Leipziger Luthertum und bürgerliche Kultur in der Frühen Neuzeit

Abstract

Abstract Lutheran Leipzig offers an excellent example for an early modern German territorial city where religion and civil culture entered into a long-lived symbiosis. This article follows Leipzig’s church history from the first arrival of the Wittenberg Reformation after 1519 to the middle of the nineteenth century. It was not before the end of the sixteenth century that orthodox Lutheranism, based on the formula of concord, was firmly established as the city’s official form of protestantism. Lutheran confessional culture reached its zenith during the seventeenth century. Religion was considered as a constituent part of public welfare. But Leipzig ran through a phase of de-confessionalization in the later eighteenth century. Religion was now understood as part of the private life, and confessional boundaries became increasingly obsolete. With respect to sociability, Lutheranism made a considerable contribution to the social life of the Leipzigers, but it had little to do with their leisure time habits.