive works. Ardor is a thin veneer covering alienation, in the years just before the radical acts of Martin Luther. Steven Ozment’s views are similar.11 It is just these assertions concerning the discrepancies between late medieval religiosity and the incipient Reformation that require our reevaluation here. Newer, anthropologically influenced scholarship has refrained from whiggish interpretation. It has investigated nonjudgmentally the rich and variegated forms of late medieval German piety. Robert W. Scribner has led the way in describing, but also in tying religious observance to, ingrained ways of life and world view. In connection with iconoclasm, he has written about the theory and meaning of images to ordinary worshippers.12 10 “Frömmigkeit in Deutschland um 1500,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 56 (1965), 5–30, here at 7–8, 16, and 22. Translated into English by Joyce Irwin as “Piety in Germany around 1500,” in Steven E. Ozment, ed., The Reformation in Medieval Perspective (Chicago, 1971), 50–75. Moeller regards the clergy as sharing little of the lay yearning of the heart, and as contributing less. He finds that the reforming impulse behind the Brethren of the Common Life, for example, was exhausted, shallow, and monotonous, in a negative manner preparing the way for the upheaval of the Reformation (57). 11 Steven E. Ozment, The Age of Reform 1250–1550: An Intellectual and Religious History of Late Medieval and Reformation Germany (New Haven, 1980), 204–22, esp. 208–9 (about the “inner anguish” of the Catholic laity); idem, The Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth-Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, 1975), 22–32 (concerning the “terrible burden of late medieval theology”). 12 By Scribner above all the essays in idem, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London and Ronceverte, 1987); idem, “The Impact of the Reformation on Daily Life,” in Mensch und Objekt im Mittelalter und in der Frühen Neuzeit: Leben – Alltag – Kultur (Vienna, 1990), 315–43; idem, “The Reformation and the Religion of the Common People,” in Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel, eds, Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationen und Debatten (Gütersloh, 1993), 221–41; idem, “Elements of Popular Belief,” in Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, eds,

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What I propose to do is to show how the adherents of the new forms of belief were made aware, by means of ritual and church decoration, that along with the old religion, emotion-oriented piety was at an end. The new confessions – to a lesser degree in the Lutheran churches, but more thoroughly in Calvinist communities, and with internal variations – communicated to their members that God was present only spiritually upon the earth. God was neither physically approachable nor susceptible of manipulation by humankind. How the faithful reacted to this message cannot be taken up here, for it requires a study of its own. The changes in liturgical words, gestures, cultic artefacts, and the arrangement of the sacral space – in short, in the whole of ecclesiastical ritual – gave the congregation to understand that they should not give dramatic expression to their devotion. In general, the new program strove to dampen the outer demonstration of religious fervor, though not piety itself. Protestant piety was defined as quiet submission to the requirements of the faith and the gentle, unemotive, nonflaunting service of one’s neighbor. Indeed, princes, reformers, and magistrates sought to suppress strong emotion in all aspects of life, in the service of that broader social discipline to which, from somewhat varying perspectives, Gerhard Oestreich, Ernst Zeeden, Heinz Schilling, and Wolfgang Reinhard have drawn attention.13 We Handbook of European History 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 1 (Leiden, 1994), 231–55 (not confined to Germany or the late Middle Ages); idem, “Das Visuelle in der Volksfrömmigkeit,” in idem, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 46 (Wiesbaden, Germany, 1990), 9–20. On the reduction of emotion, see Norbert Elias, Power and Civility, vol. 2, The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1982), 291 – which material is, however, lacking in the German original. 13 The pertinent literature has taken on a scale that prevents its exhaustive listing here. Suffice it to say that Oestreich formulated the idea of social disciplining, according to which church and state cooperated with one another in the interests of subduing their shared subjects (Geist und Gestalt des frühmodernen Staates [Berlin, 1969], with a modified English version, Neostoicism and the Early Modern State, ed. Brigitte Oestreich and Helmut G. Koenigsberger, trans. David McLintock [Cambridge, 1982] 155–65). See also Winfried Schulze, “Gerhard Oestreichs Begriff ‘Sozialdisziplinierung’ in der frühen Neuzeit,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 14 (1987), 265–302. Ernst Walter Zeeden described the process of confessionalization, of bringing Christians to believe and to identify with the cultic variation being imposed upon them by church and state conjointly (Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe [Munich, 1965]; and Konfessionsbildung: Studien zur Reformation, Gegenreformation und Katholischen Reform [Stuttgart, 1985]). Schilling and Reinhard have oriented their work toward, respectively, Protestantism and Catholicism. Schilling’s salient publications on the subject are Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh, 1981), which is summarized, updated, and translated in idem, Religion, Political Culture, and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden, 1992); and idem, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland – Das Problem der “2. Reformation” (Gütersloh, 1986), in which various experts consider Schilling’s ideas about the special amenability of

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might speculate whether the clerical and princely effort to make God less tangible and completely unmanipulatable, whether or not carried out consciously, does not offer a striking parallel to the attempt to mold docile subjects who may not presume to insert themselves into matters of earthly or heavenly governance. The key word of the day was order – order at every level. It is encountered in nearly every sort of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century context. My intention, then, is not to compare the qualities of pre-Reformation affective piety or of ideas of physical presence to those that preceded it or that may have survived. That must be a separate endeavor. It is to demonstrate that the Reformation strove to reduce or eliminate this form of piety no matter what its finer features. My sources are for present purposes more often symbolic (semiotic) than verbally explicit ones, and they are connected to the ritual scenes and life of the churches. 2. Sacred Objects in the Sanctuary14 The artistic representations that filled the late medieval churches were often designed to arouse emotion in the onlookers. The crucifixes and paintings of the crucifixion and the preliminary sufferings of Christ were, we know, often more grisly in the North of Europe than in the classically affected South. They are striking for the bodily anguish with which they confront the viewer. The Savior’s face was contorted in agony, and His body was spattered with blood. A major purpose of the clergy who directed the artistic program of the churches or who, at the very least, influenced the wealthy patrons who selected artists, was to arouse in the devout a sense of Jesus’ excruciating pain – and thus both of his humanness and of his willingness to endure the unendurable in order to atone for humankind’s vast sinfulness. The Christian ought to feel with the Son of God and to be moved by regret for his part in causing such suffering. The devout should experience this sympathy, if possible, in their bodies as in their psyches. Calvinist regimes to confessionalization. By Reinhard, see especially “Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–52; “Konfession und Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland,” in idem, ed., Bekenntnis und Geschichte: Schriften der Philosophischen Fakultäten der Universität Augsburg (Augsburg, 1981), 165–89; idem, “Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” Zeitschrift für historische Forschung 10 (1983): 175–7. See also Lyndal Roper’s remarks in her Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London and New York, 1994), 145–48. 14 My thoughts in this section have been influenced by Gerard Lukken and Mark Searle, Semiotics and Church Architecture: Applying the Semiotics of A. J. Greimas and the Paris School to the Analysis of Church Buildings (Kampen, 1993).

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In proportion to their means and their luck in possessing patrons, churches were full, besides, of two- and three-dimensional depictions of the gruesome martyrdom of the saints: Saint Katherine with the wheel on which her torturers tried to break her, resorting in the end to decapitation; Saint Laurence being roasted on a gridiron; Saint Erasmus with his innards being wound out on a windlass; Saint Sebastian penetrated by numerous arrows; Saint Agatha having her breasts cut off; Saint Bartholomew being flayed alive. Even when these and myriad other martyrs were not shown in their death throes, the emblems of their torment served not only to inform the onlooker of their identity but also to elicit physical revulsion, horror and grief, inspiration and repentance. Undoubtedly, frequent encounters with all these images tended to dull people’s reaction. Nevertheless, a fundamental purpose of such art was to arouse emotion. The tormented body was a vehicle of such arousal. The artistic presence of the Virgin and other female saints had its own additional semiotic significance. It is well known that in the Middle Ages and on up to the modern era, emotionality and corporality stood at the center of the definition of femininity. From one perspective, this was a weakness, and it provided justification for women’s subordination to (reasoning) men. Women, inescapably physical, were easily moved, and they were therefore undependable; as such they constituted a threat to society. Men were more likely to be rational, to subordinate matter to mind, and because of that quality they were the fundament of a stable social order. From another perspective, the Virgin presented a model of all womanly virtues, among these the tenderness of maternal love and scarcely consolable grief at the loss of her Son. Although a sword pierced her heart, she remained constant. Hers was the kind of profound feeling that her followers ought to emulate. Some of the above cultic objects were forcibly removed during early, isolated episodes of iconoclasm.15 I must regard the smashing of idols, at one level, as a late outburst of that intensely emotive piety which was about to be disapproved of. Most works of art disappeared not as a result of violence, but of the determination of princes and Reformers to eliminate all depictions that could not withstand scriptural and historical scrutiny. The purpose of those that remained, as of those that were added after the Reformation had begun, was to teach the basic precepts of the faith.16 Jesus’ Passion was no longer the 15 Of the newer literature, see Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin (Cambridge, 1986); Scribner, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm; Lee Palmer Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge, 1995); Norbert Schnitzler, “Bilderstürmer – Aufrührer oder Blasphemiker?” in Marie Theres Fögen, ed., Ordnung und Aufruhr im Mittelalter: Historische und juristische Studien zur Rebellion (Frankfurt/Main, 1995), 195–215. 16 Carl C. Christensen, Art and the Reformation in Germany (Athens, and Detroit, 1979), 42–65; Sergiusz Michalski, The Reformation and the Visual Arts (London and New York, 1993).

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center of attention, nor was there the same acute need to identify with it. Instead, the congregation was to understand with the mind the doctrine of the atonement. Here again the physicality of approved early modern piety underwent reduction. The saints, as Luther taught, had achieved no good by themselves. Their virtues were entirely the result of God’s grace. They were not in any sense mediators and should not be the objects of Christians’ entreaty. Their presence in the sanctuaries of Germany would be misunderstood by the masses of the uninformed faithful, and this temptation had to be taken from their path.17 Their physicality could only mislead Christians into attributing sacral power to things, whether to artefacts or the human bodies with which they were associated. In brief compass, this was the theological reason for the disappearance of most icons from the sacred theater. At the conscious level, this is what leaders of church and state believed that they were accomplishing. I am arguing, however, that there were other effects, unconscious though they may have been. For one thing, holy women with all their levels of meaning nearly vanished. Where pictures of Mary the Mother of Christ remained, they usually cast her as but one sorrowing figure at the foot of the cross.18 Most attention was to concentrate upon her Son above, and His body was no longer contorted but hung limp, temporarily a soulless corpse. The masculine with its rational connotations, and the disembodied spirit now permeated the surfaces of the church interior.19 17 Reinhard Lieske, in his “Die Bilderwelt evangelischer Kirchen in Württemberg,” Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte 90 (1990): 92–122, ignores the symbolic shifts in the iconographic message in the transition from Catholic to Lutheran and maintains that there were hardly any differences under Lutheranism in the appearance of the sanctuaries. Lieske observes simply that Dukes Ulrich and Christopher ordered the removal of much artistic “buffoonery” (Gaukelwerk), a characterization of late medieval ecclesiastical art that the author apparently accepts. He notes that themes not related to the life of Christ tend to disappear (97), but he does not seem to accord this great meaning. 18 Luther expressed his distaste for the Catholic depiction of the Virgin in his Christmas Day sermon of 1530 (WA 47: 257): “Ich soll mich des Kindes annehmen und einer Geburt und soll der Mutter vergessen, so viel’s möglich ist – wiewohl ihrer nicht kann vergessen werden, denn wenn eine Geburt da ist, muss auch eine Mutter da sein – aber dennoch darf man nicht an die Mutter glauben, sondern nur daran, dass das Kindlein geboren ist” (quoted by Otto Clemen, Luther und die Volksfrömmigkeit seiner Zeit, Studien zur religiösen Volkskunde, Abt. B, Heft 6 [Dresden and Leipzig, 1938], 11). Relevant to this and other points made in this paper is Donna Spivey Ellington, “Impassioned Mother or Passive Icon: The Virgin’s Role in Late Medieval and Early Modern Passion Sermons,” Renaissance Quarterly 48, 2 (1995): 227–61. 19 On masculinization, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “City Women and Religious Change,” in idem, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, California, 1975), 87–88; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau,” Sixteenth Century Journal 12, 2 (1982): 28, 36; and Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, New Approaches to European History 1 (Cambridge, 1993), 192.

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The near-elimination of pictures of women – those emblems of emotionality – and of suffering signaled to the pious that the best religiosity was calm, interior, and unrelated to material objects. The devout were to enter the church in a collected state and retain their composure throughout their visit. This tranquility was to pervade their demeanor as they returned home too. Other aspects of the decoration of the churches conveyed the new norms.20 Even in the villages peasants, with the sometimes considerable help of neighboring knights’ families and cloisters, adorned their churches with objects of gleaming metal and vivid embroidery. It has become rather a cliché that the people of the late Middle Ages, upon visiting a cathedral or any other richly decorated church, felt themselves to be in an anteroom of heaven. To the limits of communities’ means, this was also true in the humbler temples of the countryside. Torches and candelabra, candles, incense, hand-held bells for ringing during services, patens, monstrances, chalices, vestments, tapestries, drapes, altar cloths, and all other ritual objects clearly marked the contrast between the sacral sphere and the humble environment beyond the church – although we must note additionally that in the people’s opinion, godly power extended beyond the walls of the church at least to the far reaches of the cemetery (Kirchhof ). The great bell in the belfrey, also a ritual object, lent its beneficent effect as far as its sound could be heard.21 All these treasures of the church served to elicit human emotion and thereby to underscore the perception of the divine service as bracketed outside the mundane, to be sure, but as a ready source of supernatural power nevertheless, that could be applied with great benefit in managing the vicissitudes of daily life. They allowed worshippers to apprehend the divine through their senses, to verify and tap God’s presence among them. Both Lutheran and Reformed varieties of Protestantism cleansed the sanctuaries of elaborate and valuable cultic implements. The most notable exception to this generalization is the Electorate of Brandenburg, which throughout the sixteenth century was “higher church” than any other Lutheran territory.22 Monstrances, pyxes, and thuribles all had their raisons d’etre in a sacrificial theology of the Mass, but as soon as this theology was banned, they were redundant. This itself was sufficient justification for selling 20 On the range and significance of nonpictorial implements of the Mass, see Wandel, Voracious Idols, esp. 26–51. 21 Precisely for this reason, the authorities of church and state tried to curtail bell-ringing as much as possible. They encountered widespread popular resistance and often had to moderate their directives, leaving a very modest tolling in place along with plentiful explications of its nonsuperstitious function. 22 This is evident in the visitation protocols, but for a general and illuminating treatment of the Brandenburg Reformation, see Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994).

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them off or melting them down. Heavily embroidered vestments, cloths, and hangings enhanced the mediative and sacred office of the priesthood and could no longer be tolerated. Modifications were more thorough and more immediately noticeable in Reformed sanctuaries, but they occurred in Lutheran churches as well. In both settings, an ornamental simplification took place. To be sure, the altars remained in most Lutheran churches, although moved forward to the front edge of the chancel dais so that the pastor could face the congregation while administering Holy Communion. To these, God’s children came forward, soberly, in their sex-specific ranks, to receive what were still the Body and the Blood of Christ. Their concentration upon this comparatively cleansed altar was to be only temporary – during the eucharistic ceremony – and to focus peacefully upon the inner reality of God’s mercy rather than upon the suffering of the Savior. The Calvinist divines in the second half of the century replaced altars, papist symbols in their eyes, with mere tables, and the round Hosts with table bread. They whitewashed the walls. Although the Calvinists went even farther than the Lutherans in reducing emotion-arousing messages and corporeal suggestion, including the lighting of altar candles during daylight, both abolished most signs that had made the divine presence perceptible and had served to arouse emotional response to the devout. Where they had not already existed, pews were built in. Before the Reformation those who were not dignitaries may have had customary standing places, except at Eastertime and the one or two other seasons when crowds of people were present. Then these places gave way to informal moving and mingling: sitting at the foot of the pulpit to hear a sermon, pressing forward at the moment of consecration to view the transubstantiated Host. Now, in conformity with sola scriptura and the teaching of the Word, pulpits, some of them highly elevated, projected into the rows; the held and directed human body, seated in a pew, was to concentrate upon the occupant of that structure – more precisely, upon the Word that he explained. People sat in echelons, according to their rank and sex in a hierarchical society, and they concentrated their intellects upon the divine Word. Acts such as genuflecting and making the sign of the cross were forbidden. Kneeling, which remained, was a position of quiescent humility. The people were to be peaceful and outwardly unmoved. They listened and thought, processes reflected in the favored word Andacht. 3. The Sermon With the Reformation, the preached Word of God itself became a ritual artefact. It was, indeed, in theory the centerpiece of the service of worship. In

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its cerebral nature, it contrasted markedly with the sacrifice of transubstantiation. But this is not saying enough about the sermon. The contents of the post-Reformation sermon changed in respect of emotion. No longer was it permissible to depict the danger of hellfire with its eternal physical and mental torment, for example. Jonathan Edwards was not of the Reformation era! As we know, in the late Middle Ages some among the urban laity complained that not enough sermons of any sort were being preached, and wealthy patrons occasionally endowed preacherships in the great churches. But even in the more ordinary parishes, priests were particularly obligated to preach around Easter, no matter that this activity often took the form of reading appropriate postills aloud. The Passion of Christ was to be described in as great and convincing detail as possible so that its beneficiaries might be moved to penitent compassion. Conscientious preachers deliberately tried to arouse the feelings of their listeners. After the Reformation, this kind of histrionic was strictly proscribed. Luther formulated the new concept in his Deutsche Messe und Ordnung Gottesdiensts of 1526: Lent, Palm Sunday, and Holy Week shall be retained, not to force anyone to fast, but to preserve the Passion history and the Gospels appointed for that season. This, however, does not include the Lenten veil, throwing of palms, veiling of pictures, and whatever else there is of such tomfoolery – nor chanting the four Passions, nor preaching on the Passion for eight hours on Good Friday. Holy Week shall be like any other week save that the Passion history be explained every day for an hour throughout the week or on as many days as may be desirable, and that the sacrament be given to everyone who desires it. For among Christians the whole service should center in the Word and sacrament.23

Meditative exercises such as the reflection on, even the praying to, the wounds of the Lord were abolished. In place of these, preachers were to instruct their audiences in the biblical course of events and its meaning. Comparatively impassively, the preacher taught and the laity learned. The homiletician laid his rhetorical weight on Christ’s satisfaction for the believer’s sin, which is to say, on an intellectual concept and achievement rather than on the successive unbearable pains of the Savior.

23 The original is in WA 19, 112–13; this translation is from Luther’s Works, American Edition, vol. 53, Liturgy and Hymns, ed. Ulrich S. Leupold and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia, 1965), 90.

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4. Baptism Catholic baptism possessed powers that were taken away from it in Protestantism. To a certain extent this redefinition of the sacrament’s meaning took place in the early years of the Reformation, although a very significant step, the abolition of exorcism, was taken in Saxony only at the end of the century. Prior to the evangelical movement, baptism saved in two ways: by banning the devil and by the application of divine grace. What was in Catholicism like a marvel – those present witnessed God’s vanquishing of the devil – became with the Reformation a figure or a sign of simply a spiritual blessing, which for its lack of tangibility was removed from many people’s conceptual reality. The previous power of baptism, an earthly act, to effect provisional salvation was now lost.24 To emphasize the validity of the new official view, authorities often removed the stone baptismal fonts that had representations of hell on them. Divines debated whether it was truer to the Bible to dip babies in the font or to sprinkle them or to pour water over them.25 I write here not of church leaders’ success in weaning the common people away from the earlier worldview, but rather of their wish to do so. Many ordinary laymen and women did not accept a reduction in baptism’s salvific potency. Another way of stating this is to say that in the popular mind, baptismal words and acts had the awesome, emotion-eliciting power to overcome the very devil. Theologians’ and ordinary Christians’ interpretations tended to diverge. As the visitation protocols repeatedly reveal, people widely attempted to steal the baptismal water in order to use it as a healing agent for themselves, their families, and their livestock. They could not free themselves of the notion of God’s physical intervention. A few courageous individuals openly resisted the abolition of exorcism, but theirs was a losing cause. As it was envisioned by evangelical and Calvinist divines – their theological differences on baptism aside – this sacrament contained little incitement to affective piety. In their opinion, the proper attitude of participants was a modest, humble, quiet gratitude – and in no case enthusiastic wonderment. On the social level, the Reformers and their successors were determined to reduce the emotion of post-christening celebrations. The birth of a first or second legitimate child was an occasion for the gathering of relatives 24 Since writing this, I have changed my opinion, at least concerning Lutheran baptism. The essay reflecting my further views is “‘Suffer the Little Children to Come unto Me, and Forbid Them Not’: The Social Location of Baptism in Early Modern Germany,” forthcoming. 25 Hughes Oliphant Old, The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century (Grand Rapids, 1992), esp. chapter 10, “The Washing and the Word,” 249–82. I summarize the traditional and the new practice in Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London and New York, 1997), chapter 2, “To Beat the Devil: Baptism and the Conquest of Sin,” 43–71.

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(Freundschaft). In their selection of godparents, the parents’ strategy for securing future advantage for their child stood revealed. Occasionally as many as eight, ten, or even more sponsors accompanied the infant to the baptismal font. The preceding and the following costly, loud, disorderly – and therefore also expressive and uninhibited – gatherings with their characteristic imbibing attracted the authorities’ most unfavorable notice. They forbade the postponement of the sacrament beyond three days after the birth, which meant that relatives living at a distance could not arrive in time. Their absence in turn narrowed the group within which godparents had to be chosen and may have weakened familial ties that ritual both symbolized and reaffirmed. The pastorate now typically allowed not more than three adults to stand as godparents at a child’s christening, and each of these had to be examined as to faith and moral uprightness beforehand. The magistrates ever more concertedly limited attendance at and expenditure for post-baptismal celebrations. In short, church and state cooperated in the secular sphere in the effort to render their subjects moderate and sober. The discouragement of affective piety inside the church had its direct parallels in the discouragement of emotional and material display outside the church. Traditionally unbridled modes of behavior were no longer to be forborne. 4. Weddings Weddings were originally a purely secular observance that first the Catholic Church and then the Protestant denominations desired to render holy. Since at least the twelfth century, the wedded pair constituted a metaphor for Christ and His church. Theology aside, until the late Middle Ages the role of the clergy in these ceremonies remained small. The priest’s function was chiefly to inquire whether both the bride and the groom had given their uncoerced consent to the union, and next to bless the pair, often outside the church. Afterward, it was up to the bridal couple whether to hear a Mass or not. The focus of the festivities was the joining of two families, with the exchange of property that this entailed. Emotion lay in the social observance: in the oaths related to the dowry, trousseau, and the groom’s relatives’ contribution; in ritualized bibulousness; in the formal inviting of the neighbors; in the symbolic wedding feast (for example, the bride-sized loaf of bread); in the splendor of the bridal wreath or crown; in the tradition-laden dance; in the vulgar bedding of the pair.26 Many sorts of corporeal emphasis coincided in the sealing of the nuptial bond. 26 See Lyndal Roper, “Going to Church and Street: Weddings in Reformation Augsburg,” Past and Present 106 (1985): 62–101; idem, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989), chapter 4, 132–64; Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual,

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As the Reformation began, the Church was still to some extent an outsider. The Reformers exerted themselves in an effort to gain control over this major transaction, and to a degree they succeeded. They set the locus of the wedding blessing in the church edifice and squarely before the altar, and they elaborated the simple medieval liturgy so as to impress upon the couple the religious seriousness of the marital tie. Just as important, by mid-century every Lutheran pastor had to deliver a wedding sermon, in which he exhorted his listeners, and especially the bride and groom before him, to cultivate mutual affection, fidelity, wifely obedience, and husbandly forbearance. By love the governors of the church did not mean passion. Instead, their vision of marital deportment incorporated reciprocal inclination toward each other, the calm readiness to support one another, and constancy in fulfilling their respective functions in relation to the household. Luther protested to his friends after his marriage to Katharina von Bora in 1525 that he did not love his wife. He had not wed her because he burned to possess her body; to his mind, this would not have befitted a Christian. He had done so in order to spite the pope and the devil, to please his father, and to seal his witness before martyrdom. He cherished his bride – a calmer, more contained sentiment.27 He wished to play down the ineluctable physicality of the wedded life. The social and fleshly strains out of which the worldly nuptial observance had arisen were too strong to be fully mastered by church authorities. Calvinist regions, with their unyielding supervision, attained a greater measure of success. Elsewhere, as the servants of the Lutheran churches perpetually complained in visitation and disciplinary ordinances, the tradition of excess lived on. This does not mean, however, that when we look across the daily life and religious practice of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we find that governors failed entirely in restraining the demonstrative sexuality of the populace. 6. Holy Communion We encounter here a variety of emotion-rousing ritual circumstances, generally in proportion to the presence or absence of Christ’s body and blood. Under Catholicism, the celebration of the Eucharist recreated a drama that chapter 1, “Engagement and Marriage Ceremonies: Taming the Beast Within,” 6–42; idem, “Beer, Honor, and the Devil: Alcohol Consumption in Engagement and Wedding Rituals in Early Modern Germany,” unpublished paper presented at the meetings of the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, October 1995, San Francisco, California. 27 WA, Briefwechsel 3, Nr. 900, p. 541: “Hoc novissimum obsequium parenti meo postulanti nolui denegare spe prolis, simul ut confirmem facto quae docui …. Ego enim nec amo nec aestui, sed diligo uxorem.” Cf. Roland H. Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther (New York, 1950), 224–5.

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charged the atmosphere in the churches. Every priestly gesture, every liturgical particle pointed toward the replication of Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, which the people were permitted not only to witness but often to participate in through their ingestion of their Lord’s present and veritable body. The cult of Corpus Christi took on large proportions in the late Middle Ages.28 As we know, Luther staunchly retained the Real Presence, whereas Calvin (with whose position Melanchthon sympathized) wrote of spiritual presence and nourishment, and Zwingli rejected even this concession to tradition in favor of a strictly commemorative Eucharist. But in Lutheran territories, too, no one was permitted to pray to or to adore the bread and wine; the cult of the Host came thereby definitively to an end. Monstrances were among the very first ritual objects to be sold or melted down. Nonetheless, the element of corporeal presence that remained – we can surely surmise this – supported a perceptible residue of popular opinion that the Communion bread still had considerable apotropaic power. This in turn led to the temptation to retain crumbs of it in the mouth or elsewhere and to convey them out of the sanctuary. Within Lutheranism, where according to this logic a wonderment in the presence of the emblems of the true Christ could well have survived, the organizing divines took other measures – verbal, visual, and disciplinary – to reduce the inclination toward emotive piety. The predella of Lucas Cranach the Elder’s famous Wittenberg altarpiece shows Martin Luther in a pulpit at the right pointing toward the central figure of the crucified Christ, whose emotional remoteness is conveyed not only by His limp, spiritless earthly remains but also by the fanciful, smokelike wafting in either direction of His overlong loincloth.29 We are the examiners of an iconography of spiritualization. The contrast between the peace of Christ’s body in the Wittenberg predella and the agonized facial features of the Lord in the Catholic crucifix is remarkable.30 The Man of Sorrows with His gruesome, moving wounds has disappeared, replaced by the obedient Son of God who has fulfilled His task of atonement. To the left of Cranach’s work, the women (all but one) sit and the men stand, intent upon the meaning of the doubly 28 Rubin, Corpus Christi; Zika, “Hosts, Processions, and Pilgrimages; John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200–1700,” Past and Present 100 (1983): 29–61; Bynum, Holy Feast and Holy Fast; Piero Camporesi, “The Consecrated Host: A Wondrous Excess,” in Michael Feher, Ramona Nadaff, and Nadia Tazi, eds, Fragments for a History of the Human Body, 3 vols (New York, 1989), 1: 220–37. Cf. Virginia Reinburg, “Devotional Practices,” in Hans J. Hillerbrand, ed., The Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols (Oxford and New York, 1996), 1: 476–80, esp. 478–9. 29 This altarpiece has been widely photographed. I initially examined it in Karlheinz Blaschke, Wittenberg, die Lutherstadt (Berlin, 1977), plates 23–4. A slide of the predella is available directly from the Stadtkirche Lutherstadt Wittenberg, slide no. 1110–4. 30 Compare to Valentin Groebner, “‘Abbild’ und ‘Marter’: Das Bild des Gekreuzigten und die städtische Strafgewalt,” in Jussen and Koslofsky, Kulturelle Reformation, 209–38.

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presented Word. Their faces reflect serene attention but neither awe nor any other sort of overt feeling. The visitation records reveal, however, that especially pregnant women and the sick desired frequent communion, and this reflects the special potency that they, and no doubt many of their fellows, continued to attribute to the physical elements of this sacrament. In the bare, altarless sanctuaries of the Reformed churches, sentiment on reception of the Lord’s Supper was to have been subtler still. If on the one hand the purified ceremony was still a community-defining act, on the other it was supposed to be almost wholly interior and heavily intellectualized. It may well be that those exiles – educated and well-off men and their families – who passed their time in Geneva as “Marian exiles” were satisfied by spiritual nourishment. It may be that they were able to attain the level of selfdiscipline that Calvinism demanded of its adherents. The more intriguing question is how the common people of the Rhenish Palatinate reacted when Elector Friedrich III introduced the Reformed cleansing of ecclesiastical ritual. One wonders how many of his subjects could have shared Friedrich’s own confidence, as he lay dying, that Holy Communion was unnecessary to his salvation. This man completely mastered at least one emotion, anxiety, in exemplary style! I am arguing that such mastery was a more than implicit goal of the entire reform movement, one not shared by the entire populace. Popular resistance to the official definition of the nature of the Eucharist appears, such as I have asserted in the case of baptism, in the recurrent concerns expressed about the wellbeing, the proper handling, of the Host. Lutheran parishioners were unhappy enough to inform inspectors that their pastor had dropped the wafers, or that he had broken them in pieces in case there were not enough to go around.31 At the core of these differences is not simply a differing theological outlook but rather another cosmic view; the elements of Communion still possessed supernatural and thus emotional force among some people. They were still the very present Body of the Lord. 7. Extreme Unction and the Burial of the Dead During the late Middle Ages, two feelings had the upper hand in relation to death: anxiety and grief. The Reformation sought to reduce both, if not to eliminate them entirely. At the end of the fifteenth century, the Catholic Church had become a “consumer of the dead” (Totenfresser). As Erasmus asserted without reticence in his colloquy, “The Funeral,” it mercilessly exploited the dying laity and their grieving families.32 Abuse aside, the 31 If he had broken the wafers simply in half, the complainants might have been insinuating that their pastor was behaving as Catholic priests had. But this was not the case. 32 Peter Pfrunder, Pfaffen, Ketzer, Totenfresser: Fastnachtskultur der Reformationszeit – die

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Catholic Church desired to motivate human beings to perform good works, including regular partaking of the sacrament, for their souls’ salvation. Besides this, the conviction still dominated among the people – and it was probably shared by the average parish priest – that a relationship continued between the living and the dead that was beneficial to both. In order reliably to play their role as shorteners of purgatorial punishment for departed souls, people needed the incentive of sorrowful fear. All genres of the religious symbolic system served to arouse this feeling: works of art, burning candles before the images of especially powerful saints, the proximity of corpses in the churchyard and even in the walls and under the floors of the churches themselves, the centrally placed and daily visible ossuary, the sounding of the great church bell at each administration of extreme unction and at each funeral, the wailing of women (Klagefrauen) whose task it was audibly to weep for the dead, and the regular participation of neighbors in burial processions. If people did not feel anxiety, grief, and sympathy, perhaps they had neglected their duty.33 As Craig Koslofsky has written, with the Reformation the theology that underlay these observances came to an end. Koslofsky has correctly assessed the new situation as he describes the separation of the dead from the living.34 This development is characteristic of all corners of the evangelical world. The Reformers stressed that the dead were no longer present – for a body without its form-giving soul was not a human presence – and that their fate lay in the hands of God, who could not be swayed by men and women. The living could Berner Spiele von Niklaus Manuel (Zurich, 1989), 191–3; Pamphilius Gengenbach, “Die Totenfresser,” in Richard Froming, ed., Das Drama der Reformationszeit (Stuttgart, 1894; reprinted Darmstadt, 1964), 1–10. Craig R. Thompson, ed. and trans., The Colloquies of Erasmus (Chicago, 1965), 359–73. 33 On the reciprocal relationship between the living and the dead, see Craig Koslofsky, “‘Helpers’ and ‘Ghosts’” below; see also his The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (London, 2000). There is an immense literature on death in medieval and early modern Europe, from which I select a few titles that have stimulated my thought: Patrick J. Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca, 1994); Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York, 1995); Paul Richard Blum, ed., Studien zur Thematik des Todes im 16. Jahrhundert, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 22 (Wolfenbüttel, 1983); Michel Vovelle, La mort et l’Occident de 1300 à nos jours (Paris, 1983); idem, “On Death,” in his Ideologies and Mentalities, trans. Eamon O’Flaherty (Chicago, 1990), 64–80; idem, ed., Mourir autrefois: Attitudes collectives devant la mort aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siécles (Paris, 1974); Arthur E. Imhof, Ars moriendi: Die Kunst des Sterbens einst und heute (Vienna and Cologne, 1991); idem, Geschichte sehen: Fünf Erzählungen nach historischen Bildern (Munich, 1990); esp. 59–92; Philippe Ariès, L’Homme devant la mort (Paris, 1977), trans. into English by Helen Weaver as The Hour of Our Death (New York, 1981); an entire issue of Annales: Autor de la mort, 31 (1976); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris: XVIe, XVIIe, XVIIIe siécles (Paris, 1978); Norbert Ohler, Sterben und Tod im Mittelalter (Munich, 1990). 34 “Death and Ritual in Reformation Germany,” Ph. D. dissertation, University of Michigan, 1994, especially part 1: “Separating the Living from the Dead,” 27–134. Published as The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (New York, 2000).

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not commune with the dead. It was incumbent upon Christians to rely entirely, calmly upon the secret providence of their Heavenly Father. The terms of discussion between pastors and their congregations on the theme of death were, then, drastically changed. Luther was of the opinion that the dead were sleeping in their “little beds of rest” (Ruhebettlein) in the cemetery and waited for the angelic signal at the end of the world. He admonished his listeners and readers not to weep immoderately when a loved one died.35 If they could not manage actually to be happy, then they should strive for impassivity as they bore their dead to the grave. In 1544, he accepted the remarkable hymn, “Now Let Us Bury the Body” (“Nun lasst uns den Leib begraben”), into the Wittenberg hymnbook.36 For the remainder of time, the corpse was merely a detritus to be forgotten. The pastor came to the chambers of the dying now more to pacify family members than the opposite. Devils and angels no longer hovered and sparred around the bedposts. The cleric heard the confession of the sick person, dispensed absolution, and administered Holy Communion. The visitation protocols reveal that many people still believed in the saving power of the sacrament, which the authorities continually regretted. A formal admonition, delivered at the side of the sickbed, was supposed to rectify this misunderstanding. After Luther’s death, the transactions of the dying chamber became more complex than I am able to describe here. A retreat into psychic dependence upon ritual acts prevailed even though this was contrary to official doctrine and to reformed ideals.37 The outlooks of clergy and laity diverged.38 The ideal of the Christian departure was in its atmosphere like that peaceful and 35 In the first of two sermons that he preached at the funeral of Frederick the Wise, Elector of Saxony, on May 10, 1525, Luther told the gathered magnates and the people,

So solt jr, die jr andere gedancken, hertz und sinn habet, denn die Heiden und eins andern und ewigen lebens jnn jener welt erwartet, nicht trauren, Sondern gewis sein, das ewre verstorbene Freunde … nicht tod sind, sondern schlaffen jnn süsser, lieblicher ruge und am Jungstentage gewis wider aufferstehen werden und ein Leib haben, der liechter und heller sein wird denn die Sonne. Es thut wol hertzlich wehe, wenn uns unsere beste und liebste Freunde, weib, kind etc. frome, friedsame Herrn und fürsten mit tod abgehen…. Doch gleichwol sol des trawrens und klagens ein mass sein, Und der trost, den uns S. Paul hie furhelt, den Sieg behalten, Das ein Christlich trawren und klagen sey, nicht wie die Heiden pflegen zu trawren, die nicht weiter sehen denn, wie jre Freunde gestorben und begraben sind, und nicht anders wissen, denn alle hoffnung sey nu mit jnen aus etc. (WA 17: 204). 36 Elisabeth Blum, “Tod und Begräbnis in evangelischen Kirchenliedern aus dem 16. Jahrhundert,” in Blum, ed., Studien zur Thematik des Todes, 97–110; on this hymn, 104. 37 I describe this phenomenon in The Reformation of Ritual, chapter 5, “Banning the Dead and Ordering the Dying: The Selective Retention of Catholic Practice,” 138–89. 38 Robert W. Scribner, “Anticlericalism and the Reformation in Germany,” in idem, Popular Culture and Popular Movements, 243–56, esp. 255–6; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Neoclericalism and Anticlericalism in Saxony, 1555–1675, Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24, 4 (1994): 615–37.

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untroubled one portrayed as the best sort by Erasmus in his colloquy. In just such an ideal, Luther himself believed – in a death experienced with patience (Geduld) and thoughtful devotion (Andacht). Although Lutherans and Calvinists banned candles at the deathbed, every Christian was expected to slip off to eternal sleep without sound or grimace, “just like a candle going out.” Concrete tapers were simply rendered metaphorical. Wailing women were forbidden now. Burial was to occur not later than the very next day after the demise, with the closest relatives and neighbors accompanying the corpse to the cemetery. Even in Lutheran territories, the ceremony there was short and simple, followed (after mid-century) by a funeral sermon either at the graveside or afterward in the church. Naturally, the observances after the death of a prince or patrician were not so abbreviated, but this can be explained with reference to political, economic, and social factors. People of high rank were always exceptions. But also for Lutheran burghers of middling condition, the tendency is apparent to have choirboys sing hymns in the procession. Song can be regarded as arousing feeling, but the texts of these hymns demanded trust in God. Close relatives were advised to keep their emotions under control. The Calvinist procedure was cleansed still further of traditional elements.39 The pastor came to the bedside without the sacrament, specifically in order to console the sick. Indeed, he often took no part in the small train to the burial ground, held no service, preached no funeral sermon. Hardly any part of this minimal observance reminded one of Catholic practice. God’s will, after all, had determined and conditioned all events. To grieve immoderately exposed a human will that struggled against the divine plan. 8. Controlled Piety: Some Conclusions 1 In this initial effort at deciphering the semiotics of the Reformation, I have regarded the removal of ecclesiastical images and ritual artefacts, the reordering of the liturgical space, and changes in ritual processes themselves as a configuration of signs that informed worshippers that earlier models of affective piety were no longer acceptable. To please God and to conform to His will, those shaping the devotional milieu strove to encourage quiet thankfulness and unmoved obedience. Evangelical virtues were to be cultivated upon a foundation composed both of God’s omnipotence and of the ultimate separation of divinity from humanity.40 Despite Luther’s admiration for Theologia Deutsch and Johannes Tauler, 39 Ursula Rohner-Baumberger von Rebstein, Das Begräbniswesen im calvinistischen Genf (Basel, 1974). 40 Cf. Clemen, Luther und die Volksfrömmigkeit, 40.

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neither Lutherans nor Calvinists were to entertain mystical impulses, with their emotional connotations.41 Certainly, in neither branch of Protestantism were mere human beings in a position to influence the Almighty. All pretence of manipulating the unseen by means of objects, substances, and formulae, whether in or out of the church, was to be abandoned. 2 Simultaneously, reforming authorities, by removing many sacred objects from the churches and outlawing their “superstitious” use, reduced the physicality of the divine. Because tangibility reinforced among ordinary people the sense of God’s presence, the removal of these artefacts and their condemnation by the clergy reduced God’s accessibility. God was now indeed to be a spirit, approachable only spiritually. The ideal human body was quiescent, and in no case a protagonist in what was now a purely spiritual exchange between the Creator and the creature. 3 All the same, numerous variations arose among the far-flung and differently ruled lands of the Holy Roman Empire. Each prince and magistrate considered for himself what proper observance consisted of; and each found himself in constant interaction with local personages, strains, and conditions. The Elector of Brandenburg, although a follower of Luther from 1540, retained the most Catholic practices and insisted that many of the old ceremonies and ritual objects continue in use, even the celebration of Corpus Christi.42 In Saxony, the princes chose a middle path, which nevertheless entailed a quite drastic modification of the old. Over the course of the sixteenth century, they had the majority of images of saints and sacramental artefacts removed. They reduced the frequency and splendor of all ritual. By means of these changes, they admonished the laity to cultivate inner as well as outer tranquility. Yet we should not underestimate the extent to which the retention of the Real Presence in the Lutheran Eucharist offered to people who were receptive to affective devotion an immeasurable support for their miracle-based responses. Farther toward the German Southwest, in Württemberg, the parish visitors of the second half of the century seem to have been even more intent on purifying the minutest details of ecclesiastical procedure. Their ostensible wish was to remove every perceptible Catholic residue. It may 41 Heiko A. Oberman has rightly observed that mysticism is not all of one stripe, and he carefully examines Luther’s ideas about mystical experience, particularly that not just a few individuals but all faithful may feel the presence of God, but not in an ecstatic sense (“Simul gemitus et raptus: Luther und die Mystik,” in Ivar Asheim, ed., The Church, Mysticism, Sanctification and the Natural in Luther’s Thought [Philadelphia, 1967], 20–59; a translated version of which is reprinted in Oberman, The Dawn of the Reformation [Edinburgh, 1986], 126–54. See also the two following essays in Asheim, The Church, Mysticism: Erwin Iserloh, “Luther und die Mystik,” 60–83; and Bengt Hägglund, “Luther und die Mystik,” 84–94). 42 Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession, 7, 21, 46–65, 111, 154–5.

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be that this principality was subject to regional Calvinist strains. Certainly Reformed divines left in place the fewest symbols that might have fostered either joy or sorrow. 4 We need to revise the view that popular piety in Germany at the end of the Middle Ages was characterized by an unarticulated longing for a less emotive, less active, less corporeal religiosity. The ritual evidence suggests that although people seldom openly revolted against the subdued practices introduced among them, their apprehension of the liturgy was other than that official interpretation expounded to them from the pulpit. They frequently manifested great feeling and a sense of God’s presence on earth; they continued to attribute power to holy objects as instruments of God’s action, however scarce these might have become. It appears doubtful that the charismatic religious leaders of the early sixteenth century convinced the masses of the faithful with the changes they made in the ecclesiastical symbolic system.43 5 In the cities, however, parishioners allowed themselves to be more easily shaped and disciplined, although only gradually. The permanent watchfulness of those in power in the urban context was more successful than in the countryside, where dances around the St. John’s fire and enthusiastic wedding festivities could not be eliminated. Especially in the rural Southwest, intertwining and unclear boundaries permitted nominally evangelical and Reformed residents to join their Catholic relatives and neighbors on pilgrimages, in Passion plays, and at harvest festivals. Lutheran officials exerted themselves to suppress such unchristian celebrations. 6 I must observe in passing that the post-Reformation Catholic Church took the opposite tack and used affective piety as a means of control over parishioners. It strove for liturgical uniformity more than it had before, but it continued to regard the emotions of the devout as a means of delineating the true faith from the false and of holding the allegiance of its flocks. Thus, fervor and its degrees and forms became a distinguishing feature between, and ultimately among, denominations.44 Catholic rulers were as intent as Protestant in their pursuit of a docile citizenry, but they saw in expressive piety a help in attaining that end.45 While the Catholic 43 Richard van Dülmen, “Volksfrömmigkeit und konfessionelles Christentum im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Wolfgang Schieder, ed., Volksreligiosität in der modernen Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen, Germany, 1986), 14–30; van Dülmen, “Volksfrömmigkeit und religiöse Praxis,” in idem, Kultur und Alltag in der Frühen Neuzeit: Religion, Magie, Aufklärung (Munich, 1994), 56–78. Cf. C. Scott Dixon, “Popular Beliefs and the Reformation: The Writing of Protestantism,” in R. W. Scribner, ed., Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe 1400–1800 (New York, 1996), 119–39. 44 Van Dülmen, Religion, Magie, Aufklärung, 70–78. 45 Louis Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation

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Church attempted to exert greater control over the cultic objects of the faith and to reduce the more fantastic popular imputations of power to them, overall the Church’s permissiveness in regard to the interpenetration of the mundane and the sacred spheres remained intact.46 7 Mikhail Bakhtin was surely correct in observing that Carnival was laden with emotion.47 But I would argue that Carnival and Lent were not opposites but instead comparable insofar as each brought deep feeling into play and each was profoundly sensual. I would add that in the late Middle Ages, such expression (with class-conditioned qualifications) arose not just in the peasantry and the urban lower classes but also in the elites of countryside and town. After the Reformation, these elites gradually defined for themselves a dignity that was more withdrawn from the masses than before in physical and emotional respects. Their idea of propriety impelled them to become more refined and to distance themselves from nature.48 In the last three decades, we social historians have reacted against of a New Society (Cambridge, 1989); cf. Philip Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: CounterReformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, 1993); also Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, Handbook, vol. 2 (Leiden, 1995), 641–81. As to the belief that Catholic priests could effect miracles whereas Protestant pastors did not possess as much power, see Lorna Jane Abray, “The Laity’s Religion: Lutheranism in Sixteenth-Century Strasbourg,” in R. Po-chia Hsia, ed., The German People and the Reformation (Ithaca, 1988), 216–33, esp. 224–5. 46 On the closely related question of the Catholic retention of and learned opinion concerning images, see Christine Göttler, “Die Disziplinierung des Heiligenbildes durch altgläubige Theologen nach der Reformation. Ein Beitrag zur Theorie des Sakralbildes im Übergang vom Mittelalter zur Frühen Neuzeit,” in Bob Scribner, ed., Bilder und Bildersturm, 263–95, esp. 294. See also Carlos M. N. Eire, “Masses for the Dead, Inflation, and Religion Reform in Sixteenth-Century Madrid,” in Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfried G. Krodel, eds, Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationen und Debatten, special vol. of Archive for Reformation History (Gütersloh, Germany, 1993), 410–39, esp. 438–9. 47 Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Hèléne Iswolsky (Bloomington, 1984). The German debate over Bakhtin has occasionally been ad hominem. See Norbert Schindler, “Karneval, Kirche und die verkehrte Welt: Zur Funktion der Lachkultur im 16. Jahrhundert,” Jahrbuch für Volkskunde (1985), 9–57; reprinted in idem, Widerspenstige Leute: Studien zur Volkskultur in der frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt/Main, 1992), 121–74, esp. 151–74; Dietz-Rüdiger Moser, “Lachkultur des Mittelalters? Michael Bachtin und die Folgen seiner Theorie,” Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 84 (1990), 39–111; Rainer Stollman, “Lachen, Freiheit, und Geschichte,” Jahrbuch für internationale Germanistik 20, 2 (1988), 25–43; and Heidy Greco-Kaufmann, “Kampf des Karnevals gegen die Fasten: Pieter Bruegels Gemälde und die Diskussion um Karneval und Lachkultur,” Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte 86 (1992), 319–32. 48 In his essay, “The Carnival Spirit: Bakhtin’s Theory on the Culture of Popular Laughter,” Gabor Klaniczay refers to “the regulation of eating habits, the increasing use of cutlery, the widening prohibition on nudity … the growing sense of shame and disgust regarding bodily functions” as constituting a “radically new cultural standard” (idem, The Uses of Supernatural Power [Princeton, 1990], 19). But Klaniczay does not observe that elites first adopted this cultural standard and attempted to impose it on society at large. This phenomenon cannot be divorced from our consideration of religious impassivity/ incorporeality, to which it may run

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the previous overemphasis upon the activities of prominent men, with the unfortunate result that we have not yet applied interdisciplinary methods to the study of the religious culture of the upper classes in early modern Germany. 8 I shall end with several questions: What impulses, beginning late in the sixteenth century, produced again the rise of affective strains and eventually Pietism within Lutheranism? Are we justified in concentrating our scrutiny upon the thought of men like Valentin Weigel, Philipp Jakob Spener, and August Hermann Francke? Why did Jakob Böhme attract followers? What of the tendency of ordinary people to ignore the dictates of their pastors when a self-appointed prophet appeared?49 It is probable that no amount of discipline could suppress in many folk the inclination they felt toward a more affective, even mystical religiosity. They desired to know God’s presence, to commune with Him, to sense His action in their lives. This yearning created fertile soil for Pietism and other variations on Lutheran themes. Yet, in the end the disciplinary spirit of the age saw some lasting results: none of the more spiritualist tendencies that attracted a noticeable following advocated the loosing of outer, icon-intolerant stays. Instead, some Lutheran Christians reclaimed the direct, fervent psychological access to God that earlier Lutheranism and Calvinism to varying extents had curtailed. By their attraction to a more affective piety, they returned the supernatural to the midst of human society. The music of Johann Sebastian Bach is an example of the affective spirit of a later era, but all the same it contains elements of the new formulations of piety that reach back into the sixteenth century.

parallel. In considering these developments in greater detail, one might well need to take up, too, the spread of neostoic strains among better educated people. Cf. my essay, “‘Not Like the Unreasoning Beasts’: Rhetorical Efforts to Separate Humans and Animals in Early Modern Germany,” in Cultures of Communication from Reformation to Enlightenment: Constructing Publics in the Early Modern German Lands, James Van Horn Melton, ed. (Aldershot, 2002), 225–38. 49 I gave a paper on such a prophetess, the Saxon servingmaid Anna Hillig: “Forbidden Visions, or Why Were There No Lutheran Beatas?” at the meetings of the Society for Reformation Research, Kalamazoo, Michigan, May 1993. Among much else, Hillig received revelations from an angel and communicated these to the throngs of the humble who traveled to see her.

Astrology and the Confessions in the Empire, c. 1550–1620 Robin B. Barnes

Bodo Nischan made numerous lasting contributions to the study of the late Reformation era, not the least of which was to shed light on “confessionalization” as a comprehensive political, social, and cultural process. If we acknowledge, as he did, that this process might involve many or even all aspects of social and cultural life, we encounter a variety of potentially fruitful but thorny questions. One complex of problems that scholars have only begun to explore concerns the roles of prophecy and divination in the major confessional cultures. It is difficult to avoid noting, for instance, that the most prominent divinatory art of all, astrology, reached a peak of pervasiveness and influence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the very same era that well-worn models depict as the heyday of confessionalizing trends in Europe. Certain lines of inquiry seem to open up here almost automatically. Did the three major confessional cultures manifest different prevailing attitudes toward and levels of engagement with astrology? Were there astrological dimensions to confessional identities and conflicts? How might answers to such questions bear on our broader concept of “confessionalization”? Focusing on the three major confessions within the Holy Roman Empire, this essay first presents a brief survey of evidence, much of it already well known, that Lutheranism proved by far the most hospitable to the perpetuation and intensification of a popular astrological culture. A second, complementary goal is to show that this pervasive discourse of celestial prediction was in fact integral to the formation of a Lutheran confessional culture and to Lutheran confessional identity. Finally, the essay suggests some implications of these points for our overall view of Lutheran confessionalization. Because these goals bear on some very large issues, and because the volume of potential sources is enormous, the treatment offered here must remain to some extent sketchy and programmatic. To approach “astrology” with these aims does not require us to labor over definitions. Historians often take note of a distinction between “natural” and

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“judicial” forms of the art, pointing out that only the latter was subject to serious controversy and condemnation. Similarly, much has been made of the often fuzzy line between zodiacal astrology per se and the interpretation of celestial wonders, i.e. unexpected, irregular, or unpredictable appearances such as comets. These distinctions, though by no means unimportant, were rarely as clear as we are sometimes led to believe. More to the point, they were of limited significance in relation to popular instruction, propaganda, and discourse. Our concern here is with any predictive or prophetic use of the stars, planets or other celestial phenomena in vernacular publications generally recognized as astrological. While learned thinkers of all three confessions continued to pursue various forms of sidereal speculation, the evidence leaves little question but that astrology in this general, popularized form found by far its warmest reception among Lutherans. The post-Tridentine Roman Church was clearly not friendly toward astrological study or practice, especially as an element of lay culture. As R.J.W. Evans has pointed out, “Catholics mistrusted prediction from the start, and the more Protestants stressed it, the more they could assail it with an easy conscience.”1 Evans finds evidence of a serious Catholic campaign in central Europe, starting in the late sixteenth century, to rein in all forms of popular divination. To be sure, Catholic humanist astrologers such as Joseph Grünpeck, Peter Apian, and Johann Virdung had been prominent publicists through the early Reformation decades. But this generation was mostly gone by mid-century, with few notable successors to fill its shoes.2 By the 1560s we find German Catholic polemicists beginning to ridicule and attack what they saw as the rapidly spreading use of astrology as Lutheran propaganda. Among them was the Franciscan Johann Nas, who both satirized the art and denounced it as the twin sister of heresy. For Nas, Luther was an exception among heretics in his supposed opposition to astrology. Like the heretics, the astrologers denied free will; their perverse teachings implied fatalism, and hence spread feelings of helplessness and fear.3 It has been reasonably R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979), 396. On Grünpeck see Paul A. Russell, “Astrology as Popular Propaganda: Expectations of the End in the German Pamphlets of Joseph Grünpeck (†1533?),” in Antonio Rotondò, ed., Studi e testi della storia religiosa del Cinquecento, 2 (Florence, 1991), 19–49. For fuller biographical details see Albin Czerny, “Der Humanist und Historiograph Kaiser Maximilian I. Joseph Grünpeck,” in Archiv für österreichische Geschichte, 73 (1888), 315–64. On Virdung, though with caution: Max Steinmetz, “Johann Virdung von Hassfurt: sein Leben und sein astrologischen Flugschriften,” in Paola Zambelli, ed., ‘Astrologi hallucinati’: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin, 1986), 195–214. On Apian: Willy Hartner, “Apian, Peter,” in NDB, 1, 325ff. 3 Still valuable on Nas is Adolph Hauffen, “Fischart-Studien,” in Euphorion: Zeitschrift für Literaturgeschichte, 5 (1898), 25–47; 226–56. See also Silvia Pfister, Parodien Astrologisch1 2

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suggested that the sort of Augustinian attack on astrology represented by Nas was closely linked to the broader Catholic Counter-Reformation movement.4 In Nas and later Catholic writers such as Johann Rasch we find a clear reaction against popular astrology in light of its appropriation as a tool of Protestant prophecy and anti-Romanism. According to Rasch the heretics were guilty not only of illegitimately combining the art with spiritual prophecy; they had also managed to sow vast confusion among the common folk through their almanacs and other vernacular works.5 The Catholic campaign went further with the 1586 Papal Bull Coela et Terra, which reinforced Tridentine strictures, severely proscribing judicial astrology along with other forms of divination. “Natural” astrology was of course necessary and allowable for use in medicine, agriculture, and navigation. But this recognition was outbalanced by a defensive reaction against the rapidly emerging Protestant domination of popular genres such as the annual prognostication. The names and works of prominent astrologers appeared on the Index of Forbidden Books.6 The Jesuit initiatives in the empire appear to have involved opposition to all but the safest forms of celestial science; a debunking work by Benedictus Pereira, issued at Ingolstadt in 1591 and again later at Cologne, “supplied the pattern for Jesuit treatises of this type.”7 In the opening years of the seventeenth century “a chorus of official theologians [in Catholic Central Europe] denounced the art”; Péter Pázmány was among the numerous publicists who attacked it as “a characteristically Lutheran aberration.”8 By the mid-sixteenth century, the German tradition of the annual popular almanac had already withered in Catholic towns, where publicly appointed astrologer-physicians rarely gained the sort of prominence they enjoyed in Protestant cities. In centers such as Würzburg and Bamberg, where annual astrological calendars had become a tradition well before the Reformation, bishops or cathedral chapters took control of the enterprise. Significantly, the calendars published in such cities from the 1530s on showed notably less medical and astrological content than those issued by Protestants. Perhaps Prophetischen Schrifttums 1470–1590 (Saecvla Spiritalia, 22: Baden-Baden, 1990), 452ff, et passim. 4 Pfister, Parodien, 456. 5 Johann Rasch, Gegenpractic, Wider etliche aussgangen Weissag, Prognostic vnd Schrifften (Munich, 1584). On Rasch as well as Nas see the works by Hauffen and Pfister (note 3 above), and also my Prophecy and Gnosis: Apocalypticism in the Wake of the Lutheran Reformation (Stanford, 1988), 161–62. 6 Ernst Zinner, Geschichte und Bibliographie der astronomischen Literatur in Deutschland zur Zeit der Renaissance (Stuttgart, 1964), 40; see also Pfister, Parodien, 455. 7 Don Cameron Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance: The Quarrel about Astrology and Its Influence in England (Durham, NC, 1941), 90–91; see also Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 347n; 397. 8 Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 398.

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more important, here the tradition of the annual prognostication or practica, which became a staple in evangelical settings, was greatly enfeebled or ended altogether.9 From a broader perspective, since the Catholic population of the empire was on the whole less urban and less literate than Protestants, the sorts of astrology conveyed in popular literature simply could not achieve the same currency. Recent studies on the centrality of shrines and saintly miracles in the popular piety of Catholic regions suggest that here, the prevailing forms of popular healing remained far less closely linked to astrological teachings than in Protestant areas.10 In this sense the German Counter-Reformation clergy seems to have achieved some success in defeating a potential rival. On these grounds it is certainly plausible to suggest that “judicial astrology found more practitioners among committed Protestants than committed Catholics in this period.”11 But in this regard as in many others, Protestantism was by no means monolithic. While the German Reformed or “Calvinist” scene is by no means easy to assess, John Calvin’s well-known opposition to judicial astrology, widely publicized through his brief and clear, if less-than-original attack of 1549, does appear to have set the tone among his heirs in central Europe as elsewhere. Denis Crouzet has persuasively depicted the Calvinist movement, in France at least, as a severe enemy of astrology in most of its common forms. Like the Roman cult of images, the stargazer’s art offended belief in divine sovereignty, and served to torment the conscience rather than to free it. In this picture, Calvinism aimed to destroy the anxiety of astrological culture. Calvin himself carried on a long battle to suppress or control the circulation of popular almanacs.12 Similar programs are evident among German Calvinists such as the Nassau theologian and lawyer Wilhelm Zepper, who stigmatized all those preoccupied with divination or other “magical” arts.13 9 On Würzburg and Bamberg calendars, see Walter M. Brod, Mainfrankische Kalender aus vier Jahrhunderten (Würzburg, 1952), 16–28; also Klaus Matthäus, “Zur Geschichte des Nürnberger Kalenderwesens,” in Archiv für Geschichte des Buchwesens, 9 (1969), 973–4. 10 See, for example, Philip Soergel, Wondrous in His Saints: Counter-Reformation Propaganda in Bavaria (Berkeley, 1993); Steven D. Sargent, “Miracle Books and Pilgrimage Shrines in Late Medieval Bavaria,” in Historical Reflections, 13: 2–3 (1986), 455–71. 11 Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 396. 12 Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps de troubles de religion, vers 1525-vers 1610 (Seyssel, 1990), I, 135–53. 13 Paul Münch, “Volkskultur und Calvinismus. Zur Theorie und Praxis der ‘reformatio vitae’ während der ‘Zweiten Reformation’,” in Heinz Schilling, ed., Die Reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland: Das Problem der ‘Zweiten Reformation’ (Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, 195: Gütersloh, 1986), 291–307; here 300–1. The prevailing view, expressed for example by Richard van Dülmen, is that the strictest efforts to reform popular religion were made by the Reformed. See his “Volksfrömmigkeit und konfessionelles Christentum im 16. Jahrhundert,” in W. Schnieder, ed., Volksreligiosität in der modernen Sozialgeschichte (Göttingen, 1986), 14–30; here 26. Certain complications arise with efforts to assess the relationship between astrology and the Zwinglian heritage in Germany, which I have not attempted to address in this essay.

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As Calvinism began to gain a foothold in western German lands, it encountered strong traditions of popular astrology which were not easily erased. The prominent Reformed physician and scholar Thomas Erastus worked hard to discredit contemporary German astrologers and their art; for him as for many like-minded Calvinists, this false learning was part of the undergrowth of Catholic superstition. Erastus translated, edited and published in 1557 an earlier anti-astrological work by Savonarola, which presented many of the same stock arguments that had become common currency through Giovanni Pico’s famous Disputationes aduersus astrologiam (1494). In the eyes of this Calvinist physician virtually no form of astrology was justifiable among Christians; medical practice, he argued, had no need of astrological theory. This attack was clearly aimed at the massive and rapidly expanding market for popular prognostications in the empire. Erastus was immediately engaged by the Lutheran Christoph Stathmion of Nuremberg, whose strident Astrologia Asserta appeared the following year.14 Stathmion, a producer of hugely popular prognostications as well as more learned works, represented a Melanchthonian conception of astrology that was just then achieving nearly doctrinal status among many Lutherans, but that Calvinists regarded with serious hesitancy. Heidelberg, the main bastion of early Calvinism in the empire, was notably underrepresented as a place of publication for astrological works in the late sixteenth century. One of the few surviving prognostications published here appeared in 1563, just as the new Reformed teachings were being enforced; its author, Nikolaus Gugler, lamented that anyone was free to produce astrological calendars and practicas, and called for measures to limit the enterprise to licensed professionals.15 But such calls for restrictive measures were soon overshadowed by a broader program to discredit all forms of divination as essentially demonic. Perhaps even more than their Catholic neighbors, German Calvinists feared the popular rumors, speculations, passions, and disorder that they came to associate with astrological publicity. Like the Catholics, however, Calvinists responded not only with frontal assaults but with satire as well. The most famous German anti-astrological satire of the age was Johann Fischart’s Aller Praktik Grossmutter of 1572. Inspired in part by other Reformed writers such as Johann Weyermann, Fischart painted the authors of the popular calendars and practicas as a gaggle 14 Erastus’s translation of (and commentary on) Savonarola’s work was published at Schleusingen in 1557: Astrologia Confutata. Ein warhafte Gegründte Vnwidersprechliche Confutation/der falschen Astrologi oder abgottischen warsagung aus des himels vnd des gestirnen lauff/die warheit zu steuer/vnnd dem gemeinen man zur warnung…. Stathmion’s reply was his Astrologia Asserta (Nuremberg, 1558). I thank Dr. Charles Gunnoe for supplying me with a copy of the latter work. 15 Zinner, Geschichte und Bibliographie, 20.

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of idiots and charlatans.16 Serious Reformed theologians such as Johannes Piscator also engaged in broad satire of the stargazer’s art.17 To be sure, astrological thinking did become an earnest pursuit among some of the leading Reformed thinkers in central Europe. As Howard Hotson’s important work on J.H. Alsted shows, the main centers for Reformed ventures into astrological speculation, as well as into such realms as iatrochemistry, alchemy, and hermeticism, lay in Hesse-Kassel, especially at the University of Marburg, where a quite different atmosphere obtained from that which the young Alsted had found earlier at Herborn or at Heidelberg. Hotson points to astrology as the main “hermetic” influence on the young Alsted, who along with figures such as Rudolph Goclenius became part of a Marburg circle caught up in currents of encyclopedism and magical reformism in the period leading up to the Thirty Years’ War. His was a world of dramatic polar tensions, most obviously between Calvinist biblicism and dreams of magical transformation. Alsted’s early Calvinist training gave scant sanction to this latter quest, and as a result his intellectual life was marked by ongoing efforts to synthesize powerful but highly disparate ideals.18 Unlike the sort of astrology that prevailed in the popular planet books and almanacs, Alsted’s art was not conceived as a resource broadly available to a large number of practitioners or to the public at large. It was a high form of magic, rooted far more in neoplatonic visions of human potential than in the more common framework of Aristotelian, Ptolemaic, and Galenic doctrines. It was directed to an intellectual elite, to those who possessed the education, social standing, and wisdom necessary to help lead a transcendently ambitious transformation of the world. And since his astrological speculations were extremely difficult to reconcile with Calvinist orthodoxy, Alsted was increasingly forced to live in two separate worlds, one public and orthodox, the other private and “hermetic.” Hotson describes the atmosphere that nourished Alsted’s astrological ideals as unusual in the Reformed world, calling the intellectual situation at Marburg “unique within the ambit of the second reformation.”19 The rarified forms of astrology cultivated here had little to do with the emergence of Calvinist confessional identity in the empire; in this respect the Reformed scene appears not dissimilar to the Catholic one. In both cases, an immense gulf came to separate the intellectual world of an elite, where astrological and magical speculations could be Pfister, Parodien (see note 3 above). Howard Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted 1588–1638: Between Renaissance, Reformation, and Universal Reform (Oxford, 2000), 215n. 18 Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 185 et passim. 19 Hotson, Johann Heinrich Alsted, 54. Hotson observes that while in Reformed regions such as Nassau “endeavors to purify ritual of all traces of impurity and magic were related to a general abhorrence of magic and superstition … in Hesse-Kassel they were accompanied by an increased interest in astrology, iatrochemistry, alchemy, and hermeticism.” 16 17

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indulged, from the larger world in which demands for confessional conformity were mounting. By contrast, evidence for the ongoing intensification of a vernacular astrological culture among German Lutherans is striking. Numerous studies have recognized the “especially free development of astrology in the Lutheran realm” during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries;20 indeed it would be difficult to find a setting that witnessed broader sanction for the cultivation of this discourse at all levels. In some respects Luther’s heirs simply inherited what was already a booming enterprise for German printers. But they would closely appropriate and greatly augment this inheritance; from the 1530s on, the swiftly expanding market for popular astrological works became increasingly dominated by evangelical physicians, pastors, and schoolmasters. Overall astrological publication figures for the seventy-year period from 1550 to 1620 present a remarkable picture. For the single genre of the annual vernacular practica, which formed only a fraction – though a significant one – of the popular astrological literature, we know of well over 1,300 editions, an average of some twenty per year. With print-runs in all likelihood running frequently to thousands, the yearly calendars and practicas were the major channel for the dissemination of astrological ideas and imagery to a broad lay audience. Although it is not always possible to establish a definite confessional connection for particular authors or printers, calculations based on one major bibliographical listing suggest that nearly 90 percent of annual German vernacular practicas published over these seven decades were of Lutheran provenance.21 While this great preponderance has occasionally been noted, its relationship to the formation of a Lutheran confessional culture has received relatively little sustained attention. Any discussion of this apparently exceptional affinity must recognize the role of Philipp Melanchthon as the prime encourager of astrological study in central Europe. It is now well established that Melanchthon’s interest in celestial science was intimately tied to his overall philosophy of nature and to his broad pedagogical program.22 He did more than any other contemporary 20 Volker Leppin, Antichrist und Jüngster Tag: Das Profil apokalyptischer Flugschriftenpublizistik im deutschen Luthertum 1548–1618 (Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, 69; Gütersloh, 1999), 286. 21 These figures and calculations are based on my tabulation of data from Zinner, Geschichte und Bibliographie, supplemented by additional listings from the holdings of the Herzog-August Bibliothek, Wolfenbüttel, and the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Munich. In calculating the percentage of “Lutheran” practicas, I have excluded numerous listings for which the evidence is too scanty to allow a judgment. 22 Here and in the following paragraphs I have benefited greatly from several recent studies on Melanchthon’s natural philosophy: Dino Bellucci, Science de la Nature et Réformation: La

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figure to establish the art as legitimate and necessary, both as an academic discipline and as a popular tool; in this respect his role was dramatically different from that of Alsted and his hermetically inclined Reformed associates. The Praeceptor Germaniae lent his enormous weight to the push for a “purified” science of astrology, and under his leadership Wittenberg became the training center for several generations of scholars, pastors, and physicians whose view of the world was profoundly shaped by astrological assumptions. His influence was reinforced by the prolific labors of colleagues such as Caspar Peucer and Johann Garcaeus.23 Melanchthon’s teachings are more or less evident in the great majority of practicas and related works from the period in view here. Melanchthonian astrology showed two fundamental aspects: an emphasis on divine order, and a balancing recognition of divine freedom. In the first aspect the study of the stars, as of nature in general, taught of divine law. Melanchthon accepted Martin Luther’s teaching that fallen human reason was limited to understanding of the law, and could never comprehend the transcendent message of the Gospel. Accordingly, he came to limit philosophy to the realm of the law. Departing fundamentally from the medieval tradition of natural theology, Melanchthon conceived of a natural philosophy only, and philosophy became in his eyes essentially the study of law. He defined philosophy as “the knowledge of natural causes and effects.” Since causes and effects were ordered according to God, it followed that “philosophy is the law of God, which is the teaching of that divine order.”24 Fallen humankind could grasp the law of the creator only incompletely, but did have natural access to a rational cognizance of the divine. This sort of knowledge was primarily negative, showing the utter weakness and helplessness of human beings. It did, however, have a positive expression in “natural law,” meaning essentially an understanding of the natural relationships that the Creator had established between himself and his human creatures. Careful observation of the heavens was commanded by God, for humankind was created to recognize and learn to obey God through physique au service de la Réforme dans l’enseignement de Philip Melanchthon (Rome, 1998); Günter Frank, Die Theologische Philosophie Philipp Melanchthons (1497–1560) (Leipzig, 1995); Sachiko Kusukawa, The Transformation of Natural Philosophy: The case of Philip Melanchthon (Cambridge, 1995). Also helpful is Charlotte Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen: Stimulus to a Theological Mathematics (Aldershot/Brookfield, 1998), Ch. 3, 61–106. 23 Peucer’s main work bearing on astrology was his widely cited Commentarius de praecipuis generibus divinationum, first published at Wittenberg in 1553. Garcaeus was equally if not more famous as a star in the Melanchthonian circle; his several works on the art included the Astrologiae Methodus… secundum doctrinam Ptolemaei (Basel, 1576). 24 “On the distinction between the Gospel and philosophy,” in Sachiko Kusukawa, ed. and trans., Philip Melanchthon: Orations on Philosophy and Education (Cambridge, 1999), 23–5; here 24.

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knowledge of law.25 In the heavens, humans could behold the clearest evidence of divine Providence, and also learn the principles by which they might follow God’s law. Astronomy and astrology were wonderful gifts from God; Melanchthon could even write that “human beings were given eyes in order to study astronomy.”26 This natural knowledge of God imposed the general duty to preserve human life and society. At a more concrete level, it discerned the basic institutions necessary for the survival of humanity in a fallen world. These institutions were essentially family, civil community, and economy, the so-called “orders of creation.” The right ordering of human relationships in these institutions was moral philosophy, which was itself grounded in natural law. Melanchthon’s astrology was not merely of the bland sort, often called “natural,” that even a general enemy of sidereal prediction such as John Calvin could acknowledge. Convinced that God generally ruled nature through “secondary causes” that could be understood on the basis of human experience, Melanchthon did not shy away from the calculation of horoscopes or from general predictions about human events. While some causal connections were more subtle and difficult to discern than others, the certainty of an underlying cosmic order encouraged in Melanchthon the entirely reasonable assumption that since one’s temperament was fixed at birth, one’s inclinations under various circumstances could be subjected to systematic analysis. The potential benefits to human life, in both the individual and social realms, were considerable. At no point in his writings on astrology do we find Melanchthon implying any role for the art that extended beyond the realm of law. In this respect the astrologer remained essentially a philosopher. Yet it is important to note that Melanchthon always assumed a dialectical relationship of law and Gospel, with the result that the Christian’s understanding of the law was not simply that of unaided reason. Thus, as Ralph Keen remarks, for Melanchthon the truest knowledge of God through nature is the knowledge of God’s goodness; it is a pious awareness, not a merely rational apprehension.27 In this sense, the observations of the astrologer might be a source of consolation to the faithful as well as of warning to the godless. That consolation came in the awareness that God was in control, everywhere and at all times. The apprehension of God’s providence through nature should thus support the believer’s conviction that the divine plan would be unfailingly fulfilled,

25 Bellucci, Science de la nature et Réformation, 221; Frank, Die Theologische Philosophie, 307–8. 26 Bellucci, Science de la nature et Réformation, 223. 27 Ralph Keen, “Naturwissenschaft und Frömmigkeit bei Melanchthon,” in Günter Frank and Stefan Rhein, eds, Melanchthon und die Naturwissenshaft seiner Zeit (Sigmarinen, 1998), 73–83; here 77–8.

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should strengthen the trust of the faithful that God would keep his promises. Since the providential order included history as well as nature, Melanchthon’s astrology almost inevitably included a prophetic element. And this element was shaped profoundly by Melanchthon’s assumption, which he shared with Luther and the great majority of his evangelical contemporaries, that the divine plan was nearing completion. As much of a humanist as he was in key respects, Melanchthon shared the apocalyptic faith that undergirded the whole early evangelical movement. Thus for example in the Chronica Carionis (1532), a major world history which Melanchthon put into final form, the celestial patterns properly read confirmed biblical prophecy; paradoxically, they implied the ultimate contingency of their own order by pointing beyond that order to the last judgment.28 A world in decline was a world in which unusual or unprecedented signs abounded, but astrology as Melanchthon conceived it could supply insight into divinely sanctioned disorder as well as order. Here is the second major dimension of the Melanchthonian art: the recognition that God acted directly as well as through secondary causes, could override nature’s laws at any time, and could send special signs to warn and console. Melanchthon shared with Luther an intense concern with unusual natural phenomena, including celestial appearances such as comets; he believed that these fell under the purview of astrologers as well as of evangelical preachers. Such phenomena might ultimately have natural explanations, but in any case they were to be regarded as direct signs from God conveying prophetic messages. Melanchthon guarded God’s freedom to respond to prayer and otherwise to interrupt the regular order of nature as he brought the universal plan to consummation.29 There was therefore nothing ultimately fatalistic about this teaching. On the contrary, this sort of astrology implicitly acknowledged, and indeed carried over into the natural realm, the evangelical paradox of law and Gospel, order and freedom. The Melanchthonian effort to reform astrology was commonly understood as paralleling the evangelical movement itself: as the pure Gospel was now preached, so too the arts and sciences could now be revived in their pristine forms. Among the broad ranks of Melanchthon’s colleagues, students and disciples, the stargazing art properly understood had nothing whatever to do with magic or superstition, various forms of which were frequently denounced as “Zauberei” in the practicas; nor did it allow the fatalism of the Arab teachings. It was rather the very model of true science, based mainly on Ptolemaic principles and surrounded by the light of Christian truth. In fact, 28 Chronica durch Johann Carionis fleissig zusammengezogen, menigklich nützlich zu lesen (Wittenberg, 1532). See my Prophecy and Gnosis, 106–8. 29 Stefano Caroti, “Melanchthon’s Astrology,” in Zambelli, ed., ‘Astrologi hallucinati’, 109–21.

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the practica-writers viewed their art as an integral part of what historians today commonly see as the Reformation offensive against superstition. The apologies for astrology that frequently appeared in these works reflect not so much a defensive posture as the active assertion of a cleansed and renewed Christian art. Far removed from the delusions of both fatalism and magic, this godly pursuit required recognition of divine omnipotence as well as divinely instituted natural law. The practica-writer Johann Klain spoke for many in presenting his work for 1578 as the product of an art “unadulterated, without any admixture of foreign superstitions or destructive elements.”30 Pointedly guarding against charges of fatalism, virtually all the astrologers repeatedly stressed that God was both free and active. As Hieronymus Wilhelm wrote in the preface to his practica for 1571, “Our God is not some ‘Stoic divinity,’ but a fully free agent. He does not sit in idle majesty, allowing the world to run on as it will. Rather he cares for his creation; he watches over his handiwork, and exercises his wonderful rule especially over his elect.” Georg Caesius made a complementary point in introducing his predictions for 1584: “I know and believe in my heart that God Almighty can change the order of nature and hear the prayers of the just.”31 The opposite danger, namely imagining that one might somehow find means to manipulate stellar influence and thus move toward a mastery of nature, did not require such explicit treatment. For no reader of the practicas could miss the repeated emphases on divine power and corresponding human helplessness. The heavens revealed the glory of God, not of man. Unlike any form of operative magic, knowledge of the stars revealed a divinely instituted natural order to which one could merely adapt. Lutheran astrology thus agreed with the Protestant principle of a “one-way” flow of divine power.32 Naturally some Lutherans did see dangers in astrology, especially in light of the massive waves of popular literature through which the art was gaining ever greater currency. But do we have grounds for the argument, central in at least one recent study, that this period witnessed a theologically motivated campaign against astrology by Lutheran writers concerned with the establishment of a purely evangelical confessional identity? Should we view 30

Johann Klain, Prognosticon Oder Practica Teutsch/Auff das [1578] Jar… (n.p., 1577),

Aij/v. 31 Hieronymus Wilhelm, Prognosticon oder Practica/auff das [1571] Jar… (n.p., 1570), [Biij/verso]; Georg Caesius, Prognosticon Astrologicum [1584] (Nuremberg, 1583), as quoted and translated in C. Scott Dixon, “Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda in Reformation Germany,” History, 84 (1999), 403–18; here 415. 32 On this “one way” principle see Robert W. Scribner, “The Reformation, Popular Magic, and the ‘Disenchantment of the World’,” in C. Scott Dixon, ed., The German Reformation: The Essential Readings (Oxford/Malden, 1999), 259–77; here 268.

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the massive expansion of a popular astrological culture, in which many of the active agents were evangelical clergymen, as wholly extraneous or even opposed to a theological vision that was the core of the Lutheran confessionalizing movement?33 One direct Lutheran attack on the sorts of astrological prediction in which the practica writers engaged was issued at Jena in 1554 by Johann Aurifaber and Johann Stoltz, Gnesio-Lutheran court theologians at Weimar.34 Aurifaber and Stoltz were especially outraged by the prognostications of Johann Hebenstreit of Erfurt, a physician who was notably unreserved about commenting on the spiritual and even the political significance of celestial phenomena. But for these Weimar theologians Hebenstreit’s practicas were merely among the more egregious examples of spreading astrological superstitions, which they censured here as directly opposed to the Gospel, as in fact a tissue of lies inspired by the devil. The critique included nothing new; it was in essence simply a compilation of traditional anti-astrological arguments. The circumstances suggest that it was offered up at least partly to serve particular concerns of the moment, which were not limited to the legitimacy of sidereal prediction. This attack appeared at a critical stage in the conflict that exploded among evangelical theologians after Luther’s death in 1546. At this point, Melanchthon’s theological enemies were looking for any and all ways to discredit his image. For at least a decade, the influence of Melanchthonian teachings had been growing increasingly evident in the popular astrological works, which themselves became more widespread with each passing year. To oppose the practica-writers was to oppose Melanchthon himself on one of several possible fronts. Moreover, the choice of Hebenstreit as a special target was probably not unrelated to his tendency to make predictions that were clearly unfriendly to Melanchthon’s enemies.35 Still, the antiastrological position of Aurifaber and Stoltz cannot be dismissed as merely tactical. Many practica-writers had come to regard the teaching that the heavens represented divine law as naturally implying the astrologer’s 33 This is a central contention in Volker Leppin, Antichrist und Jüngster Tag (see note 20 above). Leppin argues that three distinct messages were conveyed in the pamphlet literature of this period: apocalyptic, astrological, and warnings of divine punishment. Only the apocalyptic message built confessional identity. 34 Johann Aurifaber and Johann Stoltz, Kurtze Verlegung der unchristlichen Practica Magistri Johannis Hebenstreits auff das jar 1554, zu Erffurd ausgangen (Jena, 1554). 35 I have not had access to Hebenstreit’s practica for 1554, which was apparently one of the first he produced. In similar works for later years, however, he clearly expressed his ardent partiality for Melanchthon and intense vituperation against those who attacked astrological forecasting. In his Prognosticon for 1559, for instance (Erfurt, 1558), he wondered how anyone could “so gar ein vacuum cerebrum haben vnd ihre grobe/ungeschliffene/Epikurische Eselskappen/an tag geben….” (Aij). His work for 1562 crowed of expected victory for Melanchthonian methods and teachings “biss ans ende der Welt” (B).

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responsibility to issue warnings against widespread corruption and sin. The apparent sanction to denounce human failings in the mode of Old Testament prophets was not one they were slow to seize. For the Weimar theologians, this rapidly waxing tendency to blend the roles of natural forecaster and prophetic preacher threw the human pretensions of the astrologers into bold relief. It was both vain and pernicious to employ any art in an effort to divine God’s will. Significantly, however, this sort of outright assault was rarely repeated later in the sixteenth century or in the first years of the seventeenth. It is difficult to find evangelical figures from this period who denounced astrology in terms so unambiguously negative. Well before the Formula of Concord (1577) officially resolved the theological issues that divided “Gnesio-Lutherans” and “Philippists,” controversy over astrology had largely faded from popular intraLutheran struggles. Among prominent clergymen who might be imagined natural antagonists, we encounter most often either silence, or occasional noncommittal references to the observations of the “mathematicians” or astronomers. When a theologian such as Jacob Andreae tried to show the foolishness of particular astrological forecasts, as he did in a series of sermons in the 1560s, he did not assert that such forecasts were positively contrary to the Gospel; he offered the traditional and far less damning argument that since God could alter nature’s course at any moment, astrological predictions were inherently uncertain and were thus mainly a waste of time.36 This position was not unlike the critical but still relatively tolerant attitude sometimes expressed by Luther himself. More or less restrained protests similar to Andreae’s continued in later decades, but never became more than a thin and weak stream in comparison with the continuing torrent of popular astrological literature. Admittedly one can find some further examples of anti-astrological expression among Lutherans during this period. But the contexts in which they were produced bear noting. Astrologers were high-profile figures in evangelical towns, where the council generally appointed an officially calendar-maker whose duties included the writing of an annual practica. The more spirited among these figures could easily find themselves at the center of heated controversies, in which the presumptions of the practica-writer’s art were naturally liable to attack. Yet these denunciations tended to be so tangled up with other motives that one cannot assume that they were motivated by any principled opposition to astrology.37

36 Jacob Andreae, Christliche, notwendige vnd ernstliche Erinnerung, Nach dem Lauff der irdischen Planeten gestelt… was für glück oder unglück, Teutschland zugewarten… (Tübingen, 1567). See my Prophecy and Gnosis, 162–3. Charlotte Methuen (Kepler’s Tübingen; see note 22 above) implies that these sermons constituted a frontal assault on popular astrology. But Andreae’s tactics were more subtle than she suggests, and his unwillingness to issue blunt indictments is significant.

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Parodies of popular astrology also continued to appear. But these works attest above all to the tremendous pervasiveness of stellar imagery in that age, and as Silvia Pfister has shown, in general such writings cannot be viewed as fundamentally anti-astrological.38 Moreover those that went beyond the sort of Patristic critique that transcended confessional boundaries tended to come from the pens of Catholics or Calvinists, as in the cases of Nas and Fischart. Again, one encounters the occasional broad attack such as that of the Tübingen scholar and poet Nicodemus Frischlin, published at Frankfurt in 1586. But Frischlin was a notorious maverick, an unhappy man alienated from his colleagues; he was clearly not representative of views at Tübingen, where astrological study was generally held in high regard.39 He was moreover neither a mathematician nor a theologian, and his indictment of the stargazers, like other works issued in Latin, was of little concern to those who sailed the seas of vernacular publication. The sort of anti-astrological polemic represented by Aurifaber and Stoltz would again surface forcefully only toward the end of our period, in the second and third decades of the seventeenth century. One example of the growing reaction against popular astrology around that time is a tract published at Erfurt in 1624 by Henning Fridrich, a Saxon pastor, titled Gründliche Widerlegung der Abergläubischen Astrologorum. Decrying the ubiquitous practicas, astrological calendars, nativity books, and the like, all of which were “as soon to be found in our houses as the Holy Bible,” Fridrich presented a long and detailed sermon against a pervasive obsession that amounted in his eyes to heathen magic and an idolatrous violation of the first commandment. He made much of every hint of a dismissive attitude he could cull from Luther’s writings, and worked to cast Melanchthon’s belief in stargazing as a deeply misguided superstition. The main source for his substantive arguments, however, was the 1554 work of Aurifaber and Stoltz, which he quoted and paraphrased repeatedly.40

37 While occasional polemical exchanges between astrologers and preachers continued to break out in the 1560s, these conflicts did not necessarily imply any fundamental and inherent conflict of views between the practica-writers and biblical preachers. The prolific Nuremberg astrologer Joachim Heller held strong Gnesio-Lutheran views. Yet like his successor Christian Heiden, an equally ardent Melanchthonian, he was engaged in numerous public disputes over matters both theological and mundane. On Heller and Heiden see Matthäus, “Zur Geschichte des Nürnberger Kalenderwesens,” 1025–43. 38 Pfister, Parodien (see note 3 above). 39 Nicodemus Frischlin, De astronomicae artis cum doctrina coelesti, et naturali philosophia congruentia… (Frankfurt, 1586). On this work see the discussion in Allen, The Star-Crossed Renaissance, 87–89; also Methuen, Kepler’s Tübingen, 118–24. Still useful on the learned debates in which Frischlin was engaged is Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, Vol. VI (New York, 1941), Chs. XXXIII–XXXV, 99–206. 40 Henning Fridrich, Gründliche Widerlegung der Abergläubischen Astrologorum, So auss dem Gestirn… vom Glück vnd Vnglück eines Menschen propheceyen/oder Weissagen/vnd damit eitel Teuffelische Lügen fürgeben (Erfurt, 1624). Fridrich identified himself as pastor at Herbsleben.

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Had his search for theological support allowed him to cite works by German Catholics or Calvinists, Fridrich would have had no trouble finding more recent and equally forceful diatribes against the astrologers. But this obviously committed Lutheran was looking for confessionally pure witnesses whose arguments might easily be deployed in popular polemic. For this purpose his choices were limited; indeed the best one he could discover was already several generations old.41 Equally notable is that after decades of intense Lutheran engagement with the stars and their messages, Fridrich now conceived a parallel between the astrologers and the hated Calvinists. Just as the Calvinists placed Christ in the heavens (opposing the doctrine of ubiquity), so the astrologers would make Christians subject to external heavenly influence; and just as the Calvinists restricted divine grace by making God responsible for eternal damnation, so the astrologers’ teachings limited the saving power of the divine Word. In a similar vein the astrologers could be compared with the Papists, who taught that it was not enough to believe what was clearly revealed in Holy Scripture, but clung to foolish human inventions and traditions.42 These analogies amounted to imaginative twists in light of prevailing attitudes among the three main confessions over the seventy years since the attack of Aurifaber and Stoltz. If biblically oriented Lutherans were waging a war against astrology, why do we find such weak and scattered evidence of it during these decades? It appears, rather, that no persistent campaign of this sort materialized. For despite some examples of sharp opposition around mid-century, when astrology quickly emerged as a major vehicle for Lutheran preaching and propaganda, already by the 1570s the Melanchthonian position had clearly prevailed, had in fact become so commonly acknowledged that hardly anyone wasted the effort to question it. Not only had these teachings become the basis of a thoroughly pervasive discourse, sanctioned by city councils and territorial 41 The vernacular debate had been rekindled well before Fridrich’s work appeared, but many if not most of the slightly earlier anti-astrological writings appear to have come from Calvinists. For instance: Abraham Scultetus, Warnung Für der Warsagerey der Zäuberer vnd Sterngücker, verfast in zwoen Predigten (Amberg, 1609). An exchange between Philipp Fesel (a Calvinist?) and the Lutheran preacher Melchior Schaerer in 1609–11 showed parallels with the Erastus-Stathmion debate decades earlier: Philipp Fesel, Gründtlicher Discvrs von der Astrologia Judiciaria (Strassburg, 1609); Melchior Schaerer, Verantwortung vnd Rettung der Argumenten vnd Vrsachen, welche M. Melchior Schaerer … Eingeführet: Wider den Hochgelehrten Herrn Philippum Feselium (n.p., 1611). Johann Kepler joined this debate in defense of a carefully limited astrology: Tertivs Interveniens: Das ist, Warnung an etliche Theologos, Medicos, et Philosophos, sonderlich D. Philippum Feselium, das sie … nicht das Kindt mit dem Badt aussschüten… Frankfurt a. M., 1610). Several Lutheran works attacked abuses of astrology among the practica-writers, but not its basic assumptions, for example Huldericus Schoethusius, Calenderbutzer, das ist, Was von den Calender-Schreiber Prognosticis zu halten … (n.p., 1614). 42 Fridrich, Gründliche Widerlegung; parallel with the Calvinists: 17; with the Romanists: 50.

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princes, and consistently refueled and intensified by a host of well-established professional publicists. Even Lutherans whose desire for theological purity may have sparked initial criticism of the astrologers had little or no motivation for sustained hostility against widely read authors who preached zealously on human helplessness, insisted that the heavens and all of nature were but the handmaidens of an all-powerful God, and harped on the celestial signs as warnings to immediate repentance in the face of divine wrath and impending judgment. In short, no program to shape Lutheran confessional identity in the late sixteenth century could divorce itself entirely from the astrological publicists. Even if one doubted their pretended art, one could hardly scorn their public influence. The best one could do under such circumstances was perhaps to use the all-pervasive imagery of the practicas in a metaphorical way in an effort to teach biblical lessons. This was a tack taken by several writers, including the theologian Andreae. The picture of an anti-astrological war led by one Lutheran faction on the basis of theological principle is based on a largely abstract and anachronistic conception of inherent conflict between philosophical and biblical outlooks, or more precisely between astrological and apocalyptic messages.43 Historically, astrology has at least as often served to intensify a sense of apocalyptic imminence as to dampen such an outlook. Just as biblical texts, the stars could be deployed either to support or to oppose apocalyptic expectancy. Instead of positing an archetypal opposition between humanistic astrology and biblical apocalypticism, we need to acknowledge two forms of apocalyptic imagery, which were mutually and powerfully reinforcing. Both forms depended upon a dialectical, indeed paradoxical recognition of divine order and divine freedom, and both contributed to the formation of Lutheran confessional identity. The biblical preacher of the nearing judgment dwelled on both the fulfillment of a divine plan and waxing disorder in the last times. For the evangelical astrologer, the stars hammered home in a closely parallel way simultaneous messages of natural order and universal breakdown. An ongoing if ultimately contingent natural order was taken for granted in the practicas: the first calling of the calendar- and practica-writers was to supply basic orientation to the laws of human existence in the natural world. By virtue of 43 Leppin, Antichrist und Jüngster Tag, sees this conflict mainly in terms of “strict” Lutheran (Gnesio-Lutheran) conviction about the incompatibility of humanistic philosophy and evangelical theology. Recognizing many exceptions, he is forced to fall back on a concept of “affinities”: the strict Lutherans thus showed a special affinity for the “apocalyptic” message. This approach obscures the larger affinity between Lutheran preachers and astrologers.

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laying out a calendar for each coming year, measuring out the moons and seasons, predicting the planetary movements and drawing out the probable natural consequences, these works supplied guides for daily living. At the same time, the majority of the practica-writers recognized the extrordinary character of their own day. In biblical terms, the central apocalyptic signs were the revival of the pure Gospel and the revelation of the Roman Antichrist, two sides of the same prophetic coin.44 These were crucial and complementary indicators that the last days had come, history had run its course, the end was imminent. The apocalyptically minded astrologers often echoed this perspective, emphasizing not only the prophetic image of the Antichrist but also the eschatological significance of the revived Gospel. In his practica for 1579, for example, Matthaeus Bader cited the certainty of “the highly inspired man of God,” Doctor Luther, “that the final break must come,” and noted Luther’s avowal that he had “no other comfort or hope than that the last day was at the door.”45 An equally common theme was the rapid multiplication of the astrological signs – regular as well as irregular – that pointed to Christ’s return, to the imminent collapse of the natural order. The astrological perspective was no less apocalyptic on account of its sources in the patterns of the visible world. For the practica writers, any rigid distinction between astrological causes and divine warning signs was practically meaningless. Comets, for example, had long been objects of astrological analysis; both their terrestrial effects and their larger meanings had to be judged according to their movements amidst the planets and constellations. As Johann Hebenstreit wrote in his practica for 1559, it was part of the astrologer’s calling to announce such signs as indicators of God’s wrath. In a practica for 1572, Johannes Rau explained that all the heavenly phenomena, including entirely predictable ones such as planetary conjunctions, quadratures, and oppositions, as well as eclipses, were to be regarded as signs with prophetic meaning as well as natural events with terrestrial effects.46 Such arguments overran theological as well as philosophical boundaries, and moved in fact toward an Augustinian understanding of the entire creation as a tissue of miraculous signs. At the same time, however, this position maintained the value of astrology as a practical art for human adaptation to natural law. The synthesis of astrology 44 Leppin, Antichrist und Jüngster Tag, is to be criticized for his nearly exclusive emphasis on the revelation of the Antichrist as an apocalyptic sign, and insufficient attention to the positive recovery of the gospel. Moreover, to restrict the essence of Lutheran apocalypticism to the Antichrist idea is again to impose abstract and artificial categories on the Reformation-era discourse. 45 Matthaeus Bader, Predictiones Meteorologicae [1579] (Strassburg, 1578), Biiij/v. 46 Johann Hebenstreit, Prognosticon/von allerley seltzamen zufellen des [1559] Jhars (Erfurt, 1558), Aij–Aij/v; Johannes Rhau, Prognosticon Astrologicvm … auff das jar [1572] (Frankfurt a. M., 1571), Aij.

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as philosophical art and prophetic preaching remained a central feature in popular publication well into the seventeenth century. At least one broad shift is noticeable in the outlook of the practica-writers. During the middle decades of the sixteenth century and through the 1570s, the biblical texts they cited most often were the Old Testament prophets, and their preaching was accordingly filled with admonitions and threats against those who lived godless lives, ignoring divine law. By the decades around 1600, however, the prevailing tone had become marked by more thorough disgust with and alienation from a sinful world. The practica-writers preached more furiously than ever on the signs of celestial and universal disorder, and referred more often to New Testament promises of deliverance.47 One turning point came with the presumed seventh world-historical “great conjunction” in 1583–84. In its wake, several prominent writers suggested that the time God had charted for the world was manifestly over. It was now clearer than ever that every second was a gift of grace. With growing urgency toward the turn of the century, the practica-writers preached that not a moment in this life could be taken for granted. References to “the breaking in of the last day” as a present reality grew ever more frequent in the decades around 1600.48 Numerous evangelical preachers and astrologers publicized the belief that the heavens themselves were collapsing at an accelerating pace; the dissolution of the cosmos was becoming dramatically evident.49 For the astrologers, however, the growing chaos did not indicate God’s utter abandonment of his creation. One had to live in the natural world, with the paradox of natural order and disorder, until the trumpet finally sounded. This astrological message complemented that of the more biblical preachers so well that for decades their relationship was a mainly cooperative alliance. There are good reasons to believe that the spiritual and cosmic siege mentality manifested in the astrological publicity was in fact central to the outlook of Lutheran culture. Robert Kolb has described the Lutheran position in the late sixteenth century as a “battle on two fronts,” i.e. against the other two major confessions. We might go further and add that many Lutherans regarded themselves as fighting on innumerable fronts at once. While Luther had identified only one genuine Antichrist, by the end of the century his followers were discovering a whole host of Antichrists, not only Papists and 47 On this shift see my “Hope and Despair in Sixteenth-Century German Almanacs,” in Hans R. Guggisberg and Gottfied G. Krodel, eds, Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europa: Interpretationen und Debatten (Gütersloh, 1993), 440–61. 48 Among countless examples: Georg Frideric Caesius, Prognosticon Astrologicvm [1603] (Nuremberg, 1602), Aij/v: “der hereinbrechende Jüngsten tag.” 49 See my essay “Der herabstürzende Himmel: Kosmos und Apokalypse unter Luthers Erben um 1600,” in Manfred Jakubowski Tiessen, Hartmut Lehmann, et al., eds, Jahrhundertwenden: Endzeit- und Zukunftsvorstellungen vom 15. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1999), 129–45.

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Calvinists but Turks, enthusiasts, false prophets, warmongers, usurers, adulterers, thieves, tyrants: the world swarmed with enemies.50 The natural parallel to this complete moral and spiritual collapse was the breakdown of the cosmic order itself. As a perfectly practical matter, the task was now to defend whatever order remained against threats from both without and within. The practicas were widely recognized for their immense power as a public medium. As we might well expect, then, they commonly reflected elements of the “Aristotelian patriarchalism” that has been associated with Melanchthonian teachings.51 They were marked by a fundamentally defensive social and political outlook, most clearly expressed in deference to secular authorities, but also in general fears of social and economic breakdown. In 1570 Victorin Schönfelt offered his predictions about coming scarcity so that the needy “might better order their household economy and might have the necessary food when the time comes.” In his forecast for 1595 Nicolaus Winckler prayed for God’s help “that poor and rich may live together peacefully, [and] that no unrest will be awakened among subjects against Reich and government.”52 The astrologers preached that children were to obey their parents, wives to obey their husbands, citizens to obey their rulers, and all to obey God. When they saw social or political rebellion on the horizon, they rarely failed to predict bloody but divinely ordained punishment for those involved. Such admonitions complemented apocalyptic expectancy: the role of established authorities was to maintain a modicum of stability for believers in a crumbling world from which they would soon be delivered. Thus secular power was itself restricted to an essentially conservative role, maintaining traditional freedoms as well as order. To defend an existing order was not the same as mobilizing a new one; in a disintegrating world, new structures merely added to the chaos. Georg Caesius, a prominent pastor-astrologer in 50 Scott Dixon has made the argument that the adoption of popular astrology as a means of Lutheran preaching was owing above all to the sense that “the Reformation movement had not succeeded in its essential task, that of winning hearts and minds to the new faith”; most clergy “saw the last chance for the faith in these ‘astral sermons’.” This last assertion overlooks the Melanchthonian training that led many pastors to see astrology as a prophetic art, and hence underplays the inherent cosmological aspect of Lutheran apocalypticism. But Dixon’s approach recognizes that pastor-astrologers shared a deepening disappointment in the progress of the gospel, and that their growing desperation was not unrelated to their use of the widest possible channels of mass-communication. Dixon, “Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda,” 416–17. On the theme of growing pessimism see also my “Hope and Despair” (above, note 47). 51 Robert Kolb, “Die Umgestaltung und theologische Bedeutung des Lutherbildes im späten 16. Jahrhundert,” in Rublack, ed., Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung, 202–31; here 213. 52 Victorin Schönfelt, Prognosticon Astrologicvm. Auff [1571] (n.p., 1570), Eij/v; Nicolaus Winckler, Practica vnd Bedencken ex Lege Naturae … Auff das Jahr [1595] (Augsburg, 1594), Biij.

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Brandenburg, repeatedly offered high praise and support to the electoral house and its agents. But he made it clear that neither the elector nor his subjects would be around for long; hence the attention of all classes should be on the coming end. The physician-astrologer Nicholas Weiss railed against the ungratefulness and corruption evident at every level of society. The coming divine punishments would include disasters for the great lords as well as unprecedented misery for the common people. He predicted that in the years before 1588, “many lands and peoples will be piteously wasted, and there will be many new laws and regulations; similarly the old freedoms and civic statutes will be much altered.” Christian Heiden’s popular practicas similarly warned that zealous efforts would be needed to maintain the “old freedoms” in whatever time remained before the last judgment.53 Among the greatest dangers to the tenuous order guarded by Lutherans was any institutionalized form of clerical power. Despite the large number of evangelical pastor-astrologers, some of whom became extremely prominent, popular astrology remained essentially a practical lay tool, subject to lay control, and reflecting mainly lay values. In a basic sense the stargazer’s art was inherently anticlerical: it called for an unmediated reading of the natural text, a book that lay open, at least potentially, to everyone. The practica-writers acknowledged the responsibility of clergymen to preach the word of God, but rarely implied that clerical authority should extend any further. Indeed, from the early years of the evangelical movement, anticlerical currents had generally run together with apocalypticism; it should therefore not surprise us to discover both of these themes in the practicas. With reference to a somewhat later English setting, Bernard Capp has referred to “the astrologers’ ferocious anti-clericalism,” directed against both popery and presbyterianism; a parallel if slightly less marked phenomenon is to be found in Lutheran Germany during our period.54 Among evangelical astrologers, anti-clerical sentiment was most often expressed as intense distrust of clerically enforced moral discipline. In this sense, both the Romanists and the Calvinists posed threats to the “old freedoms.” Anti-Romanism and anti-Calvinism, while only implicit in many practicas, often surfaced clearly. Opposition to the Roman Antichrist became especially marked in the wake of the new Gregorian calender (1582), which the majority of practica writers decried as a blatant example of satanic corruption: the pope and his hirelings were trying to confuse the order of time itself. Explicit expressions of anti-Calvinism were less common, but certainly 53 Georg Caesius, Practica oder Prognosticon Auff das Jar [1584] (Nuremberg, 1587), Preface; Nicholas Weiss, Practica auff Zehen Jahr… (n.p., 1578), Aiij/v; Christian Heiden, Practica … Auff das [1567] Jar (Nuremberg, 1566), Bij. 54 Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London/Boston, 1979), 150–63 et passim; here 154.

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appeared, as when Albin Moller predicted great misfortune in 1595, especially in lands to the west, “because of the malicious Calvinists.”55 The astrologers were well aware that true teaching had to be identified partly through reference to what was false. Thus even as the tone of the practicas grew more negative and despairing over time, a basic social defensiveness remained a consistent note in these writings, a defensiveness of established order as well as of established liberties. The goal was to maintain a modicum of stability in a swiftly crumbling world. Insofar as they disseminated this basic message, the mass-market astrological works can hardly be understood as reflecting any new movement of social discipline.56 What was central in Lutheran settings, it appears, was rather the sense of failure to achieve meaningful discipline through the preaching of the gospel. The more evident it became that the Word had not done its work, the more frustration and pessimism mounted, the clearer it became that what defined Lutheran evangelicals was precisely their conviction that the gospel hope lay entirely beyond this world. Melanchthonian teachings and the readymade forms of popular astrological literature offered precisely what was needed for preaching this message while also driving home the defensive need for personal discipline and social order. Practica writers clearly shared with official evangelical preachers a conception of their own prophetic role, which was to sound an urgent and universal alarm. The striking and undeniable adoption of a popular astrological culture among German Lutherans therefore reinforces the general picture presented a century ago by Ernst Troeltsch, who argued that early Lutheranism was supportive of a highly traditional social order, and thus in most respects did not promote the development of the modern state.57 “That the Providence of God is knowable through this world,” writes Sachiko Kusukawa, “is a specifically Lutheran interpretation.” These words, intended Albin Moller, Practica Astrologica… auff das Jahr [1595] (Nuremberg, 1594), Dij/v. The standard model of confessionalization as developed by Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, among others, sees the heart of the process as a movement of “social disciplining” that was a step toward modern state-formation. While this model has recently been challenged in several respects, it remains highly influential. For a classic statement see Heinz Schilling, “Confessionalization in the Empire: Religious and Societal change in Germany between 1555 and 1620,” Chapter 5 in Schilling’s Religion, Political culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society: Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden/New York/ Cologne, 1992), 205–45. Troeltsch’s view that early Lutheranism defended the traditional society of estates has been revived by Luise Schorn-Schütte, “Lutherische Konfessionalisierung? Das Beispiel Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel (1589–1613),” in Rublack, ed., Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung, 163–94. 57 See Ernst Troeltsch, The Social Teachings of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon; Vol. 2 (New York, 1931). 55 56

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to illuminate the significance of Melanchthonian natural philosophy in particular, recall another observation made long ago by Troeltsch, that “the relative uniformity of early Lutheran culture” was based on “the assumption of an inward unity and conformity of Natural Law with the Christian Spirit.”58 The former insight hints at what set Lutheranism apart, while the latter points to what united Lutheran culture. But both suggest that early Lutherans did not make a sharp separation between the knowledge of nature and of God, and that it is a serious error to approach their world of thought, or the confessional identity they began to conceive in the later sixteenth century, as if they thought in modern theological or philosophical categories. The evidence is strong that Lutheran confessional culture proved welcoming to the cultivation of astrological imagery and assumptions in a way that was not characteristic of German Catholicism or Calvinism in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. In these latter settings, clerical opposition tended to restrict the art to elites, and limited its influence on broadly shared perceptions. The great majority of Lutheran clerics, on the other hand, seem to have indulged and even promoted a popular astrological culture that complemented and strongly articulated their own increasingly intense apocalyptic outlook. This pervasive astrological discourse thus stood not in opposition to the drive to establish a Lutheran confessional identity, but rather contributed to the development of that identity. Regarding the social and political realm, the popular astrological literature conveyed teachings that legitimized established secular authorities, but that preached lay freedom from clerical control and resisted new forms of authority. Hence in the practicas, which formed a major channel for the shaping of public attitudes, we do not find much evidence of an outlook favorable to confessionalization in the sense of political modernization. Lutheran confessional identity in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was closely tied to apocalyptic expectancy; true believers were those who lived lives of repentance in the face of imminent judgment and the eternal kingdom. Far from excluding cosmological evidence and reckonings, this outlook included them. When the alliance between evangelical preaching and popular astrology finally began to unravel by around 1620, what survived was not biblical apocalypticism shorn of non-biblical accretions, but scholastic doctrines that moved to disavow all forms of apocalypticism, biblical as well as astrological. The leaders of seventeenth-century Lutheran orthodoxy would successfully present themselves as the upholders of pure teaching, even as they abandoned evangelical apocalypticism in favor of a highly personalized and even spiritualized eschatology. Ultimately they 58 Sachiko Kusukawa, “Aspectio divinorum operum: Melanchthon and Astrology for Lutheran Medics,” in Ole Peter Grell and Andrew Cunningham, eds, Medicine and the Reformation (London/New York, 1993), 33–56; here 43; Troeltsch, The Social Teachings, 535.

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repudiated a message that had been central to the early formation of Lutheran confessional identity, a message in which not only the biblical truths of law and Gospel, but also the natural evidence of cosmic order and divine omnipotence, stood in paradoxical juxtaposition. It was perhaps only as this repudiation took place, as the meaning of order and freedom became less paradoxical amidst the chaos and bloodshed of the Thirty Years’ War, that the real process of Lutheran confessionalization could begin.

Confessionalization and the Campaign against Prenuptial Coitus in SixteenthCentury Germany Terence McIntosh

During the sixteenth century, a handful of Protestant cities, lordships, and princely territories in central Europe introduced the first decrees and injunctions to punish properly engaged couples who cohabited before celebrating a public wedding. These measures in effect launched a campaign that, by the late seventeenth century, resulted in the widespread criminalization of prenuptial coitus.1 The striking paucity of evidence of prosecutions before the Thirty Years’ War suggests weak enforcement, but thereafter the authorities demonstrated considerable resolve and effectiveness in punishing offenders. As a result, large numbers of young men and women who courted and married in accordance with time-honored local practices came before secular and ecclesiastical officials and paid fines, spent time in prison, and performed public church penance.2 Moreover the criminalization of prenuptial coitus hastened a radical transformation in the way in which Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the third triennial international conference of Frühe Neuzeit Interdisziplinär (Pittsburgh, April 2001) and at the Triangle Seminar in Medieval and Early Modern German Studies (Durham, NC, April 2002). The author is grateful for the helpful comments from the participants at these meetings. 1 Throughout this essay, the term “prenuptial coitus” refers exclusively to the sexual relations of a properly engaged couple before the celebration of a wedding. The contemporary terms for the crime of prenuptial coitus are früher Beischlaf, frühzeitiger Beischlaf, and coitus anticipatus. 2 Richard van Dülmen, Kultur und Alltag in der Frühen Neuzeit, Vol. 1: Das Haus und seine Menschen: 16.–18. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1990), 143–5, succinctly outlines this development. The most compelling evidence on the increasing prosecutorial zeal comes from cities. See Renate Dürr, Mägde in der Stadt: Das Beispiel Schwäbisch Hall in der Frühen Neuzeit (Frankfurt am Main, 1995), 224–45; Susanna Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit – Orte der Unzucht. Ehe und Sexualität in Basel während der Frühen Neuzeit (Paderborn, 1999), 90–105, 170–7. For a middle-sized German state, see Markus Meumann, Findelkinder, Waisenhäuser, Kindsmord: Unversorgte Kinder in der frühneuzeitlichen Gesellschaft (Munich, 1995), 72–91, which discusses the prosecution of many types of illicit sex, including prenuptial coitus, in electoral Hannover and the Hildesheim Hochstift.

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couples entered the estate of marriage. No longer did they and their families control the rites of passage that initiated conjugal life. The clergy, with the state's unqualified support, had arrogated this control, and the repeated public admonitions that a church wedding should precede cohabitation were anything but a toothless bark. The criminalization also emphatically underlined the stricter standards of moral and sexual behavior associated with the Reformation and early modern social discipline. Despite these obviously profound developments, the process by which the campaign against prenuptial coitus actually gained traction in the sixteenth century remains somewhat obscure. Some historians mistakenly (or perhaps inadvertently) suggest that, after inception in the 1530s, the campaign strengthened steadily, its triumph never in doubt. Thus after noting some of the initial sanctions against prenuptial coitus, Steven Ozment observed simply, “As the years passed, in Protestant cities and towns premarital sex and pregnancy came to be considered seduction, fornication, or adultery (assuming one party was married), each transgression carrying an appropriate punishment.”3 In fact, far from gathering momentum, the campaign against prenuptial coitus virtually stalled. During the next thirty-five years, only two German states barred properly engaged couples from having sexual relations before the church wedding. Moreover Württemberg, which had criminalized prenuptial coitus in 1537, decriminalized it in 1553. By contrast, Joel Harrington, in an exemplary study of marriage in Reformation Germany, argued that Protestant authorities prosecuted prenuptial coitus only to a limited extent. Criminal marriage ordinances, he explained, first appeared in the late fourteenth century, especially in cities, but the ordinances dealt only with major sexual offenses such as adultery, concubinage, and prostitution. In the sixteenth century, Lutheran and Calvinist cities and states reissued and sharpened these ordinances, especially the penalties for adultery. The sexual relations of properly engaged couples rarely received special attention, however.4 But Harrington’s systematic survey of Protestant marriage law does not extend much beyond 1550, and thus he did not observe the surge of new prohibitions of prenuptial coitus in the last third of the sixteenth century.5 Cohabitation by a properly betrothed couple drew increasing official censure, if not necessarily prosecutions, in the years when the early confessional struggles between the Gnesio-Lutherans and Philippists reached a head. The possible connections between these struggles,

3 Steven Ozment, When Fathers Ruled: Family Life in Reformation Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), 36. 4 Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge, 1995), 124, 145–6, 239–40. 5 Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 138, table 1. The book refers ad hoc to post-1550 marriage ordinances.

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which marked the beginning of Lutheran confessionalization, and the renewal of the campaign against prenuptial coitus demand consideration. This essay draws primarily on Walter Köhler’s detailed study of sixteenthcentury Swiss and South German marriage legislation and the sixteenthcentury Protestant church and marriage ordinances published in the series of volumes edited initially by Emil Sehling. Covering Saxony, Brandenburg, Mecklenburg, Pomerania, Lower Saxony, Hesse, the Electoral Palatine, Bavaria, a portion of Württemberg, and other regions, these volumes provide sufficient geographical scope for broad generalizations. A critical study of the ordinances shows that, for most of the sixteenth century, princes and magistrates generally expressed little concern about prenuptial coitus. Significantly, however, their attention focused on the considerably more urgent and socially disruptive problem of clandestine marriages of minors and adults and the sexual relations that could follow. The attack on clandestine marriages created inconsistencies in the application of marriage law that, by the end of the sixteenth century, may have contributed to the growing interest by church and state to renew the campaign against prenuptial coitus. To appreciate fully the authorities’ distinct concerns about prenuptial coitus and clandestine marriages, one should recall briefly some important elements in the Reformation’s reappraisal of the institution of marriage. Naturally, the arguments of Martin Luther loom large.6 In vehemently rejecting canon law’s distinction between the present vows of marriage (sponsalia per verba de praesenti) and the promise to exchange vows in the future (sponsalia per verba de futuro), Luther contended that the exchange of vows by the couple established a valid marriage. In other words, regardless of the vows’ temporal frame (present or future), their exchange forged the conjugal bond immediately. In Luther’s eyes, a public engagement, or betrothal, which, ipso facto, involved an exchange of vows, constituted a valid marriage forthwith. The wedding ceremony itself had no constitutive power but affirmed publicly the validity of the marriage already established by the engagement.7 Not surprisingly, Luther advocated as short an interval as possible between the betrothal on the one hand and the wedding and the establishment of a household on the other. Shortening the interval would reduce the likelihood that one partner would break the engagement and, thus, the marriage before their public affirmation and sexual consummation. 6 For the following discussion, see Hartwig Dieterich, Das protestantische Eherecht in Deutschland bis zur Mitte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Munich, 1970), 53–5, 93; Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 91–2, 201, 204–5. 7 Thus Martin Luther wrote, “Denn wir droben gehort haben, das eine offentliche verlobte dirne heisse eine Ehefraw, und das solch offentlich verlöbnis … stiffte eine rechte redliche Ehe. … Es ist eben so wol ein Ehe nach dem offentlichen verlöbnis als nach der hochzeit.” Von Ehesachen, in D. Martin Luthers Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, 101 vols to date (Weimar, 1883–), 30/3: 231.

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Luther also emphatically rejected clandestine marriages. He demanded that the betrothal occur publicly, in the presence of witnesses, and, much more importantly, that the couple’s parents approve the betrothal expressly. Thus an engagement that lacked either public witnesses or parental approval also lacked validity and did not constitute a marriage. But this principle admitted one major exception. Luther and other early Protestants conceded that the sexual consummation of a clandestine marriage created a valid marriage. Although the principle and the concession lacked logical congruency, they made it both possible and desirable for secular government to intervene and punish separately clandestine engagements, which were invalid, and their sexual consummation, which repaired the invalidity. Indeed, to banish the plague of secret engagements, Luther admonished the authorities to punish the consummation and thus close an enormous loophole for couples who wished to marry without parental approval.8 But this intervention, one must emphasize, had in principle no implications for prenuptial coitus, the sexual consummation of a public engagement before the wedding. Because a public engagement already constituted a valid marriage and the wedding had no constitutive power, prenuptial coitus, in theory, posed no problem. How then did the campaign against prenuptial coitus gain traction? Zurich marched in the vanguard. In 1534, three years after Huldrych Zwingli’s death on the battlefield of Kappel, the city decreed that betrothed couples that had sexual relations before the solemnization of their vows in church had to pay a fine of ten pounds. Such couples merited this punishment because they had not only dishonored the estate of marriage (dadurch nit nur der h. eestand entehret wird) but also risked shame and embarrassing difficulties (lychtlich große ungelegenheiten, auch schmach und schand ervolgen möchten). According to Köhler, the Zurich law marked the first and decisive step by Protestants to require a church wedding before the marriage’s sexual consummation.9 But other Swiss-German cities did not rush to follow Zurich’s lead. Although Sankt Gallen introduced its first marriage court ordinance in 1547, it did not proscribe the sexual relations of properly engaged couples. Basel introduced a marriage court ordinance in 1533, but during the next fourteen years, the period covered in Köhler’s study, the magistrates did not amend the ordinance in any way in order to sanction cohabitation before the wedding. In fact, the city criminalized prenuptial Von Ehesachen, WA, 30/3: 217, 218, 226. Walther Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht und Genfer Konsistorium, Vol. 1: Das Zürcher Ehegericht und seine Auswirkung in der deutschen Schweiz zur Zeit Zwinglis (Leipzig, 1932), 104–5. 8 9

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coitus only in 1637.10 Similarly, the magistrates in Bern introduced a marriage court ordinance in November 1530, but none of the subsequent mandates issue before 1539 concerned cohabitation before the wedding. In fact, Bern criminalized prenuptial coitus only in 1686.11 In Graubünden, the League of the Ten Jurisdictions (Zehngerichtenbund), an association of peasant communes, adopted marriage articles in 1532 similar to those enacted in Zurich in 1525. But when the League confirmed and revised its marriage articles in 1543 and 1561, it did not enjoin a properly engaged couple from having intimacy prior to the nuptials.12 Remarkably then, Zurich’s novel measure of 1534 did not produce any resonance among neighboring leagues and city-states. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, Straßburg’s Reformation church ordinance of 1534 did not prohibit prenuptial coitus. In an episcopal admonition from 1480, Albert, the bishop of Straßburg, called upon the clergy to exhort engaged couples not to have sexual relations before the solemnification of their marriage. Reissued in 1508–10 and 1513, the admonition does not mention any sanctions, but it does indicate that at least some late medieval churchmen disapproved of cohabitation before the wedding.13 The Alsatian metropole, it seems, had already embarked on the same course as Zurich’s. But Martin Bucer, who helped to draft the 1534 church ordinance and, in his 1533 memorial for Ulm’s magistrates, attached much significance to the church wedding as a seal of a marriage’s validity, apparently did not perceive any need for the ordinance to address the issue of prenuptial coitus. Significantly, in 1542, Straßburg preachers complained that betrothed couples began cohabiting roughly a month before their wedding.14 10

Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht, 1: 261–8, 298–303, 400–2; Burghartz, Zeiten der Reinheit,

90–4. 11 Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht, 1: 333–43; Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Dorf und Religion. Reformierte Sittenzucht in Berner Landgemeinden der Frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart, 1995), 200–1, 210. Köhler traced the developments in Schaffhausen and Glarus only until 1532 and in Chur only until 1535. 12 Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht, 1: 383–5; R. Wagner, “Rechtsquellen des Cantons Graubünden,” Zeitschrift für schweizerisches Recht 26 (1885): 96–100. On the origins of the League of the Ten Jurisdictions, see Randolph C. Head, Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons: Social Order and Political Language in a Swiss Mountain Canton, 1470–1620 (Cambridge, 1995), 45–7, 53–5. 13 Walther Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht und Genfer Konsistorium, Vol. 2: Das Ehe- und Sittengericht in den süddeutschen Reichsstädten, dem Herzogtum Württemberg und in Genf (Leipzig, 1942), 357; François Wendel, Le mariage à Strasbourg à l’époque de la Réforme, 1520–1692 (Strasbourg, 1928), 214, 215. 14 Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht, 2: 6, 434–5, 500. See also H. J. Selderhuis, “Martin Bucer und die Ehe,” in Christian Krieger and Marc Lienhard, eds Martin Bucer and Sixteenth Century Europe: Actes du colloque de Strasbourg (28–31 août 1991), 2 vols (Leiden, 1993), 1: 178. For the text of the section on marriage in the 1534 Straßburg church ordinance, see Aemilius Ludwig Richter, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts: Urkunden

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Augsburg and Nuremberg, the wealthiest and most important urban centers in the Holy Roman Empire, also deserve consideration, but for two entirely different reasons. In 1537, Augburg’s magistrates issued the city’s famous Discipline Ordinance (Zuchtordnung), an enumeration of the crimes that would draw prosecution. The Discipline Ordinance criminalized prenuptial coitus, without, however, specifying the particular punishment.15 Thus three years after Zurich’s injunction, a bandwagon was forming. Steven Ozment would like to place Nuremberg on this bandwagon, claiming that the city’s 1537 marriage ordinance also punished prenuptial coitus.16 Unfortunately, he misinterpreted his sources. Nuremberg did not issue a marriage ordinance in 1537, although the city and the margraviate of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach jointly promulgated a church ordinance in 1533. This ordinance did not prohibit prenuptial coitus, however. Four years later, in 1537, the city council issued a mandate concerning the reading of the banns prior to a public wedding. Judith Harvey, in her dissertation on Nuremberg’s marriage laws, speculated that the city fathers, in 1537, may have accepted the view that a church wedding and not the marriage promise established the validity of the marriage bond, a position contrary to Luther’s. Even so, the magistrates’ view, unless framed in law, did not mean that a betrothed couple’s intimacy constituted a criminal act. Only in 1582, at a time when a number of other German cities and princely territories officially proscribed prenuptial coitus, did Nuremberg do the same.17 The first princely territory to join the campaign was the Duchy of Württemberg, but it soon deserted. The 1537 marriage ordinance, which Duke Ulrich issued shortly after the introduction of the Reformation, included a prohibition of sexual relations by an engaged couple before the solemnization of the marriage in church; marriage judges and councilors had the authority to punish infractions.18 In preparing to revise the duchy’s

und Regesten zur Geschichte des Rechts und der Verfassung der evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, Vol. 1: Vom Anfange der Reformation bis zur Begründung der Consistorialverfassung im J. 1542 (Weimar, 1846; reprint, Nieuwkoop, 1967), 238. 15 Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht, 2: 320. Köhler treated Augsburg’s prohibition of prenuptial coitus in a cryptic and disappointingly cursory fashion, in contrast to his extended discussion of Zurich’s 1534 prohibition. Puzzlingly, Lyndal Roper did not mention Augsburg’s prohibition at all: “‘Going to Church and Street’: Weddings in Reformation Augsburg,” Past and Present 106 (February 1985): 81–93; The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989), 143–7, 154–64. Steven Ozment, however, cited a crucial passage from the Discipline Ordinance: When Fathers Ruled, 36, 197. 16 Ozment, When Fathers Ruled, 36. 17 Judith Walters Harvey, “The Influence of the Reformation on Nürnberg Marriage Laws, 1520–1535,” (Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, 1972), 57–61; Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 11: Bayern: Franken, ed. Matthias Simon (Tübingen, 1961), 482, 557–8. 18 Richter, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 1: 281. Although Johannes Brenz

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marriage ordinance, however, Duke Christoph, Ulrich’s son, requested in 1551 that the jurists Bonifacius Amerbach in Basel and Johann Sichard in Tübingen assess the existing provisions. While Amerbach enthusiastically applauded the prohibition on sexual relations before the church wedding, Sichard demurred. He argued that since the couple’s consent, or promise of marriage, effected the conjugal union and the wedding itself did not contribute materially to the marriage’s consummation, the prenuptial sexual relations of a betrothed couple deserved no punishment. Sichard’s demurral prevailed, and the 1553 marriage ordinance did not mention prenuptial coitus at all.19 Duke Christoph’s doubts about the prohibition, the jurists’ contrasting opinions, and the subsequent policy reversal all point to an unsteady intellectual ground incapable of supporting a broad assault on traditional practices of courtship and marriage. Reformed Geneva possessed none of Württemberg’s irresolution. Undoubtedly reflecting John Calvin’s indefatigable drive to restore order to a disordered world, a 1547 ecclesiastical ordinance for rural churches, a 1547 council ordinance, and the 1561 marriage ordinance prohibited betrothed couples from cohabiting before the celebration of a church wedding. The 1561 marriage ordinance prescribed for the violators a three-day imprisonment and an appearance before the consistory, a punishment considerably more severe than that enacted in Zurich in 1534.20 But Geneva’s criminalization of prenuptial coitus did not give new impulses to the campaign in the German territories. This failure reflected in part linguistic and cultural barriers and, much more importantly, the gradual solidification of the confessional walls separating the Evangelical and Reformed faiths. In the 1570s and 1580s, the surge of new injunctions against prenuptial coitus originated in the Lutheran camp. By 1555, when the Peace of Augsburg achieved a fragile political and religious equipoise in the Holy Roman Empire, remarkably little had changed regarding marriage law’s treatment of properly betrothed couples. Bar Geneva,

apparently authored much of the 1537 marriage ordinance, none of his earlier writings broached the subject of prenuptial coitus. Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht, 2: 235–3. 19 Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht, 2: 255, 260 n.126. See also idem, “Bonifacius Amerbach und die württembergische Eheordnung von 1553,” in Vom Wesen und Wandel der Kirche. Zum siebzigsten Geburtstag von Eberhard Vischer, ed. Theologische Fakultät der Universität Basel (Basel, 1935): 60, 68–9. Aemilius Ludwig Richter, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des sechszehnten Jahrhunderts: Urkunden und Regesten zur Geschichte des Rechts und der Verfassung der evangelischen Kirche in Deutschland, Vol. 2: Vom Jahre 1542 bis zu Ende des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts (Weimar, 1846; reprint, Nieuwkoop, 1967), 128–31, has the text of the 1553 marriage ordinance. 20 Köhler, Zürcher Ehegericht, 2: 625, 628–9, 636–7, 642.

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only Zurich, Augsburg, and Württemberg had criminalized prenuptial coitus, and the duchy failed to stay the course. One finds little compelling evidence to suggest that other cities, lordships, and princely territories had introduced similar proscriptions. In the middle decades of the sixteenth century, however, Protestant polities began, on a fairly wide scale, to criminalize clandestine marriages. Moreover, in a few cases in which a territory issued two marriage ordinances during the period, the authorities’ apprehension over the sexual consummation of clandestine marriages palpably increased. Württemberg illustrates clearly this growing alarm. The duchy’s 1537 marriage ordinance prohibited clandestine marriages for both minors and those who had reached majority, declared such unions invalid, and threatened violators with either prison sentences, loss of property, or chastisement. No provision mentioned special sanctions for a clandestine marriage’s sexual consummation, however. But the 1553 marriage ordinance added such punishments. For minors under the authority of either parents or guardians, the ordinance stated only that the consummation of a clandestine marriage would result in a commensurately more severe punishment than the nonconsummation. For those who had reached the age of majority, however, the ordinance mandated indisputably severe punishments. Guilty adult men and women received, respectively, a month and two weeks in prison with only bread and water.21 Thus, while backtracking, as already noted, with respect to prenuptial coitus, Württemberg’s 1553 marriage ordinance harshly disciplined those who consummated clandestine marriages. Developments in the Electoral Palatine paralleled those in Württemberg. Thus, while the 1546 police ordinance and the 1556 marriage ordinance prohibited and punished clandestine marriages,22 the 1563 marriage ordinance, issued just three years after Elector Friederich III adopted the Reformed religion for his territories, had sanctions specifically for the sexual consummation of such marriages. Minors guilty of this offence had to appear before the marriage court. If the court ruled that the union constituted a valid marriage, the couple still had to suffer judicial punishment, the bride could not wear an honorific wreath at the wedding, no guests could attend the wedding, and the parents or guardians did not have to transfer any portions to the couple. Nonminors who consummated a clandestine marriage and then came before the marriage court because of a dispute about the union faced imprisonment and honorific punishments if the court recognized the validity of the marriage. If the court ruled otherwise, the couple could expect a harsher punishment.23 Finally, in a case of prenuptial coitus, the 1563 ordinance Richter, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 1: 280, 2: 128–9. Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 14: Kurpfalz, ed. J. F. Gerhard Goeters (Tübingen, 1969), 7–22, 104–5, 221–3. 23 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 14: 281, 282. 21 22

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strongly suggests that an infraction had not occurred if the properly betrothed couple began cohabiting after the proclamation of the banns on three Sundays.24 As long as the engagement possessed sufficient publicity, in part to assure that neither partner had already promised to marry someone else, sexual relations could ensue. In the middle of the sixteenth century, the authorities in Württemberg and the Electoral Palatine did not regard prenuptial coitus as a crime but punished clandestine marriages and their consummation. In a study of marriage law in the landgraviate of Hesse, Uwe Sibeth has described a rather different situation – a major Evangelical territory that prohibited prenuptial coitus. A critical consideration of the arguments and evidence suggests, however, that his conclusions are overdrawn. Sibeth highlights Article 14 of the 1556 synodal decree, which prohibited a pastor from celebrating a wedding if the prospective newlyweds had, in Sibeth’s words, “sexually anticipated their marriage” (Paare, die ihre Ehe sexuell antizipiert hatten) but had not performed public church penance and which barred the couple from having various entertainments at the wedding. What Sibeth does not mention, however, is that the prohibition pertained to just a single category of sexual activity before marriage.25 To see this restriction clearly, one must bear in mind when a marriage occurred. The synod implicitly maintained that a church wedding did not constitute a valid marriage but rather confirmed one that existed through the exchange of vows, which could precede the wedding. Thus in recommending the institution of an antenuptial catechetical examination, Article 12 of the 1556 decree refers to the wedding as a confirmation and solemnification of the prospective newlywed’s marriage.26 In fact, Sibeth himself stresses that Hesse’s leading Protestants had generally embraced this particular understanding of the relation between marriage and the wedding.27 Regarding the sexual anticipation of marriage, however, the synodal decree refers only to couples that had sexual relations prior to the decision to marry (so vormals in der unehe sich leiblich erkant und hernach sich in ehestand begeben wollen) – in 24 Wir wöllen und gebieten auch ernstlichen, daß sich alle eheleuth, so zusammengeheurath und -verlobt, ein gute zeit darvor, ehe und zuvor sie zu kirchen gehen oder eynander beywohnung leysten, irem pfarherr anzeygen, auch in stetten und flecken, dreymal und auf drey Sontag, auch in einer kirche, wann die gemein beyeinander versamblet ist, offentlich verkündigen lassen [emphasis mine]. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 14: 284. 25 Uwe Sibeth, Eherecht und Staatsbildung. Ehegesetzgebung und Eherechtsprechung in der Landgrafschaft Hessen [-Kassel] in der frühen Neuzeit (Darmstadt, 1994), 145, 147, 156–7, 217; see also Alfred Niebergall, Die Geschichte der evangelischen Trauung in Hessen (Göttingen, 1972), 49–50, 64, 84. 26 [S]oll man [the pastor] erstlich niemand unverhort im catechismo, weil sie futuri patres et matres sein, seine ehe vor der kirchen mit einsegnen becreftigen [emphasis mine]. Walter Sohm and Günther Franz, eds Urkundliche Quellen zur hessischen Reformationsgeschichte, Vol. 3: 1547–1567, eds Günther Franz and Eckhart G. Franz (Marburg, 1955), 239. 27 Sibeth, Eherecht und Staatsbildung, 133–7.

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other words, prior to the engagement.28 Technically, Article 14 targets fornicators – not betrothed couples who had sexual relations before their wedding – and thus has nothing to do with prenuptial coitus. No other interpretation squares with the notions of marriage and the wedding that prevailed at the time.29 Article 14 also mentions the possible imposition of secular penalties (doch hiemit noch unbenommen u[nserem] g[nädigen] f[ürsten] und h[errn] eusserliche und weltliche strafe) on prospective newlyweds that had sexually anticipated their marriage.30 But in 1556 Hesse had no law prescribing penalties for prenuptial coitus. The 1543 church discipline ordinance, however, not only reaffirmed that a man who had sexual relations with an unmarried woman or a widow should either marry or dower her and pay a fine of thirty gulden, as required by the 1526 police ordinance, but also specified that both individuals should spend two months in prison. In all probability, the passage about secular penalties in the 1556 synodal decree refers to this provision in the 1543 ordinance.31 A decade later, the draft church ordinance of 1566 dealt with another aspect of the sexual anticipation of marriage. After affirming that those who entered a secret marriage (heimliche eheverbindung) did so by evil and irregular means and thus deserved punishment, the ordinance also notes, in a single appendant phrase, that those who “secretly have coitus” (sich heimlich beschlafen) before the wedding are also punishable.32 But ambiguity surrounds the words “secretly have coitus.” Although Sibeth does not parse the term, his discussion implies that the draft condemned all sexual activity before marriage.33 In the 1553 and 1563 marriage ordinances for, respectively,

28 Sohm and Franz, Urkundliche Quellen, 3: 239. One should note that the terms frühzeitiger Beischlaf and coitus anticipatus, the common official designations for the sexual anticipation of marriage, do not appear in Article 14. 29 The wording of the banns in the 1566 draft church ordinance also bears upon this interpretation. The pastor proclaims, “Es wollen nach göttlicher ordenung greifen zum stand der heiligen ehe N. und N., begeren zu solchem ein gemein gebet, auf daß sie diesen christlichen stand in Gottes namen anfahen und zur ehr Gottes volenden mögen.” Since the announcement of the banns occurs after the couple’s decision to marry but before the public wedding, the phrase “sich in ehestand begeben wollen” from the 1556 synodal decree is almost certainly not a circumlocution for the wedding. The 1566 draft church ordinance has inconsistencies regarding the act that constitutes a marriage, however. Moreover, because of landgrave Philip’s death in March 1567 and the division of his territory among his four sons, the draft never acquired the force of law. Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 8: Hessen: Die gemeinsamen Ordnungen, ed. Hannelore Jahr (Tübingen, 1965), 27, 32, 322. 30 Sohm and Franz, Urkundliche Quellen, 3: 239. 31 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 8: 40–41, 151. In December 1557, less than two years after the issuance of the 1556 synodal decree, the landgrave reaffirmed the provision in the 1543 ordinance. Sohm and Franz, Urkundliche Quellen, 3: 251. 32 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 8: 321. 33 Sibeth, Eherecht und Staatsbildung, 156–7.

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Württemberg and the Electoral Palatine, however, officials employed the phrase to refer specifically to couples who exchanged secret marriage promises and then had sexual relations. In other words, a secret engagement (heimliches verloben) was a necessary condition for secretly having coitus.34 Without much doubt Gerhard Hyperius and Nikolaus Rhodingus, the theologians responsible for the 1566 draft church ordinance, employed the phrase in a similar manner. In short, the authorities in Hesse had not yet contemplated the criminalization of prenuptial coitus. Theologians, along with secular officials, once again considered the intertwined issues of sex and secret marriage promises at the general synods of 1569 and 1571. These two synods deliberated sundry matters relating to the governance of the territorial church, including the preparation of the 1572 church ordinance.35 In commenting on the need for a provision in the ordinance concerning secret engagements, the 1569 synod refers to cases of “irregular coitus” (dem unordentlichen beischlaffen) acknowledged by either one or both partners.36 Although this term may mean secretly having coitus, the context alone offers no clues. The 1571 synod, however, closely linked secret marriage promises with irregular coitus (den onerbaren auch ongepurlichen fleischlichen vermischungen), indicating that the latter flowed from the former.37 Moreover, in order to discourage secret coitus (der onerbarn heimlichen vermischung vor offentlicher vollenziehung der ehe), the 1571 synod recommended that, as in other territories that had accepted the Augsburg Confession, a bride guilty of this infraction should not wear a wreath during the wedding and that the couple should abide by Article 14 of the 1556 synodal decree, which barred marrying fornicators from having various merriments at the wedding.38 Since the language of the 1571 synodal protocol corresponds seamlessly with formulations in the 1566 church ordinance and in the 1569 protocol, one can only conclude that the references to secret and irregular coitus pertained only to cases of clandestine marriage. The context never included properly betrothed couples and thus never pertained to the issue of prenuptial coitus. 34 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 14: 282, 300; Richter, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 2: 129. One finds the lexical conjunction of “secret coitus” and “secret engagement” in Martin Luther’s writings on marriage at least as early as 1530. Luther asked, for example, “Aber was sol man thun, wenn das heimlich verlöbnis nicht ein schlecht verlöbnis ist, sondern auch darauff gefolget das heimliche beschlaffen?” Von Ehesachen, WA, 30/3: 218, 220, 226. 35 Heinrich Heppe, Geschichte der hessischen Generalsynoden von 1568–1582, 2 vols (Kassel, 1847; reprint Amsterdam, 1969), 1: 18–23; Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 8: 343–4. 36 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 8: 352. 37 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 8: 360. See also Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 14: 299. 38 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 8: 360.

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Concerning the sexual anticipation of marriage, Sibeth cites also Hesse’s 1572 reformation ordinance (Ordnung vnd Reformation), but again he does not point out the limited scope of the prohibition. He suggests that it modestly sharpened Article 14’s alleged general prohibition of sexual commerce before the wedding.39 Leaving aside the fact that Article 14 applied only to marrying fornicators, one should note that the relevant passage in the 1572 reformation ordinance pertained specifically to two broad categories of court cases concerning marriage.40 The first consisted of those cases in which the accused acknowledged having sexual relations with the accuser but denied exchanging marriage promises with him or her. The second category, described simply as all other cases (allen andern fellen), consisted of various types of disputes over consummated secret marriage promises described in the preceding five paragraphs of the church ordinance.41 The passage in the 1572 ordinance did not apply to properly engaged couples, however, and thus does not by any stretch of the imagination amount to a blanket prohibition of prenuptial coitus. Nothing barred such couples from having intimacy before the wedding. Once again Sibeth neglected to explain that the passages concerning the sexual anticipation of marriage represented elements of a significantly more important discussion about secret marriage promises. The example of Hesse underscores the importance of knowing the precise prenuptial sexual offenses targeted in the marriage laws of the midsixteenth century. With few exceptions, these laws prohibited and punished, at most, the consummation of clandestine marriages and went no further.42 The Duchy of Pfalz-Zweibrücken presents a noteworthy 39 Sibeth, Eherecht und Staatsbildung, 156, 217; see also Niebergall, Geschichte der evangelischen Trauung, 65–6. 40 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 8: 403–4. 41 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 8: 402–3. Because this section of the marriage ordinance addressed, in part, secular and ecclesiastical judges who must resolve marriage disputes, different types of court cases provide the organizational frame for the discussion. Hesse’s 1572 reformation ordinance resembles Wolfenbüttel’s 1569 church ordinance, which mandated substantial prison sentences for persons no longer under parental authority who had exchanged and consummated secret marriage promises only if one partner later challenged the marriage’s validity in court. Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 6: Niedersachsen: Die Welfischen Lande, Bk. 1, Die Fürstentümer Wolfenbüttel und Lüneburg mit den Städten Braunschweig und Lüneburg, ed. A. Ritter and A. Sprengler (Tübingen, 1955), 215–16. 42 The 1572 marriage ordinance for the County of Hohenlohe-Neuenstein is a case in point. Although some of the preamble’s sweeping language suggests inadvertently that a prohibition of prenuptial coitus will follow, an earlier paragraph plus the ordinance’s specific provisions clearly indicate that the prohibition applied only to consummated clandestine marriages. Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 15: Württemberg I. Grafschaft Hohenlohe, ed. Günther Franz (Tübingen, 1977), 175, 176–7, 178–9, 200, 201–2. Concerning Hohenlohe’s campaign against clandestine marriages, see Thomas Robisheaux, “Peasants and Pastors: Rural Youth Control and the Reformation in Hohenlohe, 1540–1680,” Social History 6 (October 1981): 282–90; idem, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1989): 95–120.

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variation from the broad pattern. In January 1561, the authorities issued a prohibition with the seemingly unambiguous title “Premature Coitus before the Church Wedding” (Frühzeitige Beyschlaff vor gehaltenem Kirchgang). But the title alone obscures the directive’s limited scope. Crafted shortly after the ducal marriage court had heard an unusually complicated petition for divorce and remarriage that involved desertion, adultery, a secret marriage promise, and bribery of an official, the prohibition explicitly concerned widows and their fiancés.43 Apparently, the 1561 directive did not apply to everyone who agreed to tie the knot. PfalzZweibrücken only proves that the particulars of a marriage law mattered immensely. The devil was in the details. In the mid-sixteenth century, only one German prince criminalized prenuptial coitus. Alas, the reasons why Georg Friedrich, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, decided to forbid properly betrothed couples from cohabiting before the church wedding are far from clear. The available evidence does not suggest any explicit filiation with the earlier prohibitions in Zurich, Augsburg, and Württemberg. Nevertheless, his decision reverberated in the 1570s and 1580s, leading to similar decrees elsewhere, especially in Franconia and the Upper Palatinate. In 1558, the margrave prepared to conduct a territorial visitation and thus informed his officials of the sexual delicts that required punishment. Besides condemning clandestine engagements, adultery, lay concubinage, and desertion, he prohibited the cohabitation of bride and groom before the wedding.44 The 1561 marriage ordinance for the Duchy of Jägerndorf and the lordship Leobschütz, a Silesian fief (today Krnov in the Czech Republic and Glubczyc in Poland) acquired by Georg Friedrich in 1557, warned betrothed couples against cohabiting before the wedding. Violators risked irons or imprisonment for four days and the foregoing of music, dancing, and the wearing of the honorific bridal wreath at the wedding.45 The 1565 marriage articles for Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach repeated almost verbatim the

43 Frank Konersmann, “Disziplinierung und Verchristlichung von Sexualität und Ehe in Pfalz-Zweibrücken im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” Blätter für Pfälzische Kirchengeschichte 58 (1991): 21, 28; idem, Kirchenregiment und Kirchenzucht im frühneuzeitlichen Kleinstaat: Studien zu den herrschaftlichen und gesellschaftlichen Grundlagen des Kirchenregiments der Herzöge von Pfalz-Zweibrücken, 1410–1793 (Cologne, 1996), 305. 44 Martin Gernot Meier, Systembruch und Neuordnung. Reformation und Konfessionsbildung in den Markgraftümern Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach 1520–1594: Religionspolitik – Kirche – Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 366. 45 Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 3: Die Mark Brandenburg. Die Markgrafenthümer Ober-Lausitz und Nieder-Lausitz. Schlesien, ed. Emil Sehling (Leipzig, 1909), 450, 451.

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Jägerndorf and Leobschütz prohibition.46 A slightly revised version of the 1565 articles appeared in 1573. For over a decade, Georg Friedrich and his territorial administrators introduced measures to combat prenuptial coitus. The campaign had clearly resumed. Unlike the earlier bans in Zurich, Augsburg, and Württemberg, the prohibitions in Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach did not remain isolated measures. Already in 1572, the police and territorial ordinance for Anhalt, a small principality in middle Germany wedged between the cities of Magdeburg and Wittenberg, stipulated a fine of thirty thalers or banishment for six months for a couple whose firstborn received baptism shortly before or after the wedding and a fine of twenty thalers for each instance in which an engaged couple overnighted together.47 More significantly, cities and territories neighboring Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach also followed suit. In 1574, the lordship of Wolfstein, surrounded partially by BrandenburgAnsbach, issued marriage articles that criminalized prenuptial coitus but prescribed only honorific punishments for infractions.48 The Duchy of PfalzNeuburg, portions of which also shared a border with Brandenburg-Ansbach, prohibited prenuptial coitus in 1577. Transgressors risked imprisonment and even banishment from the territory, regardless of whether knowledge of their crime preceded or followed the wedding.49 In 1579, the imperial city of Nördlingen, less than twenty kilometers southwest of Brandenburg-Ansbach, promulgated a church ordinance that criminalized prenuptial coitus. A guilty man had to spend eight days in prison; his partner four days; and the couple could not enjoy the wedding privileges and entertainments reserved for a chaste bride and groom. If the offense became public after a wedding that included these privileges and entertainments, the prison sanctions would double.50 Except for Wolfstein, these polities punished the crime with prison sentences; this severity contrasts with the modest or unspecified sanctions in Zurich, Augsburg, and Württemberg in the 1530s. In some significant 46 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 11: 367, 368, 369; Meier, Systembruch und Neuordnung, 367; C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation and Rural Society: The Parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–1603 (Cambridge, 1996), 121. Dixon’s assertion that the prohibition of prenuptial coitus “would not have been out of place in the marriage courts of Catholic Germany” obviously misses the mark. 47 Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 2: Sachsen und Thüringen, nebst angrenzenden Gebieten. Zweite Hälfte, ed. Emil Sehling (Leipzig, 1904), 572–3. 48 Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 13: Bayern III: Altbayern, ed. Matthias Simon (Tübingen, 1966), 561, 564, 594, 595–6. Wolfstein consisted of two separate territories. 49 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 13: 246. Pfalz-Neuburg consisted of three separate territories. 50 Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 12: Bayern: Schwaben, ed. Matthias Simon (Tübingen, 1963), 345.

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respects, the campaign against prenuptial coitus did not originate in northern Switzerland and southwest Germany but in Franconia and the Upper Palatinate.51 From there, a spark landed in Electoral Saxony. In the mid-sixteenth century, only portions of the Albertine territories observed the Celle and Dresden marriage ordinances, which had condemned clandestine marriages. Moreover in contrast to developments in Württemberg and the Electoral Palatine, these ordinances did not regard the consummation of clandestine marriages as a separate crime warranting harsher punishment.52 This relative mildness and the absence of uniform marriage laws throughout the electoral territories ended with the promulgation of the 1580 Saxon church ordinance. As possible punishments for the consummation of clandestine marriages, the ordinance mentioned imprisonment, banishment, and complete disinheritance. More significantly, the ordinance prohibited prenuptial coitus. Engaged couples who began sexual relations before they publicly married would risk imprisonment and the loss of honorific nuptial privileges, even if pregnancy did not result or evidence of the crime emerged only after the couple had celebrated a church wedding.53 In 1582, Nuremberg issued a mandate that dealt exclusively with prenuptial coitus, which the authorities disparagingly labeled Hurerei (fornication) instead of frühzeitiger Beischlaf. In addition to the deprivation of the usual honorific nuptial entertainments and privileges, the groom, after the wedding, had to spend two weeks in prison, the bride two weeks in irons. Those whose guilt became known only after the wedding had also to pay a fine of ten gulden; inability to pay brought an additional two weeks in prison 51 In 1579 or shortly thereafter, Elector Ludwig VI issued for his territories in the Upper Palatinate a directive against prenuptial coitus. These territories bordered BrandenburgKulmbach and Pfalz-Neuburg. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 14: 601 n. 14, records the directive’s title but does not include the text. Under Ludwig, the Electoral Palatine returned from the Reformed to the Lutheran confession. Moreover, under Elector Friedrich III, Ludwig’s father, Calvinism had failed to gain a foothold in the electoral territories in the Upper Palatinate because of implacable Lutheran resistance. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 14: 43, 47, 50, 51, 60–63; Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 13: 263–8. 52 Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, Vol. 1: Sachsen und Thüringen, nebst angrenzenden Gebieten. Erste Hälfte, ed. Emil Sehling (Leipzig, 1902), 97–100, 294 (the Celle marriage ordinance of 1545), 304, 305 (a 1545 directive concerning secret engagements), 110–11, 344–5 (the Dresden marriage ordinance of 1556). The Albertine line wrested the electoral dignity from the Ernestine line in 1547. The Ernestine territories also prohibited clandestine marriages but did not specifically criminalize their consummation. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 1: 209 (the 1542 constitution of the Wittenberg consistory), 229 (the police and territorial ordinance of 1556). 53 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 1: 388. The prohibition did not mention a specific prison term, however.

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or irons.54 In Franconia, the punishments for prenuptial coitus spiraled upward. The 1583 police ordinance for the Thuringian city of Erfurt introduced a fine of twenty pounds for couples who baptized their firstborns at the wedding or shortly thereafter. Couples unable to pay faced imprisonment or banishment.55 Then, in 1588–89, the Counties of Hohenlohe-Weikersheim and Hohenlohe-Neuensten, respectively northwest and west of Brandenburg-Ansbach, issued a police ordinance that prescribed either a fourteen-day prison sentence or a public censure at the wedding for the crime of prenuptial coitus.56 Finally, in 1591, the Silesian lordships of Freudenthal (Bruntál in the Czech Republic) and Goldstein, which neighbored Georg Friedrich’s Duchy of Jägerndorf, prohibited the cohabitation of a properly betrothed couple but did not set specific punishments for infractions.57 After the 1580s, German princes and magistrates issued progressively fewer church and marriage ordinances than before. As a result, the sources for documenting the spreading criminalization of prenuptial coitus become much less accessible.58 But the 1580s, it seems, already marked a decisive phase in the campaign. By then, the number of polities with prohibitions had probably reached a critical mass sufficient to spur other cities, lordships, and principalities to introduce similar measures. Significantly, the prohibition in Electoral Saxony, eight years after the one in Anhalt, signaled a decisive geographical widening of the criminalization beyond the fountainhead in Franconia and the Upper Palatinate. Moreover, Electoral Saxony had greatly enhanced its prestige and preeminence among the Evangelical states in the Holy Roman Empire by securing broad acceptance of the Formula of Concord in 1577–78 and the Book of Concord in 1580. With the 1580 church ordinance, Saxony put its imprimatur on the prohibition of prenuptial coitus, thereby increasing the likelihood that other Lutheran states would, in time, revise their marriage laws accordingly. The campaign had now achieved considerable momentum, and it did so precisely because of the character of early confessionalization within German Lutheranism. From the early 1550s to the 1570s, Germany’s Lutheran churches struggled to define doctrinal orthodoxy. The Philippists and the Gnesio-Lutherans, the principal antagonists, disagreed bitterly over the nature of justification through faith, the real presence of Christ in the Lord’s Supper, adiaphora, and Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 11: 557–8. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 2: 373. Anhalt’s 1572 prohibition of prenuptial coitus apparently served as the model for Erfurt’s. 56 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 15: 572–3, 585. 57 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 3: 480. 58 One of the few early seventeenth-century church ordinances published in the Sehling volumes is from 1618 for the Franconian lorship of Rothenberg. The ordinance has a loosely worded prohibition of prenuptial coitus. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 13: 551. 54 55

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other theological and ecclesiastical issues.59 The resolution of these differences, largely at the Philippists’ expense, represented a major advance in early Lutheran confessionalization. But the disputed doctrines themselves did not bear upon the campaign against prenuptial coitus. In Brandenburg-AnsbachKulmbach, for example, theological controversies deeply divided the leading clergymen during the late 1550s and 1560s. Margrave Georg Friedrich, a steadfast champion of Protestant unity, invited eminent churchmen from other territories to mediate these disputes and avoided prejudging the issues.60 But one is at a loss to link the issues to the margrave’s prohibitions of prenuptial coitus, introduced during the same period. In Electoral Saxony, by contrast, the criminalization of cohabitation by a properly betrothed couple occurred after the theological controversies had quieted, and the fragmentary archival evidence suggests at best an extremely tenuous association between disputed doctrines and revisions of marriage law.61 The explanation of how early confessionalization imparted momentum to the campaign against prenuptial coitus lies in the remarkable intersection of Saxon, Franconian, Württemberg, and Upper Palatine church politics that Jakob Andreae personified. Chancellor of the university of Tübingen and South Germany’s most influential theologian during the 1560s and 1570s, Andreae, more than any other individual, mended the rift between the Philippists and the Gnesio-Lutherans. He did so by spending years patiently negotiating with the various involved parties in order to render, under the auspices of the Saxon elector, the Formula of Concord and the Book of Concord. Andreae also forged much of the 1580 Saxon church ordinance.62 In comparison to these titanic achievements, his missions to Franconia and the 59 For an informative account of the doctrinal and other differences between the two camps, see Robert Kolb, “Dynamics of Party Conflict in the Saxon Late Reformation: GnesioLutherans vs. Philippists,” The Journal of Modern History 49 (September 1977): D1289–D1305. 60 Meier, Systembruch und Neuordnung, 158–77. Only in 1573, did the Lutheran church in Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach define a doctrinal canon. 61 In 1575, the court preacher Martin Mirus apparently condemned a report of the Leipzig consistory from 1555 that included praise of Georg of Anhalt’s treatment of marriage law. Georg was the bishop of Merseburg from 1544 to 1550, and Mirus’s polemical diatribe reflects the Gnesio-Lutherans’ rejection of Georg’s compromising policies during the Interim. Sächsisches Hauptstaatsarchiv Dresden, Loc. 10600/4, fols. 2r–4r (7 November 1575). In discussing the report of the Leipzig consistory, Sehling did not mention Mirus’s memorial. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 1: 102, 110. 62 For a brief account of Andreae’s life, see Robert Kolb, “Jakob Andreae, 1528–1590,” in Shapers of Religious Traditions in Germany, Switzerland, and Poland, 1560–1600, ed. Jill Raitt (New Haven, 1981), 53–68. On the relative significance of Andreae’s contribution to the crafting of the Formula of Concord, see Jobst Ebel, “Jacob Andreae (1528–1590) als Verfasser der Konkordienformel,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 89 (1978): 78–120. Andreae became chancellor in 1562. In 1576, Duke Ludwig of Württemberg granted him an extended leave to assist in Elector August of Saxony’s project to reconcile the Lutheran churches.

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Upper Palatinate, where he supervised or assisted in the reorganization of several Lutheran churches, seem quite modest. Significantly, however, Andreae’s efforts paralleled and reinforced the concurrent undertakings of Margrave Georg Friedrich and his leading churchman, Georg Karg, to centralize and strengthen the church in Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach.63 Through the missions to Franconia and the Upper Palatinate, Andreae, it seems, learned of Georg Friedrich’s criminalization of prenuptial coitus and then, partly to foster Lutheran unity throughout the region, more or less urged neighboring cities and territories to introduce similar penal measures. When Andreae crafted Electoral Saxony’s 1580 church ordinance, he imported the prohibition. This argument is admittedly speculative because it does not rest on any historical records directly concerning the criminalization of prenuptial coitus.64 Nevertheless, a brief review of Andreae’s work in Franconia, the Upper Palatinate, and neighboring lands suggests how the efforts to establish sound institutional foundations for the territorial churches – a key facet of early Lutheran confessionalization – may have provided an ideal medium for the propagation of the prohibitions. In March 1558, the year in which Georg Friedrich directed his officials to punish prenuptial coitus, Andreae led a visitation to reorganize the church in the County of Oettingen, just south of Brandenburg-Ansbach. His colleagues included Georg Karg, from whom Andreae could receive first-hand accounts of ecclesiastical matters in Franconia.65 Two years later, Andreae participated in a visitation of the church in Pfalz-Neuburg, and he returned to the duchy in January 1576 to review a church ordinance and produce a consistorial ordinance. During the latter visit, Andreae, at the very least, probably obtained some knowledge of PfalzNeuburg’s 1577 marriage ordinance, which, as noted earlier, prohibited prenuptial coitus and which officials had actually completed in February 1576.66 Later that year Andreae sent to the magistrates in Nördlingen written advice on drafting separate church, marriage, and consistorial ordinances. His guidelines served as the frame for the 1579 church ordinance, which banned the cohabitation of properly betrothed couples before the wedding.67 Reflecting in part Duke Christoph of Württemberg’s determination to restore 63

Meier, Systembruch und Neuordnung, 182–94; Dixon, Reformation and Rural Society,

51–4. 64 On the primary sources available for the study of Andreae’s life and work, see Rosemarie Müller-Streisand, “Theologie und Kirchenpolitik bei Jakob Andreä bis zum Jahr 1568,” Blätter für württembergische Kirchengeschichte 60–61 (1960–61): 227–8. 65 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 12: 399. Altogether, Andreae conducted four separate visitations in Oettingen between 1558 and 1561. Müller-Streisand, “Theologie und Kirchenpolitik,” 322–3. 66 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 13: 32–5. 67 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 12: 282.

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Protestant unity throughout the Holy Roman Empire, Andreae wanted to harmonize the ecclesiastical constitutions of the different territories. Thus both Oettingen and Nördlingen adopted church constitutions that conformed in large measure to those in Pfalz-Neuburg and Württemberg.68 In March 1576, Andreae departed for Saxony, where he spent the next four years in the service of Elector August. But the organization of Franconia’s Evangelical churches still engaged Andreae, who, in 1577, 1578, and 1580, collaborated with jurists and theologians in Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach to fashion the territory’s 1580 consistorial ordinance. The church ordinance that he completed for Saxony during the same period served as a model for the margraviate.69 Andreae then worked the next two years on the 1582 Hohenlohe church ordinance, which also mirrored the Saxon ordinance.70 Although the 1582 ordinance did not have a prohibition of prenuptial coitus, two Hohenlohe duchies introduced such measures seven years later. The chronological correspondence between Andrea’s ecclesiastical missions, on the one hand, and the diffusion of the prohibitions in Franconia, Saxony, and the Upper Palatinate, on the other, is striking. Thus one cannot help conjecturing a link between these missions and the strengthening of the campaign against prenuptial coitus. But such a conjecture should not obscure the importance of other relevant considerations. In the mid-sixteenth century, the proliferation of measures against clandestine marriages certainly spearheaded the campaign. Specifically, by severely punishing a clandestine marriage’s consummation, officials implicitly yet emphatically affirmed a relatively new principle, namely that a church wedding had to precede sexual relations. Harnessed to deter couples from marrying without parental consent, this principle need not have applied to properly betrothed couples. But no firewall existed to prevent the principle’s extension, for the sake of judicial consistency, from one class of marriages to the other. In other words, the campaign against clandestine marriages entailed an inevitable drift toward the criminalization of prenuptial coitus. But this drift cannot explain where and when the campaign actually began to gain ground. For such an explanation, one must highlight early Lutheran confessionalization in Franconia, Saxony, and the Upper Palatinate. 68 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 12: 283, 399; Müller-Streisand, “Theologie und Kirchenpolitik,” 275–7, 322–3. 69 Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 11: 298–9. In 1570 and 1575, Andreae dealt with other ecclesiastical matters in Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach. Meier, Systembruch und Neuordnung, 170, 173, 175, 194. 70 Günther Franz, Die Kirchenleitung in Hohenlohe in den Jahrzehnten nach der Reformation: Visitation, Konsistorium, Kirchenzucht und die Festigung des landesherrlichen Kirchenregiments 1556–1586 (Stuttgart, 1971), 113–41. Official ratification of the 1582 ordinance may never have occurred, however. Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen, 15: 434–5.

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Finally, in delineating the origins of the early prohibitions of prenuptial coitus, this essay has not addressed the complementary issues of compliance and enforcement. Ultimately, the campaign’s effectiveness hinged on both the willingness of villagers and townspeople to obey the new strictures against cohabitation and on the prosecution and punishment of transgressors. But recent scholarship has already adequately outlined the overall situation. In Germany, an aggressive policing of marital and sexual offences did not occur in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Harrington has argued, because authorities relied on traditional means of initiating prosecution.71 In Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, where the campaign against prenuptial coitus first began to gain traction, the authorities struggled to obtain compliance with the new norms for sexual behavior.72 Given these circumstances, the proliferation of prohibitions prior to the Thirty Years’ War probably did not have much effect anywhere in Franconia, Saxony, and the Upper Palatinate. But the failure to achieve an indubitable victory during this period does not in any way detract from the importance of fully understanding why magistrates, lords, and princes first decided to criminalize prenuptial coitus on a wide scale.

Harrington, Reordering Marriage, 249–53. Meier, Systembruch und Neuordnung, 370–91; Dixon, Reformation and Rural Society, 118–24. For some provisional reflections on the enforcement of the prohibition of prenuptial coitus in Electoral Saxony before the Thirty Years’ War, see Terence McIntosh, “Public Church Penance in Saxony,” in Ways of Knowing: Ten Interdisciplinary Essays, ed. Mary Lindemann (Boston, forthcoming). 71 72

“The Queen of Evidence”: The Witchcraft Confession in the Age of Confessionalism Thomas Robisheaux

Let us not yet judge uncertainties, until the Lord comes, Who will bring forth hidden things into the light, and illumine what is concealed in the darkness, and make manifest the counsels of hearts. For however true these things may be, they are still not to be believed unless they are established by clear evidence, demonstrated by clear proof, and made public by the judiciary. Gratian, Decretum, c. 30 q. 5 c. 8 Among all of the bits of proof from which sorcery is demonstrated none is stronger than the voluntary confession as when the sorcerer or the sorceress voluntarily and without coercion confesses their wickedness on their own. For there is no stronger proof than the testimony of one’s own mouth. Thus Philippus Corneus consil. 261. says. The confession is the most perfect proof. And the judge has nothing more to do with one who confesses than to let the judgment fall on him . . . And Innocent. in c. cum contingat 5. indigeat de offi. d. leg. That which is known through the confession one calls true and open as the day. And it is said that one knows something for certain when one knows it through the confession. gloss. 1. iunct. text. in C. Sisacerdos ext. de office. ord. and the confession is like a [legal] instrument or letter and seal. Bald. in l. fin. C. de edict. Diui Adria. toll. And the confession is called not just a proof but a legal and just proof. gloss. in C. ad Abolendam in 5. Deprehensi de haereticis. J. Gödelmann, Von Zäuberern, Hexen und Unholden … (1592), l. iii c. vii

So two jurists, one medieval and Catholic, one Protestant, both widely read at the end of the sixteenth century, assessed the importance of the confession before the law. Anyone who lends a ready ear – believing the accusation and the confession to be valid – will finally find himself so deluded that, like a person trapped in a hopeless

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labyrinth, he will never find a way out – if he decides on the basis of hearsay to pursue the whole matter according to legal norms and with the full rigor of the law. These are the wiles of Satan designed to entwine and confound matters in the most subtle perplexities, so that they cannot be extricated by the shrewdness of Theseus or unraveled by the wisdom of Oedipus. Johann Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum (1563) l. 6 c. x

So Johann Weyer, a Protestant physician, who, while expressing doubts about the veracity of witchcraft confessions, went on to use them as evidence for his own arguments about witchcraft as a demonic delusion or a sign of mental illness. Despite the wide gulf separating the views of Weyer from those of Gratian and Gödelmann, their words attest to a consensus in the sixteenth century that the confession represented evidence of a special kind. By juridical confession, I mean the formal, spoken and written acknowledgement of an accused person before a court concerning the truth of a statement or criminal charge. The words of a confession, truthfully uttered, represented the pivotal speech-act in the legal process. They moved the judge to order “the sworn scribe of the court, in the presence of both parties, to have the judgment read out openly” and then “to break his staff at the place appointed by custom and commit the poor [sinner] to the executioner and command him to abide by his oath in executing obediently the said judgment.”1 To judges, a true, voluntary confession “works like a wonderful power,” wrote Johann Gödelmann, “for whoever of their own accord confesses should be punished more mercifully, as the glossators have noted.”2 To the person uttering them, the words helped complete a metamorphosis: no longer a dangerous convict, she became a pitiable “poor sinner.” When read aloud on the marketplace or at the execution site, the dramatic revelation of hideous, shocking crimes until then hidden from public view could stir crowds anticipating the execution to fear, awe, pity, or joy. Catholics and Protestants therefore endowed the witchcraft confession with special qualities in the age of confessionalism. Like formal confessional statements, theological treatises, liturgical manuals, biblical commentaries, church ordinances, sermons, visitation records, pamphlets and similar such materials, printed witchcraft confessions and references to them rose sharply after 1560 before their uses and meanings changed in the middle of the 1 From the criminal law code of the Holy Roman Empire, the Constitutio Criminalis Carolina of 1532, §94 and §96; in Gustav Radbruch, ed., Die peinliche Gerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V. von 1532 (Carolina) (Stuttgart, 1962), 70–1. 2 Johan Georg Gödelmann, Von Zäuberern, Hexen und Unholden, warhafftiger vnd wolgegründter Bericht Herrn Georgji Gödelmann, beyder Rechten Doctor und Professorn in der Hohen Schbul zu Rostock, wie dieselbigen zuerkennen und zu straffen …, trans. Georg Nigrinus (Frankfurt, 1592), 350.

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seventeenth century. If reformers and state authorities recognized that civic and liturgical rituals helped instill sharper religious confessional identities in their populations, as Bodo Nischan and others have pointed out, then they also recognized that trials of witches might produce extraordinary first hand evidence in the form of a juridical confession concerning the often invisible, demonic forces arrayed against them.3 Witchcraft confessions might be likened to the wondrous and sometimes shocking accounts of exotic foreign lands by early modern travelers. Where explorers and adventurers described colorful, exotic lands and peoples from far corners of the globe, the confessed witch revealed the invisible workings of demons among people and landscapes very close to home. When courts had confessions read aloud at the public trial, witchcraft confessions attested to the reality of terrible but hard to detect things occurring to people and property: abominable rites, occult conspiracies, ghastly murders, poisonings, sickness, malicious damage to crops and cattle, secret identities, and other strange, horrifying aspects of the invisible world. Small wonder then that jurists, theologians, pastors, natural philosophers, physicians and popular writers studied them and turned them to their own purposes. Why did contemporaries endow witchcraft confessions with such interest, even authority as evidence of a special kind? In this essay, I argue that the aura of authority and factuality surrounding the confession stemmed not only from its status as a product of the legal process but also from the mystique of sanctity attaching to it out of its close associations with the religious rite of confession. The history of the long, complex symbiosis between juridical and religious confession reaches back to the twelfth and forward into the nineteenth century with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forming a watershed. In principle, early modern jurists and theologians distinguished the juridical confession sharply from the religious rite of auricular confession. 3 In his work on Brandenburg Bodo Nischan pointed to the significant role that liturgies and other public rituals played in the process of shaping religious identities in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See his Prince, People and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994); and “Ritual and Protestant Identity in Late Reformation Germany,” in his Lutherans and Calvinists in the Age of Confessionalism (Aldershot, 1999), II, 142–58. I use the term “confessionalism” to refer to the complex processes by which Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists and other Protestant sects fashioned distinct religious identities in this period. While problematic in some ways, the term has more flexibility than the more narrowly defined concept of “confessionalization” developed by Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhart. For an introduction to this concept and critiques of it see the introduction and other chapters in this volume touching on this problem. Two illustrative examples of the “confessionalization” thesis are: Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe,” in Handbook of European History 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance and Reformation, vol. 2: Visions, Programs and Outcomes, eds Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy (Leiden, 1995), 641–81; and Wolfgang Reinhart, “Konfession und Konfessionalisierung: ‘Die Zeit der Konfessionen (1530–1620/30)’ in einer neuen Gesamtdarstellung,” Historisches Jahrbuch 114 (1994): 107–24.

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In practice, however, they often blurred the lines between the two. The rite of auricular confession reinforced the legitimacy and the claim of the juridical confession to be a truth statement, and vice versa. Understanding the juridical confession’s affinities with its religious twin may help us to understand better why public authorities, crowds at executions, and even intellectuals curious about the workings of nature all saw the witch offering a first-hand account about the invisible workings of the world. Writers about witchcraft and religion might make general claims based on Scripture, ancient authority, or tradition but these accounts provided immediate, empirical reports of a particularly compelling kind. In recent years, scholars have begun to overcome their reluctance to work with witchcraft confessions. As several pioneering studies have shown, they can reveal very much more than the fantasies of the inquisitor. While historians like Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan, Joseph Hansen and Henry Charles Lea, among others, mined witchcraft confessions as sources for church history, philologists, like Johannes Franck, and folklorists, like Eduard HoffmannKrayer and Hans Bächtold-Stäubli, considered them prime evidence about the history of language , folk beliefs and practices.4 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, Alan Macfarlane, Erik Midelfort and Keith Thomas opened up innovative new perspectives on the confession, using it to help to decipher the intellectual, legal and sociological dynamics of the witch trials.5 More intriguing yet, Carlo Ginzburg, Hans Peter Duerr, and Wolfgang Behringer, each in different ways, have argued that the confession can reveal a deep substratum of ancient pagan ideas, practices and mythical structures lying just beneath the surface of the stories produced in witch trials.6 Lyndal Roper has 4 Wilhelm Gottlieb Soldan, Geschichte der Hexenprozesse aus den Quellen erzählt (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1843); (Joseph Hansen, ed., Quellen und Untersuchungen zur Geschichte des Hexenwahns und der Hexenverfolgung im Mittelalter (Bonn, 1901); Zauberwahn, Inquisition und Hexenprozess im Mittelalter und die Entstehung der grossen Hexenverfolgung (Munich, 1901); Henry Charles Lea, Materials toward a History of Witchcraft, 3 vols (Philadelphia, 1939); Johannes Franck, “Geschichte des Wortes Hexe,” in Quellen und Untersuchungen, Hansen, ed., 614–70; Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer, ed., “Luzerner Aketn zum Hexen- und Zauberwesen,” Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde 3 (1899): 22–40, 81–122, 189–224, 291–329; and Hanns Bächtold-Stäubli, gen. ed., Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens, 10 vols (Berlin, 1927–42). See the historiographical comments by Wolfgang Behringer, “Geschichte der Hexenforschung,” in Hexen und Hexenverfolgung im deutschen Südwesten: Aufsatzband, Sönke Lorenz, ed., Volkskundliche Veröffentlichungen des Badischen Landesmuseums Karlsruhe, vol. 2/2, (Karlsruhe, 1994), 105–13. 5 Alan Macfarlane, Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study (New York, 1970); H. C. E. Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany, 1562–1684 (Stanford, 1972); and Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York, 1971). 6 Carlo Ginzburg, The Night Battles: Witchcraft and Agrarian Cults in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1983); and Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York, 1991); Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning

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even argued that the confession, and the interrogation records leading up to it, reveal the psychical theatre of the individual.7 While there is little doubt that these approaches yield intriguing intellectual, social, folkloric, and psychological evidence about witchcraft and popular culture, these are not the only meanings – or even the most important meanings – contemporaries ascribed to the confession. Unfortunately, the history of torture has overshadowed the history of the confession, perhaps obscuring not only the relationship between the two but also making it difficult to discern the functions and meanings of the juridical confession in early modern law and culture.8 We still lack modern studies of the juridical confession in its legal, religious, literary, and other dimensions.9 What legal function and meanings did contemporaries ascribe to the confession as the law became more central to governing state, church, and society in the confessional era? What ritual and cultural meanings did the confession have in societies keenly attuned to ritual processes in public life? What wider religious and cultural meanings attached to the confession beyond the trial?10 In this essay I try to answer these questions with regard to the Holy Roman Empire between about 1560 and 1680, that is, roughly the century when witchcraft confessions contributed in significant ways to the shaping of the Germanies’ legal, religious and popular cultures. I first aim to analyze the the Boundary between Wilderness and Civilization, trans. Felicitas Goodman (New York, 1985); and Wolfgang Behringer, Shaman of Oberstdorf: Chonrad Stoecklin and the Phantoms of the Night, trans. H. E. Erik Midelfort (Charlottesville, 1994). 7 Lyndal Roper, “Oedipus and the Devil,” in her Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994), 226–48. 8 See, for example, the superb history by Edward Peters, Torture, rev. ed. (Philadelphia, 1996). 9 Most German legal historians discuss the confession within the context of the reception of Romano-canonical law, studies of the Carolina and the development of the inquisitorial procedure. See, for example, Gerd Kleinheyer, “Zur Rolle des Geständnisses im Strafverfahren des späten Mittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit,” in Beiträge zur Rechtsgeschichte: Gedächnisschrift für Hermann Conrad, Gerd Kleinheyer and Paul Mikat, eds, Rechts- und Staatswissenscahftlich Veröffentlichungen der Görres-Gesellschaft, N.F., no. 34 (Paderborn, 1979), 367–84. For a treatment that stresses the blending of law and religion in the confession in Counter Reformation Italy see Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della Conscienza: Inquisitori, Confessori, Missionari (Turin, 1996). Legal historians have lagged behind in offering new approaches to the history of witchcraft. For some current legal historical approaches to the problem of witchcraft see especially Peter Oestmann, “Böse Nachbarn – gute Juristen? Rechtshistoriche Anmerkungen zur neueren Hexenforschung,” Zeitschrift für Neuere Rechtsgeschichte 23 (2001): 254–84; and Günter Jerouschek, “Die Hexenverfolgungen als Problem der Rechtsgeschichte: Anmerkungen zu neueren Veröffentlichungen aus dem Bereich der Hexenforschung,” Zeitschrift für neuere Rechtsgeschichte 15 (1993): 202–24. 10 For a wider understanding of the complex relationship between religion and the law as it touches upon the issues of crime and sin see the insightful comments of Heinz Schilling, “‘History of Crime’ or ‘History of Sin’? Some Reflections on the Social History of Early Modern Church Discipline,” in Politics and Society in Reformation Europe: Essays for Sir Geoffrey Elton on his Sixty-Fifth Birthday, E. I. Kouri and Tom Scott, eds (Houndmills, 1987), 289–311.

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confession as the centerpiece, the crowning evidence, in the Romanocanonical evidentiary system and suggest that its evidentiary authority, even when disputed, endowed the confession with extraordinary status as a truth statement revealing hidden spiritual and physical realities. My approach here integrates recent scholarship in legal and institutional history with theoretical insights gained from anthropology. The result is an understanding of the confession’s functions and meanings both as legal proof and as a potent ritual speech-act. I then turn to understanding the close associations of juridical confession with the religious rite of confession. Legal scholars have long pointed to the roots of juridical confession in the medieval sacrament of auricular confession, and yet the close interplay of the two has never been fully explored for the age when auricular confession became widely and frequently practiced among Catholics and Lutherans in the early modern period. Using insights from anthropology, socio-linguistics, and literary theory, I then explore the multi-vocal quality of the confession as a narrative carefully crafted to reveal an authoritative public account of confusing and often deeply conflicted events. I will then turn briefly to the wider cultural uses of the confession and suggest ways in which the confession may have contributed to changes in seventeenth-century legal and religious culture. I What were the functions of the juridical confession? How and why did many jurists, court officers, and those who witnessed trials regard it as truthful, compelling evidence? The answers to these questions lie in understanding the alchemy of the legal process, how in the course of a trial magistrates and courts transformed raw, conflicting testimony and evidence into confessions endowed with the authority and the aura of true, certain evidence, even about the darkest and most occult affairs. The confession was no formalistic statement, no rote attesting to charges against a defendant. Jurists, magistrates, and jurors (Schöffen) considered it certain, material truth, a truth both factual and empirical as well as quasi-metaphysical. In fact, one might view the entire inquisitorial procedure as straining to achieve one overarching goal: the production of certain, indisputable proof about things in the form of a confession. Overlaying this first, mostly Romano-canonically inspired function, was a second function of the confession in the German lands: as a ceremonial speech-act in the public trial. The roots of this second use of the confession lie in medieval German customary law. In this tradition, the public authorities gradually replaced the oaths sworn at the end of a trial with the guilty party publicly confessing his sins before the court and the community. Legal

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historians have sometimes viewed the transposition of this medieval custom into early modern trials as “mere ceremony,” suggesting perhaps the weight of tradition over innovation. But such a view overlooks the role that civic rituals, in general, and trials, in particular, represented the public enactment of law and the ritual restoration of order. In German cities, the day of judging and sentencing, the Endlicher Rechtstag or Final Judgment Day, unfolded as a carefully scripted civic spectacle. The authorities considered it so essential for public order that this civic ritual be performed properly that they staged it carefully, often in accordance with prescriptions in the law. Some law codes like the Carolina, the Imperial Criminal Law Code of 1532, left nothing to improvisation. From the ringing of bells right on down to the speeches, gestures, and costumes of court officers worn for this occasion: the code prescribed each in turn so that the ritual might have the desired effects.11 In this spectacle, the words on which this civic drama turned were those of the convict: the words of confession or its affirmation. The free and imperial city of Nuremberg prescribed in its criminal code of 1526 that only upon hearing “the confession and legal affirmation (Urgicht) of the miscreant” could the court announce the Final Judgment Day.12 When on that occasion the chief court officer heard the confession or its affirmation, he could then proceed to pronounce the judgment of the court.13 The confession therefore played two parts in a trial, and the combined effect elevated the confession to the pivot, the central moment, in the judicial proceeding. Not only did the confession reveal the material truth of the matter, but the words summoned the court officers to enact the law, pronounce judgment, and instruct the executioner to carry out the court’s will in restoring order. By making the course of the trial turn on producing material truth as a confession and then revealing it in the civic drama of the trial, the German courts sealed the authenticity of the statement and lent the story it related an aura of factuality.14 This two-fold functioning of the 11 On the ceremonial Day of Judging see especially Richard van Dülmen in Theater des Schreckens: Gerichtspraxis und Strafrituale in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich, 1985), 38–61; and Richard J. Evans, Rituals of Retribution: Capital Punishment in Germany 1600–1987 (Oxford, 1997), 65–73. On the use of civic rituals and their power to enact public authority see Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1997). 12 The word Urgicht, the early modern German word for juridical confession, originated in the Middle High German word for confession, giht or orgicht. While its original meaning pertained to all confessions made in inquisitorial procedures, its actual early modern usage usually referred to the confession after torture recorded in the court protocols. Some towns and courts kept a separate volume of Urgichten or written confessions. See W. Sellert, “Urgicht” in Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte, Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann, eds, (Berlin, 1997), vol. 5, 571; and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, eds, Deutsches Wörterbuch (Leipzig, 1936), vol. 24, 2425–7. 13 Cited in Kleinheyer, “Zur Rolle des Geständnisses im Strafverfahren,” 371. 14 The best theoretical examination of the process by which societies endow certain stories

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confession might best be illustrated by a brief examination of the most important German law code of the early modern era, the Carolina, and its relationship to the witch trials. Already at the time of the introduction of the Carolina, the magistrates from a wide variety of different jurisdictions in the Holy Roman Empire often insisted upon confessions to close a trial’s proceedings. Free and imperial cities, secular domains such as the Habsburg territories, and especially ecclesiastical states: all provided for the confession in their law codes.15 In addition, through its considerable influence in the late medieval empire, the Church had familiarized many parts of the empire and Germans of all ranks and status with Romano-canonical law and inquisitorial procedure as it was applied within church jurisdictions.16 Lending theological and moral weight to inquisitorial procedure and the confession were also the teachings of theologians and preachers. Through the teachings of the Dominicans, the argument of Thomas Aquinas that a sinner could not lie about his sins before worldly magistrates without committing a mortal sin. reached a wide audience.17 While conflict attended the long, complex course of these legal changes, one should also stress that Romano-canonical jurisprudence also held out to local authorities the appealing prospect of definitively sealing a prosecution with a confession.18 By making the legal process pivot on acquiring a confession, however, local authorities also opened themselves to the argument that they must treat the confession, at least in principle, according to the rigorous principles of the evidentiary system. In Romanocanonical law, the confession was, after all, regina probationum, the queen of proofs. or statements with an aura of authority and factuality is still Clifford Geertz, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York, 1973), 90. I differ from Geertz in that I see the process of “producing” authoritative truth statements not as an abstract process but as one embedded in very particular social and institutional circumstances and inseparable from the exercise of power in a community. 15 Kleinheyer,”Zur Rolle des Geständnisses im Strafverfahren.” 16 The work of Eberhard Schmidt, Einführung in die Geschichte der deutschen Strafrechtspflege, 3rd edn (Göttingen, 1965), remains the most important starting point for understanding the medieval and late medieval background to the Carolina. See also John Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance: England, France, Germany (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 140–66. More convincing than Schmidt regarding the church’s influence on the adoption of inquisitorial procedure, however, is Winfried Trusen, “Strafprozeß und Rezeption: Zu den Entwicklungen im Spätmittelalter und den Grundlagen der Carolina,” in Strafrecht, Strafprozess und Rezeption: Grundlagen, Entwicklung und Wirkung der Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, Juristische Abhandlungen, vol. 19, Peter Landau and Friedrich-Chrfistian Schroeder, eds (Frankfurt, 1984), 29–118. 17 H. Holzhauer, “Geständnis,” in Adalbert Erler and Ekkehard Kaufmann, eds, Handwörterbuch zur deutschen Rechtsgeschichte (Berlin, 1971), vol. 1, cols. 634, 636–7. 18 On the reception of Roman law see Gerald Strauss, Law, Resistance, and the State: The Opposition to Roman Law in Reformation Germany (Princeton, 1986).

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The trouble for German authorities with setting such high standards for the confession was that the Romano-canonical evidentiary system raised almost as many uncertainties as the older forms of proof that it replaced. Uncertainties about evidence had posed difficulties for jurists right from the inception of Romano-canonical law in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when they first made the confession the centerpiece of the evidentiary system. What constituted convincing proof? What evidence mattered? How much evidence was sufficient for conviction? How was a judge to interpret evidence or weigh one kind of evidence against another? What constituted proof in secret or occult crimes? Can a fallible judge really establish the material truth about confusing crimes?19 Italian jurists and canon lawyers had answered these questions by incorporating the religious confession – a rite which viewed the sinner as standing before a divine court – right into the formal inquisitorial procedure. The primary object of the procedure was to establish certain material proof, and the procedures meant to achieve this high standard aimed at making it possible for a judge to determine the authorship of criminal acts “based on rational inquiry into the facts and circumstances.”20 Over time an elaborate system of rules and procedures – the teachings on evidence (indicium or, in German Indizienlehre) – emerged to safeguard the production of truthful confessions. In the hierarchically arranged evidentiary system, the confession counted as “full proof,” very much more, in other words, than circumstantial evidence. The words of the accused herself, in other words, bore the burden of providing the material truth of the matter.21 When sixteenth-century German jurists and magistrates confronted some of these very same issues, they could turn for solutions to this highly developed tradition of Romano-canonical jurisprudence. The key issue in making use of Romano-canonical law for many magistrates and local authorities was not torture, although questions abounded about the uses of torture. The central problem lay in guaranteeing the confession as certain material truth.22 When the writer of the Brunner Schöffenbuch, a manual of legal instruction for towns in Bohemia and Moravia, considered the daunting prospect of reforming flawed local legal procedures, he turned to Roman law since he saw in it proven safeguards essential to the production of truthful confessions under torture.23 Later in the late sixteenth century, when bitter controversies broke out over witchcraft confessions, participants in the See Peters, Torture, 44–50. Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, 131. 21 On the late medieval development of inquisitorial procedure see Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, 129–39. 22 Trusen, “Strafprozeß und Rezeption, “ 92ff. 23 Trusen, “Strafprozeß und Rezeption, “ 60–62; and, more generally on the problem of evidence, Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, 140–66. 19 20

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debates were simply continuing these same debates about the confession within the evidentiary system. The Carolina aimed at addressing many of the concerns and complaints surrounding the production of truthful confessions. As Gustav Radbruch has pointed out, the framers of the Carolina provided German imperial, territorial and urban authorities not so much with a criminal law code as with a comprehensive and methodical manual of criminal law procedure, one that was thoroughly informed with Romano-canonical jurisprudence.24 In reading the Carolina in this light, one is therefore struck with how the framers of the law focused rigorously, even “myopically” as John Langbein suggests, on solving the problem of producing truthful confessions under torture. Not only was the convict to confess details of the crime no innocent person could possibly know, but the confession must then be confirmed by independent investigation: If upon receiving a report of a crime, questioning under torture is undertaken and leads to the confession of the suspect, and if, as is clearly set down in the previous articles, all possible investigation and inquiries about it are diligently executed, and if in the same confessed deed such truth is therefore found that no innocent [person] can mention and know, then without a doubt the same confession is believed to be stable, and according to the shape of things corporal punishment is then to be adjudged, as is later set out in the one hundred and fourth article …25

The framers had little faith that lay judges, court officers, witnesses, or even the evidence itself, could produce certain conviction about a dubious matter. The procedure itself produced certain truth. This faith in rational 24 Radbruch, ed., Die Peinliche Gerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V., 14–15. The scholarship on the Carolina is too massive to cite in any great detail here. In addition to Radbruch’s edition and Eberhardt Schmidt’s general history of criminal law one should also turn to his article: “Die Carolina,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 53(1933): 1–34; Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, 167–209; Peter Landau and Friedrich-Christian Schroeder, eds, Strafrecht, Strafprozess und Rezeption: Grundlagen und Wirkung der Constitutio Criminalis Carolina, Juristische Abhandlungen, vol. 19 (Frankfurt, 1984); Gerhard Schmidt, “Sinn und Bedeutung der Constitutio Criminalis Carolina als Ordnung des materiellen and prozessualen Rechts,” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 83 (1966): 238–57; Friedrich-Christian Schroeder, ed., Die Carolina: Die Peinliche Gerichuordnung Kaiser Karls V. von 1532, Wege der Forschung, vol. 626 (Darmstadt, 1986); R. Stintzing, Geschichte der deutschen Rechtswissenschaft, 2 vols (Leipzig, 1880–84); Hellmuth von Weber, “Die peinliche Halsgerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V.” Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Germanistische Abteilung 77 (1960): 288–310; Robert von Hippel, Deutsches Strafrecht, 2 vols (Aalen, 1971); and Joseph Kohler and Willy Scheel, eds, Die Peinliche Gerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V. (Constitutio Criminalis Carolina) (Aalen, 1968). On the legal thought which framed the work of jurists and magistrates working to introduce Roman law and the Carolina see especially Franz Wieacker, A History of Private Law in Europe with particular reference to Germany, trans. Tony Weir (Oxford, 1995). 25 Radbruch, ed., Die Peinliche Gerichtsordnung, §60, 57.

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procedure is why one has the sense in reading the Carolina that the confession, while all important, was also fragile, corruptible, full of potential lies or errors, and easily deflected into the pursuit of partisan interests. Yet the confession was better than other evidence. It counted as “full proof,” not the fractional proof of eyewitness accounts or other circumstantial evidence.26 Adhering scrupulously to the procedures, the rational lay judge could be confident that the outcome would transcend human frailties and produce certain material truth.27 To the Carolinas’ framers the rational principles of the law had the power to bring the light of truth into the darkest and most secret of affairs. How did the framers view the evidence of occult crimes? As these crimes took place in secret, and no witnesses could provide evidence, the full weight of proof fell on the confession. Yet the Carolina made no allowance for treating such crimes any differently from other crimes. In the Malleus malificarum, Heinrich Kramer had pressed jurists hard to suspend “ordinary” trial procedures and treat witchcraft as a crimen exceptum (“exceptional crime”).28 But the framers of the Carolina, and German jurists and magistrates committed to Romano-canonical standards of the law, rejected his arguments out of hand, recognizing that the Malleus’s legal arguments would eviscerate the entire evidentiary system and its safeguards for producing material proof.29 That is to say, the Carolina treated confessions for even the most secretive crimes according to the same evidentiary standards as for all other crimes. A confession must be presented and heard only before the court by the judge. It had to reveal knowledge of the crime no innocent person could know. The confession must be specific as to circumstances. The details about how, where, when, and with whom must all be accurate and then checked independently by the judge. If elicited under torture, the confession had to be affirmed voluntarily before the judge.30 In addition to these general standards, however, 26 The rules governing the inquiry procedure and the evidentiary system were laid out in Articles 18–77. For a general overview see Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, 179–88; and for a review focused specifically on the witch trial see Sönke Lorenz, “Der Hexenprozeß,” in Sönke Lorenz, ed., Hexen und Hexenverfolgung im deutschen Südwesten, Volkskundliche Veröffentlichungen des Badischen Landesmuseums Karlsruhe, vol. 2/2 (Karlsruhe, 1994), 67–84. 27 Joy Wiltenburg argues that part of the appeal of the Carolina lay precisely in its rhetorical construction of the common judge as rational, sensible and intelligent. The law code’s reception and incorporation into local law therefore suggests identification with a wider legal culture among jurists and magistrates. See her “The Carolina and the Culture of the Common Man: Revisiting the Imperial Criminal Code of 1532,” Renaissance Quarterly 53 (2000): 713–34. 28 Many late sixteenth-century witchcraft trials, in fact, adopted this looser standard and produced confessions using torture without all of the safeguards of the “ordinary procedure.” 29 See the insightful comments of Jerouschek, “Die Hexenverfolgung als Problem der Rechtsgeschichte,” 70–1. 30 Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, 183–6.

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Article 52 of the Carolina went on to lay down the specific criteria for evaluating the material truthfulness of a witchcraft confession: Should someone confess to sorcery, one should also inquire into the grounds and circumstances [of the crime], (as stated above), and more: with whom, how and when the sorcery occurred and with what words and deeds. If the person under interrogation says that she buried something, or kept something that should serve [to work] such sorcery, one should search for it and see if one can find it. Should someone have performed such [sorcery] using other things, whether words or acts, one should also investigate these things and consider whether they were used for sorcery. She is also to be asked about the person from whom she learned sorcery, and how she came to practice it, and whether she used this sorcery against other people, who they are, and also what damage was done with it.31

The truthfulness of the confession therefore depended not only on the material circumstances of the crime, but on the judge verifying the evidence visually for himself. One did not accept a confession at face value. Only by moving, step by step, through the rational stages of the procedure could the judge evaluate the testimony of the suspect and then arrive at his own independent apprehension of the material circumstances of the crime. Not the person, but the procedure produced objectively verifiable material truth. If we are to understand the peculiar revelatory power of the confession, we should also understand that the Carolina treated it as a potent speech-act in the public drama of the Final Judgment Day. Once written down and affirmed, the confession no longer functioned as evidence or proof. In the ceremonial trial, the confession worked through its powers as the speech-act in the civic ritual that invoked the awesome public display of the law. This ritual function was the reason why law codes and customs subjected this speech-act to such tight controls or prescriptions. Not only were recantations but even wrong words, halting utterances, or words out of turn to be avoided. Given that civic rituals like the Final Judgment Day displayed the authority and power of the court and public authorities to restore order, to purify the community of particularly dangerous crimes and sins, this care with the spoken word is hardly surprising. In cases of witchcraft confessions, one additional consideration must be taken into account: its function within the context of a wider social crisis or, to invoke Victor Turner’s theory, “social drama.” Despite the fact that the Carolina treated witchcraft as an “ordinary” crime, communities, in practice, considered it an extraordinarily dangerous and threatening crime, one that struck at the roots of the community’s bonds. In punishing the crime and restoring order, there was a particular need to provide an authoritative account 31

Radbruch, ed. Die Peinliche Gerichtsordnung, §52, 53–4.

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of the disturbing events, a narrative, if you will, which gave meaning to all the confusing events that had happened or that were thought to have happened.32 The confession was just such an authoritative story. The confession provided what Turner calls “the narrative component in ritual and legal action which attempts to rearticulate opposing values and goals in a meaningful structure, the plot of which makes cultural sense.”33 A story, in other words, but no ordinary story: it was publicly sanctioned as official and “true.” If one views the surge in witch trials around 1590 as part of a widely perceived social crisis in the south German lands, for example, then the witchcraft confessions served as officially sanctioned accounts of what really lay behind these misfortunes of the time.34 The confession’s juridical status alone therefore does not account for the aura of factuality surrounding the witchcraft confession. As stories, these confessions revealed the meaning of disorder and misfortune to the entire community. Given the public, ritual function of the confession, one can better understand the nervousness on the part of the authorities about the proper staging of the Final Judgment Day. Even more explicitly than other ordinances the Carolina placed unusual safeguards around the confession. The articles that laid out the ceremonies of the Final Judgment Day (Articles 78 through 103) read like the script and stage directions of a drama, right down to the precise words and gestures of the actors.35 Johann von Schwarzenberg, one of the architects of the Carolina, justified prescribing such tight instructions, arguing that the public display of justice simply must not be botched by incompetent lay judges: Following the custom and usage of this territory, our local criminal courts may be staffed with none other than common people, who necessarily have not learned or exercised the law; therefore throughout this our ordinance is found in all clarity, with the diligence appropriate to the need, the way all such judicial matters shall be conducted, heard and recorded at the final Rechttag; also where necessary how the judgment shall be made according to the advice of the legally knowledgeable; in order that at the final Rechttag no one be disadvantaged.36

The restoration of order was simply too important to be left to improvisation and chance.

32 Victor Turner, “Social Dramas and Stories about Them,” in W. J. T. Mitchell, ed., On Narrative (Chicago, 1981), 137–64. 33 Turner, “Social Dramas,” 163. 34 Wolfgang Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reason of State in Early Modern Europe, trans. J. C. Grayson and David Lederer (Cambridge, 1997), 89–114. 35 Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, 188–92. 36 Cited in Langbein, Prosecuting Crime in the Renaissance, 191.

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There was one other reason to have the words of the confession uttered carefully and audibly. Spoken and responded to in the prescribed way the words transformed the identity of the convict. In order fully to appreciate this metamorphosis one should bear in mind that in the sixteenth century the spoken word was still thought capable of invoking hidden powers, bringing about a change in social status, or working transformative effects on the individual. At the Final Judgment Day, the words of the confession helped complete the ritual transformation of the convict into “poor sinner” (“arme Sünder”). Recalling the time between Christ’s Crucifixion and Resurrection, she prepared for this role for three days in her cell, confessing her sins and receiving consolation from her confessor, taking communion, sharing the lavish Hangman’s Meal with the executioner, and even, as in the customs of Bavaria, forgiving the executioner with a blessing.37 Once she affirmed her confession in the ceremony before the court, the judge broke his staff, thus breaking the bonds that bound her to the community. From this point on she lost her personal identity and was referred to only as the “poor sinner.” When Richard Evans likens the public execution to a religious drama, he points precisely to the fascination of the public in watching a Christian sinner meet her fate.38 How she played her part in receiving the judgment and then marching in the procession to the scaffold mattered. For in her performance were religious and moral lessons for every Christian. The authorities were also concerned that the words the convict spoke might wreak havoc or threaten personal injury. She might renounce her confession, for example, and we know from some few cases that when this happened, disorders or riots could ensue as the ritual could no longer restore public law and order properly. Just as worrisome the suspect might turn the tables and judge the judge or executioner with her words. Such was the meaning of the words a poor sinner uttered on the scaffold, cursing the executioner or inviting him to join her on the other side in the Valley of Jehosophat for divine judgment. There God would himself judge those who judged unjustly.39 Concerns about such curses show us that judges, too, felt the drama and import of the words uttered on judging days. At the least, such concerns point to the heightened awareness of the force of the spoken word on judging days. Of course, the territories and estates of the Holy Roman Empire were not compelled to introduce and apply the Carolina. The code’s reception was long, slow and complex, the turning point coming in the first half of the seventeenth century.40 Yet in the wake of the shocking scale of the witch trials 37 38 39 40

Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 66–9. Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 85. Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 84. The famous “saving clause” of the Carolina meant that imperial authorities were

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in the 1580s and 1590s, one can clearly discern the Carolina’s impact in helping shape the legal debates which then emerged over witchcraft confessions and the standards for producing them. One might better understand this debate by recognizing that the larger issue at stake for most of the public authorities – even more important than the reality of witchcraft itself – was how to preserve the legal status of the confession as a statement of material truth.41 Were the confessions true or not? Did fantastic accounts of the sabbath or night flight or the working of charms and salves point to real operations of nature? Or were they false confessions, as Johann Weyer argued? Answers to these questions certainly involved the nature of witchcraft but they went to the heart of the legal system itself. Did legal procedures really guarantee the production of full, material truth through the confession? This concern runs through all of the arguments of the “skeptics” and the “realists” alike.42 The advocates of the short, summary trial, certainly in the ascendancy in key areas into the early seventeenth century, more or less gave way by 1630 to a much more widely entrenched set of interests insisting upon close adherence to the Carolina.43 Even Hermann Goehausen, a fierce Catholic supporter of short, summary trials, recognized the weakness in his arguments by this time. In arguing for suspending ordinary procedures and safeguards in producing a witchcraft confession, he ran counter to more powerful arguments being made in favor of judicial caution.44 The work that helped entrenched this cautious attitude towards the confession and criminal legal procedures in general in the empire was the massive tome of Benedict Carpzov: the Practicae novae imperialis Saxonicae rerum criminalium (1635). Given that Carpzov embraced the elaborated theory of witchcraft and zealously advocated hunting witches, one would encouraged, not compelled to follow the code in all its details. See the literature cited in note 24 for references. 41 See the insightful comments of Jerouschek, “Die Hexenverfolgungen als Problem der Rechtsgeschichte,” 211–12. 42 On the intellectual debates see especially the magisterial work of Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1997). Wolfgang Behringer has shown how the questions largely about legal procedures in the witch trials led to the formation of factions within the chancelleries of major states like Bavaria. Such factional divisions no doubt were replicated elsewhere in the empire. See Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria. For the legal framework surrounding these debates see Winfried Trusen, “Rechtliche Grundlagen der Hexenprozesse und ihrer Beendigung,” in Das Ende der Hexenverfolgung, Hexenforschung vol. 1, Sönke Lorenz and Dieter R. Bauer, eds (Stuttgart, 1995), 203–26; and Lorenz, “Der Hexenprozeß.” 43 See Trusen, “Rechtliche Grundlagen der Hexenprozesse.” 44 Trusen, “Rechtliche Grundlagen der Hexenprozesse,” 217; and Michael Ströhmer, Von Hexen, Ratsherren und Juristen: Die Rezeption der peinlichen Halsgerichtsordnung Kaiser Karls V. in den frühen Hexenprozessen der Hansestadt Lemgo 1583–1621, Studien und Quellen zur Westfälischen Geschichte, vol. 43 (Paderborn, 2002), 99–101.

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hardly expect the Saxon jurist to stand for jurisprudential caution and skepticism.45 And yet this is precisely what he essentially argued, synthesizing Roman, Imperial, and Saxon law, with such compelling comprehensiveness, such force of argumentation, that the work decisively influenced jurists and magistrates throughout the empire. In the procedural part of his work, Carpzov laid out, in methodical detail, every step in the inquisitorial procedure essential to the production of truthful confessions.46 In defending the Carolina he argued that its evidentiary system, when interpreted in light of Romano-canonical jurisprudence, provided precisely the finely graded distinctions necessary for a judge to evaluate evidence and arrive at the truth. When the confession came, it was not only materially true, but through it the judge could discern with certainty the truth of the matter on the behalf of the state.47 In his analysis of the rules of evidence leading up to confession, he displayed erudition in grasping what it meant for a judge to apprehend the truth. On occasion, he described the judge’s process of thinking like that of a sophisticated semiotician sifting each sign until the apprehension of the truth was “certain, immediate and indubitable.”48 Through the evidence and the confession a good judge could virtually “see” the events even though remote in time and place. Juridical reforms like those of Carpzov’s helped stabilize the status of witchcraft confessions after the 1630s. The irony of this achievement was that such cautions tended to reduce the doubts about witchcraft confessions as truth statements at the price of trimming out of them the more fantastic

45 See the new assessments of Carpzov in Günter Jerouschek, Wolfgang Schild, and Walter Gropp, eds, Benedict Carpzov: Neue Perspektiven zu einem umstrittenen sächsischen Juristen, Rothenburger Gespräche zur Strafrechtsgeschichte, vol. 2 (Tübingen, 2000). 46 For this article I have used the 1670 edition of the Practicae novae … (Wittenberg: Mevius, 1670). What distinguished this work was the systematic and comprehensive way he wove together Romano-canonical jurisprudence with Imperial and Saxon law, always with an eye towards the actual application of the law in the service of the state and public order. His emphasis on blending legal theory into legal practice, treating Roman law less in the abstract or theoretical way that Renaissance jurists tended to do, earned him a reputation as an advocate of the usus modernus or “modern use” school of jurisprudence in the seventeenth century. See Benedict Carpzov, ed. Jerouschek, et al. above. Carpzov divided the Practicae novae into three parts: two theoretical parts and one practical or procedural part. Part I defined and treated crimes against persons. Part II defined and examined crimes against objects or things. In the critically important Part III he laid out and analyzed criminal procedures. Not surprisingly Part III, the practical part, had a separate publishing history, having been quickly translated from Latin into German, and circulated in forms judges might readily read and consult. On how jurists may have read Carpzov see Thomas Robisheaux, “Zur Rezeption Benedict Carpzovs im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Hexenprozesse und Gerichtspraxis, H. Eiden and R. Voltmer, eds (Trier, 2002), 527–43. 47 Carpzov, Practicae novae criminalis (1670), Pars III, Qu. 116 §36–48, pp. 148–9. 48 Carpzov, Practicae novae criminalis (1670), Pars III, Qu. 119 §60, p. 174.

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claims of the elaborated theory of witchcraft. As such, they tended to lose their usefulness for a wide variety of non-legal purposes. They might have become more certain, even credible in their way, but they also revealed much less about the hidden dimensions of the devil’s activities. II Legal developments by themselves cannot fully explain why the shapers of German confessional cultures endowed witchcraft confessions with such authority as evidence about hidden realities. To gain a wider perspective one should also understand how Protestant and Catholic teachings and practices embedded the juridical confession into the wider religious cultures of the era. While it is important to bear in mind the clear differences between the Catholic and Lutheran practice of confession, it is helpful to stress that both religious confessions assigned to confession a particular role in shaping communal and individual religious identities. Both Protestants and Catholics retained confession as a ritual closely associated with the Eucharist. Both worked to make confession more frequent, even routine. Both churches staged confession in accessible settings within the church so that it was visible to congregants. And both churches drew out the juridical quality of the confession. While jurists and theologians might distinguish the juridical from the religious confession, the actual parish practices tended to break down those distinctions. After initially breaking with Catholic thought and practice, Luther came to see confession as an important rite for every Christian, one which should be practiced regularly and linked carefully to the taking of communion. The fact that Luther no longer considered confession and penance as a sacrament or vehicle of God’s grace did not diminish the utility he saw in the rite as an opportunity to teach Christians about sin, judgment and salvation. The notion that one could know and confess all of one’s sins he considered absurd, and so the detailed recitation of sins before a priest was to him a dangerous form of works righteousness. Yet he still considered the confession of one’s true sinfulness essential preparation for heartfelt contrition, so that the Christian could then face God’s judgment, mercy, and forgiveness.49 The Augsburg Confession of 1530 also retained confession in the liturgy. Even more important, however, Lutheran church ordinances made confession mandatory for all Lutherans, linking the rite strictly to the sacrament of communion. The exploration of individual sins, however, was transformed 49 For a recent and particularly concise analysis of the rite as it was understood and practiced by Lutherans in the Reformation era see Susan Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London, 1997), 91–137.

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into an opportunity to instruct the laity in proper religious doctrine in general.50 By the late sixteenth century, Lutheran church administrators even provided parishioners with formulaic texts specifying precisely what confessants were to say in response to questions about doctrine. The pastor’s absolution was also reduced to a formulaic liturgical utterance. The reprimand and absolution confessants heard remained, in everyday experience, very close to that of the Catholic position.51 While the Lutheran church may have removed the mediating role of the clergy from the rite, at the same time they heightened its official public status by making it a mandatory ritual experience. Pastors sometimes made open use of it to discipline their parishioners. In no way did the rite become a private encounter between a pastor and confessant. In Lutheran practice, confession took place openly in the church as a ritual performance, one often performed in groups.52 Even Württemberg state officials took an active interest in making sure that villagers confessed their sins and attended communion.53 Lutheran reformers and state officials therefore treated the ritual as one of many mechanisms to create a more godly society, to bring sinfulness out into the open and, where possible and necessary, to discipline the laity openly before the community. In the German Lutheran territorial churches, the rite of confession therefore blended pastoral concerns with the overarching need to bring external moral behavior into accord with the demands of faith. This end was achieved by linking confession strictly to communion and adapting the rite to local social realities. In this regard, it proved hardly effective in transforming the interior lives of the laity, as Hans-Christoph Rublack has argued. In addition, any such efforts would have run up against the hard reality that villagers tended to define the self within a matrix of social relationships and therefore considered sin as a disturbance in those relationships and not as a reflection of some interior state.54 On the other hand, confession could serve as a rough form of state regulation of moral conduct that called gross malefactors into public notoriety and subjected them to the pressures of conforming.55 In following the teachings of Johannes Brenz, church officials of the Duchy of Württemberg considered confession and communion so 50 Hans-Christoph Rublack, “Lutherische Beichte und Sozialdisziplinierung,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 84 (1993): 131. 51 Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, 98–9. Calvinists, on the other hand, made a much more radical break with Catholic practice and rejected confession out of hand. 52 See Rublack, “Lutherische Beichte und Sozialdisziplinierung.” 53 David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), 37–60. 54 David Sabean, “Production of the Self during the Age of Confessionalism,” Central European History, 29 (1996): 1–18. 55 Rublack, “Lutherische Beichte,” 147–8.

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essential for the maintenance of the community, that force and coercion could be applied to individuals who refused to participate.56 A pastor might even shame a person in church before the congregation by reading out a prepared text concerning a certain malefactor’s sins and then revealing the sinner’s change of heart in his confession.57 One reason for the insistence on these public demonstrations was that Lutherans, very much like Catholics, considered sin not only as an offense to God, but as objective social acts which endangered the entire community and which therefore needed to be brought out into the open before both the individual and the community could then be purified.58 While acknowledging the distinction between the two types of confession – juridical and sacramental – the Catholic Church in the Holy Roman Empire openly blurred the lines between the two by highlighting the juridical nature of the sacrament of confession. In fact, the Council of Trent responded to Protestant attacks on the sacrament by emphasizing the role of confessors as “judges and rulers” in their standing in for Christ and considering the absolution as a judicial pronouncement.59 When Trent renewed the Church’s insistence on the complete confession of sins, that is, a detailed recounting of all sins, including the circumstances surrounding them, the judicial quality of the confession was also reinforced. Of course, the Church recognized that the sacrament of confession was distinctive from juridical confession in that it served spiritual or pastoral purposes.60 Still, the liturgical language likened confession to a tribunal. The heightened dignity and solemnity surrounding confession also reinforced the public view of the confession as a court where one accused oneself before God, asked for forgiveness, received judgment or absolution and then performed satisfaction for the harm done to one’s neighbors and the Body of Christ. In the Articles of Reformation for Passau, Bavaria, confession was to take place in an open space, close to the altar, with the confessor seated “as a judge.”61 Referring to the priest as a “spiritual judge,” the Augsburg synodal reforms instructed the priest to deport himself gravely during confessions, to wear special vestments, and to set up the confessor’s chair in a visible location in the church. All of the congregants who then viewed the confessions would therefore be impressed with the gravity of the rite.62 Sabean, Power in the Blood, 37–60. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, 129–30. 58 On this social dimension to confession and the Eucharist see especially John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution,” Past and Present 100 (1983): 29–61; and more generally in Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985). 59 On the confession in German Catholic lands in this period see David Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk:” Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Ithaca, 1996). 60 Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk,” 109–10. 61 Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk,” 132. 62 Myers, “Poor, Sinning Folk,” 132. 56 57

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Perhaps the most direct way to understand how religious confession buttressed the juridical confession is to examine the special role of priests and pastors in trials. In the late medieval heresy trials, judges and confessors had worked closely together, the one eliciting a juridical confession, the other working to convert the heretic, confess him of his sins, pronounce absolution over him and then offer consolation as he met punishment. In the witchcraft trials a similar symbiosis was at work. Recognizing the need to minister to criminals in prison Ambrosius Moiban, the Lutheran reformer of Silesia, advised pastors in a short treatise of 1530 not to treat criminals differently from other parishioners, but to counsel them and advise them to confess their sins freely so that they might receive absolution and meet their death with dignity.63 Bugenhagen later wrote into model church ordinances that pastors should care for the poor sinners before their execution, urging them to confess and attend communion. The influence early modern confessors exercised in prodding convicts towards a juridical confessions cannot be easily ascertained. The prescriptive literature idealizes the situation, stressing the strictly spiritual role of confessors before the public trial and execution. Certainly jurists like Jacob Brunnemann, whose manual was widely consulted in the late seventeenth century, saw the pastor’s role as a purely spiritual one: “to admonish him [the poor sinner] to penitence and contrition, to hear his confession, to strengthen him in true belief and trust in God and the merit of Jesus Christ, to caution him to be patient, and to pray diligently with him …”64 In practice, however, one wonders whether the close cooperation of the clergy with court officers, and the part confessors played in preparing convicts for the public trial, effectively worked to coerce convicts into open confessions.65 One can imagine with Radbruch that confessors forced some suspected witches into confession simply by withholding absolution and communion from them.66 One would misread the evidence, however, if one saw in the clergy’s efforts a move to brand the miscreant as beyond the pale of the community or divine mercy. To the clergy the poor sinner could become a moral exemplar, a living sermon for all sinners. Moiban tackled this problem directly, arguing that pastors should counter the desires of the community to take comfort in the poor sinner’s pain and suffering as a sign of their own moral superiority. In fact, he urged all Christians to identify with the poor sinner and his fate: 63 Gustav Radbruch, “Ars moriendi: Scharfrichter – Seelsorger – Armersünder – Volk,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Strafrecht 59 (1945): 477–8. 64 Cited in Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 66. 65 Articles 72 and 73 prescribed that confessors provide spiritual consolation and confess the poor sinner in preparation for the Final Judgment Day. Radbruch, ed., Die Peinliche Gerichtsordnung, §60, p. 57. See also Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 66–7; and van Dülmen, Theater des Schreckens, 58. 66 Gustav Radbruch, “Ars moriendi,” 478–9.

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The poor sinner must know that everyone their entire life is steeped in sin, that we are all liars and sinners before God – the only difference is that the poor sinner’s sins are more visible in the world by having violated the law and been punished by the court. We all are nothing more than a pile of sinning dirt. Everyone stands before God in the End, and no form of death – whether natural or violent or peaceful and quiet – is any better or worse in God’s eyes than the other.67

Moiban took the natural tendency to turn a miscreant into an outcast and an object of hatred and opprobrium and turned it on its head. The poor sinner, so Moiban, revealed the deeper message that all Christians were steeped in sin and that everyone should therefore identify with his or her fate. Accompanied by choir boys and the singing of hymns, the poor sinner might well recall the suffering and martyrdom of Christ as she marched to the gallows.68 One can appreciate just how important religious confession was in providing legitimacy and support for the juridical confession by studying those cases where this symbiosis broke down. The effect could shock a community and alarm the authorities. In the Bavarian witch trials, the work of confessors often slowed the trial process down and might point to resistance against the trials.69 On other occasions, confessors broke openly with the authorities and publicly denounced a trial or a witchcraft confession. When in 1591 the hospital chaplain and confessor at Schongau formed the opinion that the local women accused of witchcraft were innocent, he accepted the revocations of their confessions and openly proclaimed their innocence. Communal protests erupted against the witch trials.70 Public order might also break down when victims renounced their confessions at the execution. Over the long run, the obvious strains on the confessional process fed serious doubts about the witch trials in general and the juridical confessions they helped produced. When Adam Tanner publicized his widely read work of moral theology, the Theologica scholastica (1626–27), he based his doubts about the witch trials in general on the dubiousness of confessions. His doubts grew out of years of personal experience with confessed witches in Bavaria.71 When Friedrich von Spee began composing his powerful denunciation of the witch trials and witchcraft confessions, his Cautio criminalis (1631), he drew directly on Tanner: “One might ask what a father confessor is to do when he learns from the [auricular] confession or somewhere else that the accused is innocent (which is not out of the question if one only reads Tanner).”72

67 68 69 70 71 72

Cited in Radbruch, “Ars moriendi,” 478. Evans, Rituals of Retribution, 85. Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 195. Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 198. Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 245–6. Cited in Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 195.

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III Before we examine how witchcraft confessions were used more broadly in the culture of the period, it is first important to understand how witchcraft confessions were constructed and employed within the context of a trial. If we keep in mind Victor Turner’s point about elites providing officially sanctioned narratives to the public as part of the effort to restore authority and order, then one can readily perceive the function of a witchcraft confession as an authoritative account of troubling, divisive events.73 This purpose may have been all the more important due to the fact that witchcraft accusations often unleashed additional conflict and rancor in a community, not to mention gossip, rumors and stories. It is therefore helpful to view the legal process, as Turner does, as addressing these conflicting accounts and restoring the breaches in the social order by filtering the brute facts and experiences of the affair through normative political, legal, religious and social values to produce a compelling narrative account.74 The confession or Urgicht was precisely such a story. Early modern jurists, like judges and lawyers in other cultures and times, drew on narrative conventions, at least in part, to make official accounts like confessions compelling public documents.75 This process of producing a Turner, “Social Dramas,” 152–3. Turner, “Social Dramas,” 152. 75 My approach in understanding the narrative structure of witchcraft confessions differs somewhat from the more psychological or sociological understandings of the interrogation process and the confessions it produced. I do not mean to play down in any way the coercive dynamics that lay behind a confession. For a lucid summary of the socio-psychological dynamics at work see Robin Briggs, Witches and Neighbors: The Social and Cultural Context of European Witchcraft (New York, 1966), 57–8, 390–2. My aim instead is to draw out the narrative qualities of the final confession, using insights derived, in part, from the recent theoretical work on law and literature which has explored the importance of narrative strategies in shaping almost all aspects of the judicial process, including legal documents. For an introduction to the theoretical literature see Bernard S. Jackson, “Narrative Theories and Legal Discourse,” in Cristopher Nash, ed., Narrative in Culture: The Uses of Storytelling in the Sciences, Philosophy, and Literature (London, 1990), 23–50; and Robin West, Narrative, Authority, and Law (Ann Arbor, 1993). While much of the theoretical literature has been developed for the Anglo-American legal context, one can find one example of how narrative insights also inform German legal processes in Ludger Hoffmann, “Zur Pragmatik von Erzählformen vor Gericht,” in Konrad Ehlich, ed., Erzählen im Alltag (Frankfurt, 1980), 28–63. Since the pioneering work of Carlo Ginzburg and Natalie Davis the historical literature that has exploited the literary dimensions of early modern law and trials has grown too large to cite in detail, but one might read with profit the wide-ranging comments of Sara Maza, “Stories in History: Cultural Narratives in Recent Works in European History,” American Historical Review 101 (1996): 1493–515. For literary approaches to witchcraft confessions in England one should turn first to the insightful works of Diane Purkiss, The Witch in Early Modern History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London, 1996); Marion Gibson, Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches (London, 1999); and Peter Rushton, “Texts of Authority: Witchcraft Accusations and the Demonstration of Truth in Early Modern England,” in Languages of 73 74

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compact and compelling official narrative of the events could be exceedingly complex in the case of witchcraft, however, as the court had to interpret the raw local social experiences and testimonies through the lenses of law, theology, natural philosophy, medicine, magic, politics and communal norms. The protocols of German witchcraft trials, where they survive intact, also reveal that the court often took into account a large number of conflicting, troubling, difficult to interpret testimonies and evidence. One should bear in mind that witchcraft confessions were therefore exceedingly complex composite constructions which hid their many sources behind the voice of the confessant and which bore the official stamp of the court.76 When completed and publicly presented, the confession therefore acted as a single official narrative which superseded all other accounts and was pronounced with official fanfare at the trial and execution. They achieved this official effect by stringing the revealed “facts” into compelling narrative form. Before briefly analyzing one such confession, we should bear in mind the specific circumstances and procedures that governed the confession’s production. First of all, confessions were usually authored by the magistrate responsible for the case and written down by a court scribe. The language of the document concealed this fact, however, and instead presented the confession as the “confession” or “testimony” of the witch herself. Second, the language of the confession also concealed the fact that its separate elements originated in a multiplicity of voices recorded in the secret protocols of the legal proceeding. This made the confession appear to read as if it were a single comprehensive and integrated text when, in fact, it was highly intertextual in

Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture, Stuart Clark, ed. (Houndmills, 2001), 21–39. Because of the differences between English and German law the studies of the English cases, while suggestive, may not tell us much about the literary aspects of the witchcraft confession in the German lands. While literary scholars have yet to take up the German witchcraft confession systematically, one can gain literary insights into them from Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville, 1992); Gerhild Scholz Williams, Defining Dominion: The Discourses of Magic and Witchcraft in Early Modern France and Germany (Ann Arbor, 1996); and Christoph Daxelmüller, Zauberpraktiken: eine Ideengeschichte der Magie (Zürich, 1993). The one case of analyzing witchcraft confessions from a literary point of view that I know is Christel Beyer’s study of the Würzburg confessions in “Hexen-Leut, so zu Würzburg gerichtet:” Der Umgang mit Sprache und Wirklichkeit in Inquisitionsprozessen wegen Hexerei, Europäische Hochschulschriften, Reihe I, Deutsche Sprache und Literatur, vol. 948 (Frankfurt, 1986). Particularly insightful about the institutional and social contexts of peasant testimonies before official bodies of inquiries is David Sabean, “Peasant Voices and Bureaucratic Texts: Narrative Structure in Early Modern German Protocols,” in Peter Becker and William Clark, eds, Little Tools of Knowledge: Historical Essays on Academic and Bureaucratic Processes (Ann Arbor, 2001), 67–93. 76 On the generation of narratives in conflict situations see especially the theoretical insights of Charles L. Briggs, “Introduction, “ in his Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality, Charles L. Briggs, ed. (New York, 1996), 3–40.

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its making.77 A typical confession might draw on a variety of testimonies from eyewitnesses, neighbors, interrogators, family members, expert witnesses (physicians or surgeons), pastors or priests, magistrates, the juristconsults, and, of course, the accused witch herself as she responded to questions. These protocols, however, conceal the fact that they, in turn, were often shaped by wider discussions and gossip in the community at large. These accounts had a temporal quality, and, as a trial went forward, the changing nature of gossip and opinion within the village might actually feed back onto and affect the way that testimonies were taken up or specific questions emphasized. Concealed even more from view were references taken from various learned discourses and treatises. Obviously, magistrates drew most often on learned treatises in law and theology, including treatises about witches and demons, but they might also draw upon works from medicine, botany, and other disciplines. Finally, one should bear in mind that the finished confession was meant for several audiences. These included the judges who presided over the legal procedures, of course, but also other legal experts who had to be convinced of the legitimate status of the confession: jurisconsults, appellate judges, magistrates on the Imperial Chamber Court, even court advisors and rulers themselves who might review the documents before final sentencing and punishment might take place. By the middle of the seventeenth century, this review process seems to have stimulated magistrates to draw up these documents with greater care than earlier.78 Given the spiritual nature of the crime one must also recognize that the confessant herself was a significant audience. She was the one who had to grapple with the terrible strain of reconciling her juridical and religious confessions. The confession revealed her secret identity, after all, in fact a new and publicly sanctioned identity. Finally, 77 I am grateful to Max Reinhart for these insights about the intertextual dimensions of the confession. On “intertextuality” see the incisive introduction to a large and complex literature by Graham Allen, Intertextuality (London, 2000). As it is critical to understand the very precise social settings and circumstances which gave rise to particular stories about witchcraft, especially in a trial setting, I find the theoretical insights of M. M. Bakhtin about language as socially situated helpful. For an introduction see Allen, Intertextuality, 14–30. Bakhtin argues that complex texts, masking the social conflicts that give rise to them, have a “dialogic” quality. That is to say, authors of necessity incorporate parts of other texts into their own text often without acknowledging it. In the case of legal documents, especially the confessions I am considering here, this insight is critical in that it calls attention to the multivocal quality of the final text. See Bakhtin’s The Problem of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (Ann Arbor, 1973); The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin, 1981); and Rabelais and His World (Bloomington, 1984). 78 On the unique system of legal referral in the empire see especially Söke Lorenz, Aktenversendung und Hexenprozess dargestellt am Beispiel der Juristenfakultäten Rostock und Greifswald (1570/82–1630), Studia philosophica et historica, vol. 1 (Frankfurt, 1982–83), 2 vols. On the witchcraft cases which were appealed to the Imperial Chamber Court see Peter Oestmann, Hexenprozesse am Reichskammergericht, Quellen und Forschungen zur höchsten Gerichtsbarkeit im alten Reich, vol. 31 (Cologne, 1997).

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when read aloud on the Final Judgment Day or posted on billboards at the church or market for all to read or even mentioned in a sermon, the confession reached its widest audience: the local community. We do not yet have studies of the regional and temporal variations in witchcraft confessions. This history, when written, might reveal intriguing variations over time and place. One example followed by a brief analysis will have to suffice. The confession below is a transcript of the confession (Urgicht) of Anna Elisabeth Schmieg of Hürden from the old County of Hohenlohe. Her trial and those of ten others made up a last small moral panic in the region between 1668 and 1672, making it one of the last episodes of witch hunting in the German Southwest in the late seventeenth century.79 She affirmed the following confession several times, the last time on the morning of her public execution on November 8, 1672 in the small residence town of Langenburg: The old miller woman Elisabetha Schmieg’s confession and testimony: 1.)

2.) 3.) 4.) 5.) 6.) 7.) 8.) 9.)

She was seduced in Regenbach as a maid of fifteen or sixteen years by the evil spirit and was persuaded to renounce God and her baptismal covenant, then with her blood and signature bound herself over [to the Devil] in a new baptism; after this [she] attended the witches’ dances and did a lot of evil to men and cattle, in particular: In Bächlingen she murdered her child and little boy of four years with a poisoned porridge. [She] gave her still living daughter a [witch’s] shot in the shoulder; which pained her for an entire year; [She] even wanted to murder this same [daughter] last Shrovetide Eve with a poisoned little cake and because She was prevented from doing so, commanded that it be brought to Anna Fessler, now deceased; from which she [Fessler] died within a few hours. [She] then sent a poisoned little cake to the little Fessler boy, which the father kept the child from eating, otherwise he too would have lost his life. Once again her daughter innocently brought another of these poisoned little cakes to the coachman’s wife in Hürden, whose dog refused to eat it, and it was thrown away; Then [she] saved two other poisoned little cakes for [Michel] Fessler and her son-in-law; and because he did not come, threw them away in the ditch beside the mill. [She gave] a widow in Forst named Eva a [witch’s] shot in the arm which gave her unbearable pain.

79 On the Hohenlohe witchcraft trials see Elisabeth Schraut, “Fürstentum Hohenlohe,” in Hexen und Hexenverfolgung im deutschen Südwesten, Lorenz, ed., 275–80. For the wider historical context of these trials see H. C. E. Midelfort, Witch Hunting in Southwestern Germany; and the contributions in Hexen und Hexenverfolgung im deutschen Südwesten, Lorenz, ed.

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10.) [She] killed all manner of cattle here and there with poisonous powder, salves, herbs and the like, in particular her own calf, a cow and a calf of Huebfritz’s wife in Hürden, a cow and a yearling of Leonhardt Weidmann’s, an ox of Hanns Barthel Walther, a calf of Fessler’s; from Nesselbach a calf of Leonhardt Eckhard, two calves and a pig of Tower Michel, a steer each from Cräfflins Jerger, Michel Franck and Leonhardt Finck, an ox of Albrecht Truckenmüller’s; in Bächlingen a sheep of Georg Kurtz, and in Forst a cow of the tailor’s. In addition 11.) [She] drew off milk from some of the cows, and gave it to others. 12.) [She] also used in all of this [witchcraft] all kinds of superstitious and magical things; likewise she also 13.) Confesses to have done in general all kinds of wickedness her entire life all of which she cannot actually remember; [she] therefore 14.) Confesses her entire godless and reckless life to cursing, swearing, drinking, many other things, and 15.) Had Hueb Appel of Hürden not come around, she would have hung herself with a rope and taken her own life.80

One of the striking features of this confession is its narrative construction. After first establishing that this account relates Anna Schmieg’s own confession, the text then lists in a short, concise, and factual manner fifteen specific crimes that she has committed. If one reads the list carefully, and especially if one reads them aloud, the confession actually unfolds as a terrible story of disobedience, murder, destruction of property, and moral depravity. The story begins in Anna Schmieg’s seduction and apostasy, and these opening acts become the driving explanation behind a lifetime of crime that then follows. At fourteen or fifteen Anna Schmieg had been seduced by the devil, renounced God and her baptism, and then bound herself over bodily to Satan. This opening story of disobedience and lese majesty then serves as the compelling explanation for the stories that then follow. The acts that follow (#2–3) actually relate the story of a mother whose first murderous plots took the life of her own innocent four-year-old boy and hurt another. Then on Shrovetide Eve she sets off on a spree of killings and attempted murders, moving out from her own family to strike at all of her neighbors and even their children (#4–8). Before her spree comes to an end the mayhem spreads to all of the surrounding villages (#9–11), harming people (#9), destroying livestock (#10), and magically drawing off supplies of milk from the village cows (#11). 80

[n.d.]

Hohenlohe Zentralarchiv-Neuenstein, Archiv Langenburg, Amt Langenburg 144/13,

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The narrative then widens out to describe the moral depravity she had fallen into: superstitions, sorcery, a godless life, cursing, drinking, and so on (#12, 14). Her life involved so many sins and crimes, in fact, that she cannot even recall them all (#13). By the end this godlessness and moral depravity, we learn, drives her to one last, unspeakably horrible act of despair: the attempt to hang herself. Any seventeenth-century villager or townsman would immediately recognize this story’s plot as a familiar one. In its narrative structure, it conforms exactly with popular tales about witchcraft from the popular street literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Women had a virtual monopoly on the German witchcraft story as they were related in pamphlets, ballads, and broadsides. Generally, they begin, as Schmieg’s tale does, in an act of seduction and disobedience to God. Once given over to the devil, the witch typically turned first against her own children and family members before reaching out in a murderous rage against the entire community.81 Typically they worked their evil through poison. Compared to witchcraft narratives from other parts of Europe, England in particular, German witches in these stories were prone to mass destruction.82 This is a plot about the mayhem that is unleashed by a disobedient woman. In other words, the confession made sense of otherwise senseless violence by deploying a narrative structure and norms that accorded closely with social and religious values of the age of confessionalism. The norms the Langenburg magistrate deployed to frame the elements of this story were the hegemonic norms of the Lutheran confessional state: obedience to God’s commandments, parental duty and obligation, familial love, moderation and temperance, respect for neighbors, communal peace and harmony, modesty and humility, and so on. As the confession was cast in the authoritative third person, the document laid claim to objectivity and truth.83 The confession, in short, derived its meaning as revelations of the godlessness which lurked beneath the veneer of domestic relationships, communal norms and seeming piety of everyday Christians. All other stories that might have accounted for Anna Schmieg’s life and the tragic deaths of others – stories which might involve revenge, the defense of honor, inheritance and retirement strategies, – have no place in the official account. And it employed those norms through a familiar narrative plot that enabled contemporaries to distinguish orderly and pious conduct from deviant, malicious and socially destructive behavior. To press home the importance of this official life story, the parish priest of See Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women, 238–50. Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women, 250. 83 Bakhtin might say that in the struggle between the “dialogic” and “monologic” parts of the text the monologic dominates. Of course, most Langenburgers who heard the confession may have known some but not all of the sources that went into the final confession. 81 82

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Bächlingen drew on Schmieg’s confession when he entered her death into the parish register. What was also critical in a confession like this was that it also be consistent with the law and nature. In the 1560s, 1570s, and 1580s, for example, critics of the witch trials considered confessions incredible because the stories clashed with authoritative accounts of nature and even the specific requirements of the law. For this reason, the magistrates of Rothenburg ob der Tauber hesitated in 1587 to accept one boy’s fantastic stories about witchcraft.84 Concerns like these help explain why some cautious court magistrates tailored the confessions of witchcraft their courts produced to fit the more narrowly defined crime of sorcery and witchcraft according to Article 109 of the Carolina.85 Desiring to widen the law, but also wanting to avoid the controversial aspects of the elaborated theory of witchcraft, the writers of the Saxon code of 1572 broadened the definition to include apostasy.86 They simply left aside the other elements of the elaborated concept, including night flight, the witches’ sabbath, and so on. Hence in those territories influenced by the Saxon ordinance, witch trials tended to produce confessions which restricted the range of preternatural activity of witches and demons. If confessions were to be effective, if they were to bring an end successfully to a moral panic and a social crisis, they had to draw on those norms and values and narrative structures widely deployed in the society. IV Before concluding this study, it is important to consider briefly the uses of witch confessions beyond the trials. The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries produced a rich and complex literature drawing upon witchcraft confessions to advance a variety of claims about the law, religion, politics, morality, crime, society, and even nature. As Stuart Clark has noted, there were no demonologists in this era, only pastors, theologians, jurists, playwrights, pamphlet writers, natural philosophers, physicians, and others who treated witchcraft as evidence concerning other matters.87 Given the witchcraft confession’s status as evidence of a particular kind, however, it was exceptionally useful material for a wide variety of designs and purposes. We have already pointed to the critical role that debates over witchcraft confessions played in the development of the law between 1560 and 1660. 84 Alison Rowlands, Witchcraft Narratives in Germany: Rothenburg 1561–1652 (Manchester, 2003), 89–93. 85 Radbruch, ed., Die peinliche Gerichtsordnung Karl V., §109, p. 76. 86 Jerouschek, “Die Hexenverfolgungen als Problem der Rechtsgeschichte,” 212. 87 Clark, Thinking with Demons.

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The witchcraft confession represented a particularly extreme example of wider issues in the law having to do with the reception of Roman law, the integration of the Carolina into local and territorial legal practice, the jurisconsult system, and the integrity of the inquisitorial procedure itself. The efforts to safeguard the confession at the center of the legal process were driven, on the one hand, by the storm of controversy over witchcraft confessions. On the other hand, the production of massive numbers of witchcraft confessions operated in the late sixteenth century as a kind of feedback loop. Fierce orthodox proponents of short, summary witch trials like Jean Bodin, Peter Binsfeld, Nicolas Remy, and Hermann Goehausen cited confessions as evidence for the need for more vigorous prosecutions.88 At the same time, judicial skeptics, alarmed at the prospect of executing innocent Christians and undermining the legal system through false confessions, focused on careful, painstaking attention to procedural details to safeguard the sanctity of the confession at the center of inquisitorial procedure. Even the sharpest critic of the witch trials, the Jesuit Friedrich Spee, chose to focus his criticisms very carefully on the process by which confessions were produced. While Spee concluded that the present system inexorably and inevitably produced false confessions, thereby brutally persecuting innocent Christians, jurists, in response to his criticisms, tended to draw the lesson that judges should adhere even more rigorously to the safeguards in the Carolina in order to avoid invalid confessions.89 Though far removed from Spee on the reality of witchcraft, Carpzov’s work also shored up the juridical confession. By the middle of the seventeenth century, the witchcraft confession was rarer and shorn of its more fantastic elements. Theologians, natural philosophers and physicians made important uses of witchcraft confessions, too. For theologians they provided experiential evidence – and not just evidence from scriptural authority – about the real menace of demons and witches to Christians. Walter Stephens has recently pointed out, for example, that the Malleus malificarum could only make a compelling case for the reality of witchcraft by treating confessed witches as expert witnesses about the precise physical realities about human interactions with the demon world. Oral and written evidence from the confessions 88 Jean Bodin, De magorum daemonomania: vom aussgelasnen wütigen Teuffelssheer allerhand Zauberern, Hexen unnd Hexenmeistern … (Strasbourg, 1591); Peter Binsfeld, Tractat von Bekantnuß der Zauberer und Hexen, ob und wie sie viel denselben zu glauben … (Munich, 1592); Nicolas Remy, Daemonolatria, das ist, Von Unholden und Zauber Geistern … (Frankfurt, 1598); and Hermann Goehausen, Processus Juridus contra sagas et veneficos, Das ist rechtlicher Prozeß, wie man Unholden und Zauberische Personen verfahren soll … (Rinteln, 1630). 89 See Trusen, “Rechtliche Grundlagen der Hexenprozesse,” 210–11; and “Friedrich Spee als Justizkritiker: Die Cautio Criminalis im Lichte des gemeinen Strafrechts der frühen Neuzeit,” in Friedrich Spee zum 400. Geburtstag: Kolloquium der Friedrich-Spee-Gesellschaft Trier, Gunther Franz, ed. (Paderborn, 1995), 115–36.

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guaranteed what church tradition and the church fathers could not, that is to say, detailed evidence about the workings of demons in the contemporary world.90 After 1560, juridical confessions were therefore used not only as prime evidence about how demons interacted with the physical world, but they were also deployed in various pastoral works meant to develop more thorough Catholic or Protestant religious cultures. Close investigation of witchcraft confessions also underpinned arguments for a more “spiritualized” view of witchcraft and might help pastors drive home to their parishioners the point that misfortune came ultimately from God. Like Job, Christians should meet misfortune with patience and faith.91 To some natural philosophers, witchcraft confessions served as evidence about the workings of the natural and the preternatural worlds. If confessions were true, then they provided critical evidence supporting the view that preternatural interventions in the operations of nature did indeed occur. On the other hand, confessions could support the argument, advanced by Johann Weyer, that what were thought to be preternatural effects were in reality delusions induced by demons or caused by medical conditions like melancholy.92 Trimming confessions of their fantastic diabolical elements seems to have contributed indirectly to what Lorraine Daston has called the “naturalization of the preternatural” in the seventeenth century.93 Finally, the popular press distributed widely the sensational stories of witchcraft confessions and either printed them verbatim from local court records or incorporated parts of them into pamphlets and other publications. Almost never did these popular works treat the confession critically. Instead these publications mined the confessions for their dramatic narrative quality in order to drive home the dangers of the crime and the witches who committed it. Typically, they recounted the stock story that emphasized the disobedience of a disorderly woman and the wild mayhem she brought.94 Predictably these stories reinforced conventional social norms for women: obedience, piety, virtue, devotion to husband and family. In some cases whole confessions were printed. In other publications, official confessions were printed verbatim out of the court record.95 So-called “witchcraft newsletters” Walter Stephens, Demon Lovers: Witchcraft, Sex and the Crisis of Belief (Chicago, 2002), 43–6. On the general arguments of these pastoral works see Clark, Thinking with Demons, 438–44. 92 Weyer, De praestigiis daemonum. 93 On the evidence of witchcraft in debates about nature see Clark, Thinking with Demons, 151–60; and Lorraine Daston, “Marvelous Facts and Miraculous Evidence in Early Modern Europe,” Critical Inquiry 18, 18 (1991): 100–8. 94 Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women, 238–50. 95 See, for example, the bundle of stories brought together and published by Reinhard Lutz in 1586 at the beginning of the first large wave of witch hunts: Theatrum de Veneficis, das ist, Von Teuffelsgespenst, Zauberen, Giftbereiteren, Schwartzküntsler, Hexen und Unholden, vieler fürnemmen Historien und Exempel … (Frankfurt, 1586). 90 91

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and other “newsletters” like the Fugger newspapers seem to have played a particularly important role in spreading the contagion of witch hunting in the 1580s and 1590s.96 This essay has explored how the witchcraft confession assumed a peculiar and important role in the formation of German confessional cultures in the sixteenth century. If witchcraft treatises in general served as an idiom to explore a wide variety of issues at this time, then it was also true that witchcraft confessions provided some of the critical evidence for a variety of claims. They played this role because through law and religion the confession was endowed with an aura of authority and factuality that set it apart from a great deal of other evidence about hidden things. That factuality was never entirely certain, of course. Many writers contested the veracity of witchcraft confessions, and did so vigorously. Ironically, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the very efforts undertaken to shore up the confession’s veracity also tended to restrict its usefulness as evidence about occult operations of demons and nature. It was not that witches no longer existed. Few doubted that they did. The one sure way of confirming authoritatively the hidden workings of demons and witches and bringing them out into the open – through judicial investigation – now rarely penetrated the veils that kept such hidden realities from view.97

96 Wolfgang Behringer, “Hexenverfolgungen im Spiegel zeitgenössischer Publizistik: Die‚ Erweytterte Unholden Zeyttung’ von 1590,” Oberbayerisches Archiv 109 (1984): 339–60. 97 On the part that legal developments played in the decline of witch trials see Trusen, “Rechtliche Grundlagen der Hexenprozesse,” and especially Brian Levack, “The Decline and End of Witchcraft Prosecutions,” in Witchcraft and Magic in Europe: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, Bengt Ankarloo and Stuart Clark, eds (Philadelphia, 1999), 1–94.

“The Second Bucer”: John Dury’s Mission to the Swiss Reformed Churches in 1654–55 and the Search for Confessional Unity Bruce Gordon

The mission of the Scotsman John Dury (1596–1680) to the Swiss Reformed churches in 1654–55 on behalf of Oliver Cromwell was intended to bring together the Protestant states of Europe under English leadership. For Dury, however, this was not merely about politics, for the unity of the Reformed churches and a possible reconciliation with the Lutherans were life-long goals which he had pursued with extraordinary zeal, fortitude, and patience.1 He belonged to that generation of Scotsmen in the seventeenth century who had led itinerate lives across northern Europe, and together with two other displaced figures, Samuel Hartlib and Amos Comenius, he was an influential voice in the ear of the Protector.2 These men were characterized by their millenarian sense of the impending arrival of the kingdom of Christ and the unique role which England, indeed Cromwell, was to play in that new world. Dury believed that the greater cause of church unity overrode all dogmatic and ecclesiological differences, a reflection, no doubt, of his own elastic

This essay is the start of a larger project on confessional relations between Scotland and the continental Reformed churches in the seventeenth century. The rich seam of material relating to Dury’s mission to the Swiss is found in the Staatsarchiv Zürich (StAZ). I am grateful to Rainer Henrich for his assistance and hospitality during my stay in Zurich and to Roger Mason of the Department of Scottish History in St Andrews for some extremely useful tips. 1 The literature on Dury’s missions is limited. Karl Brauer, Die Unionstätigkeit John Duries unter dem Protektorat Cromwells. Ein Beitrag zur Kirchengeschichte des siebzehnten Jahrhunderts (Marburg, 1907); J. M. Batten, John Dury, advocate of Christian reunion (Chicago, 1944). The most important recent essay on Dury is Antony Milton, ‘“The Unchanged Peacemaker”?: John Dury and the politics of Irenicism in England, 1628–1643’, in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Rayler, eds, Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation, (Cambridge, 1994), 95–117. 2 See Hugh Trevor-Roper, ‘Three Foreigners’, in Religion, The Reformation, and Social Change (Melbourne, Toronto, 1967), 237–93.

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position on church government, and this proved both his greatest strength and his greatest weakness. In the end, it came to nothing, but this brief episode tells us a great deal about the limitations of the Reformed networks which had developed from the late sixteenth century. Despite the exchange of students and the personal friendships built between scholars and ministers, contact between the Reformed churches was sporadic in the seventeenth century, and the principal channels of information remained personal contact. This meant there was often little understanding of changing developments and circumstances. The willingness of the Swiss to receive Dury does suggest that despite the dogmatic rigour of Reformed orthodox theology the churches remained flexible on discussions with other confessions. Yet clearly they were not certain about what was going on in England and Scotland or about the nature of the Republic. The Swiss saw Cromwell as a defender of the Reformed cause, a view more consonant with their own needs than with the Protector’s religious inclinations. For their part, Dury and Cromwell had little understanding of the historical realities which had created the Swiss Reformed churches, and the naïve enthusiasm in which the mission was undertaken led to Dury’s entanglement in issues which he could not grasp. The international Protestant network which brought Dury to the Confederation in 1654 also served to undermine the project as the Swiss began to suspect that what the Scotsman represented was something quite foreign to their understanding of the church. During the 1630s the Reformed churches of the Swiss Confederation had been drawn into the unfolding drama in Britain. The head (Antistes) of the Zurich church, Johann Jakob Breitinger (1575–1645), deeply concerned about the possibility of war between King Charles and his Scottish subjects, decided to intervene in the name of the Swiss churches. He penned a letter addressed to Archbishop Laud and circulated it among the churches of Basle, Berne, and Schaffhausen.3 The letter implored the prelate to do everything in his power to avoid war; yet at the same time as Breitinger expressed the support of the Swiss for the Scottish church he was careful not to mention any political events for fear of appearing to meddle.4 Laud’s reply could not have been more unequivocal: the Covenanters were rebels and the Swiss should use their influence on the Scotsmen to return them to obedience to the king.5 Two years later Andrew Ramsay wrote an extensive letter on behalf of the 3 James K. Cameron, ‘The Swiss and the Covenant’, in G. W. S Barrow, ed., The Scottish Tradition: Essays in Honour of Ronald Gordon Cant (Edinburgh, 1974). On Breitinger, see Hans Rudolf von Grebel, Antistes Johann Jakob Breitinger 1575–1665 (Zurich, 1964), also J. C. Mörikofer, Breitinger und Zürich: Ein Kulturbild aus der Zeit des dreißigjährigen Krieges (Leipzig, 1874). 4 StAZ E II.369,223 April 1638. 5 Laud’s letter, StAZ E.II.369.223 April 1639.

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Covenanters to the Swiss churches justifying their position.6 He attacked the king and Laud and defended the stance taken by the Covenanters. The Swiss were entirely sympathetic and expressed their support for the Scots in their correspondence. In the summer of 1640 the Swiss churches replied through Zurich to the Scots; they gave an enthusiastic endorsement of the Scottish theology but combined this with an admonition to remain blameless in the eyes of the world.7 The Swiss had hoped to use their influence to keep peace between the two churches which they regarded as part of the international Protestant fellowship, but, as James Cameron has pointed out, they withdrew from the scene as the matter became more deeply intertwined in British politics.8 The matter, however, was of the greatest importance for the Dury episode in the 1650s. It demonstrated the natural empathy of the Swiss churches for the Presbyterian order in Scotland, a bond which had been cemented through extensive contacts at the Reformed academies of Geneva, Leiden, Marburg, and Herborn. At the same time, it is clear that the leaders of the Swiss churches had only the vaguest understanding of ecclesiastical politics in England during the middle decades of the seventeenth century. Although much was made of their connections, in fact the Swiss were not able to follow the rise and fall of factions, and as a result of this confusion they were open to the persuasive powers of John Dury fifteen years later. Born in Edinburgh, John Dury was educated in the Low Countries before serving the Scottish/Prussian Reformed church in Elbing (1624–31). It was while he was in Prussia that Dury came under the influence of Gustavus Adolphus, who won him over to the idea of the unification of the Protestant confessions. Dury returned to England to campaign on behalf of this idea, which he would continue to hold until his death. His inspiration came from the attempts at reconciliation between the Lutherans and Reformed at the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631, the meeting summoned by Johann Georg of Saxony to create a Protestant alliance to stand against the Imperial and foreign forces.9 His stay in England, however, was brief and he returned to central Europe seeking support among the Reformed churches. What he encountered, however, seemed not wholly encouraging. The Swiss, under Johann Jakob Breitinger from Zurich, were distinctly cool, and only the Reformed Academy of Sedan offered warm support. The Lutherans were even less receptive, with only Helmstedt replying positively, whilst from Leipzig and Jena came a cold blast. Dury remained on the continent for two years, finally returning to London in 1633 with little to show for his efforts. He Cameron, ‘The Swiss and the Covenant’, 159. StAZ E.II.369, 266. August 1640. 8 Cameron, ‘The Swiss and the Covenant’, 162. 9 On the Leipzig Colloquy, see Bodo Nischan, Prince, People and Confession. The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994), 240–1. 6 7

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returned to central Europe in 1634 for the synod of the Reformed churches, and this did seem to offer some hope, but the defeat at Nördlingen forced him to hasten back to London. In 1636 Dury travelled to Sweden at the invitation of Gustavus Adolphus’ chaplain, and there he negotiated with Swedish Lutherans in Stockholm and Upsala on the question of reconciliation with the Reformed churches. He had come to Sweden in the hope of using the connections he made with Gustavus’ court whilst in German lands to put his plans for union back on course, but he found, to his exasperation, that the Swedish Lutherans were extremely sceptical about all attempts to unite the confessions. When he returned to England in 1640 Dury found as much turmoil as he had left behind among the Germans. He was first a court preacher for Mary, daughter of Charles I, but by 1643 he was a delegate to the Westminster Synod, before taking a position as minister to the English merchants in Rotterdam. In each of these positions Dury tirelessly sought to win supporters for his plans for Protestant unification. During this time he came in contact with Samuel Hartlib (1600–62), a native of Elbing, who had come to England to study at Cambridge and to flee the Swedish forces in German lands. Hartlib was to exercise considerable influence on Dury and shared with the Scotsman many of his irenic ideas.10 Hartlib feared the creation of a Catholic League which would seek to overthrow the Puritan regime in England and he believed that the only defence was an alliance of the Protestant states of Europe. Hartlib and Dury built up a circle of like-minded friends which included John Milton, the mathematician John Pell, Amos Comenius, and Robert Boyle.11 For ten years following the close of the correspondence between Andrew Ramsay and Breitinger there was little contact between the British and Swiss churches. Indeed, the Confederation saw a generational change as Breitinger died and Theodor Zwinger, the grand man of the Basle church, was now very old. Dury, meanwhile, had busied himself with his other great intellectual endeavour, the reform of education and of libraries.12 Dury was closely connected to the government of Cromwell through his friendship with John Milton, and the plans of Dury and Hartlib for a union of the divided Protestant churches attracted the Protector. Hugh Trevor-Roper has argued 10 On Dury and Hartlib, see Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Raylor eds, Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation. Studies in Intellectual Communication (Cambridge, 1994). 11 Christopher Hill, Milton and the English Revolution (London, Boston, 1977), 146–7. 12 Dury wrote on the position of the university library keeper and how libraries could be reformed to serve the wider community and the cause of Christ. John Dury, The Reformed School and the Reformed Library Keeper (Menston, 1972).

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that Dury, Hartlib, and Comenius formed the intellectual world of Oliver Cromwell, for they, like him, were products of the 1620s, when Protestant Europe was collapsing through disunity.13 In the 1650s Cromwell’s foreign policy, dominated by relations with Spain and Mazarin’s France, led the Protector to consider the usefulness of a broad Protestant alliance.14 Cromwell turned to Dury and Hartlib with their apocalyptic visions of a new Europe under the leadership of Protestant England. The union of the Protestant churches, however, formed only one aspect of the millenarian thought of Dury and Hartlib, who were also persuaded that the moment had come in the divine plan for the conversion of the Jews to Christianity, and their philosemitism became one of the dominant religious ideas of mid seventeenth-century England.15 Both the union of the churches and the great conversion were to be parts of the nascent thousand-year reign of Christ on earth. Dury presented the plan to Cromwell in terms of a united Protestant alliance under the leadership of England. In 1655 Cromwell declared to the ambassador from the Elector of Brandenburg that he saw it as his God-given duty to ‘hold all the Protestant powers, princes, and republics in good Christian unity and trust’.16 For Dury this was a dream come true. The possibility that his plans for unity, so long frustrated, might now have the backing of a powerful ruler who could bring them to fruition filled him with renewed resolve. John Milton played a crucial role in bringing about this propitious moment. Having become an enthusiastic supporter of Dury, he now used his influence with Cromwell. But Dury needed more: he had to win over the influential theologians in order to establish the theological basis for union. A key backer was Archbishop James Ussher of Armagh. At this point Dury put his ideas into print with his italics ‘An earnest plea for Gospel-Communion in the way of Godliness’ printed in London in 1654.17 Previously, Dury’s experiences in the 1630s had not only brought him face to face with the reluctance of Lutherans to engage in discussions on church unity, but also with the discord among the Reformed churches. Any attempt to bring the two confessions together would have to begin by resolving Trevor-Roper, ‘Three Foreigners’, 281. On the European context, see Timothy Venning, Cromwellian Foreign Policy (London, 1995), 38–63. 15 Richard H. Popkin, ‘Hartlib, Dury, and the Jews’, in Mark Greengrass, Michael Leslie, and Timothy Rayler eds, Samuel Hartlib and Universal Reformation (Cambridge, 1994), 118–36. 16 Urkunden und Aktenstücke zur Geschichte des Kurfürsten Friedrich Wilhelm von Brandenburg. Vol. VII, 728, cited in Brauer, Die Unionstätigkeit, 9. 17 John Dury, An earnest plea for Gospel-communion in the way of Godliness: which is sued for by the Protestant Churches of Germanie, unto the churches of Great Britain and Ireland, in a letter written by them to these, which was sent hither to that effect (London: printed for Richard Wodnothe, 1654). 13 14

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internal differences among the Reformed churches of Europe. The beginning point, Dury believed, had to be the Swiss churches, the oldest, though no longer the most influential of the Reformed churches. Dury’s attraction to the Swiss churches likely had much to do with his own youth in the Netherlands, which during the first half of the seventeenth century was closely connected to the Swiss Reformed churches.18 The Swiss churches, under the leadership of Johann Jakob Grynäus, Amandus Polanus, and Johannes Buxtorf in Basle and Johann Jakob Breitinger in Zurich, had turned strongly towards Reformed orthodoxy, and this had done nothing to heal the breach with the German Lutherans which had been opened in the 1520s between Zwingli and Luther. The Swiss had participated at the Synod of Dordrecht, where Breitinger delivered a speech in which he defended the theology of Heinrich Bullinger, whom the Arminians had cited in support of their position on predestination.19 The canons of the Synod of Dordrecht were immediately adopted in the Swiss Confederation, although there was considerable hostility between the hard-line Calvinists and those who rejected the doctrine of double predestination.20 In 1619 the Bernese Council declared the canons to be binding upon the members of its church. As Pfister has remarked, the Second Helvetic Confession, the essential dogmatic formulation of the Swiss Reformation, was henceforth interpreted in light of Dordrecht.21 The Thirty Years’ War placed the Reformed Churches of the Swiss Confederation in the greatest danger.22 There was little unity in the face of the war, and Bernese attempts to draw together the Reformed states was greeted with hesitation. Zurich, Berne, and Basle all looked to bolster their own fortifications rather than seek confessional unity. Even Gustavus Adolphus, the so-called saviour of the German Protestants, was a problem for the Swiss. There were discussions of a pact with the king, but in the end the Swedes were Lutherans, and there was no reconciliation with the Lutheran church. In 1634, after the death of Gustavus Adolphus, the Swiss hoped that the Swedes might defend the Protestant churches in the Confederation, but the Swedes would not be enticed. However, three years later, at the regular meeting of the Swiss Reformed churches in Baden the resident English ambassador, Oliver Fleming, proposed a greater alliance with Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden, and Holland to support the beleaguered German Protestants. At the same moment a more serious crisis was unfolding in the 18 Max Geiger, Die Basler Kirche und Theologie im Zeitalter der Hochorthodoxie (Zurich, 1952), 100ff. 19 J. J. Breitinger, ‘Apologia’, in Johann Heinrich Hottinger, ed., Historiae Ecclesiasticae novi testamenti tomus VIII, Saeculi XVI, pars IV, Tiguri 1666, 958–77. 20 Rudolf Pfister, Kirchengeschichte der Schweiz II (Zurich, 1974), 421–2. 21 Pfister, Kirchengeschichte, II, 422. 22 Still fundamental is the work of Frieda Gallati. See her ‘Eidgenössiche Politik zur Zeit des Dreissigjährigen Krieges’, Jahrbuch für Schweizerische Geschichte, vols 43 and 44 (1918/19).

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Graubünden for much of the first half of the seventeenth century. The Graubünden had been confessionally divided since the Reformation, with the principle of religious parity used to maintain peace.23 The valleys of the Graubünden, however, were bordered by Spanish Milan to the south and the lands of the Austrian Habsburgs to the east, and these Catholic powers sought to inflame confessional rivalries. Tension peaked in the massacre of Tirano, which lasted from 18–23 July 1620, when approximately 600 members of the Reformed community were put to death. The massacre, known as the ‘sacro macello’, was regarded by Catholics in the Confederation as a sign of divine favour, while the Reformed Churches responded with bitter outrage.24 The intervention of Austrian and Spanish forces in the Graubünden between 1620–39 was largely to secure the Alpine passes for troop movements between Italy and the north, but it was also a considerable success for the CounterReformation. When peace was concluded in 1639 the Spanish had won guarantees for movement of their troops through the lands and a large part of the Graubünden had been returned to Catholicism. The intervention of France prevented a complete Catholic victory, but the Reformed church was reduced to a rump. The Swiss Confederation struggled to cope with the consequences of the Thirty Years’ War. Vast numbers of refugees had fled into Swiss lands, bringing bubonic plague, which ravaged the Confederation. At the same time peasant unrest was led by Nicholas Leuenberg, who demanded relief from taxes and more recognition of tenant rights. Leuenberg amassed an army of 16,000 in June 1653 which razed villages, but the revolt was brief and eventually quashed by federal forces at Wohlenschwil.25 Tensions were also stirred by renewed efforts by Zurich to create a more centralised Confederation; this was part of the on-going confessional conflicts which led to the First Villmergen war of 1655, when Zurich and Berne were defeated by the Catholic forces.26 The legacy of the Swiss Reformation of the sixteenth century was the constant threat of religious war, which was occasionally realised. When Dury took up correspondence with the Swiss churches in 1649 he had not been in contact for almost fifteen years. Oliver Flemming put him in touch with the head of the Zurich church, Johann Jakob Ulrich. Dury’s reason for writing, he argued, was to explain to the Swiss what had happened in Britain during the 1640s and to put to rest many of the false rumours about 23 See above all, Randolph C. Head, Early Modern Democracy in the Grisons: Social Order and Political Language in a Swiss Mountain Canton, 1470–1620 (Cambridge, 1995). 24 Emil Camenisch, Storia della Riforma e Controriforma nelle valli meridionali del Canton Grigioni (Samedan, 1950). 25 Peter Stadler, ‘Die Zeitalter der Gegenreformation’, Handbuch der Schweizer Geschichte (Zurich, 1980), 653. 26 Stadler, ‘Die Zeitalter’, 658–63.

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the nature of the Puritan church.27 Ulrich was receptive to Dury’s overtures and during the period 1649–52 there was an exchange of letters in which the nature of the new English republic was discussed. Through this epistolary relationship with Ulrich, Dury established a link with the key Swiss church leaders, and it seems that the Swiss quickly warmed to the Scotsman. In 1653 the Stadtschreiber of Schaffhausen, Johann Jakob Stockar, travelled to England to meet Dury and the following year Dury was writing to the Swiss expressing both his gratitude for their friendship and his optimism that church unity might be forged.28 His opportunity was soon to arrive as in 1654 England decided to cement its renewed relations with the Swiss through a diplomatic mission, and Dury applied to join. In the spring of that year John Pell was sent as ambassador along with approximately twenty-three ministers (including Dury), and representatives of the theological faculties of Oxford and Cambridge.29 Dury arrived in Zurich on May 16 1654 and was greeted by the head of the Reformed church, Johann Jakob Ulrich, and the scholar Johann Rudolf Stucki. The two hosts immediately praised Dury for his work in seeking to unite the Protestant churches, a cause, they claimed, which was close to their hearts.30 For their part, Ulrich and Stucki praised the warmth with which the Swiss delegation to England under Stockar had been received and they declared the Protector Cromwell to be a ‘pious and exemplary’ man whose affection for the Swiss churches was well known. Dury was accommodated in the home of one Hans Jakob Schmid and treated as a most honoured guest in the city. The negotiations, however, could not begin for another two weeks until the Bürgermeister returned; in preparation, the church formed a commission of about a half dozen leading ministers. The discussions between Dury and his Zurich hosts took place in the house Engelberg, where the Scotsman was staying. The opening round consisted of a welcoming speech from the Antistes Ulrich in Latin, the presentation of letters of recommendation from England, and an account by Dury of his previous labours on behalf of Protestant unity. Perhaps most significantly, Dury presented to the Zurich churchmen a draft of his principal work on StAZ E.II.457g.71. ‘Certe mihi nihil optatius accidere potuit, quam vestris desideriis in tam pio et laudabili proposito inservire; et nihil honorificentius unquam nihil evenisse arbitor, quam experiri, quod fiduciam de meo erga Ecclesiam et Rempublicam vestram affectu conceperitis, quae veritati summopere consentanea est, et quam confirmare et augere quibuscunque potero officiis nullo unquam tempore intermittam. Pergite Illustrissimi Heroes ut cepistes, communia Evangelicae causae commodia procurare, incommoda prospicere et salubri consilio atque opera praevenire.’ StAZ E.II.457b. 26 January 1654. 29 StAZ E II 457b. 30 Johann Jakob Ulrich’s account of the meeting is found in StAZ EII 457a and b. 27 28

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unity, Irenicum.31 The meeting then concluded with a meal and a resolution to continue the discussions the following day. As most honoured guest, Dury was shown around the churches of the city, given a tour of the archives (which for a librarian must have been of great interest), and taken for a boat trip on Lake Zurich. We are well informed about the details of the Dury’s visit through the diary kept by the Antistes Ulrich, who recorded every aspect in great detail.32 Ulrich and Stucki clearly were very much taken by Dury and his persuasive manner, but they also had a very particular purpose in undertaking the negotiations. They saw Dury, and perhaps even more importantly, Cromwell, as the only means by which they could build a bridge to the German Lutherans. But this was optimistic, for relations between the two confessions had, if anything, deteriorated with the rise of Protestant orthodoxy. While it may be that some of those who met with Dury, including Ulrich and Stucki, genuinely hoped for Protestant unity, the Swiss position was essentially drawn by the fear that they would be engulfed by powerful Catholic neighbours. The next decisive stage in the negotiations took place at Aarau, at the regular meeting of the Reformed Swiss Confederates. The Diet began on 12 June and Dury and Pell arrived accompanied by the Zurich Bürgermeister. The two men were to address the Reformed Confederates on the purpose of their cause, and Pell led off with his Propositio.33 Pell essentially outlined the political situation in Europe and argued that Cromwell’s achievements had brought about a new age when unity was possible. He assured the Swiss delegates of Cromwell’s abiding concern for the state of the Reformed churches on the Continent and his desire that they should be brought together. Pell was then followed by Dury, who picked up on the same themes and argued that the British had long been concerned about the Swiss churches and that this relationship had been revived by the visit of Stockar. It was now the wish of the Protector that something be done to establish firmly the relationship between the two churches. He then turned to flattery: the Swiss churches, in his words were, historically, ‘tanquam aliarum per Europam Reformatarum mater’. Long had they nourished the other churches and sought to maintain unity through the teaching of true doctrine. Further, their location was ideal as the base for negotiations with the German Lutherans. The presentation in Aarau before the Reformed delegates seemed to go well, an assessment which was strengthened when Stucki, on behalf of the

31 J.Duraei irenicorum tractatuum prodromus, in quo praeliminares continentur tractus de I. Pacis ecclesiasticae remoris e medio tollendis II. Concordiae evangelicae fundamentis sufficienter jactis III. Reconciliationis religiosae procurandae argumentis… IV Methodo investigatoria ad controversias omnes. Amstelodami, 1662. 32 Ulrich’s diary is found in StAZ E.II 457a. 33 Pell’s Propositio is found in StAZ E.II.457a.

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Zurich church, presented his report on Dury’s text Irenicum.34 The positive nature of the report resulted in a decision by the delegates to join Cromwell in his work for Protestant unity. Each of the Reformed churches was to respond individually, and it was decided that they should either send their report directly to Zurich or present it at the next meeting of the Jahrrechnung, the annual Swiss Diet. Dury and Pell had used the opportunity at Aarau to befriend the leading political officials of the Reformed Swiss Confederates; in particular they developed good relations with Bürgermeister Johann Rudolf Wettstein of Basle and Anton von Grafenreid of Berne. Dury and Pell seemed to have persuaded the Swiss that Cromwell was the man to unite the Reformed churches of Europe. It is clear that at this early point the Swiss churches’ need for strong foreign support met with Dury’s enormous enthusiasm for unity; the difficult issues concerning theology, ecclesiology, and Cromwell’s relationship to the Reformed faith were as yet untested. Back in Zurich the negotiations continued with Stucki’s report forming the centre of discussions. Although Stucki had, for the most part, affirmed Dury’s theological positions and written warmly of his goals, there were some points which he found troubling. Dury for his part undertook to re-examine his text and make necessary revisions in light of Stucki’s comments.35 The summer of 1654 was highly rewarding for Dury and Pell. In the period leading up to the meeting of the Swiss Confederates in Baden at the end of June the various Reformed churches reported their enthusiasm for the work of the Scotsman. From Schaffhausen, St Gall, and Chur, in the confessionally ravaged Graubünden, in the east came positive responses and a willingness to participate further in the discussions, while from the west an equally positive reply came from Biel. Certainly Antistes Ulrich had done his part in bringing into line those churches most directly under the influence of Zurich, but there was little doubt that the Swiss did see a way forward. This was reinforced in July, when Dury’s text ‘de mediis’ received a highly positive report from the Zurich representatives in the negotiations. Dury’s success appeared stunning – he had won over the leading theologians and politicians of Zurich to the cause – but he understood very well that this was only the beginning. For any serious attempt to unite the Reformed churches and bring them into negotiations with the German Lutherans, he would need an equally positive response from Berne and Basle. Berne, since the sixteenth century, had remained the most inward-looking of the major Swiss Reformed states. Its theological orientation was conservative and somewhat suspicious of outsiders. Nevertheless, Dury was fortunate in having two figures who were prepared to further his cause: the 34 35

14ff.

StAZ E.II. 457a. Stucki’s report (Gutachten) and Dury’s comments are found in StAB Th.Hott. F.64,

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theologian Christoph Lüthard and the preacher in the Berne Münster, Johann Heinrich Hummel. These two men occupied rather different positions on the theological spectrum: Lüthard was a deeply conservative man who eventually warmed to Dury’s ecumenical spirit; Hummel was suspected of holding questionable theological views and had been required to submit a confession of faith.36 When Dury arrived in Berne in August 1654 he immediately sought out the Bürgermeister, Nicolaus Dachselhofer, in order to win him over. The positive response of the leading clergy in the city to Dury’s presence led to the formation of a commission to begin negotiations. This was something of a disappointment for the Scotsman, who, clearly misreading his hosts, thought that he might conclude his business in Berne with a quick affirmation of the union plan. The Bernese, however, had no thoughts of a speedy resolution and intended to have a full discussion along the lines of that which had taken place in Zurich. The discussions went well, largely as a result of the close friendship Dury was able to strike up with Lüthard and Hummel. The latter in particular was deeply sympathetic to the Scotsman on account of a personal concern for religious refugees and eirenic theology. After a stay of four weeks in Berne Dury was able to leave confident that the second of the three dominant Reformed Swiss cities was now on his side. The situation in Basle was very different. The leader of the church Theodor Zwinger, a stern defender of Reformed orthodoxy, was extremely dubious. He wrote to Ulrich in Zurich to ask by what authority Dury, whom he called ‘a second Bucer’, was undertaking these negotiations.37 For Zwinger, Dury represented yet another attempt to fudge the differences between the Reformed church and the Lutherans, whom he despised. In contrast to Zurich, Berne, and the other Reformed churches Zwinger assessed Dury’s Propositio extremely negatively. Zwinger declared that before there could be any unity between the English and Swiss churches it was essential to establish whether the theology of the English churches was in harmony with the ‘pure, true religion and confession’ of the Swiss.38 This was, he added, all the more crucial as he had heard that the English church was riven by sects. Zwinger’s sources on the situation in England need to be established, but clearly he (likely through Scottish and Dutch connections) was being given a very different impression of Cromwell than Dury had delivered in Zurich. In Basle Cromwell’s attitudes towards church government and the clergy were not seen as amenable to the Swiss Reformed tradition. Further, Zwinger was adamant that there could be no compromise between the Reformed, with their pure teaching and doctrine, and the despised Lutherans, and that, therefore, Dury’s endeavour was in vain. 36 37 38

K. Guggisberg, Bernische Kirchengeschichte (Berne, 1958), 306–7. The letter is quoted in Brauer, Die Unionstätigkeit, 38–9. Zwinger’s reply. StAZ E.II.457b.

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All, however, was not lost, for there were in the Basle church other men receptive to Dury’s plans, above all the influential figures Johannes Buxtorf and Johann Rudolf Wettstein. Both of these men were friends of Stucki and Ulrich in Zurich and their friendship network opened the path to Basle for Dury, who arrived in the city in September 1654. Zwinger posed a problem both as a powerful man and, worse, as the prospective head of the commission which would lead the negotiations with Dury. Zwinger did everything he could to stall the proceedings. Dury remained stranded in the city, caught between the theological differences of his hosts and seemingly unable to advance his cause. He remained, nevertheless, tireless and attended every meeting of the Basle church in an effort to win over supporters. During that awkward September Ulrich managed to break the deadlock by persuading Zwinger, through a series of letters, to let the negotiations begin.39 Dury’s optimism that the Basle church would now step into line was sorely disabused with the opening of negotiations. Once again, he experienced the apprehension of the Basle church towards discussions with the Lutherans. Zwinger was seriously ill and much of his participation came from his bed. In the end the Baslers gave Dury an answer, but it was not what he had hoped for.40 The Baslers masked their lack of enthusiasm behind procedural objections: in broad outline, they stated, they supported the plans for union, but such an undertaking could only be carried out by someone of the stature of Protector Cromwell, and not by his representative. This was followed by an assertion clearly intended to kill Dury’s plans. Any theological agreement, the Basle statement declared, would have to be judged by the confessional standards of both the Reformed and Lutheran churches. It also recommended that German Reformed theologians should lead the way as the Lutherans had nothing but hate for the Swiss on account of their strictly Reformed religion. Dury must have departed Basle with mixed emotions. Given that when he had arrived he had faced the serious criticisms of Theodor Zwinger, he must have been glad that in principle the Baslers had affirmed his project. But the tone of their document was hardly enthusiastic. They were sceptical of any positive outcome and the document contained some painful criticisms of Dury’s ideas. Without doubt Zwinger had exercised decisive influence in formulating the Basle position and his hostility to the Lutherans, so recently vented in the theological quarrel with Johann Georg Durchaeus in Rostock, clearly coloured his response to Dury. The Scotsman felt that he had not really been given a chance and that Zwinger, on account of his illness and confessional hostility, had hardly read his texts. Basle, however, was not Dury’s only problem. In a letter dated 17 August 39 40

Ulrich to Zwinger and Buxtorf, StAZ E.II.457b.170. 26 September 1654. The Basle reply is found in the Basle University Library. UB M et J. V. n. 93.

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1564 the Dutch Reformed theologian Samuel Maresius (1593–1673) in Groningen wrote to Stucki in Zurich to warn him about Dury.41 Maresius adamantly opposed any form of deviation from orthodox Reformed theology and further denounced Cromwell’s attempts to build a Protestant alliance, warning that the Protector had done nothing to combat the rise of sects in England. Fortunately for Dury Stucki was not receptive and he undertook, on behalf of the Swiss churches, to write in protest against the Dutchman’s interference.42 At the same time southern German Lutherans were getting wind of what was taking place and they too voiced opposition to any accommodation with the despised Reformed churches.43 By the autumn of 1654 Dury’s work among the Swiss churches had reached a delicate stage. The unhelpful report from the Basle church threatened to undo the good will he had experienced in Zurich and Berne and if Dury’s mission was not to lose momentum it needed a fresh impulse. In Zurich the Antistes Ulrich renewed his commitment and intervened with the magistrates to secure their support for the imperilled cause; he asked the Zurich Council that all of the material pertaining to the Dury mission be assembled and disseminated through the land in order that ministers might be better informed.44 Ulrich’s plans went further. Fearing that the Basle church might succeed in preventing Dury from accomplishing anything during his stay in the Confederation, the head of the Zurich church proposed that a new report be written in the name of all the Swiss churches.45 His intentions were clear: the Zurich church should take the lead, putting Basle in a secondary position. The report, Ulrich proposed, would set out the terms by which the Reformed churches would be prepared to negotiate with the Lutherans; it was an idea which appealed to Bürgermeister Johann Heinrich Waser and he promised the support of the Council.46 For such negotiations Dury had already been using a document which he believed might form the basis of confessional discussions. These were the eight ‘conditiones suecicae’ which had been given to him by the theological faculty in Upsala in 1636 as the basis for negotiations with the Reformed churches. Naturally they were heavily Lutheran in tone, but Dury believed that they formed a useful starting point. The contact is described in Brauer, Die Unionstätigkeit, 56. The correspondence between Dury and Stucki on Maresius, StAZ E.II.457c. 43 The letter of Nicolaus Macler to Chabray in Ifferton. StAZ E.II457b. 136. Macler described Dury’s theology as ‘Syncretismus’. The letter became known among the Swiss churches and Dury wrote a refutation of Macler’s charges. StAZ E.II. 457b.144. 44 Ulrich’s report to the Council, StAZ E.II 457b. 87. 45 Ulrich made the suggestion to Bürgermeister Johann Heinrich Waser on November 1 1654, StAZ E.II. 457a. 46 On Waser, see Norbert Domeisen, Johann Heinrich Waser (1600–1669) als Politiker – ein Beitrag zur Schweizer Geschichte des 17. Jahrhunderts (Dissertation, Zurich, 1975). 41 42

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During November 1654 Dury travelled to St Gall, where he believed, on account of the influence of the Zurich church in the eastern part of the Confederation, that he could expect a warm reception for his work. He was not disappointed. On 28 November he met the representatives of the St Gall and Appenzeller churches, who received him enthusiastically and expressed a willingness to participate in the formula being drafted by the Zurich church. Whilst in the eastern part of the Confederation Dury also met representatives of the Reformed church from the Graubünden, who rode to Appenzell to meet the Scotsman. Once again Dury felt that the meeting had gone well and that mutual understanding and sympathy prevailed. Letters from both the St Gall and Appenzeller churches were dispatched to Zurich in December expressing their support for Dury’s union work.47 Dury returned to Zurich just before Christmas, in time to read Stucki’s draft for a joint statement of the Swiss churches. What he read must have greatly pleased him, for Stucki affirmed all the central principles of Dury’s plans. This encouraged the Scotsman to travel west, leaving Zurich on 21 December and arriving two days later in Berne. Politically, Berne was the most vulnerable link for Dury on account of the influence of the French, but when he arrived in the city it became clear that the magistrates were still enthusiastic about his plans. Lüthard, along with many of the Bernese clergy, however, remained dubious about the Lutheran document from Upsala as the basis for theological reconciliation. But the general willingness to participate in the process was indicated by the fact that Dury’s union work was included in the official Sunday prayers employed by the churches of Berne and its rural territories.48 From Berne Dury continued west to Neuchâtel and Biel, where once again he was well received. Never ceasing to explain his position, Dury was successful in securing from both of these churches statements of support.49 Dury’s principal goal in the west, however, was Geneva, Calvin’s city. The previous June the Genevans, together with the Swiss churches, had indicated their support for Dury at the meeting in Aarau, but the mood had changed. When Dury made contact with the Genevans from Lausanne, where he was staying in February 1655, the response was not entirely warm. The Genevans made it clear that they saw no possibility of reconciling the Reformed and Lutheran confessions, but that they were prepared to talk about Protestant unity.50 Dury was eager to disabuse the Genevans of the suspicion, clearly shared with Basle, that he sought a syncretism of the Reformed and Lutheran confessions. The Genevans, however, remained cautious and agreed to meet 47 48 49 50

ZB Th.Hott. F.64.203. Brauer, Die Unionstätigkeit, 64–5. The documents of support are dated 16 February 1655. ZB Th. Hott. F. 64.210. Letter of the Venerable Company of Pastors to Dury, StAZ EII.457c.230.

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Dury only at Nyon, where they would send a delegation consisting of the minister Daniel Chabrey, the professors Philippe Mestrezat and François Turretin and the rector of the Genevan Academy. At this initial meeting on 18 January Dury succeeded in persuading the Genevans that the best way forward was for him to come to Geneva in person and explain to the leaders of the church what he sought to achieve. Chabrey accepted this point and the Scotsman was duly invited. Dury’s warm reception in Geneva by the Syndics owed more to his known concern for the state of the Huguenot churches in France than to the plans for a Protestant alliance he was peddling. The Syndics instructed a commission to be struck to negotiate with Dury, and from 23 January the Scotsman met with the theologians Theodor Tronchin, Daniel Chabrey, Philippe Mestrezat, Antoine Leger, François Turretin, and the professors of philosophy Paul Bacuet and Jean du Pan.51 The principal points for debate were a closer union of the Swiss churches, contact with the Lutheran churches, the Upsala document, and a Harmonia Confessionum. The Genevans heartily agreed to the first point, but stated that political and ecclesiastical cooperation with the Lutherans could only be on a case by case basis and not through organic union. As for the Upsala document they agreed to make it central to discussions with the Lutherans, but there remained scepticism about any Harmonia Confessionum.52 It was agreed that Tronchin would draw up a statement on behalf of the Genevan church and this would be sent to Dury, who left the city on 30 January on account of perceived danger to his person from the neighbouring French. The Genevan statement was dated 11 February and for Dury it must have been a disappointment similar to that which he had experienced in Basle. Tronchin, writing on behalf of the Genevans, obviated any reference to the details of the discussion and cloaked the document with vague statements of support for Dury’s union work. Nothing was said about negotiations with the Lutherans or doctrinal reconciliation. Dury had clearly misread the Genevans, who were not prepared to water down their Reformed positions. This may have had something to do with the presence in the city of Johannes Zwinger, son of Theodor, the head of the Basle church who had recently died. Whilst Dury was travelling in the west Basle was once more thwarting his endeavours. On 18 December 1654 Stucki had completed his ‘Declaratio’ and ‘Iudicium’ on behalf of the Swiss churches and it was dispatched to Basle, Berne, and Schaffhausen. The latter two cities immediately signalled their support, with only the most minor reservations, but Basle demurred. The Basle Council was very much beholden to the views of the principal theologians in the city in the Dury matter, and the situation in December 51 52

Brauer, Die Unionstätigkeit, 73. Brauer, Die Unionstätigkeit, 73.

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1654 proved not propitious. Zwinger was dying and responsibility for formulating the city’s response fell on Buxtorf, who harboured considerable reservations. In his letter to Stucki Buxtorf offered a variety of excuses, including the death of Zwinger, for the delay in his reply, but when he came to address the Declaratio he was extremely cautious.53 He wanted to wait to see how other leading princes responded before he committed the Basle church to a position. The reply from Zurich was swift. The Zurich church leaders stressed that unity in such matters appeared crucial and it seemed vital that the reply come from all the Swiss Reformed churches speaking with one voice rather than from individual churches with differing views. There was already a rumour among the Germans, the Zurichers wrote, that Dury’s mission had split the Swiss churches.54 The reply from Basle written by Buxtorf signalled a hardening of their position.55 This time the Basle theologian had new ammunition. From the son of Theodor Zwinger he had received an account of the negotiations between Dury and the Genevans, and he was aware that in Calvin’s city little enthusiasm existed for the cause. Secondly, and more damagingly, Johannes Müller, a theologian from Zurich, had just returned from England through the Netherlands. He reported that when he was in London, leading churchmen claimed to know nothing of Dury’s mission and, worse, when told about it, they replied that they wanted to know nothing further. Müller had also reported that Dury’s reputation among the Dutch was extremely low, being represented as a syncretist and a supporter of those who had murdered the English king. It has been suggested that Maresius was the source of this character defamation, but that seems to have troubled the Basle theologians little. A further dimension relevant to this case was the opposition to Cromwell’s policies among Scottish Presbyterians and the dissemination of their views to the continent. In particular we need to turn to Samuel Rutherford, by far the most distinguished Scottish churchman and the most well-connected with the continental Reformed churches, who had been twice offered the chair of theology in Utrecht in 1651. The Swiss knew Rutherford through letters he had co-written to them from the Westminster synod seeking their opinion on dogmatic matters.56 His opposition to Cromwell’s religion was well known; he feared that Cromwell’s emphasis on the conscience would lead to an undesirable religious pluralism, a concern echoed in the objections raised by

Letter of Buxtorf to Stucki, StAZ EII.457c233. The letter is from Ulrich to the Basle church, 21 January 1655. UBB m.et J. V. n. 112–15. 55 ZB Th. Hott. F.64.148. 24 January 1655. 56 The letter co-signed by Rutherford is found in StAZ E II, 369. The letter is written in German and was likely translated in Zurich on arrival. 53 54

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Basle.57 Rutherford and his circle were working through contacts in the Netherlands to discredit Cromwell, and, thereby, Dury, in the eyes of continental Reformed church leaders. The exact nature of these contacts still need to be researched, but clearly they played a role in convincing the Basle church that Cromwell was of a different spirit from their orthodox theology and clerical ecclesiology.58 The conduct of the Basle church in the Dury case was in line with its previous relations with the other Swiss Reformed churches.59 Basle had always taken an independent line, refusing for example to sign the Second Helvetic Confession in 1566. Now, by the middle of the seventeenth century, the winds had changed and Basle regarded itself as the bastion of Reformed orthodoxy. Under the terms of its partnership with Zurich, Berne, and Schaffhausen, the Baslers retained the right to go their own way in theological matters. The Basle magistrates, however, clearly were growing concerned about the intransigence of the church leaders. In negotiations with Zurich the Basle Council undertook to ask the church once again, but Buxtorf held firm, saying that the answer given to Dury would have to suffice. The situation remained deadlocked, but Dury found another opportunity to restore momentum at the meeting of the Reformed Swiss Confederates on 23 February. He reported to the assembled delegates on his success in the western part of the Confederation and, optimistically, in Geneva, and he encouraged the Swiss states to write to Cromwell, as well as to the electors of Brandenburg and the Palatinate. The delegates responded that the Swiss found it difficult to take a role until they had arrived at a common position. Zurich was particularly adamant that the Reformed Confederates continue to work towards an agreed statement. The Basle delegation was asked to return to the city and encourage their Council to put pressure on the theologians. The opposition of the Basle theologians focused on the fact that confessional unity with the English republic proved impossible while the English church refused to produce a statement of faith. Dury’s continued assurances from Cromwell were no longer sufficient for those Swiss theologians who feared deviation from the strict Reformed position laid down at Dordrecht.60 Three days after Buxtorf had declared on behalf of the Basle

57 John Coffey, Politics, Religion and the British Revolutions (Cambridge, 1997), 59. David Stevenson has argued that after 1654 the Presbyterians in Scotland could no longer abide Cromwell. David Stevenson, ‘Cromwell, Scotland and Ireland’, in J. Morrill, ed., Oliver Cromwell and the English Revolution (London, 1990), 172. 58 This rather speculative point is the focus of research I am currently carrying out. 59 See Hans R. Guggisberg trans. and ed. Bruce Gordon, Sebastian Castellio, 1515–1563. Humanist and Defender of Religious Toleration in a Confesssional Age (Aldershot, 2003), 34–48. 60 Buxtorf responded to the Basle Council on 25 March 1655. StAB Kirchenakten A.11.

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clergy that there could be no support for a Iudicium of the Swiss churches the Basle magistrates reported the bad news to Zurich.61 The situation, however, was not as desperate as it might have seemed, for help came from an unexpected quarter. Buxtorf, in private correspondence with Antistes Ulrich, indicated that the Basle church would accept a modified statement which retained the criticism of Dury’s outline for unity found in the Basle statement of October 1654.62 Further, the Baslers were not willing to accept the enthusiastic description of relations between the English and Swiss churches penned by Stucki in the Iudicium. They did not regard Dury as an official ambassador of the English and were not, for the reasons stated above, prepared to accept an agreement with a church which did not have a clear confession. The readiness of the Baslers to compromise stood in contrast to the statements from the Basle council that it could not act because of the resolute opposition of its clergy. It would appear that the council was using the clergy as an excuse for staying out of the matter. In the end, Zurich, desperate for an agreement, accepted the Basle modifications to the document, which was thereby considerably shortened. Dury stayed in Berne whilst these negotiations between Basle and Zurich were taking place, and in consideration of the ad hominem nature of the discussions his Zurich friends decided to keep the revised document out of his sight. In Berne Dury sought to prepare for his return to England when he would report to Cromwell on the reception by the Swiss churches of his proposal. Dury went to the head of the Bernese Council (Schultheiss) Anton von Grafenried and proposed that Hummel should accompany him to England. He gave three reasons:63 the Swiss churches should be represented in negotiations by talented representatives; the Protector would interpret the arrival of such men as a very positive sign of the Swiss response to his offer; the willingness of the Swiss to participate in the negotiations would do much to overcome any unwillingness among the other Reformed churches in Europe. The Bernese Council prevaricated, saying that while they were not in principle opposed, there was opposition among the clergy to one of their leading ministers being sent away. Dury went before the Bernese clergy to make his case, but the contrary voices argued that as the Zurich and Basle churches were much larger they should shoulder the burden and send some of their ministers. Dury was treated with the utmost respect and given a celebratory dinner on his departure, but the Bernese were not prepared to allow Hummel to accompany him. This reversal made Dury adamant that he had to secure agreement on a Swiss response to Cromwell at the next meeting of the Reformed 61 62 63

StAZ E.II 457a. StAZ E.II.457b. The document is cited in Brauer, Die Unionstätigkeit, 93.

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Confederates at Aarau in March. Dury was dependent on the support of his Zurich patrons, and, despite the reservations raised by Basle, success was achieved. Berne and Schaffhausen, ignoring Basle’s position, joined with Zurich and declared themselves in favour of promoting Cromwell’s plans. Reluctantly Basle agreed in order to preserve solidarity. Dury required of the Swiss states letters of recommendation to the electors of Brandenburg and the Palatinate, as well as the Landgrave of Hesse. These were produced on 8 April, and in the document Zurich reminded the electors that they had already committed themselves to confessional negotiations at the Leipzig Colloquy of 1631.64 Dury, eight days later, was given a copy of the joint declaration of the Swiss church, and on April 28 Zurich wrote in the name of the Swiss churches to Cromwell indicating their readiness to participate in the plan for union.65 John Dury left the Swiss Confederation in the spring of 1655 ready to commence the next stages of his mission to the German and Dutch Reformed churches. The fact that the Swiss churches were backing his endeavours was certainly a triumph, but a pyrrhic one. The documents which he carried with him had only been made possible by Zurich, without whose steadfast support the mission would have ploughed into the sand. Dury had shown little understanding of the complex inner workings of the Swiss Confederation and of its Reformed churches. He had badly misread the mood in Basle, and he showed no awareness of the fact that Zurich was using his visit to assert once more its claims to pre-eminence among the Swiss churches. The Swiss churches, on account of the historical evolution of the Confederation and of the Reformation, had always struggled to speak with one voice, achieved only when there was an external threat. The danger posed by the Catholic neighbours, the reversals in the Graubünden, and the growing persecution of the Waldensians in Savoy lifted the Swiss out of their particularism by receiving Dury. For a brief moment they imagined Cromwell to be their saviour, but this view was not universally held. The high esteem enjoyed by Cromwell in Zurich and Berne was not shared in Basle or Geneva, which, given their more developed contacts with Britain, had come to very different conclusions about the Protector’s interests. The response of the Swiss to the Dury mission revealed the fragmented nature of the Swiss churches in the period of Reformed orthodoxy. Dury’s mission to the German lands was to prove bitterly disappointing: he died, deserted by his supporters, without any sense of having brought the Protestant churches of Europe together. For the Swiss, the next two centuries would bring intermittent religious wars as they clung precariously to the 1531 confessional settlement of the Peace of Kappel. Dury’s plans were a pipedream which ignored the theological and historical development of the 64 65

StAZ Akten Grossbritannien. A.222.1 StAZ Akten Grossbritannien. A.222.1

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Reformed and Lutheran churches from the Reformation, but this brief episode does bring into relief the fluidity of religious positions during the prevailing orthodoxy and the central place occupied by personal contact and friendships in confessional relations.

Catholic Confessionalism in Germany after 1650 Marc R. Forster

German Catholicism developed in several different directions after the Thirty Years’ War. The basic institutional structures of the imperial church, the Reichskirche, characterized by the secular authority of prince-bishops and many abbots, remained very stable for at least the century after 1650. Most Catholics continued to live in confessional states in which church and state were closely linked. At the same time, both church and state moved away from militant confessional politics and activist intervention in local religion. The confessional state, even in its most developed forms in Austria and Bavaria, became more bureaucratic in practice, while turning more and more to propaganda and education in its efforts to influence and guide the religious life of the people. This article will focus on these developments within church and state institutions. At the same time, it is important to recognize that these institutional changes occurred in the context of the full flowering of Baroque Catholicism and under the influence of important changes in the character of the clergy. German Catholicism was characterized by the development of a vibrant religious practice and a baroque culture that transcended social and regional differences. Catholics across German lands embraced pilgrimages, confraternities, the cult of the Virgin Mary, and an increasingly elaborate liturgy, most of it practiced within the framework of the approved church practices. Meanwhile, the development of devotional literature, church music, schools, and the building of churches and monasteries spread baroque culture to all levels of society. Catholic culture developed its own characteristic forms, often in contrast to Protestantism, but its most important structures after 1650 were its dynamism, its continued regional diversity, and its churchliness, that is the predominantly church-centered nature of popular practice. Because of the dynamism of Baroque Catholicism, the close church-state ties that characterized the territorial confessional state and the stability of church institutions did not lead to a rigid orthodoxy in popular practice. Widespread Catholic confessional identity developed after 1650 in the context

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of this dynamic and elaborate Baroque religiosity. This was a new stage of confessionalization with a different focus from that in the decades before the Thirty Years’ War. In the earlier period, Catholic leaders focused their attention on reforming the clergy and reorienting elite religious practices. This effort was characterized, as all scholars of confessionalization emphasize, by close cooperation between state officials and church authorities. After 1650, this state sponsored confessionalization became far less important, as church and state authorities turned more to bureaucratic and routinized methods. By 1700, confessional identity and a sense of churchliness among German Catholics had become anchored among the wider population through the religious practices of Baroque Catholicism. This was, in important ways, a confessionalization from below. The clergy evolved in new ways within this religious culture. As a consequence of new educational institutions, more stable career paths, and better financial conditions, the professional performance and social status of parish priests improved markedly. The role of the religious orders within German Catholicism also evolved. On the one hand, the older orders like the Benedictines claimed a place as important elements in rural religion, especially in southern German lands. On the other hand, the Jesuits declined in importance in many places, often losing influence to the Capuchins, who especially benefited from the explosion of pilgrimage piety. The Reichskirche The Peace of Westphalia stabilized the constitutional structure of the Holy Roman Empire and secured for the next century and a half the continued existence of the institutions of the imperial church. Stability and security, together with the decline of religious conflict with Protestantism, led in turn to a sense of confidence and even self-satisfaction at the higher levels of the church in Germany. The sense of crisis and the fear of further Protestant gains that energized Catholic leaders in the decades around 1600 faded after 1650. Furthermore, the fear of secularization by the large territorial states declined, at least until the middle of the eighteenth century. The constitutional and institutional stability of the empire was especially important for the ecclesiastical states. These states were not inconsequential. In the early eighteenth century, 65 ecclesiastical princes governed 3.0 to 3.5 million subjects (about 12 per cent of the population of the empire), and about 14 per cent of the land.1 Some of these states were important middle1 Gerhard Benecke, “The German Reichskirche,” in William J. Callahan and David Higgs, eds, Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the 18th Century (Cambridge, 1979), 80. For comparison, secular princes governed 22.5 million subjects, imperial cities and secular lords one million each, imperial knights 0.5 million.

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sized territories, like the Electorate of Mainz, which had 300,000 inhabitants. Other ecclesiastical principalities were tiny, like the many monasteries of the southwestern part of the empire whose territories were really clusters of villages with a few hundred to a few thousand inhabitants. Stability and complacency led to two somewhat contradictory developments in religious affairs in these states. On the one hand, ecclesiastical rulers saw less need to impose the kind of disciplinary measures designed to “clean up” local religious practices. On the other hand, these states, following the lead of the secular states, worked to build more active and efficient secular administrations. The incubator of the Old Reich permitted particularism to dominate the imperial church, thereby enhancing the local character of German Catholicism.2 Tridentine reformers, especially the papal nuncios and the Jesuits, had tried to counter this tendency by pushing the German church to adopt the Tridentine model of church reform. If this effort had some success before the Thirty Years’ War, after 1650 few German bishops modeled themselves after Carlo Borromeo, and cathedral canons, abbots and abbesses, monks and nuns were much less inclined to accept the need for far-reaching reform measures. The secular clergy, both among the non-noble officials in episcopal and state service and among the parish priests, was the one group that continued to look to the Council of Trent as a guide for their personal and professional lives. German prince-bishops did not completely abandon the ideal of the pastoral bishop, but most found the role of secular ruler more amenable. Some became quite active in imperial politics after 1650. This trend began during the Thirty Years’ War, when in 1632 the Archbishop-Elector of Trier, Philip Christoph von Sötern, abandoned the Catholic-Imperial coalition to form an alliance with France.3 Von Sötern feared the expansion of Habsburg power and believed the French would be a useful counter-force in the empire. He should perhaps not be overly criticized for underestimating the long-term French threat; furthermore, his policy was a clear failure and in 1635 the archbishop was captured by imperial forces and spent twelve years in prison! Von Sötern’s foray into European and Imperial politics was taken up (with more success) after 1650 by Johann Philip von Schönborn, the ArchbishopElector of Mainz. Called by his admirers the “German Solomon” for his successes in the negotiations that produced the Peace of Westphalia, von Schönborn was the founder of an ecclesiastical dynasty that would give its 2 The notion of the “incubator” comes from Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca, 1971). 3 Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages. Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca and London, 1992), 147–9. Von Sötern was also PrinceBishop of Speyer.

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name to the whole period of German church history.4 After 1648, he worked to organize the smaller and middling states of the empire into a “third Germany” that could serve as a political balance between France and Austria.5 Von Schönborn initially feared Habsburg power and organized a “Rhine Union” in 1658 that included France, but after 1661 he reversed course, supporting the Habsburgs against the ever more threatening Louis XIV. Johann Philip’s influential nephew, Lothar Franz von Schönborn, was also active in Imperial politics. As bishop and ruler of Bamberg and Mainz from the 1690s until his death in 1729, von Schönborn kept a number of clear goals in mind.6 A primary concern remained to maintain the empire in its current configuration, as a federal union of independent territories. The prince-bishop was also convinced that warfare was the greatest danger to the smaller states of the empire. By the 1690s, of course, France constituted the greatest military threat, although von Schönborn continued to fear the Protestant powers as well. Like his uncle, Lothar Franz believed that associations of smaller states were needed to prevent the destruction of the empire and, furthermore, that the ecclesiastical principalities should take the lead in such groupings. His success in organizing these associations contributed to the revival of various regional imperial institutions like the imperial circles (Kreise) that were so important to the survival of the empire through the eighteenth century.7 Of course the Schönborns had a familial interest in the survival of the empire and the imperial church. Indeed, the von Schönborn family is one of the great success stories of the German church.8 This Franconian noble family exploited its connections with the church to expand its wealth and landholdings until it was one of the richest noble families in Germany. Along the way, the von Schönborns achieved first free imperial status and then were made counts in 1701. Members of the family held 33 positions in various

4 Hubert Jedin, “Die Reichskirche der Schönbornzeit,” in Kirche des Glaubens. Kirche der Geschichte, Vol. I (Freiburg, 1966), 455–68. 5 Friedhelm Jürgensmeier, Das Bistum Mainz. Von der Römerzeit bis zum II. Vatikanischen Konzil (Frankurt, 1988), 220–3; Rudolf Endres, “Franken 1648–1803,” in Walter Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, Zweiter Band, Von der Glaubensspaltung bis zue Säkularisation (St. Ottilien, 1993), 391–3. 6 Alfred Schröcker, Ein Schönborn im Reich. Studien zur Reichspolitik des Fürstbischofs Lothar Franz von Schönborn (1655–1729) (Wiesbaden, 1978); Jürgensmeier, Das Bistum Mainz, 233–4; Endres, “Franken 1648–1803”, in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 395–8. 7 See James Allen Vann, The Swabian Kreis. Institutional Growth in the Holy Roman Empire 1648–1715 (Brussels, 1975). 8 Alfred Schröcker, Die Patronage des Lothar Franz von Schönborn (1655–1729). Sozialgeschichtliche Studie zum Beziehungsnetz in der Germania Sacra (Wiesbaden, 1981); Peter Hersche, Das deutsche Domkapitel im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert Vol. II, Vergleichende sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen (Bern, 1984), 157.

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cathedral chapters and 12 of these men became bishops, and one, Damien Hugo, was made cardinal. Alfred Schröcker has shown in depth how the von Schönborn bishops used their patronage – control of appointments to administrative positions in the Hochstifte (prince-bishoprics), influence in the elections of bishops and even emperors – to secure property and wealth for the family and positions in the church for nephews. In particular, the von Schönborns cultivated ties with other noble families that were active in the imperial church in order to divide the spoils and secure control over the key episcopal sees. Developments in the cathedral chapters also reflect the security and even complacency of the imperial church.9 The Domkapitel had always been predominantly aristocratic – the cathedral prebends in Cologne and Strasbourg were reserved for counts, those along the Rhine and Main for free imperial knights – but over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries the chapters systematically excluded non-noble canons.10 Furthermore, the chapters became more reluctant after 1650 to admit members of princely families like the Habsburgs and Wittelsbachs. The canons no longer felt the need for princely protection, as they had in the period 1580–1620, when a number of princes were elected bishops. Noble canons also entered the chapters at ever younger ages, in violation of church statutes and the decrees of the Council of Trent. In the knightly chapters in the west new canons were often thirteen or fourteen years old and in the other noble chapters twenty-two to twenty-four. Canons also and increasingly held benefices in two or more chapters. Few canons performed the ecclesiastical or liturgical functions associated with their positions, leaving those duties to middle-class clerics. These trends are all signs that there was little concern with Tridentine decrees about age or clerical qualifications for canons. As they had for centuries, cathedral chapters continued to fill two roles. They were Versorgungsstätten des Adels, that is, institutions that provided wellendowed benefices for sons of noble families and allowed them to live a lifestyle appropriate to their rank. It was even possible, with good planning, the application of patronage, and a little luck, to be elected bishop and thereby achieve princely status. Cathedral chapters also had a political function in the ecclesiastical states, where they functioned as a kind of estates, with the duty to help the bishop govern the territory, while also restraining his power. Both these functions gained in importance after 1650, for several reasons.11 The competition for positions in the chapters intensified as some noble families Hersche, Das deutsche Domkapitel, esp. vol. II. The knightly chapters were those along the so-called Pfaffengasse (“priests’ alley”) that is Bamberg, Würzburg, Mainz, Trier, Speyer, and Worms where only men from families of free imperial knights were elected. 11 Hersche, Das deutsche Domkapitel, Vol. II, 194–202. 9

10

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converted to Catholicism, while others had larger numbers of children, which meant more young men competed for a fixed number of positions. At the same time, stability in the empire meant a declining interest in church reform and reduced the canons’ already limited interest in spiritual matters. The chapters’ social and political functions, together with a growing tendency to recruit canons from the regional aristocracy, also meant that the cathedral chapters contributed forcefully to the particularism of the German church. The heavy engagement of prince-bishops in Imperial politics and in the administration of their states was mirrored at the regional level by the smaller ecclesiastical princes. The great abbeys, commandaries of the Teutonic Knights, and the collegiate chapters were increasingly well organized in defending their “liberties.” In Swabia, for example, the abbots of the richest monasteries were active in the affairs of the Swabian Circle, which helped them work with the neighboring secular lords to protect their independence.12 Leaders of the imperial church of the seventeenth and eighteenth century generally withdrew from engagement with wider notions of reform within the Catholic Church and instead immersed themselves in German and regional politics. This focus led them to develop the administration of their own principalities and brought them into more conflict with the increasingly organized secular states. Confessionalization after 1650 Catholics living in the larger states, secular and ecclesiastical, had to deal with increasingly efficient and well-organized states. As before the Thirty Years’ War, princes and their officials embraced “confessionalization,” that is policies aimed at creating religious unity, a disciplined clergy, a financially solvent church, and a pious and obedient population. The difference between the policies of Catholic leaders of the later seventeenth century and those of the princes in the decades around 1600, like Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn the (in)famous Bishop of Würzburg, was first of all one of tone. The urgency and sense of crisis that marked the Counter-Reformation era were gone, replaced by a sense of security and a bureaucratization of the confessional state.13 Furthermore, after 1650, this new atmosphere led Catholic leaders to turn away from policies oriented toward social discipline and to give priority to methods of persuasion, propaganda, and representation. 12 Vann, The Swabian Kreis, esp. 43–6. See also Konstantin Maier, Die Diskussion um Kirche und Reform im schwäbischen Reichsprälatenkollegium zur Zeit der Aufklärung (Wiesbaden, 1978). 13 Rudolf Vierhaus, Deutschland im Zeitalter des Absolutismus (1648–1763) (Göttingen, 1978), 18.

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The Catholic Church, because of its status as an international organization and its historically based immunities and privileges, could never be fully incorporated into the state, as was the case in Protestant principalities. However, in the ecclesiastical territories, especially the larger Hochstifte, prince-bishops held both secular and ecclesiastical authority. In these territories there could be a real unity of purpose between church and state. Some prince-bishops attempted to take advantage of this congruence of power and authority. Münster Christoph Bernhard von Galen, the Prince-Bishop of Münster from 1650 to 1678, followed policies designed to create a model confessional state.14 Von Galen was an energetic and ambitious ruler who embraced both state-building and church reform. Because Münster had not experienced much reform before the war and because of the destruction of the 1630s and 1640s, the bishop had to start from the beginning. He began by working to remove occupying Protestant troops from the towns of the Hochstift followed by a concerted effort to root out Protestant inhabitants, especially in the city of Münster, where he ordered Protestants to be excluded from public office. Von Galen considered himself a Tridentine bishop of the Borromean model, and began his episcopate by publishing the decrees of the Council of Trent. In classic fashion, he followed the publication of the decrees with a series of “reform synods” where the bishop often personally admonished the clergy to obey Trent.15 As Manfred Becker-Huberti points out, reform synods were quite unusual in the late seventeenth century, but von Galen held them twice a year for 28 years! The synods were backed up by episcopal visitations. Between 1654 and 1656, the bishop personally visited 54 of the larger parishes in his diocese (about 1/3 of the parishes visited), while his officials visited all the rest of the diocese.16 This was one of the few times a German bishop personally conducted visitations and it apparently had considerable impact on local people. Von Galen also attempted to put institutions in place that would ensure the continuity of reform. Here he was less successful because he faced considerable 14 Manfred Becker-Huberti, Die tridentinische Reform im Bistum Münster unter Fürstbischof Christoph Bernhard v. Galen 1650–1678. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Katholischen Reform (Münster, 1978); Rudolfine Freiin von Oer, “Münster,” in Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler, (eds), Die Territorien des Reichs im Zeitalter der Reformation und Konfessionalisierung. Land und Konfession, Vol. 3, Der Nordwesten (Münster, 1991), 127–8. Zimmermann, “Die ‘siegreiche’ Frömmigkeit des Hauses Habsburg” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 19 (2000): 157–75. 15 Becker-Huberti, Die tridentinische Reform im Bistum Münster, 78–111. 16 Becker-Huberti, Die tridentinische Reform im Bistum Münster, 125–142.

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opposition from the cathedral chapter in Münster and from the archdeacons. The latter had traditionally exercised ecclesiastical jurisdiction at the local level, for example investing new priests and adjudicated marriage cases. As required by Trent, von Galen attempted to take these powers away from the archdeacons. In this he failed, as the archdeacons had the support of the cathedral chapter; instead he tried, with a bit more success, to keep the archdeacons in place but subordinate them to the bishop.17 Furthermore, in an attempt to bypass the archdeacons, von Galen revived a moribund clerical council (geistliche Rat), but it never gained any real authority.18 Von Galen also failed, despite a variety of plans, to find the financial resources to open a seminary. The example of Münster shows that in many ways little had changed since before the Thirty Years’ War. The impact of Tridentine reform depended on the person of the bishop. An activist like von Galen might make a considerable impact on the lives of the clergy, and perhaps even the population as a whole. On the other hand, even the combination of secular and episcopal power in the hands of a prince-bishop could not overcome the power of cathedral chapters and great monasteries and many essential Tridentine institutions could not be created. The structure of the imperial church continued to limit the development of the ideal confessional state. In most of Catholic Germany there was little of the kind of reform pushed by Bishop von Galen. Cologne Although they were all members of the Bavarian Wittelsbach family, the archbishop-electors of Cologne did not create a well-developed confessional state in their territory. It is revealing, for example, that the decrees of the Council of Trent were only incorporated into diocesan law in 1662 and that an episcopal seminary was not created until the eighteenth century.19 Nevertheless an effort to restart Tridentine reform occurred in Cologne and, as in many German dioceses, a 1662 diocesan synod attempted to inspire a new reform impulse. Church authorities used regular visitations as their primary method of controlling and reforming local Catholicism. Over the course of the seventeenth century, however, the visitations became increasingly bureaucratic. Around 1700, for example, diocesan officials developed a printed list of questions, allowing the visitor to fill in the results of his investigation. Furthermore, the forms were often sent in advance to parish 17 18 19

Becker-Huberti, Die tridentinische Reform im Bistum Münster, 57–67. Becker-Huberti, Die tridentinische Reform im Bistum Münster, 68–77. Thomas Paul Becker, Konfessionalisierung in Kurköln (Bonn, 1989), xiv–xv.

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priests so they could fill them in before episcopal officials came to visit. As Thomas Paul Becker points out, episcopal archivists loved the printed forms and carefully saved them: “To be sure, this improved archiving is a sign of the tendency to change the visitation from a ceremonial act to a bureaucratic act.”20 The secular authorities in Cologne did little to help visitors. Any absolutist tendencies on the part of the archbishop-electors were undermined by the powerful cathedral chapter, and this weakened the state. The recommendations and decrees inspired by visitations were ignored and the punishments imposed were often minimal. If there occurred little confessionalization here, at least relations between episcopal visitors and those they investigated (parish priests and the local population) were cordial and relaxed. Again, as Becker puts it: “… in a small state with weak central authority, neither the behavior of the population nor the pressure from the authorities was of the kind to give rise to strong emotions [about religious practice].”21 Visitations in Cologne, and elsewhere, increasingly focused on the material and financial condition of parishes, a further indication of the bureaucratization of the confessional state.22 This new focus came at the expense of concern about heretics and meant fewer questions about the quality and work of the clergy as well. In a sense, as many scholars argue, the interest in buildings, decoration of churches, and finances is a sign that the confessionalization process had (logically) reached an advanced stage. In the 1650s, to be sure, a concern with material conditions was necessary in the wake of the Thirty Years’ War. Würzburg Developments in the Franconian bishopric of Würzburg followed a similar pattern. Here again, bishops attempting to strengthen the ecclesiastical state faced entrenched resistance from the cathedral chapter. The canons played a role in the appointment of many important state officials, approved new taxes, and governed the Hochstift in the absence of the bishop. In this context, the power of the bishop depended on “the personality, the desire for power Becker, Konfessionalisierung in Kurköln, 9–12, quote 12. Becker, Konfessionalisierung in Kurköln, 24–6, quote 25. 22 Becker, Konfessionalisierung in Kurköln, 115–17; Peter Thaddäus Lang, “Reform im Wandel. Die Visitationsinterrogatorien des 16 und 17. Jahrhunderts,” in Peter Thaddäus Lang and Ernst W. Zeeden, eds, Kirche und Visitation. Beiträge zur Erforschung des frühneuzeitlichen Visitationswesens in Europa (Stuttgart, 1984) 145–6; Peter Thaddäus Lang, “Die katholischen Kirchenvisitationen des 18. Jahrhunderts. Der Wandel von Disziplinierungs- zum Datensammlungsinstrument,” Römische Quartalschrift für christliche Altertumskunde und Kirchengeschichte 83 (1988); 265–95. 20 21

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(Machtanspruch), and the tactical ability of each individual bishop.”23 Some administrative rationalization took place in Würzburg in the late seventeenth century, particularly in the financial bureaucracy. Overall, however, the Hochstift was relatively decentralized and under-administered, having, for example, no intermediate officials between the central government and local officials.24 Under these conditions, church reformers could not expect the consistent and effective support of secular officials. In any case, Bishop Johann Philip von Schönborn (ruled Würzburg 1642–73) was not inclined to re-institute the aggressive anti-Protestant policies of the pre-war period. Von Schönborn was known for his willingness to compromise with the Protestants and even devised plans for the reunification of the confessions.25 Within the dioceses he governed (Mainz and Worms, as well as Würzburg) von Schönborn clearly preferred persuasion to force. He did produce a new church ordinance for Würzburg in 1668, based on the 1584 rural statutes of the CounterReformation bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn, but most of von Schönborn’s policies emphasized revitalizing the liturgy. The bishop wrote and published new hymns and advocated a preaching style based on scripture. Like many bishops of this era he also ordered the publication of new liturgical books. After 1650, the Hochstift Würzburg was certainly a confessional state in a formal sense, which meant that Protestant inhabitants were not tolerated and church attendance was mandatory, but neither the church nor the state showed much interest in extensively regulating (or disciplining) local religion. Similar developments took place in the smaller ecclesiastical territories in western and southwestern Germany. The bishops of Augsburg, for example, demonstrated little interest in church reform and the small Hochstift they governed was lightly administered and dominated by a powerful cathedral chapter.26 Several mid-eighteenth-century episcopal decrees demonstrate the focus of church policy. The bureaucratic impulse is reflected in a 1749 decree ordering parish priests to submit statistics about the number of confessions heard and the number of masses said. In 1764 priests were admonished to preach each Sunday and holiday, hold catechism lessons, and keep proper parish registers.27 23 Rudolf Endres, “Franken 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 406–8, quote 408. 24 Rudolf Endres, “Franken 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 409–14. 25 Rudolf Endres, “Franken 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 417–23. 26 Wolfgang Wüst, “Schwaben 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 357–89. 27 Wolfgang Wüst, “Schwaben 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 367.

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In the southwest, the bishops of Constance continued to send episcopal visitations into the countryside. This regular activity is a sign that the Tridentine impulse remained important after 1650. As in Münster, church officials, especially in the clerical council in Constance, continued to invoke the decrees of the council and lament the ways in which the local church did not measure up to Tridentine models.28 The reports produced by the visitors were, in contrast to the reports from the period around 1600, usually remarkably terse lists of benefices, priests, confraternities, and financial resources. Here too there was a tendency to make the work of church administration bureaucratic and routine. Bavaria Even the largest Catholic secular states, Bavaria and Austria, moved away from religiously oriented politics. Bavaria remained a deeply Catholic confessional state, but, as Alois Schmid puts it, “in the period of court and enlightenment absolutism the religious basis of politics was no longer as dominant as it had been in the early period of confessional absolutism, when the church gave goals and direction to the state.”29 Indeed, princes and officials in Bavaria now saw Catholicism almost exclusively as a tool for strengthening loyalty to the state. This shift was most obvious in foreign policy, where the Bavarian electors found themselves caught between France and Austria. In the 1740s, Elector Max III Joseph even abandoned the traditional French alliance to fight with the Protestant powers, England and Holland!30 Ecclesiastical structures in Bavaria were further stabilized in the century after 1650. The clerical council, which had exerted considerable influence over policies before the Thirty Years’ War, developed an increasingly bureaucratic character. The membership of the council was stabilized at seven ecclesiastical and three secular members. In the early eighteenth century special sub-committees (Spezialdeputationen) were created, with a panel for converts, a deputation for administering the “Turkish taxes,” and a censorship committee. Soon thereafter, the council organized its own chancellery and archives. Founded to promote and manage church reform, the clerical council had become a normal, indeed unremarkable, part of the central administration in Munich.31 28 Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque. Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001), 210–17. 29 Alois Schmid, “Altbayern 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 301. 30 Alois Schmid, “Altbayern 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 302. 31 Alois Schmid, “Altbayern 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 316–18,

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Although the Bavarian state continued to seek the creation of an exclusively Bavarian diocese, it also strengthened its position vis-à-vis the eight bishops who exerted ecclesiastical authority in Bavaria. A series of agreements, called Rezesse, were negotiated regulating the Concordat of 1583; in most cases these agreements strengthened the hand of state officials and limited church privileges.32 Conflicts between church and state were never of course put to rest, but there was a certain ritualistic character to the disputes over taxes and jurisdiction. As the Bavarian state became more bureaucratic – and correspondingly less active and interventionist – the court and the ruling Wittelsbach family continued to develop and promote a particular Bavarian religious style.33 The Pietas Bavarica owes much to Archduke Maximilian I (ruled 1598–1651), whose personal piety became legendary after his death. Maximilian and his successors promoted Marian devotions of all kinds, symbolized by the Mariensäule (Marian column) on the Marienplatz in Munich, which was copied in other Bavarian cities and towns. Pilgrimage shrines, especially the Bavarian “national” shrine at Altötting were another central feature of the Pietas Bavarica. The Wittelsbach promotion of these practices was very public: the princes and their families went on pilgrimage, participated in processions and public church services, joined confraternities, and named their daughters – and sons – Maria. They also gave financial and political support to particular practices, funding, for example, the importation of relics from Italy and the construction of new monasteries at pilgrimage shrines. Most visibly, the Bavarian state supported the construction and reconstruction of many churches and monasteries, above all in Munich, but also in the countryside. In the long run, the promoters of the Pietas Bavarica aspired to move beyond the court and the city of Munich and hoped to influence the Bavarian population as a whole. The decisive impulse came from the princely court, which was inspired by the conviction that religion is not at all a personal or private affair of princes, but rather that it had a political and statist dimension. For this reason, the court consciously took its religiosity into the public space, in order to encourage similar behavior among the subjects.34

Here again, we see late seventeenth-century princes and state officials showing a preference for persuasion and propaganda, rather than disciplinary measures 32 Alois Schmid, “Altbayern 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 318–27, 318–19. 33 Alois Schmid, “Altbayern 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 305–11. 34 Alois Schmid, “Altbayern 1648–1803,” in Brandmüller, ed., Handbuch der bayerischen Kirchengeschichte, 310.

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in religious matters. Along the same lines, the Bavarian state supported the extensive Jesuits missions to the countryside in the first half of the eighteenth century. These missions were oriented around preaching, confession and communion, and incorporated dramatic theatrical displays.35 The confessional state did not relinquish its dominance over religious matters in the century after 1650, but it turned to new, less rigorous methods of promoting Catholicism. Austria In the Habsburg lands, state officials continued to be very active in religious affairs, at least in the first decades after the Thirty Years’ War. Habsburg officials in Silesia, where there was a large Lutheran population, continued to resort to the traditional Counter-Reformation methods that they had perfected in Bohemia during the war. “Reformation commissions” were sent into the region where they ordered the expulsion of Lutheran ministers, forced the appointment of Catholic priests, closed Protestant churches, and even ordered the quartering of soldiers to pressure the population into abandoning Lutheranism.36 The Habsburgs, like most other rulers in this period, continued to consider religious uniformity an important characteristic of a strong state. Despite the persistence of a militant tendency, Catholic authorities in Austria also turned increasingly to persuasion and propaganda. The activities of the Jesuits well illustrate this trend.37 Although they participated in the Reformation commissions and served as missionaries to Protestant regions, the Society focused its efforts on the urban population and the nobility. Jesuit schools and universities dominated Catholic education in the Habsburg lands and generations of urban patricians as well as the aristocracy of this multinational empire experienced this practical yet deeply Catholic education. Robert Bireley points out that Catholic political theorists reinforced this trend by arguing for …patience in the process of winning over people and underlined the positive measure to be employed: clergy of high moral quality, effective preachers, genuine care for and adaptation to the people, and education.38

35 Louis Châtellier, The Religion of the Poor. Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism (Cambridge, 1997), 77–83. 36 R. J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy (Oxford, 1979), 118–21; Charles Ingrao, The Habsburg Monarchy, 1618–1815 (Cambridge, 1994), 61–4. 37 Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 124–6. 38 Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince. Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill and London, 1990), chap. 9, quote 232.

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Furthermore, as in Bavaria, the Austrian state was increasingly characterized by the commitment of the ruling family to particular forms of religious practice rather than the use of repression against dissenters. The Pietas Austriaca of the Habsburgs was, in fact, a close cousin to the piety of the Wittelsbachs; it was also an integral part of Baroque Catholicism in Austria.39 When the leading Jesuit playwright Nicolaus Avencini produced a play in Vienna in 1659 called Pietas victrix sive Flavius Constantinus Magnus de Maxentio Tyranno Victor (“Piety Victorious or Flavius Constantine the Great, Victor over the tyrant Maxentius”), he was of course equating the Habsburgs with the great Christian emperor of the fourth century.40 At one level, the message of the play was simple: the piety of the Habsburgs was the virtue that brought them victory. Somewhat more profoundly, the Pietas Austriaca also reflected the political theory of the time, especially that of Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), who argued that an absolute monarch would only succeed if he maintained popular support, or reputation, which owed much to the personal piety of the ruler.41 Jesuit plays and political theorists presented the Habsburgs as models of pious princes who had earned the loyalty of their subjects through their religious virtue. The Pietas Austriaca may have functioned to justify the power of monarchy and the imperial family, but it was also a clearly defined ensemble of religious practices.42 As in Munich, the Viennese court practiced an ostentatious piety oriented around the cults of the Eucharist and the Virgin. The Corpus Christi processions in Vienna became major displays of court ritual in the seventeenth century. Marian devotions owed much to the Bavarian example. The Austrians, for example, copied the Mariensäule that were so popular in Bavaria. Emperor Leopold was particularly known for his devotion to the Immaculate Conception and several generations of Habsburgs supported and developed the national shrine at Maria Zell. As Wolfgang Zimmermann points out, The idea that the rule of the Habsburg family was a result of the piety, of the pietas Austriaca, and thus grounded in God’s grace, did not remain limited to a matter of theoretical reflection in court circles. Instead, it became a form of dynastic

39 Anna Coreth, Pietas Austriaca: österreichische Frömmigkeit im Barock (Munich, 1982); Wolfgang Zimmermann, “Die ‘siegreiche’ Frömmigkeit des Hauses Habsburg” Rottenburger Jahrbuch für Kirchengeschichte 19 (2000): 157–75. 40 Zimmermann, “Die ‘siegreiche’ Frömmigkeit des Hauses Habsburg,” 166–9. 41 Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince, chap. 4. 42 Coreth, Pietas Austriaca, esp. chap. 3. See also Wolfgang Brückner, “Devotio und Patronage. Zum konkreten Rechtsdenken in handgreiflichen Frömmigkeitsformen des Spätmittelalters und der frühen Neuzeit,” in Klaus Schreiner, ed., Laienfrömmigkeit im späten Mittelalter. Formen, Funktionen, politisch-soziale Zusammenhänge (Munich, 1992), 79–91.

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propaganda (dynastischer Kultpropaganda), an award of praise (Lobpreise) for the emperor directly appointed by God, which was passed on and thus popularized.43

The piety of the royal family served as a model for all of Austria, spreading from the court to ever widening parts of the population. The Pietas Austriaca was not, however, static. In his study of Jesuit theater Jean-Marie Valentin identifies a major transition in the Pietas Austriaca in the decades after 1650, as reflected in the plays presented in Austria, especially in Vienna.44 The Jesuits were certainly mainstays of the Pietas Austriaca, supporting and developing the notion of the special religious and imperial mission of the Habsburgs. Avancini and his colleagues wrote and produced a series of plays known as the Ludi Caesari (“Plays for the Emperor”). The prince of these plays is “a soldier of God who refuses to compromise with the adversaries of Christ, and who wants nothing but the happiness of his subjects.” In the conflict between good and evil, the good prince is conscious of his choices and his ability to sin, yet he fights (and usually wins) the good fight. The pietas of the good princes (always equated with the Habsburgs) wins out over the impietas of the tyrants, increasingly linked to the Turks.45 If some of this myth dated back to the sixteenth century, Valentin sees the “pietas austriaca of the reign of Leopold and the Austria gloriosa of the baroque” as something new in the late seventeenth century. No longer focused on Germany and the Protestant threat, Austria was turning east in preparation for defeat of the Turks and the conquest of the Danubian basin.46 Conclusion The transition from a policy of confessionalization characterized by the use of disciplinary measures to a milder form of state sponsored religious persuasion was never complete. Both aspects of confessionalization remained important in Catholic Germany well into the eighteenth century. The well-known expulsion of the Protestant farmers of the alpine valleys above Salzburg in 1732 by the Catholic archbishop-prince shows that princes could still resort to force.47 Nevertheless the tendency to employ the tools of persuasion and propaganda, combined with increased bureaucratization, reduced the forcefulness of confessionalization, especially as experienced at the local level. Zimmermann, “Die ‘siegreiche’ Frömmigkeit des Hauses Habsburg,” 166–8. Jean-Marie Valentin, Les Jésuites et le théâtre (1554–1680). Contribution à l’histoire culturelle du monde catholique dans le Saint-Empire romain germanique (Paris, 2001), chap. XIV. 45 Valentin, Les Jésuites et le Théâtre, 668–71, quote 669. 46 Valentin, Les Jésuites et le Théâtre, 687. 47 Mack Walker, The Salzburg Transaction. Expulsion and Redemption in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ithaca and London, 1992). 43 44

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After the Thirty Years’ War confessionalization, in the form of state policies aimed at enforcing religious conformity and guiding popular religion, declined. This did not mean, however, that the “Age of Confessionalism” was over. Local and regional studies make it clear that the century after 1650 saw the maturation of popular confessional identity. The invisible border (die unsichtbare Grenze), that cultural boundary between the confessions, highlighted in Étienne François’ study of Augsburg, ran through all the German lands.48 Furthermore, in Catholic Germany in this period it was the interplay of political and confessional stability, political and religious particularism, and a dynamic Baroque religiosity with strong elements of popular participation that caused confessional loyalties to be internalized by the wider population. While the elites moved toward a more tolerant and open view of religion, peasants and townspeople came to be imbedded in confessionalized communities and Catholic culture. This situation would remain an important characteristic of German society until the middle of the twentieth century.

48 Étienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg, 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen, 1991).

Fashioning Reformed Identity in Early Modern France Raymond A. Mentzer

Though a near total lack of cooperation between the Reformed movement and the monarchical state in France militated against confessionalization as scholars have commonly characterized the process,1 the French Reformed Churches worked tirelessly to inculcate a strong sense of confessional identity among the faithful. To this end, the local church and its consistory operated much as counterparts in Geneva, the Netherlands, Scotland, various Swiss city states, and some German principalities. The pastors, elders and deacons, who assembled for the weekly consistory meetings, promoted regular attendance at worship and catechism, disciplined sinners of most every hue and stripe, supervised the details of poor relief, and generally sought to fashion a Protestant religious culture. Ironically, while French Protestants’ status as a religious minority with ever diminishing political influence worked against confessionalization in the usual sense, it did contribute forcefully to the construction of a distinctly Protestant religious identity. The French Reformed Churches and their followers inevitably had the foil of traditional medieval Christianity and an emerging, more militant, papal Catholicism. This rival form of Christian faith and devotion served to define who French Protestants were not and, over the course of time, establish the boundaries of confessional distinctiveness. The consistory laid out that which its members regarded as the ideals of scripturally sanctioned belief and behavior, while pointedly using the example of Catholic neighbors for improper views and comportment. The positive and negative dynamics of Protestant Catholic relationships and the attendant difficulties can be readily discerned at Dieulefit and Aubenas during the early seventeenth century after the religious warfare had subsided considerably and the Edict of Nantes of 1 See the chapter by Mack Holt in the present volume; also Philip Benedict, “Confessionalization in France? Critical Evidence and New Evidence,” in Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685, edited by Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer (Cambridge, 2002), 44-61, and James R. Farr, “Confessionalization and Social Discipline in France, 1530–1685,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte (forthcoming).

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1598 ushered in a less violent yet anxious confessional coexistence. The two towns are situated in the central Rhône corridor and for each there are substantial manuscript records. Both had significant Protestant populations as well as Catholic residents with their own church and clergy. The two religious groups experienced numerous “dangerous” contacts whose effect the Reformed consistory continually sought to attenuate and amend. How then did the Reformed churches in these localities and elsewhere in France go about instilling the standards of acceptable belief and conduct? To what extent did Catholic neighbors represent a temptation? Were the Catholics a convenient, accessible model for the inappropriate and deplorable? Is it possible that the circumstances, while threatening, also served to bolster Protestant identity? How did the interactions between opposing communities of faith help to shape and even define confessional character among French Protestants? As we examine these and related issues, let us turn first to a case that came before the consistory of Dieulefit in the Dauphiné during the early seventeenth century. It began with a childless Protestant couple, desperate to have progeny, but soon encompassed a close circle of friends and acquaintances, a problematic widow, the local Catholic priest and, eventually, the Reformed pastor and elders. The episode speaks to early modern expectations and frustrations concerning family and descendants, perceptions of the sacred and the power of magic, the experience of “sin,” and the difficulties in molding Protestant religious distinctiveness in a multiconfessional community.2 The consistory of Dieulefit, a town in the Alpine foothills about thirty kilometers east of the Rhône river, took up the affair in late-January 1607 when it summoned Daniel Chavalard, a man reputed to have had “recourse to a priest” because he thought himself “impeded [empesché] in his marriage.” Chavalard and his spouse likely believed that they were victims of the satanic ligature. According to the widely accepted ritual of the aiguillette, a sorceress, typically in the service of an enemy or rival, could “tie off ” a couple and prevent them from having a family. As the pair stood before the pastor or priest for the nuptial blessing, the witch surreptitiously knotted a cord, symbolically binding the genitals, notably the male testicles, and rendered the union unproductive.3 Upon the consistory’s summons, Chavalard appeared and explained that, being “impeded,” he had sought, at the urging of several

2 The pertinent manuscript sources are Musée du Protestantisme Dauphinois (Le Poët Laval), Ms A 1, Livre du consistoire de ceste Eglise reformée de Dieulefit, fol. 12ff; see also a copy in the Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (Paris) (hereafter BPF), Ms. 654, p. 54ff. 3 Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “L’aiguillette,” Europe: revue littéraire mensuelle (March 1974): 134–45.

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friends, the Catholic curé who, in turn, provided a pewter bowl or drinking cup (escuelle) on the bottom of which were inscribed “some characters.” Chavalard may well have been illiterate for it later became clear that the “characters” etched in the bowl were from Psalm 146:7–8 in the Vulgate version: Dominus solvit compeditos, Dominus illuminat coecos. The first part – the Lord releases the bound – seemed particularly apropos the man’s dilemma. The curé directed that Chavalard and his wife drink “some wine or other beverage” from the cup and he would be “instantly freed (desempesché).” The pair did so and Chavalard reported to the consistory that he found the curé’s prediction true (veritable). The elders and pastor firmly scolded the man for his “great fault” – resorting to an “illicit” expedient and “trusting in enchantments” – and they next summoned Jean Pré who, according to Chavalard, had put him in contact with the priest. Pré presented himself several days later and admitted acting as the gobetween. He too was chastised for giving “joy to the devil.” More important in the consistory’s view, who had told him “that the curé knew such maliciousness?” Not surprisingly, the person familiar with these dark matters was female, older and widowed – the Damoiselle de Saint-Martin. She was immediately summoned and, with her appearance, consistorial concern in the matter shifted and intensified. Saint-Martin, who was clearly suspected of previous involvement in similar “abominable affairs,” claimed that her knowledge of the priest’s ability to “free” those who were “incapacitated” in their marriage was nothing more than the result of common street gossip. If, moreover, she had offended God and scandalized the church, she pleaded for pardon. The consistory remained decidedly unconvinced and undertook to investigate further that which it quickly characterized as the “Saint-Martin affair.” It appointed two elders to interrogate Chavalard and Pré anew and to seek out their common acquaintance, a “papist” named Paul Valier. The inquiry now focused squarely on the widow. The investigation into the woman’s activities lasted nearly three weeks, revealing what the consistory saw as a disturbing and threatening tangle of misbehavior. There had been several suppers, one hosted by the widow, and all attended by her, Chavalard’s friends, and the curé. Here a bargain seems to have been struck. The priest would remedy Chavalard’s impotency in exchange for several sheep, and Damoiselle de Saint-Martin would receive a pair of pigeons for her salutary mediation. In all of this, the widow purportedly played a highly active role, soliciting a client for the “sage and secret” priestly exorcist. When the widow returned to the consistory chambers in late-February 1607, she readily admitted to drawing attention to the curé’s power to restore ill-fated, childless unions. Didn’t everyone say that he and, indeed, his

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predecessor “knew the remedy for those whose marriage was impeded?” She denied, however, summoning the priest or arranging for payment. The consistory did not believe her and called upon Jean Pré to challenge her testimony in the classic judicial confrontation of witness and accused.4 This attack on the widow’s version of events was forceful and disagreeable. Eventually, she asserted a weak memory and refused to answer further questions. The affair then took an astonishing turn when, a few days later, the priest requested a hearing before the consistory to defend Damoiselle de Saint-Martin, who was, in his words, “beside herself ” over the affair. The priest arrived in the company of three “papists,” serving as confessional bodyguards. He hastened to explain that the widow Saint-Martin had little involvement in the affair. Rather, the priest shouldered all responsibility. He had visited a physician for “some potions” to remedy impotency. In addition, he consulted a “book of exorcisms,” which he eagerly displayed to the elders and pastor. The book was the source for use of the bowl and language from Psalm 146. Although the curé, as a Catholic, refused to swear an oath before Protestants, who were not his “competent judges,” he maintained that he was telling the truth. A sharp exchange of questions and responses followed. Throughout, the curé was at pains to exonerate the widow. Finally, the pastor and elders recalled all of the principals for one last round of questions before their final deliberations. In the end, the consistory found that the widow was, in its words, not “exempt from culpability.” It “gravely” censured the woman and publicly suspended her from the approaching celebration of the Lord’s Supper. In addition, the members sternly warned that they would be keeping “an eye on her.” And in one last gesture, they dispatched two elders to inform the priest that he was flirting with simony and ought not to press Daniel Chavalard for payment in consequence of the exorcism. A number of observations seem appropriate at this point. To begin, this was a public offense, which required a public solution in the consistory’s view. Many Protestants and Catholics in the community were surely aware of the events. The Protestants, in particular, had to understand that resort to folk magic or the customs of a wicked medieval church was wholly unacceptable. In addition, “sin” as expressed by the consistory of Dieulefit hardly bore the static quality of transgressions mechanically enumerated in a medieval penitential or inquisitor’s manual. Rather, it possessed an organic character, framed and molded by the pastor and elders. This particular affair grew and evolved, transforming itself in curious ways as the consistory investigated. Reformed ecclesiastical officials clearly pursued the elements that they regarded as especially dangerous. What had begun as an urgent, all too 4 Raymond A. Mentzer, “The Self-Image of the Magistrate in Sixteenth-Century France,” Criminal Justice History: An International Annual 5 (1984): 23–43.

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frequent attempt to counter infertility soon acquired the more ominous tones of inappropriate female roles and abuse of sacral authority. The widow and priest undoubtedly occupied powerful time-honored positions within the community. They evidently worked together to resolve difficulties, which had paramount individual and collective importance, yet required solutions that were on the periphery of institutional religious forms. The woman was not labeled a sorceress; still, she possessed many of the associated qualities. She was older, independent of obvious masculine control, seemingly versed in magical ways, and capable of dealing with the devil. Her expertise and experience, as well as the magical universe, which she represented, had long been present in the community and seemed unamenable to facile eradication by the Reformed Church. She also embodied the religious vocation, which the strongly patriarchal Reformed movement systematically sought to deny women. The Protestant widow’s ally within the community was the Catholic priest. The curé’s spirited defense of her behavior is far from startling. She offered an important ecumenical dimension to his priestly, even magical powers. Many people, including some Protestants, regarded priests – men empowered to celebrate the mysteries of the Mass – as fitting sources for secret charms and potions. Another young Protestant couple, in this instance from Castelmoron, far to the west in Gascony, similarly sought out the local priest to lift the curse of infertility that they believed had been placed on them. The prelate gave them a special powder. They added it to a soup, which they then consumed in anticipation of breaking the ligature that had thwarted their marriage.5 The ritual of dissolving the ligature drew, in Chavalard’s case, upon strong parallels to local customs surrounding the betrothal ceremony. Couples in southern France traditionally sealed betrothal vows by drinking from a common cup “in the name of marriage.” They simultaneously agreed to a symbolic “donation of one another’s bodies,” thereby pledging themselves to a future marital and reproductive reality.6 When Chavalard and his wife drank from a cup to resuscitate and reinvigorate their sexual union, the ceremony took a recognizable, established form. The sipping ritual sprang as much from communal as religious convention and, in any event, was not well-received by Reformed authorities. Altogether, the consistory took an extremely legalistic and juridical approach to this particular “sin,” perhaps because the members readily understood that the two most dangerous transgressors – the widow and priest – were persons over whom they had far less authority than they might wish. The woman was Reformed but appears to have enjoyed considerable BPF, Ms. 222/1, ff 101v–102v. Raymond A. Mentzer, “Disciplina nervus ecclesiae: The Calvinist Reform of Morals at Nîmes,” Sixteenth Century Journal 18 (1987): 89–115. 5 6

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autonomy and certainly existed on the edges of official Protestantism. The priest, while menacing, was beyond their competence, as he pointedly told them. Hence consistorial method was less pastoral counsel than criminal trial process. Some of the elders may have been attorneys, who resorted to a procedure that they found familiar. This was certainly true elsewhere within French Reformed churches. More to the point, the consistory wanted to break the widow and, to this end, used its every advantage. It made a forceful attempt to intimidate her, particularly in the intense cross-examination and confrontation with witnesses in the affair. The pastor and elders went to great lengths to find inconsistencies, frequently petty, in her account of events. The priest too met intense prosecuting zeal when he voluntarily presented himself. Later, the consistory accused him of simony – more a crime than a sin – and threatened actual litigation if he continued his activities. The pastor and elders of Dieulefit appear to have been less interested in contesting the priest’s power as exorcist than in denying him the opportunity to practice among members of their congregation. Historians understand that Reformed notions of sin strongly differentiated between private and public faults. Both were offenses against God and church. On the other hand, consistorial interest and the watchful eye of church authorities fastened on public shortcomings, which reflected badly on the body of the saints and which would inevitably give rise to scandal. In this instance, the matter went well beyond usual concerns. Chavalard and Pré were censured and compelled to undergo the familiar ritual of begging divine, communal, and consistorial forgiveness. Saint-Martin and the curé, however, challenged the theological and communal foundations of the Reformed church. The consistory repeatedly confronted a popular sociability and mental universe that it readily comprehended and recognized. Yet, it refused to yield to this sort of unregulated behavior or accommodate the underlying religious and social assumptions. The task facing elders and pastors – rooting out what they considered a superstitious medieval and Catholic understanding of the godly and replacing it with a correct Reformed version – encountered substantial popular resistance. The widow and priest seemed to personify the difficulty. The usual rites of penitence and reintegration, such as those applied to Chavalard and Pré, were inadequate. Accordingly, they gave way to a coercive, legal approach. If the pastor and elders of Dieulefit confronted a medieval mixture of Christianity and folk religion in their attempts to instill Reformed identity, leastways in the case of Daniel Chavalard, their counterparts at Aubenas had to contend with the remnants of an unacceptable medieval religious culture as well as a reinvigorated, exceedingly strident Catholicism articulated and advanced by members of the Society of Jesus. It was a combative and tense

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milieu. Excepting a half dozen years between 1587 and 1593, the Huguenots had controlled the town of Aubenas since the eruption of religious strife in the early 1560s. The Edict of Nantes, however, permitted the return of Catholic clergy and resumption of the Mass and other aspects of Catholic devotion after 1598. The Jesuits seized the opportunity to launch an aggressive missionary program that centered on public preaching and the establishment of a free school for boys.7 Reformed authorities soon found themselves locked in a struggle to eradicate time-honored religious behavior on the one hand, and prevent infectious contacts with Jesuit religiosity on the other. There were, of course, the typical confessionally contaminating associations. People all too frequently entered into religiously mixed marriages or joined Catholic neighbors in masques and similar revelries, often connected to quasi-religious events. The consistory censured four men who celebrated Mardi Gras and threatened to make them repent before the entire congregation if they didn’t mend their ways. Several others danced and masked at a fair held at a neighboring village in connection with the feast of Saint Anthony; a young woman was censured for participating in “papist dances.” These and other dangerous exchanges so worried the local Reformed church that it recast the usual catechism instruction prior to the four annual celebrations of the Lord’s Supper with an eye specifically to eliminating “every suspicion of superstition.” Marriage to a Catholic typically involved a ceremony over which a priest presided; sometimes there was a Mass. The public scandal meant that repentant offenders regularly had to perform public reparation on Sunday before the entire congregation. In addition, fathers, as heads of household, repeatedly sought forgiveness of the faithful for marrying their daughters to “papists.”8 The Reformed church characterized one such marriage in the strongest language. A Protestant man, in marrying a “public whore” in a Catholic ceremony, had committed “apostasy.”9 The dangers associated with these marriages were obvious. Protestants were exposed to the religious errors of their Catholic spouses and, more important, the children born of these unions risked being raised Catholic. As an example, Anne de Barthélemy married a Catholic; she subsequently hesitated to present herself to the consistory for resolution of her fault “out of fear of her husband.” Catherine Raphele also married a Catholic and, according to her testimony before the consistory, soon found herself “forced to attend Mass.”10 7 Edouard de Gigord, Les Jésuites d’Aubenas 1601–1762 (Paris, 1910), 1–42. Samuel Mours, Le protestantisme en Vivarais et en Velay des origines à nos jours (Montpellier, 2001, reprint of 1949 edition), 39–40, 60, 63–64. 8 Archives Départementales (hereafter AD), Ardèche, 65 J4, Livre du consistoire pour l’Eglise d’Aubenas, ff. 1v, 3, 6, 17v, 20v, 24–24v, 72, 76, 86, 92–92v, 96, 99–100, 135; 1 J 169/1, ff. 13, 26v, 37–38v; 1 J 169/2, fol. 43v–45, 50–53v, 58v, 73–73v. 9 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 34–34v. 10 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 101; 1 J 169/2, fol. 68.

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Everyone had to understand these dangers and, at the same time, their identity as members of a true church. Even normal social obligations and simple human decency could be at odds with the demands of religious integrity. Thus the consistory censured three men for participating in a funeral ceremony conducted according to the standards of Catholic ritual. It severely scolded another man when several priests, carrying an “idol,” presumably a saint’s statue or other likeness, entered his house and ministered to his sick Catholic brother. Other men and women were similarly reprimanded for allowing priests to “exercise their idolatry” in attending sick Catholics living in their homes. Two women were temporarily suspended from the Lord’s Supper for attending a Catholic baptism, presumably the christening of a friend or relative’s child.11 These matters could sometimes become deeply entangled in a fine mesh of social and economic obligations. Separating the strands and isolating the religiously unacceptable element was nearly impossible. Take, for example, the man who was reprimanded for working on repairs to the “temple of idolatry” as the consistory characterized the local Catholic church. Although a member of the building trades and, as such, publicly available for employment, he was told to avoid service to “papists.”12 Far more difficult to eradicate were deeply entrenched guild customs and practices that possessed a professional and social character, along with unmistakable religious overtones. The guilds served a variety of purposes. Beyond the obvious professional connections, they offered good-fellowship, provided a context for sharing food and drink, insured a decent burial, and had deep ties to worship. Artisans sometimes seemed unable or unwilling to detach themselves from this complex of associations, especially the social expressions. In the autumn of 1601, for instance, the consistory of Aubenas publicly suspended ten members of a local guild for having celebrated the 25 October feast of Saint Crispin, the longstanding patron of shoemakers and leather workers. Participating in these sorts of festivals complete with religious observances, a meal and other elements was deemed unscriptural and dangerous. Each of their names was read aloud to the congregation at the Sunday worship.13 These observances and participation by Reformed tradesmen, however, were not easily eradicated. For the next several years, the consistory continued to chastise artisans for celebrating their patron saint’s feast with the fellow, doubtless Catholic guild members. In late October 1605, the consistory again chastised a score of cobblers for “eating and drinking” with their Catholic fellow artisans “in the temple of this idol” (Saint Crispin). The following February, two other artisans “dined” with Catholic craftsmen on the feast of 11 12 13

AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 22, 63v–64v, 113–113v; 1 J 169/1, ff. 31v–32. AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 19v–20. AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 4.

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Saint Blaise (3 February); he was long associated with workers in the wool trade.14 On other occasions, the consistory seems to have judged the festivities less a religious observance than the occasion for inappropriate feasting, drinking, and music.15 Thus a number of tailors had committed “insolences” in connection with their guild fellows on the patron saint’s feast day and additional occasions. Others donned masks and reveled to the sound of flutes and drums on May Day 1605. Three years later, the consistory scolded several leatherworkers for “playing the violin” on Saint Crispin’s feast, another for tolerating an “infinite number of blasphemies in his shop” by fellow artisans on the same day. The consistory reprimanded several men and women in 1609 for participating in dances, balls and masquerades which celebrated the feast of the carders’ patron saint. A few of the young men created so great an open scandal, parading “day and night” about town to the accompaniment of musical instruments, that the consistory forced them to atone openly before the assembly of the faithful at the Sunday worship.16 From the Protestant church’s perspective, perhaps more ominous than this traditional mix of professional affiliation, religion and sociability, were the men and women who attended Jesuit sermons and the celebration of the Mass. The Jesuit fathers momentarily convinced one man to participate in their “abuse and superstition” before he repented his error and returned to the Reformed faith. They persuaded another person to attend Mass, and many years passed before he confessed his error and returned to the Reformed church. An itinerant wool carder admitted that he had been “seduced by the Jesuits” and “persuaded to attend Mass.” The consistory used these and similar incidents to reinforce its position; it compelled the offenders to appear before the entire congregation to implore God’s forgiveness and promise never again to hear Jesuit sermons and attend Mass.17 Another man seems to have been accustomed to attending the Reformed sermon service on Sunday morning and a Jesuit sermon the afternoon of the same day. He was pointedly told to cease going to the Jesuit sermons and to join his fellow Protestant worshipers in “singing the Psalms.”18 In this instance, Reformed ecclesiastical authorities invoked the participatory nature of the Reformed liturgy as a means for cementing Protestant identity. The Jesuit school was cause for equal anguish. Not only were the Reformed faithful endangering their sons by sending them to the Jesuit collège, but they were providing room and board for other students who attended the school. The consistory repeatedly summoned fathers and mothers for entrusting their 14 15 16 17 18

AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 46–7, 49v, 51. AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 15v–16, 20v, 27, 54v–55. AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 37–8v, 69v–70, 94v, 96, 97v–98. AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, fol. 45; 1 J 169/1, ff. 19–19v. AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 6, 9, 11, 16v, 23, 25–26v.

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boys’ education to the Jesuits. Most families soon learned not to send their sons to the school; others were more obdurate. Some, moreover, continued to lodge nephews or friends’ children. The additional income was likely beneficial and the obligations of family and amity could be compelling. A weaver, for instance, seems to have found the arrangement a welcome supplement to his meager income. Another man could hardly refuse his Catholic brother who wanted his son to be with family while studying. Stern consistorial warnings against these arrangements were not successful in every instance and failure to comply with either prohibition eventually led to excommunication. Yet the school’s attraction was strong and twenty years after the school’s foundation, the consistory was still summoning fathers and occasionally mothers to account for confiding their boys to the Jesuits for instruction.19 The consistory confronted these obstacles within weeks of the school’s opening in 1603 and quickly asked the provincial synod for support of its determined position. The synod’s response was unequivocal. Parents were not allowed to have their children educated by the Jesuit priests. The situation threatened the faith of both generations. One man, for example, sent his son to the school and, in due course, he was absent from Reformed sermons, all the while increasingly attending Jesuits sermons.20 The provincial synod recognized the menace that the school represented and reiterated a firm warning to parents, coupled again with an explicit promise of excommunication to those who disobeyed. The provincial synod also asked the national synod to petition the crown for abolition of the Jesuit school and its replacement with a Reformed collège.21 The church of Aubenas unsuccessfully pursued legal action against Jesuit public preaching in a suit before the chambre de l’Édit, a special court attached to the Parlement of Toulouse. It was empowered to hear all Protestant complaints, both civil and criminal. The pastor and elders even attempted to enlist the support of the duc de Ventadour, the royal lieutenant general for the province of Languedoc, in its campaign against the “Jesuits and papists,” again without satisfactory result.22 Protestant families were barred from lodging Catholic schoolboys, even blood relatives. The case of Daniel Niclot fully demonstrated the peril that arose when Protestants housed Catholic students. Niclot was an elder and presumably among the more respected and informed members of the church.

19 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 25–8v, 32v, 39v, 42–3v, 56–8v, 61v, 65, 88, 90v–91, 93, 96, 98v–9; 1 J 169/1, ff. 26–7, 39v; 1 J 169/2, ff. 26, 28. 20 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 58v–9. 21 Subsequent provincial synods echoed these warning to parents, suggesting that some Protestants continued to pay little heed. AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 11v–14, 22v, 30–30v, 102v. 22 AD, Ardeche, 65 J 4, ff. 49–48v, 56–57, 59v, 102v.

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Yet he boarded several Catholic boys who attended the Jesuit collège. When the children fell ill, Niclot allowed a Jesuit priest to enter his house and administer the consecrated host to the ailing boys. The resulting scandal led to Niclot’s censure and suspension from the Lord’s Supper. Still, Niclot balked; he was not fully reintegrated into the community and allowed to participate in the Eucharist for several years. The consistory constantly reiterated its threat to excommunicate publicly anyone who lodged students attending the Jesuit school. It pointedly warned Jean Guerre, for example, to send home the “papist schoolboy” who boarded at his house. More than a dozen others received similar admonitions. Several were ultimately excommunicated and thereby excluded from the celebration of the Eucharist because of their “rebellion and obstinacy.” The problem persisted for well over a decade. Still, most people had a change of heart when confronted by consistorial directives and sent Catholic boarders on their way.23 For some members of the Reformed community, the attraction of the Jesuits and their school was overwhelming. Jean Dubreton sent his son to the Jesuit collège, attended their sermons, and was absent from Reformed worship. Eventually the pastor and elders asked Dubreton point blank to “which religion” he belonged.24 For their part the Jesuits increased the allure by offering tuition free instruction. The conditions were understandably attractive to cash-strapped Protestant parents. Some people even used the situation to leverage the consistory for financial assistance. An orphan boy admitted that he had been “induced and seduced by the Jesuits to become a papist” through their promise of free schooling. Repentant but penniless, he asked the consistory to assist him financially so that he could remain a devout member of the Reformed church yet have the opportunity to learn to read and write. The pastor and elders responded by placing him at the church’s expense with a local Protestant legal clerk who had opened a small school at the church’s request. The boy was so destitute that they agreed, in addition, to provide for his sustenance.25 Along similar lines, Abraham Ferin confessed that he considered sending his three sons to be educated by the Jesuits because they “asked nothing for their instruction.”26 Jean de Pax eventually agreed to withdraw his son from Jesuit instruction, but immediately requested and received church funds to educate the boy elsewhere. When a woman pleaded that she was too poor to send her son for schooling other than with the Jesuits, who offered the service gratis, the Reformed church promised to finance the boy’s education. Others 23 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 17–19, 32, 48, 49v, 51v, 53–53v, 54–6, 58–8v, 64v, 74v–76, 78–9v, 81v–82, 102v; 1 J 169/1, ff. 22v. 24 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 13, 35v, 42v. 25 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 13–14. 26 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 58v.

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too received assistance from the poor fund so that they could be educated by Protestant schoolmasters rather than the Jesuits.27 Insufficiency of financial resources became an all too frequent refrain for men and women summoned to answer for their sons’ attendance at the Jesuit school. Indeed, by the early seventeenth century, education along with poor relief had become major confessional battlegrounds everywhere in France as Catholic reformers sought to recapture the souls of people whose parents or grandparents had earlier joined the Protestant ranks. The consistory of Aubenas worried about the confessional exposure of both school children and the poor. It complained bitterly, for instance, to the local judicial magistrates that Jesuits were “disturbing and pestering” impoverished sick Protestants in the local hospital for the poor.28 After more than a decade of struggling with the Jesuit collège, the Reformed church of Aubenas tried, without particular success, to launch its own school. It engaged one and, for a time, two schoolmasters to instruct the youth of the Protestant community. The project, however, proved financially difficult. The instructors initially charged students and the Reformed church provided, at best, supplemental support. Later, the church agreed to pay the schoolmaster’s salary, but had to appeal to the provincial synod for money to purchase books. Lacking sufficient, sustained resources, the small school was never more than a precarious and not especially inviting alternative to the Jesuit enterprise.29 Even less successful was an earlier campaign to relocate the Protestant collège at Privas, some thirty kilometers to the northeast. Although the provincial synod supported the move from Privas to Aubenas, the national synod countermanded the venture.30 Over time, Reformed ecclesiastical authorities had ample opportunity to delineate and enunciate key differences in conviction and conduct between members of a true church and those of an erroneous “papist” position. Even if the faithful did not always respect these norms, they gradually came to recognize and associate with them. Still, the ties to traditional medieval religiosity and folk beliefs or the draw of Jesuit edification proved strong and, in some cases, overpowering. Protestant authorities at Aubenas, Dieulefit, and a host of other towns and villages struggled relentlessly to thwart and reduce this contamination. At the same time, the ongoing ceremonies of open repentance at Sunday worship for those who found themselves unable to resist involvement with certain elements of unreformed Christianity proved more than rituals of expiation for transgressions committed and the repentant AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 60v, 68v, 90, 93, 95. AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 35. 29 AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, ff. 114; 1 J 169/1, ff. 13v, 15, 33–4v; 1 J 169/2, ff. 10–13v, 15, 20, 43, 48v–50, 59v–60, 87–87v. 30 AD, Ardèche, 1 J 169/1, ff. 7v–8. Mours, Le protestantisme en Vivarais et Velay, 159. 27 28

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sinner’s reintegration into the community. They were a powerful, constant reminder of proper and improper Christian behavior, and reinforced for everyone in attendance the meaning of membership in the community of the saints. This functional approach to delineation and demarcation of religious position had positive as well as negative facets. French Protestants understood the expectations attached to their confessional devotion and had all the while before them the dreadful standards of the unacceptable and immoral. In the course of time, they came to a keen appreciation of their special religious character, what it meant to be Protestant and how others were not.

Confessionalization beyond the Germanies: The Case of France Mack P. Holt

Originally the idea of Walter Zeeden, Heinz Schilling, and Wolfgang Reinhard, the confessionalization model was an attempt to explain how the various confessional identities in Germany came to be delineated after the Peace of Augsburg in 1555. While Zeeden’s original idea focused primarily on how different confessional groups defined their boundaries and identities, Schilling and Reinhard ultimately tied this process to the church (both Protestant and Catholic) working hand in hand with the state for the twin purposes of social disciplining and state-building.1 Confessionalization has led to many novel insights and has opened up many new questions for social historians. Social discipline was obviously stressed by Protestant and Catholic reformers alike, with perhaps Martin Bucer’s De Regno Christi being the most explicit example; John Bossy called it “the ur-text of Reformation disciplina.”2 Moreover, this entire approach has allowed historians of the Reformation to see the similarities and parallels among all the Protestant and Catholic reformations. A good example of this is Ronnie Hsia’s comparison of social discipline in the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic regions of Germanspeaking central Europe; despite different means, each confession was 1 See, among many other writings, Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Entstehung der Konfessionen: Grundlagen und Formen der Konfessionsbildung im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe (Munich, 1965); Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: Eine Fallstudie über das Verhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe (Gütersloh, 1981); and Wolfgang Reinhard, "Gegenreformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitalters," Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 68 (1977): 226–52. The best statement of the model of confessionalization in English is probably Heinz Schilling, "Confessional Europe," in T. A. Brady, H. A. Oberman, and J. D. Tracy, eds, Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, 2 vols (Leiden, 1995), II, 641–81. A recent overview of the entire debate in English is Joel F. Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, "Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870," Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77–101. For further elucidation of the confessionalization model and more complete historiographical details, see the other essays in this volume. 2 John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), 180.

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attempting to achieve similar ends.3 The model is not without its critics, however, because of the simplistic and blunt way that social disciplining and state-building tend to be lumped together, reservations that Hsia himself had already pointed out. His study of Münster after the fall of the Anabaptist kingdom in 1535 demonstrated that in this city ruled by a Catholic princebishop his subjects continued to incorporate a number of Protestant practices, such as communion in both kinds and singing hymns in German, in what was still nominally a Catholic liturgy. When these practices were eventually replaced by a more Tridentine Catholic orthodoxy by the early seventeenth century, it was not the result of pressure from above by the prince-bishop, but rather the efficacy of the Society of Jesus working from below.4 Similarly, Marc Forster has also demonstrated that confessional identity was often determined not by the efforts of church or state from above, but by lay support from below. In southwestern Germany, for example, he shows conclusively that the success of reformed Catholicism was not the result of any church or state driven program of confessionalization, but was entirely due to the vitality and growth of traditional Catholic lay piety in the villages.5 And finally, Bodo Nischan has also made it very clear in his study of Brandenburg that confessionalization did not always achieve its goal of homogenizing religious pluralism into a common confession. When the Elector John Sigismund made public his conversion from Lutheranism to the Reformed faith in Berlin on Christmas Day in 1613, his expectation was that the majority of his subjects would eventually follow suit, something that never came close to happening.6 What is most important, however, is not whether any particular paradigm of confessionalization ultimately stands or falls, but that the entire debate about it has opened up new lines of research that promise much for the future. But up until now, the debate has been limited almost entirely to historians of the German Reformation. Does confessionalization as a concept have any broader applications outside the German experience? If we look westward across the Rhine to France, the confessionalization model immediately becomes much more complicated. For a start, the state during the French Wars of Religion (1562–98) was weak and was clearly unable to enforce religious uniformity. Moreover, throughout the sixteenth 3 R. Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550–1750 (London, 1989). 4 R. Po-chia Hsia, Society and Religion in Münster, 1535–1618 (New Haven, 1984). 5 Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca, 1992), and the same author’s Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (Cambridge, 2001). 6 Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994), as well as his article, “Confessionalism and Absolutism: The Case of Brandenburg,” in Andrew Pettegree, Alastair Duke, and Gillian Lewis, eds, Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620 (Cambridge, 1994), 181–204.

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century the French monarchy refrained, at least publicly, from endorsing the decrees of the Council of Trent, which was the backbone of Catholic social discipline. So, on the surface at least, it would appear that the SchillingReinhard model of confessionalization may not be easily applicable to France. But if we ask a slightly different question from that posed by most German historians of the Reformation and one more relevant to the French situation, indeed if we go back to Zeeden’s original approach, confessionalization takes on a broader and more useful application. Instead of asking how the German lands came to be confessionalized into different states of Lutherans, Catholics, and Calvinists after the Peace of Augsburg, we should pose a different question: how did the kingdom of France manage to integrate a small minority of Calvinists into a Catholic state? That is, if we focus on the process of confessionalization and how it occurred rather than on pre-conceived outcomes such as separation into distinct confessional groups or the linkage between social discipline and the rise of the state, confessionalization becomes a much more useful tool for analysis outside the Germanies. Scholars who focus on the Reformation outside the Empire have, in fact, some good German models to guide them. After all, it was Zeeden’s original idea to focus on the process of confessionalization over several generations, from which he concluded that Tridentine Catholicism had induced changes in lay behavior that were similar to those long recognized in the various Protestant reformations.7 Taking this lead from Zeeden, several scholars have tried to assess the efficacy of confessionalization as a tool for analysis in the context of the French Wars of Religion and its aftermath.8 Gregory Hanlon was one of the first to ask how Protestants and Catholics managed to co-exist and define their respective confessional boundaries in the bi-confessional town of Layrac in Aquitaine at the end of the religious wars.9 He found an unusual degree of inter-confessional sociability that resulted in relatively peaceful co-existence between Protestants and Catholics in this one town in the seventeenth century, a stability that contrasted sharply with the violence of the religious wars of the previous century. More strikingly, he found that fully ten percent of all marriages in Layrac in the years 1606–36, 1654–63, and 1672–88 were mixed marriages between Protestant and Catholic spouses. Keith Luria has discovered similar results in his analysis of Protestant and Catholic burials in bi-confessional areas. Mirroring Hanlon’s 7 In addition to his book cited in n. 1, see Zeeden’s article, “Grundlagen und Wege der Konfessionsbildung in Deutschland im Zeitalter der Glaubenskämpfe,” Historische Zeitschrift 185 (1958): 249–99. 8 For a summary of all research to date that links confessionalization to France, see James R. Farr, “Confessionalization and Social Discipline in France, 1530–1685,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 94 (2003): 276–93. 9 Gregory Hanlon, Confession and Community in Seventeenth-Century France: Catholic and Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Philadelphia, 1993).

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conclusions of significant toleration and peaceful co-existence in the seventeenth century, Luria found that there is evidence of significant cemetery sharing between Protestants and Catholics, with sometimes one confession absorbing the local funeral customs and burial practices of the other.10 And Philip Benedict has also taken the Zeeden model of confessionalization to focus on the city of Montpellier in the seventeenth century, perhaps more evenly divided confessionally than any other city or town in France.11 His conclusions for Montpellier, however, suggest that toleration and peaceful coexistence were not the rule everywhere. There was an initial period of relatively fluid religious boundaries in the first decade of the seventeenth century, where maybe five to ten percent of all marriages were mixed marriages and numerous inhabitants of both faiths frequently did business across confessional lines. Over the course of the century, however, confessional lines hardened as leaders of both communities sought to separate and isolate themselves along more strictly confessional lines, and religious tensions in the city increased as a result. Benedict concludes that in the long run confessionalization in Montpellier worked to separate rather than integrate the two faiths. Thus, all three of these examples show that in France, just as in the empire, local conditions, social structures, and political situations shaped the outcome of confessional division. None of these scholars attempts to tie the process of confessionalization to social disciplining or to state-building in any kind of mechanical way; instead they focus on articulating the way the two confessions managed to co-exist over the long term. What I propose to do in the remainder of this essay is to focus on a fourth example of confessionalization in France, the city of Dijon in Burgundy. Unlike both Layrac and Montpellier, Dijon did not survive the religious wars of the sixteenth century with a Huguenot population at all. The city did have a small but still sizeable Protestant minority by 1561 that numbered maybe as many as 500–600 people, out of a total population of maybe 12,000–13,000.12 Probably only half of these were residents of Dijon, the remainder being composed of transitory journeymen artisans. Confessionalization there, however, resulted in this minority becoming absorbed into the Catholic majority, through suppression or abjuration and 10 Keith Luria, “Separated by Death? Burials, Cemeteries, and Confessional Boundaries in Seventeenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 24 (Spring 2001): 185–221. 11 Philip Benedict, “Confessionalization in France? Critical Reflections and New Evidence,” in idem, The Faith and Fortunes of France’s Huguenots, 1559–1685 (Aldershot, 2001), 309–25. This article has also been reprinted in Raymond A. Mentzer and Andrew Spicer, eds, Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (Cambridge, 2002), 44–61. 12 This seems the most realistic estimate of Dijon’s Huguenot population, which I have calculated from the figures given by Jean Richard, “Les quêtes de l’église Notre-Dame et la diffusion du protestantisme à Dijon vers 1562,” Annales de Bourgogne 32 (1960): 183–9.

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conversion of most of the residents and expulsion from the city altogether of the non-residents. By 1585 the zealous city magistrates could find only 69 suspected Huguenots left in Dijon, and it is likely that not all of those on the list were actually practicing Protestants.13 And just a few years later during the League regime in Dijon (1588–95), even this number declined to virtually zero, at least publicly, as Dijon was for all practical purposes exclusively a Catholic community. How this happened offers us a different look at the process of confessionalization, the process by which the two communities not only negotiated and defended their doctrinal differences, but also how they transgressed and ultimately came to assault each other’s sense of sociability. The Reformation in Dijon Although one of the members of Dijon’s city council exclaimed in 1554 that “the rumor was going around that two-thirds of the city were Lutherans,” this was a wild exaggeration in terms of numbers as well as confession.14 Nevertheless, in the 1550s Dijon witnessed a small but growing number of Protestants passing through the city, mainly Calvinists from nearby Geneva. Inevitably, small numbers of locals began to convert and eventually Protestant services began to be held clandestinely in private homes. By 1560 there were maybe 500–600 Protestants, mainly Calvinists, in the city, with maybe half that number being permanent residents. Dijon was a city with an overwhelming clerical presence, however, as there were not only seven parish churches with their own ecclesiastical staffs, but also the Sainte Chapelle (former private chapel of the Dukes of Burgundy, used in the sixteenth century by the royal governor of Burgundy) and the large abbeys of St. Etienne and St. Bénigne, each with its own clerical team. In addition, there were two mendicant convents in Dijon, the Jacobins (Dominicans) and the Cordeliers (Franciscans), each with its own clerical community, as well as a Carmelite monastery with its White Friars, the church of the Madelaine, and the collegiate church of the Chapelle aux Riches.15 With such a prominent ecclesiastical presence in the city, it is no surprise that this mix of regular and secular clergy vehemently urged the city council to do something about this rapid growth of heresy in the community. Given that in Paris King Henry II and the Parlement were arresting, convicting, and even executing Protestants for the crime of heresy, the local magistrates were 13 Archives municipales de Dijon [hereafter AMD], B223 [Deliberations of the Hôtel de Ville], ff. 82v–83r, 29 October 1585. 14 AMD, B192, fol. 92v, 17 July 1554. 15 For details of these ecclesiastical communities and their founding in Dijon, see Henri Chabeuf, Dijon: Monuments et souvenirs (Dijon, 1894), 161–265.

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only too happy to oblige.16 Thus confessionalization in Burgundy essentially was a process whereby those who had strayed from what was considered the true faith, were either imprisoned, restored to the Catholic church, or forced outside the community altogether. There were three intensive periods of suppression of the Huguenots in Dijon: an initial phase from 1554 to the publication of the Edict of Toleration in January 1562; a middle phase from the beginning of the third civil war in 1568 to the aftermath of the St. Bartholomew’s massacres in October 1572; and a final phase in the summer of 1585, immediately after the Treaty of Nemours, between Henry III and the Guises, which countermanded all earlier edicts of pacification and made it illegal to be a Protestant in France. The early phase was marked by significant force and violence, while the latter two phases were decidedly less violent and witnessed large numbers of abjurations, as most of Dijon’s remaining Protestants ultimately concluded that they had no choice but to rejoin the Catholic church if they wanted to continue to reside in the city. A closer look at the earlier period of suppression and violence as well as the later periods of abjurations will better illustrate how the process of confessionalization worked in Dijon. The suppression of the Protestant movement in Dijon began in the late 1550s in response to the growing number of acts of iconoclasm against Catholic sacred images. Multiple desecrations of the images of saints, the Host, and the Virgin Mary between 1557 and 1560 indicated that not only was the Protestant community in Dijon growing, but that authorities had to crack down to maintain public order.17 Expecting trouble and some kind of Protestant disruption at the annual Corpus Christi procession, the city council authorized all Catholics in Dijon in June 1561 to bear arms to protect themselves.18 Although nothing happened on that occasion, religious tensions were further enflamed when a Protestant candidate, Antoine Brocard, counselor in the Chambre des comptes, became a candidate for mayor of Dijon in the annual elections. Although he lost due to an unusually large turnout of Catholic vignerons, the mere fact that he stood for election openly as a Protestant and participated in a public campaign demonstrated that the Protestant community no longer represented an invisible cohort in the city.19 16 For more on the early growth of Protestantism in Dijon, see Edmond Belle, La Réforme à Dijon des origines à la fin de la lieutenance généralle de Gaspard de Saulx-Tavanes, 1530–1570 (Dijon, 1911), 1–49, and Jacques Fromental, La Réforme en Bourgogne aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1968), 1–33. 17 For just a sample of these incidents of iconoclasm, see AMD, B195, fol. 139v, 17 January 1558; AMD, B197, fol. 48r, 11 August 1559; and AMD, B198, fol. 30r, 20 July 1560. Also, see Belle, La Réforme à Dijon, 24, and Fromental, La Réforme en Bourgogne, 17–18. 18 AMD, B198, ff. 133v–134r, 3 June 1561. 19 For the significance of the mayoral election of 1561 and the religious division it spawned, see my “Wine, Community and Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Burgundy,” Past and Present 138 (February 1993): 58–93.

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But open violence in Dijon always remained just below the surface, and it eventually reared its head later that same year. On 29, 30, and 31 October 1561 nearly two hundred Protestants assembled illegally in the homes of prominent and wealthy members of the Huguenot community in Dijon. During the last of these meetings a Catholic crowd began throwing rocks at the house and at those inside as they attempted to exit. The city council had to call out armed guards to break up this confrontation, which could have turned even more violent, since some of the Protestants inside were armed.20 On the following morning, the feast day of All Saints, Dijon’s Catholics awoke to discover that several hundred Huguenots had occupied the rue des Forges and had barricaded both ends of the street. Catholic vignerons immediately began ringing church bells all over the city, calling their comrades from the city and the surrounding villages to come break up the Protestant demonstration, as the rumor circulated that the Huguenots had stolen an image of the Virgin from the nearby parish church of Notre-Dame.21 Again, rocks and other objects were thrown, and this time even a few firearms were discharged between the two mobs before authorities were able to break up the mêlée. When they did, one Catholic dyer lay dead. The Parlement in Dijon ordered the city council to arrest all the Huguenots who had assembled on the rue des Forges. They were quickly rounded up and imprisoned. The city expelled those Huguenots who were not permanent residents. Residents who refused to abjure Protestantism were threatened with the confiscation of all their property as well as expulsion.22 In just two short months, however, a royal edict from the court gave these Huguenots cause for hope by recognizing their legal right to exist under the law for the first time. The Edict of Toleration issued in January 1562 was a very bitter pill for most French Catholics to swallow, and the reaction in Burgundy underscores how the doctrinal differences between the two confessions also represented different concepts of socialization. Although the edict did recognize the right of Protestants to exist, it was a very limited existence. They could neither meet nor assemble in any town or city in France, publicly or privately, and they could only assemble for worship outside all urban jurisdictions. Furthermore, all Huguenots were still required to observe and obey all restrictions on Catholic feast days and other holidays. All these limitations were placed upon the Protestants out of a desire to maintain public order.23 And when the Huguenots in Dijon began to contravene these restrictions, the complaints of AMD, D63 (liasse), depositions of 28, 29, and 30 October 1561. AMD, B199, fol. 81v, 2 November 1561. 22 AMD, D63 (liasse), 1 November 1561; and AMD, B199, fol. 81v, 2 November 1561. 23 See N. M. Sutherland, The Huguenot Struggle for Recognition (New Haven, 1980), 354–5. 20 21

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the mayor and city council were explicitly couched in terms of maintaining public order. In a long list of grievances addressed to Claude de Lorraine, duke of Aumale, royal governor in Burgundy, the mayor and city council pleaded for the arrest and detention of all those Huguenots who had violated the terms of the edict. They made numerous references to those of the “so-called Reformed religion” and how their behavior was contrary “to the honor of God, the service of His Majesty, the defense and protection of this city, [and] the peace and tranquility of his good, loyal, and faithful subjects.” The twelve specific complaints covered the entire realm of the regulation of the body social: the Huguenots’ refusal to observe Catholic feast days, on which “the socalled reformed [Protestants] work and labor publicly and openly in their shops”; the selling of “censured and scandalous” books; tavern-keepers and hoteliers who served meat during Lent and other prohibited periods; the celebration of Protestant weddings and baptisms in the seasons prohibited by the Catholic church “to the great scandal of everyone”; the continued propagation of “secret pedagogies … to seduce the poor and tender youth, who are incapable of resisting their odious words”; the “scandalous singing of the Psalms in public in a loud voice”; and even the Huguenot’s opposition to the last mayoral election, in which a militant Catholic defeated the Protestant candidate for mayor in June 1561. This last complaint, the magistrates argued, contravened “all order of the policing of the city and contrary to the inhabitants’ right to elect their own magistrates and officers, which had always been a sign of the most famous, ancient, and flourishing republics”.24 The centerpiece of this list of grievances to the royal governor, however, was clearly the Huguenot attacks against the Catholic Eucharist. “They parade openly in front of the Palais [de Justice] and generally everywhere in all public places selling libels, defamations, effigies and other figures of unworthiness and derision of the holy sacrament of the Mass.” Moreover many Protestants had openly blasphemed the sacrament, “daring impudently to call the holy sacrament Jean Le Blanc [John White, or John the Blank]”.25 Although this seemed the most explicitly theological of all the magistrates’ complaints, it too hinted of its social implications. Calling the Host Jean Le Blanc on account of the color of the white wafer used in the Eucharist represented an explicit profanation of the sacred. Like the Protestant taunts in Lyon of “god of paste” that Natalie Davis has so convincingly described, this epithet cut to the heart of the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation; le blanc was a reference not only to the color but also the inefficacy of the Host. It assaulted the specific enfolding together of the body social, body politic, and body of Christ that Catholics believed the Eucharist represented. The magistrates informed the governor that they had already imprisoned those Huguenots who had 24 25

AMD, D 63 (liasse), letter of the mairie of Dijon to the Duke of Aumale (spring 1562). AMD, D 63 (liasse).

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blasphemed the holy sacrament by calling it Jean Le Blanc, and they urged him “to seize the initiative and uphold the king’s will so that exemplary punishment can be done to eliminate and quell such audacious and seditious speech”.26 Thus although confessional differences were responsible for both the Huguenots’ behavior and the Catholic magistrates’ reaction to that behavior, it was the social implications of these confessional differences that animated both. The city’s Catholics perceived the Protestant attacks on the Eucharist in Dijon in 1562 as attempts to redefine the boundaries between the sacred and the profane and as a threat not only to their theology, but to the body social and body politic as well. Thus the early stages of the confessional confrontation in Dijon were marked by the suppression of Protestantism in the form of imprisonment, fines, and the confiscation of property. And this policy would have doubtless been successful given the paucity of Protestant numbers, except for the inconvenient fact that the crown itself had guaranteed the legal recognition and protection of the Huguenot community in the form of the edict of January 1562 in which Catherine de Medici had given royal sanction to the Protestants’ right to exist. And this sanction would be underscored in each successive peace edict following the early civil wars: in the Edict of Amboise in 1563, in the Edict of Longjumeau in 1568, and in the Edict of St. Germain in 1570. On each of these occasions, Protestants returned to the city and some of those imprisoned were released. But as soon as war broke out again, the terms of the edict were ignored and suppression began all over again. Another side of confessionalization in Burgundy, however, is noticeable in the pattern of Protestants who abjured their faith and returned – at least publicly – to the Catholic church. It soon became clear to them that pressure not only from the local magistrates but from the citizens of Dijon as well appeared strong enough to counter whatever legal rights they had gained from royal edicts of pacification. In short, once they realized that their property and continued residence in Dijon were in jeopardy, many Huguenots began to think seriously about making a public abjuration of their faith. These public abjurations tell us a great deal more about the Catholic mentality in the city than about the individual motivations of those Protestants who chose to recant Protestantism and rejoin the Catholic church. Nevertheless, the language and terms contained in the actual certificates of abjuration, written up and signed by clergyman appointed by the city council, are quite revealing despite the seemingly formulaic sameness to them. First of all, these certificates tell us virtually nothing about religious conversion and abjuration in any meaningful way, because signing one represented the only way any Protestant who was imprisoned or whose

26

AMD, D 63 (liasse).

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property had been seized could liberate himself or his goods. The edicts of pacification during the civil wars did not mandate these imprisonments and seizures (and they were explicitly contravened by some of the edicts), but this was the will of the local magistrates: the mayor and échevins on the city council. Moreover, the chronology of these abjurations makes it very clear that whenever the council imprisoned significant numbers of Huguenots, abjurations immediately followed. Of the surviving sample of certificates of abjuration – a total of 277 individuals27 – 76 of them (27.4 percent) were issued in September 1568 immediately after the outbreak of the third civil war ended the Peace of Longjumeau; 147 (53.1 percent) were drawn up between 2 September and 31 October 1572 following the St. Bartholomew’s massacres in Paris and the imprisonment of all Huguenots in Dijon; and 34 (12.3 percent) were dated in July and August 1585 following the Treaty of Nemours, when Henry III capitulated to the Catholic League, which made it illegal even to be a Protestant. These certificates account for 257 of the 287 abjurations in the sample: 92.8 percent. Thus there is little question that these abjurations followed immediately after intensive efforts on the part of Catholic magistrates to incarcerate Burgundian Protestants. The certificates themselves are interesting in their own right, however, for what they tell us about Catholic perceptions of the Huguenots in their community and what abjuration and reuniting with the Catholic community actually meant to them. Parish clergy selected by the city magistrates actually recorded the certificates, but they had to be deposited in the town hall with the mayor and council before any prisoner or his property could be released. So although each document bears a clerical signature, it appears that the contents of the certificates reflect the sensibilities of the magistrates much more than those of the clergy. One of the most striking features about these certificates, for example, is the almost total absence of explicit references to doctrines, beliefs, and Catholic theology. In only two certificates from the entire sample of 277 could I find any specific reference to doctrine: the abjurations of a merchant named Thierry Lefevre and a launderer named Jehan du Mattal in September 1568. Lefevre’s certificate stated that he understood that “the duty of a Christian was to present himself humbly for the sacrament of confession and then for the reception of the very sacred body and blood of Jesus Christ at holy Mass.”28 Whether it was Lefevre himself or the attending cleric who crossed out the words “et sang” in the certificate, it was an indication of the Catholic doctrine of concomitance whereby Christ’s 27 This total includes 175 names on 40 different certificates, all with dates 17–30 September 1568 or 2 September–31 October 1572 [AMD, D 65 (liasse)], and 102 names (not 93 as indicated on the wrapper) on certificates dated between 1560 and 1587 [AMD, D 66 (liasse)]. 28 AMD, D 65 (liasse), 17 September 1568.

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blood was fully contained in the consecrated Host. He closed his statement of abjuration by indicating that he believed in “the sacerdotal succession of the [Holy] See since St. Peter” and by swearing to maintain “the name of Catholic, which is to say universal”. Du Mattal was the other Protestant who specifically referred to doctrine in his certificate of abjuration. He swore that not only had he never been a member of the Protestant church, but that “he had done his Easter duty as a good Christian should and ought to do”. Moreover, he reiterated that his curate and neighbors could all testify to this, and Du Mattal even had them sign at the bottom of his certificate that they witnessed him “faire ses pasques (fulfill his Easter duties)” and attended Mass together on 3 September in the parish church of St. Michel.29 These are the only Huguenots in the surviving sample who made any mention of any of the sacraments or the papacy. And if these were the exceptions that prove the rule – the rule that the abjurations had equally consequential social implications as theological – Lefevre and Du Mattal explicitly mentioned the body of Christ and the sacrament of the Eucharist, the communal rite and social ritual that loomed so large over the Catholic body social. What did the other 285 statements of abjuration say, then, if they did not refer to doctrines or sacraments? The one phrase that occurred over and over again in virtually all the certificates is that each Huguenot promised to “vivre catholicquement.” And what did living Catholicly mean for the magistrates of Dijon? A few examples make this more clear.30 Paul Barbier, a comptroller, promised “to conduct himself and live peacefully with everyone as he always wanted to do.” The baker Claude Pasquier promised “to live Catholicly and according to the statutes and ordinances of our Roman Catholic and mother church,” and he also swore that he had never “carried arms against His Majesty nor committed any scandalous act”. A bookseller named Pierre Grangier simply affirmed on his certificate “that he had never carried arms nor done anything tending to sedition”. A poor, twenty-five year old, infirm male named Jehan de Mouhy simply promised “to live and die” in the Catholic church. Hugues Bourrier, a cobbler in the parish of St. Michel called Pistolet, demanded to be released because “it was more than three years since he had made any act in the so-called reformed religion, and that he had always lived Catholicly following the Roman church without any complaint or scandal” (the emphasis is mine). Moreover, he promised in future “to live according to the Catholic church and to do service to His Majesty”. This poor cobbler closed by begging for mercy, because “he was indigent and without means to live or feed his wife and children by a previous marriage”. The merchant Jehan Fronaille affirmed that he wanted “to join the number of faithful Catholics AMD, D 65 (liasse), 17 September 1568. The following examples are all taken from AMD, D 65 (liasse), 28 February 1570 to 11 October 1572. 29 30

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who desired to live and die under the will of God, in his service, and in his church, and to employ his life and earthly possessions for the conservation of His Majesty and the kingdom”. And finally, the metal-polisher Thibault de Rochefort denied all those who had testified that he was a Huguenot. “On the contrary,” he attested, “he had always conducted himself modestly and Catholicly in the obedience of the Roman Catholic church. And since the beginning of these recent troubles he has always been ready and in arms under the charge of his captain [of the parish] to do service to the king and to the commonwealth whenever they were endangered.” It was only “heinous enemies and liars” and those of “sinister opinions” who claim he was now a Protestant, and “he would prefer to die than to be thought of as such”. He concluded his statement, as so many others had also done, by promising “to live Catholicly as he had done all his life” and by swearing that “he was perpetually committed to make humble and faithful service to His Majesty the king and to the commonwealth, and that he would always be ready to risk the last drop of his blood in order to serve the city of Dijon.”31 What seems clear from these examples – which are characteristic of the surviving sample of certificates of abjuration – is that the Dijon magistrates appeared to be much more concerned about scandalous acts, seditious behavior, loyalty to the king, and threats to public order than in explicit statements of faith or doctrine. I do not mean to suggest that beliefs were unimportant, only that these beliefs had some very powerful social implications for the bulk of the laity. Whether it was calling the Eucharist Jean le Blanc or singing the Psalms publicly in French, these social acts were perceived as violations and profanations of the sacred body social. They also underscore, as John Bossy has suggested for more than thirty years, that for French Catholics religion was as easily understood as a community to which one belonged, as it was perceived as a set of ideas one believed in.32 The definition of being a true member of that community meant not so much inner belief as conformity in behavior and outlook: in other words, social relations. What is also interesting about these certificates of abjuration is that many of the Huguenots who signed them and promised “to live Catholicly” further appealed to the Catholic magistrates’ own sense of the social order rather than make any further attempt to convince the magistrates of their doctrinal orthodoxy. For example, thirty-two Huguenots appealed in 1569 to be released from incarceration “so that they could practice their profession and earn a living for their wives and children, who were in great need”, while there survive ten appeals for release on account of sick children.33 Again, the AMD, D 65 (liasse), 28 February 1570 to 11 October 1572. John Bossy, “The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe,” Past and Present 47 (1970): 51–70; and also his Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985). 33 AMD, D 65 (liasse), undated, but Spring 1569. 31 32

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emphasis here is on the social implications of confessional strife during the Reformation. All these examples should not lead us to conclude, however, that all Huguenots either abjured, or that they became Nicodemites, conforming outwardly in their public behavior simply to gain their release from prison. These 287 cases of public abjuration did not represent the entire Protestant community in Dijon. While the number of Huguenots in Dijon in 1562 has been estimated to be maybe as many as 500–600 persons (out of a population of about 12,000–13,000), many fled the city at the first sign of suppression by the magistrates. Significant numbers went directly to Geneva, in fact, which was far closer than either Lyon or Paris, French cities with sizable Huguenot congregations. There were also some who remained resolute to their faith and refused to abjure. They were always perceived as a minority, as most either fled or abjured and then fled. But some, such as the cobbler Nicolas Hurtault, remained incarcerated for long periods rather than recant their Calvinist faith. Hurtault had been arrested along with his wife in October 1563 when their neighbors complained that they had been “singing the Psalms of David very loudly in French in their shop”.34 Rather than abjure as so many of his co-religionists did and promise “to live Catholicly,” Hurtault stood firm in his faith, at least for a time. Five years later in 1568, however, he joined dozens of others who abjured in order to be released from prison.35 Given that the largest number of abjurations in the sample – slightly more than half – occurred in the weeks immediately following the St. Bartholomew’s massacres in August 1572, it is tempting to conclude that these Huguenots, and presumably many of the others as well, could not have sincerely abjured their faith. They either genuinely feared a massacre in Dijon emulating the one in Paris (which did occur in twelve provincial towns with significant Protestant congregations), or they were pressured to convert with actual force. All the surviving evidence suggests, however, that there was no force used in Dijon. When news of the Paris massacres reached Burgundy on 31 August 1572, Léonar Chabot, count of Charny and lieutenant-general of the province, ordered all Huguenots in Dijon to present themselves to the city magistrates at city hall the following day. The Protestants were then herded into the keep of the château for their own safekeeping. When the false rumor arrived a day or two later that it was the king’s will that all Protestants be killed, both Charny and Pierre Jeannin, a judge in the Parlement of Dijon, ordered the prévôt des maréchaux at the château not to harm them, thus averting another massacre in Dijon. There was one Huguenot casualty, however, a sieur de Traves who was shot trying to escape on 21 September. The following day Charny ordered all prisoners released who would sign a 34 35

AMD, D 65 (liasse), 2 October 1563. AMD, D 65 (liasse), September 1568.

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statement promising “to live Catholicly,” beginning the process of mass abjuration already described.36 Thus to explain the abjuration of nearly 150 Huguenots in Dijon soon after the massacres of St. Bartholomew’s night in Paris we need to look beyond force. It would appear that the motivation to abjure for so many Protestants in Dijon meant one of two things: either a genuine fear of repression and possibly a massacre like the one in Paris, or a grudging acceptance that the massacres signified that perhaps God had abandoned the cause of the new religion. Many must have felt like the Calvinist minister Hugues Sureau, who lamented: “I began to consider it [the massacre] to be an expression of God’s indignation, as though he had declared by this means that he detested and condemned the profession and exercise of our Religion.”37 This situation resembled that in Rouen, as Philip Benedict has shown.38 And it also apparently prevailed elsewhere in France, as the diary of Claude Haton, a curé in Provins, recorded after the massacres. The Huguenots who survived St. Bartholomew’s Day, he wrote, “all went to mass, without being compelled or ordered to go, even though they swore when they [initially] renounced the Catholic Church that they would never go there no matter what commandment was given them and even if they were burned alive; (but now) it seemed as though they had never left or been separated, so cheerfully did they behave, going not by ones or twos but in large groups to sing in the churches.”39 Although Haton concluded from this that Protestants everywhere were just fickle in their faith, the other sources would appear to offer a different conclusion: that seeing no other alternative, the Huguenots in Dijon, as elsewhere in France, made an explicit effort to heal the rift in the body social after the massacres of 1572 by rejoining the community and “living Catholicly.” And Denis Crouzet has demonstrated that many Protestants did so out of a genuine fear that the massacres signified the imminent end of the world.40 Also mirroring the behavior of Protestants in Rouen described by Philip Benedict, the Huguenots in Dijon proved not inconstant once they abjured. Although the baptismal records are not as incomplete for Dijon as they are for Rouen, the surviving registers do not show a single Protestant baptism in the city’s seven parishes after 1578, when the earliest surviving records begin.41 36

AMD, B 208, ff. 15v–23r, deliberations of the Hôtel-de-ville, 31 August–22 September

1572. 37 Quoted in Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Consolidation of the French Protestant Movement, 1564–1572 (Geneva, 1967), 117. For a greater analysis of this view, see Denis Crouzet, La nuit de la Saint-Barthélemy: Un rêve perdu de la Renaissance (Paris, 1994). 38 Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge, 1981), 125–50. 39 Quoted in Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion, p. 148. 40 Denis Crouzet, Les guerriers de Dieu: la violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610), 2 vols (Seyssel, 1990), especially vol. 2, 82–143. 41 AMD, B 482 ff. (état civil).

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Nor do any further arrests for scandalous acts or sedition by Protestants appear in the mayoral courts after 1572. Although rumors occasionally still persisted that small groups of Protestants were continuing to meet secretly in Dijon, for all practical purposes, the community had ridded itself of the cancer of Jean le Blanc. And although the impetus for this purification of the body social may have come from the elites – especially the city magistrates – the evidence suggests that this cleansing represented the work of elites and the masses working together. The effort to insure that the entire community was “living Catholicly,” in fact, could not have been so successful without such popular support. Whether the winegrowers’ initiative in breaking up a Protestant demonstration on All Saints’ Day in 1561, the pressure of artisans in harassing any of their members who sang Psalms publicly in French, or the communal oversight by the entire population in policing the city for infractions against “living Catholicly,” this perception of religion did not constitute a part of any elite campaign to root out and destroy popular religion. Whatever scholars such as Jean Delumeau, Robert Muchembled, and many others who have studied popular culture and popular religion may have concluded, the evidence in Dijon suggests that a common denominator of religious culture in Burgundy, focused on “living Catholicly,” ultimately prevailed. Thus it is difficult to agree with those who suggest that popular or “unlearned” religion was essentially separated and distinct from the official religion of social elites. Indeed, lay society generally in Burgundy seems to have drawn from a common cultural well of perceptions that bound them together, despite the socio-economic or political forces that inevitably pulled them apart.42 Based on the evidence presented here, it would seem that the Eucharist represented the most visible and explicit definition of the boundaries of the body social for Dijon’s Catholic community. This ritual demonstrated like no other that the body social and body politic were enfolded with the body of Christ, whose sacrifice stood as a visible symbol of everything the body social and body politic were supposed to be. The Mass further reminded every Catholic what the first duty of every true Christian was if he or she sincerely intended “to live Catholicly”: to receive the Eucharist where that sacrifice was re-enacted. For Dijon’s Protestants the icon held a similar message. If they ever hoped to reunite with their Catholic friends and neighbors in the community of Christ, they too had to pass back over the frontier between the sacred and the profane by receiving the Eucharist after having confessed their sins. “To 42 For just a sample of the view that popular religion and learned religion were two distinct entities, with the elites in perpetual pursuit of the destruction of the superstitions of the masses, see Jean Delumeau and Thierry Wanegffelen, Le catholisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1997); and Robert Muchembled, Popular Culture and Elite Culture in France, 1400–1750, trans. L. Cochrane (Baton Rouge, 1985).

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live Catholicly” in sixteenth-century Dijon meant to partake of this sacrament of sociability.43 What, then, does the process of confessionalization in Burgundy in the 1560s and 1570s tell us about the efficacy of confessionalization as a concept outside the empire? There is no question that in some sense there existed significant pressure from both the church and the state in Dijon aimed against the city’s Protestant population, in an effort to get them to conform to Catholic rituals and practices. Imprisonment and confiscation of personal property certainly provided strategies that worked to speed up the process of re-integration into a common Catholic community. And no doubt the news of what happened in Paris on 24–5 August 1572 convinced many Huguenots that their own lives remained in danger, a significant catalyst to the numerous abjurations in the wake of the St. Bartholomew’s massacres. Thus in a general way the opposition to the Reformation in Dijon by Catholic authorities, both clerical and secular, certainly infused the process of the confessionalization of Dijon Protestants. Moreover, the explicit efforts made to get these Protestants to re-integrate into Catholic communal rituals and practices, above all the Mass, underscores the aspect of social discipline common to confessionalization in the empire. In this general sense, confessionalization in Burgundy would appear to have much in common with the German models proposed by Schilling and Reinhard. It is equally clear, however, that confessionalization in Burgundy was not part of any state-building program. If anything, the local magistrates were opposed to the crown’s policy of the legal recognition of Protestantism in France, and they fought consistently against it. It was the weakness of the monarchy in France during the religious wars, in fact, that allowed such local and particularist opposition to flourish. In addition, the political support from the state given to the process of confessionalization in Dijon derived entirely from the local city council and the local parlement, not from the monarchy or the Parlement of Paris. Likewise, the pressure from the city’s vignerons, the workers in the local wine industry, provided significant opposition to Protestantism in the city. From this perspective, confessionalization in Dijon represented much more a process whose impetus came from below, rather than from the state above. Dijon’s clergy, magistrates, and vignerons all sought a religious settlement that ran counter to the limited toleration of the Huguenots advanced by the Edict of January 1562 and all subsequent peace edicts during the Wars of Religion right up to the Edict of Nantes in 1598. Dijon certainly offers a case for social discipline, but statebuilding never provided the raison d’être for confessionalization in France. In summary, then, Zeeden’s original definition of confessionalization has 43 Also see John Bossy, “The Mass as a Social Institution,” Past and Present 100 (1983): 29–61.

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much to offer to historians of the Reformation in France. Efforts on the local level in cities such as Dijon and elsewhere to effect a religious settlement of uniformity within the Catholic church share much in common with many communities in the empire where religious uniformity, whether Lutheran, Calvinist, or Catholic, remained a clear goal. On the other hand, the emphasis of Schilling and Reinhard on state-building and social discipline seems less relevant for the French case, where the state was seriously weakened by thirtyfive years of civil war, with significant violence inflicted by civilians of both confessions against each other. There certainly existed local municipalities and even some noble families from both sides of the confessional divide who sought to use the Reformation to further their own power. While on the surface this effort might resemble the German situation of the local princes using religion to bolster their authority against the emperor, the process of confessionalization in France clearly did not lead to the creation of a more modern state. If anything, both urban magistrates and provincial elites sought to maintain much older and more traditional notions of order and government. And while religion obviously played a part in the creation of the modern state in France, that state did not emerge until the French Revolution.44

44 See Dale Van Kley, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution (New Haven, 1996).

Reconstructing the Context for Confessionalization in Late Tudor England: Perceptions of Reception, Then and Now Peter Iver Kaufman

Five years ago I accepted an assignment without fully comprehending how complicated it would be to complete it on time. I agreed to relate recent developments in the study of continental reformations to the study of sixteenth-century English reform. My research interests in the latter kept me current. Teaching obligations took me across the channel with some regularity. The first and second reformations in Germany featured on the fixed menu in my introductory courses. I figured that my nodding acquaintance with the terms ‘communalization’ and ‘confessionalization’ should suffice to get me into and through the latest literature on Germany and then again to England. I was wrong. As the deadline approached, I turned to Bodo Nischan, friend and colleague, for help. To say I learned as much about generosity as about Germany will only confirm what every acquaintance of his will know. Knowledgeable, thoughtful, generous, and genial, Bodo parsed my bibliography and corrected my misconceptions. He swerved from his tasks at hand to assure I might get mine done without tripping over my ignorance and grabbing for indefensible observations on my way down. I am delighted that my further reflections on that assignment and my continuing study of lay reception now find a place in his volume. To the extent that they contribute to cross-channel inquiry, readers and I are indebted to him. Berndt Hamm’s definition of ‘reformation’ is a relatively uncontroversial place to start. To say, as he does, that sixteenth-century religious reform constituted something of a ‘break’, of course, is to repeat the obvious, although Hamm knows perfectly well how massively dependent early modern reform was on ‘diverse movements’ of the later middle ages. And he notices that its medieval ‘roots’ did not stay subsurface once the reformation broke ground. But

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breaking ground and breaking away from the Catholic church, it possessed, along with its debts, ‘a peculiar coherence’ as ‘a radical shift away from the old religiously defined society’ to a new ‘system of religion’. The shift originated with Martin Luther’s insistence that every legitimating principle be retrieved from the bible. Luther embarked on a theological reorientation by concentrating on two doctrinal foci, divine sovereignty and the gratuity of grace. Soon afterward, the reformation was recognizable as ‘a radical breakaway movement’, an Umbruchsbewegung, and, from 1520, the breakage was irreparable. There is nothing reckless or revisionist here, and Hamm’s generalization seems eminently adaptable to the study of reformation worship, soteriology, and exegesis. Historians more attentive to social contexts, however, are known to point out that Dogmengeschichte’s heroic figures start to look mock-heroic once we discover how few people listened to them: no breakaway movement gets anywhere without lay reception.1 To get at reception, we are often told to sift the reformers’ sermons. They and pamphlet literature, once under appreciated, now mark the route to street level perceptions and to reception. Yet sermons and pamphlets are selfevidently prescriptive rather than descriptive. We should mine them carefully for resistances as well as for authors’ idealizations. Sermons may well be the excellent sources for lay reception that a number of historians now assume them to be, yet investigations invariably proceed from the surface, from ideas and rhetorical structures. Such strip-mining may work in some venues, yet we must not forget that preaching and reading were performances. Until we learn to ascertain how reformed performances were experienced, received, resisted, sometimes ignored, we must not think we can measure definitively the velocity of movements for reform and the severity of the break at any given time. Studies of local church life and order yield interesting results that tend to argue for regional variation in England as on the continent. To say more about lay reception, however, scholars of early modern religious culture have taken to filching from the anthropologists, specifically, to exploring what historical anthropology might add to conclusions provisionally drawn from parish records, visitation protocols, ecclesiastical court records, and the few diaries or journals our lay subjects kept. The problem is that ethnographic sources for the early modern period do not survive in sufficient quantity or detail to cinch any single generalization about lay reception. And what survives usually tells us more about our informants, the parish elites, who were as eager as elite informants of a later age, colonial officials, to set themselves apart from indigenous, prole populations. Hence historical anthropologists who rely on injunctions and 1 Hamm, ‘Einheit und Vielfalt der Reformation’, in Hamm, Berndt Moeller, and Dorothea Wendebourg, eds, Reformationstheorien: Disput über Einheit und Vielfalt der Reformation (Göttingen, 1995), 57–127.

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prohibitions may be stuck with what Robert Scribner calls ‘the continual pressure of elites and institutional agencies’. And pressure from above gets us no closer to the laity’s internalization of reformist or residual Catholic norms for behavior.2 That is a contestable conclusion, misleading as well as defeatist. But before snatching a respectable stalemate from the jaws of defeat, we ought to acknowledge one way around the problem. We can comb documents composed by laymen at several strata of society soon after a reformer’s ideas were first aired. Scholars still swarm around probate records, willing themselves into the wills of the sixteenth century, expecting to find formulae that betray faith and suggest confessionally charged preparation for the grave.3 And the relatively recent surge of interest in pamphlet literature tempts others to gauge lay reception (and internalization) without reaching for the anthropologists’ tools and wrestling with their difficulties. Heinrich Richard Schmidt, for instance, makes use of pamphlets drafted during the early 1520s by the educated and elite as well as by craftsmen or commoners. They all found Luther’s ideas remarkable, worthy of remark and elaboration, that is, wonderfully, personally regenerative and socially significant. Die Laien haben Luther gut verstanden; they understood their man, Schmidt says, and they knew to emphasize justification sola gratia and sola fide. It would appear, then, that the ‘breakaway movement’ gathered momentum early and quickly, that doctrinal or confessional innovations, at least the ‘base-line’ convictions, curiously captured the lay imagination without much of a battle. Yet the lay authors were resourceful, stressing the rigorist implications of reformed soteriology even more than Luther might. They insisted that the faithful, made righteous by grace and faith, were able and obliged to be righteous, to be rigorously ethical. Luther’s and Melanchthon’s laity, technically, remained simul peccatores, ethically challenged, but the Lutheran laity’s righteous laymen were ethically changed. The pamphlets’ soteriology, Schmidt explains, ‘was not merely forensic but sanative’. Lay reception, therefore, was hardly passive. It ‘broadened out’ the behavioral implications of sola gratia salvation.4 Reformed soteriology in England was not as clear as early. Laymen were

2 See Scribner’s ‘Reformation and Desacralization: From Sacralized World to Moralized Universe’, in Scribner and R. Po-chia Hsia, eds, Problems in the Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Europe (Wiesbaden, 1997), especially 87–8. 3 But dealing with testators can be tricky. See, for example, Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford, 1982), 196–7. 4 Schmidt, ‘Die Ethik der Laien in der Reformation’, in Bernd Moeller, ed., Die frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 199 (Gütersloh, 1998), 333–70, quoted at 359 and 369. Note also, though, that Thomas Kaufmann had earlier questioned Schmidt’s identification of basic soteriological tenets; Kaufmann, ‘Die Konfessionalisierung von Kirche und Gesellschaft’, Theologische Literaturzeitung 121 (1996): 1113–14.

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invited to help clarify doctrine and elaborate discipline, because, according to William Tyndale in the 1520s, ‘there are found many among [them] which are as wise as officers’ of the church. The assessment, though, was not widely shared and the invitation seldom issued. Layman William Roper, however, was ready to volunteer but was dissuaded by his father-in-law, Thomas More. Tyndale published himself into trouble; Roper was spared, and reformed soteriology got a chilly reception among the laity for nearly another generation.5 Arguably, King Henry VIII was the chief obstacle, even after he divorced Rome and dispatched More in the 1530s and to the end of his reign in 1547. With Henry in his grave, Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury, was free for a time to proceed more aggressively to reform liturgy, dissolve chantries, and welcome reformed refugees from the continent to instruct his clergy. But lay reception is hard to calculate. There seemed to be no surge of reformed religious sentiment from commoners, despite the pamphlets circulating to stir lay resentment of unreformed clergy. John Champneys, for example, calling himself ‘an unlearned lay manne’, railed against ‘unnedefulle ministers’. He proposed that ‘every lively member’ of the reformed church, upon combing scripture, could appreciate its promises and consolations. His proposition was strikingly lollard-like and suggested antipathy rather than reception.6 But at this stage in the realm’s reform, patronage might well have been a better barometer than propositions and pamphlets were. Conspicuous lay patronage reassured reformers of lay receptivity. Evangelicals were promoted to benefices in lay control. The benefactors wrote knowledgeably to their ministers and befriended the continental clergy whom Cranmer resettled in England – Bucer, Vermigli, Ochino, Laski, prominent among them. Martin Bucer once suggested that select members of the realm’s evangelical laity understood the radical character of religious reform better than leading English prelates, who, he sadly noticed, were prone to compromise. They were impatient with renegade diocesans, whereas many laymen were not. John Hooper was heartened by lay support when, failing to get a satisfactory explanation, he criticized the slow progress of reform. He was supported as well by Jan Laski and other refugees or ‘strangers’ who, along with English laymen assisting with their settlement and encouraging their freedom from diocesan authorities, were pleasantly surprised to learn that the ‘dainty meat’ of episcopal preferment did not make every bishop ‘dumb and inactive’.7 5 See Tyndale, Doctrinal Treatises and Introductions to Different Parts of the Holy Scripture, ed. Henry Walter (Cambridge, 1848), 236–41; for Roper, see Susan Brigden, New Worlds, Lost Worlds (New York, 2000), 96–7. 6 Champneys, The Harvest is at Hand (London, 1548), B3v–4r and E5v–6v. 7 See Original Letters relative to the English Reformation, ed. Hastings Robinson, vol. 2

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Patrons’ placements obviously are a significant symptom of lay reception, but we cannot be certain that they knew well what they had received. In 1554, when Mary I had succeeded Edward VI and Catholicism replaced Protestantism, John Bradford, much like Hooper and Laski, was comforted by lay support. It enabled him to ‘go lustily and cheerfully’ to the stake, he confided, yet he also found occasion to comfort his comforters – partisans and patrons – who felt unequal to the task of defending the faith they received from him. ‘As for [your] unableness to answer for your faith, it shall be enough to will them [those who interrogate you] to dispute with your teachers.’8 The ineptitude of Bradford’s patrons and friends warns us against importing Schmidt’s conclusions. But we would be wrong to put the ‘unableness’ at the center of our story of lay reception. Patrons could be receptive, proactive, and steadfast without being particularly articulate. Prolific lay diarists in England and New England came later. Only then, well into the seventeenth century, was reception meticulously detailed in confessional, autobiographical narrative. Previous lay patrons were less forthcoming, to be sure, but they often exhibited preferences for a more thorough and rapid reform than the governments of Elizabeth I and James I endorsed. And quite often patrons’ preferences were not those of most other parishioners. An Osbourne acquired the right to present to the living of Northill in early seventeenth-century Bedfordshire and promptly removed Thomas Adams who was ‘conformable to the orders of the church’. Parishioners found their pastor’s conformity congenial and petitioned the bishop to overrule Osbourne and retain Adams. Their cause might be construed as an instance of lay interest in, or receptivity to reform, but it also signals lay indifference, if not resistance to, radical reform. Northill looks like an advertisement for what Christopher Haigh calls ‘consumer resistance’. Parishioners, Haigh tells us, liked their pastors clownishly sociable rather than searingly critical. They preferred their Prayer Book liturgy to stinging sermons as well and recoiled from reformers who identified liturgical conformity with sin. That recoil or resistance, into the 1580s and afterward, determined what was received in many parts of the realm: the laity ‘tamed and anglicized’ the reformed church. Laymen were not ‘mere recipients’. Their reception changed what they received. They forced preachers to abandon confrontational style, to put aside ‘fire’ and ‘sword’, Haigh says, and to marvel less at, and meddle less with, their parishioners’ lives. The ceremonial eclipsed the evangelical, reversing what Ronald Hutton calls ‘the Elizabethan story of decline and (Cambridge, 1847), 582; Diarmaid MacCulloch, Thomas Cranmer, A Life (New Haven, 1996), 469–83; and Melissa Franklin Harkrider, ‘Faith in a Noble Duchess: Piety, Patronage, and Kingship in the Career of Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, 1519–1580’, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2003, 80–119. 8 The Writings of John Bradford, ed. Aubrey Townsend (Cambridge, 1853), 120–24.

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diminution’ during the last years of the queen’s reign. So the story of late Tudor reception became a tale of resistance and, finally, one of clerical accommodation.9 Evidence for resistance and accommodation is impressive, although not overwhelming. True, parishioners complained about overzealous, ‘forward’ puritan preachers, and bishops generally obliged and removed offensive incumbents. The literature suggests widespread discontent with the most strident nonconformist preachers who insisted piety and reception be measured in terms of disciplined and ‘sanctified’ behavior as well as by demonstrated exegetical interests and even prowess. The puritans would ‘have all men divines’, complained George Gifford’s Atheos, loath to have ploughmen searching the scriptures or sifting each other’s conduct. But Atheos was not the hero of Gifford’s ‘Country Divinity’, and what Peter Lake describes as a conformist’s ‘worst nightmare’ was based in reality: a ‘voracious, almost a bottomless, market for the word preached and an environment perfectly suited to turn the resulting cacophony of clerical voices and lay responses into a lively series of ongoing arguments’.10 The fears of conformists were not groundless. Their critics claimed to have drawn the proper polity implications from the bible, specifically, from the Acts of the Apostles, inviting ordinary people to deliberate in matters of importance to each parish, including the selection of lay and clerical leadership as well as the correction of parishioners’ beliefs and behavior. In the early 1570s, John Field and Thomas Wilcox, admonishing parliament to reform ‘patronages … and bishoppes authoritie’, also urged the government to ‘bring in that old and true election, which was accustomed to be made by the congregation’. They wanted their reformed church to resemble what they took to have been the churches of the first century in which the laity purportedly called and culled the parish clergy and in which the consent of the people counted for just about everything.11 Conformists countered that lay participation in the early church was rare rather than routine. But, more to the point at issue here, conformists also argued that sixteenth-century laymen were hardly as ready and able to participate meaningfully in parish

9 Christopher Haigh, ‘The Taming of Reformation: Preachers, Pastors, and Parishioners in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England’, History 85 (2000): 572–88; Judith Maltby, Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Cambridge, 1998), 64–82, esp. 77–8; and Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1996), 176–89. 10 Peter Lake, The Boxmaker’s Revenge: ‘Orthodoxy’, ‘Heterodoxy’, and the Politics of the Parish in Early Stuart England (London, Stanford, 2001), 395. Also consult the conversation between Atheos and Zelot in George Gifford’s A briefe discourse of certain points of religion which is among the common sort of Christians, which may be termed the countrie divinitie (London, 1598), notably 11–17, 26–8, 80–90. 11 Puritan Manifestoes, eds W. H. Frere and C. E. Douglas (London, 1954), 36.

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deliberations as Field and Wilcox willed them to be. Ordinary people had not yet received the truths of their reformed religion; to be more precise, notwithstanding a decade of Elizabethan preaching and catechesis, their reception was not yet reflected in evangelical conviction and moral commitment. How long would parishioners put up with pastors who censured them? Would the late Tudor laity gravitate to sociable or stern pastors? Could laymen themselves be expected to be stern disciplinarians when, as sinners, they hoped to be spared by panels and tribunals their neighbors composed? Conformists feared the outcome of any initiative that devolved ‘patronage to the people’.12 John Barstow, lay political analyst, put the problem in another context. He wrote about ‘training up’ the electorate. Tongue-in-cheek, in 1576, he proposed that an ancient remedy be recycled. He heard that Egyptian pharaohs and their deputies ordered subjects to ‘give a straight accompt’ of their virtues and executed all who lived wickedly or lied. Barstow’s ‘Nile policy’, in effect, replaced ‘training up’ with paring down. Elizabethan proponents of broadly participatory parish regimes seem to have shown no enthusiasm for the trade but would have to find some solution to lay resistance to reformed religion before implementing plans for lay authority and local control of their churches.13 Of course, they trusted God to ‘raise up’ a laity worthy of the reformed administration of its parishes. The break with Rome, which three English monarchs endorsed, would come to little without lay consent. In the parishes, congregants’ consent and consensus depended on commoners’ reception of reformed doctrine and discipline, and that stipulation, one might say, had the status and force of a mission statement. Commoners’ resistance was a problem. In part, the solution, so to speak, was patience. The reformed Christian trusted that, in God’s time, preaching and catechesis would yield useful results, but, pragmatically, the solution was to have delegates in parish consistories competent to rule for and, eventually, with their congregations. Calvinists known now as presbyterians appreciated that relationships between consistories and congregations had to be delicately managed. Parishioners were asked to ‘consent upon and chuse’ representatives variously called seniors or elders or presbyters. These delegates ‘may not usurpe authoritie over the whole church’, yet ‘the whole’ was warned against challenging and overruling its elders. Partisans of lay participation believed that ‘the right and ready way to resolve all doubts and questions in religion’ led to and through the local congregation, ‘from one or few to moe’. Expecting trouble, however, they also opened a route ‘from [the] moe to the moe godly and learned’, a route that finally led to regional clerical conferences. The presbyterians’ Holie discipline 12 13

Oxford, Bodleian Library, Selden Supra MS 44, 67r and 71v. Cf. Barstow’s Safegarde of society (London, 1576), 79v–80r, 88r, 107v–110r.

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put lay elders at those sessions, but the conformist critic Matthew Sutcliffe judged the lay delegates to be ‘cyphers in the synode’. Thomas Cartwright, one of the more implacable presbyterians in the 1570s, conceded – almost boasting – twenty years later that he and his associates gave little authority to the laity.14 But during the 1580s, proponents of lay authority and local control continued to press for what they understood to be ‘the perfection’ of parish regimes. Dudley Fenner, the closest that early presbyterians came to a systematic theologian, claimed he could ‘deduct the right ecclesiastical government of the church’ from the reformed faith. He insisted his deduction would not so much alter as complete Elizabeth’s religious settlement. Patronage belonged to the people from the start, he said, repeating what puritan partisans of lay participation argued for years. Hierarchy came later as a proportionate response to ‘continuall tumults, partialities, and disorders’ spawned by rival interpretations of scripture. But reformed Christianity was not just another rival, Fenner stipulated; it was – and would soon widely be received as – the correction and perfection of the faith.15 A degree of democracy could then be restored. Fenner acknowledged the risks. Laymen might dissent or disagree among themselves, and their tenacity would lead to the kind of ‘tumults’ or ‘partialities’ that bedeviled medieval Christendom. So he stopped shy of advocating direct democracy and looked conspicuously less confident in lay reception and broad participation after a short spell as curate in a contentious Kent parish. His Sacred theology suggests that elders guide congregations to consensus. True, he was heard to argue that ‘the people ought in everie church to choose their owne ministers’ and when they do not do well ‘to put [them] out and choose other’. But he denied it, emphasizing that he never gave the laity such ‘sway’.16 The presbyterians were growing cautious, timid perhaps. At first, panels of presbyters thought about the laity and its prerogatives. By the late 1580s, they were asked to think for the laity. Fenner counselled that nothing of consequence be done without ‘the foreleading of the presbytery’.17 Predictably, conformists were unappeased. They maintained that Fenner and his friends in

14 London, British Library, Additional MS 48064, 221v; Sutcliffe, A treatise of ecclesiastical discipline (London, 1590), 196; and Oxford, Bodleian Library, Selden Supra MS 44, 77v. For the Holie discipline, see Oxford, Queens College MS 280, 116r–118v. 15 Fenner, Defence of the godly ministers against the slaunder of Dr. Bridges (London, 1587), B1v, D1v–D2r, and 121–2. 16 Fenner, Counter-poyson (London, 1584), 149 and Sacra Theologia, 105v–106r. London, British Library, Lansdowne MS 30B, 211r reports Fenner’s ‘ought in everie church’. To sample the contention in the parish of Cranbrook, consult ‘The answer unto a certain privy reply or invective of Mr. Fletcher, curate of Rye’, circulated on behalf of Fenner’s predecessor, London, Dr. Williams’s Library, Morrice MSS B.2, 16r–25r; C.225–41. 17 Fenner, Counter-poyson, 24–5.

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Kent miscalculated. Archbishop Whitgift, among others, pointed out the stirs and sedition that plagued previous efforts to fashion parish consent, starting with the ‘marvellous contentions’ that attended episcopal elections in Antioch, Alexandria, and Rome.18 But even if history suggested that the laity could be managed locally and laically, Whitgift could not have been persuaded to entrust the ‘training up’ of lay presbyters to clerical nonconformists who, like Fenner from 1583, were tirelessly challenging episcopal power, Prayer Book prescriptions, and their own suspensions from the ministry. The archbishop and his suffragans figured that puritan malcontents had gotten their ideas about participatory regimes from Anabaptists on the continent. Sectarians there closely monitored lay reception of their eccentric ideas in a number of small, disciplined companies. Yet parishes were not sects, Whitgift advised; the English often resisted reform and always resisted control. The archbishop opposed initiatives for lay leadership and participation because he saw in them a leveling so comprehensive that it would obliterate the critical differences of property, erudition, age, and gender – the very differences on which order, oligarchy, and hierarchy depended. Fenner, accused of being an English Anabaptist, fled to the continent.19 Fears of ‘anabaptistrie’ and residual Catholic sympathies – fears that the ‘break’ with their immediate past was either too shattering or incomplete – preyed on reformed authorities. They mistrusted the laity. Their perceptions of lay reception, resistance, and indifference varied, of course, from place to place and over time, yet their gestures, from the late 1560s, were fairly consistent. They understood the radicals’ appeals to – as well as the appeal of – lay-led congregations. The first Christian communities seemed to do rather well without an officially ordained ministry. But authorities were reluctant to support all that scripture countenanced. Should we fall to foot-washing, they asked? As for lay and local initiatives, authorities were not ready to risk the deterioration of their positions as dutiful servants of a sovereign Christian queen, dignities altogether alien to Jesus’ first followers and for generations after. Elizabeth I and her Christian magistrates and diocesans, in other words, removed the need for further, local, lay counsel and consent. The threat from ‘the left’, the possibility that parish altercations might lead to factions and then sects, made such counsel and consent undesirable as well as unnecessary. Nihil a plebe; nothing remained for commoners to do, but obey.20 To be sure, they were accommodated liturgically while being marginalized politically. In some places, chancel seats were installed to make the laity comfortable closer The Works of John Whitgift, ed. John Ayre, 3 vols (Cambridge, 1853), I. 446–7. Works of Whitgift, I. 128–9 and II. 516. Whitgift appears to have relied on Niels Hemmingsen’s reports of Anabaptist anarchy, Commentarius in epistolam Paul Ephesios (London, 1576), 137 and 148. 20 London, British Library, Cotton Titus MS. C VI, 20v–22r. 18 19

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to its creator and redeemer. So, until the Laudians agitated for a seat-free chancel, converted stalls and free-standing chairs welcomed commoners (as well as their social superiors) to worship. Nothing to do but obey, and pray!21 Elizabeth wanted her subjects’ prayers and obedience. Had she wanted much more than that, comparisons between England’s ‘second reformation’ and confessional consolidation on the continent might well be standard fare in the historical literature of the last quarter century. Yet there are good reasons to make such comparisons. English authorities ‘at the center’ set ‘boundaries of acceptability’, applying recusancy statutes against Catholics and puritans alike to define what reformed religion was not, although strangely leaving what it was, understipulated. A push for clerical conformity produced regulations for liturgical practice. As for the reception of reform among the commoners, however, confessionalization in England cleared the ground and prepared for a general, worshipful acquiescence rather than a doctrinal consensus and consolidation.22 Acquiescence was the government’s objective. Religious radicals hoped for more, for widespread enthusiastic lay reception. Into the 1580s, they expected everyone to come around – from the base and mean to the queen. Twenty years earlier, however, the regime and religious radicals started on the same page. They aimed to complete their break from Rome with a series of removals. Priests known to have preached in favor of papal authority, pilgrimages, and prayers in Latin would have to give evidence of thorough change or go, as did rood screens and saints’ images. The privy council’s commissioners patrolled the realm to supervise the purges. Altars were removed ‘against their visitation.’ Letters patent permitted them to transfer their powers to local officials who interrogated anyone suspected of Catholic sentiments and who enforced their queen’s religious settlement as best they could. But even where and when they were resolute, enforcers could not assure wholehearted compliance. In London, the churchwardens at St. Lawrence Jewry ordered only that their roodloft be ‘cut lower’ in 1563. ‘The tymber of them that be taken downe lieth still in many churches [in Chichester, in 1569] redy to be set up agayne.’23 Into the 1570s, the ‘timber that lieth still’ told against prompt and eager lay reception. Archbishop Parker stepped up his campaign for removals. He instructed that chalices be melted down and replaced by modest communion cups, because when commoners spied a 21 Christopher Marsh, ‘Sacred Space in England, 1560–1640: The View from the Pew’, Journal of Ecclesiastical History 53 (2002): 294–9. 22 Caroline Litzenberger, ‘Defining the Church of England: Religious Change in the 1570s’, in Belief and Practice in Reformation England, eds Litzenberger and Susan Wabuda (Aldershot, 1998), 137–8, 151–2. 23 London, Public Record Office, State Papers 12/60/71, purports to document ‘disorders of the diocese of Chichester’ as part of Parker’s sede vacante visitation; for St. Lawrence, Jewry, Guildhall MS. 2590/1, 14.

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chalice they imagined a mass. Parker presumed that an irreparable break with Rome and a reformed consensus were the likely consequences of what historian Eamon Duffy now calls ‘the iconoclastic austerities of Protestant worship.’24 Puritanism, which pressed for greater austerities along that line, was hardly comparable to the rival Protestant confessions on the continent. Late Tudor protests against the surplice, refusals to conform to authorized Prayer Book instructions, and unlicensed preaching appear casual and almost impromptu alongside the ‘confessional absolutisms’ that punctuated the contests over ‘Calvinization’ in places like Brandenburg. In England, all agreed on the threat that a resurgent Catholicism posed during Elizabeth’s reign. That, too, made Protestant confessional politics on the island less intense, much as the menace of Catholic Habsburg power to both occasionally reduced the Lutherans’ and Calvinists’ reciprocal antagonisms. But English initiatives to control the lay reception of reformed Christianity responded less to external peril than to suspicions about local loyalties and about the populists’ proposals to empower local laity. There seems to have been less of that in Germany. To be sure, the office of priest was somewhat diminished in Protestant confessions, but, as Harald Goertz observes, there was no corresponding encouragement of lay involvement. If Goertz is right, the Lutheran leadership at least may also have mistrusted the ‘rude and rash people’, who, as one Elizabethan apologist noticed, ‘know not whither to turn them … neither what to leave not what they should receive’.25 Pessimistic perceptions of lay reception were not necessarily determinative, though they were influential during the first and church-centered phase of the so-called second reformation. Gifford’s Atheos exhibits attitudes Elizabethan reformed preachers wanted to purge. He trusted, for instance, that God would reward him for doing his best and that less preaching to the contrary would leave him and the realm in peace. His interlocutor, Zelot, Gifford’s protagonist, assembled a convoy of counterarguments, but to no avail. Similarly, after generations of solafideist sermons, Lutheran pastors were still discovering resistances. They would preach about sin, only to hear parishioners pronounce their own works and themselves righteous. Pastors expected the reformation received to improve the conduct of the reformed, 24 Duffy, The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village (New Haven, 2001), 175–8. Duffy comments on the chalice melt-down there, but also consult his Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c1400–1570 (New Haven, 1992), passim, for other ‘removals’. 25 The Works of John Jewel, vol. 2, ed. John Ayre (Cambridge, 1845), 983–4. For Laienengagement among Lutherans, see Harald Goertz, Allgemeines Priestertum und ordiniertes Amt bei Luther (Marburg, 1997), 326–30 and, for Habsburg pressures on confessionalization, Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994), 257–9.

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only to find parishioners going about their business, neglecto Christo et ejus verbo. Mistrust may be an enduring, and arguably endemic, part of reformation culture. Could it have been otherwise when the finality of the ‘break’ we call the reformation depended so on lay reception, on the internalization of standards for character and conduct?26 In England the reformation’s shift inward had repercussions that, along with the aforesaid ‘iconoclastic austerities of Protestant worship,’ destroyed the ‘festive culture’ long associated with Catholic parishes and subparochial fellowship. Mistrust spread as the parish elites grew distant from their ‘inferior’ neighbors. The outcome was a fear of the mob or multitude, an increasing, sometimes overwhelming sense among the more affluent and influential that commoners’ initiatives invariably led to disorder and that populists’ proposals to that end, in effect, were an unwelcome prelude to some pox populi, the symptoms of which included commoners’ insolence and susceptibility to superstition.27 Carelessness was not an option. Diocesan and government authorities were especially wary as the century drew to a close and speculation about the succession abounded, some of it seeming seditious. What might become of the realm’s religion after Elizabeth? Would Catholics lead the English people who ‘knew not wither’ back to Rome? Or might populist preachers, who had been deprived of their pulpits yet were ‘on call’, so to speak, as lecturers and exorcists, ‘inveagle and seduce beholders’ and stir popular resistance to any reformed religious settlement in place? By 1599, authorities, in their prosecution of John Darrell, conveniently pinned together what they believed to be the two most immediate threats to continued order and discipline. Darrell was accused of having borrowed ‘sleights … from popish exorcists’, conjured before crowds, pretended to heal ailments, and promised redemption. Demons departed when Darrell uttered the word ‘presbyter’. They fled at the sight of any other nonconformist ministers Darrell introduced during his ‘pageants’. And demons, allegedly, could not abide the presence of persons who refused to kneel at communion. If we trust the prosecution, exorcism was little more and no less than a celebration of defiance, intended to beguile and eventually to empower the laity.28 Darrell, his ‘dispossessed’, and the beguiled bystanders are less important to 26 Compare Hans-Christoph Rublack, ‘Lutherische Predigt und soziale Wirklichkeiten’, in Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland, ed. Rublack (Gütersloh, 1992), 379–80, on ‘die Verschiebung der Verhaltenssteuerung von aussen nach innen’ with Gifford, Brief discourse, 51–5, 77–8. 27 Hutton, Merry England, 260–1. Also consult, in this connection, but with special reference to the elites’ increased surveillance, Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700, 2nd edn (Oxford, 1995), 179–81, 212–13. 28 Samuel Harsnett, A discovery of the fraudulent practices of John Darrel (London, 1599), 20–36.

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us than the prosecution that perceived their bonding rituals as detrimental to the confessional bonding the queen and regime desired. Authorities insisted radicals resorted to ‘pageant’ and pretense because they had exhausted all arguments for further reform and participatory (‘consistorian’) parish management, those based on plausible though uncompelling scriptural interpretation and those baseless from the start. So the official responses need not have been, and were not, exegetical or doctrinal. Commissioners for ecclesiastical causes, not known for elegant theological riffs, wagered instead that they could coerce unity by suppressing deviant behavior and liturgical diversity. But their efforts to consolidate and ‘Calvinize’ ‘fostered and widened … religious divisions’.29 To the tale of Darrell’s suppression and of social control, though, we should add those told by many historians of local and mostly municipal reformations. John Craig’s fine new study of Suffolk, for example, shows ministry and magistracy collaborating to achieve a ‘consensual’ rather than coercive confessional consolidation.30 To rerun as definitive of confessionalization or ‘Calvinization’ English style, either the episodes of intimidation, prosecution, incarceration, and ‘widened divisions’ or those of ‘municipal order and discipline’ would yield only distinct, synchronous phases of Elizabethan initiatives. The urgency of the first phase or set of initiatives derived from the low opinion of the laity and the fear that its advocates favored interminable argument to confessional agreement. The perseverance of the second was due less to a trust in the laity than to the tight control of ‘the godly’ and to local conditions that enabled them to close ranks and oppose conservative and radically sectarian impulses.

29 Thomas Freeman, ‘Demons, Deviance, and Defiance: John Darrell and the Politics of Exorcism in Late Elizabethan England’, in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, 1560–1660, eds Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, 2000), 34–63. 30 Craig, Reformation, Politics, and Polemics: The Growth of Protestantism in East Anglian Market Towns, 1500–1610 (Aldershot, 2001), 125–31, 178–81.

The Formation of the Pious Soul: Transalpine Demand for Jesuit Devotional Texts, 1548–1615* Lance Lazar

This paper seeks to contribute to our understanding of the process of molding souls and inculcating new devotional habits in the wake of the European Reformations of the sixteenth century. Scholars have long drawn our attention to profound changes taking place in how early modern Europeans understood the inter-related roles and responsibilities of the state, the church, and the individual. Following in the wake of Norbert Elias, contemporary scholars such as Jean Delumeau, Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard have chosen to organize our broadest conceptions of the early modern period around the linked processes of “Civilizing,” “Christianizing,” and “Confessionalizing.”1 Scholars have highlighted a broad array of resources used to mold an interior conversion within each individual believer, including preaching, visitations and catechisms, missions, confession, the inquisitorial process, selfdisciplining, and so on.2 As all these studies show, what it meant to be a “devout Christian” was changing in both Protestant and Catholic lands. *The author wishes to thank the editors of the volume for their careful and informative counsel regarding the paper. The errors, of course, remain entirely the author's. 1 Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, eds, Die Katholische Konfessionalisierung: Wissenschaftliches Symposion der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1993 (Gütersloh, 1995). For a brief review of the issue in English, see Wolfgang Reinhard, "Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: a Reassessment," Catholic Historical Review, 75/3 (July 1989): 383–404. For the argument on "christianization," see Jean Delumeau, Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1971). Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire: a New View of the Counter-Reformation, tr. (London, 1977). For the process of "civilizing," see Norbert Elias, Über den Prozess der Zivilisation (Basel, 1939). The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners and State Formation and Civilization, tr. Edmund Jephcott (New York, 1978; Rev. edn: Oxford, 1994). 2 On preaching, the literature here is vast, but a recent and useful compilation of articles is Larissa Taylor, ed., Preachers and people in the reformations and early modern period (Leiden, Boston, 2001). For a recent survey of preaching in England, see Susan Wabuda, Preaching during the English Reformation (Cambridge, New York, 2002). Still a worthwhile classic visitations and catechisms is Gerald Strauss, Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the

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While much discussion of confessionalization, especially in German lands, revolves around the expanding role of the state, this paper will focus on confessionalization in Catholic areas as a process of devotional modelling and construction, taking place over decades, in which new pious practices and dispositions came to characterize and to identify a new Catholicism. Whether one conceives of the formation of a new early modern Catholic identity as a ‘refashioning’, a ‘renewal’, or in other terms, a central element in this process was the propagation of a vast body of devotional literature.3 These texts ranged from short and cheap handbooks (frequently targeting a particular situation or kind of devotion, such as a pilgrimage), to multi-volume engraved folio editions which marshaled enormous scholarly erudition, and which frequently served in a polemical context.4 While the high-end editions – particularly those by Dominican, Carmelite, and Jesuit theologians and mystics – have garnered the most scholarly attention, the inexpensive devotional treatises were arguably more influential in building confessional identity because of their far greater dissemination and dispersion. Because of their often ephemeral nature and materials, many of these popular texts have been lost, but enough survive so as to create a “Bibliothèque Bleue” of early modern Catholicism.5 Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore, 1978). On missions, see Louis Châtellier, La religion des pauvres: les missions rurales en Europe et la formation du catholicisme moderne xvièmexixème siècles (Paris, 1993). The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1997). Also his L'Europe des dévots (Paris, 1987). The Europe of the Devout. The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of a New Society, tr. Jean Birrell (Cambridge, 1989). On confessions, see David W. Myers, "Poor, Sinning Folk": Confession and Conscience in Counter-Reformation Germany (Ithaca, 1996) and various articles in Anne Thayer, and Katharine Jackson Lualdi, eds, Penitence in the Age of the Reformations (Aldershot, 2000). On inquisitions, see Gustav Henningsen and John Tedeschi, eds, The Inquisition in Early Modern Europe (Dekalb, IL, 1986). For the activities of the inquisition in Italy, the most recent comprehensive treatment is in Adriano Prosperi, Tribunali della coscienza: inquisitori, confessori, missionari (Turin: G. Einaudi, 1996). On disciplining, see Paolo Prodi and Wolfgang Reinhard, eds, Il concilio di Trento e il moderno (Bologna, 1996); also edited by Prodi: Disciplina dell'anima, disciplina del corpo e disciplina della società tra medioevo ed età moderna (Bologna, 1994). For a broad treatment of "sozialdisciplinierung" in the German lands, see Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicism and the early modern state, eds. Brigitta Oestreich and H. G. Koenigsberger, tr. David McLintock (Cambridge, New York, 1982). 3 Two notable and panoptic reassessments include Robert Bireley, SJ, The Refashioning of Catholicism, 1450–1700: A Reassessment of the Counter-Reformation (Washington, DC, 1999) and Ronald Po-chia Hsia, The world of Catholic renewal, 1540–1770 (Cambridge, 1998). For a discussion of the terminology, especially the argument (which I accept) for ‘Early Modern Catholicism’ over ‘Counter-Reformation’, see John O’Malley, SJ, Trent and all that: renaming Catholicism in the early modern era (Cambridge, MA, 2000). 4 The paradigmatic example would be the Annales ecclesiastici of Theatine Cardinal Cesare Baronio, intended to counter the Magdeburg Centuries of Flacius Illyricus. 5 The name refers to the characteristic blue coverings of cheap French books from Troyes, about which a substantial degree of scholarship has accumulated. See Lise Andriès, La Bibliothèque bleue au dix-huitième siècle: une tradition éditoriale (Oxford, 1989); Giovanni

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Considering simultaneously the publication of these inexpensive devotional treatises both above and below the Alps draws attention to the trans-national and homogenized character of much of early modern Catholic devotion, a theme that has received insufficient attention. Indeed because of the Jesuits’ strong central leadership in Rome and their early and broad European dispersion, a significant number of these treatises exist in nearly simultaneous translations in Latin and the various European vernacular languages. The Jesuits make a particularly valuable subset of devotional authors because members of their order were on the front lines in writing controversial literature in opposition to Protestants, especially in the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries, and at the same time, they were among the most widely published authors of devotional texts – indeed, more often than not, the same individuals contributed in both genres. While some Jesuit writers such as Peter Canisius and Robert Bellarmine have received ample attention for their œuvre, the notable and compendious contributions of a second tier of Jesuit authors (for example, Gaspar Loarte, Diego Ledesma, Frans Coster, Luca Pinelli, Louis Richeôme, Jacob Gretser, Gaspar Lechner, and Jeremias Drexel, among others) provide a rich and insufficiently exploited field for study.6 This essay takes as its chronological and thematic point of departure the first publication of the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius in 1548, because that short compendium of procedures and guidelines for a spiritual director to lead an exercitant through a religious retreat became the spiritual core of the Jesuit enterprise and method. Already within the Exercises, one finds the characteristically Ignatian emphasis on service formed through internal consideration and assent, the heart of the ideal of “contemplation in action”, which while not invented by the Jesuits, surely served as a touchstone for Jesuit practice.7 Not only did all Jesuits themselves have to make the Exercises at least once (and more often than not, on two or more occasions), but the program of mental re-creation and meditation found in the Exercises – considering such propositions as the Kingdom of Christ, the Two Standards, the Three Classes of Men, and so on – became the Jesuit model for effecting Dotoli, Letteratura per il popolo in Francia (1600–1750): proposte di lettura della "Bibliothèque bleue" (Fasano, 1991); Robert Mandrou, De la culture populaire aux XVIIe et XVIII siècles; la Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes (Paris, 1964). For a useful compilation of Italian sources, see Lorenzo Baldacchini, Bibliografia delle stampe popolari religiose del XVI–XVII secolo: Biblioteche Vaticana, Alessandrina, Estense (Florence, 1980). 6 The most recent, comprehensive, and up-to-date prosopographical reference work on the Jesuits is Charles E. O'Neill, SJ, and Joaquín M. Domínguez, SJ, eds, Diccionario histórico de la compañía de Jesús, 4 vols (Rome, 2001). 7 David Lonsdale, SJ, Eyes to See, Ears to Hear: An Introduction to Ignatian Spirituality (Chicago, 1990); (Maryknoll, 2000). See also the article of John O'Malley in John O'Malley, John Padberg, and Robert Wild, Jesuit Spirituality: A Now and Future Resource (Chicago, 1990): 1–20, esp. 2–3.

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a change of heart and interior conversion, whether through preaching or through penning devotional works.8 As H. Outram Evennett aptly put it: “[The Exercises] were in a sense the systematized, de-mysticised quintessence of the process of Ignatius’ own conversion and purposeful change of life, and they were intended to work a similar change in others.”9 I have chosen to close my discussion roughly at 1615, because this corresponds to the end of the term of office of Claudio Aquaviva, who served as the fifth general of the Society of Jesus from 1581–1615, and under whose four and a half decades of leadership the Jesuit modus operandi or “way of proceeding” became effectively codified.10 Thus the seven decades from 1548 to 1615 provide a glimpse of the infancy and maturation of Jesuit spiritual practice and devotional publications before their grand efflorescence in the Baroque Age. In this first period, one finds Jesuit writings responding to their own internal character and momentum (seeking to be authentically Jesuit, when what it meant to be a Jesuit was itself still in formation), and also responding to changes taking shape within Catholic practice – while simultaneously contributing to those changes. This period also coincides with the development of the age of confessionalization more broadly, when the initial successes of the Reformations came to define themselves by inculcating new practices, from the Peace of Augsburg to the Peace of Westphalia.11 Therefore it will be a primary task of this paper to frame the character of the earliest Jesuit popular devotional writings by classifying them into five distinct genres, including: 1) catechisms, 2) spiritual biographies, 3) polemics, 4) devotional and meditational treatises, and 5) supplemental literature for confraternities and sodalities. A populace hungry for spiritual direction demonstrated a cavernous appetite for these new genres of devotional formation, as testified by the repeated publication and broad geographical diffusion of these volumes. Thus to accomplish this task will require, as Dr. Samuel Johnson enjoined, “rising to the grandeur of generalizations.” But a panoptic point of view also provides the greatest rewards in making comparisons with Protestant approaches and assessing popular devotional literature’s pivotal role in this still under-exploited corner of the process of 8 For a survey and analysis of the broad penumbra of Jesuit treatises interpreting the Exercises, leading up to Aquaviva’s Directorium of 1599, see Martin Palmer, SJ, On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (St. Louis, 1996). 9 H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, ed. John Bossy (Cambridge, 1968), 45. 10 For a chronological treatment of the various generals and the highlights of their tenures, see William Bangert, SJ, A History of the Society of Jesus, 2nd edn (St. Louis, 1986). 11 On this age of the “second Reformation,” broadly in German lands, see Heinz Schilling, ed., Die Reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland: Das Problem der “Zweiten Reformation” (Gütersloh, 1986). One finds an excellent case study in Bodo Nischan’s Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994).

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confessionalization. To prepare the ground for those comparisons, let us turn now to consider the broader context of popular culture and the popular press as they contributed to the formation of confessional identity in early modern Europe. The central role of the printing press in disseminating catechisms, polemical literature, and scriptural and devotional readings in order to implant and to further the goals of the Reformation is axiomatic.12 The magisterial reformers, especially Luther and Calvin, elected to write in Latin in order to gain the respect and attention of the elites, and to write in the vernacular in order to make their ideas accessible to the broadest cross-section of the literate and semiliterate public. The first generation of reformers was enormously successful in exploiting the medium of print to multiply broadsheets and treatises, and in recognizing the thirst for spiritual literature in the vernacular; indeed, Luther’s German translation of the New Testament achieved such broad diffusion as to anchor and to influence the German language itself.13 This marriage of popular literature and popular devotion thus characterized early modern religious reform from the outset, although the mix could also produce volatile offspring, such as the Peasants’ Revolt of 1525 or the apocalyptic implosion of Münster in 1535.14 Furthermore popular culture and religious reform movements could collide in more mundane ways, as reform-minded clerics in both the Protestant and the Catholic camp ratcheted up expectations for controlling sexual license, or inveighed against the excesses of carnival festivities, for instance.15

12 The classic formation is still Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1978). For a recent aggiornamento, see Jean-François Gilmont, SJ, ed., La Réforme et le livre: l’Europe de l’imprimé (1517–v. 1570) (Paris, 1990). Translated into English as The Reformation and the Book, tr. Karin Maag (Aldershot, 1998). 13 On the exploitation of the printing press in the early Reformation, see Hans-Joachim Köhler, ed., Flugschriften als Massenmedium der Reformationszeit (Tübingen, 1981) and Steven Ozment, Reformation in the Cities: The Appeal of Protestantism to Sixteenth Century Germany and Switzerland (New Haven, 1975). 14 Still a starting point for discussion on the Peasants’ War is Peter Blickle’s Die Revolution von 1525 (Munich, 1975). The Revolution of 1525. The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective, tr. Thomas Brady and H. C. Eric Midelfort (Baltimore, 1977). A convenient compilation of sources on the Peasants’ War is Bob Scribner and Tom Scott, eds and trs., The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents (Atlantic Highlands, 1991). For a discussion of Münster and its aftermath, see Ronald Po-Chia Hsia, Society and Religion in Münster, 1535–1618 (New Haven, 1984). 15 On the Italian Catholic side see, for instance, Guido Ruggiero, The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice (New York, 1985). For Protestant and Catholic Germany, see Lyndal Roper, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford, 1989) or more broadly and recently, see her Oedipus and the Devil. Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London, 1994).

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Suffice it to say that the relationship between societal elites, both governmental and clerical, with the broadest swath of the public was more complex than the guiding influence of a “great tradition” on a “little tradition,” which absorbed and internalized those goals and directions.16 Any such uni-directional models fail to capture the participation of elites with elements of the ‘little tradition’, the local variety of popular culture, and the divergent meanings and interpretations on cultural gestures applied by the members of the “little tradition.” Indeed the more scholars have plumbed the depths of popular culture, the more they have underscored its vitality and ability to syncretize elements from elite culture and appropriate them for its own ends, proving remarkably resilient against wholesale efforts of “acculturation”, and indeed showing signs of “spiritual resistance” and even “negation.”17 Thus chastened from employing too simplistic a model of trickle-down influence, scholars who have grown dissatisfied with ever more rarified interpretations of elite literature and who have sought to capture broader popular sensibilities have found fertile ground in the “poor man’s library” of chapbooks, broadsheets, and penny devotionals.18 While the field of popular literature was still marginalized in the realm of antiquarians and languishing under suspicions of irrelevance as recently as forty years ago, it has subsequently enjoyed unprecedented attention from social and religious historians.19 Of course, this “discovery” is not new, and 16 See the valuable theoretical discussion of this position of social anthropologist Robert Redfield in the 1930s in Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978), 23–64, esp. 23–29 and 58–64. A revised edition is also available (Aldershot, 1994). 17 For further development of this thesis, see the excellent short essay of Peter Burke, “A Question of Acculturation?” in Scienze, credenze occulte, livelli di cultura: Convegno internazionale di studi: (Firenze, 26–30 giugno 1980) (Florence, 1982), 197–204. Very interesting parallels can be found in the work of Albert J. Raboteau in discussing the varied appropriation of Christianity by African slaves in America; see his Slave religion: the “invisible institution” in the Antebellum South (Oxford, 1978). 18 Scholars of the German Reformation have been among the most successful at incorporating popular literature into standard narratives of religious change: see Bob Scribner and Trevor Johnson, eds, Popular Religion in Germany and Central Europe, 1400–1800 (London, 1996). Other classic formulations include Bob Scribner’s Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (London, 1987) and his For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Cambridge, 1981, Second edn: Oxford, 1994). 19 The literature has become vast. For Germany, see Richard Benz, ed., Deutsche Volksbücher (Heidelberg, 1956); Peter Suchsland, ed., Deutsche Volksbücher (Berlin, 1968, new edn1982); Max Lüthi, Volksliteratur und Hochliteratur (Bern, München, Francke, 1970). For France, see Francis Higman, Piety and the People: Religious Printing in French, 1511–1551 (Aldershot, 1996); Geneviève Bollème and Lise Andriès, eds, Les Contes bleus (Paris, 1983) and La bibliothèque bleue; littérature populaire en France du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Paris, 1971); the basic catalogue resource is Alfred Morin, Catalogue descriptif de la Bibliothèque bleue de Troyes (almanachs exclus) (Genève, 1974). For England, see Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth Century England

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scholarly attention to popular culture can be traced back at least as far as Johann Gottfried Herder and Joseph von Görres, in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germany. However, the interpretive nuances of contemporary scholars such as Roger Chartier have expanded our understanding for the practices of reading, the uses of print, and the market forces surrounding the production of popular literature, and have set the genre soundly on its own footing, more than as a mere reflection of “high” literature.20 One of the striking conclusions arising from this attention to popular literature has been the recognition of the perennial predominance of texts with a religious orientation. Where inventories exist of book-sellers stocks, or where wills have been surveyed to assess the ownership of books, from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, books of a religious nature have occupied anywhere from 40–50 per cent, even up to 80–90 per cent of the repertory, completely dominating the collections of fables and romances that have often captured the attention of modern approaches to this literature. Moreover, at the lower levels of book ownership, when only one book was recorded, that book was almost always religious, thus profoundly underlining the intimacy between printing and belief.21 In sixteenth-century Catholic France, these books tended to be exceedingly traditional, such as Books of Hours or liturgical compilations of prayers and litanies, whereas in Protestant lands, vernacular translations of the Bible or at least the New Testament (Cambridge, 1985); Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge, 1991); Victor E. Neuburg, Chapbooks: a guide to reference material on English, Scottish and American chapbook literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, 2nd edn (London, 1972). For Italy, see Lorenzo Baldacchino, cited above and Anne Jacobsen Schutte, Printed Italian Vernacular Religious Books, 1465–1550; a Finding List (Geneva, 1983); Ottavia Niccoli, Prophecy and People in Renaissance Italy, tr. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, 1990), originally Profeti e popolo nell’Italia del Rinascimento (Rome, 1987); for formational literature directed to women, see Gabriella Zarri, ed., Donna, disciplina, creanza cristiana dal XV al XVII secolo: studi e testi a stampa (Rome, 1996); for “self-help” literature, see Rudolph Bell, How to do it: guides to good living for Renaissance Italians (Chicago, 1999). 20 For two recent compilations, see Roger Chartier and Hans-Jürgen Lösebrink, eds, Colportage et lecture populaire: imprimés de large circulation en Europe, XVIe–XIXe siècles: actes du colloque des 21–24 avril 1991, Wolfenbüttel (Paris, 1996) and L’Europe et le livre: réseaux et pratiques du négoce de librairie XVIe–XIXe siècles (Paris, 1996). See also Chartier’s L’ordre des livres: lecteurs, auteurs, bibliothéques en Europe entre XIVe et XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1992) and Lectures et lecteurs dans la France d’Ancien Régime (Paris, 1987). Also of use for an earlier period is Sandra Hindman, ed., Printing the Written Word: the Social History of Books, circa 1450–520 (Ithaca, 1991); and for a broad assessment beyond the European context and extending to the present day, see Cathy Lynn and Michael J. Preston, eds, The other print tradition: essays on chapbooks, broadsides, and related ephemera (New York, 1995). 21 See the articles compiled as chapters 5, “Publishing Strategies and What the People Read, 1530–1660,” and 7, “The Bibliothèque Bleue and Popular Reading,” in Roger Chartier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France, tr. Lydia Cochrane (Princeton, 1987), 145–82, and 240–64, esp. 149–51 and 241–6.

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dominated. If we telescope our focus to the next most popular category of religious books, those of religious instruction and guides to conduct and devotion, here again, the early best-sellers continued to be highly traditional treatises such as Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ (although most often attributed to Jean Gerson in this period) or even Ludolf of Saxony’s Life of Christ, both of which went through repeated vernacular editions, proving that good reputations die hard.22 If we contract our lens still more, to focus on the newly written handbooks and guidebooks of religious devotion, we arrive at the genre that experienced the greatest expansion by the end of the sixteenth century, and which most directly filled the demands of a readership thirsty for spiritual guidance. Because the five categories into which I divide my analysis of Jesuit devotional literature were responding to cultural impulses broader than any individual confession, a brief comparison with their Protestant counterparts will prove helpful. When assessing the literature of spiritual formation, pride of place must go to Luther’s Kleine Katechismus of 1529, which revolutionized approaches to religious pedagogy and transformed the medieval genre of “Mirrors for Christians.”23 Printed in vast numbers, and from an enormous number of locales, catechisms played an essential role in the process of confessionalization, whether in Lutheran, Calvinist, or Catholic lands. While dryer and more formulaic than other approaches, catechisms formed the bedrock of popular devotional literature by laying out, in an accessible format, the foundational theological tenets for an age obsessed with correctness of belief. By its very nature, a catechism seeks to address in a logical and orderly fashion the gamut of questions about the faith that an enquiring Christian could entertain and to which an individual could return conveniently for 22 Both these works went through numerous editions from Protestant publishers as well, and both were specifically influential on Ignatius of Loyola, and among the few books he consistently recommended. For the broadest discussion of the popularity of the Imitation, see Augustin de Backer, SJ, Essai bibliographique sur le livre De imitatione Christi (Amsterdam, 1966). This should be supplemented with Willem Audenaert, Thomas à Kempis De Imitatione Christi en andere werken: een short-title caltalogus van de 17de en 18de eeuwsw drukken in de bibliotheken van Nederlandstalig Belgie (Leuven, 1985). On Ignatius’ reading preferences, see Joseph Tylenda, “The Books That Led Ignatius to God,” Review for Religious (May–June 1998): 286–98. 23 See the article, “Catechism,” in Hans Hillerbrand, ed., The Oxford Encyclopedia of the Reformation, 4 vols (Oxford, 1996). The best broad interpretation of catechetical literature in the Lutheran Reformation is Robert James Bast, Honor your fathers: catechisms and the emergence of a patriarchal ideology in Germany, 1400–1600 (Leiden, New York, 1997). For a worthwhile look at the incorporation of catechism in preaching, see Mary Jane Haemig, “The living voice of catechism: German Lutheran catechetical preaching 1530–1580,” The Harvard Theological Review, 89/4 (1996): 407–8. A convenient English source on early catechisms, including Luther’s, is Denis Janz, ed., Three Reformation catechisms: Catholic, Anabaptist, Lutheran (New York, 1982), including Dietrich Kolde’s “Mirror for Christians” (1480), Hubmaier’s “Christian catechism” (1527), and Luther’s “Small cathechism” (1529).

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reference. In short, catechisms sought to provide the contours and character of belief. Indeed given their intent to isolate and to inculcate proper devotional attitudes in their readership, many of the subsequent works of devotional literature could well be considered as catechisms “with a spoonful of sugar.” With respect to my second category of devotional literature, spiritual biographies, sixteenth-century Protestants were more conflicted. On the one hand, they rejected the traditional cult of saints, and the industries (such as pilgrimages) surrounding the veneration of relics, while on the other hand, they recognized the value of providing models for emulation, and especially sought to memorialize and to commemorate those who had paid the highest price for their faith, the martyrs, of whom the sixteenth century ultimately produced a great number.24 Regarding my third and fourth categories, polemical and devotional treatises, sixteenth-century Protestants produced a seemingly inexhaustible supply. Outside of the inner circle of reform leaders, all of whom were enormously accomplished polemical writers and speakers, great numbers of men, and some women, both clergy and lay, elite and popular, all took up the call to further Protestant polemics right from the earliest days.25 Similarly, from the outset, the magisterial reformers and a broad swath of supporters rushed in to provide positive devotional statements of Protestant belief, from Luther’s Freedom of a Christian, to popular and prolific treatments like Cranach’s Passional Christi und Anti-Christi which straddled the gap between polemical and devotional literature intended for popular consumption.26 Regarding my fifth category of devotional literature, publications supporting confraternities and sodalities, only a tangential comparison with Protestant authors may be made. Confraternities were accorded the same 24 For Protestant opposition to the cult of saints, see Lee Wandel, Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (Cambridge, 1995) and Phyllis Mack Crew, Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands, 1544–1569 (Cambridge, 1978). For the most comprehensive treatment of Early Modern martyrdom across the confessinal spectrum, see Brad S. Gregory, Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA, 1999). Regarding the narrower concern of Protestant responses to hagiography, see I. Ross Bartlett, “John Foxe as hagiographer: the question revisited,” The Sixteenth Century Journal, 26/4 (1995): 771–89 and Rebecca Sammel, “The Passio Lutheri: parody as hagiography,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 95/2 (1996): 157–74. 25 Here again, the literature is vast, but a broad and articulate discussion can be found in Mark Edwards, Printing, Propaganda, and Martin Luther (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London, 1994) and by the same author, Luther’s Last Battles, Politics and Polemics, 1531–1546 (Ithaca, 1983). For a strident woman’s voice, see Peter Matheson, ed., Argula von Grumbach: A Woman’s Voice in the Reformation (Edinburgh, 1998). For a broad assessment of women’s role in reform, see Merry Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1993). 26 For an insightful discussion of the Passional, see Lee Wandel, Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (Cambridge, 1990). See also Scribner For the Sake of Simple Folk.

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skeptical eye as other “overly exuberant” devotional outlets such as saints’ days, carnival, and lenten observances. Protestant theologians in the wake of Luther preferred to emphasize the “brotherhood of all believers,” rather than any separate groups that might divide a congregation or community.27 Consequently, confraternities frequently disbanded along with the religious orders, or simply atrophied through the attrition of their membership. Yet Protestant authors were quick to fill the devotional gap with renewed emphasis on communal organizations and offices, and quick to advocate shouldering the charitable responsibilities and civic functions previously performed by the confraternities.28 Indeed as several recent local studies have shown, sometimes the transition from confraternity to board of trustees was exceedingly gradual, a testimony to the efficacy and longevity of the older confraternal habits and patterns.29 Thus the publications of the laws, statutes, and promulgations of these municipal charitable organizations can in this important respect be compared to the peripheral literature designed for confraternity members and written by the Jesuits. Thus the Jesuits, like their Protestant counterparts, were responding to broad societal demands for devotional guidance that transcended religious confessions, as much as they were seeking to mold the identity of their devout co-religionists. But let us turn our attention now to a more detailed consideration of the earliest Jesuit devotional literature and the characteristic means they employed to impart devotion. Before developing the five categories of Jesuit popular devotional writing, I wish to emphasize that I am not suggesting that the Jesuit authors themselves represented a popular voice. A lengthy university education in Latin was a necessary component in the preparation of all professed Jesuits, and even the

27 See Martin Luther’s sermon, “The Blessed Sacrament of the Holy and True Body of Christ, and the Brotherhoods, 1519,” tr. Jeremiah Schindel in Luther’s Works, Vol. 35, ed. E. Theodore Bachmann (Philadelphia, 1960), 45–73. 28 See Luther’s “Ordinance of a Common Chest, Preface, 1523,” tr. Albert Steinhaeuser, and “Fraternal Agreement on the Common Chest of the Entire Assembly at Leisnig,” tr. Walther Brandt, in Luther’s Works, Vol. 45, ed., Walther I. Brandt (Philadelphia, 1967), 176–94, and 195–230. See Robert Jütte, Poverty and Deviance in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 1994) and Carter Lindberg, Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor (Minneapolis, 1993). 29 See, for instance, Timothy Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism. The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden (Edinburgh, 1999); Claire Schen, Charity and Lay Piety in Reformation London, 1500–1620 (St. Andrews, 2000); Anne E. C. McCants, Civic Charity in a Golden Age: Orphan Care in Early Modern Amsterdam (Urbana and Chicago, 1997). Augsburg provides a particularly interesting case due to its co-existing Catholic and Protestant factions: see Thomas Max Safley, Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (Atlantic Highlands, 1997).

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spiritual coadjutors (lay brothers in the order) would have achieved vernacular literacy.30 Moreover many Jesuits came from bourgeois or patrician families, if not from the aristocracy, and thus represented an important component of the perspective of clerical elites. Nevertheless, the Jesuits targeted from the outset, even in Ignatius’ own conversionary experience, “helping souls” and “enflaming hearts” to the greatest extent possible “for the greater glory of God.” This intellectual and spiritual agenda relentlessly propelled them into all the layers of society.31 Moreover their experience as educators provided them first-hand experience with the moral formation of youth, and so they were well versed in the pedagogical utility of clarity and simplicity in the presentation of moral counsels.32 While Jesuit educational institutions often targeted the nobility and elite groups, they also kept the door open to the poor through a policy of providing education free of charge.33 Thus when I refer to “popular Jesuit devotional treatises,” I consider them to be “popular” in so far as they target a broad non-elite audience through both their content and their form. By content, they address the pious Christian laity, sometimes both male and female, in a pragmatic fashion. By form, I emphasize especially those publications appearing in the vernacular, in relatively cheap octavo, dodicesimo, or even diciottesimo and ventiquattresimo format (8°, 12°, 18°, or 24°) in single volumes, without excessive length, capable of being carried

30 On Jesuit educational ideals and practices, see Frank Cesareo, “The Collegium Germanicum and the Ignatian Vision of Education,” Sixteenth Century Journal, 24 (1993): 829–41 and John O’Malley, “The Jesuit Educational Enterprise in Historical Perspective,” in Jesuit Higher Education, ed. Rolando Bonachea (Pittsburg, 1989). See also the two magisterial works by Paul Grendler, The Universities of the Italian Renaissance (Baltimore, 2002) and Schooling in Renaissance Italy: Literacy and Learning, 1300–1600 (Baltimore, 1989). 31 This language is most evident in the constitutions and the so-called autobiography of Ignatius. Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. George Ganss (St. Louis, 1970, 1996). John Olin, ed. The Autobiography of St. Ignatius Loyola, with Related Documents, tr. Joseph O’Callaghan (New York, 1992). 32 See James A. Donahue, “Jesuit Education and the cultivation of virtue,” Thought, a Review of Culture and Idea, 67.265 (June 1992): 192–206. For a brief discussion of the impact of teaching in the schools on the Jesuits’ own form of life, see John O’Malley, “How the Jesuits changed: 1540–56,” America 165 (1991): 28–32. Investigations of the Jesuit Educational system are legion; a few recent broad treatments include: Chapple, Christopher, ed., The Jesuit Tradition in Education and Missions: a 450-Year Perspective (Scranton, 1993); Scaglione, Aldo, The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit College System (Philadelphia, 1986). Gian Paolo Brizzi, ed., La “Ratio studiorum” Modelli culturali e pratiche educative dei gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento (Rome, 1981). 33 Indeed, their eventually vast network of schools provided the primary recruiting ground for religious vocations with the Jesuits, as well as other orders. As but one telling example of recruitment in the schools, in the Jesuit College of Douai in 1617, out of 217 students who finished their studies, 120 entered various religious orders. Albertus Poncelet, SJ, Histoire de la Compagnie de Jésus dans les anciens Pays Bas, I-II (Brussels, 1927), II, 338. Regarding the training of élites in Jesuit colleges, see Gian Paolo Brizzi, La formazione della classe dirigente nel Sei-Settecento (Bologna, 1976).

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in a pocket, and with simple or minimal woodcut ornamentation and typeset – precisely the kind of format that advertised itself to the early modern book buyer as a ‘popular’ and affordable book.34 Moreover the Jesuit authors of popular devotional treatises had the home-court advantage of using the presses in a number of Jesuit colleges, or they otherwise found publishers among the principal houses of the early modern book market. In Italy, Jesuit treatises were printed primarily in Venice and Rome (followed by Naples, Brescia, and Milan); in the Low Countries, Antwerp and Brussels (followed by Louvain, Douai, and Tournai); in the empire, primarily Cologne, Ingolstadt, and Vienna; and otherwise Paris, Lyon, or Madrid.35 The Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola serve as the gravitational center for Jesuit spirituality and both inform and suffuse subsequent Jesuit spiritual writings.36 In this capacity, the Exercises both precede and stand apart from the five categories (catechisms, spiritual biographies, polemics, devotional and meditational treatises, and supplemental literature for confraternities and sodalities) into which I have divided early Jesuit popular devotional treatises. Significantly, they were intended primarily as a preparatory handbook for an experienced spiritual director to guide exercitants making the exercises on a month-long retreat, although even from the time of Ignatius, they were not always treated that way.37 As a guide for a Jesuit director, they were not 34 See Paul Grendler, “Form and Function in Italian Renaissance Popular Books,” Renaissance Quarterly 46/3 (Aut 1993): 451–85. 35 Olaf Hein and Rolf Mader, “La stamperia del collegio romano,” Archivio della società romana di storia patria, 116 (1993): 132–46. 36 When considering the Jesuit contribution to devotional literature in the formation of early modern Catholicism in continental Europe, there are a number of indispensable bibliographical resources, upon which the argument of this paper is based. The point of departure is the twelve volume compilation of the Jesuits Carlos Sommervogel and Augustin de Backer, the Bibliothèque de la Compagnie de Jésus, 12 vols (Brussels, 1890–1930, repr. Louvain, 1960). This should be supplemented by Ignacio Iparraguirre’s Répertoire de spiritualité ignatienne de la mort de s. Ignace à celle du P. Aquaviva (1556–1615) (Rome, 1961); Jean-François Gilmont, SJ, Les écrits spirituels des premiers jésuites: Inventaire commenté (Rome, 1961); László Polgár, Bibliographie sur l’histoire de la compagnie de Jésus: 1901–1980 (Rome, 1981). For interpretive treatments, the three fundamental sources are Joseph de Guibert’s La spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus, John O’Malley’s The First Jesuits, the recent four volume reference work, the Diccionario histórico, supplemented where appropriate by more individualized studies. Joseph de Guibert, SJ, La spiritualité de la Compagnie de Jésus: esquisse historique (Rome, 1953). The Jesuits: Their Spiritual Doctrine and Practice, A Historical Study, tr. William Young, SJ (Chicago, 1964); note the criticisms by John O’Malley in “De Guibert and Jesuit Authenticity,” compiled in Rome and the Renaissance, Studies in Culture and Religion (Aldershot, 1981): XIV: 103–10. John O’Malley, The First Jesuits (Cambridge, MA, 1993); Charles E. O’Neill, SJ, and Joaquín M. Domínguez, SJ, eds, Diccionario histórico de la compañía de Jesús, 4 vols (Rome, 2001). 37 At times the period of the retreat would be shortened, and copies quickly found there way outside Jesuit hands. See Paul Begheyn, SJ, “A Bibliography on St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises,” Studies in the Spirituality of Jesuits, 23/3 (1991): 1–68. Also of use is Adrien Demoustier’s “Donner les exercises: esquisse de la theorie d’une pratique,” Recherches de Sciences Religieuses, 79 (O-D 1991): 585–613.

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considered as suitable for popular consumption, and the fact that so many commentaries exist only in manuscript form is a tell-tale sign of the seriousness with which the Jesuits understood the role of spiritual direction, and its potential for causing both benefit and harm.38 Nevertheless, in terms of theme, methods, and philosophical approach, they typify the Jesuit “way of proceeding.” As a preparatory guide for direction, as opposed to a devotional treatise per se, the Exercises do not always proceed in a linear fashion. The primary division is into four “weeks” or major parts, preceded by annotations and followed by rules. The twenty-third and last annotation introduces the first principle and foundation: that “man is created to praise, reverence, and serve God our Lord, and by this means to save his soul.” Then each week proceeds with a sequence of spiritual goals, prayers, and related meditations. The first week proposes to bring the exercitant to a state of contrition through the recognition of the heinousness of sin, and the sweetness of repentance. The second week begins with a meditation on “the Kingdom of Christ” and is followed by a series of meditations from the incarnation through Palm Sunday, before ending with the consideration of choosing a state in life. The third week is dedicated to Christ’s passion, suffering, and death. The last week comprises meditations on Christ’s resurrection and ascension, and methods of prayer. Then the subsequent appendices of “rules” contain guides for the discernment of spirits and directives for the movement of spiritual consolation and desolation, as well as directives for alms giving, scruples, and “thinking with the church.”39 Virtually every element comprising the Spiritual Exercises was anticipated by other spiritual traditions, especially the devotio moderna, and the classic representative of that late medieval tradition, the Imitation of Christ, was the one devotional treatise that Ignatius specifically recommended in the Exercises.40 The Exercises gain much of their efficacy both from their nonprescriptive character, leaving room for an infinite variety of resolutions, and from their ability to channel the emotions and to attend to subtle movements of the heart.41 In the hands of an experienced director, the Exercises have 38 See Martin E. Palmer, SJ, ed. and tr., On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (St. Louis, 1996). 39 The “discernment of spirits” has long been considered one of the primary spiritual insights on the work, and has been subjected to considerable analysis, see: Piet Penning de Vries, SJ, Discernment of Spirits according to the Life and Teachings of St. Ignatius of Loyola, tr. W. Dudok van Heel (New York, 1973). 40 Paragraph #100, in virtually any edition. Many of the meditations on scenes from scripture are strikingly reminiscent of Geert Zerbolt of Zutphen’s Spiritual Ascents, also within the devotio moderna tradition. A convenient edition and translation of the Spiritual Ascents is in John van Engen, ed., Devotio Moderna, Basic Writings (New York, 1988). 41 John O’Malley develops this non-prescriptive character in his article, “Early Jesuit Spirituality: Spain and Italy,” compiled in Religious Culture in the Sixteenth Century: Preaching, Rhetoric, Spirituality and Reform (Aldershot, 1993), IX, 3–27, esp. 5–6.

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brought generations to respond to an internal call, and they have aptly been called a “recipe for conversion.”42 Much of what makes them distinctly or authentically Ignatian is their use of mental prayer, particularly the meditational methodology in which they engage both the senses and the will to frame mental images based on scriptural passages or programatic scenes, like the Two Standards.43 At the same time the Exercises characteristically subordinate the internal psychological states of the exercitant to the fruits that they produce in service to God and one’s neighbor. While one can look back and recognize in the Exercises the kernel of the Jesuit “way of proceeding,” their charism did not leap fully formed from the head of Ignatius, and did not immediately imprint its stamp on Jesuit formational treatises intended for the laity. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the genre of catechisms, which by their nature seek not so much to represent any particular devotional slant as to capture a generic orthodoxy. Indeed it is arguable that the first and most influential of all Jesuit catechists, Peter Kanis (“Canisius”) of Nijmegen, found as much inspiration for his catechisms from Luther as he did from any Catholic theologian. The simple organization in the question and answer format of the Lutheran catechism of 1529 became the primary model for Canisius’ Summa doctrinae Christianae or “Great Catechism” published in Vienna in 1554. By 1556 he produced a catechism for children, the “Baby Catechism,” and by 1558 a third Latin version, the “Small Catechism of Catholics.” Each of these three Latin versions went through dozens of editions before the end of the century, and each was quickly translated into a great variety of languages, including German and French (1557) Flemish (1558), Italian (1560), English (1567), Spanish (1576), several eastern European languages, Japanese and “Indian” which in their turn went through multiple editions before 1600.44 The “small catechism” and the “baby catechism” in particular appeared in numerous vernacular 12°, 16°, 18° and 24° editions, all easily pocketable, and designed to be accessible even to the marginally literate – thus representing a significant contribution to popular formational literature. While only with great difficulty might one try to assign any particularly Jesuit character to the doctrine or organization found in these catechisms, nevertheless, the gesture of condensing abstract theological principles into small, bite-size, palatable platitudes, and of making them conveniently and H. Outram Evennett, The Spirit of the Counter-Reformation, 65. Much analysis has been devoted to this feature of mental imagining and manipulation. See Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Ignace de Loyola le lieu de l’image (Paris, 1992) and Antonio T. de Nicolas, Powers of Imagining. Ignatius de Loyola: A Philosophical Hermeneutic of Imagining through the Collected Works of Ignatius de Loyola, with a translation of these works (Albany, 1986). 44 Sommervogel, II: 617–88. The English biography of James Brodrick, SJ, Saint Peter Canisius, SJ, 1521–1597 (London, 1935, 1950, 1998) is considerably out of date, while a more recent compilation is Josef Bruhin, SJ, ed., Petrus Kanisius (Freiburg in der Schweiz, 1980). 42 43

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regularly available in inexpensive and portable formats is surely consonant with the Jesuit ideal of “helping souls.” Moreover the Jesuits were quick to develop a variant on the catechism format that bears a strikingly Ignatian imprint: the illustrated catechism composed of woodblock prints or engravings with linked texts. Just as Ignatius modeled the composition of the place and the application of the senses in meditations in the Spiritual Exercises, so combining images with the written catechetical themes would engage the same visual faculties, and would have the added benefit of aiding the illiterate and unlearned or converts to Christianity who had less familiarity with the theological concepts. Already by 1569 a Latin version of Canisius’ “small catechism” appeared with engravings in 8° format from the Plantijn house in Antwerp, and then a 16° version appeared in 1576. In 1589, Plantijn published a significantly expanded version in 8° based on the images designed by Giovanni Battista Romano, a Jesuit and converted Jew from Rome formerly known as Elijah Eliano, who worked with the Catechumen House in Rome and intended to use the illustrated version as a catechizing device for neophytes converted from Judaism. In 1591 Romano published an Italian version in Rome, using the same plates.45 The concept of uniting image with text proved so appealing and compelling that within another two years the Jesuit theologian Jerome Nadal produced a beautiful and elegant folio edition of comments and meditations illustrating passages from the gospels, not as a catechism but as an expensive devotional compendium, that was reissued on a number of occasions.46 Within the next decade, the Spiritual Exercises

45 On Romano, see chapter 4 of my monograph, Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (Toronto, 2004). The two catechisms are: Romano [Eliano], Giovanni Battista, SJ, Institutiones christianæ seu Parvus Catechismus catholicorvm, Præcipua Christianæ pietatis capita complectens: Primum quidem à p. Ioanne Baptista Romano, Societatis Iesu, in rudiorum & idiotarum gratiam, iuxta SS. Concilij Tridentini decretum sess. 25. imaginibus distinctus, nunc verò æreis formis ad D. Petri Canisii, Societatis Iesu, Institutiones eleganter expressus. (Antverpiæ, 1589). Dottrina Christiana nella quale si contengono i principali Misteri della nostre Fede, rappresentati con figure per istruttione de gl’idioti, & di quelli che non sanno leggere. Conforme a quello che ordina il Sacro Concilio tridentino, nella Sessione XXV. Aggiuntosi il Rosario della B. Vergine Maria, con le Litanij di essa B. Vergine, per vso delli devoti, & principalmente per quelli della Compagnia del S. Rosario. Composta dal P. Gio: Battista Romano della Compagnia di Giesv. (Rome, 1591). On the importance of the Plantijn house (later, Plantin-Moretus), see Léon Voet, 1919–, The Plantin Press (1555–1589): a bibliography of the works printed and published by Christopher Plantin at Antwerp and Leiden (Amsterdam, 1980). 46 On Nadal, see William V. Bangert, SJ, Jerome Nadal, S.J., 1507–1580: Tracking the First Generation of Jesuits, ed. Thomas McCoog (Chicago, 1992). For the edition, see Jerome Nadal, Evangelicae historiae imagines ex ordine euangeliorum, quae toto anno in missae sacrificio recitantur, in ordinem temporis vitae Christi digestae. Auctore Hieronymo Natali Societatis Iesu theologo (Antuerpiae, 1593). The title page and plates were designed by Martin de Vos and Bernardo Passeri, and engraved by Jerome, Antony, and Jan Wierix, Adrian and Jan Collaert, and C. de Malery. The combination of image and text has proven tantalizing for art historians

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themselves were published with elegant engravings designed by Peter Paul Rubens.47 Canisius can also be credited with inspiring another variant on the genre of catechism: the catechism in verse and song. In 1569, the same year as the first illustrated catechism from Antwerp, a German catechism was published in Cologne in rhyming stanzas, suitable for song.48 Poetry and song were favorite mnemonic and pedagogical devices employed by the Jesuits especially for children and young students, as was dramatic performance on stage, especially in Germanic lands, and while a catechism itself seems not to have been staged, virtually all Jesuit drama had a thoroughly catechetical and edifying tone.49 Canisius and Romano hardly exhausted the sixteenth-century Jesuit renditions of the catechism. As provincial of Peru, Jose de Acosta, SJ (1539–1600) felt from close range the need for effective catechizing tools to convert the indigenous peoples of South America, and he composed three versions between 1583 and 1585.50 Diego Ledesma, SJ (1519–75) also authored a popular catechism and a variant in the form of a dialogue, first in Spanish in 1571, then translated into Italian, Flemish, Breton, English, French, Lithuanian, and Polish.51 Finally the famous cardinal and theologian Robert Bellarmine, SJ (1542–1621) closed out the century with a popular catechism in Italian in 1598, which was eventually translated into over thirty languages and dialects from every continent.52 Thus the Jesuits made something of a cottage industry out of the

as well; the best edition and interpretation are in Annotations and Meditations on The Gospels, Vol. I, The Infancy Narratives, ed. Walter Melion, tr. Frederick Homann (Philadelphia, 2003). 47 Insolera, Lydia Salvucci, “Le illustrazioni per gli esercizi spirituali intorno al 1600,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 60 (1991): 161–217. See also Pierre-Antoine Fabre, Ignace de Loyola le lieu de l’image (Paris, 1992), and by the same author, “Les Visions d’Ignace de Loyola dans la diffusion de l’art jésuite,” MLN, 114/4 (1999): 816–47. On Rubens as a book illustrator, see The illustration of books published by the Moretuses, various authors (Antwerp, 1997). 48 Catechismus in Reimen gesetzt, zum singen (Köln, 1569). 49 See Richard Dimler, “A Geographic and Genetic Survey of Jesuit Drama in GermanSpeaking Territories from 1555–1602,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Jesu 43 (1974): 133–46. See also James Parente, Religious Drama and the Humanist Tradition: Christian Theater in Germany and the Netherlands 1500–1680 (Leiden, 1987) and William McCabe, An introduction to the Jesuit theater: a posthumous work (St. Louis, 1983). 50 Jose de Acosta, Doctrina Christiana y catecismo para instruccion de los Indios y de las demas personas, que han de ser enseñadas en nuestra sante Fe. Con un confessionario, y otras cosas necessarias, … (1583). Confessionaio para los curas de Indios, con la instruccion contra sus ritos, Exortacion para ayudar a bien morir … (1585). Tercero Catecismo. (1585). A fascinating manuscript with a painted version of the Our Father created by an indigenous Mexican has recently been published which illustrates still further the utility of images for the purpose of catechism, especially for converts to Christianity. Galarza, Joaquín, Catecismos indígenas: el Pater Noster: método para el análisis de un manuscrito pictográfico del siglo XVIII con su aplicación en la primera oración, el Pater Noster (México, 1992). 51 Doctrina Christiana (1571). Dottrina cristiana a modo di dialogo (Rome, 1589). 52 Dottrina cristiana (Rome, 1598).

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genre of catechism in a multiplicity of forms: indeed by the end of the century over ten variants of catechisms, not counting all the languages into which they were translated, were available along with a few published instructions for catechists to round out the lot. The Jesuits had also made teaching Christian doctrine to men, women, and children an integral part of their missionary strategy and routine, as their missionary practice had become regularized since the 1570s and 1580s. Perhaps the strongest confirmation of their close association with teaching the catechism was that the very association itself became the subject of satires of the Jesuits by their detractors and opponents.53 If the Jesuits were prolific in the publication and dissemination of catechisms, they showed still more enthusiasm for writing spiritual biographies, my second category for analysis.54 Particularly after the 1560s and 1570s when the first generation of Jesuits began to die off, the edifying life became an important means for preserving the institutional memory of the order. Indeed so many Jesuits of such different function and character applied their hand to the genre of life-writing, that one gets the impression that if any Jesuit author were between books, then he would pass the time by writing an edifying account of a fellow Jesuit. Undoubtedly, the great profusion of spiritual biographies grew in part from the Jesuit obsession about correspondence and communication with their headquarters in Rome. The practice of writing letters back to the general every quarter recounting their trials and successes kept the Jesuits in the field in the practice of writing encomiastic narratives. In short time, the practice evolved of circulating the letters for the edification of Jesuit communities across the globe, especially once the adventurous accounts of Francis Xavier in India began returning to Rome.55 Next these circulating letters with edifying summaries of the past years’ missionary successes (the well-known Annual Letters) came to be compiled and published, so it was a short step to convert the hyperbolic accounts of mass conversions and the world-wide expansion of Christianity into biographical narratives.56 This process gained still more momentum after 1588, once Sixtus V broke the 62-year hiatus on canonizing new saints, and then the floodgates opened for advocacy by religious orders to gain the attention of the newly-minted Congregation of Sacred Rites and Ceremonies, responsible for advancing the causes of saints.57 53 See, for example, Etienne Pasquier, Le catechisme des Iesvites: ov Examen de levr doctrine (Paris, 1602). 54 The numbers of Jesuit biographies of pious individuals is so grand and so diffuse as to defy simple or short categorization, so I will treat this genre thematically. 55 Francis Xavier, The letters and instructions of Francis Xavier, tr. and ed., M. Joseph Costelloe (St. Louis, 1992). 56 For an old but still accurate summary, see Charles W. Colby, “The Jesuit relations,” The American Historical review, 7/1 (1901): 36–55. 57 See Peter Burke’s article, “How to be a Counter-Reformation Saint,” in The Historical Anthropology of Early Modern Italy: Essays on Perception and Communication (Cambridge, 1989).

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Another reinforcement came with the increased popularity of martyrdom accounts, both ancient and contemporary, culminating in the forty Jesuit martyrs of Nagasaki. The very real dangers faced in the missions, and the courage and resolve of missionaries in the face of that danger was the perfect formula for sacred biography. The fact that the Protestants rejected the veneration of saints tout court and began to poke holes in hagiographic accounts and to satirize spurious saints just added fuel to the Jesuits’ resolve to vindicate the saints all the more, and to repudiate the Protestants’ arguments.58 The beginnings of Jesuit hagiography lie in Pedro de Ribadeneira, SJ (1526–1611) whose 1572 Life of Ignatius Loyola provided a model that was repeated countless times. Ribadeneira continued this with lives of other Jesuits, and his enormously popular Flos Sanctorum of 1599 which ran into dozens of editions in Latin and vernacular languages.59 Thus the seeds were sown for the grand enterprise of the young Flemish Jesuit, Jan Bolland (1595–1665) to catalogue, to verify, and to prune the lives of saints, to assure a solid ground for justified veneration that would stand up to skeptical inquiry. The Bollandists, still headquartered in Brussels, continue that work by constantly updating the Acta Sanctorum.60 Thus the intimate liaison between the Jesuits and the Bollandist enterprise could hardly provide a stronger confirmation of the Jesuit penchant for spiritual biography. The foundation of the Bollandists amid controversies with the Protestants also underscores my third category of Jesuit popular formational literature: polemics. The Jesuits applied themselves to this field with the same alacrity that they applied to the other devotional genres. Religious controversy and polemics antedated Christianity and characterized its development and expansion at every turn. Even during the long summer of ostensible Christian unity from the reign of Charlemagne through the sixteenth century, the fabric of consensus was rent by the Great Schism with the Greeks, and the periodic condemnation and suppression of heterodox groups.61 Indeed the foundation 58 See for example, John Calvin’s An Admonition Concerning Relics, translated and published in Tracts and Treatises on the Reformation of the Church (Edinburgh, 1958). 59 On Ribadeneira and his influence, see Jodi Bilinkoff, “The many ‘Lives’ of Pedro de Ribadeneyra,” Renaissance Quarterly 52/1 (Spr 1999): 180–94. 60 Many versions of the Acta Sanctorum exist, and the lists keep expanding: Acta sanctorum quotquot toto orbe coluntur: vel a catholicis scriptoribus celebrantur / quæ ex Latinis et Græcis, aliarumque gentium antiquis monumentis collegit, digessit, notis illustravit Joannes Bollandus … ; servata primagenia scriptorum phrasi; operam et studium contulit Godefridus Henschenius … Editio novissima, ed. Joanne Carnandet … (Parisiis, 1863). The series continues with the Analecta Bollandiana. See Hippolyte Delehaye, L’œuvre des bollandistes à travers trois siècles, 1615–1915 (Brussels, 1959). 61 See John van Engen, “The Christian Middle Ages as an Historiographical Problem,” American Historical Review, 91 (1986): 519–52. On medieval heresy, see Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Reform Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation (Cambridge, 1992).

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of the Preaching Friars by Dominic de Guzman in the early thirteenth century was posited on the polemical context of defeating Albigensian heterodoxy. The scholastic culture of medieval universities encouraged and was often punctuated by rancorous debate. The burning of Hus and the disinterring of the remains of Wycliff ordered by the Council of Constance continued the ecclesiastical reflex of squelching dissent, which Leo X applied with predictable consistency in his excommunication of Luther after the Diet of Worms.62 Thus the Jesuits could easily conceive of themselves as participating in a long and venerable tradition of defending the faith against calumniators and heresiarchs through their investment in the field of polemics. At first sight, it may seem inappropriate to include polemical literature as part of the genre of devotion, but when reading the polemical treatises themselves, one consistently encounters alongside the tone of righteousness or even schadenfreude in riddling the opponents’ position with holes, a corresponding sense of reaffirmation of the eternal verity of one’s own position. Occasionally these treatises employ the rhetorical gesture of conciliation in proffering a hand to the opponents, “if they would only recognize and retreat from their errant ways, and return to the bosom of the church.”63 Given the strongly Iberian and Italian cast of the early Society of Jesus, the context of Mediterranean sensibilities regarding honor and its disparagement and defense seems also to have characterized many early Jesuit polemical responses, particularly with regard to the Protestant devaluation of the status of the Madonna.64 To an important degree, Ignatius’ own life experience, including being called before the inquisition on a number of occasions, and his determination to return to school late in life to pursue further theological education, was predicated broadly on a polemical context. Indeed years after Ignatius’ death, the polemical vision of Ignatius as a counter-pole to Luther was carefully crafted and enhanced by the Jesuits themselves.65 In addition, the Jesuits’ frequent innovations and uncharacteristic manner of religious life, which did not include the recitation of the divine office in choir, also placed them frequently on the defensive. Thus the characteristically Ignatian emphasis on 62 On the early polemical context surrounding Luther, his first debates with Eck, and the many condemnations raised against him, see David Bagchi, Luther’s Earliest Opponents. Catholic Controversialists, 1518–1525 (Minneapolis, 1991). 63 This technique at times characterized the two most famous early controversial exchanges, between Luther and Erasmus, and Sadoleto and Calvin. Erasmus-Luther. Discourse on Free Will, tr. Ernst F. Winter (New York, 1961). A Reformation Debate; Sadoleto’s Letter to the Genevans and Calvin’s Reply, ed. John Olin (New York, 1966). 64 For a discussion of this value system, see J. G. Peristiany, Honour and Shame: The Values of Mediterranean Society (London, 1965). 65 See Jodi Bilinkoff, “The many ‘Lives’ of Pedro de Ribadeneyra,” Renaissance Quarterly 52/1 (Spr 1999): 180–94, and Jos Vercruysse, SJ, “Ignatius: anti-Lutherus,” Jezuïten, 40 (1982): 245–50.

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a thorough theological grounding required of all professed Jesuits was on occasion employed to defend the Jesuits’ own manner of life, along with preparing them to contribute to the most public contemporary theological debates. In the 1540s and 1550s, Ignatius dispatched his most accomplished Jesuit theologians, Salmeron and Lainez, to the Council of Trent, and they played an important role up through its conclusion in 1563. Subsequent to Pius IV’s promulgation of the decrees of Trent, the Jesuits contributed a vast and prodigious production of theological treatises in the scholastic vein, from those of the famed and prolific Spanish theologian Francisco Suárez, SJ (1548–1617) to the perfunctory doctoral commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, as innumerable as they are forgettable. While such treatises were not strictly polemical, they were nonetheless colored by the context of a plurality of dissenting theological positions, and not only those of the Protestants. In addition, the Jesuits did not shy away from conflicts with the other Catholic mendicant or monastic orders, nor sit on the sidelines during heated theological debates. As an example, the acrimonious exchanges between Franciscans and Dominicans regarding the Immaculate Conception of Mary in the 1560s even prompted Pope Pius V to issue a number of bulls prohibiting public disputation on this topic, lest through their fissiparous bickering the Catholics make a spectacle of themselves.66 Besides producing such grand multi-volume expositions of positive theology, on the sacraments or on the Virgin Mary, for instance, the Jesuits were also in the vanguard of Catholic polemicists more narrowly defined, publishing treatises in specific refutation of Protestant publications or penning the occasional letter initiating or responding to an attack. Canisius’ catechisms, for instance, prompted a vigorous response and exchange of commentaries, criticisms, and apologies in Latin and all the European vernacular languages that continued well into the eighteenth century. As a convenient and compact compendium of beliefs, it inevitably proved to be a magnet for attacks and defenses which reinforced confessional identity and differences. One example of a characteristic Jesuit polemical career can stand for the whole. Despite the relative calm in the Holy Roman Empire after the Peace of Augsburg, the peripatetic outbreak of military conflict between Catholic and Protestant factions settled during the 1560s, 1570s, and 1580s on the Low Countries in general, and on Flanders in particular, where some of the most violent clashes in the Dutch Revolt took place.67 The outcome of this deadly 66 For copies of the bulls, turn to Charles Cocquelines, and Hieronymus Mainardi, eds, Magnum bullarium Romanum: bullarum, privilegiorum ac diplomatum Romanorum Pontificum amplissima collectio, 18 vols (Rome, 1733–62) (Reprint.: Graz, 1964–6): tome IV, part III, no. CLVIII and no. CXLIX. 67 See Alastair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London, 1990) and Peter Limm, The Dutch revolt, 1559–1648 (London, 1989). See also the articles assembled by Martin van Gelderen, ed., The Dutch revolt (Cambridge, 1992).

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conflict was by no means assured, as Philip II tried to hold on to the commercial jewel in the crown of the Spanish possessions.68 While their compatriots joined the militia, the Jesuits, such as the Fleming Francis Coster (1532–1619), manned the ideological barricades.69 Charged with administrative responsibilities and service in the Jesuit colleges of Douai and Bruges through the 1560s and 1570s, Coster entered the polemical fray with the 1585 publication in Cologne of his compendious 336-page Latin “Handbook on the Chief Controversies of our time.”70 A Dutch translation was published by Plantijn in Antwerp in 1591, while abridged German, French, and Italian versions followed by 1600. Coster’s handbook, entitled “The Shield of the Catholics against the Heretics” in Dutch, prompted a lengthy rebuttal in two volumes entitled “The Shield of Truth taught in the Christian Churches of the United Netherlands,” and “The Mirror of the True Church of Christ,” by the prominent Dutch Calvinist theology professor at the University of Leiden, Francis Gomar, published from 1599–1602 in Latin and Dutch versions in Antwerp and Leiden.71 While neither theologian broke new ground in the defense of his own positions nor in the attack of the other’s positions – for their arguments turned mostly on the issue of predestination – they each chose to re-issue their treatises and also to publish numerous exchanges of polemical letters over the next few years, until Coster published in 1604 an Apologia in three volumes (at 276, 514, and 640 pages respectively!) simultaneously in Latin and Dutch, and later translated into Spanish and published in Barcelona. For better or worse, after 1603 Gomar 68 For a diplomatic approach, see Geoffrey Parker’s The grand strategy of Philip II (New Haven, 1998); for a logistical/military approach see his The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road 1567–1659; the Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries’ Wars (Cambridge, 1972). Also an excellent political approach can be found in R. A. Stradling, Spain’s Struggle for Europe: 1598–1668 (London, 1994). 69 See J. Andreissen, “Costerus” in Diccionario Histórico, 981–2; also Sommervogel, tom. II: 1510–34. 70 Enchiridion Controversiarvm præcipvarvm Nostri Temporis de religione, in gratiam sodalitatis Beatiss. virginis Mariae. … (Coloniæ Agrippinæ In officina Birkmannica sumptib. Arnoldi Mylij, MDCXXXV). 8° In 1587 it was revised and expanded to 509 pages. Antwerp served as the chief printing center in the Low Countries until it was eclipsed by Amsterdam. See Antwerpen, Dissident Drukkerscentrum. De rol van de antwerpse drukkers in de godsdienststrijd in Engeland (16de eeuw), various authors (Antwerp, 1994), and Alfons K. A. Thijs, Van Geuzenstad tot katholiek bolwerk, maatschappelijke betekenis van de Kerk in contrareformatorisch Antwerpen (Turnhout, 1990). 71 Coster, Schildt der Catholijcken teghen de ketterijen, inhoudende de principaelste gheschillen die in onsen tijden opgeresen zijn in t’gelooue, met een oprechte verclaeringhe der seluer. Ghemaeckt int Latijn, ende nu nae den laetsten druck in Nederduytsche taele ouergeset door Godevaert vanden Berghe (T’Antwerpen, In de druckerijie van wijlen C. Plantijn, by de weduwe ende J. Mourentorf, 1591). 8° 451 pages. Gomar, De Schildt Der waerheydt, Die in de Christelijcke Kercke der vereenichde Neerlanden geleert wordt. … (Tot Leyden, By Christoffel Guyot, Voor Jan Jansz. Ozlers, Anno 1599). 8° 357 pages. De Spieghel van de Waere Kercke Christi … (Tot Leyden, By Christoffel Guyot, Voor Jan Jansz. Ozlers, Anno 1602). 8° 254 pages.

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became entangled in predestination controversies with his fellow Calvinist professor at Leiden, Arminius, and was not able to continue the exchange. But the gauntlet was picked up by the Germans Philip Marbach and Albert Grauwer with Latin rebuttals in 1606 and 1614.72 For his part, Coster somehow found the time outside of his responses to Gomar to take on a number of other Dutch Calvinists, including a protracted exchange with Gaspar Grevinchoven. The publicity of the prolonged dispute with the Calvinists (and a side battle consisting of Coster’s two Dutch treatises against the Anabaptists) emboldened the Lutheran Lucas Osiander to enter the fray in 1604 with a calumniating treatise in Latin, and later in German, that prompted an equally vituperative response from Coster in 1606, then a rebuttal from Osiander in 1608, and a 392-page counter-rebuttal from Coster, also in 1608.73 As a parting shot against all his opponents, Coster composed a humorous dialogue entitled “Disputation of Frans Coster over the foundation of all Heresies, whether old or new” which was published in Antwerp in 1610, and in a German translation in 1617.74 While Coster was among the more prolific as well as long-winded of the Jesuit polemical writers – indeed he gained the sobriquet “Hammer of Heretics” for his efforts – he was not unique. Similar exchanges and counterexchanges could be recounted for Jesuits like the German dramatist and philologist of Greek, Jacob Gretser (1562–1625), the even more prolific German theologian Jeremias Drexel (1581–1638), or the French controversialists François Véron (1575–1649), and Louis Richeôme (1544–1625). What is characteristic of the Jesuit approach in these and other examples that could be adduced, is the determination to reply to the opponents on both an elite theological plane in Latin, as well as a more popular plane in the vernacular, in editions that were affordable and accessible to the urban merchant classes at the least. Taking advantage of the

72 D. Phil. Marbachii Disputationes Theologicae … (Argentorati, apud Bertram, 1606). 4°. Alb. Gauweri, Theologi Jenensis Disputationes Anti-Costerianæ (Jenæ, 1614). 4°. 73 The Anabaptist treatises are: Toetsteen van de versierde Apostolische Successie eens wederdoopers Jacob Pieterssen Van de Molen (T’Hantwerpen, 1603). 8° 219 pages; and Wederlegginghe Francisci Costeri Priester der Societeyt Jesu van de beant-woordinghe op syn vyf questien ... (T’Antwerpen, 1604). 8° 65 pages. The exchange with Osiander is: Osiander, M. Lucæ Osiandri solida confutatio virulentæ illius Apologiæ … (Francofurti, apud Bernerum, 1604). 8°; Coster, Apologia Francisci Costeri Sacerdotis Jesu, adversus Lucæ Osiandri hæretici Lutherani Refutationem Octo Propositionum Catholicarum … (Coloniæ Agrippinæ, Birkmannica, 1606). 8° 155 pages; Osiander, M. Lucæ Osiandri Enchiridion contra Pontificios, refutatione octo propositionum conscriptarum a Francisco Costero Jesuita ... (Francofurti, Bernerum, 1608). 8°; Coster, Ad stolidam refutationem Lucæ Osiandri hæretici Lutherani Responsio Francisci Costeri … (Coloniæ Agrippinæ, Birkmannica, 1608). 8° 392 pages. 74 Disputatie Francisci Costeri, Priester der Societeyt Iesu, Over het fondement alder Ketterijnen, t’ sy oude’, t’ sy nieuwe: by forme van t’ sammensprekinge. … (T’Hantwerpen, 1610). 8° 102 pages.

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cosmopolitan character of the Society of Jesus, successful authors’ works would receive swift translation into a variety of vernacular languages when suitable wherever the Jesuits had a presence. Also characteristic of early modern polemics generally, and not just for the Jesuits, was the dogged determination to make lengthy point-by-point refutations, leaving no stone unturned nor challenge unanswered, lest through silence consent be inferred. On the flip-side of these controversial writings were the meditational and devotional treatises, the fourth category I will discuss, and by far the most diverse and eclectic. Here one finds the medium through which the Jesuits most effectively applied their Ignatian heritage – the application of the senses through mental prayer and meditation, and the expectation of measurable fruits in service as a result – and yet the actual emphases and characteristic spirituality could vary wildly by author, particularly in the earlier period, before the Jesuit charism had become more defined. As in the case of the spiritual biographies, an enormous number of Jesuits made contributions in this genre, rather than the more constricted number of Jesuits who entered into the arena of polemical writing. Indeed one gets the sense that devotional writing was closer to the Jesuits’ heart and soul because every author who wrote controversial literature also wrote devotional treatises, whereas the opposite was not the case. Perhaps the most prolific, popular, and characteristic of early Jesuit devotional writers, whose oeuvre encompassed virtually all the subcategories in this genre, was the Spanish Jesuit Gaspar Loarte (1498–1578).75 The son of new-Christians in Medina del Campo, Loarte joined the influential spiritual circle of Juan de Avila, himself descended from new-Christians, before teaching theology at the university of Baeza from 1546–52, at which point he joined the Society of Jesus, and at the specific request of Ignatius came to Rome. The rest of his career, save the last two years of his life, were spent in Italy, and all of his publications were written originally in Italian, before being translated into Latin or the other European vernacular languages. He served as the Rector of the Jesuit college in Genoa, and later Messina, before spending several years as a confessor to pilgrims in Loreto, by the shrine of the Holy House. Spending his career in Italy was in part to protect him from the stigma associated with his new-Christian status in Spain, although even in Italy, he was never completely free from trailing suspicions.76 His oeuvre, despite its range, is strongly unified by a simple and direct style

75 Loarte is an author definitely in need of a modern scholarly biography. Until then, see M. Ruiz Jurado, “Loarte” in Diccionario Histórico, 2402–03; Gilmont, Les écrits sprituelles, 260–8; Sommervogel, tom. IV, 1879–86. 76 On the never-fully-trusted character of descendents of conversos, see Pierre-Antoine Fabre, “La conversion infinie des conversos. Des ‘nouveaux-chrétiens’ dans la Compagnie de Jésus au 16e siècle,” Annales: histoire, sciences sociales, 54.4 (1999): 875–93.

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addressing a humble and sincere Christian with an invitation to adopt a more profound manner of Christian living, through the practice of the sacraments, prayer, and the works of mercy. His first treatise, “The Exercise of a Christian Life,” appeared anonymously in Genoa in 1557, and then in an expanded version under his own name in 1559, and then in dozens of editions and excerpt editions in all the European vernaculars up through the nineteenth century.77 Broken into small chapters, it provides simple, concrete, and practical advice about holy living. It encourages the use of the sacraments, especially communion and confession; it provides instructions for various kinds of prayer, and includes an appendix of examples; it discusses the seven deadly sins and remedies for the temptations resulting therefrom. There is nothing particularly remarkable or novel in the advice or the kind of life advocated, but the appeal and success of this treatise, as all of Loarte’s other treatises, stems more from the psychological penetration of his understanding of sin, and the framework for presenting the remedies in the context of friendly and simple invitations and solutions. Loarte also published books of meditations on the passion of Jesus and on the mysteries of the Rosary of the Virgin.78 These treatises were broken into two parts, first providing counsel on the manner of meditating, and then providing a collection of points upon which to meditate. Often, but not always, these treatises were accompanied by woodcuts or engravings for part two, followed by three points for each meditation, and then a discussion. These treatises were also characterized by simplicity, and a tone of invitation to experience intimately the presence of Christ. They could be expanded or contracted, printed with engravings or without, and increased to 8° format or reduced to 24° format. More than any other sub-category of this devotional genre, they represent a direct application of the methods and character of the Spiritual Exercises brought outside the context of a retreat and into the daily application in the home, and again appeared in dozens of editions in numerous vernacular languages. Loarte published a small book addressing the methodical correction of particular faults, in this case the sins of blasphemy and gambling.79 Offering a variety of counsels in his characteristic unthreatening style, Loarte captures here again in a versatile format the elements of the first week of the Spiritual 77 Essercitio della vita cristiana, dove si tratta dei principali essercitii ne’ quali il christiano con molto frutto sprituale possa spender la sua vita (Genova, 1557). 16° ff. 160. 78 Instruttione et avisi, per meditare la passione di Christo nostro redentore; con alcune meditationi di essa (Rome: Soc. Jesu, 1570). 16°, f. 48, 16 engravings. Instruttione et avertimenti per meditar i misterii del Rosario, della Santissima Vergine Madre. Raccolti per il Reverendo P. Gasparo Loarte Dott. Theologho della Compagnia di Giesu. (Rome: Justina de’ Rossi, 1573). 24° f. 148. 79 Trattato delli remedii contra il gravissimo peccato della bestemia dove ancora si tratta del giurare, & spergiurare, & giocare, che sono vitii, che schifar si debono. (Roma, 1573). 18° 48 pages.

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Exercises of Ignatius. In his book on patience and abiding suffering, Loarte addresses a multiple audience of scholastics, religious, as well as confessors, or those in a position to give advice to this experiencing turmoil and trouble.80 With his characteristic tact and sensitivity, Loarte provides numerous consolations and encouragements, relying especially on the efficacy of meditation, prayer, and frequent communion. In part two, he addresses in particular those tribulations so closely tied to the human condition in the world: loss of wealth, illness, dishonor, family difficulties, and so forth. In part three, Loarte addresses especially the tribulations susceptible to those in cloister: temptation, desolation, dryness, and so on. The short work concludes with a series of vocal prayers accompanied by images. Closely related to the above work on patience and suffering is one written shortly thereafter and intended strictly for priests and confessors.81 In this second treatment of the theme of helping the suffering through the sacrament of confession, Loarte revisits the same problems as before but provides specific counsel to the confessor on penetrating the psychological realm of the penitent. Rather than offering a book of casuistry, as was a typical model for this sub-genre, Loarte reaches into his own experience as a confessor in Loreto to provide examples and suggestions for helping penitents to recognize and to conquer their characteristic faults. He reminds the confessor of his role as father, judge, and doctor, and provides varied encouragements for helping those in need. In one other area Loarte drew on his experience as a confessor in Loreto, by writing a devotional and formational treatise for the pilgrim, just in time for the Jubilee year of 1575, the first jubilee since the conclusion of the Council of Trent, and thus an extremely important symbol of the new face of early modern Catholicism. A convenient palm-sized vademecum running to about one hundred pages and published both in Rome and Venice in 1575 (conspicuously close to the most popular north-south pilgrimage route) the “Treatise on Holy Pilgrimages” dilated on the internal attitudes of devotion and sober reverence necessary for the sought-after indulgences to be valid.82 In case the inattentive reader missed his extensive treatment in the first ten chapters, chapter eleven provides a convenient recapitulation of the twentytwo points he intended to hammer home. 80 Il Conforti degli afflitti, dove si tratta de’ frutti e rimedi delle tribolazioni; utile cosi per secolari, come per i religiosi, massime confessori, donde potrano cavare conforti e medecine d’applicare a i penitenti (Roma, 1574). 12° f. 167. 81 Avisi di sacerdoti et confessori (Parma, 1579). 18° 317 pages. 82 Trattato delle sante peregrinazioni, dove s’insegna il modo di farle con molto frutto spirituale, Et si tratta anchora delle Stationi, & Indulgentie, che nelle peregrinationi si sogliono quadagnare. Composto nuovamente per il R. P. Gaspare Loarte, Dottor Theologo, della Compagnia di Giesu. (Rome, 1575). A more erudite Latin version was published at the same time, however, the edition I consulted was the following: Opusculum de sacris peregrinationibus atque indulgentiis. Omnia nunc Latinitati donata per Ioannem Gelderman (Cologne, 1619).

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First of all, the pilgrimage should be undertaken not for curiosity or idle pleasure, but devotion. Loarte then provides practical advice: unmarried women should stay home, and fathers should take care of their households before departure, and then confess and take communion.83 The long journey itself is an opportunity for spiritual progress: pilgrims should avoid quarrels, and try to hear Mass each morning if possible. Along the way, to avoid the tedium of the travel, pilgrims should distract themselves with meditations, stopping to smell the roses and to let the beauties of the countryside remind them of the glories of heaven and Eden, or the ravines remind them of the horror of hell. They should reverence crosses and Madonnas they pass on the roadside, and give alms for the poor, or if themselves in need, ask for alms gently. Pilgrims without the resources to provide pecuniary alms can give spiritual alms, edifying words and conversation, or say an Ave for those who offer charity. Loarte encourages the singing of psalms, hymns, or devotional songs to lighten the journey. At dusk, the group should find lodging and food in honest places. Lest one be tempted in bed before sleep, the pilgrims should meditate on how their souls will rest in heaven, since each day closer to the destination is also closer to death, so all should be prepared. They should walk in the light both physically and spiritually, and upon arrival in a city, immediately give thanks. Pilgrims should take care not to offend their hosts in the hostels and hospices, and once they reach their destination, give thanks inside a church. Pilgrims should refrain from sightseeing, especially in Rome, where they should avoid the pagan monuments, and return to home spiritually refreshed, where they can be models for their communities.84 Thus in the able hands of Loarte, the experiences of the model pilgrim become yet another opportunity to inculcate right belief and right practice, informing and modeling an internal conversion, as expressed through traditional acts of devotion. Loarte’s works were never compiled into any Opera omnia editions; if 83 Although Loarte did not encourage unmarried women to travel for the Jubilee, other Jesuits, including Benedetto Palmio during the special extension of the Jubilee (granted at the request of Carlo Borromeo to the archdiocese of Milan), were quick to notice and admire the participation of matrons and virgins. Palmio notes, however, that tables were positioned in the four Jubilee churches in Milan so as to separate male and female pilgrims. See Tacchi-Venturi, P. Pietro, 1861–1956, SJ, “L’anno santo del 1575 celebrato da San Carlo Borromeo in Milano secondo una lettera inedita del Padre Benedetto Palmio,” Echi di San Carlo Borromeo (1938): 3–5. 84 Loarte here demonstrates a clear understanding of “pilgrimages as social processes,” as Victor Turner describes them: “At first, it is [the pilgrim’s] subjective mood of penitence that is important while many long miles he covers are mainly secular, then sacred symbols begin to invest the route, while in the final stages, the route itself becomes a sacred, sometimes mythical journey until almost every step is a condensed, multivocal symbol capable of arousing much affect and desire.” Victor Turner, “Pilgrimages as Social Processes,” in Drama, Fields and Metaphors. Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, 1974), 197f.

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anything, they were dissected and individual portions or parts were excerpted into still smaller formats, testifying to their effective stand-alone status. However, if we consider them together, they typify the broad contours of Jesuit devotional writing: first of all, general counsels on virtuous living, and the practice of the Christian life; then meditations on the life and passion of Christ, or on the mysteries of the Rosary; counsels for conquering vices, such as blasphemy and gambling; comfort for those suffering tribulations; counsel for pilgrims; and specific books targeting priests and confessors to aid in their formation as consolers of souls. These are the treatises that appear again and again with variants of title, length, and treatment, by authors such as Luca Pinelli (1542–1607), Alonso Rodriguez (1526–1616), Achille Galliardi (1537–1607), or Jeremias Drexel, Peter Canisius, and Louis Richeôme, whom we have seen above.85 Such a discussion cannot be exhaustive, but it can map out the basic contours of the market and production of Jesuit devotional treatises. The only significant devotional sub-category not included in the above list would be treatments of angels, especially guardian angels, and souls in heaven, hell, or purgatory – but these began to arrive only after 1600, and point more in the direction of Baroque piety than to the earlier period of devotional writing that I am treating.86 First among the primary markets for these devotional and meditational treatises were the affiliations of students, workers, merchants, professionals, priests, and nobles that the Jesuits grouped together and guided in their Marian congregations – which brings us to the last category of devotional and formation literature: the supplemental treatises, manuals, and rulebooks for confraternities and sodalities.87 The Marian congregations began in the 85 Luca Pinelli was nearly as prolific and varied as Loarte, and Sommervogel records 18 titles written in either Latin or Italian and translated repeatedly. Drexel and Richeôme were indefatigable publishers in German and French, respectively, as well as Latin, and their works were also translated and reprinted widely throughout the seventeenth century. 86 See Luca Pinelli, Trattato dell’altra vita, e dello stato delle Anime in essa. Dal Padre Luca Pinelli, da Melfi, della Compagnia di Gesu. … (In Venezia, presso Gio. Batt. Ciotti, MDCIIII [1604]). 12°; Francesco Maria Albertini, Trattato dell’Angelo Custode cavato fedelmente da alcune prediche del R. P. Francesco Albertino, … (Napoli, per Gio. Jacomo Cadino, 1612). 8° 199 pages; Also Jacques Hautin, Angelus Custos, seu de mutuis angeli custodis et angelici clientis officiis (Antwerp, 1620). Antonio Vasconcellos, Tractado do Anjo da quarda (Evora, 1621). Jeremias Drexel, Horologivm avxiliaris tvtelaris angeli / auctore Hieremia Drexelio Ë Societate Iesv (Munich, 1622). In addition one might add the tradition of The Art of Dying Well, which dated from the fifteenth century, but which the Jesuits only began to develop after Bellarmine’s version of 1620. 87 See Sommervogel, tom X: 438–42. For a broad considerations of these groups in northern Europe, see Louis Châtellier, La religion des pauvres: les missions rurales en Europe et la formation du catholicisme moderne xvième-xixème siècles (Paris, 1993). The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500–1800 (Cambridge, 1997). For Italy, see my forthcoming Working in the Vineyard of the Lord: Jesuit Confraternities in Early Modern Italy (Toronto, 2004), ch 5. For Rome, see Michael Maher, SJ, “Reforming

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Roman College as an ad hoc collection of students under the leadership of the Belgian Jesuit Jan Leunis in 1563. From there they soon proliferated wherever the Jesuits established a college or professed house, in a perfect demonstration of the Jesuits’ capacity to take a good idea and replicate it throughout all the widespread capillaries of the Society. In an important way, the pious members of these sodalities became a kind of captive audience, as the spiritual director – always himself a Jesuit priest – would enjoin them to read edifying books to supplement their participation in the activities of the sodality. The regular meetings and charitable outreach of the sodality would then guarantee the opportunity to reinforce and to exercise the virtues inculcated in the devotional books, in a self-fulfilling cycle. Besides consuming the catechisms, spiritual biographies, polemics, and devotional treatises produced or recommended by the Jesuits, the Marian congregations also created a demand for rule books, manuals, and ephemeral printed materials such as litanies, prayers, and psalms that would accompany devotional activities such as Forty Hours devotions.88 The same Frans Coster we observed before as a controversialist was also among the most avid promoters of the Marian congregations in the Holy Roman Empire, the Low Countries, and France. His first series of publications from 1576 onward was in the promulgation of rulebooks for use by sodalists.89 Coster continued to reprint and to distribute his rulebook, adding first the approbation of Gregory XIII in 1581, and then, after the standardization of the rules by General Claudio Aquaviva in 1584, he expanded, renamed, and reprinted the rulebook in Latin, French, and Dutch editions in 1586 and 1587.90 Spanish and German editions followed early in the seventeenth century. Besides the continued proliferation of Coster’s editions, two other Jesuits, François Véron, and Gaspar Lechner (1584–1634), contributed their own variants on the rulebook in Latin by the first quarter of the seventeenth century.91 As yet

Rome: The Society of Jesus and Its Congregations,” Ph.D. Diss., University of Minnesota, 1998. 88 Luca Pinelli, SJ, Quaranta esercitii spirituali reguardanti l’oratione delle quarant’hore (Napoli, nella stamperia di Felice Stigliola, 1605). For a broad discussion of Forty Hour devotions with special emphasis on capuchins, see Carlo Cargnoni, Le quarantore ieri e oggi. Viaggio nella storia della predicazione cattolica, della devozione popolare e della spiritualità cappuccina (Rome, 1986). 89 Bulla super forma juramenti professionis fidei; cum piis et christianis Institutionibus, in usum Sodalitatis B. Mariae Virginis (Coloniæ, Apud Ludovicum Alectorium, et haeredes Iacobi Soteris, Anno 1576). 16° 344 pages. 90 On Aquaviva’s standardization, see Elder Mullan, The Sodality of our Lady Studied in the Documents (New York, 1912). Coster’s revised version: Libellus sodalitatis, hoc est, christianorum institutionun libri quinque in gratiam Sodalitatis B. Virginis Mariae (Antverpiae, ex officina Christophori Plantini, arcityp. regii, MDLXXXVI [1586]). 8° 493 pages. 91 Véron, Manuale Sodalitatis Beatae Mariae Virginis. In domibus & Gymnasiis Societatis Iesu toto Christiano orbe institutae, Miraculis dictae Sodalitatis illustratum. A.R.P. Francisco Veron

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another related expansion of the market for sodalist formation literature, the congregations in German lands of the empire and the Low Countries developed the practice of distributing a free book, or Xenium, to all members at the beginning of the each year.92 Not infrequently, this book was a catechism or spiritual biography, two categories of devotion which bring us full circle. It is hoped that this survey of the character and development of Jesuit devotional treatises can contribute to our understanding of the nature, means, and processes in the formation of a new Catholic identity in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Europe. This construction and dissemination of a new core devotional identity, by the means of a broad variety of affordable devotional publications, was just as much a part of the process of confessionalization in Europe as the differentiation from competing faiths, or collusion on the part of secular elites. Placing a critical mass of formational literature into the popular market, and thus into the hands and ears of a broad cross-section of the devout Christian public, was a vital element in the Jesuit ministerial strategy of informing minds and enflaming hearts. As proponents and participants in the re-fashioning of Catholic devotions, the Jesuits capitalized on their cosmopolitan membership to disseminate near simultaneous, one-size-fits-all treatises in Latin and the European vernacular languages, in a dramatic exploitation of the printing press for mass distribution. Although they themselves represented the interests of the clerical elites, their Ignatian charism compelled them to engage with the broadest cross-sections of early modern society, and the early publications they produced confirm their efforts to realize that goal. Jesuit devotional treatises focused on the internal life, but tended to be action oriented, aiming for the paradox of “contemplation in action.” Their spirituality was not radically new or revolutionary in its individual elements, but gained efficacy through its attention to the internal psychological motivations of the individual Christian and its insistence on the expression of sincere religious conversion through visible fruits in service. The Jesuits’ ultimate goal of reforming the whole world was to be accomplished by converting one soul at a time. Thus their early popular devotional writings placed themselves not on the plane of social activism, which would contribute to the suppression of the Jesuits in the eighteenth century, but on the spiritually and socially generic plane of the perfection of Societatis Jesu. Postrema Editio auctior & castigatior (Paris, 1608). Lechner, Sodalis Parthenius… (Ingolstadt, 1621). 92 Alfons K. A. Thijs, “Leven in en rond de ‘Sodaliteit’ te Antwerpen: sedert eeuwen een tijdspiegel,” in De Nottebohmzaal: Boek en mecenaat, various authors (Antwerp, 1993).

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the individual. One would search in vain for directives relating to the obligations owed to Caesar, or to any radical social program. The political status quo was taken for granted, and the Jesuits focused on changing and enflaming the heart of each individual wherever he or she was at the time. It was for that more intimate purpose that they developed a varied and effective repertory of spiritual tools, which I have addressed here in five thematic categories: 1) catechisms to anchor the understanding; 2) spiritual biographies to inspire with edifying models; 3) polemics to chasten and to warn against the alternatives; 4) meditational and devotional treatises to console and to provide practical advice; and 5) materials for devotional communities of likeminded individuals, to help to support and to reinforce all the other objectives. In this varied and deliberate manner did the Jesuits contribute to the process of confessionalization and the construction of an early modern Catholic identity, and thus did they seek to mold each soul.

Political Unity and Religious Diversity: Hermann Conring’s Confessional Writings and the Preface to Aristotle’s Politics of 1637 Constantin Fasolt*

Thomas Hobbes defined a person as someone “whose words or actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction.”1 His definition distinguishes sharply between the person and the person’s words or actions. Of course the words or actions can be regarded as the person’s own. That would reflect our natural understanding of what a person is: a human being saying and doing certain things. But Hobbes stretches the natural understanding beyond its ordinary limits. The way he sees the matter, words and actions need not at all belong to the person saying and doing them. They can represent the words and actions of someone else. Indeed, they need not come from any human being; they can be attributed to things. Even if the attribution is grounded in a fiction, the person does not lose its reality. From Hobbes’point of view, a person is like an actor appearing on a stage in one of infinitely many forms of play.2 The person is one thing, the role is quite another. The actor wears a mask. What lies behind the mask may never be revealed without undoing the very nature of the person. Hobbes justified his definition by drawing on the meaning of πρóσωπον * I would like to thank the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel, the American Philosophical Society, and the University of Chicago for their support of the research on which this article is based. I would also like to thank J. Michael Raley for his help in tracking down different versions of Conring's preface to Aristotle's Politics in the Herzog August Bibliothek. 1 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 1:16, ed. C. B. Macpherson (Harmondsworth, 1968), 217. 2 “The word Person is latine: instead whereof the Greeks have πρóσωπον, which signifies the Face, as Persona in latine signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the Stage; and sometimes more particularly that part of it, which disguiseth the face, as a Mask or Visard: And from the Stage, hath been translated to any Representer of speech and action, as well in Tribunalls, as Theaters. So that a Person, is the same that an Actor is, both on the Stage and in common Conversation." Hobbes, Leviathan, 217.

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in ancient Greek and persona in ancient Latin. But there was something more at stake than classical etymology. Hobbes was reacting to the strain that two opposing forces placed on early modern Europeans: on the one hand, deep uncertainty about the nature of religious truth, and on the other, the need to identify with some form of it. The writings of men like Luther, Zwingli, and Calvin and documents like the Augsburg Confession or the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent had never settled the question of religious truth. Each was lucid in its way. But they did not agree with one another and their interpretation was a matter of intense debate. Yet theologians, politicians, and ordinary folk all had to play their part in society. Emigration or the establishment of new communities in isolated places was taken up by some. But it was not for all, and minding your own business without disturbing others worked only so long as war did not come knocking on your door. War did come knocking, and soldiers came to ask if you were able to pronounce the shibboleth. What was your faith? Under those circumstances it made sense to heighten a distinction between the person and the person’s role that is basic to the human condition, but only on occasion raised to consciousness. In just this fashion Hermann Conring (1606–81), professor of medicine at the University of Helmstedt and soon to become professor of politics as well, stepped self-consciously onto the stage of European confessional debate early in 1648 in order to impersonate a Catholic theologian.3 At the time negotiations for bringing the Thirty Years War to a conclusion had long been underway. But late in 1646 confessional hackles had once again been raised by the publication of a Catholic memorandum maintaining that it was impossible to make real peace with Protestants.4 Even among Catholics that position was regarded as extreme. Conring decided to respond with a book entitled Pro pace perpetua Protestantibus danda consultatio Catholica (A Catholic Recommendation to Conclude Perpetual Peace with Protestants). He had it published under the fictitious imprint of “a long-suffering German” (Apud Germanum Patientem) in the fictitious town of Frideburg (actually Helmstedt), and he wrote it under the pseudonym Irenaeus Eubulus, which may perhaps be translated as “Peacelover Goodwill” without concealing the inelegance of a name chosen for no other purpose than to leave no doubt in the reader’s mind about the laudable intentions to which the author was laying claim.5 3 For information about Hermann Conring’s life and works, see Constantin Fasolt, The Limits of History (Chicago, 2004), and Michael Stolleis, ed., Hermann Conring (1606–1681): Beiträge zu Leben und Werk (Berlin, 1983), henceforth cited as Beiträge. 4 This was the Iudicium Theologicum written by Heinrich Wangnereck for the bishop of Augsburg in 1640, but not published until the end of 1646; see Fritz Dickmann, Der Westfälische Frieden, ed. Konrad Repgen, 4th edn (Münster, 1977), 413f. 5 Hermann Conring, Irenaeus Eubulus. Pro pace perpetua Protestantibus danda consultatio Catholica (Frideburgi [i.e. Helmstedt]: Apud Germanum Patientem, 1648), reprinted in

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Styling himself an Austrian theologian (Theologus Austriacus) Conring pretended to write from a point of view quite different from his own. He did not even hesitate to refer to Protestants as heretics in formulating the central question that Irenaeus Eubulus sought to answer: “Is it possible for his Holy Imperial Majesty and the other estates of the Roman Empire to conclude perpetual peace with Protestants, that is, with heretics, without violating conscience?”6 His disguise worked so well that its effect was possibly not quite what he intended. His friend Lampadius (1593–1649), a leading voice among Protestants, wrote a preface welcoming the arguments of Irenaeus Eubulus. But since he did not know the author’s true identity, he also gave vent to his frustration that even moderate Catholics did not seem able to refrain from denouncing Protestants as heretics.7 The Consultatio Catholica confronts historians interested in Conring’s views about religion with a difficulty similar to the one that led Lampadius astray. They can examine Conring’s performance of a role that he adopted in order to achieve a particular effect. But they cannot examine what Conring actually believed. They see a mask. But why did Conring choose to wear that mask? Was it a theological commitment? Or was it just a matter of pure politics? Was Conring seeking to subordinate religion to reason of state? Or was he quite on the contrary promoting religious unity? Did Conring have a kind of faith? If so, what kind? What, in short, did Hermann Conring think about religion? Conring’s Confessional Writings At first sight there may seem to be an easy road to answering those questions. The Consultatio Catholica was, after all, not Conring’s only writing on matters Hermann Conring, Opera, 7 vols, ed. Johann Wilhelm Goebel (Brunswick, 1730; reprinted Aalen, 1970–73), 2: 472–517, henceforth cited as Opera. About ten years later Conring republished the Consultatio Catholica as the first item in a collection of closely related documents, including Wangnereck’s Iudicium. This time he published it under his own name and called the whole collection De pace perpetua inter imperii Germanici ordines religione dissidentes servanda libelli duo (Helmstedt, 1657). Twenty years after that he published a revised edition of the same collection under the title De pace civili inter imperii ordines religione dissidentes perpetuo conservanda libri duo (Helmstedt, 1577 [i.e., 1677]). This is the version reproduced in Opera, 2: 467–66. Note the omission of Germanici in the title and the shift from pax perpetua in 1648 and 1657 to pax civilis perpetuo conservanda in 1677. 6 Caeterum quaestio ardua est, num talis perpetua pax Protestantibus, hoc est, haereticis, a S.C.M. et reliquis catholicis imperii Romani Ordinibus salva conscientia possit concedi. Opera, 2: 473. 7 See Conring, Opera, 2: 472, and cf. Dickmann, Der Westfälische Frieden, 414. On Lampadius see Richard Dietrich, “Jacobus Lampadius: Seine Bedeutung für die deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte und Staatstheorie,” in Forschungen zu Staat und Verfassung: Festgabe für Fritz Hartung, ed. Richard Dietrich and Gerhard Oestreich (Berlin, 1958), 163–85.

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of religion. On the contrary, the evidence for his ideas about religion is abundant. How abundant can be illustrated by a quick look at the bibliography that William Kelly and Michael Stolleis compiled in 1983.8 Eighty-seven items on the list of Conring’s published writings were printed in the thirteen years from 1648, when the Consultatio Catholica was published, to 1660, when Conring began to focus more exclusively on questions of politics (including both 1648 and 1660, but without counting either the numerous reprints that Kelly and Stolleis identify along with the originals, or the occasional German translations of writings that were first published in Latin). Twenty-five, more than a quarter, deal more or less directly with questions of religion; thirty-eight deal with politics, history, and law; and the remaining twenty-four deal with medicine, Conring’s original profession. Classifying Conring’s writings in this way is of course a little arbitrary. How, for example, should one classify the Gründlicher Bericht von der landesfürstlichen ertzbischöfflichen Hoch- und Gerechtigkeit über die Stadt Bremen (Thorough Account of the Majesty and Jurisdiction the Territorial Prince and Archbishop Has over the City of Bremen) published in 1652? It deals with episcopal authority. Is that a matter of politics or of confessional dispute? Morever, in the 1660s Conring wrote less about religion than before. Out of fifty-two items listed by Kelly and Stolleis for the years 1661–70, only eight were clearly devoted to religion. But that was still more than the six devoted to medicine, and it included a book that deserves to rank among the most important pieces Conring ever wrote about religion: the Pietas Academiae Juliae of 1668.9 The Pietas Academiae Juliae was Conring’s public, emphatic, and systematic declaration in favor of his mentor, Georg Calixt (1586–1656), against Calixt’s orthodox Lutheran opponents in the theological battles that had broken out into the open with the so-called Latermannsche Händel in 1648 and raged into the 1680s. He had it sent to Protestant courts, consistories, and universities in order to ensure the recognition that he wanted. In Johannes Wallmann’s judgment it played a crucial part in the single most important battle dividing Lutheranism after the Reformation by putting Lutheran orthodoxy on the defensive.10 There surely is no lack of evidence for Conring’s views about religion. And yet it does not take long to recognize that the road to understanding Conring’s ideas about religion is not as easy as the volume of the evidence suggests. True, he expressed himself often. But usually he expressed himself in terms that were 8 William Ashford Kelly and Michael Stolleis, “Hermann Conring: Gedruckte Werke, 1627–1751,” in Beiträge, 535–72. 9 Hermann Conring, Pietas Academiae Juliae programmate publico prorectoris et senatus academici adversus improbas et iniquas calumnias cum aliorum quorundam tum D. A. Strauchii asserta (Helmstedt, 1668). 10 Johannes Wallmann, “Helmstedter Theologie in Conrings Zeit,” in Beiträge, 36–7, 47–8, with references to the pertinent literature.

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defined by others. In fact, some of the items on the list of Conring’s confessional writings consist entirely of works by other authors that Conring simply re-edited because he wished to publicize their views.11 Some consist of annotations on writings by other authors that he regarded as particularly important.12 Most commonly he reacted to attacks from his opponents. Such was of course the case with the Consultatio Catholica itself, provoked by the publication of Heinrich Wangnereck’s Iudicium theologicum. Such was also the case with the Vindiciae Pacificationis Osnabruccensis et Monasteriensis, published in 1653 in order to rebut Pope Innocent X’s annulment of the Peace of Westphalia.13 And such was the case again with the Defensio ecclesiae Protestantium of 1654, to mention only three prominent examples of the polemics that constitute the bulk of Conring’s confessional writings.14 Most of the evidence, in other words, testifies to Conring’s engagement with the views of others. Hardly ever does he seem to have written down just what he regarded as central to his faith. This is true even of a document as clearly designed to make one theological position prevail over another as the Pietas Academiae Juliae.15 Conring declares it quite unnecessary to engage directly with the writings of Calixt and his opponents. Instead he concentrates on defending the university and the church against the calumnies of their enemies on the grounds that even non-theologians must not remain silent when their well-being is under direct assault.16 What he himself believed remains opaque. The problem thus is not simply that Conring relied on pseudonyms sometimes. The problem is that even when he did write under his own name, 11 Thus he edited the works of Georg Witzel and Georg Cassander, two sixteenth-century Catholic authors who had devoted themselves to the cause of religious peace. See Hermann Conring, ed., Via regia sive de controversis religionis capitibus conciliandis sententia, by Georg Witzel (Helmstedt, 1650), and Hermann Conring, ed., Georgii Cassandri et Georgii Wicelii De sacris nostri temporis controversiis libri duo (Helmstedt, 1659). 12 See his annotations on Grotius’s De veritate religionis christianae in Opera, 5:1–105. These were not published in Conring’s lifetime. 13 Vindiciae Pacificationis Osnabruccensis et Monasteriensis, a declaratione nullitatis articulorum arrogantiae Pontificum temerariae praejudicialium, impudenter satis et audacter attentata ab Innocentio Papa X (London, 1653). This was published under the pseudonym Ludovicus de Montesperato. 14 Defensio ecclesiae Protestantium adversus duo Pontificiorum argumenta, petita a successione episcoporum ac presbyterorum ab apostolis usque derivata (Helmstedt, 1654). Johannes Wallmann, “Helmstedter Theologie in Conrings Zeit,” in Beiträge, 52 n. 43, suggests that the Defensio may have been written in response to a request from Johannes Schwartzkopff, the chancellor of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who wanted arguments to counter the bad precedent that had just been set by the conversion of the oldest son of the count of Nassau to Catholicism. For more examples of Conring’s polemics see Inge Mager, “Hermann Conring als theologischer Schriftsteller, insbesondere in seinem Verhältnis zu Georg Calixt,” in Beiträge, 55–84. 15 The closest he ever seems to have come to venturing onto explicitly theological terrain is his De purgatorio animadversiones in Ioannem Mulmannum, Iesuitam (Helmstedt, 1651). 16 Pietas Academiae Juliae (Helmstedt, 1668), 10, 17.

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he did not expose his religious views to public scrutiny. No doubt he stood up for Calixt’s theology. No doubt he wanted to promote confessional coexistence on the basis of the Peace of Westphalia. That his writings breathe a certain spirit of toleration and that they are directed against religious intransigence is evident enough as well. Most certainly he thought that no form of religious intransigence was more important to combat than that which he attributed to the papacy. But what were the grounds on which he adopted those positions? Is there anything besides hostility to Catholics and good will for Protestants that holds his views together? Is there a principle, a system, some positive means by which we could attribute coherence to Conring’s religious views beyond the unilluminating truth that he opposed the papacy? What would that principle be? Is it theology? Is it faith? Is it philosophy? Or something altogether different? There are no good answers to those questions in the existing literature. Few of the scholars who examined Conring’s life and works have paid attention to his ideas about religion, and those who did have come to different conclusions. Ernst von Moeller, in what remains the most detailed biography, omits to deal with Conring’s confessional writings altogether.17 Erik Wolf, in an influential collection of biographical sketches of significant figures in the history of German legal thought, doubts that Conring was capable of any genuinely religious commitment. From his perspective Conring was an enlightened but somewhat shiftless rationalist with no real interest in religion, a cold and calculating modern thinker with little spiritual depth and a correspondingly weak sense of morality.18 Inge Mager agrees that Conring’s focus was on politics and that his writings on religion are much too disparate to coalesce into a coherent theological position (Gesamtposition). Yet she seeks to defend Conring against Wolf ’s insinuations of religious superficiality. She explains his reticence to engage directly in theological debate as the result of uncertainty about religious truth and disagreements with Calixt, and she insists that theology in Conring’s mind continued to function as an allembracing form of knowledge (eine totale Kategorie).19 Michael Stolleis agrees that Conring’s views on theology are difficult to ascertain. But in sharp contrast with Erik Wolf he maintains that a strong faith in God supported 17 Ernst von Moeller, Hermann Conring, der Vorkämpfer des deutschen Rechts, 1606–1681 (Hannover, 1915). The sole occasion on which Moeller touches directly on confessional questions concerns Conring’s decision in 1631 to accept a position in Brunswick in spite of his misgivings about Brunswick’s strict Lutheranism. See p. 28 for Moeller’s judgmental conclusion: “Wer weiss, wo er geendet hätte, wenn er damals Nein gesagt hätte und sich selber treu geblieben wäre? Tadle ihn, wer es darf! Ich tue es.” 18 Erik Wolf, Grosse Rechtsdenker der deutschen Geistesgeschichte, 4th ed. (Tübingen, 1963), 226–7. 19 Inge Mager, “Hermann Conring als theologischer Schriftsteller, insbesondere in seinem Verhältnis zu Georg Calixt,” in Beiträge, 56, 62, 64–6.

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Conring’s entire way of thinking. For Conring natural science was a means to study God’s design, human beings were obliged to follow God’s commands, and the mere pursuit of power was never legitimate. From Stolleis’s point of view, Conring’s ideas about theology lie at the very center of his thought.20 Perhaps Johannes Wallmann put it best when he declared that Conring the theologian is yet to be discovered.21 The purpose of this article is to contribute to that discovery. It proceeds on the assumption that the neglect of Conring’s confessional writings is not so much a deficiency in the scholarly literature as an expression of the sound intuition that the significance of Conring’s confessional writings is impossible to ascertain until the principles on which they rest are better understood. I will therefore refrain from a direct analysis of Conring’s confessional writings, not only for the pragmatic reason that there are more of them than can be studied here, but also because a direct approach seems methodologically premature. I will instead try to gain hold of the principles that held Conring’s ideas about theology together by focusing on the preface he wrote for his edition of Aristotle’s Politics in 1637 and dedicated to Duke William of Brunswick-Lüneburg.22 The Preface to Aristotle’s Politics of 1637 A preface to Aristotle’s Politics may not look like a good source of information about Conring’s views on religion. In fact, however, it furnishes a lucid statement of Conring’s most basic ideas, especially including his ideas about religion. It sketches the history of the empire, offers a diagnosis of the empire’s contemporary difficulties, defines the value of political science, and outlines 20 Michael Stolleis, “Die Einheit der Wissenschaften: Hermann Conring (1606–1681),” in Beiträge, 22, 23–4. 21 Johannes Wallmann, “Helmstedter Theologie in Conrings Zeit,” in Beiträge, 35. 22 Hermann Conring, “Praefatio in Politica Aristotelis ad Illustrissimum Principem Dn. Guilielmum Ducem Brunsvicensium et Luneburgensium,” in Aristotelis Politicorum libri octo, cum prooemio H. Conringii, ed. Hermann Conring (Helmstedt, 1637), 3–74 of the unpaginated front matter; pages 3–58 are reprinted in Opera, 1: 117–28. On the title page the preface is announced as Conring’s prooemium, but the text beginning on p. 3 bears no title of its own. It presents itself as a dedicatory letter to the duke, beginning “Illustrissimo Principi ac Domino D. Guilielmo … Felicitatem.” Later printings refer to this as Conring’s “Praefatio in Politica Aristotelis,” which is the title I shall use. Opera, 1: viii and 1: 117, uses the same title, but replaces Politica with Politicam. Note that the preface of 1637 is not to be confused with the “Introductio in Politica Aristotelis” that followed the preface on pages 75–183 of the unpaginated front matter. The introduction, unlike the preface, deals with the text and arrangement of Aristotle’s Politics. The revised edition of the Politics that Conring published with Daniel Heinsius’s Greek text in 1656, Aristotelis Politicorum libri superstites, ed. Hermann Conring (Helmstedt, 1656), includes a revised version of the “Introductio,” which is reprinted in Opera, 3: 457–90, but it does not include the preface of 1637.

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the proper relationship between politics and religion with a programmatic clarity that leaves little to be desired. It was formulated early in Conring’s career, when he was thirty-one, only one year after he obtained his doctorates in medicine and philosophy, and it was never superseded. Conring had it reprinted on at least three separate occasions.23 The first was in 1654, at the very end of his book on the boundaries of the Holy Roman Empire.24 The second was in 1666, in a collection of his prefatory letters.25 The third was in 1677, in a revised edition of the very same Consultatio Catholica with which this article began.26 It shows not only that Conring continued to believe in 1677 what he had written in 1637, but also how directly his reading of Aristotle’s Politics was linked to his understanding of the condition of the Holy Roman Empire and the problems of confessional co-existence. The preface to Aristotle’s Politics of 1637 can be divided into three parts.27 23 There may have been more. Conring’s works were often reprinted, and the reprints often differ from each other in ways impossible to ascertain except by direct inspection. A complete census has not been attempted here. 24 Hermann Conring, De finibus imperii Germanici libri duo (Helmstedt, 1654), 858[misprinted as 878]–90. The pirated edition of this work published under the same title in the same year by Martin in Lyon does not include the preface to Aristotle’s Politics. The second edition published by Conring himself, however, De finibus imperii Germanici, editio nova (Frankfurt and Leipzig, 1680–81), 854–90, does include the preface to Aristotle. 25 Hermann Conring, Epistolae hactenus sparsim editae, nunc uno volumine comprehensae, de varia doctrina (Helmstedt, 1666), 64–94. Goebel omitted the preface to Aristotle’s Politics from his reprint of the Epistolae in Opera, 6: 346–430, because he had already printed it together with the De finibus imperii Germanici in Opera, 1: 117–28. 26 Hermann Conring, De pace civili inter imperii ordines religione dissidentes perpetuo conservanda libri duo, 2nd edn (Helmstedt, 1577 [1677]), 878–96. Following p. 372, the pagination of this volume is thoroughly garbled; cf. the corrections printed at the end of the volume. Counting forward from p. 372, the title of the “Praefatio in Politica Aristotelis” appears on p. 376, and the text on pages 377–413. On this occasion Conring omitted to reprint the concluding pages of the preface, that is, pages 58–74 of the unpaginated front matter in the original edition of 1637, beginning with the sentence, “In quibus omnibus satis fortassis a consiliis nobis esse poterunt antiqua prudentiae civilis monumenta, ne denuo Bodinum aliquem quis censeat desiderandum.” They offer a brief critique of Bodin’s account of the empire, describe his initial encounter with the study of political science, and praise his mentor Calixt for his unique understanding of the value of political science. It seems likely that Conring decided to omit them because they were largely autobiographical, bound to personal circumstances forty years out of date, and did not add anything of substance to his argument concerning religious peace. As will be seen below, that argument was self-contained and ended with a nice conclusion of its own. 27 Since Goebel printed the preface to Aristotle’s Politics at the beginning of the De finibus imperii Germanici (Opera, 1: 114–485), one is led to assume that he reproduced the version Conring had included at the end of the De finibus imperii Germanici in 1654, and repeated in the second edition of 1680–81. But Goebel’s edition of the Opera does not contain the text of the autobiographical section at the end that is included there. He reproduced the truncated version that Conring published in De pace civili, 2nd edn (Helmstedt, 1577 [1677]), 878–96 [misprinted pagination; see preceding note]. After Goebel had already published the first volume of the Opera, he discovered certain manuscript annotations concerning details of the

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In the first part Conring offers his diagnosis of the condition of the Holy Roman Empire, or German Empire, as he preferred to call it on occasion.28 In the second part he describes his plans for a therapy by means of political science, particularly political science as taught in Aristotle’s Politics.29 And in the third part he addresses the main obstacle preventing such a therapy from taking effect.30 That obstacle, of course, consisted of disagreements over religion. In a few clearly articulated steps the preface thus explains how the calamity of the Thirty Years War is related to the history of the empire, how the history of the empire is related to the study of politics, and how the study of politics is related to disagreements over religion. It presents the reader with a logical chain of reasoning that runs right through the center of Conring’s thought. In order to gain a clearer sense of how that chain of reasoning was constructed, it will be best to describe the case that Conring makes in the order in which he made it. In part one Conring recounts the empire’s decline from the times of the Ottonians to the present. In the beginning, which is to say, up until the reign of Emperor Henry IV, the empire’s power was great. France, Poland, and Hungary were comparatively weak; Denmark and Sweden were more or less under the empire’s sway; and Italy was entirely under its control. At that time, Conring believed, the empire would have been able to withstand not just any one among its neighbors but all of them combined.31 Now, however, the empire has lost the power to determine its own fate, while Poland, France, the Ottoman empire, Sweden, Denmark, Britain, Russia, and Spain have managed to strengthen themselves, either by extending their boundaries or by centralizing power in the hands of the monarch.32 The causes to which Conring attributes the empire’s decline are manifold.33 He finds one of them in the natural warlikeness of the German people and the freebooting ways that manifested themselves just as soon as the troubles of Henry IV invited rebellion. Another consisted of the deplorable habit of history of the Holy Roman Empire. He published them in Opera, 2: 1-4. See his opening remarks in Opera, 2: i. Given the effort Goebel made to publish these notes, it seems unlikely that he omitted the autobiographical conclusion of the preface knowingly. I will pay no further attention to that conclusion, nor will I examine the details Goebel added from Conring’s manuscripts. I have also made no effort to trace the sources of Conring’s unattributed quotations, which he printed in italics. 28 Opera, 1:117–23. For Conring’s habit of referring to the Holy Roman Empire as imperium Germanicum see, among many other possible examples, the title of De finibus imperii Germanici. 29 Opera, 1: 123–5. 30 Opera, 1: 125–8. 31 Opera, 1: 118. 32 Opera, 1: 122. 33 Opera, 1: 118–20.

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German kings even prior to Henry IV to diminish their authority by alienating public goods, compounding their failure to distinguish properly between private and public finance. Then there was the power of the great men of the realm who only sought to build their own dynasties; the division of Germany into heritable counties; the ability of bishops to combine political and religious power in one hand; and Henry IV’s miscalculations. When Pope Gregory VII launched his deadly attack against the empire, the authority of German emperors was effectively ruined. Most principalities became hereditary and the conferral of episcopacies and abbacies was removed from imperial control. Political authority, Conring explains, depends on the ability to inspire fear or to distribute gifts. Once that ability was gone, the subjects of the empire lost their respect for its authority, escaped from central control, and concentrated on accumulating monarchical power over their own subjects. Conring acknowledges that this state of affairs is commonly referred to as the liberty of the estates. But in his opinion the liberty of the estates is but a euphemism for the servitude of the many to those few who managed to cast off the imperial yoke and concentrated power in their own hands in order to wield it all the more effectively over their subjects. The empire, Conring implies, was better qualified than the estates to serve the cause of liberty.34 There is one cause of the empire’s decline, however, that Conring considers worse than all the rest. That cause is religious strife.35 Just when the creation of imperial circles was raising modest hopes that the empire’s organization might recover some solidity, all hopes were dashed by civil war over the question of religion.36 Whether the religious disagreements were genuine or merely a convenient pretext for political advantage, there is no doubt in Conring’s mind that they divided Germany into factions more bitterly opposed to one another, and more destructive of good public order, than anything previously seen in German history. All other troubles look harmless by comparison. For now the question is no longer merely how to preserve internal unity. Now the survival of Germany itself hangs in the balance.37 Conring’s analysis of the empire’s contemporary condition concludes with a gloomy assessment of the difficulties ahead. Inaction is certainly no option. 34 Opera, 1: 120. Recent scholarship on the Holy Roman Empire would appear to corroborate that judgment more effectively than earlier generations of historians deemed imaginable; see James A. Vann, The Making of a State: Württemberg 1593–1793 (Ithaca, 1984); John Boyer and Julius Kirshner, eds, Politics and Society in the Holy Roman Empire, 1500–1806 (Chicago, 1986); and Karl Otmar Freiherr von Aretin, Das Alte Reich, 1648–1806, 3 vols (Stuttgart, 1993–97). 35 Opera, 1: 120–21. 36 On the imperial circles see Winfried Dotzauer, Die deutschen Reichskreise in der Verfassung des Alten Reiches und ihr Eigenleben, 1500–1806 (Darmstadt, 1989). 37 Opera, 1: 118, 121.

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If you are surrounded by other powers, you cannot preserve your safety by doing nothing. Where the goal is domination, your peace and tranquillity are nothing but an incitement to others to reduce you to slavery.38

That German unity must be restored is obvious. If we could act in harmony, and if we could agree with one another on what we want and what we do not want, there is no doubt that our immediate and our more distant neighbors could not harm our empire with impunity, even if they were all united.39

But it is difficult to see how national unity could possibly be brought about. In the first place, a people engaged in civil war is so deeply absorbed with its own affairs that it tends to forget its foreign enemies. It does not even recognize the danger it faces from abroad. It acts as though it were invisible to all the world and had none but friends beyond its borders. Hate for its neighbors can blind the weaker party in a civil war so thoroughly that, rather than face defeat at home, it expects salvation from enemies abroad and enters into alliances with foreign powers. That hardly helps the cause of unity.40 In the second place, an end to civil war is not at all the same as restoring national unity. Assume one party wins a decisive victory: Who is there who does not want to dominate his enemies if he can, or would not wish to return the state to a condition that, if his wish came true, would make it impossible for him to be in the position in which he actually finds himself?41

It is, in other words, not merely impractical to try to reverse the results of civil war; it is logically inconceivable. The very desire to go back to how things were before the war broke out proceeds from memories of past injustices and fears of revenge that presuppose the destruction of the very condition the victor is pretending to restore.42 There is no going back. Moreover, 38 Neque vero inter potentes tuto quiescas. Ubi dominatus quaeritur, pax et tranquillitas tua irritamentum est servitutis. Opera, 1: 123. 39 Ac certe non etiam nostrum hoc imperium vel uniti vicini populi omnes, vel remotiores quique lacesserent impune, si concordes ageremus, et idem volentes idem nolentes consuleremus in commune. Opera, 1: 123. 40 Opera, 1: 123. 41 Quotus vero quisque est, qui, cum possit, non etiam velit dominari hostibus devictis, aut rempublicam illo rursum loco cupiat esse, quo cum esset, ipse non poterat esse loco suo? Opera, 1: 123. 42 The analytic precision of Conring’s recognition that a difference in temporal location is sufficient to establish a categorical difference between otherwise identical sets of circumstances (the conditions that obtained before the war broke out, and the identical conditions that the victor would like to restore) is a good indication for his grasp of the logic of historical knowledge that forms the subject of Arthur Danto, Narration and Knowledge (New York, 1985).

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the power to rule is too sweet, and nothing is commonly considered to be sweeter than the power to control one’s enemies. [The unfortunate consequences of ] victory in civil war should therefore not be held against the victor, but against whoever heedlessly provoked the war. For starting that kind of war is malicious in the extreme, whereas refusing to abandon power won by arms is just a common human failing.43

The unfortunate truth of the matter is that a country divided by civil war is exposed to attack, not only from abroad, but from its own citizens, and from none more so than from those who manage to win a decisive victory, even if they happen to be your friends and share the same religion.44

The clarity with which Conring rejects victory and the confessional belief of the victors as a reliable foundation for the restoration of political order is remarkable. But matters are hardly better if victory is any less one-sided. As soon as one party prevails, it will promote factionalism. Even in the unlikely event that civil war concludes with a perfect balance between the contending parties, the wounds that they inflicted on each other will be remembered “in a dark corner of the mind.” In sum “the true friendship and firm association without which no commonwealth can flourish will not be easy to restore.”45 In the second part of his preface Conring proposes a therapy for the problems he has described in the first. That therapy consists of studying political science in general and Aristotle’s Politics in particular. He begins on a somewhat defensive note.46 He declares that he has no desire to impose his views on those who are obliged by birth or oath to care for the commonwealth. He seems to have feared that it might not have been regarded as appropriate for him to meddle in political affairs because his appointment at the University of Helmstedt obliged him to teach natural philosophy from 1632–37 and medicine thereafter. It was not until 1650 that he was formally appointed to a chair of politics. In his excuse he mentions the private ills

43 Nimis dulce est regnare: nihil dulcius certe vulgo aestimatur, quam hostibus imperare. Sic scilicet fere res est: ut dominatus ex victoria civilis belli natus non tam vitio vertendus sit victori, quam illi qui belli auctor temere fuit: quum movere istiusmodi bellum malitiae plerumque sit extremae, dominatum armis partum nolle dimittere, communis hominum impotentiae. Opera, 1: 123. 44 Neque tamen externis tantum patet ad ictum civitas suis dissidiis, sed et ipsis civibus, ipsis amicis ejusdemque sacramenti hominibus, maxime ubi veram atque sine exceptione victoriam aliqui expresserint. Opera, 1: 123. 45 Quod etsi aequis partibus finiatur contentio, maneat tamen repostum alta mente inflictum utrinque vulnus, haud rursus coeunte facile vera amicitia ac firma societate; qua sine tamen nulla civitas est salva. Opera, 1: 123. 46 Opera, 1: 123–4.

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arising day in, day out, from the convulsion of the public order. They make it impossible for him to remain completely silent. The common people have a right to complain about their suffering at the hands of the rulers of this earth, and they may even be obliged to raise their voices when the rulers of the earth are tottering. But the main reason why Conring regards himself entitled to speak out is that his business (negocium) consists not only of knowledge in general (eruditio), but also of knowledge of politics in particular (civilis sapientia). Unless he is very much mistaken, Germany’s ills flow in large measure from failure to heed the truth (philosophia). No one whose job it is to teach true philosophy can therefore very well avoid addressing himself to Germany’s political travails. With this emphatic declaration that men of knowledge cannot fulfill their calling unless they accept responsibility for their role in politics, Conring hits his stride.47 He draws on the analogy with medicine. As a physician needs to know the illness in order to be able to demonstrate the value of medicine, so someone wishing to establish that political science (civilis prudentia) is not merely useful, but necessary to the common good, must understand the ills afflicting the commonwealth. Ignorance of the principles of monarchical government is the reason why the kings of Germany lost their authority. Ignorance of the art of government led a misguided people into armed rebellion against its rulers. If political science had been properly understood, the authority of German kings would have survived intact, or at the very least Germany would have known how to transform itself into a proper aristocracy, on the Venetian model, and not descended into utter confusion. Just as neglect of political science has been the main cause for Germany’s deterioration, so the study of political science affords whatever hope is left for Germany’s restoration. Where would a collapsing commonwealth find more effective assistance and protection from total ruin than in the doctrine that alone can tell what must be sought and what avoided in public affairs, that alone estimates both risks and damages, that carefully weighs hopes and fears, and that alone knows how to treat the disease?48

It may be worth stressing that Conring’s understanding of political science is of course not identical with that maintained by members of the academic discipline carrying the same name today. The differences are significant.49 But Opera, 1: 124. Et vero undenam collabescens aliqua republica praesentius capiat auxilium ac ruinae suae fulcimentum, quam ex illa doctrina, quae sola novit quid fugiendum publice quid appetendum sit, quae sola pericula damnaque expendit, quae denique spe metuque utrinque libratis sola non ignorat medicinam malorum? Opera, 1: 124. 49 In brief, Conring regarded science as complementary to history. History consisted of 47 48

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it is crucial to realize that he does regard it as a science. To be sure, his favorite way of referring to it is civilis prudentia. But he refers to it as politica scientia, civilis philosophia, and civilis sapientia as well.50 More important, the difference between civilis prudentia and politica scientia is not, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, the difference between a virtue and a science. The difference is that politica scientia means political science as such whereas civilis prudentia means political science as applied in practice. The difference turns on a technical distinction in Aristotelian philosophy between the different c ways (what Conring calls habitus, and Aristotle ε′ξις) in which the same knowledge can manifest itself. Where that difference does not demand special attention, politica scientia and civilis prudentia can serve as synonyms. In Conring’s view both are expressions of what he simply calls politica, and he leaves no doubt at all that politica is a science in the strict sense of the term. As he puts it in his Miscellaneous Theses on Civil Prudence : Prudentia civilis and politica are different words for the same thing. … Civilis prudentia deals exclusively with the characteristics of bodies politic in and of themselves. Whatever is not characteristic of bodies politic in and of themselves falls outside the scope of politica scientia. … We maintain that politica is a true science in the strict sense of the term. But it can also be considered a [kind of ] prudentia, because an expert in this science is well equipped to govern a commonwealth.51

The significance Conring attributes to political science is evidently great. empirical facts obtained by direct observation or by relying on direct observations reported by others. Science consisted of rational explanations of those facts by means of universally valid causal relations. Cf. Constantin Fasolt, “Conring on History,” in Supplementum Festivum: Studies in Honor of Paul Oskar Kristeller, ed. James Hankins, John Monfasani, and Frederick Purnell (Binghamton, 1987), 563–87. 50 For examples see the “Praefatio de historiarum, Germanorum inprimis, studiis,” in Hermann Conring, ed., De moribus Germanorum, by Tacitus (Helmstedt, 1635), in Opera, 5: 253–78; Theses miscellaneae de civili prudentia (Helmstedt, 1650), in Opera, 3: 277–80; De civili prudentia liber unus (Helmstedt, 1662), in Opera, 3: 280–421; and Propolitica sive brevis introductio in civilem philosophiam (Helmstedt, 1663). 51 Vox Prudentia civilis, idem quid notat ac vox Politices. … Ad civilem prudentiam pertinent eae solae affectiones, quae de civitate primo ac per se praedicantur. Quae vero reipublicae primo ac per se non insunt, a Politica scientia aliena sunt. … Nos politicam vere et proprie dictam scientiam esse affirmamus. Potest etiam prudentia censeri, in quantum videlicet hac scientia imbutus quis redditur aptus reipublicae gerendae. Theses miscellaneae de civili prudentia, nrs. 1, 63–4, 83–4, Opera, 3: 277–80. Conring made the same point at much greater length in De civili prudentia liber unus, chapters 8–9, Opera, 3: 318–37. For background see Pierre Aubenque, La prudence chez Aristote (Paris, 1963), esp. 33–41; Volker Sellin, “Politik,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, 7 vols, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart, 1972–92), 4: 789–874, esp. 814–24; and Wolfgang Weber, Prudentia Gubernatoria: Studien zur Herrschaftslehre in der deutschen politischen Wissenschaft des 17. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 1992).

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But he is careful not to exaggerate its power. Even political science cannot foretell the future. Political science can make predictions of a certain kind. But such predictions are subject to the same limits that circumscribe all forms of human knowledge. “Nature has hidden many things beneath a sacred cover, and no mortal human being is permitted to know everything.”52 Again he draws on the analogy with medicine: in an acute illness predictions of recovery or death are never certain. Illnesses of the body politic are similar. To the extent that they are acute (acutum aliquid ), they are subject to scientific analysis. But they also include an element of unpredictability (fatale aliquid ). That element comes from God, and since it comes from God, it is only for God to know.53 One must accordingly distinguish between things that can, and that cannot, be predicted. But that does not detract from the value of political science as such. Much less does it afford an argument for predictions made on other than scientific grounds. To the extent that such matters are possible to penetrate with human ingenuity at all, neither the stars nor the birds teach them to us, but only the oracles of prudence. They will more readily reveal the remedies for our ills to us than Delphi ever did to ancient Greeks. They are uncorrupted counsellors, free of hate, fear, and hope. For they alone keep their distance from the causes of such emotions.54

The oracles of prudence (prudentiae oracula). With that crucial and wonderfully telling phrase Conring establishes that the pursuit of science is not at all a matter of religious neutrality. As the jealous God of the Old Testament refused to tolerate other divinities, so the jealous God of science refuses to tolerate other forms of knowledge. Conring has nothing but contempt for oracles of any other kind and does not hesitate to brand them as superstition. In such matters there is no reason for consulting Ammon, beseeching Delphi, inspecting entrails, observing the flight of birds, or questioning our Chaldeans last of all – methods we perceive to be dear to many people in spite of their having been repeatedly prohibited by divine and human law. Those kinds of seers are not 52 Solus in hisce prudens sapit. Soli illi datum imminentia non nescire. In quantum sane futurorum capax est humanum genus. Etenim multa tegit sacro involucro natura, nec ullis fas est scire quidem mortalibus omnia. Opera, 1: 124. 53 Opera, 1: 124. This clearly reflects Conring’s knowledge of Aristotle’s views on so-called future contingents. For a lucid contemporary analysis of this issue see Danto, Narration and Knowledge, 183–200. 54 Quaecunque tamen humano in his sunt ingenio pervia, illa profecto non astra, non aves docebunt, sed prudentiae oracula. Ab illis etiam promptius remedia malis nostris impetrabimus, quam Graeci olim Delphis. Haec incorrupti consiliarii, absque odio, absque timore et spe; ut quorum et causas sola habeant procul. Opera, 1: 124.

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inspired to foretell the future by means of art or science. They are superstitious fortunetellers and impudent soothsayers who give directions to others without knowing their own way.55

Science can conquer superstition. But only if its advice is closely heeded. Science may not be taken up or dropped at will. While things were going well, it was perhaps permissible not to pay much attention. But in the face of Germany’s destruction that is no longer so. When the wind is favorable and the skies are clear, on the high seas, far from the rocks, the rudder can safely be entrusted to anyone. But on the sandbanks or when the north wind is raging, our safety depends upon the skipper. Thus, so long as the commonwealth is at peace, one need perhaps not always call on the counsel of political science. Under those circumstance even ordinary people picked randomly from a crowd can govern reasonably well. But now the world is being turned upside down. Every mistake can have a lethal consequence. Continuing to live according to the old ways under such circumstances, if I am not completely wrong, would both be a horrendous crime and the height of madness.56

Science, moreover, is more than just an instrumental form of knowledge or a diversion for the curious, and it does more than merely to reveal the means by which Germany’s unity can be restored. Science is in and of itself one of those means because it pleases God. Not to want to know is in and of itself an offense against God, as wanting to know is to obey God’s laws. Confusion spreading throughout the mind is certain evidence for the wrath of God.57

Of course God helps the stupid every now and then. But that does not make stupidity a good example or a reliable defense.58 Science is a religious 55 Neque enim est quur in his negotiis, aut Ammonem consulamus, aut petamus Delphos, aut inspiciamus exta, aut aves observemus, aut postremo Chaldaeos nostros interrogemus; quod nunc etiam tot post interdicta divina humanaque multis cernimus esse familiare. Non enim sunt ii aut arte divini aut scientia, sed superstitiosi vates, impudentes harioli, Qui sibi semitam non sapiunt alteri monstrant viam. Opera, 1: 124. 56 Ut enim impetrent veniam suae negligentiae tempora antecessa, haec certe nescio qui inveniant. Scilicet ut secundo vento aut tranquillo caelo, inque alto, longe a rupibus, sine periculo clavus navigii cuivis etiam committitur; inter Syrtes vero aut depraeliantibus Aquilonibus ad solum tuto nauclerum recurrimus: sic quieta adhuc republica fortassis licuerit non advocare semper prudentiam civilem in consilium, et potuerint illam non male moderari vel de trivio homunciones; at nunc quando summa imis vertuntur, quumque error quilibet habeat quid lethale, profecto moribus illis (nisi totus fallor) vivere et nefas magnum et summa dementia fuerit. Opera, 1: 124. 57 Nolle sapere, hoc ipsum est Deum offendere: ut velle, ejus est legibus obsequi: certumque est divinae indicium irae caligo menti offusa. Opera, 1: 125. 58 Opera, 1: 125.

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obligation. God grants his favor only to people that do not hide from truth, and God hides the truth from people who refuse to do his will. We have provoked the wrath of God with countless sins. Once his wrath has been placated, I hope that foresight and hard work will restore German affairs to integrity, as if by a ceremony of postliminium; that the original honor of the people will return; and that the liberty of the estates will be moderated by monarchy in such a fashion that we must neither fear the wilfulness of princes nor the licence of the estates, but that the sacred authority of the laws will constrain all to fulfill their proper function.59

Science, in other words, is the best hope that Conring has for overcoming the destructive selfishness that has divided Germany and that prevents the parts from restoring the unity on which their prosperity depends. Science is the pursuit of knowledge, and the pursuit of knowledge is a religious offering, a sacrifice intended to propitiate a deity visiting its wrath upon a sinful people. In the third part of the preface Conring turns to what he regards as the greatest obstacle that must be overcome for Germany to reap the benefits of science. That obstacle, of course, consists of religious disagreements. He begins conventionally enough.60 He calls religious disagreements the single most important cause for the murderous slaughter in which Germany is threatening to consume itself. He indicts religious hatred as an unjustifiable, indeed, inhuman form of superstition and likens it to the misguided zealotry of Jews (furores Judaicorum zelotarum) who think it wrong to show the way to, or accept gifts from, anyone besides other Jews. He insists that neither the true faith (rationalis pietas) nor the Mosaic law lend their support to such a lack of humanity, and he invokes as proof the water Christ accepted from the Samaritan woman and the parable of the good Samaritan.61 He reminds his readers that Christians are commanded to love their enemies. Of course he recognizes that St. Paul prohibits communion with heretics. But in his judgment the Apostle’s strictures only apply where heresy has been established beyond a doubt. They do not apply to anyone for whom there is still hope, much less to people seduced into heresy by others. That sounds like a disappointing mixture of anti-Judaism, empty pieties, 59 Et certe placata numinis indignatione, quam innumeris hactenus peccatis irritavimus, restituetur providendo ac laborando quasi postliminio in integrum etiam res, (quantum spero) Germanorum, redibitque pristinum gentis decus, ita libertate Ordinum temperato Principatu, ut neque in hoc libidinem neque in illis licentiam habeamus metuere, sed sacra legum auctoritate cuncta in officio contineantur. Opera, 1:125. Postliminium is the ceremony by which Roman citizens who had been captured and fallen into slavery were restored to their civic rights; cf. Adolf Berger, Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law (Philadelphia, 1953), s.v. postliminium. 60 Opera, 1: 125. 61 Opera, 1: 125; cf. John 4: 8–42, Luke 10: 30–7.

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and vain admonitions to Christian charity. Indeed, that Conring appears to have considered Christ’s example as probative for Jews points to the limits of his own humanity. What follows, however, amounts to a radical assault on confessional identity. The crucial passage is worth quoting in full: Here I will not engage in debates about the question whether any of the contending parties ought to be indicted for some kind of heresy, or to which of them the charge in fact applies. But this I do consider certain: true heresy does not consist of error, but of the pertinacity with which the error is maintained. Lethal ideas sometimes rise up in people of good character. There is no inconsistency between having a Catholic mind and holding a heretical opinion, just as a person acting with entirely good will is capable of committing iniquities. What is it that moves us to think worse about each other than Salvian, priest of ancient Marseille and a man of undisputed sanctity, thought of the Arians? “They are heretics,” he said, “but unknowingly; they are heretics only in our eyes, not in their own. For they are so certain of their own adherence to the Catholic faith that they charge us with heresy. What they are in our eyes, we are in theirs.” And a little later he adds, “Thus they err, but in good faith, not out of hatred of God or partiality, but believing themselves to honor and love God. Although they may not have the right faith, they judge it to be the perfect love of God. No one can know how they are to be punished for the error of their false opinion on judgment day, except the judge himself.”62

Relying on Salvian for support, Conring thus draws a radical distinction between the quality of a person – what he calls the ingenium – and the beliefs that person may express. He insists that in and of itself there is no necessary relationship between the former and the latter. A good person can do bad things out of good will; a person with a Catholic mind can hold heretical opinions; and though Conring does not say so, one suspects that he considered the reverse equally true: a bad person can do good things out of bad will, and heretics can hold Catholic opinions. There is no uniform relationship between character, action, and belief; human beings are no more 62 Non equidem disputabo hic, sitne partium aliqua haereseos nomine infamanda, vel in quamnam earum merito hoc congruat probrum; id certum arbitror, verum haereticum non tam errore quam errandi pertinacia censendum esse, et posse interdum lethales sententias non pessimis ingeniis innasci, adeoque cum haeretica opinione nonnunquam catholicum animum consistere; plane ut agere iniquum quod etiam minime iniquus potest. Quid nos movet vero, quur peius de nobis invicem suspicemur, quam de Arianis sanctissimus Massiliensium olim presbyter Salvianus? Haeretici sunt, dicebat ille, sed non scientes: denique apud nos sunt haeretici, apud se non sunt: nam in tantum se catholicos esse judicant, ut nos ipsos titulo haereticae pravitatis infament. Quod ergo illi nobis sunt et hoc nos illis. Paulo post subjungens: Errant ergo, sed bono animo errant, non odio sed affectu Dei; honorare se Dominum atque amare credentes. Quamvis non habent rectam fidem, illi tamen hoc perfectam Dei aestimant caritatem; et qualiter pro hoc ipso falsae opinionis errore in die judicii puniendi sunt, nemo potest scire nisi judex. Opera, 1: 126. Cf. Salvian, De gubernatione Dei, in Patrologia latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1847), 53: 95–6.

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able to judge the quality of a person than to predict the future. As only God can know whether or not the sick will actually die, so only God can judge who actually is a heretic. From this premise Conring goes on to draw a series of momentous conclusions. First, he acknowledges the terrifying power of belief to blind those whose belief it is to the possibility that others may hold their own belief in equally good conscience. Great is the power of inveterate belief over both parties, as if it had been mixed with mother’s milk, like a disease that, if it is exacerbated by partisan zeal, strikes its victims deaf and blind, as Galen agrees, and that, if we believe him, is more impossible to cure than leprosy.63

Second, Conring does not abandon his conviction that heresy exists and must be punished. But he defines heresy on grounds entirely different from religious belief. The true heretic is someone who is driven by arrogance or love of fame to found or foster a sect and who disturbs the public peace of the church with factions.64

Religious belief thus is irrelevant to prosecutions for heresy in all courts but one: the court where God himself presides. A few years later Conring would justify the irrelevance of religious belief on two specific grounds: first, because invincible error constitutes a valid defense, and second, because it is strictly impossible to determine whether the error on which any particular instance of false religious belief could be said to rest is vincible or not.65 As far as human courts are concerned, that leaves only deliberate and freely acknowledged violations of conscience and disturbances of the public order as potential grounds for heresy. Heresy thus turns on action, but only action of a specific kind, namely, action that divides the good of the individual from that of the community. 63 Magna scilicet vis est in utramque partem opinionis inolitae, quaeque ceu cum materno lacte immulsa est, si accedat cumprimis sectae studium, morbus, Galeno etiam meo judice, quavis scabie insanabilior, quo qui tenentur, si eidem credimus, coeci atque surdi reddi consuevere. Opera, 1:126. Cf. Wittgenstein’s beautifully clear statement of the same basic point, “One can mistrust one’s own senses, but not one’s own belief. If there were a verb meaning ‘to believe falsely,’ it would not have any significant first person present indicative.” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations: The English Text of the Third Edition, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York, 1958), 190. 64 Non ego pravae pervicaciae sum patronus, nec veniam peto vere haeretico homini, h. e. quem arrogantia aut nominis amor sectam facit condere aut fovere, quique factionibus turbat publicam Ecclesiae tranquillitatem. Opera, 1: 126. 65 See Conring’s letter “De haeresi et haereticorum poenis” of 23 June 1641 (Feria IV Trinitatis) to Justus Gesenius, Opera, 6: 631–3.

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You may believe what you like, and in a sense you may even do what you like; but you may not divide yourself from the community. To believe that your own good is incompatible with the good of all is arrogance and love of fame; to act on that belief is to promote a sect; to continue to promote a sect when asked to stop is pertinacity; and pertinacity must be restrained. Third, Conring distinguishes sharply between followers and leaders.66 He has no mercy for instigators of heresy. Nor are their followers to be regarded as completely free of blame. But since the followers are not themselves propelled by partisan zeal, the proper course of action is not to threaten but to enlighten them. They suffer from a deception. Force may possibly have to be used, but it must never even seem to be directed at their destruction. They must be treated gently until they understand that their opponents hate, not their persons, but only, exclusively, their beliefs. Fourth and finally, Conring insists that public peace does not depend on the establishment of religious unity. I want nothing other, illustrious Prince, than that each and every one of us in our entirety be called upon in earnest to face the perils disturbing our commonwealth, so that minds presently torn asunder and dispersed by faction will be restored to concord and devotion to the commonwealth in every way. There is no reason whatsoever, not even the religious controversies by which we are afflicted, not to separate our private opinions from the pursuit of concord and public peace. For the religious hatred engaging our citizens does not arise from the law of faith, but from a mindless superstition.67

Here Conring’s argument has reached its culmination. It is not faith but superstition that causes hatred and religious war. Superstition, not true faith, maintains that only one kind of religious faith can lead to peace. Superstition forges a meretricious bond between the common good and individual opinion that only accomplishes the opposite of what it promises. It makes people hate their neighbors and judge them in lieu of God. It blinds them to the truth that their own faith looks as heretical to others as other faiths look to themselves. True faith must be emancipated from slavery to superstition. And that can only happen if the pursuit of peace is segregated from the search for religious truth. In his concluding observations Conring describes the task that lies ahead. Opera, 1: 126. Ego vero nihil aliud volo, Illustrissime Princeps, quam periculis in quibus patria versatur praesentissimis, omnes omnino, quotquot sumus, serio admoneri, ut animi divulsi et factionibus distracti omnibus modis reducantur ad concordiam et commune reipublicae studium: nihil vero esse, ne religionis quidem queis laboramus controversias, quur saltim a curis concordiae et pacis civilis cogitationes nostras segregemus: quod enim hinc hostilia inter cives odia exerceantur, non tam pietatis lege fieri quam inani quadam superstitione. Opera, 1: 126. 66 67

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He quotes church fathers like Cyprian, Optatus, and Gregory of Nazianz to support his view that friendship with people caught in religious error is possible. He evokes the ideal of a commonwealth united with Christ in body, blood, and soul and balances it against the looming threat of a division like that which Rehoboam and Jeroboam caused between Israel and Juda. And he concludes with a call for an end, not only to military hostilities, but also to the relaxation of public morals and the manifold forms of crime to which the war has given rise. What is the point of pondering the strength and the authority of law amidst pure violence and crimes that have long since forced every law under their power and now undermine the very foundations of the commonwealth? Justice suffers in any kind of war, and our military has long since become corrupted. But in a civil war, as ours has mostly been, the very idea of law dies too.68

Conring does not profess to know specifically how obedience to the laws is to be restored. But that is not his task. “In human affairs the story is always the same; only the persons change.”69 There is accordingly no better course of action than to heed the remedies for civil war that Aristotle advocated centuries ago. Conring concludes with an expression of his hope: that in reality things will turn out for us the way they do for trees when they are split apart by wedges. As the splits close up again with extraordinary force and in a single instant the moment the wedges are removed, may all of us return to concord and unity the moment those who now divide us at their pleasure have been cast out.70

Political Unity and Religious Diversity By no means every point that Conring made was new. His quotations from the church fathers alone are enough to show how deeply he was indebted to antiquity. Tradition, moreover, had long held that heresy did not simply 68 Quid enim inter meram vim et scelera, quae dudum leges omnes suam in potestatem traduxerunt, et jam fundamenta reipublicae subruunt, cogitemus legum robur atque auctoritatem: Scilicet inter arma etiam alias justitia prolabitur, neque nuper primum militia nostra coepit corrumpi; inter civilia autem arma, qualia hactenus magnam partem fuere nostra, etiam moritur ius. Opera, 1: 127–8. 69 Eadem quippe semper fabula agitur humanarum rerum, tantum mutantur personae. Opera, 1: 128. 70 Spero autem nobis usu eventurum, id quod arboribus qui cuneis divelluntur. Scilicet ut illae excussis cuneis magno impetu unoque momento ad sese redeunt, ita ad concordiam atque unitatem redituros nos omnes, ubi rejecti fuerint, qui nos ad libidinem suam distrahunt. Opera, 1: 128.

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consist of heterodox belief.71 Conring’s stress on pertinacity was not unprecedented. Nor could it be said that Conring was fully satisfied with every aspect of his argument. He waffled over St. Paul’s treatment of heretics. As late as 1641 he wrote to his friend Justus Gesenius that he felt unsure about the proper penalties for heresy.72 He did not yet have much to say about just how he envisioned religion and politics to be related in the future. It would take time and further writings before he could speak with confidence about the difference between natural and revealed religion, the principle of human fallibility, and the impossibility of knowing who held heretical beliefs, as opposed to the possibility of knowing who disturbed the public order.73 And yet, when all due qualifications have been made Conring’s preface to Aristotle’s Politics of 1637 testifies to a basic shift in the relationship between religion and politics. In Conring’s mind the boundaries between the sacred and the profane were redrawn in such a way that religious diversity could be envisioned without any necessary threat to political unity. In 1677 Conring would say it clearly: Without mentioning examples from antiquity, our age itself exhibits many cases of flourishing commonwealths in every corner of the world where there is much religious diversity without any damage to political unity.74

The main ingredient in this shift was the elimination of confessional belief from the relationship between the person and the political community. Confessional belief, Conring maintained, was utterly irrelevant to the question whether a person did or did not qualify as a good member of the community. Given the fierce intensity with which people had staked their 71 “A heretic, by canonical definition, was one whose views were ‘chosen by human perception, contrary to holy scripture, publicly avowed and obstinately defended.’” R. I. Moore, The Formation of a Persecuting Society (Oxford, 1987), 68, with reference to Gratian, Decretum, C.24 q.3 cc.27–31, in Corpus Iuris Canonici, ed. E. Friedberg (Leipzig, 1879), 1: 997–8. 72 “De haeresi et haereticorum poenis” of 23 June 1641 (Feria IV Trinitatis) to Justus Gesenius, Opera, 6: 632. 73 Most of his uncertainties seem to have been settled by 1646. See his second letter “De haeresi et haereticorum poenis” to Gesenius, dated 28 May 1646 (Opera, 6: 633–6), and especially his Exercitatio politica de maiestatis civilis autoritate et officio circa sacra of 1645 (Opera, 4: 615–43). Conring returned to the subject much later in his Exercitatio politica de majestate eiusque iuribus circa sacra et profana potissimis of 1669 (Opera, 4: 605–15). Also informative is a letter “De immortalitate animae” of 7 October 1659, to Rabanus von Canstein (Opera, 6: 638–9), and a letter “De pacis et concordiae ecclesiasticae desiderio” of 19 January 1674, to Gerhard Titius (Opera, 6: 636–8). 74 Ast ne ad vetera provocem exempla, haec ipsa aetas nostra passim terrarum plurimas exhibet longe florentissimas respublicas, ubi citra ullum civilis concordiae dispendium magna satis obtinet religionis diversitas. Opera, 2:468, from the letter of dedication to the 1677 edition of the Consultatio Catholica.

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existence on one or another kind of confessional belief, and the violence to which that intensity had given rise, Conring’s elimination of confessional belief from the equation was hardly without risks. That is perhaps sufficient to explain why he published his Consultatio Catholica under a pseudonym. But something more fundamental was at stake than merely the desire to avoid the risk of exposing his person to attack. At stake was a new understanding of belief. In Conring’s eyes there was no necessary link between the quality of the person and the belief the person held. Confessional belief became an independent variable. Confessional belief could be adopted, abandoned, changed, defended, and debated without any necessary danger to the integrity of persons or their participation in the commonwealth. This was the point that Conring made, if only by implication, when he referred to Protestants as heretics while posing as a moderate Catholic theologian. The point went deeper than simply to admonish people to keep their confessional beliefs to themselves. The point was that their identity could not be drawn from their beliefs at all, whether they kept them to themselves or not. Here the treatment of religion and politics was made to depend on a boundary dividing character from belief that no mere human being could ever cross. The link between confession and politics was broken. This was a radical position. It rested on the conviction that, as a matter of principle, human beings are not fully in charge of their identity. The mask was no exception, donned merely on certain dangerous occasions to hide what otherwise would have been plain to see; it was the rule and what it hid was never seen, not even by the person wearing it. As Hobbes was going to explain in his Leviathan, without a mask there could not even be a person. Religious diversity was therefore not an option; it was part of the very nature of political communities. Conring thus stands for principles that we identify with the Enlightenment. He turned confessional belief into a matter of opinion and opened the way to modern politics. He spoke explicitly about the light of truth, the darkness religious passions cast on the mind, and the clarity with which the mind’s eye can perceive the truth as soon as passions have been dispelled by reason. “Once affects no longer cloud the mind’s eye, it will see clearly the sunlight of the truth, on which our vices now cast darkness … .”75 He praised gentle speech as the best teacher. He placed his trust in science and focused his criticism on superstition. And yet it would be a profound misunderstanding to characterize Conring as a secular intellectual. The enlightenment for which he called arose directly from the desire to contain religious violence. That shaped its character. Neither the violence nor its religious motivation would simply disappear. Instead they 75 Imo fiet, ut affectuum purus mentis oculus clare perspiciat caligantem nunc vitio nostro veritatis solem … . Opera, 1: 127.

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were translated into a modern idiom designed to remove them from contention without at all forsaking their religious core. Henceforth society would be devoted to the pursuit of justice, truth, and reason. Henceforth people were going to be free to hold whatever religious views they liked. But people could never be allowed to hold the view that their identity as members of the political community depended on their religious views. That was something quite different from just one other kind of permissible confessional belief. That would have undermined the order that Conring hoped to bring about and threatened the very reason of the Enlightenment with madness and insanity. That was, in short, the modern equivalent of heresy. One may of course legitimately wonder what to call the belief that religious belief can vary independently of a person’s ability to play a constructive role in the political community. One may call it secular on the grounds that it separates politics from religion, particularly confessional religion as practiced in early modern times. One may also call it religious on the grounds that it constitutes a first principle of social order that can neither be deduced from reason nor proven by empirical observation. The same goes for its opposite. But however such a belief ought to be classified, Conring was very clear about the target against which it was directed: “mindless superstition” (inanis superstitio) particularly if it took forms approaching “the furors of Jewish zealots” (furores Judaicorum zelotarum).76 It should therefore come as no surprise that Conring regarded the pursuit of science and political unity as matters commanded by Christian faith itself. He did not hesitate to draw on St. Vincent of Lérins’s classic definition of the Catholic faith in order to define exactly what he had in mind when he spoke of the sunlight of the truth: Once affects no longer cloud the mind’s eye, it will see clearly the sunlight of the truth, on which our vices now cast darkness, so that all of us shall embrace that which is truly Catholic, that is, what has been believed everywhere, always, and by all.77

The scientific truth that Conring advocated was Christian to its very core. His reliance on the ancient fathers of the church was more than antiquarian. He insisted that science was joined to Christian virtue. See above, p. 338 and n. 67. Imo fiet, ut affectuum purus mentis oculus clare perspiciat caligantem nunc vitio nostro veritatis solem, utque omnes id amplectentes quod vere καθολικóν est, h.e., quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus est creditum. Opera, 1:127. Cf. Vincent of Lérins, Duo Commonitoria, Patrologia latina, ed. J. P. Migne (Paris, 1846), 50: 640: In ipsa item Catholica Ecclesia magnopere curandum est ut id teneamus quod ubique, quod semper, quod ab omnibus creditum est. Hoc est etenim vere proprieque catholicum, quod ipsa vis nominis ratioque declarat, quae omnia fere universaliter comprehendit. 76 77

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Religious zeal is bitter and lacks science. I mean the kind of science that is first of all chaste, then peaceful, equitable, obedient, full of mercy and good fruits, without deceit and not in the least bit insincere. We pursue the truth, but we mature with charity. That kind of science constrains anger. It is kind. It does no wrong, it is not puffed up, it does nothing dishonorable, it does not seek its own advantage, it does not get irritable, does not contemplate evil, has trust in everything, has hope for everything, and sustains everything.78

Science went into battle against religious superstition. But the difference between science and superstition was not at all that only superstition drew on oracles. Both drew on oracles. Both claimed religion in support. The difference was that only the “oracles of prudence” (prudentiae oracula) spoke the truth. The truth was that no human being was qualified to judge, because each human being wore a mask that hid one’s true identity from all but God. Whoever denied that truth, maintaining that human beings were defined by their confessional belief, was afflicted by a terrible disease, blind to the light of reason, inciting religious war and Jewish zealotry. Victims of that disease had lost the means to yield voluntarily to reason. They deserved, for their own good and that of the community, to be gently restrained. There is therefore a darker side to Conring’s vision. Conring explicitly held out the hope for restoring Germany to a fully Christian form of unity, and explicitly opposed it to the example of the Jews: What if sweet speech were to bear such fruit that Rehoboam and Jeroboam, Juda and Israel, Jerusalem and Samaria would exist no longer in our midst? What if the wall between us were to come down and we, who have the same blood and share the same commonwealth, were to have the same Christ as well, and the wounds that our disputes have inflicted on his body were to heal, and his tunic, which even military furor was once ashamed to rend, but which we have torn into innumerable pieces, were to be repaired? … For since the church is the soul of the commonwealth, the commonwealth can be said to be contained in the church with no less truth than it was once denied by Optatus of Milevis in another sense.79 78 Zelus iste zelus amarus est, et carens scientia: illa saltem, quae primum quidem casta est, deinde pacifica, aequa, obsequens, plena misericordia et fructuum bonorum, absque disceptatione et minime simulata. Veritatem sectemur, sed adolescamus prorsus cum charitate. Illa vero iram cohibet, benigna est, non agit perperam, non inflatur, non agit indecore, non quaerit quae sua sunt, non exacerbatur, non cogitat malum, omnia credit, omnia sperat, omnia sustinet. Opera, 1: 126. 79 Quid, si et in nobis dulcis sermo istum fructum pariat? Ne videlicet amplius et in nobis sit Roboam et Jerobeam, Juda et Israel, Hierosolyma et Samaria; sed intergerino pariete confracto, qui unius sanguinis uniusque simus reipublicae etiam unius simus Christi, coalescentibus vulneribus, quae ejus corpori dissidia nostra inflixerunt, et reparata ejus tunica quam militaris furor olim scindere erubuit quidem, nos autem innumeras in partes divisimus. … quippe quum anima quasi reipublicae sit Ecclesia, adeoque non minus vere dicit possit, rempublicam in Ecclesia esse quam vere id olim alio sensu negavit Optatus Milevitanus. Opera, 1: 127.

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Surely the form of science and Christianity to which Conring subscribed was novel. No doubt the disassociation of religious belief from political life helped put an end to religious war and made way for the creation of political communities that no longer needed to define themselves in terms of Christian confessions and that were even capable of promoting, or at least permitting, the integration of the Jews. But none of that eliminated religious passion from those battles with superstition into which the oracles of prudence led the modern state, much less religious tension between Christians and Jews. In sum, the preface to Aristotle’s Politics that Conring wrote in 1637 shows nothing more clearly than the logic by which the desire to restore the unity and power of Germany from the great damage it had suffered from religiously motivated violence resulted in the translation of an old form of religion into a modern one. The old form was confessional Christianity. The modern was the worship of science, reason, and the state. What that modern religion required its adherents to believe remained uncertain for some time to come. But that should be no reason to blind us to the ambiguous relationship that it established between truth and power. Conring’s insistence on freeing the person from a politically debilitating identification with confessional belief was liberating for the moment. But it offered no guarantee that the justice of that liberation would never be used to sanction the exercise of force in ways possibly more unfettered, and therefore more tyrannical, than force used explicitly in the name of Christ. This goes some way towards explaining the conflicting judgments about Conring’s religious views. Erik Wolf is entirely right to observe that Conring no longer shared the religious commitments of preceding generations. But he is thoroughly mistaken in concluding that Conring had no genuinely religious commitments at all. They just happened to be commitments of a different kind. Inge Mager is equally right to point out that Conring’s religious commitments need to be taken seriously. But she misses the mark when she says that Conring lacked a theological “Gesamtposition.” Not to have such a position was Conring’s position. Stolleis, it seems to me, has it exactly right: Conring’s pursuit of science is impossible to understand apart from his ideas about God, nature, and theology. Precisely how Conring’s confessional writings helped to promote the new combination of science and politics with Christianity remains to be investigated in detail. But that they did so by placing a religious sanction on the line dividing confessional belief from science and politics should now, I hope, be clear. In retrospect, perhaps the most intriguing historical detail about the preface to Aristotle’s Politics may well consist of the princes to whom Conring dedicated it over the course of its career. In 1637 he dedicated the original to Duke William of Brunswick-Lüneburg. In 1654 he republished it in his book on the boundaries of the German Empire and dedicated it to the Great

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Elector Frederick William of Brandenburg.80 And in 1677, four years before he died, he included it in his revised edition of the Consultatio Catholica and dedicated it to Frederick, son of the Great Elector and future King Frederick I of Prussia.81 He made a point of repeating his worries about the unity of Germany, and expressed the high hopes he placed on the rulers of Brandenburg because of their exemplary ability to maintain political unity while allowing for religious diversity.82 In and of themselves, those dedications can hardly bear the weight of much historical interpretation. But seen in the right light, they point directly to the conjunction of science with religious toleration and the rise of the modern state that used to shape European history and may, for better or for worse, not yet have lost its power.

80 De finibus imperii Germanici libri duo (Helmstedt, 1654), pp. 3–6 of the unpaginated front matter; reprinted in Opera, 6:373; cf. Goebel’s remarks in Opera, 1: vii–viii. 81 De pace civili inter imperii ordines religione dissidentes perpetuo conservanda libri duo, 2nd edn (Helmstedt, 1577 [1677]), pp. 3–10 of the unpaginated front matter; reprinted in Opera, 2: 468–9. 82 Opera, 2: 468.

Thomas More’s Horrific Vision: The Advent of Constituted Dissent* John M. Headley

The present essay stems from diverse motives, sources and interests. In its major intent it seeks to define and capture the truly revolutionary, innovative element in a movement of reform, the Protestant Reformation, which is not always identified with such arresting implications. As a second dimension and purpose this paper derives from its author’s own recent exposure to the issues of global history in the Early Modern period and an effort to present our Western civilization in a more positive light than today’s academic world finds acceptable. Thus the attempt to discover and define the exceptional and unique features, solely intrinsic to the Western development and currently reshaping the planet, cannot help but encounter dismay and produce alarm among some members of the academy. Indeed an implicitly global, comparative reference throws into relief the dual focus of this essay: namely, the first expression of a politically constituted dissent – and this as a unique feature of the West, distinguishing it from other civilizations. In the application of such a resonant and multi-faceted subject and as a sort of coda to our present ruminations we need to recognize once again the unintended consequences of the historical development and the irony of history itself. Of course, one may well argue that any movement when judged after a sufficiently long passage of time can assume shapes and proportions that its own period of gestation and dominance – here the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century – would never have been able to recognize, intend, or accept. Yet in this instance such an apparently irresponsible leap in time and in historical development is justified by a leading contemporary of that same period – namely, Sir Thomas More, whose dark premonition inspires the present inquiry. Let us begin with the global perspective before turning to the focus of our * This paper was earlier given in posthumous honor of Bodo Nischan as distinguished university professor, at East Carolina University, 12 March 2003. The author wishes to thank the Germanists of the present volume for reading it and especially Professor Barnes for his helpful criticism.

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problem in the Protestant Reformation. The sort of “globalism” evinced here is somewhat exceptional in being rooted in a continuing interest in and respect for European civilization. It is increasingly directed toward explicating what appears to be the unique, positive features of that civilization. Therein three seem prominent in shaping the currents of globalization: first, Western technology and science, certainly the least debatable; secondly, the idea of a common Humanity drawing with it programs of human rights; and thirdly, the capacity for self-criticism. The first two have already been treated elsewhere in the perspective of being deeply rooted in our original classical (Stoic)/Christian beginnings.1 The last, however, is seen as very much a contingency of the historical development. It is this last, presenting immense conceptual difficulties, that provides us with our problem here: namely, the definition and historical emergence of institutions, practices, and habits of mind in which conflict, dissent, is not only admitted and recognized but positively constructed for the survival and amelioration of society. Perhaps the most immediately notable example of this third strand, constituting Western exceptionalism, is the idea of His Majesty’s [most loyal] Opposition that abruptly brings into focus the procedure whereby in modern democracies the practice is not to imprison, exile, or exterminate one’s opponent but rather to integrate such opposition into a system of ongoing constitutionalized criticism and control that inevitably modifies the brunt of the temporary majority. For “the immediate purpose of opposition criticism is to check, prevent, and rectify any abuses of which government may be guilty.” Although the actual term does not seem to have been used until 1826 and then, as with so much else English, in a moment of absentmindedness,2 it points up a long and tenuous, uniquely insular, parliamentary development culminating in the eighteenth century with Bolingbroke’s Dissertation upon Parties, leading on to the further development in Montesquieu’s checks and balances. But the culture of self-criticism has of course a deeper root in Plato’s dialogues, medieval scholasticism, the growth of philosophical skepticism, and the first shoots of toleration appearing in the early modern period. Perhaps even more prominently the most unique and distinctive feature operative from the beginnings of Western civilization is the twofold jurisdictions, spiritual and temporal, in tense and tenuous accord evident with St. Augustine but definitely enunciated by Pope Gelasius I in 494: the moral / spiritual authority (auctoritas) of the bishops and the political power (potestas) of kings. Our question thus becomes one of measuring and accounting for a civilization that comes not only to admit but even to court the realities of difference, diversity, pluralism, fragmentation, all lurking in 1 John M. Headley, “The Universalizing Principle and Process: On the West’s Intrinsic Commitment to a Global Context,” Journal of World History 13 (2002): 291–321. 2 Archibald S. Foord, His Majesty’s Opposition 1714–1830 (Oxford, 1964), 1–2.

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our problem. No matter how imperfectly and inadequately admitted and cultivated, this effort, furthered by what will later develop as a relatively free press, the process of judicial review, and respect for the rights of the minority, collectively constitutes the present arena of self-criticism and review. If respect for the relative, the probable, the subjective all characterize and inform the modern mentality and all have their clear beginnings in Europe’s early modern period, their cultural realization and actual institutionalizing must await the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and nineteenthcentury Liberalism. Our problem becomes one of determining what, if anything at all, does the Early Modern period, 1500–1700/1750 contribute to the unique Western capacity for contending constructively with, or attempting to contend with, the fact of division, diversity, dissent. Since dissent as a fundamental principle has been authoritatively associated with Protestantism, our answer would seem to lie with the Reformation and most specifically with Luther at Worms.3 Very shortly following upon his Great Witness at Worms, the actions of his friends, the accusations of his enemies and succeeding ages have understood Luther’s expression of conscience in the context of the triumph of private judgment. Such was not Luther’s understanding at all. He does not conceive of conscience as being free floating and autonomous but claims his own conscience to be bound to the objective authority of the Word of God. He never gives conscience any autonomous authority in determining the meaning of the Christian faith. In other words he has constructed a new, different framework for it from that of the medieval church and its broad consensus. He claims for this new authority that it is objective and immediately perceptible to all. The difficulty will arise from the fact that his own interpretation of scripture is neither objective nor absolute but that there proved to be many other interpretations of Scripture.4 For Luther’s own special linking of conscience with the Word of God – no matter how splendidly understood and laid bare by him – would nevertheless give rise almost immediately to divergent interpretations. In the process, however, Luther had created the critical/prophetic principle of Protestantism, derived and recovered from the Hebrew prophets, that nothing in this world can claim for itself an inherently divine sanction. But after the Edict of Worms in 1521 the story of the Reformation is one of continuous, successive dissent. And the West has never turned back from that road of dissent. Later perceptions of Luther’s Witness would increasingly dissociate the act of defiance from its specifically religious/doctrinal commitment. And while there is no direct path from Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago, 1948), 162–3, 208–9. On the matter of conscience and authority in Luther before 1521, see Michael G. Baylor, Action and Person: Conscience in Late Scholasticism and the Young Luther (Leiden, 1977), 254–71, esp. 267–70. 3 4

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Luther’s captive conscience to modern private judgment, the subsequent fragmentation of religious life and interpretation, the rationalizing and secularizing forces, all bring the apparent authority and sanctity of private judgment into being in a way that Luther would not recognize nor sanction. In its later historical workings his witness would have that effect and more immediately within a decade a number of exotic sects and indeed two new major expressions of Christianity in Lutheranism and Zwinglianism had proliferated. But at what point, how, and where do we encounter the effort to construct the coexistence of dissenting groups? Consider the following statement coming from one who had earlier established his credentials as a leading Christian humanist but for the past ten years had become embroiled in savage polemic and theological controversy in the service of Catholic prosecution of heretics and within less than three years would suffer martyrdom for his traditional Christian faith: And yet, son Roper, I pray God, that some of us, high as we seem to sit upon the mountains treading heretics under our feet like ants, live not in the day that we gladly would wish to be at a league and composition with them to let them have their churches quietly to themselves, so that they would be content to let us have ours quietly to ourselves.5

Thomas More’s statement, as reported by his son-in-law, William Roper, throws into relief the unraveling of a hierarchically organized unity into a community veritably founded upon the coexistence of differing churches, apparently de-fanged by religious pluralism, doctrinal indifference, disestablishment, tolerance. More’s terrible vision bespeaks the total subversion of the entire thousand-year-old traditional order in which compulsory religious uniformity is conceived as fundamental and absolutely essential to social and political stability. Indeed it has been said that to early modern Europe pluralism was unacceptable – certainly a modest understatement.6 For ever since the closing decades of the fourth century, when the late Roman emperors made Christianity the one religion of the empire, religious unity was considered as the necessary foundation for political unity, ethical performance and social order. Reeling backward in horror and disgust, More projects forward at least four centuries to our own day, to that religious neutrality that makes possible liberal democracy and the secular, sovereign state. Enunciated at the 5 William Roper’s Life of Sir Thomas More,” in Two Early Tudor Lives, R. S. Sylvester & D. P. Harding, eds, (New Haven and London, 1962), 126. 6 Keith P. Luria, “The Politics of Protestant Conversion to Catholicism in SeventeenthCentury France,” in Conversion to Modernities: The Globalization of Christianity, ed. Peter van der Veer (New York and London, 1996), 30.

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beginning of what would prove more than one hundred years of bloody religious strife, the former Lord Chancellor here identifies the telos and the long range meaning to the whole event of the Reformation: that the truly revolutionary import of the movement is less to be found in the ambiguous workings of the newly heightened evangelical conscience and the new depths to the individual human’s complexity – real enough as they are – but rather in the enforced departure from at least a formal unity and the creation of that nasty, unwanted context of rival confessional camps, of churchlets equally Constantinean, in fact, the coexistence of opposites. In the perspective of confessionalization the period of religious wars can be seen more positively as affording Europe a unique experience in the horrors of religious fundamentalism; under the operative pressures of practical necessity the Reformation in its course and effect would reluctantly provide the primordial experience of a constituted dissent. It will be neither in the England of the Clarendon Code and emerging Dissent, nor the France moving toward the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes that one may discover the establishment of a functional ecclesiastical parity and the balanced coexistence of opposing groups. Rather it will be in the Germanies, the empire with the Augsburg settlement of 1555 that one first finds the coexistence of two, then three religious groups dissenting from each other, all within a constructed order, strengthened over time by the rising tide of skepticism, toleration and the appeal to a natural law. Somehow the scene had radically changed: what for an entire millennium had been the most necessary constitutive and unifying force, namely religion, had now become the most divisive and destabilizing threat to the social/political order. The emerging problem had to be addressed. Among the most prominent in the required rethinking of political order is the future father of international law, the Dutch humanist, Hugo Grotius, who obliquely advances our understanding of this thorny problem of religious pluralism and the coexistence of dissenting groups: obliquely, because Grotius is more precisely an apostle less of toleration as coexistence than of a broad assimilation, concordia or consensus, by means of irenic practices and the deliberate ignoring of the most critical doctrinal differences.7 His well known work on this subject is the De veritate religionis christianae of 1622. Nevertheless in a work composed in 1611, recently discovered in 1984 and published in 1988, he presents what amounts to being the first exposition of his broad religious persuasion. In advocating a concordia not significantly different from the irenic practices charted by Erasmus in his preface to his edition of St. Hilary almost a century earlier, Grotius nevertheless appeals to 7 For the definitive exposition of the distinction being made here see Maria Turchetti, Concordia o Tolleranza ? François Bauduin (1517–1573) e i “moyenneurs” (Geneva, 1984), 11–14; 290–9, 406–11.

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a historical condition that hardly represents one of concordia – namely, that of amalgamating different confessional groups by means of overlooking their doctrinal distinctions. Rather the text signifies the political, practical acceptance of an earlier stand-off between opposing religious camps. He directly draws upon the work of the fifth-century presbyter, Salvian of Marseilles, who describes the new presence in Gaul of the barbarians, who are Christian but of the wrong persuasion – Arian Christians. Now, reaching back a thousand years, Grotius quotes from Salvian: Granted they are heretics, but they are so unwittingly. That is to say that they are heretics in our eyes, but not in theirs. For they so much believe themselves to be Catholics that they bring us into disrepute by calling us heretics. So what they are in our eyes, we are in theirs. […] We have the truth, but they presume they have it. We honour God, but they are convinced that their creed is the right way to honour God. They do not observe their religious duties, but to them this is the highest religious duty. They are impious, but they think theirs is the true piety. So they do err, but they do so in good faith, not out of hatred of God but out of love for him, convinced that they honour and love the Lord. Although they do not have the right faith, yet they consider this the perfect love for God. Nobody except the Judge can know in what way they are to be punished for this erroneous belief on Judgment Day. I think that until that time God is patient with them, since He sees that though they do not have the right belief, their error results from a sincere conviction.8

The passage is especially interesting not only because Grotius ends his work on this note, thus as his final resolution apparently to the problem of religious fragmentation, but also that this passage circulated widely in the religious controversies of the post-Reformation era. For our purpose here it serves to reinforce the dilemma that had earlier alarmed Thomas More as to its essential outcome. Salvian’s statement arises from the political experience of the late Roman world’s disintegration in the West, where there had developed a sort of standoff between the two major forms of the Christian religion – between the conquering Arian Christian barbarians and the largely catholic RomanoGallic population. The situation dictated a practical observance of toleration as a wary coexistence; only in North Africa occurred the persecution of the native population at the hands of the Arian Vandals. Neither reunion nor

8 Hugo Grotius, Meletius sive de iis quae inter Christianos conveniunt epistola, Guillaume H. M. Posthemus Meyjes, ed. (Leiden, New York, Copenhagen, Cologne, 1988), 1, 10–13; 134, 162. Cf. Salvian, De gubernatione Dei, Franciscus Pauly, ed., CSEL (Vienna, 1883), V–ii. 9–11 (104).

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concordia figures here. Grotius is apparently unable to deal intellectually with the new actualities of toleration as the peaceful, if strained, coexistence of opposing religious groups. His religious thinking is that of an irenicist, moving in the grooves of an all-embracing, if loose, consensus. But he can hardly be blamed for failing to appreciate the distinctive features of a political arrangement, a thousand years removed into the past. Nevertheless during Grotius’ own lifetime, in the course of the century 1555 to 1648, another formidable instance of tolerance, painfully exercised in the interests of coexistence and somewhat reminiscent of its fifth-century predecessor, would be experienced in the Holy Roman Empire. The general textbook presentation of the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, beyond affirming the fact of now two legally recognized religions, emphasizes the limiting of freedom of religion to the members of the imperial estates and the resulting right of each ruler to determine the religion of his territory. Princely authority and the enhancement of sovereignty in the myriad of micro-states appear as the winners. For is not the clue to German history and for that matter European history the consolidation of political power in the rise of the territorial sovereign state that will later explain the glaring reality of the modern nation state? No, or only partly – and one would hope its dominance in historiography to be of limited duration. For such a reading has long obscured the gradual emergence of a German constitutionalism occurring at the center, the Reichstag or Imperial Diet, and not among the separate territorial parts in each of which a single established church conjoined with the state apparatus prevails. For all its idiosyncrasies and archaisms, this awkwardly functioning constitutionalism in the chief federal institution of the Reichstag presents the first example of an exercised restraint allowing for the coexistence of differing confessional camps. It is an achievement largely ignored but warranting attention here. The German historian, Martin Heckel, twenty years ago thoroughly analyzed the forced relations of Catholics and Lutherans as hostile, rival, but ultimately collaborative religious parties during that period one identifies as the Confessional Age. It is his Deutschland im konfessionellen Zeitalter that we here shamelessly draw upon for a clarification whose meaning we seek to extend beyond German history itself.9 Heckel presents a matchless analysis of the political/constitutional operation of the Reich, the confederated Empire, at the level of the Imperial Estates in their convening in successive Reichstags, Imperial Diets. The strained cooperation between religious parties has hitherto remained obscure and essentially unattended, yet warrants not only attention but profound appreciation both in the immediate context of German history and more largely for our purposes here in assessing the unique

9

Martin Heckel, Deutschland im konfessionellen Zeitalter (Göttingen, 1983), passim.

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achievement of European civilization in general. For the painfully crafted and long sustained experience of constituted dissent and difference, once achieved, and shortly thereafter, philosophically packaged appropriately, would come to distinguish the West as much as the floundering idea of Humanity. The magnitude of this achievement, namely the de-fusing of religious fundamentalism at the highest, traditionally most prestigious political level would be eventually complemented by the passage of religion from the public sphere to the private experience. Thus in its long range workings the Reformation can best be credited for assisting the creation of those conditions leading to a constitutionally recognized dissent. As if in preparation for the settlement achieved in the Peace of Augsburg, the interim arrangement of this system of dual opposing confessional camps first appeared at Speyer in 1529, received reformulation in the Nürnberg Standstill of 1532, would be refashioned in 1555 and, hardening through the duration of practice, be brought to fruition in 1648, realizing that essential principle of parity in the procedural formulas of the itio in partes or formal separation of the diet into two bodies, as set forth in Article V, section 52 of the Osnabrück Instrument of Peace.10 The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 had begun a peculiar century-long controversy between both confessional groups now acting as religious parties within a mutually agreed upon framework of parity. Buffered by the understanding that it was an interim, provisional arrangement, the peace settlement concealed in its interstices gaps, doubts, tensions that would promote different exegeses by each party; thereby the more material aspects of religious questions came to be politically negotiated. Each party, Catholic and Lutheran, understood itself as in possession of the sole theological truth and the other as fraudulent and a lie in a standoff eerily reminiscent of what Salvian a thousand years earlier had described as prevailing between the catholic orthodox and the Arians. In the later case, however, what staved off a seemingly inevitable breakdown into armed hostilities was the rudiments of the understanding, later formulated in the itio in partes clauses of Westphalia’s Article V, section 52, whereby each confession defined its own religious questions for itself and negotiated as a unit with the other. Even in the apparent breakdown evinced during the opening stages of the so-called Thirty Years’ War – a war as much politically internal as confessional and increasingly fueled by European power politics, intensified in its horrors by undisciplined soldiery and the current methods of recruiting – neither religious party wanted to abandon the substance and ideal of religious peace. And at the high watermark of Habsburg/Wittelsbach/Catholic triumph, the Edict of Restitution of March 1629, which saw a huge displacement of hitherto Protestant ecclesiastical

10

Heckel, Deutschland, 44–5, 52–5, 67, 82, 97.

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property back to the Catholic side, there was no thought of the actual extermination of Protestantism in its Lutheran form.11 Increasingly perceived in secular terms, the confessions could be considered part of the political landscape. As Corpus Evangelicorum and Corpus Catholicorum they represented the domestication of the earlier Protestant Union and Catholic League – a foreshadowing of modern political parties. The de corpore ad corpus procedure of the confessional groups – namely, negotiation between the two confessional bodies – instead of the usual deliberation in the individual curias of the Imperial estates, had developed not only out of the ground of the Westphalian settlement but was already practiced in the earlier settlements of 1532, 1539, 1541, 1544, 1552 as well as the Peace of Augsburg. Article V, section 52 merely confirmed and better instituted the practice of insulating the theological/religious discord from the sphere of political negotiation. The empire’s constitution provided refuge for the dissent of both confessions from the assault of religious/theological enmity, so that the empire in spite of its religious division at least remained politically viable. The majority principle operated only within the separate curias of the Imperial estates where common domestic issues justified negotiation; between the different curias the majority principle was dropped for de corpore ad corpus negotiation, thereby respecting the interests of the minority Protestants, all in order to achieve amicabilis compositio, a friendly settlement.12 While the contemporary intellectual currents of neo-Stoicism and natural law undoubtedly eased and confirmed this process of secularization, the existing historical contingencies and political necessity itself rather than the incursion of any grand philosophy or even a redirection in thought account for the achievement of the politically operative coexistence observed by the two and, after 1648, three confessions. Indeed in this largely constitutional/juridical/political picture provided by Heckel only one element is lacking and never receives due credit: the salutary presence of the Turk, the dreadful spectre of Moslem engulfment, impelling the estates to some degree of collaboration for the raising of troops to oppose the long standing Ottoman threat.13 The Reformation may here be seen as an abruption that in the

11 Heckel, Deutschland, 146. On the rival confessions’ cooperation with the emperor against the Calvinists at this point see Bodo Nischan, “Confessionalism and Absolutism: The Case of Brandenburg” in Calvinism in Europe, 1540–1620, Andrew Pettegree et al. (Cambridge, 1994), 194, who seems to suggest here ultimately otherwise. 12 Heckel, Deutschland, 116–20, 166–7, 200, 205–6. On the workings of the majority principle see Winfried Schulze, “Majority Decision in the Imperial Diets of the 16th and 17th Centuries,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 58 Supplement (December 1986): 46–63, esp. 50–1, 58–61. On the operation of the curias and their committees in the Reichstag, see Rosemarie Aulinger, Das Bild des Reichstages im 16. Jahrhundert (Göttingen, 1980), 210–27. 13 Winfried Schulze, Reich und Turkengefahr im späten 16. Jahrhundert (Munich, 1978), 67–191; 297–301.

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context of the Holy Roman Empire creates the political necessity of a religious coexistence among the major confessions – a new and unwanted experience. The present focus upon that form of toleration that comes to advance the coexistence of effectively constituted opposing groups, inimical on the most decisive and basic issue that the sixteenth century could provide, is obviously but one aspect of a most multifarious, complex history of the development of toleration. Our task here has not been to trace anew any broad stirrings of tolerance but rather to examine a defining feature in the development of toleration. Certainly the larger picture prevailing throughout the individual territories of the empire would remain one of quite limited and piecemeal toleration.14 While the Reformation’s libertas conscientiae and libertas religionis would be worked out philosophically and legally in the European political literature regarding toleration, within the empire the constitutional/political implications revealed themselves in the operations of successive Imperial Diets stemming from the Peace of Augsburg. Amidst the religious fragmentation produced by the Reformation, the creation of conditions of coexistence among the supremely sensitive confessional camps deserves attention as a unique achievement. If confessional strife has long held the historical foreground in the judgment of the period, less obviously but more significantly the empire through the practices of its diet was inching away from religious confrontation to long – range habits of collaboration and respectful coexistence. Such processes would work to the attenuation and demise of the Confessional Age. And in a larger perspective they would constitute a significant step toward the controlled admission of dissent in the Western experience and toward the realization of Thomas More’s fearful prospect. To conclude by way of recapitulation. First we have sought to disclose the intrinsically revolutionary, long-range impact and effect in the Protestant Reformation by affirming and giving positive weight to its negative results and at least at the time most disastrous features, for Luther had sought to reform the whole medieval church: namely, the ecclesiastical fragmentation and the consequent wars of religion. Here we have bestowed a positive interpretation upon this resulting period of terrible bloodshed, upon the Reformation’s most negative results. Otherwise stated, that political necessity and genuine religious exhaustion would present the first case of a constituted political dissent in a system of practical, tolerated coexistence.15 The much maligned 14 On the practical difficulties and limitations of toleration within the individual territories of the Empire see the sobering account by Joachim Whaley “A Tolerant Society? Religious Toleration in the Holy Roman Empire, 1648–1806,” in Toleration in Enlightenment Europe, Ole Peter Grell and Roy Porter, eds (Cambridge, 2000), 175–95. 15 Cf. here Horst Dreitzel, “Toleranz und Gewissenfreiheit im konfessionellen Zeitalter: Zur Diskussion im Reich zwischen Augsburger Religionsfrieden und Aufklärung,” in Religion und Religiosität im Zeitalter des Barock, Dieter Bruer, ed. (Wiesbaden, 1995), I, 115–28.

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Old Reich would provide the necessary context in its own time and would fall mercifully short of any ruthless national consolidation or Gleichschaltung. The magnitude of the achievement for containing religious dissent, howsoever strained and precarious, may be better appreciated by comparison with a more narrowly political consideration of the problem at the hands of a notorious contemporary thinker. Simultaneously with Luther’s challenge, Machiavelli had in the opening chapters of his Discorsi boldly inquired how a republic or any political system can endure inner conflict such as evinced by the Roman republic, but also presented in the cases offered by ancient Sparta and contemporary Venice. While noting that a prince, a nobility, and the power of the people provide a system of reciprocal checks (I, 2), Machiavelli acclaimed the adroit introduction of the tribunes at Rome for guarding the interests of the populace and Roman liberty (I, 4). With Sparta and Venice he found the deliberate limitation and even extinction of access for the populace at large to political deliberation (I, 6). He argued for the necessity of organizing a republic in such of way that it could withstand the destabilizing forces that disrupt a state. For lacking such a legal safety valve, the masses would resort to illegal means with upsetting effects (I, 7).16 Yet by way of comparison the confessional issue with its dangerous religious overtones posits a more absolute, totally pervasive and fundamental threat of disruption, transcending the ordinary social and economic tensions of a political community. Regarding the latter, namely those political contexts with confessional issues diminished, they would prove themselves more amenable to later formal, abstract programs of constitutional checks such as considered by James Harrington or John Locke and subsequently perceived by Montesquieu as emergent in English political life. Secondly, we have simultaneously suggested that this constituting of two otherwise inimical groups as parties mutually hostile on the most sensitive issue of the century, religion – although it has no direct follow-up in German or even European history, for the line of development that leads from British constitutionalism to Montesquieu and Madison seems quite innocent of the development that we have noted here – nevertheless the German achievement alerts us to a forgotten and early pioneering example of politically constituted coexistence and dissent. Admittedly the solution at the time did not include sectarians, Jews, and certainly not the atheists. The German case is a sort of harbinger for a new stage in our own unique civilization, a new and most distinctively Western experience: we are reminded that no matter how limited and imperfectly realized at the time – the realities of difference, diversity, pluralism, fragmentation, dissent can only survive and operate constructively 16 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince and the Discourses (New York: Modern Library, 1950), 110–121; 124–34.

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within the recognized commonality of a mutually accepted and respected constitutional framework. Finally, we confront the fact that none of this outcome, the product of consequences unintended, could be perceived or sought at the time. Insofar as it was perceived at all, its utterly strange features proved to be a source of grave distress to one most prescient contemporary. In 1533, during the second decade of what would later be designated the Reformation, our contemporary’s gaze either assumed or passed beyond the period of religious parties becoming culturally as well as politically entrenched in that stage known as confessionalization. Rather his mind came to fix upon a more distant scene constituted by a plurality of churches existing through reciprocal respect, mutual recognition and political neutrality, all made possible by the pervasive relativity of truth. Such a world transformed constituted Thomas More’s horrific vision.

Index Aarau 215, 216, 225 abjurations, Huguenots 265–70 absolutism 4 as historical period 56 Adams, Thomas 279 adiaphora in Albertine Saxony xix, 100, 104 and confessionalization xvii, 104 meaning 99 Pfeffinger on 99–105 and the state 101–4 Adiaphora Controversy 92, 93, 98 Agricola, Adam C. 40 Agricola, Johann 81 Albrecht of Prussia, Duke 69, 76, 78 Alsted, J.H. 136 Altzella 97 Amboise, Edict (1563) 265 Amerbach, Bonifacius 161 Amsdorf, Nikolaus von 75, 92 Anabaptists xxii, 86, 258, 283 Andreae, Jakob 14, 82 ecclesiastical missions 171–3 Anhalt, Georg III von, Prince 92, 95, 101, 102 Antichrist identification 148–9 papacy as 54 n.12 Antwerp 34 Apian, Peter 132 Aquaviva, Claudio 292, 316 Aquinas, Thomas 182 architecture, and confessionalization 33–5 Arianism 352 Aristotle, Politics, Conring’s preface xxiii–xxiv, 325–39, 340, 344 Arminius, Jacobus 310 Arndt, Johann 40, 44 Arnstadt 69 art history, and confessionalization 32, 33 artistic representations church buildings 112–16 martyrdom 113

astrologers, pastors 149–50 astrology attacks on 135–6, 141–6 calendars 133–4 and Calvinism 134–5 and Catholicism 132–4 and confessionalization xx, 131–53 elite 136–7 and eschatology 146–8 and free will 132 function 146–7 and Lutheranism xx, 141–6, 152–3 and Melanchthon xx, 137–41 publications 135, 137, 148–9 Rasch on 133 and the Second Coming 147 and secular power 149–50 varieties 131–2 Aubenas xxii, 243, 248 Jesuits 249, 251–4 mixed marriages xxii, 249 Reformed church, difficulties 249–55 Augsburg 54 Confession (1530) 57, 76–9, 82, 165, 191 Diet (1555) 56 Discipline Ordinance 160 Interim 69, 84, 91, 97 Peace (1555) 161, 257, 308, 351–6 prenuptial coitus, criminalization 160 August of Saxony, Elector 73 Augustine, St 348 Aurifaber, Johann 86, 142, 144 Austria confessionalization 239–41 Jesuits 239 Avencini, Nicolaus, Pietas victrix... 240, 241 Avila, Juan de 311 Bach, J.S. 113 Bacuet, Paul 221 Bader, Matthaeus 147 Bakhtin, Michael, on Carnival 128

360

Index

Bamberg 133 baptism Catholicism 118 Reformation influence 118–19 Barstow, John 281 Bartholomew, St. 113 Basle, theological orientation 217, 218, 223 Bavaria, confessionalization 14, 237–9 Becker, Thomas P. 235 Becker–Huberti, Manfred 233 Bellarmine, Robert 291 Benedict, Philip 260, 270 Berne, theological orientation 216–17 Binsfeld, Peter 203 Bodin, Jean 203 Bogucka, Maria 34 Böhme, Jakob 129 Bolingbroke, Henry St John, Dissertation upon Parties 348 Bolland, Jan 306 Bollandists 306 Book of Confutations 72–3, 78 Borromeo, Carlo 229 Bossy, John 257, 268 Christianity in the West 10 Bötker, Johann 73, 80 Bottigheimer, Karl S. 17 Boyle, Robert 210 Bradford, John 279 Brandenburg church decoration 115–16, 126 Reformation 19, 21 Braunschweig 67, 68, 76 theologians 71, 73–6, 79, 83, 86, 87, 88 Breitinger, Johann J. 208, 209, 210, 212 Bremen 73 Brenz, Johannes 192 Brocard, Antoine 262–3 Browne, Thomas, Sir xxv Brunnemann, Jacob 194 Bucer, Martin 73, 159, 278 De Regno Christi 257 Bugenhagen, Johannes 67, 71, 194 Bullinger, Heinrich 212 burial see death rituals Buxtorf, Johannes 212, 218, 222, 223–4 Bynum, Carolyn W. Holy Feast and Holy Fast... 108–9 on piety 108 Caesius, Georg 141, 149–50 Cajetanus, Thomas de Vio xix, 54 calendars, astrological 133–4

Calixt, Georg 322, 324 Calvin, John 86, 87, 121 Calvinism 3, 18 and astrology 134–5 and democracy 4 as Second Reformation 42 Cameron, James 209 Campanus, Johannes 80 Canisius, Peter 291, 304, 315 Summa doctrinae Christianae 302 Capp, Bernard 150 Carnival Bakhtin on 128 Lent, compared 128 Carolina (law code) 182–91 and juridical confessions 184–5 and witchcraft confessions 185–91, 202, 203 Carpzov, Benedict, Practicae novae... 189–90 Cartwright, Thomas 282 catechisms 302–5 role 296–7 verse 304 Catholic League 266 Catholicism 3 and astrology 132–4 baptism 118 and confessionalization paradigm 7–10, 11 confessions 193 death rituals 122–3 devotional literature 290–318 Holy Communion 120–21 piety, post-Reformation 127–8, 290–91 Protestantism, co-existence 259–60 reformed, Reinhard on 7–8 Tridentine 17, 25 Chabrey, Daniel 221 Chalcedon, Council (451) 81 Champneys, John 278 Charles V (Holy Roman Emperor) 91, 99 Chartier, Roger 295 Chemnitz, Martin xix, 67, 69–73, 75, 76 Examination of the Council of Trent 68 Repetitio 77–88 Christian III (King of Denmark) 73 church buildings artistic representations 112–16 and confessionalization 34 church decoration Albertine Saxony 126 Brandenburg 115–16, 126 simplification 114–16

Index Württemberg 126–7 Chytraeus, David 88 Clark, Stuart 202 Cologne, confessionalization 234–5 Comenius, Amos 207, 210 communalism, German history 2 comparative studies, confessionalization 27–8 Concord, Book of, 57, 170, 171 Concord, Formula of xix, 68, 76, 81, 82, 83, 88, 143, 170, 171 concordia 351, 352, 353 Confessio Sigismundi 39 confessional age 6 confessionalism as a culture 7 Hermann Conring on 340–41 and witchcraft confessions xxi, 176–7, 205 confessionalization and adiaphora xvii, 104 and architecture 33–5 and art history 32, 33 and astrology xx, 131–53 Austria 239–41 Bavaria 14, 237–9 and church buildings 34 Cologne 234–5 comparative studies 27–8 and cultural history 32–5 Dijon xxii, 260–73 dissemination 58 Dutch Republic 15, 18 England xxii, 57, 277–87 Europe, East Central 16 European scope xviii, xxiv–xxv, 10, 13, 26–8 France 15, 57 German history 2–3, 5 interdisciplinary scope 31–2 Ireland 17, 48–9 Mennonites 15 and modernity 25–6, 29–30 Montpellier xxv, 260 Münster 233–4, 258 Nischan on 19–20 post-1650 232–42 and prenuptial coitus xx, 155–74 process 57–60 Prussia 18 Reinhard on xviii research 30–31 Ruthenians 16

361

Salzburg 57 Schilling on 4–5, 10 Scotland 48 as social discipline xvii, 7, 48, 257–8 and state development 18, 25, 59, 60–62, 104–5 term xvii, 29 criticism 47 origins 57 and theology 58, 63 Utrecht 15 and witch-crazes 60 Würzburg 235–7 Zeeden on 22–4, 257, 259 confessionalization paradigm and Catholicism 7–10, 11 France 258–73 and German historiography 25–6 origins 22–32 and the Protestant Reformation 5–6, 66 confessionalization thesis 3–4, 6, 12 extension 14–17 impact 17–18 confessions Catholicism 193 as emerging political parties 355–6 Lutheranism 191–3 meaning 3, 5 and modernity 6 religious 191–5 and juridical confessions 194–5 see also juridical confessions; witchcraft confessions confutation 73 Conring, Hermann on Christianity and science 342–4 on confessionalism 340–41 on heresy 337–8, 340 on the Holy Roman Empire 327–30 on political science, value 330–35 on religious disagreements 335–8 on religious toleration 339, 342 on superstition 338 theology 324–5 works Consultatio Catholica 320–21, 323, 326, 341, 345 Defensio ecclesiae Protestantium 323 Miscellaneous theses on Civil Prudence 332 Pietas Academiae Juliae 322, 323 preface to Aristotle’s Politics xxiii–xxiv, 325–39, 340, 344

362

Index

Vindiciae... 323 writings 322–3 conscience, Luther on 349 Constance, Council 307 Corpus Christi festival 97, 121, 240, 262 Corpus Doctrinae Christinae 77 Corpus Doctrinae Prutenicum 67–8, 77, 78 Coster, Francis 309, 310, 316 Coswig 72 Counter-Reformation 25, 44, 239 as historical period 56 Covenanters, Swiss Reformed churches, contacts 208–9 Craig, John 287 Cranach, Lucas the Elder Passionel Christi und Anti-Christi 297 Wittenberg altarpiece 121–2 Cranmer, Thomas 278 criminalization, prenuptial coitus xx, 155–6, 167–73 Cromwell, Oliver 207, 211 and Protestant unity xxi, 215, 216, 219, 225 Swiss view of 208, 217 Cruciger, Caspar 67 cultural history, and confessionalization 32–5 Dachselhofer, Nicolaus 217 Darrell, John 286–7 Daston, Lorraine 204 Davis, Natalie 264 death rituals Catholicism 122–3 Reformation influence 123–5 Delumeau, Jean 271, 289 democracy and Calvinism 4 and dissent 348–9 Dessau 100 devotional literature xxii–xxiii audiences 315–16 authors 291–2 Catholicism 290–318 format 299–300 Gaspar Loarte 311–15 genres 292, 295–8 Jesuits 291–2, 298–318 polemics 308–11 Dieulefit xxii, 243 satanic ligature case 244–8 Dijon confessionalization xxii, 260–73

Huguenots 260–66 iconoclasm 262 religions 261 Discipline Ordinance, Augsburg 160 dissent, and democracy 348–9 Dordrecht, Synod 212 Drexel, Jeremias 310, 315 du Pan, Jean 221 Duffy, Eamon 285 Durchaeus, Johann G. 218 Dury, John circle of friends 210 influences on 209–10 Irenicum 215, 216 Reformed churches, unity xxi, 209–10 Swiss Reformed churches, mission 207–26 Dutch Republic, confessionalization 15, 18 Dutch Wars of Independence 308–9 ecclesiology, Luther’s 53, 62–4, 65 education Luther’s influence 63–4 and the Reformation 64 Elias, Norbert 289 Elizabeth of Schönau 110 Emser, Hieronymus 63 England confessionalization xxii, 57, 277–87 Scotland, Union (1707) 48 soteriology 277–8 Enlightenment, The 341, 342, 349 Erasmus, Desiderius, ‘The Funeral’ 122, 125 Erasmus, St 113 Erastus, Thomas 135 Erich of Braunschweig-Calenberg, Duke 69 eschatology, and astrology 146–7 Eucharist doctrine 87–8 Huguenot attacks on 264–5 symbolism 271–2 see also Holy Communion Europe East Central, confessionalization 16 secularization 28 Eutychianism 81 Evangelical Movement (1517–25) 57 Evans, Richard J. 132, 188 Evenett, H. Outram 292 evidence, juridical confessions as 183 Fabricius, Johann J. 40, 44 faith

Index justification by 83–4 Luther on 74 Fenner, Dudley 282, 283 Field, John 280, 281 Final Judgment Day, and juridical confessions 181, 186, 187, 188 Fischart, Johann 144 Aller Praktik Grossmutter 135 Flacius, Matthias 67, 73, 75, 76, 98, 103 against synergism 82–3 Melanchthon, differences 71, 72, 75, 92 Fleming, Oliver 212, 213 Forster, Marc R. 11, 15 France confessionalization 15, 57 confessionalization paradigm 258–73 and the Council of Trent 259 religious wars 258–9, 272 Francke, August H. 129 François, Etienne 13 Franconia, law, prenuptial coitus 170 Frederick I of Prussia (King) 345 Frederick William of Brandenburg, Great Elector 345 free will and astrology 132 and original sin 82–3 French Revolution 349 Fridrich, Henning, Gründliche Widerlegung der Abergläubischen Astrologorum 144, 145 Friedrich III, Elector 122, 162 Frischlin, Nicodemus 144 Galen, Christoph B. von 233 Galliardi, Achille 315 Gallus, Nikolaus 67, 92, 103 Garcaeus, Johann 138 Gasmer, Johann 68, 88 Gassmann, Benno 43 Gdansk 48 Gebhardt, Bruno, Handbook of German History 14 Gelasius I (Pope) 348 Geneva, premarital coitus, criminalization 161 Georg Friedrich, Margrave 167, 168, 171, 172 German historiography 22, 23–4 and confessionalization paradigm 25–6 German history communalism 2 confessionalization 2–3, 5

363

proto-industrialization 2 German Reformation East German views 1–2 West German views 2 Germany Reichskirche 228–32 states 61 Gerson, Jean 296 Gesenius, Justus 340 Gifford, George 280, 285 Glawischnig, Rolf 44 Gnesio-Lutherans 71, 75, 76, 82, 85, 91–2, 98, 102 Philippists, controversy 94, 143, 156, 170–71 Goclenius, Rudolph 136 Gödelmann, J. 175, 176 Goehausen, Hermann 189, 203 Goertz, Harald 285 Gomar, Francis 309–10 Görlitz, Martin 71 Görres, Joseph von 295 Gorski, Philip 17–19, 20 gospel, and divine law 81–2 Göttingen 69 Grafenreid, Anton von 216, 224 Gratian 175, 176 Graubünden Canton, massacre 213 Grauwer, Albert 310 Gregorian calendar (1582) 150 Gretser, Jacob 310 Grevinchoven, Gaspar 310 Grotius, Hugo De veritate religionis christianae 351 on pluralism 351–3 Grünpeck, Joseph 132 Grynäus, Johann J. 212 Gugler, Nikolaus 135 Gustavus Adolphus 209, 212 Guzman, Dominic de 307 hagiography, Jesuits 306 Haigh, Christopher 279 Hamburg 72 Hamm, Berndt 275–6 Hanlon, Gregory 259 Hardenberg, Albert 73, 74, 80, 81, 86 Harrington, Joel 156, 174 Hartlib, Samuel 207, 210, 211 Harvey, Judith 160 Hebenstreit, Johann 142, 147 Heckel, Martin, Deutschland im konfessionellen Zeitalter 353–4, 355

364 Hegel, G.W.F. 5 Heidelberg 74, 135 Heiden, Christian 150 Henry II (King of France) 261 Henry III (King of France) 262, 266 Henry IV (Emperor of France) 327, 328 Henry VIII (King of England) 278 Herder, Johann G. 295 heresy Conring on 337–8, 340 Salvian of Marseilles on 352 Heshusius, Tileman 72, 73, 75 Hesse, marriage regulation 163–5, 166 Hintze, Otto 18 Hirsch, Emanuel 68 historian, sociologist, compared 19 history narratives 1 periodization 56–7 Hobbes, Thomas 319–20 Leviathan 341 Holy Communion Catholicism 120–21 Reformation, influence on 121–2 see also Eucharist Holy Roman Empire 5 Holy Spirit 83 Holzem, Andreas 49 Hotson, Howard 136 Hsia, Ronnie 257–8 Huguenots Dijon 260–66 abjurations 265–70 Eucharist, attacks on 264–5 Hummel, Johann H. 217 Hutton, Ronald 279–80 Hyperius, Gerhard 165

Index Jesus Christ dual nature 80, 81 as Logos 75 Lord’s Supper, debate 73, 77, 86–7 suffering, depiction 112 Johann Friedrich of Ernstine Saxony, Duke 72 John of Damascus 78 John of Staupitz, influence on Luther 52 Jonas, Justus 67 juridical confessions and Carolina (law code) 184–5 as evidence 183 and Final Judgment Day 181, 186, 187, 188 functions 180–91 meaning 176 occult crimes 185 as public theatre 180–81, 186 and religious confession 194–5 and torture 183, 185 as truth 183–4 see also witchcraft confessions justification, doctrine 84–5

iconoclasm Dijon 262 Reformation influence 113, 125–6 Index of Forbidden Books 133 Innocent X (Pope) 323 Ireland, confessionalization 17, 48–9 Iserloh, Erwin 43

Kaplan, Benjamin 15–16 Kappel, Peace (1531) 225 Karg, Georg 172 Katherine, St 113 Kaufmann, Thomas 47 Keen, Ralph 139 Kelly, William 322 Kempis, Thomas à, Imitation of Christ 296 Kilkenny, Confederation 17 Klain, Johann 141 Klein, Thomas 40, 43 Kneiphof 76 Köhler, Walter 157, 158 Kolb, Robert 148 Königsberg 68, 69, 76 Kosellek, Reinhard 25 Koslofsky, Craig 123 Kramer, Heinrich 185 Küng, Hans 43 Kusukawa, Sachiko 151

James I/VI (King) 48 Jesuits Aubenas 249, 251–4 Austria 239 devotional authors 291–2, 298–318 hagiography 306 Münster 258

Lake, Peter 280 Langbein, John 184 Laski, Jan 278 Lau, Franz 42 Laud, Archbishop 208 Laurence, St 113 law, divine, and the gospel 81–2

Index Lechner, Gaspar 316 Leger, Antoine 221 Leipzig Colloquy (1631) 209 Leipzig Interim (1548) 71, 91, 92, 97–8 Lent, Carnival, compared 128 Leo X (Pope) 307 Lippe county 41 Lipsius, Justus 240 Loarte, Gaspar devotional literature 311–15 ‘The Exercise of a Christian Life’ 312 ‘Treatise on Holy Pilgrimages’ 313–14 Logos, Jesus Christ as 75 Lombard, Peter 68, 78 Longjumeau, Edict (1568) 265 Lord’s Supper, Jesus Christ, debate 73, 77, 86–7 Lotz-Heumann, Ute 17, 48–9 Loyola, Ignatius, Spiritual Exercises xxii, 291–2, 300–304, 312–13 Lübeck 70, 72 Ludolf of Saxony, Life of Christ 296 Luenberg, Nicholas 213 Lüneberg 72, 74 Luria, Keith 259–60 Lüthard, Christoph 217 Luther, Martin anniversary 37–8 on conscience 349 death, confusion following 72 ecclesiology 53, 62–4, 65 education, influence on 63–4 on faith 74 intentions 65–6 John of Staupitz, influence 52 on marriage 157–8 radicalism 276 on the saints 114 scriptural authority 54, 62–3, 349 on sermons 117 Smalcald Articles 77, 80 on visitations 64 wedding 120 works Freedom of a Christian 297 Kleine Katechismus 86, 296 Lutheranism 3, 4 in Albertine Saxony 95–7 and astrology xx, 141–6, 152–3 confessions 191–3 as First Reformation 42 Lutherans Book of Concord (1580) 57

365 Formula of Concord 68, 76

Machiavelli 357 Magdeburg Centuries 67 Mager, Inge 324, 344 Mainz, Electorate 229 Major, Georg 84, 85 Maltitz, Johann von 97 Marbach, Philip 310 Marburg colloquy (1529) 69 Maresius, Samuel 219 Marian congregations 315–16 marriage clandestine 157, 158, 165 Luther on 157–8 mixed Aubenas xxii, 249 Layrac 259 regulation Hesse 163–5, 166 Swiss-German cities 158–60 variations 166–7 see also prenuptial coitus martyrdom accounts 306 artistic representations 113 Mary I (Queen) 279 Maximilian of Bavaria, Duke 61, 238 Mechthild of Magdeburg 110 Medici, Catherine de 265 Medler, Nikolaus 71 Meissen 96, 97 Melanchthon, Philipp 63, 67, 70–71, 74, 77 astrology xx, 137–41 Flacius, differences 71, 72, 75, 92 Menius, Justus 74 Mennonites, confessionalization 15 Merseburg 95, 96 Mespelbrunn, Julius Echter von 232 Mestrezat, Philippe 221 Milton, John 210, 211 modernity and confessionalization 25–6, 29–30 and confessions 6 modernization theory 25 Moeller, Bernd 110 Moeller, Ernst von 324 Mohyla, Petro 16–17 Moiban, Ambrosius 194, 195 Moller, Albin 151 Moltmann, Jürgen 39, 43, 44 Montpellier, confessionalization xxv, 260 More, Thomas, Sir 347, 358

366

Index

on pluralism 350–51 Mörlin, Joachim xix, 67– 76 Repetitio 77–88 Muchembled, Robert 271 Müller, Johannes 222 Münster confessionalization 233–4, 258 disturbances 293 Jesuits 258 Musaeus, Simon 72 Musculus, Andreas 75, 85 Nantes, Edict (1598) 243–4, 249, 272, 351 narrative structure, witchcraft confessions 196–202 Nas, Johann 132, 133, 144 Naumburg 71, 72 Nemours, Treaty (1585) 262, 266 Neuser, Wilhelm H. 38 Nischan, Bodo 37, 38, 46, 177, 258, 275 on confessionalization 19–20 Prince, People, and Confession 19, 21 on the Second Reformation 39–40 Nordhausen 75 Nuremberg, law, prenuptial coitus 160, 169–70 obedience, Pfeffinger on 102–4 occult crimes juridical confessions 185 see also witchcraft confessions Oestreich, Gerhard 44, 111 O’Malley, John W., Trent and All That 11 original sin, and free will 82–3 Osiander, Andreas 68, 69, 70, 76, 79, 80, 81, 83, 84 Osiander, Lucas 310 Osnabrück, Treaty (1648) 56 Otto, Anton 75 Ozment, Steven 110, 156, 160 papacy, as Antichrist 54 n.12 Papal Bull, Coela et Terra 133 Parker, Archbishop 284–5 pastoral office 88 pastors, astrologers 149–50 Pázmány, Péter 133 Peasants’ Revolt (1525) 293 Pegau 97 Pell, John 210, 214, 216 Propositio 215, 217 Pereira, Benedictus 133 periodization, history 56–7

Peter Martyr Vermigli 87 Peucer, Caspar 138 pews, introduction 116 Pezel, Christoph 39, 40, 42–3, 44–5 Pfeffinger, Johann on adiaphora 99–105 at Leipzig 93 life 92–3 on obedience 102–4 Pfister, Silvia 144, 212 Pflug, Julius 97 Philip II (King) 309 Philipp of Hesse 61 Philippists, Gnesio-Lutherans, controversy 94, 143, 156, 170–71 physicality, and religious fervor 108–9 Pico, Giovanni, Disputationes adversus astrologiam 135 Pietas Austriaca 240, 241 Pietism 18, 129 piety Bynum on 108 Catholicism, post-Reformation 127–8, 290–1 controlled 112–29 definition 111 and religious fervor xx, 111 Pinelli, Luca 315 Piscator, Johannes 136 Plokhy, Serhii 16 pluralism Grotius on 351–3 More on 350–51 see also religious toleration Poach, Andreas 74–5 Polanus, Amandus 212 polemics, devotional literature 308–11 Prague 34 prenuptial coitus and confessionalization xx, 155–74 criminalization xx, 155–6, 167–73 Augsburg 160 Electoral Saxony 170 Franconia 170 Geneva 161 Nuremberg 160, 169–70 Württemberg xx, 156, 160–61, 162 Zurich 158 Prierias, Alexander 54, 63 printing press influence 52, 59, 62–3 Reformation 293 Protestant Reformation 2, 347

Index and confessionalization paradigm 5–6 Protestant unity, and Cromwell xxi, 215, 216, 219, 225 Protestantism, Catholicism, co-existence 259–60 proto-industrialization, German history 2 Prussia 1, 68 confessionalization 18 pulpits, modification 116 Quinn, Arthur J. 20 Rader, Matthew 61 Ramsay, Andrew 208–9, 210 Ranke, Leopold von 9 Rasch, Johann, on astrology 133 Rau, Johannes 147 Reformation baptism, influence on 118–19 Brandenburg 19 death rituals, influence on 123–5 definition 275–6 dimensions of 56 and education 64 as historical period 56 Holy Communion, influence on 121–2 iconoclasm 113, 125–6 printing press 293 and religious toleration 356–8 weddings, influence on 120 see also Counter-Reformation; German Reformation; Second Reformation Reformed churches Aubenas, difficulties 249–55 unity, Dury xxi, 209–10 see also Swiss Reformed churches Reichskirche, Germany 228–32 Reinhard, Wolfgang 9, 11, 22, 47, 55, 60, 64, 111, 257, 273, 289 on confessionalization xviii on reformed Catholicism 7–8 religion and secularization 13, 61 Tübingen school 23 religious fervor and physicality 108–9 and piety xx, 111 suppression 112–29 see also affective piety religious toleration Hermann Conring on 339, 342 and the Reformation 356–8 see also pluralism

367

Remy, Nicolas 203 Rhodingus, Nikolaus 165 Ribandeneira, Pedro de Flos Sanctorum 306 Life of Ignatius Loyola 306 Richeôme, Louis 310, 315 Rodriguez, Alonso 315 Röhrer, Georg 63 Roper, William 350 Rosenberg, Alfred 46 Rosenberg, Hans, Bureaucracy, Aristocracy, and Autocracy 21 Rubens, Peter Paul 304 Rublack, Hans-Christoph 6 Ruthenians, confessionalization 16 Rutherford, Samuel 222–3 sacraments 85–6 St Bartholomew’s massacre (1572) xxii, 262, 266, 269 St Germain, Edict (1570) 265 saints, Luther on 114 Salvian of Marseilles, on heresy 352 Salzburg, confessionalization 57 Sarcerius of Mansfeld, Erasmus 72, 73 Savonarola 135 Saxony, Albertine adiaphora in xix, 100, 104 church decoration 126 Lutheranism 95–7 Saxony, Electoral, prenuptial coitus 170 Scheible, Heinz 67 Schilling, Heinz 6, 8, 14, 38, 40, 55, 64, 111, 289 on confessionalization 4–5, 10, 257, 273 on the Second Reformation 41, 46 Schindling, Anton 14 Schmalkaldic Conference (1537) 69, 71 Schmalkaldic War (1546–47) 91, 93, 104 Schmidt, Heinrich R. 47, 277, 279 Schnepf, Erhard 72 Scholz-Hänsel, Michael 35 Schönborn family 230–31 Schönborn, Johann P. von 229, 230, 236 Schönborn, Lothar F. von Schönfelt, Victorin 149 Schröcker, Alfred 231 Schröer, Alois 44 Schubert, Ernst 14 Schwenckfeld, Caspar 81 Scotland confessionalization 48 England, Union (1707) 48

368

Index

Scribner, Robert W. 12–13, 110, 277 Scripture, authority, Luther 54, 62–3, 349 Sebastian, St 113 Second Coming, and astrology 147 Second Reformation 38 Calvinism as 42 concept 39 Nischan on 39–40 Schilling on 41, 46 term overuse 45–6 use xix, 41–5, 46–7 Second Vatican Council (1959–65) 46 secularization Europe 28 and religion 13, 61 Sehling, Emil 157 sermons Luther on 117 role 116–17 Servetus, Michael 80 sex before marriage see prenuptial coitus Sibeth, Uwe 163–4, 166 Sichard, Johann 161 Sigismund, John, Elector 258 Sixtus V (Pope) 305 social discipline, confessionalization as xvii, 7, 48, 257–8 social drama, witchcraft confessions as 186–7 sociologist, historian, compared 19 soteriology, England 277–8 Sötern, Philip Christoph von 229 Spee, Friedrich von 203 Cautio criminalis 195 Spener, Philipp J. 129 Stancaro, Francesco 81 state, and adiaphora 101–4 state development, and confessionalization 18, 25, 59, 60–62, 104–5 states, Germany 61 Stathmion, Christoph, Astrologia Asserta 135 Stephens, Walter 203 Stockar, Johann J. 214 Stolleis, Michael 322, 324, 325, 344 Stoltz, Johann 142, 144 Strasser, Ulrike 14 Strauss, Gerald 64 Strigel, Viktorin 72 Stucki, Johann R. 214, 215, 216, 218–22, 224 Stupperich, Martin 68 superstition, Hermann Conring on 338

Sureau, Hugues 270 Sutcliffe, Matthew 282 Swiss, view of Cromwell 208, 217 Swiss Confederation, Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) 212, 213 Swiss Reformed churches Covenanters, contacts 208–9 John Dury’s mission 207–26 symbolism Eucharist 271–2 weddings 119 synergism, Flacius’ arguments against 82–3 Synergistic Controversy 93 Tanner, Adam, Theologica scholastica 195 Tauler, Johannes 125 theology, and confessionalization 58, 63 Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) 40, 227, 228, 229, 242, 354 Swiss Confederation 212, 213 Timann, Johannes 73, 80 Toleration, Edict (1562) 262, 263 Torgau 97 torture, and juridical confessions 183, 185 Trent, Council of (1545–63) 62, 83–4, 193, 229, 231 and France 259 Trevor-Roper, Hugh 210–11 Tridentine Faith, Profession (1564) 57 Trinity doctrine 80 Troeltsch, Ernst 20 Protestantism and Progress 3 Tronchin, Theodor 221 truth juridical confessions as 183–4 religious, search for 320 witchcraft confessions as 178, 189 Tübingen school, religion 23 Turretin, François 221 Tyndale, William 278 Ulrich, Johann J. 213–19, 224 Ussher, James, Archbishop 211 Utrecht, confessionalization 15 Valentin, Jean-Marie 241 Vauchez, André 108 Véron, François 310, 316 Virdung, Johann 132 Virgin Mary, as feminine ideal 113 visitations, Luther on 64 Vogel, Matthaeus 76

Index Wallmann, Johannes 325 Wangnereck, Heinrich, Iudicium theologicum 323 War of the Three Kingdoms (1641–50) 17 Waser, Johann H. 219 Weber, Max 17, 18, 25, 28 weddings Luther’s 104 Reformation influence 120 symbolism 119 Weigel, Valentin 129 Weiss, Nicholas 150 Westphal, Joachim 72, 73 Westphalia, Peace (1648) 228, 229, 323, 324 Wettstein, Johann R. 216, 218 Weyer, Johann 176, 204 Weyermann, Johann 135 White Mountain, battle (1620) 34 Whitgift, Archbishop 283 Wigand, Johannes 72, 75 Wilcox, Thomas 280, 281 Wilhelm, Hieronymus 141 William of Brunswick-Lüneburg, Duke 325, 344 Wilmart, André 108 Winckler, Nicolaus 149 witch-crazes, and confessionalization 60 witchcraft confessions and Carolina (law code) 185–91, 202, 203 and confessionalism xxi, 176–7, 205 features 177–8 function 177, 179, 202–5

369

and individual transformation 188 narrative structure 196–202 example 199–202 scholarly research 178–9 as social drama 186–7 as truth 178, 189 see also juridical confessions Wittenberg 53, 63, 67, 91, 138 theologians xix, 71, 77, 88, 92, 98 Wolf, Erik 324, 344 Wolf, Karl 43, 44 Worms Catholic/Evangelical theologians 72 Diet (1521) 307, 349 Württemberg church decoration 126–7 prenuptial coitus, criminalization xx, 156, 160–61, 162 Würzburg, confessionalization 235–7 Xavier, Francis, Annual Letters 305 Zach, Krista 48 Zeeden, Ernst W. 12, 14, 42, 111 on confessionalization 22–4, 257, 259, 272–3 Zepper, Wilhelm 134 Ziegler, Walter 9, 14 Zimmerman, Wolfgang 240–41 Zurich law, prenuptial coitus, criminalization 158 Zwinger, Johannes 221, 222 Zwinger, Theodor 210, 217, 218 Zwingli, Huldrych 86, 87, 121