Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (review)

This is the first synthesis of studies on German Catholicism that spans the period from the eve of the Reformation to the dissolution of the imperial Church in 1803. Drawing on the latest scholarship and on his own previous research on Speyer and Southwest Germany, Forster has written a succinct and informative book that presents the state of knowledge on the historical evolution of Catholicism in the Holy Roman Empire. Forster divides his book into six chronological chapters: Catholic Germany before Trent (chapter 1), the Counter-Reformation (1570s–1620s, chapter 2), the Thirty Years’ War (chapter 3), the institutional developments of the Church after 1650 (chapter 4), and the features of a popular baroque Catholicism (chapter 5).A final chapter discusses the changes during the Enlightenment (1760s to 1803) that culminated in the dissolution of the old order and imperial Church. Students will find the up-to-date bibliography of great help.

Although the events and developments covered in this work are known by specialists, they have not been brought together under one cover. Moreover, Forster advances a strong argument: the alternation in German Catholicism between elitist and popular support, tradition and innovation, enthusiasm and discipline. His strongest chapters are those dealing with baroque Catholicism and the Catholic elitist reaction in the late-eighteenth century, the Catholic Enlightenment. The repudiation of baroque Catholicism—with its decorative exuberance, ritual excesses, pilgrimages, miracles, and wonders—prepared the way for secularization. Even before the ecclesiastical states and the imperial Church were swept away in 1803, the Catholic elites had already turned their backs on “popular superstitions” and baroque mummery. A secularized elite, attuned to the ideas of reason, simplicity, and practicality, prepared the opening for the end. Forster tells this story of German Catholicism in a lucid and intelligent prose. He is especially good in explaining the workings of the imperial Church, with its entanglements in the power structures of the Holy Roman Empire, of how the interests of canons and abbots subverted the centralizing attempts of prince-bishops and Catholic rulers, and of how the rigors of Tridentine reforms were attenuated by acts of resistance and noncompliance. He is sensitive to regional differences, always mindful of divergent paths of development in Cologne and Munich, Westphalia and Austria. Naturally, in a broad and short synthesis of this kind, there will be obvious lacunae. Thus, the reader learns much more about the institutional development of German Catholicism than its theology and practices. For example, although Caroline Bynum’s study of blood shrines in pre-Reformation northern Germany (Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond, Philadelphia, 2007) appeared too late for consideration, David Lederer’s important study of pilgrimage and spiritual psychics should have been included (Madness, Religion and the State in Early Modern Europe: A Bavarian Beacon, New York, 2006).These studies bring up the question of continuity between medieval and baroque Catholicism, including disturbing questions of antisemitism and demonic beliefs. The Walldürn pilgrimage, studied by Wolfgang Brückner and cited by Forster, was precisely one of the baroque revivals of late-medieval anti-Jewish blood cults. Baroque Catholicism was perhaps not as tolerant and modest as depicted in Forster’s account. Catholic elites might have given up the program of militant conversion after 1648, but for every pragmatic Archbishop Johann Philipp von Schönborn, there was also an Archbishop von Firmian, who expelled thousands of Protestants from Salzburg as late as 1731. It is questionable whether Catholic resurgence had passed its climax by 1650 as Forster argues, since the German and Austrian provinces of the Society of Jesus achieved their greatest strength only around 1700. Indeed, the period from 1700 to 1750 represented the greatest effort of German Jesuits in overseas missions, which contradicts Forster’s argument for the decline of their influence. These criticisms aside, Forster’s book represents the best one-volume synthesis on early-modern...