Defining Community in Early Modern Europe (review)

Collections of essays remain an important venue for early-modern studies, allowing both established and younger scholars to frame their research creatively in terms of a unified theme. Some of the essays in this particular volume first reached audiences in a series of sessions on “Defining Community” at the 2007 Sixteenth Century Society conference, and have now made their way into print, together with further contributions. The essays range widely, touching on themes from rituals to memory to disasters, although each draws some connection to the theme of communities and their complex position in early-modern society and culture. Somewhat surprisingly for a thematic collection, the editors have grouped the contributions by region, with sections for France, the German lands, northern Europe (including the Netherlands), and Italy. This choice makes the individual essays accessible to scholars working on those regions, who will find finely wrought studies on various topics, but at the expense of highlighting thematic similarities. Another important shared characteristic of the essays is their cautious approach to the term community: beginning with the editors’ own introduction, the polyvalence and complexity of community—both as an experienced reality in early-modern Europe and as a theoretical framework for historians’ understanding—receives focused attention. This aspect of the volume is deftly captured when Dean Phillip Bell quotes Salo Baron about “the embarrassment in defining the highly ambiguous term ‘community’” (p. 144).

The volume’s sixteen essays include case studies, comparative analyses of specific issues, and broad syntheses. Joel Harrington, for example, makes a precise contribution to arguments over the definition of community in early-modern Germany when he shows that Nuremberg magistrates routinely supported “foreign” orphans at public expense, even though their own statutes emphatically tied such aid to local citizenship. Further case studies include the early Daughters of Charity, a lay women’s order in France discussed in Susan Dinan’s paper; certain German Jews who chose to accept Lutheran baptism, analyzed by Michael Halvorson; and the Lublin family in Geneva that figures in Karen Spierling’s contribution. Although rich in engaging material of interest to scholars in these areas, these papers contribute less specifically to the definition of community.

Ranging more widely, Susan Boettcher’s essay on the “community of memory” discusses how late-sixteenth-century Lutherans drew on medieval models of memoria to build their own sense of shared history and belonging. In a subtle and theoretically rich analysis of visual representations of Lutheran identity, she illustrates how the new ecclesiastical institutions responded to a “never-abating need for theological, political, and cultural legitimacy” (p. 125) through art, architecture, and monuments that allowed “Lutheran communities to come to terms with the past of the movement and define its meaning for the future” (p. 128). Steven Hindle turns to the evolution of the Rogationtide processions along parish boundaries, drawing on evidence from across England between 1500 and 1700. By focusing on a single ceremonial practice that played a fundamental part in identifying the parish community in space as well as time, the essay not only provides an illuminating diagnosis of how post-Reformation policy and theology coped with these well-established ceremonies over the longue durée but also provides a lucid model for comparative analysis along dimensions that include ritual practice, institution-building, and secularization.

Some of the broadest synthesis, finally, appears in Bell’s discussion of Jewish communities in Central Europe, which provides a magisterial overview of the complex ways that community was conceptualized, practiced, and institutionalized among the Jewish minority in Germany and Italy. Michael Driedger takes on another minority religious community, the Dutch and German Doopsgezind Anabaptists, concentrating on the city of Krefeld as characterized in a recent book by Peter Kreidte, but also engaging with other Anabaptist groups and confronting the classic definition of community offered by Ferdinand Tönnies.

Given that “community” is a theme that encompasses an...