The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars by Jesse Spohnholz (review)

It is a truism that modern western notions of religious toleration developed only in conjunction with a major historical paradigm shift in the role of religion in society. In the Middle Ages, Christianity was foundational to all areas of individual and communal life. There was a conviction that metaphysical truths could be known and therefore had to be accepted. Those who refused were labeled obstinate or demonically influenced, to be persuaded of the truth or excised from society, itself considered by contemporaries to be the Corpus Christianum, the “Body of all Christians,” a term applied to Europe as a whole or to its various kingdoms, territories, and cities. Religious toleration in theory or practice did not fit easily into this context. But what happens when a society that understands itself as a Corpus Christianum is confronted with a variety of Christian confessions? During the late-Reformation period, the result was often armed conflict, as each group sought to retain the purity of the whole, and it is not without reason that historians refer to this epoch as “The Age of Religious Wars.” But some individuals did attempt to articulate theories of religious tolerance, and some communities endeavored to practice it.

In his monograph The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars, Jesse Spohnholz investigates one such community, the northeast German city of Wesel. Although it fell under the jurisdiction of the Catholic Duke of Cleves, its largely autonomous government established the Reformation there in the 1540s and 1550s, leaving the city of nearly 7,000 inhabitants confessionally Lutheran. But during the remaining decades of the sixteenth century, which are the focus of the book, a flood of Dutch Calvinists and Anabaptists fleeing persecution in the Low Countries entered the city, which had also retained a significant Catholic presence. Furthermore, the Lutherans were themselves divided between those more willing to compromise on doctrine and practice and those who advocated a hard line.

Spohnholz’s study is an impressive, archivally based examination of how the authorities in the town—the Lutheran civic leaders and churchmen and, to a certain extent, the Reformed consistory—achieved peace and some semblance of religious unity in this constellation of religious viewpoints, and of how the inhabitants of the town negotiated its confessional pluralism in a context where religious minorities had no legal protection and where a principled defense of toleration did not exist. Much of the scholarship on toleration during this period focuses on its theoretical emergence, with the goal of mapping the origins of modernity. Spohnholz rejects this undertaking in favor of an examination of “everyday practices of religious coexistence during an age in which people did not see pluralism as a virtuous condition, but a distasteful one” (18). Toleration, then, was not so much an intellectual construct as a set of dynamic day-to-day negotiations between ordinary people, who had limits concerning what behavior was considered acceptable in their community.

After an introduction that carefully reviews current literature on toleration, Spohnholz recounts the religious changes wrought by the Lutheran Reformation in the 1540s and the 1550s, as well as the impact of the first influx of Calvinists refugees in the 1550s and early 1560s. When the initial conservative Lutheran response of the town council and Lutheran pastors ended in upheaval, they adopted a milder approach, and it is here that Spohnholz uncovers de facto toleration. Three chapters follow, devoted to the Calvinist refugees, the response of the Lutherans to them, and the situation of the Mennonites and Catholics—all from the perspective of the city’s religious and civic authorities. A final chapter turns its attention to the people of Wesel, employing as its central evidence the impressive database Spohnholz has compiled of 7,600 names drawn from Reformed consistorial, magisterial, and legal records. He maps where individuals of various confessional loyalties lived...