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

Abstract

In recent decades various historians of early modern Europe have focused their attention on areas with diverse religious populations. Many of them have illuminated how, contrary to popular perception, most people found ways to coexist despite religious differences. Martin Christ’s stimulating book joins this robust discussion. Commendably, Christ turns the spotlight onto lesser-known Upper Lusatia, in the Holy Roman Empire’s north-east, and onto the region’s six leading towns. In a couple of instances the text touches on rural Upper Lusatia, but these passages mostly address certain nobles and cloisters and not peasant communities. The book’s effective reach is the region’s urban areas and foremost the learned elites within them. The six towns allied to form the Lusatian League in 1346 and usually cooperated thereafter despite tensions among them. According to Christ, from the 1520s onward they contained Lutherans, Catholics, Zwinglians, Philippists and mystics as well as the Sorbs or Wends, a Slav minority population and largely Lutheran. Though the king of Bohemia ruled Upper Lusatia, royal policies toward the peripheral region tended to be lenient due to the crown’s need for taxes and soldiers. The kings never attempted a ‘recatholicization’ of Upper Lusatia, and no central, ‘Lutheran’ body of authority operated in it. Neither the notion of a top-down enforced confessionalization, nor approaching Upper Lusatia with a model of confessional cultures proves useful.