Between Opposition and Collaboration: Nobles, Bishops, and the German Reformations in the Prince Bishopric of Bamberg, 1555-1619

Abstract

For over fifty years, historians of late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century central Europe have analysed religious, political and social sources within the theoretical framework of confessionalism and confessionalization. In the wake of Luther’s break with Rome, religious reformers of all stripes sought to build coherent communities of faith, which in the 1960s Ernst Walter Zeeden defined as confessions. As a model, confessionalism focused scholarly analysis on interior developments within religious camps and on relations between confessional communities. In the late 1970s Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard integrated confessional development into broader processes of political, social and cultural modernization under the rubric of confessionalization. The binding of religious and political developments sharpened the distinctions between confessions and emphasized interconfessional conflict. Two generations of scholars have tested that model in case studies, critiquing or adding nuance to its applications. Although confessionalization remains the predominant framework for understanding early modern religious history in the German-speaking world, recent studies have highlighted the limited success of efforts by religious and political leaders to enforce confessional conformity and secure confessional boundaries, while micro-studies of local conditions have highlighted the complexity of individual and group confessional identities and diverse forms of local and regional confessional coexistence.