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  • Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia by David Luebke
  • David Freeman
Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia. By David Luebke. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016. Pp. 328. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 978-0813938400.

Judging by the sheer amount of scholarship on the subject, the history of the Holy Roman Empire in the aftermath of the Reformation was one of conflict on every level. For German authorities, both Protestant and Catholic, confessional pluralization was a threat to be stamped out and a given territory to be made confessionally pure. This [End Page 154] “confessionalization” of a territory, through possibly violent, was essentially created through persuasion and education. Working together, the structures of church and state defined confessional boundaries and instructed ordinary parishioners, making them loyal to a particular confession and, tied up with that movement, loyal to a developing centralized state.

As a result, coercion and violence were the order of the day. And yet, historians can also cite many examples of confessional accommodation, which David Luebke explores in his new book. Building on the work of historians such as Benjamin Kaplan’s Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (2007), Luebke seeks to understand not the conflict engendered by confessional pluralization, but rather religious coexistence amid confessional pluralization. Using a wide variety of primary and secondary sources, Luebke turns to the Westphalian prince-bishopric of Münster during the second half of the sixteenth century. There, he focuses on the ritual practices that facilitated peaceful coexistence during this period, as the shared rituals of baptism, communion, marriage, and burial worked to preserve unity in what should have been a confessionally disunited community.

Most Westphalian communities, the hometowns of the book’s title, contained a single parish and could not solve the problem of religious pluralization by dividing parishes into Protestant or Catholic. “The hometown environment, in other words, shoved people together despite their religious differences” (15). And yet, faced with a confessionally diverse group of parishioners, priests were willing to adapt to maintain community unity, and parishioners, both Protestant and Catholic, were willing to find accommodation.

While the prince-bishopric as a whole was officially Catholic and, therefore, followed Catholic rites, parish priests were given wide latitude to experiment with church ritual. As such, priests were able to adapt the liturgy to meet at least some of the Protestant liturgical needs of their parishioners. Thus, by following a common ritual, with perhaps a Protestant chaplain or sacristan working alongside the Catholic priest, parish unity was maintained. This is not to say that the result was a simple accommodation in the sense that adherents of one confession tolerated the adherents of another as the fear of destructive religious conflict overrode the desire to impose uniform belief and observance. But rather, Luebke argues that such accommodation can be seen as positive if it is not identified as religious accommodation. For this, participation in rituals cannot be seen solely through the lens of religious belief, as the participation of the parishioners, as well as their priests, included a variety of less doctrinally defined motivations.

A good example of how that worked can be seen in baptism. Both priests and parishioners thought of baptism as a supraconfessional performance. It was not simply the induction of a child into the Christian community, but also into the civic community. And, when the “imperatives of civic belonging clashed with the demands [End Page 155] of confessional allegiance,” the civic functions of baptism usually prevailed (63). As such, baptisms of both Protestant and Catholics could be performed inside a nominally Catholic parish church by Catholic clergy. The same could be said of marriage in terms of its importance as an induction into the civic community. What was important was not the underlying confessional meaning of the ritual, but the public celebration itself. It was not that the laity did not understand—though there were some early instances of confusion as well—but rather that they understood differently than theologians. The rite had a social function and that took precedence over its creedal function. Luebke finds the same with Protestant burials as they...

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