Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan

Abstract

Confessionalization in Europe, 1555–1700: Essays in Honor and Memory of Bodo Nischan, ed. John M. Headley, Hans J. Hillerbrand and Anthony J. Papalas (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004 ; pp. xxvi + 369. £45). Professor Bodo Nischan (1939–2001) was, with Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, a leading exponent of the concept of ‘confessionalisation’ as a fundamental tool for the analysis and understanding of European culture in the late sixteenth century and beyond. From a starting-point which notes the development, after 1550, of numerous confessions of faith among Protestants, which produced a sense of communal identity among adherents to the formulation in question—in German ‘Konfessionen’, in English more often ‘denominations’—the paradigm is extended to the Catholic Reformation and other religious movements, and absorbs notions of social discipline within the ‘confessions’, hence a more powerful state control of subjects, and ultimately the creation of the modern absolute state. This collection of essays by colleagues and friends of the late Professor Nischan is unusually homogeneous for a Festschrift in its concentration on this paradigm. Three authoritative and lucid introductory articles describe the development of the paradigm ; nine chapters are then concerned with case studies and examples in the ‘German lands’, four deal with ‘confessionalization beyond the Germanies’, and two are concerned with ‘the dismantling of confessionalization’. The level of contributions is high—after all the high priests of confessionalisation are well represented, with Heinz Schilling himself, Thomas Brady, Harm Klueting, Robert Kolb and others. Several articles test the limits of the confessionalisation paradigm—Schilling on the evolution of urban architecture, Klueting on the ‘Catholic Enlightenment’ as manifestations of confessionalisation, for example. Among the ‘case studies’ the relation to confessionalisation is not always clear, for example in the treatment of pre-marital sex or the suppression of religious emotion in the Reformation—which is not to say that the articles in themselves are not interesting. What emerges clearly from this survey of the subject is that the paradigm was originally developed to treat the evolution of German Lutheranism; the transfer of the concepts to other denominations, and to other countries is more than problematic. Symptomatically there are only half as many articles treating the paradigm outside the Germanies as there are within the German lands ; and of those four, one (Mack Holt) presents a particularly severe form of confessionalisation, namely the total disappearance of Protestants from Dijon by the end of the sixteenth century, and another (Lance Lazar) deals with Jesuit devotional texts, 1548–1615, as a form of confessionalisation—but not one requiring a vast theoretical superstructure. In any case, as John Headley says in his introduction (quoting Philip Benedict), it would seem that only a ‘weak theory’ is appropriate to the French situation, as opposed to a ‘strong theory’ which fits the Germanies of the Holy Roman Empire. The Röstigraben as a linguistic and cultural divide is relevant not only to Switzerland! (Incidentally, according to the index, ‘Geneva’ receives only one mention, concerning sex before marriage ; this is not the full story, since Bruce Gordon has several pages on Geneva in his study of John Dury's mission to Switzerland in the 1650s. So the index is not entirely reliable.) More generally, it is a pity that research as represented in this volume is so often linguistically insulated : the study of Jesuit devotional texts does not even mention the parallel Protestant martyrologies in French and English of the period, the fascinating study by Constantin Fasolt of Hermann Conring's attempt to break out of the confessional mould would have benefited by a comparison with French-language efforts in the same direction, Bruce Gordon's study of John Dury's quest for a unified Protestant, or at least Swiss, front misses a point by not recognising the Harmonia confessionum as the title of a not insignificant book rather than as a simple theme for discussion. This having been said, the volume as a whole is a valuable contribution to the continuing debate about confessionalisation, and a worthy memorial to the fine scholar whom it commemorates.