Reformation and the German Territorial State: Upper Franconia, 1300–1630 (review)

The confessionalization paradigm has been a mainstay of Reformation studies for decades, which still enjoys wide acceptance as an explanatory model, especially in the historiography of early-modern Germany. William Bradford Smith contributes to our understanding of religious reform and the rise of the territorial state by adding another piece to the puzzle. His piece is the patchwork of Franconian territories, perhaps the most complex puzzle of all, consisting as it did of a multiplicity of geographically interwoven princebishoprics, imperial cities, imperial knights, and lands of the Margraviate of Brandenburg-Ansbach/Kulmbach. In the main, the book concentrates on the territories of Upper Franconia, particularly the Brandenburg lands and those of the prince-bishop of Bamberg.

The Reformation further fragmented the region by introducing religious competition between Catholic and Protestant territories. Theoretically, Smith seeks to demonstrate that the novel religious differentiations were superimposed on preexisting structures and therefore evinced continuities in the political arena. However, Smith goes one step further, grafting Heiko Oberman’s hypotheses on the pre-1517 origins of religious reform onto the confessionalization model. He puts forward events in Bohemia—the fifteenth-century Hussite revolt and the seventeenth-century defenestration—as chronological termini for the confessional age. Again, his goal is to demonstrate long-term continuities. Smith is also keen to integrate Blicklian communalism into his model so he can assess charges of “etatismus” inherent in the Weberian aspects of confessionalization and social disciplining.

Smith employs administrative sources (e.g., Protokollenbücher) in combination with the work of local historians and folklorists (e.g., Friedrich Merzbacher and Karl-S. Kramer) against the backdrop of contemporary local chroniclers. As he works at the regional level, he also analyzes the function of religion at the local level. This enables him to assess the complex interplay between the authorities and their subjects in the realm of religious reform and identify aspects of lay piety that shaped territorial policy. One excellent example of this is his quantification of the shifting sources of ecclesiastical endowments (p. 19); between 1300 and 1529, noble endowments dropped by 50 percent while the influence of burghers and confraternities more than doubled.

The book consists of ten chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. Its strong point is in its detailed explication of social structures in small territories of the Empire. In this regard, Smith’s approach is very traditional, and he provides a non–German-speaking audience with an immense amount of local detail. He also succeeds in demonstrating how the various social strata instrumentalized the message of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in their negotiations over Herrschaft. His comparative assessment leads to the suggestion that Protestantism catered to organic development, while the Counter-Reformation in Bamberg attempted a more fundamental restructuring of society from the top down and met, not surprisingly, with more fundamental resistance from the bottom up. The final three chapters focus on the latter areas, especially marriage reform and (alluding to Smith’s current research) the massive witchcraft persecutions in Franconia that were among the most traumatic in early-modern Germany. In doing so, he has built on the research of numerous local historians, re-examining and integrating their material into broader and more current issues. Smith has thus succeeded in producing a valuable contribution to regional history on the Empire.