La coexistence confessionelle en France et en Europe germanique et orientale. Du Moyen Âge à nos jours eds. by Catherine Maurer and Catherine Vincent (review)

This collection of articles dates back to a 2012 conference held in Strasbourg. The articles cover a broad sweep of history, from the early Middle Ages into the twentieth century. Most focus on German-speaking lands, with a particular focus on Alsace, but there are articles about France, Lithuania, Geneva, Poland, and the Netherlands. As always in such collections, the quality is mixed, a situation that is further exacerbated by the fact that many of the articles appear to be only lightly edited since being delivered orally.

The theme of the conference, "confessional coexistence," is understood broadly here. While the focus of the collection is on relations between the Christian confessions, articles also engage the experience of Jews, heretics, Muslims, and pagans. This broadening of subject matter is of course a reflection of current concerns with religious coexistence in an increasingly diverse Europe, but the concept "confessional" loses some of its meaning when used in this broad way.

The largest group of articles focuses on confessional relations in the Holy Roman Empire and Switzerland in the early modern period. As Catherine Maurer points out in her concise but excellent introduction, confessional relations in this period were characterized by coexistence, often contested but also defended and supported. This coexistence was not the same as tolerance and was usually based on legal and constitutional safeguards for all parties. Furthermore, this coexistence varied in character depending on the locality, and it evolved over time. Finally, Maurer points out that coexistence in the early modern period had antecedents in the medieval period, in Christian-Jewish relations and in relations with heretics like the Cathars. Unfortunately, there is no discussion of the convivencia. in medieval Spain, where Jews, Muslims, and Christians coexisted for centuries.

Most of the contributions emphasize a kind of pragmatic relationship between religions. Laurent Jalabert's discussion of some of the western territories of the Holy Roman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shows how political and jurisdictional fragmentation let to a bewildering mix of confessions, even within villages. In this setting, members of religious minorities were willing to appeal for protection to princes and noblemen, and few majority groups could or even tried to suppress confessional opponents. Christophe Duhamelle's presents an interesting analysis of the "Two Easters" of 1724. In this year, Easter fell a week later for Protestants than Catholics, despite the fact that Protestants had moved to a calendar that coincided in most ways with Gregorian calendar used by the Catholics. The dispute, Duhamelle argues, was carried out first by astronomers and then by the states, particularly Prussia on the Protestant side, as an assertion of confessional rights. In the local context, however, there were few problems, as Catholics celebrated a week earlier and local people, including the clergy, stayed out of each other's way. In fact, in quite a few mixed confessional places Protestants decided to celebrate Easter on the same day as the Catholics, in order to avoid the problem of multiple holidays in one community. The Imperial Chamber Court which was organized on the principle of confessional parity, decided to take both weeks off from work.

Kaspar von Greyerz's discussion of Switzerland, by contrast, emphasizes ongoing confessional tensions and even conflict. All confessions believed strongly in the communal and state function of the Church, which meant that minorities were considered a problem. There was violence, for example in 1620 in the Valtelline and low levels of insult and conflict in mixed regions like the Turgau. By the eighteenth century, however, people accepted biconfessionalism, but that did not mean they were tolerant of other confessions, even in daily interactions.

The early modern heritage of biconfessionalism and confessional coexistence in places like...