H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-German@h-net.org

Stefan Ehrenpreis and Ute Lotz-Heumann, _Reformation und konfessionelles
Zeitalter_.  Kontroversen um die Geschichte. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche
Buchgesellschaft, 2002. 138 pp., notes, index. EUR 16,50 (paper), ISBN
353414774X.

Reviewed for H-German by Marc R. Forster, Department of History, Connecticut
College


Confessionalization and Early Modern German Catholicism

It is striking how the study of Catholicism in Germany remains largely
marginalized within a field that is still identified as "the
Reformation."  The rise of new conceptual frameworks like
confessionalization, or "The Confessional Age," have only changed this
tendency slightly.  Yes, most historians have moved beyond the deeply
confessionalized historiography that dominated the study of religion in
early modern Germany even twenty years ago, but the study of Catholicism
remains poorly integrated into the wider field. Stefan Ehrenpreis and Ute
Lotz-Heumann, the authors of a new survey of this field, are keenly aware
of this problem, as they write: "Allerdings ist es bisher noch nicht
gelungen, eine Darstellung der 'Reformationsgeschichte' vorzulegen, in der
die alten mit den neuen Ansätzen der Reformationsforschung verbunden sind...
Die groessten Defizite in der Reformationsforschung lassen sich bei der
Beruecksichtigung katholisch-altglaeubiger Thematiken finden" (p. 113).

Ehrenpreis and Lotz-Heumann do their best to integrate the study of
Catholicism into their survey, but, because they are summarizing research
in the field, this turns out to be difficult.  The field is still
Reformation history.  The section on "Reformation und kulturelle Wandel"
focuses on (Protestant) iconoclasm and the importance of (Protestant)
pamphlets in the early Reformation.  As one would expect, "Stadt und
Reformation" draws on the important series of studies of Protestant cities
produced in the 1970s and 1980s.  Not surprisingly, the chapter on
"Reformation in der laendlichen Gesellschaft" focuses on Peter Blickle's
"Gemeinde Reformation" ("Communal Reformation"), with an excursion into the
vibrant field of Anabaptist studies. The chapter on women and gender
relations emphasizes the changes in the role and status of women caused by
Luther's (and sometimes Zwingli's or Calvin's) Reformation.

The authors cannot be faulted for presenting an overview of research in the
field that emphasizes the areas receiving the most attention from
historians.  Chapters 5 and 6, devoted to the confessionalization thesis,
bring to the forefront perhaps the most dynamic area in the study of
religion in early modern Germany.  Like most other overviews of
confessionalization, these chapters begin with Ernst Walter Zeeden's
concept of _Konfessionsbildung_ (confessional formation) which emphasized
"die geistige und organisatorische Verfestigung der seit der
Glaubenspaltung auseinander strebenden verschiedenen christlichen
Bekenntnisse zu einem halbwegs stabilen Kirchentum nach Dogma, Verfassung,
und religiös-sittlicher Lebensform" (p. 63). Zeeden, a Catholic historian,
developed this conceptualization in the late 1950s, yet it did not
penetrate the mainstream of German historiography until it was taken up by
Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard in the 1980s.  Ehrenpreis and
Lotz-Heumann point out that Schilling, an historian of "evangelischer
Herkunft" and a scholar of northern German Protestantism, and Reinhard, a
Catholic and an historian of European Catholicism, came together to develop
a "confessionalization paradigm" that explained developments in both
Catholic and Protestant regions of Germany (p. 63).  Confessionalization
thus provided a new conceptual framework that helped historians break out
of the traditionally confessionalized historiographies of the Reformation
and Counter-Reformation.

Building on Zeeden, but moving forcefully in its own direction, the
formulators of the confessionalization thesis linked the development of
confessional churches to the rise of the modern state.  They emphasized how
church and state officials worked together to impose (or encourage,
depending on the historian's emphasis) the development of religious
conformity and social discipline among the wider population.  In this
formulation, the confessionalization thesis emphasized the role of religion
in the modernization of society and politics.  Reinhard, as Ehrenpreis and
Lotz-Heumann show, was particularly effective in outlining the modern
methods--the creation of theoretical norms, the establishment of clear
norms of religious practice, the use of propaganda, the intensification of
education, and other techniques and media--used by early modern church and
state officials to strengthen confessional conformity (pp. 66-67).

Under Reinhard's leadership, research on Catholic Germany was integrated
into the study of confessionalization from the beginning.  Indeed, the
comparative element was an essential element in the three conferences which
Schilling and Reinhard organized in the late 1980s and early 1990s, one
each on Reformed, Lutheran, and Catholic confessionalization.  Although
these events tended to bring together older scholars in an effort to draw
them out of the traditional scholarly fields of Reformation and
Counter-Reformation/Catholic Reform, they gave considerable impulse to this
field.  From the early 1990s on, historians of Catholic Germany, especially
the younger ones, embraced confessionalization as a conceptual framework
that would help give Catholicism a role in the main developments in German
history, that is the rise of the modern state and the modernization of
society more generally.

However, the confessionalization thesis also caused problems for historians
of Catholic Germany.  The "statist" focus, found most strongly in the work
of Schilling and other historians of Protestant territories, was only
partially transferable to Catholic Germany.  There was certainly close
cooperation between state and church officials in Catholic Bavaria, in the
Habsburg lands after about 1618, and in some Episcopal territories
(Würzburg), but not in many Catholic regions, where state institutions were
often quite weak.  Yet these lands, such as southwest Germany, the
Rhineland, and Westphalia, also developed strong Catholic confessional
cultures.  At the very least, this situation required historians of
Catholic Germany (and historians of some Protestant regions as well) to
consider that popular confessional identity could develop without the
consistent intervention of the state.

Ehrenpreis and Lotz-Heumann point to another set of difficulties presented
by the confessionalization thesis.  Proponents of confessionalization moved
beyond the idea of confessionalization as a process and increasingly wrote
of the "Confessional Age," a period of German history that fell between the
Reformation (said to end around 1550) and the Thirty Years' War.  Of course
debates about chronology are notoriously sterile, but in this case the tie
between a process (the development of confessional cultures, or
confessional identity) and a particular time period proved very
problematic.  For historians of Catholic Germany the chronological issue
even threatened to bring back the notion of Catholic backwardness.  After
all, there was relatively little successful confessionalization in Catholic
regions before the Thirty Years' War, outside of Bavaria, parts of
Franconia and perhaps the city of Cologne.  Instead, studies by historians
like Louis Châtellier (Alsace), Etienne François (Augsburg), Andreas Holzem
(Westphalia), and Werner Freitag (also Westphalia) show that Catholic
confessionalism really developed strongly after 1650, after the so-called
Age of Confessionalism was over.  It appears that Catholics experienced
confessionalization, but perhaps later than Protestants.

The confessionalization thesis has become problematic for another
reason.  Despite some interest among historians of Italian religion,
confessionalization is really only familiar to historians of early modern
Germany.  This parochialism can have a negative impact on historians of
Catholic Germany, who are (or should be) engaged with the wider study of
Catholicism.   A number of very valuable studies of Catholic regions have
been done by French scholars like François and Gerald Chaix (on Cologne),
yet these historians to not take the conceptual frameworks around
confessionalization as their starting point. Anglophone historians writing
about Catholic Germany, while increasingly read by their German colleagues,
have to consider whether embedding their histories in the discourse of
confessionalization will limit their ability to participate in wider
debates about religion in early modern Europe.  Ideally, of course, useful
aspects of the confessionalization paradigm (as Ehrenpreis and Lotz-Heumann
call it) will come to inform these wider discussions, but this has not
widely happened.

But how and where will confessionalization gain more attention from
historians.? In my view, confessionalization gained its appeal among
historians of Germany because it allowed historians of religion (historians
of Christianity really) to break out of the traditional confessional
historiographies, while also allowing them to claim a place, along with
political and social historians, in the study of modernization.  These
issues--the confessionalized nature of the history of early modern religion
and the place of the Old Reich in the history of modern Germany  are of
limited interest to non-German historians of early modern Europe.

Ehrenpreis and Lotz-Heumann, however, may have identified how
confessionalization can lead German historians into the wider historical
discussion. They write: "Der Begriff "Konfessionalisierung" hat sich in der
deutschen Fruehneuzeitforschung weitgehend etabliert, und das eigentliche
Forschungsparadigma wird, trotz teilweise heftiger Kritik, von den meisten
Autoren als wissenschaftlich ertragreich anerkannt, allerdings unter der
Praemisse der Perspektivenerweiterung bzw. der Modifikation.  Angesichts der
Verlagerung der historiographischen Interesses hin zur Mikrohistorie,
Alltagsgeschichte und neuen Kulturgeschichte ist zu erwarten, dass sich die
Konfessionalisierungsforschung in Zukunft auf die Frage nach der Bedeutung
und Wirksamkeit staatlicher Konfessionalisierungsmassnahmen fuer die
Lebenswelten des "Volkes" richten wird." Historians of Catholic Germany
have taken the lead in integrating these new fields into studies of
confessionalization.  Studies of Baroque Catholicism, that is of the
flowering of popular Catholic life in the century or so after 1650, have
used the methods described above to give a dense analysis of religious
life.  Perhaps the best of these studies is that of Andreas Holzem, a
massively researched account of all aspects of rural Catholicism in
Westphalia.  Revealingly entitled _Religion und Lebensformen.  Katholische
Konfessionalisierung im Sendergericht des Fuerstbistums Muenster. 1570-1800_,
Holzem's book successfully uses the methods of _Alltagsgeschichte_ and the
social history of religion to examine the development of Catholic
confessionalism.  In his study, and others like it, the confessionalization
thesis provides a starting point and, at the same, is subject to
considerable revision.

Finally, recent work on the process of secularization in the eighteenth
century by scholars like Michael Pammer and Rudolf Schloegl provide an
important link in the history of Catholicism between the Baroque (and
confessional) Catholicism of the century after 1650 and the Catholic
Ultramontane revival of the nineteenth century.  Pammer and Schloegl show
how elements of the Catholic _Buergertum_ moved away from traditional,
public practices and institutions (like confraternities, pilgrimages, and
processions) toward a new, more private and individual religion.  These
studies benefit from the better understanding of traditional Catholicism
provided by the developments in the field discussed above.  The studies
also demonstrate that, _pace_ Weber, the Catholic middle class developed
modern characteristics in the eighteenth century.  Historians' willingness
to recognize parallel developments across the confessions may partially be
credited to the work on early modern confessionalization.

There is also some irony in the story of the confessionalization thesis. By
linking religion to modernization and the state, the thesis initially
served to bring the study of religion, and even the study of German
Catholicism, from the margins to the center of German history in the
post-Reformation era.  However, because the confessionalization thesis has
caused historians to examine the development and nature of religious
identities, fields of study, like _Alltagsgeschichte_, historical
anthropology and local history/microhistory, long marginalized in German
historiography, have begun to take a more prominent role.  In the future,
one would hope that studies of early modern religion will continue to
exploit this tendency, while also integrating the history of religious
developments in Germany with those in Europe more generally.

Humanities & Social
Sciences Online

Copyright © 1995-2006 - Contact Us
RSS | Validate: XHTML | CSS