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 ASHGATE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 ong, progressive climb — Egypt and Mesopotamia to Greece and Rome; Middle Ages to Renaissance and Reformation; Enlightenment and Revolution to the nation-state buile 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 comprchensibility to the most radically discupted of modem European narratives, the story of Germany and its place in Europe. For more than a hundred years this stoty 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 Yeass’ War and the birth of the new German state in 1871 — fiom 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 wich the problem of alleged German backwardness by European standards, and each sought to re-integrate Germany into geniral 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 TSO of social upheavals that eventually transformed feudal into bourgeois Europe.’ This thesis confirmed the position of the Protestant Reformation at the traditional turning point between medieval and modern German and European history and affismed Germany's vanguard role in the transition from feudal to capitalist Europe. Tn West Germany at the same time, young historians were also turning their hands to fashioning an intelligible link’ between the recent and the dceper. 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 seate hhad 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. 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 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 Max Steinmetz, “Die frubbirgerliche Revolution Deutschland 1476 bis 1535. ‘Thesen aur Vorbereitung det wissenschafilichen Konferenz in Wernigetode vom 21. bis 24 Januar 1960,” Zeitscbrif fr Geschichrswisenschafi 8 (1960): 113-24; also in Max Steinmerz, ed., Die fribbigerliche Revolucion in Dewschland. Referat und Diskusion sum Thema Probleme der “Fishbiingrlche Revolution in Deutschland 1476~1535, edited by Max Steinnmetz (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 Doxpalen, German Hisaory in Marxist Perspective: The East German Approach (Detroit, 1985), chap. 3. For the larger context, sce Petct Kriedtc, Peasants, Landlonds and Capitalists: European and the World ‘Feonomy, 1500-1800, ranslaced by V. R. Berghahn (Cambridge, 1983). 2 'The entive argument i presented in Poter Blickle, Obedient Germans? A Rebuttal translated by Thomas A. Brady, Jr. (Charloccesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997). See also Peter Blickle, Kommamalimus. Skizzen einer gesellschaftichen Organisationjorm, 2 vols (Munich: R, Oldenbourg, 2000). | 3 Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, eds, European Proto-industrialization (Cambridge: Cambridge Univesity Press, 1996). 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 che 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 ewo 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 tise 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 Exnst ‘Troelesch’s essay of 1912, Protestantism and Progress! Troeltsch identified the two Protestant confessions, Lutheranism and Reformed (“Calvinist”), as respectively less and more progressive, based on their respectively miore and less feudal social bases, and the differences emerge with notably clarity in the contrast between Lutheran and Calvinist politics. Lutheranism, Troelesch argued, had a thoroughly conservative idea of the law of nature based on its complete confidence in divine providence. It is thus “favorable to absolutistn, 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.” The world changed profoundly during the middle third of the twentieth century, and the confessionalization thesis was born of a recognition that the « Best Troeltsch, Protestantinn and Progres: 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 Schom-Schitte, “Ernst Trocltschs “Soriallehren’ und dic gegenwirtige Frithneuzeieforschung. Zur Diskussion um die Bedeutung von Luthertum und Calvinismus fir dic Entstchung der modesnen Wel,” in Ernst Truelischs Seziallebren. Studien su ihrer Interpretation, edived by Friedsich Wilhelm Graf and Tew Rendtorff (Giitersloh: Giterslober Verlagshaus Geed Mohn, 1993), 133-52, 5 Troclesch, Protetantison and Progres, 63-4.4 Historical Definitions. “Troeltschian position no longer held water. In the later 1970s, Heinz. Schilling (now of Berlin) devoted his second dissertation (Habilitationsschriff) to 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.© Today, one might argue that in this situation, absolutist rule was more “modern” than traditional communal liberties, bue Schilling’s conclusion was quite different. He found that the association of the two Protestant confessions with more authoritarian or more libertarian polities — 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 telated 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 sociery and the state between 1550 and 1650. Schilling eventually formulated his idea as a “confessionalization paradigm.” Confessionalization, in his view, “is a fundamental social transformation that inclides ecclesiastical-religious and psychological-cultural changes as well as political and social ones.” I 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 cleatly 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 © Heine Schilling, Konfsvionskonplke ond Staansbildwng. Eine Faltudie wher das Verbs ton relgisers und sozialem Wandel in der Fribmewseit am Beispiel der Grefichaft Lippe, Quellen tind Forschungen ir Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 48 (Guersloh: Gutersloher Verlagshaus Gerd Moho, 1981). Schilling summarized his findings in “Between the Testitorial Stace and Urban Liberty: Lutheranism and Calvinism in the Coungy of Lippe,” in The German People and the Reformation, edited by R. Po-chia Hsia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 263-83. 7 Heine Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisiesung von Kirche, Staac und Gesellschaft ~ Profil, Leistung, Defiite und Perspektiven eines geschichtswissenschafilichen Paradigms,” in Die kasholiche Konfesionalisierung. Akton eines von Corpus Catholicorum and Verein fiir ‘Reformatiansgeichichte veranstalieren Symposions, Augebing, 1993, edited by Wolfgang Reinbard and Heinz Schilling (Gotersloh; Mulnstes, 1995), 1149. 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 ahways conceived as social change.” Schilling’ confessonalization paradigm thus seeks to repair the gap created by the demotion of the Protestant Reformation as the birth of the modern eta by 1 pushing modernity’s pre-natal* moment forward into the immediate post- Reformation 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 Burope 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,’ and thus for the relatively lesser significance of the differences, on which theories of German “deviations” (Sonderwegé) from the path of the West have always rested." Kenn ars the tem Nera ‘oslleck. Schilling, “Konfessionalisierung von Kitche, Stat und Gesellchat,” 5 ¥ Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalsicrung, im Reich. Religliser und gesellschafiichee Wand in Deutschland avachen 1955 und 160, HisarioheZeecbif 246 (1988); 145, English: “Confessionaization in che Empire: Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555 and 1620," in Heine Schilling, Religion, Poca Culture andthe Emergence of Early Modern Society Buzage in German and Dutch Flory Studies in Medieval and Reformation ‘Thought, vol. 50 (Leiden, 1992), 20546, He expanded she model from Gertnany to Burope in Hein Sciling, “Confsionl Euop in Hand of open Hor, 1400-160. Late ‘Middle Ages, Renaisance, and Reformation, edited by Thomas A. Brady, Je, Heiko A. Oberman, and Je Ty 3 wale eld 19495 wo 260. 82 "Prominent examples: Thomas Mann, “Getmany and the Getmans", Thomas Manns Addveses Delivered at the Library of Congress 1942-1949 (Whshington, D.C:, 1963); Louis Dumont, German Ideology: Front Erance to Germany and Back (Chicago, 1994), ing borrows fiom Reinhard& Historical Definitions Like most large arguments about history, the confessionalization thesis requited 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 Tubingen historian Hans-Christoph Rublack in 1988." 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. By this time, the notion of a “confessional age” was alrcady well established. In the early 1980s the concept of confession was imported into Marxist oriography in East Germany, and in West Germany the concept was being employed to label a “confessional age.” Some years later appeared the first ‘Die refrmierte Konfssionalicerung in Detaschland. Das Problem der "Ziveiten Reformation’: Wissenschaflihes Syrposion des Verein fr Reformationsgeschichte 1985, edited by Heine Schilling, Schtiften des Vereins fir Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 195 (Gitecsloh : Giitersloher Verlagshaus Mohn, 1986); Die ducheritche Konfesionalisierung in Deutschland: Wisenschafiiches Spmposion des Vereins fr Reformarionsgescibte 1988, edited by Hans-Christoph Rublack, Schrifen des Vercins fiir Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 197 (Giitersioh, 1992). For example, Wilhelm H. Newser, “Die Eeforschung der “Zweiten Reformation’ ~ cine wissenschaliliche Fehlentwicklung,” in Die reformierte Konfasionaliienung in Deutschland, 379-86. 18. Herbert Langer, “Religion, Konfession und Kirche in der Bpoche des Obergangs vom Feudalismus zum Kapitalistmus,” Zeitschrift ir Gesohichtswissenscbaft 32. (1984): 110-24; Martin Heckel, Deutschland im konfesionellen Zeitalter, Kicine Vandeohoeek Reihe, no. 1490, vol. 5 (Géttingen: Vandenhoeck 8 Ruprecht, 1983). See the similar usage by Harm Klueting, Das konfesionelle Zeitaler 1525-1648 (Stuttgart: Ulmer Verlag, 1989), who, however, incorporates the Reformation into the confessional age. The Career of a. Concept 7 English work on confessionalization as “social discipline” and confessionalism asa culture, joined several years later by the first overview of confessionalization as a process in the German lands." 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 ong 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 asa 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 well- established comparators in Orthodox Christendom and Islam. The application of the conféssionalization 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.” The fashioning of a version of the confessionalization thesis useful for comprehending Roman Catholicism was chiefly the work of the Augsburg (chen Freiburg) historian Wolfgang Reinhard. His concepts arose not from study of the German territories, Schilling’s bailiwick, but — appropriate to his MCR, Po-chia Hsia, Sociel Diwipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550-1750 (London and New York: Routledge, 1989); Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Konfestonalisionang im 16, Jabrbundert, Enayklopadie deutscher Geschichte, vol. 12 (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1992). 5 Robert Bireley, The Reftshioning of Catholicism, 1450-1700: A Reassesment 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). (7 mcrae,= Historical Definitions: 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, 2 new view of reformed Catholicism, which in 1977 he framed programmatically in four points: 1 the concepts of “Counterreformation” and “Catholic Reform” are inadequate to designate an entire epoch of either German ot 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 epochs 3. the movement of the Counte:reformation 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 tems appropriate both t0 ceclesiastical-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.” It was not to be expected that this convergence of thinking about confessions and the confessional era would produce 2 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.””* The difference fitted the respective milieus of origin, given the greater independence, deeper traditions, and international 6 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Gegenteformation als Modernisierung? Prolegomena zu einer Theorie des konfessionellen Zeitaters,” Archiv fir Rformationsgeschichre GB (1977): 226-52. "Die katbolische Konfesionalisiertong. Wssenschafiliches Symposion der Geellchaft anv Hersusgabe des Corpus Cathoticonum und des Vereins fir Reformationsgeschichte, edited. by ‘Wolfgang Reinhard and Heiny, Schilling, Reformationsgeschichiliche Studien und Texte, vol. 145 (Manster, 1995). W Schilling, “Die Konfessionaliserung von Kirche, Staac und Gesellschaft,” 3-4, The Career of a Concept 9. 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.” He acknowledged the objection ahat “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.”* 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" Reinhaed 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.”* 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, includes® the binding of faith to the institutions the binding of faith and seligious life to traditions extensive capacities ~ the patish net, religious orders, collegial bodies, the hierarchy capped by the pope, and the continuity of canon law; acclergy constituted as a legal estate; the religious orders as agents of education and mission; the mobilization of women for religious reform and charitable taskss the use of Latin as a liturgical language: a superior international organizations the ability to maintain a distinetion between church and state; wee CoN au 2 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and the Early Modern State: A Reassessment,” Catholic Historical Review 75 (1989): 383-404, 2 Wolfgang Reinhard, “Was ise katholische Konfessionalisierung?” in Die katholische Konfesionaliserung, 49-52, here at 436-7. 2 Walter Ziegler, “Typen der Konfessionalisierung in katholischen “Territorien Deutschlands.” in Die kutholiche Konfesionaisierung, 405-18, here at £17, 2 Thomas A. Brady, Js “Ranke, Rom und die Reformation: Leopold von Rankes Entdeckung des Katholizismus,” Jahrbuch des Historischen Kollgs, 1999, 43-60. 2 Reinhard, “Was ist katholische Konfessionalisierung?” 439-48,10 Historical Definitions 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 situal and toward social history, Schilling, quite aware of this problem, tried to reduce one of the propria, Catholicism supranational charactes, 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 evene” ~ the early formation of Europes system of power politics, diplomacy, alliances, and war ‘The problem of the sceming irreducibility of the Catholic propria nonetheless remained, and it has colored the teception of the confessionalization thesis with respect to Catholic history. Ac 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 post- medieval Christianity as a single, if variegated, successor to medieval religion.” During this era, he argued, the practical, affective, corporately social religion of medieval Catholicism gave way after 1400 to a more theorized, spititualized, and individual Christianity, of which Protestantism and Catholicism represented ewo different but similar streams, Bossy expressed extreme watiness, 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 fiom an ethics of solidarity to one of civility. If we believe that a, 2 Heinz Schilling, “Konfessionalisierung und Formicrang eines interoationalen Systems wilhrend der frihnen Neuzeit,” in Die Reformation in Deutschland und Europe: Interpreationen und Debatten { The Reformation in Germany and Europe: Interpretations and kes, edited by Hans R. Guggisberg and Gotfiied Krodel (Gitersioh, 1993), 591-613, here at 591-2. For the further development of this idea, see Holger Thomas Graf, Konfésion sod internationales System. Die Anenpolitit Hessen-Kissels im konfesionellen Zeitater, Quelten und Forschungen tur hessischen Geschichte 94 (Darmstadt and Marburg, 1993). 25 John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400-1700 (Oxford, 1985). The Career of a Concept " ‘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; 0s if we prefer, in a Holy Family which excluded stich non-resident kin as John the Baptist.” Except for the stare and state-building, however, these changes “do not seem to evoke any convincing motor cvent in the world of things: few, I guess, will be prepared to swallow the proposal thar the emergence of ‘market society’ was such an event.”2" 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 brilliandy captured and called our attention to the obsession gripping Western culture to define ‘who's in, who's out.” 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.” This deficit led him to prefer the admittedly “bland and “faccless” but more capacious name of “early modern Catholicism” to all competing terms.” 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 Marke 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" 2% Bossy, Christianity in the West, 169. 2 Bossy, Christianity in the West, 170. 28 John W. O'Malley, Trent and All That: Renaming Catholicion in the Early Modern Era (Carabridge, Mass, 2000), 137. 2 O'Malley, Trent and All That, 138-9. 2 O'Malley, Tient and All That, 140, 3! Mare R. Forster, “John Bossy and the History of German Catholicist,” 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12 © Historical Definitions Ironically, the inability to comprehend religion, the chief marker of confessionalization, as a set of coherent practices has proved the Achilles hee! of the confessionalization thesis, particularly in its otiginal version. Perhaps one could have listened more catefully to Exnst Walter Zeeden, whose studies of enduring Catholic elements in the religious lifeof German Protestants after the Reformation helped him to bring the very concept of “confessional formation” (Konféssionsbildung) into’ the historians’ vocabulary.” 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 thac led ¢o 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 carly, 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 docttine. 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 brightese lights.” Although he began to study che 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 uundetstand 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 Kapwainer awischen Konfisionalsienang und Altagskultur, Vergleichende Fallaudie’ am Beispiel Preibungs und Hildesheims 1599-1750 (Freiburg, 2002). % Ernst Walter Zeeden, Die Enttebung der Konfesionen. Grundlagen und Formen der Kanfesionsbildung im Zeisalier der Glaubenskampfe (Munich and Vierina, 1965). See also his Konfessiansbildung: Studien sur Reformation, Gegenreformation nd katholschen Reform, Spitmivtelater und fruhe Neuzeit, vol. 15 (Stuttgart: Klect-Cotta, 1985). ‘To read Zeeden's Writings today sto discover why the confessionalization thesis arse in Germany, wih its living confessional cultures, and why could do so only after confessionalisin — the competition beeween Protestant and Catholic confessions — had come co an end in that country. 2 On Scribner's work in its historiographical context, sce Thotnas A. Brady, Jz, “Robert W. Scribner, A Historian of the German Reformation,” in R. W. Setibner, Religion and Crlure in Germany (1400-1800), edited by Lyndal Roper, Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought, vol. 81 (Leiden, 2001), 9-28. The Career of a Concept 13 togethier, and came to understand how misleading was the conventional distinction between the mental worlds of the common people and their social superiors, The mote Scribner explored this world with anthropological concepts, the less respect he felt for the gtand narratives based on discriminations, and the mote 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 histor From this perspective, the centrality of religion and religious culture to pre- rmoclern peoples, the confessionalization thesis truncated its story by closing an era just as its defining category, confessional religion, was approaching ies 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.” Not the sixteenth nor the seventeenth century, writes Etienne Frangois 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 bekavion” thus creating social and cultural dimensions “which expanded far beyond the religious sphere proper and explain its continuity down to our own day.”® {e is now being recognized that, in the German lands at least, the real peale of confessional cultures and theit 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.”* If in Germany, pethaps 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!” % Leeden, Die Ensiehung der Konfosionen, \8t, aleeady recognized this poi. 2% Eticnne Frangois, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protenanten und Katboliken in Augsburg 1648-1806, Abhandlungen nut Geschichce der Stadt Augsburg, vol. 33 (Sigmaringen, 1991), 2. % Helmut Walser Smith and Christ Clark, “The Fate of Nathan,” in Protestants, Catholics sand Jews in Germany, 1800-1914, edited by Helmut Walser Smith’ (Oxford and New York, 2002), 3-325 Konfesionen im Konflik, edited by Olaf Blaschke (Gottingen, 2002). % See the review article by Joel B Hlarsington and Helmut Walser Sich, “Confessionaliztion, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555-1870," The Journal of Modern History 69 (1997): 77101. 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 caditional marker to be replaced in the modernization process by a more ‘moxdemn marker such as ethnicity oF race. Sce, foran interesting example, Paul W. Werth, At the Margins of Orthodosy: Mision Governance, and Confesional Polites in Rusts Volge Kama Region, 1827-1905 (Ithaca, 2002)ee oo tastorieal Definitions: 4 These doubts, qualifications, and extensions hardly diminish the place the confessionalization thesis now occupies in the study of post-Reformation Germany and Europe.* The thesis remains least problematic in the context ~— Zeeden’s and Schillings original ficld of study ~ of the German lands, which have been covered superbly by a seven-volume, region-by-region, territory-by- territory survey (with invaluable maps) edited by Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler.” Volumes have appeared, too, on confessonalization as a regional phenomenon. 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 matsied women up to the official cult of the Virgin Mary as patroness of Bavaria — was to the centralization of this most precocious of German tertitorial states." Perhaps the most demonstrative sign of the confessionalization thesis’ now established historiogtaphical position is its use as a petiodizing concept for German history in the tenth edition of Bruno Gebhardt’s venerable Handbook of German History. Yet hard-boiled skeptics remain, even among historians of the German tervitorial states, who cultivate the thesis’ original seedbed, Emst Schubert of Géttingen, a leading scholar of the tettitories, holds that the territorial laws of this time, the crucial phase in the transformation of the old patrimonial principality into the territorial sate, simply do not bear a confessional seamp. “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.”" From the other % Soe Heinz Schilling’ own assessment in “Konfessionsbildung,’ ‘Konfessionalisierung” ~ cin Wtrauberich” Die Gahihte in Wisenchai wid Unercbe 42 (1991) 41-63, 39 Die Tervsorien des Reich im Zeisaltr der Reformation und Konfesionalisierung: Land und Konfession 1500-1650, edited by Anton Schindling and Walter Ziegler, 7 vols, Katholisches Leben und Kirchenreform im Zeitaleer der Glaubensspaltung, vols 4952, 56-7 (Minster, 1991-97). (© Konfesonalisierang und Region, cd, Peer Friess and Rolf Kiessling, Forum Suevicum. Beit ‘zur Geschichte Ostschwabens und der benachbarten Regionen, vol. 3 (Constance, 41 Ubrke Strasser, Stare of Virginity: Gender, Religion, and Polivis in an Karly Modern Catholic State (Ann Atbor, 00) eu " fey Ne ® Maximilian Lanzinner, “Konfessioncles Zeitaler 1555-1618,” in Gebbarde. Hiendbuch der deutschen Geschichte, 10th eda, vol. 10 (Stuttgart, 2001), ed. Wolfgang Reinhard, 1-203. © Emst Schubert, “Von Gebot zur Landesordnung. Der Wandel furstlicher Herrachaft vom 15. zum 16, Jahrhundeut,” in Die deutsche Reformation zwischen Spitmistelalter und Frither Neuzeit, edited by Thomas A. Brady, Jy Sclrifien des Historischen Kollegs. Kolloquien, vol. 50 (Munich, 2001), 19-62, here at 21. ‘The Career of a Concept 15 direction, too, the connection between confessionalization and state-building has been challenged, notably by Mare 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. Other studies, too, suggest that Catholic confessionalization had very little to do with either political or social modernization in the ecclesiastical states.” “The extension of the confessionalization thesis to new groups and now 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 songer 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 carly modern religious history but also as a texm of periodization, but this has not altered the standard view of French social and political history Much more surprising is an attempt to treat North German Mennonites — excluded as “non- confessional” by Schilling ~ as a confessionalized community.” 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, ot the British kingdoms. Benjamin Kaplan, in a study of Utrecht, writes that the “rise of confessionalism” had three aspects: the rebuilding of “ccclesiastical structures of religious life’; fierce competition for the doubters and unaffiliated; and the religious disciplining of congregations. All five of Utreche’s churches — Calvinist, Remonscrant, Mennonite, Lutheran, and Catholic ~ ‘experienced the rise of confessionalism in its three aspects, and in 4 Marc R. Forster, Catholic Reviual in the Age of the Barogue: Religions Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550-1750 (Cambridge and New York, 2001). © Alexander Jendortf, Reformatio Catholiva. Geselschafiliche Handlungspielriume hirchlichen Wandels im Enosife Maine, 1514-1630, Reformationsgeschicheliche Srudien und “Teate, vol. 142 (Minster, 2000). Stephan Laux, Reformationsversuche in Kurla (1542-1548). Fallstudien 220 einer Strukturgeschichte landuadischer Reformation (News, Kempen, Andernach, Linz, Reformationsgeschichtliche Stadien und ‘Teste, vol. 143 (Miinstes, 2001), concains suggestions in the same direction, though the period treated is too brief ro be conclusive, 46 Le Timps des conftssions: 15301620150, ed, Marc Venard, Histoire du christianisme des otigines & nos jours, vol. 8 (Patis, 1992). For a special study, see Gregory Hanlon, Confession caned Cornmuanity in Seventeenth-century France: Catholic ana Protestant Coexistence in Aquitaine (Pennsylvania, 1993) 4 Michael D. Driedges, Obedient Heresies. Mennonite Identities in Lutheran Hamburg and Altona during the Confessional Age (Aldershot and Burlington, 2002).16 Historical Definitions this sense their development between 1600 and 1650 ran in parallel,” though in other respects “the churches had divergent histories."** 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.” There seemed, in the view of one participant, little belieFin 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 scventeenth-century Ruthenian/Ukrainian religious histary. This requires particularly strenuous adaptation, for the Ruthenians practiced the same religion in wo different churches, Greek Catholic and Orthodox, and were divided politically between the Cossacks and the subjects of the Polish-Lichuanian 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.”*! 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’ chutch-centered version of the confessionalization thesis, because the initiative came entirely from the church at Kyiv/Kiey, 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 easlier been catried out by the princely 48 Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Confessionalism and Its Limits: Religion in Utrecht, 1600-1650," in Masters of Light: Dutch Painters in Vireebt during the Golden Age, ediced by Joancath A. Spicer and Lyon Federle Orr (New Haven, 1997), 60-71, here at 61 ® Bruce Gordon, “Konfessionalisierung, Stinde und Staac in Ostmittcleuropa (1550-1650),” German History 17 (1999): 90-4. 50 Sechii Plokhys The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford and New ‘York, 2002). Borys A. Gudzial, Criss and Reform: The Kyivane Mecropolitanate, the Patriarchate ‘of Constantinople, and the Genesis ofthe Union of Bres (Cambridge, Mass. 2001), who examines such of the sime history primarily from the Greck Catholic, rather than the Orthodox, side, does not employ the concept of confessionalization, much less the thesis. 3t Plokthy, Cossacks and Religion, 1 The Career of a Concept 7 stratum.” 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, seventeenth- century Ireland. Ute Lovz-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 powes and his established church, and did so with the help of their own church, whose agents introduced Tridentine Catholicism in Ireland. OF course, the confessionalization was not symmettical, for the Trish Confederation of Kilkenny was by no stretch of the imagination a state, and the presence of Jesuits, a prime marker for Low Heumann 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 transmited through forms of religious expression which had their origins in the medieval Gaelic past."* The Irish case is nonetheless an interesting one, for while the confessionalization thesis in Schilling’s move state-centered version fits well che 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 gencral 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 aad the state was promoted ultimately by sccularizations 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 3 Plokhy, Cassacks and Religion, 240 53 Use Lovz-Heumann and Kail S. Bostigheimes, “The Irish Reformation in European Perspective,” Archiv fitr Reformationygeschichte 87 (1998): 268-3095 Ute Loti-Heumann, Die doppelte Konfesionaliierung in Irland: Konflkt und Koexistena im 16, und in der ersten Halfie des 17. Jahrhnunderts, Spitmittealcer und Reformation, new series, vol. 13 (Tibingen, 2000). 54 Samantha A. Meigs, The Reformations in Ireland: Tradition and Confesionalism, 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.18 Historical Definitions 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 absolutise princes, It was equally the resule of a disciplinary revolution spaced by ascetic religious movements, che most important of which was Calvinism.” Gorski believes that a skeptical attitude is warranted toward theories that focus solely on elites, formal organization, or threats of coercion, He sgjects 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. In this he agrees with those, including many historians of Catholicisin (and Anglicanism) who insist on the confessions’ “propria,” not their similatities, 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 fiom Max Weber and Octo 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 2one 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.” His selection is important, because Calvinism, the confession he believes — against Schilling — to have been most disciplining and most associated with revolution, ot Pietism, which he holds to be an equivalent, became established in both states. But with quite different political consequence, because, so runs Gorsk’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.”™ Of both types of political development, “the disciplinary revolution was a necessary condition.” Gorski thus attributes “a 5 Philip S. Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisit Disciplinary Revolution and State Formation in Holland and Prussia,” American Journal of Sociology 99 (1993): 265-316, here at 266, 5© 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, 5? Philip S. Gorski, The Disciplinary Revolution: Calvinism and the Rise ofthe State in Farly ‘Modern Europe (Chicago, 2003). 3 Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisited,” 267 9 Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisited,” 283. The Career of a Concept 19 decisive causal import ... to Calvinism and ascetic Protestantism” in early modern social and political modernization. Their revolutionary political impact derived from a combination of a radical ethic of social discipline and an effective strategy of collective organization. “[TJhe Calvinist movement,” Gorski revises Weber, “provided the channel through which the discipline of the monastery entered the political world.”* 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 usefual 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 ic in terms which may be partial, so long as they fit the sources. Consistency on the one side, authenticity on the other.® The sociologist looks upon the concepts in terms of their logic, the historian in terms of their utility, [cis 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® 1c is the story of how the Lutheran reformation came to Brandenburg under Elector Joachim I 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, Ic is set, therefore, in the very cockpit of the world, che interface between the two Protestant confessions, out of which one version of the confessionalization thesis arose, Nischan pays homage to the confessionalization thesis as Heit Schilling framed it and acknowledges the term “Second Reformation” as “a proper synonym specifically for ‘Reformed confessonalization.”" Yet Nischan chooses a somewhat divergent way, for he holds that “religion — how people worshiped and how they lived thei faith, the history of the church ~ played a central role in these events and hence provides a key to our understanding of this period."® 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 Bthic Revisited,” 305. 1 Gorski, “The Protestant Ethic Revisited,” 306, @ allude here to what Max Weber called “sinngereche” and “sachgerecht” respectively. © Bodo Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession: The Second Reformation in Brandenburg (Philadelphia, 1994). Nischan, Prince, People, and Confssion, 2. © Nischan, Prince, People, and Conféssion, 1.20 Historical Definitions 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." From such an approach the history of the confessions must unfold not as 2 story of isomorphic programs and parallel development, but as one of confrontation, discrimination, and struggle. But Nischan does not recreatc 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. “Duting the Second Reformation,” Nischan relates, “with the Calvinist coure erying 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 thee confessions. ‘The tale is true to the sources,” 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 difficule to imagine that the ‘wo 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.” 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 somchow, geniuses ofa certain time and a certain place, and all strangely requiring only a litte of our blood to return to fleeting life, to speak to and through us. For they do-waie 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. Nischan, Prince, People, and Confession, 2 © The sources, however, do not really support his contention that “the people” played a ccenttal role in the failure of the Reformed Reformation in Brandenburg. 8 Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, 17. © Arthur Quinn, A New World: An Epic of Colonial America from the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec (Boston, 1994), 2 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 centuties. 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 Rosenbergs 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. Ac 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." It is, therefore, appropriate to dedicate a contribution which deals with the historiograp origins and scholarly perspectives of the confessionalization paradigm to this memorial volume for Bodo Nischan.? This is to be donc in four parts: 1) the circumstances of the formulation and the reception of the paradigms 2) the ' CE here my research note “Nochmals, ‘Zyvcite Reformation in Deutschland,”* Zeitscbrifi fir Historische Forschung 23 (1996): 501-24, esp. 511 fE 513 ff. — Bodo Nischan hhad conceptualized major project on “Confessionalization and Popular Religion in Late~ Reformation Brandenburg,” which incended to throw light on precisely that aspect of ‘confessionalization. Sec his collection of essays: Bodo Nischan, Lutherans and Calvinists in she 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’Beudes ‘Geenzaniques atthe Sorbonne in Paris (cf. the seport in: Ldes Germaniques, Revue de la Soitsé des Eoudes Germaniques 57 (2002): 401-20). U hope for understanding chat in the following historiographical analysis Twill have to refer repeatedly to my own publications. Once again | should like to thank Ute Lorz-Heumann for advice ~ not only with regard to transforming che German text into passable English!The Spread of the Protestant Reformation in Eo} N wi North Seo (Ei Reformed faith dominant ([Fiocwoseate and growing Ref ita ed . Mediterranean asm eo stciy { meh ok z : ZL ay