Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe (review)

This well-made volume contributes to current critiques of early-modern Europe: the age of confessionalization and the rise of toleration. As generalized in the very good introduction by C. Scott Dixon, it aims to understand how religious culture was fashioned less through orthodoxy, discipline, and command than through negotiation, adaptation, and resistance.

The main weight of the volume lies in the Netherlands and the German lands. A masterful overview by Willem Frijhoff ends with the insight that the secularization of eighteenth-century Dutch public life laid foundations for reconfessionalization of religious groups in the nineteenth century (largely true also of post-Napoleonic Germany). It is followed by Wayne te Brake's study of the culture and geography of secrecy and dissimulation that protected such minorities as Calvinists in Catholic Flanders, Irish Catholics in conquered Wexford, and Anabaptists in the Bernese Emmental and Judith Pollmann's searching exploration of why Dutch Catholics responded to militant Calvinism so much more passively than did French Catholics.

Two chapters treat mixed marriages. One by Dagmar Freist explores a religiously mixed district of the eighteenth-century prince-bishopric of Osnabrück and finds that people learned over time that a detailed marriage contract was their best guarantee against intramarital religious conflict. The other by Benjamin J. Kaplan examines Reformed-Catholic marriages in eighteenth-century South Holland in the late 1730s. It finds that while husbands wielded greater power in mixed marriages, neither they nor their wives succumbed to efforts of clergy, relatives, or anyone else to coerce them. A third, complementary study by Bertrand Forclaz finds in eighteenth-century Utrecht a progressive crystallization of confessional belonging but also a prevalence of family solidarities over religious division.

Six diverse studies round out the volume. Their central themes are the importance of aristocrats, many of them Lutheran converts, to popular Catholicism in the Viennese Counter-Reformation (by Karl Vocelka); the minimal effect of noble conversions and reconversions on the confessions (by Keith Luria); elaborate altarpieces in Lutheran Transylvania that celebrated in an anti-Calvinist spirit the Passion of Christ (by Maria Crǎciun); the compatibility of lay Protestant religion with belief in fairies (by Peter Marshall); the minimal impact on generally conciliatory local relations between English Protestants and Catholics of Protestant writers' use of metaphors of disease and corruption for anti-Catholic purposes (by Alexandra Walsham); and the journey of a young Württemberg prince to France in 1608–09 as an opportunity to display the Lutheran faith there, although in fact little evidence is adduced of the prince's public display of his faith (by Dorothea Nolde).

The spirit of this excellent volume is well characterized in Mark Greengrass's afterword: "There was no high road to toleration, signposted from the Reformation, but only a set of muddy and winding streets, most of them not one-way" (pp. 283–84).