Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (review)

Popular depictions of early modern Europe in cinema and literature present intolerance as life’s daily menace; vivid scenes of religious violence and the martyred heretic perishing at the stake are the dramatic proof of a world unable to accommodate religious difference. In the academic realm, historians have focused upon the hot spots of religious rivalries, dissecting the causes of religious civil war, exploring the “rites of violence” that Catholics and Protestants inflicted upon one another and offering such rich case studies of intolerance as the infamous Saint Bartholomew Day’s massacre of 1572. More broadly, surveys of the period describe how Europe hardened into confessional blocs, state authority surged, and religious conflict was the order of the day. Not until the intellectual pioneers of the European Enlightenment arrived on the scene were theological dogma and the intellectual groundings of religious intolerance dislodged.

This standard narrative of early modern religious conflict has some truth to it, but it has also imposed parameters. Textbook writers often succumb to a binarism that paints the European map into differently coded religious denominations, and an intellectual Whiggishness that credits the rise of religious tolerance to progressive rationalists disenchanted with rank superstition and pointless violence. Specialists avoid such a trap, but their scholarly attraction to the great spasms of religious conflict has muted the quieter realm of religious coexistence. Kaplan wants to tell a different story about religious conflict and the reality of tolerance, grounded in neither the pressure points of religious violence nor the intellectual origins of tolerance. His story highlights the practical accommodation and improvised arrangements of religious coexistence. In his hands, the pioneers of religious tolerance are not the philosophes of the eighteenth-century salons and coffee houses but the neighbors, kins-people, municipal and regional authorities, and government officials who puzzled through the often shifting borders of religious denominations to make ad hoc, practical arrangements for communities of different faiths—forms of pragmatic toleration avant la lettre.

Kaplan’s may be a revised story, but it is not one free of despair and bloodshed; persecutions, expulsions, and exclusions of both heretics and Muslim and Jewish infidels are integral to it. But his is a more nuanced story of porous borders, ecumenical arrangements, interfaith marriages, and both secret and shared churches that provides a fresh perspective on religious accommodation in early modern Europe. Written for both specialists and generalists in ways that skillfully speak to both audiences, Kaplan’s book is an intellectual triumph that casts a wide net from Eastern Europe to the Mediterranean.

The book opens with three chapters on confessionalism in the sixteenth century, on the triggers in public life that sparked religious conflict among Catholics and the fledgling Protestant denominations, and on the interbraiding of the new religious map with the growing power of early modern princes. Protestants clashed with Catholics as they sought free expression in the public realm, while the political arrangements of cuius regio, eius religio, and cuius dominium calcified the political boundaries of faith communities.

Part two of Kaplan’s book brilliantly explores how these insuperable obstacles were, in fact, overcome by ecumenical experiments that historians have not hitherto fully understood—such as in the small German town of Goldenstedt where Catholics and Lutherans produced a hybrid liturgy in the same church or, on a larger scale, in 1570 Poland where Lutherans, Calvinists, and Bohemian Bretheren participated in the sacraments at one another’s churches.

In three of the book’s most important chapters, Kaplan explores how Catholics and Protestants maneuvered through open borders, erected hidden churches and other places of worship, and even shared parish churches to bring religious pluralism to areas without any legal precedent for free expression of religious worship. His case studies include the practice of auslauf, or ambulation, best exemplified in the estate of Hernals outside Vienna, to which thousands of Protestants trekked on Sundays and religious holidays safely to...