Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520–1635, by Martin Christ

Abstract

In this engaging and award-winning book, Martin Christ examines the development of the Reformation in a collection of six towns that formed the Lusatian League in the Kingdom of Bohemia. The themes of toleration and coexistence remain a fruitful area of research in early modern European history and these form the basis for Christ’s volume on Upper Lusatia. Historiography regarding tolerance and intolerance is becoming increasingly diverse and it is clear that generalisations do not recognise the nuanced nature of confessional coexistence and the lived experience of religious plurality. Christ’s volume is a welcome addition to this scholarship, and over the course of eight case-studies the book examines how Catholic and Lutheran populations negotiated with each other, the established Catholic institutions, and the Catholic kings of Bohemia during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Christ identifies three ways in which the monograph deepens our knowledge of the Reformation in this period. First, Upper Lusatia is an underexplored region. When considering themes pertaining to coexistence, scholars have tended to focus on larger towns and the significant role of smaller towns and rural areas is overlooked. Secondly, Christ’s chronology of more than a century not only shows how men and women of different beliefs lived side by side but also sheds light on how they influenced ‘each other’s practices, spaces and identities’ (p. 15). Finally, while toleration was extended to some religious groups, Christ demonstrates that this was neither universally applied nor consistently accepted. For instance, Anabaptists and Calvinists were not tolerated, while Schwenckfelders and those perceived to be crypto-Calvinists could find a limited degree of toleration in some, but not all, areas.