Crossing the Boundaries of Belief: Geographies of Religious Conversion in Southern Germany, 1648-1800

5. Breaking the Ties That Bind Family and Community

145 Like the previous chapter, this one explores the transgressive quality of religious conversion within Christian communities of the Holy Roman Empire, focusing specifically on family and kinship. Conversion’s disruptive effects on familial relationships deserve special attention because they occupy such an important part of the archival record. When one family member decided to change confessional loyalties, it tested the bonds of kinship uniting relatives. Familial relationships were embedded in the larger matrix of religious , political, and social bonds that tied individuals to their communities, so that one rarely broke a familial bond without simultaneously affecting many other relationships. Typically, converts experienced the most intense quarrels with more intimate family members, especially parents, children, or spouses. We occasionally romanticize the family unit by assuming it consisted of intimacy, love, and affection.1 In contrast, some historians have argued that love and affection were less prevalent in premodern families that were premised primarily Breaking the Ties That Bind Family and Community 146 • Crossing the Boundaries of Belief on matters of property, labor, status, and honor. Richard van Dülmen offers a more nuanced perspective, noting that an “emotional feeling of solidarity” was the necessary affective component uniting not only husband and wife but also paternal and maternal kinship lines.2 Concomitantly, familial discord— like that which stemmed from conversion—threatened emotional solidarity, demonstrating that bonds of marriage and family were intensely affective, if not always based on unconditional love and loyalty.3 In many cases, a family member’s decision to abandon the family faith introduced as much friction among relatives as did disagreements over marriage partners, work, or property . In other cases, familial infighting preceded and perhaps even induced a person to change religions. Whether the decision to adopt a different confession produced conflict among kin or resulted from it, conversion threatened to shatter a family’s internal coherence and stability. The Christian Household Even without conversion, the bonds of kinship were constantly strained in the course of routine living. The uncertainties of material stability heightened tensions around matters such as inheritance and property.4 The mobility associated with exogamous marriage choices and the regional supply and demand of labor could attenuate kinship ties.5 The early modern family was a dynamic and hence unstable constellation of relationships. Given the constant pressure weighing down on the ties of kinship, a deep sense of religious obligation was one of several factors that reinforced the durability of familial relationships. Protestants enforced the view of the family as the moral center of society in a genre of writings known as Hausväterliteratur (housefather literature), which emphasized the father’s role in maintaining the moral and religious rectitude of wife, children, and servants.6 Martin Luther himself reinforced the norm of paternal authority; his Small Catechismpositioned the father and not the pastor as a child’s first catechizer, reflecting both Luther’s theological belief in the priesthood of all believers and his unquestioning acceptance of patriarchal power.7 The drive among early Lutheran reformers to turn every father into a home theologian (Haustheologe) eventually became supplanted by government- and church-sponsored schoolhouses as the primary space for the religious instruction of children, but the father still remained the spiritual patriarch of the household.8 As Lyndal Roper has shown, the household in Augsburg’s early Reformation became a site of heightened state surveillance as the city council fashioned fathers into patriarchs and mothers into matriarchs charged with enforcing moral and religious order among children and servants.9 The house- Breaking the Ties That Bind • 147 hold patriarch in Catholic Germany similarly possessed the role of moral and religious watchman. Catholics had their equivalent of Hausväterliteratur in the literary genre Ehespiegel, literally “marriage mirror.” Merry Wiesner has noted that marriage manuals by the post-Tridentine Catholic clergy “were no different than those of the Protestants” in their defense of the patriarchal order and their descriptions of “ideal wives and mothers.”10 Some historians have argued that expressions of familial solidarity showed distinct signs of confessionalization over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For example, names of children during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries corresponded strongly to parents’ confessional loyalties . Saints’ names and the names of the Holy Family were more popular among Catholics than Lutherans, while Lutherans often named their children after specific biblical characters. Similarly, there was a shift away from seeing godparenthood as a means of securing...