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The Catholic Historical Review 88.1 (2002) 133-135



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Book Review

Religiöse Festkultur. Tradition und Neuformierung katholischer Frömmigkeit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Das Liborifest in Paderborn und das Kilianfest in Würzburg im Vergleich


Religiöse Festkultur. Tradition und Neuformierung katholischer Frömmigkeit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert: Das Liborifest in Paderborn und das Kilianfest in Würzburg im Vergleich. By Barbara Stambolis. [Forschungen zur Regionalgeschichte, 38.] (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh. 2000. Pp. x, 400. DM 88.00.)

Barbara Stambolis's Religiöse Festkultur is a comparative study of the celebration of the feasts of two diocesan patron saints from two quite different regions of Catholic Germany--St. Liborius, patron of Paderborn, in Westphalia, and St. Kilian, patron of Würzburg, in Franconia. The author ranges widely in time, from the end of the old regime through the end of the twentieth century. Her work exemplifies two themes in German historiography of the past decade: the study of festivals and an interest in the social and cultural history of religion in the modern era. The combination of these two themes is not coincidental, since Stambolis investigates the festivals for the purpose of showing responses of the Catholic Church (the episcopate as well as parish clergy and laypeople) to challenges of the modern world, as they developed in central Europe. Her work considers the ramifications for the festivals of the Enlightened criticism and bureaucratic repression of baroque festivity, the competition with religion of nineteenth-century nationalism, the open challenge to the Catholic Church by the Nazi regime, the effects of post-1945 social and economic upheavals, and, finally, the changes in religious practice emerging from the Second [End Page 133] Vatican Council and the increasing secularization of German society since the 1960's.

Stambolis frames the Catholic response to each of these challenges as a dialectic of incorporation and opposition. She considers both how the Church and the faithful appropriated elements of different, competing, or hostile intellectual, cultural, and political movements into their diocesan festivities and how the festivities demonstrated a rejection of these movements. Her argument is complex and nuanced, but she ultimately sees the festival of St. Kilian as characterized by accommodation and that of St. Liborius by opposition. The religious aspects of the celebration of St. Kilian, Stambolis argues, have generally been in the shadow of secular ones, whether in the guise of nineteenth-century pageantry about the medieval origins of the German nation; a racialized and more elaborate Nazi version of the same pageantry; or a post-1950 promotion of tourism, with particularly heavy emphasis on beer consumption. By contrast, the religious ceremony and pageantry in Paderborn, while certainly changing over the past two centuries, has remained consistently central to the festival of St. Liborius, overshadowing the secular and rather mild pleasures of the accompanying fair. Nineteenth-century nationalism had little effect on the festival, and the clergy and laity of the region have steadfastly resisted efforts, whether from the Prussian bureaucracy or the Nazi authorities, to restrict or marginalize the religious import of the festival.

The author's assertions are convincing and supported by a profusion of documentation, drawing on intensive research in the archives and printed primary sources, as well as an unusually thorough grasp of the scholarly literature. The book has a number of excellent illustrations, very useful for the study of festivity, but surprisingly uncommon in works about it. Stambolis's primary interest is in northern Germany, and she has a good deal to say about Catholic religious festivals, not just in Paderborn, but elsewhere in Westphalia and, to a lesser extent, in the Rhineland. By contrast, in the book Franconia plays the role of a more secularized south German foil to the devout north, but the contrast is not exaggerated and the research on the festival of St. Kilian is quite thorough.

If I had any substantial criticism of the book, it would be that the author is not always entirely consistent in...

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