In April 1570, representatives of three Protestant churches in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth formally debated and accepted one another’s respective confessions and resolved to cooperate.1 The debate took place in a small town in the south of the country, Sandomierz (Sandomir). As a result of their lengthy synod, they signed the Sandomir Consensus and proclaimed the Sandomir Confession. Despite its name, the confession of faith was nothing more than Heinrich Bullinger’s Second Helvetic Confession translated into Polish.2 The Consensus—on the contrary—was not only an original achievement but also became crucial for the development of Protestantism in the Commonwealth and in Europe at large. Soon, it entered the canon of translations invoked by proponents of Christian irenicism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries like David Pareus, Hugo Grotius, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Daniel Ernst Jablonski, and Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf.3 Together with the Warsaw Confederation, signed in 1573, it laid the cornerstone for the idea of “Polish toleration,” which became a permanent feature of contemporary European historiography.4
The Sandomierz synod and the resulting Sandomir Consensus embody the entire spectrum of early modern irenicism that “points to the efforts of church leaders seeking to minimize doctrinal difference and discover a common theological platform between different Christian traditions,” as recently defined by Howard Louthan.5 Early modern irenicism walked a narrow path between proselytism and syncretism, both of which were condemned or at least controversial in early modern times. On the one hand, proselytism could lead to conversion that might end the confessional division but simultaneously throw the sincerity of religious choices and freedom of conscience into question. On the other hand, a common platform and religious agreement was not supposed to mean a syncretistic mixing of the disparate elements of confessions that would in effect only have ended up creating a new denomination and thus contributed to further fragmentation of Christianity. The early modern era rejected such a syncretism that combined different elements of doctrine or liturgy. In Sandomierz, however, the peaceful dialogue of theologians during the synod, secured by influential politicians backing the initiative, made it possible to find theoretical solutions that would safeguard the coexistence of multiple confessions.6 The signed document expressed mutual recognition of the three Protestant churches of their respective stances on “all the main points of doctrine,” explicitly including a compromise formula in the article on the Eucharist. Further on, it described the basic outlines of cooperation: joint church visitations and synods, intercommunion, and prohibition of confessional polemics or any form of proselytizing.
However, the same synod also revealed the limits of such an arrangement, as described by Howard Hotson with examples of other analogical irenic attempts in the Holy Roman Empire.7 The initiative came from the Reformed Confession (Calvinists and Bohemian Brethren), so the Lutherans reacted with reluctance to it from the very beginning and repeatedly attempted to hinder the talks. The final compromise faced resistance from followers of all confessions, so its implementation was long delayed, and in the end Lutherans rejected the agreement.8 Representatives of the Catholic Church were not invited to the debate, and Antitrinitarian groups (Unitarians, also called Socinians—see below) were also excluded from participation, thus limiting the irenic dialogue to selected members of selected Protestant churches, and ultimately to the Reformed Churches. More importantly, as the synod did not take place under the patronage of the king, its resolutions and proclamations had no legal status in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, remaining merely an agreement between the respective churches. Its procedures and outcomes taken together, the Sandomir Consensus perfectly exemplifies the problems of interconfessional dialogue and religious peace in the early modern era: triggered by the Reformation and the division of Western Christianity, and fueled by persecutions and the catastrophes of wars of religion, leading to the placement by historians of irenic attempts as a mere chapter in the history of toleration that has played a starring role in the historiography of Western civilization. Consequently, the Sandomir Consensus provides an opportunity to generate a broader discussion of irenicism in Central and Eastern Europe, and it serves as the starting point for the considerations presented in this volume.
1 Irenicism, Toleration, and Coexistence
This volume is devoted to the theories and practices that not only enabled dialogue between these rivaling Christian confessions, but also safeguarded their peaceful agreement and subsequent coexistence. “Searching for compromise” performed in the early modern era on the overlapping planes of theology, law, and social praxis. Subsequently, it has been addressed within the interconnected research on irenicism, toleration, and social history. And while the two latter trends have been highly popular in the historiography, the research on irenicism has remained in the shadows.
This collection of studies takes as its point of departure the debate on the development of toleration in Europe, in which Hans Rudolf Guggisberg distinguished two strands: one focusing on the development of theoretical thought and the other focusing on the social determinants of the coexistence of various religions and confessions.9 To make this distinction unequivocally, some scholars proposed separating tolerance from toleration: the former implies a liberal-minded attitude, whereas the latter refers to the legislation or formal conditions of coexistence. However, as Evan Haefeli recently put it, the researchers “are inconsistent in their usage of the terms. What is designated toleration in some studies appears as tolerance in others—or the terms are simply used interchangeably.”10
The first trend, focused on the thinkers considered by contemporary scholars to be the most important in the modern era, was dominant in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century historiography, but valuable monographs are being published to this day.11 This stream of literature served to document the creation of a theoretical framework for the concept of toleration. Rooted in its “natural habitat of intellectual history”—as Heiko A. Oberman put it—toleration developed in “the creative triangle Basel–London–Amsterdam.”12 On the one hand, the powerful intellectual, economic, and print centers allowed, inspired, even actively supported contributions to the theoretical framework of toleration. On the other hand, this “natural habitat” was also a natural environment of the researchers who defined the canon of the most important thinkers, and relatively rarely looked in other directions.
The catalog of authors under the microscope began with the humanists (like Nicholas of Cusa), headed by Erasmus and his friend Thomas More. They were accompanied by reformers (Martin Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, Martin Bucer, John à Lasco, John Calvin), who were traditionally praised as advocates of toleration but later rebuked by revisionists as bigots calling for persecution. Finally, the group of pioneers of toleration included nonorthodox humanists and radical Protestants (Sebastian Franck, Kaspar Schwenckfeld, Sebastian Castellio, Michel de Montaigne), select Catholic authors of religious disputes in the mid-sixteenth century (Julius Pflug, Georg Cassander, Johannes Gropper, Georg Witzel), and lay politicians (Michel de l’Hôpital). These analyses—cataloged under intellectual history, the history of ideas, theology, or philosophy—often portrayed the calls to abandon violence in confessional disputes as a contribution to the development of toleration. This tradition peaked among the writings of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers. Among them, a special place was occupied by adherents of Fausto Socini (1539–1604), called Socinians, whose works, published anonymously in the seventeenth-century Netherlands as Bibliotheca Fratrum Polonorum, reached the most eminent minds of the day, such as Hugo Grotius, Baruch Spinoza, and John Locke.13
The idea of toleration, rooted in the ancient philosophical traditions (especially in skepticism), and in Middle Ages theology, was subsequently employed as a response to confessional conflicts in the early modern era. And so, it formed an important component of Enlightenment thought and became a part of the dispute over the legacy of the Enlightenment triggered by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and revitalized by Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor.14 The concept of religious toleration would thereby represent a vital contribution to shaping contemporary liberal democracies and the secular world.15 In the words of John Rawls: “The historical origin of political liberalism (and of liberalism more generally) is the Reformation and its aftermath, with the long controversies over religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.”16
When held alongside the euphoric eulogy to liberalism delivered by Whig historiography and its counterparts in other national traditions,17 the tone of the recent analytical studies can often seem rather more skeptical. Research has shown how strongly the sixteenth-century toleration associated the question of preserving peace, rooted in the medieval and humanist ideal pax et concordia, with concern for arriving at the position of a single Christian confession. Looking at the group of “moyenneurs” (moderati homines), who were seeking an irenic middle way (via media) between Protestantism and Catholicism during the French Wars of Religion, Mario Turchetti suggested separating the concept of religious concord from “political tolerance.”18 Turchetti’s critique sought to demonstrate that the umbrella term “toleration” as an analytical tool did not allow for a clear and accurate characterization of historical actors, their intentions, or the effects of their actions (unions, colloquies, religious agreements).19 What is more, the disjunction—concord or toleration—pointed at the opposite logic of both actions: “refusal of diversity versus acceptance of diversity.”20
An analogous criticism can also be made of tolerant attitudes. Although a tolerant approach was meant to enable dialogue and an exchange of arguments, its ultimate purpose was to restore Christian unity, not to promote a happy world of many religions. Subsequently, the toleration in early modern times can hardly be characterized as “acceptance of diversity.” On the contrary, many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century thinkers had no doubts that religious unity found its fullest representation in their respective confessions.21 Some of them (like Thomas More or Justus Lipsius) did not even hesitate to approve of persecution.22 In other words, religious toleration was not a positive value in itself, but merely “a necessary evil” and an alternative to bloodshed and religious wars. And so—to quote Alexandra Walsham’s catchy phrase—“toleration is itself a form of intolerance”; it was “charitable hatred.”23 Ultimately—sometimes contrary to the intentions of modern scholars—such deliberations led to separating the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century notion of toleration from its Enlightenment-era counterpart, or even to rejecting the use of this term in the early modern period.24
Naturally, appeals to abandon violence in resolving disputes must always be formulated from within specific historical, political, and social situations. This observation, obvious to the historian, nevertheless has important implications. On the one hand, the provisional character of these recommendations could all too easily undermine the sincerity of such declarations. On the other hand, an analysis of the historical context of calls for peace and dialogue can influence the interpretation of the meaning of a tolerant or irenic message. And so it was that, looking at the “politics of tolerance” in the Netherlands, Andrew Pettegree emphasized the pragmatic function of “an image” of the tolerant country that was “part of a more or less conscious effort to dress a young independent nation with a plausible historical heritage.” The image was also a political weapon that “could be used as ruthlessly and cynically as persecution and intolerance to further particular political ends.”25 It was not only “a slogan, which could be exploited with a high degree of cynicism by different religious groupings,” and “served particular strategic ends,” but also “the party cry of the disappointed, the dispossessed, or the seriously confused.”26 Analogous formulations and findings have been made in the study of irenicism. Contrary to the assumption that irenicism dwells by its nature in opposition to polemicism,27 research in recent decades has often emphasized the polemical character of irenic treatises.28 If toleration could be called by Andrew Pettegree “a loser’s creed,” then irenicism could be termed the weapon of the powerless.29
Such contextualization thus exposes the rhetoric of toleration or irenicism as a code that often serves purposes other than peaceful coexistence or the creation of a common theological platform between Christian traditions. However, this observation provokes a more general question: whether irenic thought had ever anything to do with toleration. Besides similar means and arguments, there was little in common between the two traditions, and certainly much that separated them. The stated aims of the irenic tradition were to bring confessions together and to search for common theological ground, or at least to reflect openly on differences, whereas the goal of toleration—even if perceived simply as a lesser evil—was to enable a peaceful if disapproving or even sometimes contemptuous coexistence, often side by side. Eventually, the success of the toleration project could have ended the theological dialogue and overturned attempts at understanding, or, by contrast, engagement in theological dialogue might have threatened the peaceful coexistence that was based on confessional separation.
In the end, the irenic project ended in failure after failure. Studies on religious dialogue organized by Erasmian and Melanchthonian (also called Philippistic) theologians in sixteenth-century Germany demonstrated that, despite irenic efforts, no consensus was possible.30 Even if members of said disputes finally agreed on theological formulas that were acceptable to them, they failed to attract greater recognition outside their circles.31 As Mark Greengrass put it, in the seventeenth century “Christendom had become a pipedream for irenicists. […] It was a chimera because the basis for its aspirations lay in acts of state and diplomacy which shelved rather than solved the politico-religious tensions of the day.”32
2 Confessionalization and “Confessional Culture”
Reflection on the inevitable failure of irenic initiatives contributed to the main debates about the processes of “confessionalization” and the creation of “confessional cultures.” Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, and a whole host of historians after them, regarded “confessionalization” as a historical era, a macrohistorical process, and a historiographic paradigm all at the same time, that tied together the social, political, cultural, and religious transformations of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.33 Among the catalysts of changes occurring throughout early modern Europe, historians considered confessions to be the foremost, claiming that analogical and parallel processes took place in all Christian denominations. By putting the confessional issues at the center of historical transformations, the scholars were able to draw on one plane, at the theological level, a clear distinction between an alleged medieval religious coexistence and the early modern confessional struggles. At the social, political, and cultural level, they were able to link religion with secular and liberal modernity by identifying the confessions as the central factor in the emergence of the early modern state and the process of modernization.
Despite the skeptical voices, the paradigm of “confessionalization” proved to be an extremely handy tool of analysis, enabling social historians to collaborate with researchers studying the history of thought and theology. At the same time, the employment of this tool generated numerous debates on statism, the role of political and religious elites, the theory of modernization, and the functionalization of religion in modern research.34 Could the macrohistorical paradigm retain its explanatory power at the microhistorical level? Revisiting various threads present in these debates, Thomas Kaufmann proposed a conceptual category of “confessional cultures.” This Konfessionskultur was described as the product of defining the theological proprium (by publishing confessions or professions of faith, developing controversial theology, cultivating disputations, creating a historiographical tradition), which would then influence other dimensions of culture.35 In contrast to the parallelism of social and religious processes and structures claimed by “confessionalization” theory, the concept of “confessional culture” should thus make it possible to focus on confessional distinctiveness, since the formation of confessional cultures should give rise to an individual character for each confession. The focus on confessional self-perception and self-representation should modify the role of the social structures, which was so crucial for the macrohistorical paradigm of “confessionalization.”
The definition of “confessional culture” proposed by Kaufmann, who was adopting studies of Lutheranism as his starting point, uses the idea of a confessional hard core that determines the shapes of culture. Even if the confessional proprium can find its expression in many forms, not only in the Creed, Kaufmann’s centrifugal image suits perfectly the Lutheran formation in the German Empire where the Confessio Augustana—presented at the Reichstag in Augsburg in 1530, confirmed in the Peace of Augsburg in 1555, and petrified in the Book of Concord in 1580—played a dominant role. For other confessional cultures, however, this model may be questioned or appear inadequate. For example, Reformed confessions developed from many traditions and took different shapes in Switzerland, the Netherlands, the German Empire, France, Scotland, and Eastern Europe.36 Perhaps it was the historical background, experiences of exile and persecution, the need to adapt to new circumstances, and a collective self-perception as a minority group that led to the fact that “irenical initiatives stem almost entirely from the Reformed side.”37 Contrary to Reformed tradition, irenic thought was much weaker in the Lutheran confessional culture, despite the fact that the concept of “adiaphora” belonged to the core of Lutheranism. This theological concept of matters of indifference enabled the differentiation between essential components and secondary elements of the confession, and implied that nonessential elements were negotiable. Opening the Lutheran confessional culture to adaptations of some elements of the medieval tradition, whether material or immaterial (pieces of art in church interiors, liturgical vestments, songs and prayers, or some church institutions), and possibly for a dialogue with the Reformed Confession and Catholicism, the notion of adiaphora provoked an intense controversy during the theological and political crises of 1548–50.38 While Philipp Melanchthon and some Lutheran theologians would accept the political and theological compromise imposed by the emperor, according to the famous statement by Matthias Flacius Illyricus, confirmed later in the Formula of Concord (1577), “in casu confessionis et scandali” there was no place for “adiaphora.” Regardless of the outcome of the struggle between the Philippists and the Flacians, according to Markus Friedrich “adiaphorism did not become a universal founding principle in the discourse on toleration, […] [and] adiaphora have received little further attention in the recent historiography on toleration.”39 The role of the “adiaphora” concept for and within the irenic tradition seems to be only marginal, even if it remains an open research question.
Even if both paradigms, “confessionalization” and “confessional cultures,” provided researchers with an analytical toolbox, they also directed the research interests and dictated some estimations. Despite the general claims of these models, which should enable scholars to describe the situation in Europe more adequately and holistically, the applicability of paradigms to Eastern and Central Europe, where narratives in social, political, and cultural history took turns different from those in Western Europe, remains questionable.40 Additionally, from the point of view of both models, which presuppose an increasing divergence of churches and confessions, the irenic efforts and confessional coexistence could only be of marginal importance. And so, the dominance of these historiographical approaches has forced historians to revisit the concepts of irenicism, toleration, and religious compromise. However, the results of numerous studies have revealed an inconsistent picture. Despite ever-sharper confessional divisions, the coexistence of multiple denominations was a widespread social and political phenomenon in early modern Europe. In the words of Benjamin J. Kaplan, “the practice of toleration did not await the Enlightenment.”41
The origins of multiple coexisting confessions were associated not so much with the development of political theory as with social practice.42 Challenging the concept of confessionalization, Thomas M. Safley observed: “Multiconfessionalism, understood here as the legally recognized and politically supported coexistence of two or more confessions in a single polity, be it a city-state or territorial state, was the rule rather than the exception for most regions and polities that experienced Reformation.”43 However, contrary to Safley’s claims, the “ubiquity of multiconfessionalism” does not necessarily lead to the conclusion that “confessionalization strictu sensu simply does not work.”44 The phenomenon of the coexistence of multiple denominations does not so much challenge the paradigm of “confessionalization” as provoke questions about the preconditions and modalities of this coexistence. According to David M. Luebke, “the regimes of coexistence were subject to many of the same forces that also shaped mono-confessional systems as they emerged from the cultural stew of sixteenth-century pluralization.”45 In other words, the abovementioned opposition between normative and non-normative approaches can be misleading, since a social pragmatic had its regulations and rules as well. The “modes of social interaction that were both upheld and constrained in everyday life by shared assumptions, points of doctrinal consensus, accustomed behavior, and sometimes even laws and formal agreements” formed—as Luebke put it—“regimes of religious cohabitation” based on calculations of costs and benefits.46
The existence of various denominations side by side was possible due to precise regulations and practical agreements on the use of churches (e.g., Simultankirchen) as well as Christians’ mutual respect for the fundamental institutions of society (e.g., baptisms and marriages). In biconfessional German cities (best studied and described by the example of Reichsstädte), and in some other regions of the German Empire, the Netherlands, France, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, and Transylvania, these forms of coexistence were legally regulated.47 In other parts of Europe, the coexistence of multiple faiths was based on mechanisms of selective perception adopted by secular authorities, who tolerated elements of heterodoxy within the society, differentiated between the personal and public space (freedom of conscience and freedom of worship), and adopted tactics of simulation and dissimulation (like Auslaufen).48 An “invisible border” (Étienne François) simultaneously divided different faiths from one another and enabled various forms of coexistence that nonetheless extended to litigation and violence.49 Apparently, good fences did not always make good neighbors.
The general framework of this cohabitation was defined by religious peace treaties and agreements.50 As Irene Dingel pointed out, the religious peace treaties were “nothing more and nothing less than coexistence regulations […] By no means [did] they [approve Protestants] as a religious community in their own [right], but merely decreed—temporary—suspension of the heresy acts.”51 Following on the regulations proclaimed during and after the Hussite Wars (like the religious peace of Kutná Hora from 148552 ), resolutions passed by the Imperial Diet of the Holy Roman Empire could be regarded as the first agreements of this type in the age of reform. This succession of treaties peppers the entire history of the Reformation: from agreements adopted at the Diets of Nuremberg (1524) and Speyer (1526),53 to the Second Kappel peace treaty (1532), the Treaty of Passau (1552),54 and the Peace of Augsburg (1555), up to the Peace of Westphalia (1648).55 The role of the German peace treaties led Joachim Whaley to conclude that “toleration was an international idea, but nowhere was the debate as clearly circumscribed in practical, legal and administrative terms as in the Holy Roman Empire.”56 In France, however, edicts passed during the religious wars performed a similar function,57 followed by subsequent modifications to the Edict of Nantes (1598) up to its revocation with the Edict of Fontainebleau (1685).58 Among religious peace treaties considered milestones, the regulations from Eastern Europe—like the Edict of Torda, proclaimed in Hungary in 1568, and the Warsaw Confederation, adopted in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1573—particularly stand out.59
Over a decade ago, Jeffrey R. Collins enumerated the most important features of the “revisionist trends” in the historiography of religious toleration: “an emphasis on local and contingent conditions; a sensitivity to the political uses of toleration; a methodological shift of emphasis away from the history of ideas and toward broader ‘discourses’ and practices of toleration; [and] some attention to the social and economic factors generating pressure toward toleration.”60 Ever since then, there have been recurring calls to combine both of the aforementioned research trends in studies on the theory of toleration and practices of coexistence in confessional Europe.61 The almost parallel development of these trends engenders questions about interactions and spaces of conflict, where debates about toleration overlapped religious dialogue with the practices of coexistence between multiple faiths.
3 Goal of the Volume
With the shift in perspective from the theory of toleration toward the praxis of coexistence, Central and Eastern Europe have rightfully come under the spotlight in the work of current Reformation historians. Previous approaches, in focusing mostly on Western European thought, actors, and solutions, simultaneously sidelined Central and Eastern Europe. This volume follows recent studies by Joachim Bahlcke, David Frick, Howard Louthan, and Graeme Murdock and offers a different focus and broader perspective. Departing from the implicit assumption that the roots of toleration and irenicism are to be sought solely in Western Europe, this work puts Central and Eastern Europe center stage.
This region entered the circle of Christian culture relatively late, between the ninth and thirteenth centuries, resulting in weak church structures. Consequently, fewer universities were founded in this part of Christian Europe, and the influence of Roman law and humanism was also less potent. At the same time, influences from Western and Eastern Christianity, the Armenian Church, the Hussites, Islam, and Judaism intersected in this area. As previously argued by Howard Louthan, “multiconfessionalism […] was a fundamental characteristic of religious life in Central Europe throughout the early modern period.”62 However, the sources for and mechanisms of the phenomenon of “practical toleration” in Eastern Europe remain a conundrum. As David Frick recently observed: “Perhaps one answer lay in the antiquity of religious difference and coexistence […]. Perhaps another answer lay in the attenuation of binary opposition: not two confessions in one city but five confessions […], which allowed for many types of inclusive and exclusive constellations of individual groups.”63 Other historians (such as Wojciech Kriegseisen, Michael G. Müller, or Janusz Tazbir) pointed to the existence of a secular constitutional system with an eminent role played by the estates as a guarantor of religious freedom.64 Analogically, the strong position of the aristocrats and nobility was often depicted as “political decentralization,” so—to quote Howard Louthan—“many of the settlements guaranteeing religious freedom were compromises produced by a weak central state.”65 On the same assumptions, however, Gottfried Schramm formulated an opposite hypothesis: an absence of definitive commitment on the part of the rulers, who neither supported the Reformation nor persecuted its followers, led to the weakness of the Reformation and the Protestant milieus.66 In other words, the “practical toleration”—rooted in the medieval tradition, expressed in relatively peaceful religious coexistence, and guaranteed by the privileges of the nobility—hindered the process of both “confessionalization” and the creation of “cultures of confession,” eventually culminating in the consolidation of secular power.
None of these explanations can be accepted without reservation. The recurring elucidation of multiconfessionalism by the medieval tradition drastically reduces the role of the confessional division of the Reformation. The logical link between the “loose state structure,” the “political decentralization,” and the multiconfessional character of the region still demands an explanation and clarification in itself. Last but not least, it reopens the debate on confessionalization as a general explanatory model for early modern history. Was there a place in early modern Europe for a “confessional hybridity” understood as a mélange of different elements of doctrine or liturgy?67
The intention of this volume is to address the problem of religious compromises and confessional coexistence in Eastern and Central Europe from the perspective of case studies, based on primary sources. By looking at local conditions, with sensitivity to political, economic, and social structures, the authors trace the practices and discourses of religious toleration, irenicism, and cohabitation. Implicitly, the presented studies claim that practical toleration is better apprehended at the level of social relations and thus through the lens of social history, and not the history of ideas. A quarter of a century ago, Ole Peter Grell and Robert Scribner advocated for a social history of toleration.68 Now, as social history is in its ascendency or has even passed its peak already, their claim can not only be reiterated but also reformulated. To sidestep and overcome the dichotomy between a “Western theoretical approach” and an “Eastern practical approach” to toleration, it is essential to combine the history of ideas with social history.
Furthermore, to a broader extent than in previous publications, the authors attempt to include the perspective of the periphery, made possible by the use of comparative methods, and, reaching beyond the regional context, document the transfer of practices and ideas across Europe between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The goal is neither to replicate “grand narratives” of the Western European toleration, nor to repeat the story of the “special path” (Sonderweg) of an Eastern Europe where everything was simply different and incomparable. Focus on the particular actors in their local context should provide new answers to the general questions, offer a new look at the universal processes, and situate the Eastern part of the continent more strongly within the early modern European borders.
The central question posed by this volume concerns how followers of various religions and confessions lived alongside one another in early modern Central and Eastern Europe. In the face of the weakness of the state, how was the need for Christian homogeneity and for security of minorities realized? What strategies or factors enabled their peaceful coexistence despite growing religious antagonisms? How did that growing antagonism impact the maintenance of peaceful and pragmatic everyday life?
These questions, addressed in the first part of the volume, concern both the social and political determinants (social or religious composition, relationships of power) as well as cultural ones (the importance of medieval traditions or various forms of memory). What laws and regulations enabled the creation and shaped the behaviors of multiconfessional communities? How were the differences between denominations delineated? The opening essay by Christopher Voigt-Goy elucidates some legal aspects of confessional coexistence that in the Holy Roman Empire were regulated by the imperial laws. Voigt-Goy claims that the distinction between “public,” “private,” and “domestic,” canonized in the Peace of Westphalia and pivotal for the European concepts of toleration, was developed by Protestant German jurists around 1600. This conceptual distinction had been developed to protect the religious liberties of confessional minorities that were endangered by the cuius regio, eius religio rule. In a sharp contrast to this legalistic approach by the empire, Bogumił Szady reconstructs analogical solutions in Eastern Europe. Using the example of the right of patronage in Ruthenia, an eastern border region of Poland, Szady demonstrates how the traditional medieval prerogatives of the nobles allowed them to interfere in the appointment of priests and pastors, something that—on the one hand—made the Reformation a question of the individual choice of the nobility and—on the other—enforced a system of the cohabitation of many confessions and religions at the parochial level. An analogical approach is also taken by Uladzimir Padalinski, who investigates another border region: the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, where the Reformation disturbed the medieval cohabitation of the Orthodox and the Catholics. Throughout the sixteenth century, the social structure and legal measures had maintained the confessional stability of the region, even if a microhistorical analysis reveals tension in the everyday life of the Catholics, Orthodox, and Calvinists in Lviv, Vilnius, and Polatsk. At the end of the sixteenth century, however, the aggressive expansion of the Jesuit order and the confessional engagement of the secular authorities disrupted this subtle balance of power.
Kazimierz Bem and Melchior Jakubowski look closer at the everyday life of the Protestant communities in Eastern Europe. The scope of Bem’s article extends beyond the religious life of the Calvinists to consider the vexed question of the relationship between Protestants in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. In the seventeenth century, Reformed and Lutheran parishes in Poland entered into a series of local agreements, involving liturgy and theology. According to Bem, the upshot of these “church unions,” imposed by the Reformed majority, was not only an effort to maintain the peaceful coexistence, but also a plan to “turn the Lutherans into Reformed Christians.” Jakubowski compares three Eastern European regions where many Christian denominations coexisted peacefully in the eighteenth century. In Bukovina, Suwałki, and Latgale, not only did the neighborhood house the parishes of Roman Catholics, Greek Catholics, Lutherans, and Old Believers, but the believers also attended services at churches of other denominations. Analyses of the metrical registration of the parishes “provides evidence of administering Roman Catholic service to the faithful of at least three other Christian denominations—[…] on the occasion of three important events: baptism, marriage, and funeral.” According to the author, this confessional openness was dictated by the “pragmatism of everyday life” and was due to large distances between parish churches, as well as the costs of services and travel.
This topic engenders further questions about the practices, and limits, of multiconfessional coexistence that are formulated in the second part of the book. How were the problems arising out of multiconfessionalism resolved in practice? How could one reconcile peaceful coexistence with disputations and eruptions of violence? What cultural forms were adopted as a result of this exchange and cooperation in the confessional sphere? Jan Červenka focuses on the literary dialogues created in Bohemia after the Hussite Wars. While advocating on behalf of the Compacts of Basel (1436), their authors, Jan of Rabštejn, Václav Písecký, and Mikuláš Konáč of Hodíškov, called for peace and rejection of violence. The plea for toleration between Hussites and Catholics, albeit accompanied by the exclusion of the Bohemian Brethren, was conceived by both major confessions as a threat to the established compromise. As Červenka states, the authors were “seeking […] not plurality but the renewal of unity.”
By looking at the person and career of Johannes Danticus (1485–1548), a secular humanist who was subsequently a bishop of Chełmno (Culm) and Warmia (Ermland), Bryan D. Kozik asks how a “flexible Erasmian proponent of unity” turned into a “traditional Catholic advocate of conformity.” The “confessionalization of humanism,” depicted with the examples of Danticus’s activities and his correspondence network in 1530 and 1541 (Johannes Campensis, Juan de Valdéz, and Thomas Cranmer), not only offers an insight into the fate of Erasmianism in the age of reform but also demonstrates an intensity of transfer between Western and Eastern Europe.
Using the example of Jacob Fabricius (Schmidt), Sławomir Kościelak depicts a problem of coexistence encountered by Lutherans and Calvinists in multiconfessional Gdańsk. An attempt by the Calvinist minority to introduce the “Second Reformation” provoked riots and disputes in the Lutheran city. Despite the sympathy of the city elite, the Calvinists did not manage to change the religious profile of the city. Maciej Ptaszyński inquires into the limits of early modern toleration with the example of the Socinians, who were expelled from Poland–Lithuania in 1658. By looking at the confessional polemics of the Socinian leader, Jonas Schlichting, Ptaszyński demonstrates that the sentence of banishment was passed not when the theologian was turning out his polemics but when he ceased producing them and tried to reconcile the Socinians with the Calvinists.
The question of the cultural impact of confessional coexistence in the eighteenth century, when the confessional barriers gradually fell, is addressed in the third part of the volume. Drawing on analyses of European confessional debates, Alexander Schunka presents a new conceptualization of the relationship between irenicism and Pan-Protestantism. By tracing the development of irenicism in the early modern era, Schunka moves Protestant irenicism from the margins (where it was located by the main historical paradigms) to the center of the historical scene, claiming that “irenicism was not an alternative to the confessionalism following the Reformation but rather an innovative and adaptable part of it.” Further, the researcher separates the history of irenicism from the history of toleration or ecumenism. While criticizing the linear vision of the history of irenicism for neglecting the historical context, he situates irenic initiatives against a theological and political background, focusing on intraconfessional debates of Lutherans and Reformed between their orthodox and liberal wings, and demonstrating the changing nature of the irenic debate around 1700. Finally, Schunka claims that “irenicism was a concept and discourse that connected theology and politics in an innovative fashion, fostering transconfessional as well as transregional communication within a broader scheme of Pan-Protestantism.” Wolfgang Breul analyzes irenic tradition in the circle of the radical Protestants in Germany. The starting point for consideration is the analysis of the edict of toleration of the County of Isenburg–Büdingen (1712), which granted “everyone complete freedom of conscience.” The essay explains the origins of this radical formulation by putting the edict in a broader context of analogical edicts and agreements influenced by radical Protestantism. The Pietists and the Moravian Church, established by Nikolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, developed a new theological and communication framework that was intended to see awakened individuals and Protestant groups join in transcending the confessional divide.
Stephan Steiner and Paul Shore shed intriguing light on religious life in Vienna, which was simultaneously an apotheosis of baroque Catholicism and an enclave of Protestants hosted in the Danish, Swedish, and Dutch embassies. According to Steiner, “living and working in Vienna must have resembled a roller coaster ride, marked by the ups and downs of tentative irenic experiences and the staggering through confessionalized minefields.” Shore studies the career and writing of Adam František Kollár (1718–83), who was a former Jesuit and director of the Imperial Library in Vienna during the reigns of Maria Theresia and Joseph II. Despite the Jesuits’ role in the re-Catholicization of Eastern Europe, Shore emphasizes the unintended effects of the Jesuit scholarship in promoting toleration and relativism. However, in Enlightenment Vienna, after the suppression of the Society of Jesus, some former Jesuits viewed secularization—and not the Protestants—as their greatest rival.
4 Summary
The analytical studies presented in this volume lead toward a general hypothesis: that the origins, shapes, and impact of multiconfessional coexistence in Eastern and Central Europe were instrumental in building confessional identities and confessional cultures. As Szady and Padalinski document, the interconfessional patchwork was based on a tradition of late medieval toleration and grounded in the law of patronage as well as in local agreements. In contrast to the solutions adopted in the Empire (Reich), no universal legal system guaranteeing freedom of religion was developed in Central Europe. Regional solutions were negotiable and occasionally remained valid into the nineteenth century due to the power of everyday pragmatics, as Jakubowski reveals.
As Červenka, Kozik, and Ptaszyński demonstrate, the call for religious toleration was formulated from various positions, and its actual meaning depended strongly on political, religious, and social context. Furthermore, the irenic was never unconditional and absolute, nor did it sit—as Kozik points out—in opposition to the variously understood orthodoxy. Bem, Kościelak, and Ptaszyński show that the Calvinists and the Socinians (Unitarians) at times implemented irenic language to achieve other religious and political goals. As Schunka claims, the irenicism of the time should be separated from the Pan-Protestant tradition with its strong Reformed reference. Irenicism was not the opposite of polemicism but a form of confessional communication and perhaps even a form of argument.
A holistic look at the phenomena of toleration, irenicism, and religious coexistence reveals a different image of “confessional cultures,” cultures that were also shaped by the transfer of ideas, exchanges of thought, and interconfessional dialogue. Even if they did not work in concordance or were sometimes mutually exclusive, toleration, irenicism, and religious coexistence facilitated interconfessional contacts and various forms of exchange, and by doing so, accelerated the formation of “confessional cultures.” This specific contribution of irenicism to the emergence of confessional cultures can be called “confessional irenicism,” which of course had a different appearance within each confession and was often situated outside confessional orthodoxy (and even in opposition to it and to the idea of toleration). “Confessional irenicism” could rely on certain elements of ecclesiastical tradition—like dialogues, successful unions, and historical moment—to construct its own character. From the standpoint of confessional irenicism, intentions to arrive at an interconfessional consensus were crucial, not because they led to establishing a solid theological proprium—they didn’t—but rather because they contributed to building confessional identities. By looking at the European tradition of “toleration before the Enlightenment” (Benjamin J. Kaplan) through the lens of Eastern and Central Europe, the present volume casts new light on religious dialogue and early modern irenicism as factors creating confessional identity and a sense of belonging to “confessional Europe.” After all, neither toleration nor irenicism precluded disputations or the need for self-distinction. On the contrary, it often led to the development of self-awareness and identity within confessional churches, which could itself be further regarded as “confessional irenicism.”
Acknowledgments
The paper was prepared as a part of the research project 2018/31/B/HS3/00351 funded by the National Science Centre, Poland.
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Whaley, Joachim. Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Williams, Melissa S., Jeremy Waldron, eds. Toleration and its Limits. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
Witt, Christian Volkmar. “Keine Irenik ohne Polemik. Konfessionelle Wahrnehmungsformationen am Beispiel des David Pareus.” In Confessio im Barock. Religiöse Wahrnehmungsformationen im 17. Jahrhundert, edited by Malte van Spankeren, Christian Volkmar Witt, 17–53. Leipzig: Evang. Verl.-Anst., 2015.
Witt, Christian Volkmar. “Innerprotestantische Ökumene und Bekenntnis.” In Die „Confessio Augustana‟ im ökumenischen Gespräch, edited by Günter Frank, Volker Leppin and Tobias Licht, 133–156. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021.
Zagorin, Perez. How the idea of religious toleration came to the West. Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003.
Manuscipts of the proceedings in: Národní muzeum (Praha), Fragm. 1 E b 1/3, fol. 1r–38v (the synod). Edited in: Maria Sipayłło, ed., Akta Synodów Różnowierczych w Polsce, vol. 2 (Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1972), 272–301; a new edition in: Alberto Melloni, ed., Conciliorum oecumenicorum generaliumque decreta, vol. 6, part 7 [forthcoming].
The reprint: Krystyna Długosz-Kurczabowa, ed., Konfesja sandomierska (Warszawa: Semper, 1995). For a solid analysis see: Jerzy Lehmann, Konfesja sandomierska na tle innych wyznań (Warszawa: Mietke, 1937).
Kęstutis Daugirdas, “Konsens von Sandomierz—Consensus Sendomirensis, 1570. Einleitung und kritische Edition,” in Reformierte Bekenntnisschriften, ed. Andreas Mühling, vol. 3,1 (Neukirchen: Neukirchener Theologie, 2013), 1–20; Oskar Halecki, Zgoda sandomierska 1570 r. (Warszawa: Gebethner i Wolff, 1915); Maciej Ptaszyński, “Der Konsens von Sendomir in der europäischen Irenik,” in Confessio im Konflikt. Religiöse Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ein Studienbuch, ed. Mona Garloff, Christian Volkmar Witt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2019), 255–78.
Janusz Tazbir, A State without Stakes: Polish Religious Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Warszawa: Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy, 1973); Hans-Joachim Müller, Irenik als Kommunikationsreform. Das Colloquium Charitativum von Thorn 1645 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), 69–72.
Howard Louthan, “Irenicism and Ecumenism in the Early Modern World,” Odrodzenie i Reformacja w Polsce 61 (2017): 6.
See Wilhelm Holtmann, “Irenik,” in Theologische Realenzyklopädie, ed. Gerhard Müller et al., vol. 16 (Berlin, New York: De Gruyter, 1987), 268.
Howard Hotson, “Irenicism in the Confessional Age. The Holy Roman Empire, 1563–1648”, in Conciliation and Confession. The Struggle for Unity in the Age of Reform, 1415–1648, ed. Howard P. Louthan, Randall C. Zachman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 232–3.
Wilhelm Bickerich, “Zur Geschichte der Auflösung des Sendomirer Vergleichs,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte NF 12, 49 (1930): 350–81.
Hans R. Guggisberg, Religiöse Toleranz: Dokumente zur Geschichte einer Forderung (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: frommann-holzboog, 1984), 9–11.
Evan Haefeli, “The Problem with the History of Toleration,” in Politics of Religious Freedom?, ed. Elizabeth Shakman Hurd and Winnifred Sullivan (University of Chicago Press, 2016), 105.
Recently Arnold Angenendt, ‘Lasst beides wachsen bis zur Ernte’: Toleranz in der Geschichte des Christentums (Münster: Aschendorff Verlag, 2018); Rainer Forst, Toleration in Conflict: Past and Present, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 160–265; Gary Remer, Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996); Henry Kamen, The Rise of Toleration (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967). See also many works by Roland Bainton, summarized in his, The Travail of Religious Liberty (Philadelphia: Rolland Press 1951); Joseph Lecler, Histoire de la tolérance au siècle de la Réforme, 2 vol. (Paris: Aubier, 1955); Johannes Kühn, Toleranz und Offenbarung. Eine Untersuchung der Motive and Motivformen der Toleranz im Offenbarunggläubigen Protestantismus. Zugleich ein Versuch zur neueren Religion- und Geistesgeschichte (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1923); Willbur K. Jordan, The Development of Religious Toleration in England from the Convention of the Long Parliament to the Restoration, 1640–1660: The Revolutionary Experiments and Dominant Religious Thought (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1938); Karl Völker, Toleranz und Intoleranz im Zeitalter der Reformation (Leipzig: J.C. Hinrichs’sche Buchhandlung, 1912).
Heiko A. Oberman, “The Travail of Tolerance: Containing Chaos in Early Modern Europe,” in Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, ed. Ole Peter Grell and Bob Scribner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 13.
Kęstutis Daugirdas, Die Anfänge des Sozinianismus: Genese und Eindringen des historisch-ethischen Religionsmodells in den universitären Diskurs der Evangelischen in Europa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016); Sarah Mortimer, Reason and Religion in the English Revolution: The Challenge of Socinianism (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010). See also: Jonathan Israel, The Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 205–8; Melissa S. Williams, Jeremy Waldron, ed., Toleration and its Limits (New York: New York University Press, 2008).
Jeffrey R. Collins, “Redeeming the Enlightenment: New Histories of Religious Toleration,” The Journal of Modern History 81 (2009): 607–36; Maïwenn Roudot, Tolérance et reconnaissance en débat: des lumières allemandes à l’Ecole de Francfort (Pessac: Presses universitaires de Bordeaux, 2015).
Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation. How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2012); Bican Şahin, Toleration: The Liberal Virtue (Lanham: Lexington Books 2010); Perez Zagorin, How the Idea of Religious Toleration Came to the West (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2003), 289–331.
John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), xxiv.
Herbert Butterfield, The Whig-Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1931); Keith C. Sewell, “The ‘Herbert Butterfield Problem’ and Its Resolution,” Journal of the History of Ideas 64 (2003): 599–618.
Mario Turchetti, Concordia o tolleranza? François Bauduin (1520–1573) e i ‘Moyenneurs’ (Milano: Franco Angeli, 1984), 11–25, 201–33, 402–49; id., “Religious Concord and Political Tolerance in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 22 (1991): 15–25.
Turchetti, Concordia, 406 (“Bisogna distinguere e precisare, se si vogliono correttamente focalizzare, tra gli stessi fautori della libertà di conscienza, diversità di teorie e di intenti, che a uno sguardo d’insieme sembrano confusamente spinger irenisti, ‘moderati et pacificatores,’ ‘moyenneurs,’ riunionisti, tolleranti, libertini spirituali, pacifisti, politiques ante litteram, erasmiani, altri gruppi intermedi e perfino i protestanti francesi, tutti verso un unico scopo: la tolleranza”). A similar attempt: Bob Scribner, “Preconditions of Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-Century Germany,” in Tolerance and Intolerance, 32–47.
Diarmaid MacCulloch, “Archbishop Cranmer: Concord and Tolerance in a Changing Church,” in Tolerance and Intolerance, 199.
Roland H. Bainton, “The Parable of the Tares as the Proof Text of Religious Liberty to the End of the 16th Century,” Church History 1 (1932): 67–89, id., Erasmus of Christendom (London: Collins 1970), 313–15; Wallace K. Ferguson, “The Attitude of Erasmus toward Toleration,” in id., Renaissance Studies (Ontario: Humanities Department, University of Western Ontario, 1963), 80–82; Hans Rudolf Guggisberg, “Parität, Neutralität und Toleranz,” Zwingliana 15 (1982): 632–49; Manfred Hoffman, “Erasmus and Religious Toleration,” Erasmus Studies 2 (1982): 80–106; Gerhard Ebeling, “Die Toleranz Gottes und die Toleranz der Vernunft,” Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 78 (1981): 442–64.
G.R. Elton, “Persecution and Toleration in the English Reformation,” Studies in Church History 21 (1984): 163–87. On the variously understood paradoxes: John Christian Laursen, Maria José Villaverde, ed., Paradoxes of Religious Toleration in Early Modern Political (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2012).
Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006), 5; Barbara de Negroni, Intolérances. Catholiques et protestants en France, 1560–1787 (Paris: Hachette, 1996).
See Zagorin, How the Idea, 290–91 (“With John Locke and Pierre Bayle, we reach a point of transition in the concept of toleration […]. The Enlightenment stood for a constellation of themes that marked something of a break with the past”); Alexandra Walsham, “Cultures of Coexistence in Early Modern England: History, Literature and Religious Toleration,” The Seventeenth Century 28 (2013): 115 (“Early modern toleration was thus not an ideal or a virtue. It diverged significantly from the definition of mutual acceptance and denominational equality, autonomy and freedom, adopted by influential modern political theorists such as John Rawls”); Sarah Mortimer, “Human Liberty and Human Nature in the Works of Faustus Socinus and His Readers,” Journal of the History of Ideas 70 (2009): 191–211.
Andrew Pettegree, “The Politics of Toleration in the Free Netherlands, 1572–1620,” in Tolerance and Intolerance, 183.
Ibid., 183, 198.
Holtmann, “Irenik,” 268 (“Die Irenik analysiert im Unterschied zu der intoleranteren Polemik, für die der Gedanke einer möglichen Übereinkunft zwischen den Konfessionen keinen Wert hat, die bestehenden religiösen Spannungen und Unterschiede, die das Zusammenwachsen des Sozialgebildes Kirche beeinträchtigen”).
Christian Volkmar Witt, “Keine Irenik ohne Polemik. Konfessionelle Wahrnehmungsformationen am Beispiel des David Pareus,” in Confessio im Barock. Religiöse Wahrnehmungsformationen im 17. Jahrhundert, ed. Malte van Spankeren, Christian Volkmar Witt (Leipzig: Evangelische Verlaganstalt, 2015), 17–53; Christian Volkmar Witt, “Innerprotestantische Ökumene und Bekenntnis,” in Die „Confessio Augustana‟ im ökumenischen Gespräch, ed. Günter Frank, Volker Leppin and Tobias Licht (Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2021), 133–56.
Alexander Schunka, Ein neuer Blick nach Westen. Deutsche Protestanten und Großbritannien, 1688–1740 (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2019).
Klaus Ganzer, ed., Akten der deutschen Reichsreligionsgespräche im 16. Jahrhundert, 3 vol. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2000–2007).
Athina Lexutt, Rechtfertigung im Gespräch: das Rechtfertigungsverständnis in den Religionsgesprächen von Hagenau, Worms und Regensburg 1540/41 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1996); Björn Slenczka, Das Wormser Schisma der Augsburger Konfessionsverwandten von 1557: protestantische Konfessionspolitik und Theologie im Zusammenhang des zweiten Wormser Religionsgesprächs (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2010); Dulden oder Verstehen. Dokumentation zu den „Wormser Religionsgesprächen‟ vom 19. bis 21. April 2013 in Worms, ed. Volker Gallé (Worms: Worms Verlag, 2013); Saskia Schultheis, Die Verhandlungen über das Abendmahl und die übrigen Sakramente auf dem Religionsgespräch in Regensburg 1541 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013).
Mark Greengrass, Christendom destroyed: Europe 1517–1648 (London: Penguin Books, 2015), 593.
Heinz Schilling, “Die Konfessionalisierung im Reich. Religiöser und gesellschaftlicher Wandel in Deutschland zwischen 1555 und 1620,” Historische Zeitschrift 246 (1988): 1–45, the English version: id., “Confessionalization in the Empire. Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555 and 1620,” in id., Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society. Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: Brill, 1992), 205–45. See also: Ute Lotz-Heumann and Matthias Pohlig, “Confessionalization and Literature in the Empire, 1555–1700,” Central European History 40 (2007): 35–61.
Stefan Ehrenpreis, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2002), 62–79.
Thomas Kaufmann, Dreißigjähriger Krieg und Westfälischer Friede: kirchengeschichtliche Studien zur lutherischen Konfessionskultur (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 1998); id., Konfession und Kultur: lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck 2006); Thomas Maissen, “Konfessionskulturen in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft. Eine Einführung,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 101 (2007): 225–46; Matthias Pohlig, “Harter Kern und longue durée. Überlegungen zum Begriff der (lutherischen) Konfessionskultur,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 109 (2018): 389–401. A slightly different approach in: Michael Maurer, Konfessionskulturen: die Europäer als Protestanten und Katholiken (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2019).
Philip Benedict, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed. A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); Kaspar von Greyerz, “Das Reformiertentum,” in Handbuch der Religionsgeschichte im deutschsprachigen Raum, vol. 6, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz, Anne Conrad (Paderborn: Schöningh, 2012), 311–413, here 311–20.
Hotson, “Irenicism,” 233.
Irene Dingel, ed., Der Adiaphoristische Streit (1548–1560) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012); Andrew Spicer, “Adiaphora, Luther and the Material Culture of Worship,” Studies in Church History 56 (2020): 246–72.
Markus Friedrich, “Orthodoxy and Variation: The Role of Adiaphorism in Early Modern Protestantism,” in Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christenssen, eds, Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture: Order and Creativity, 1550–1750 (Leiden, 2007), 62.
Winfried Eberhard, “Voraussetzungen und strukturelle Grundlagen der Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa,” in Konfessionalisierung in Ostmitteleuropa. Wirkungen des religiösen Wandels im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert in Staat, Gesellschaft und Kultur, ed. Joachim Bahlcke, Arno Strohmeyer (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1999), 89–103; Anna Ohlidal, “Konfessionalisierung: ein Paradigma der historischen Frühneuzeitforschung und die Frage seiner Anwendbarkeit auf Böhmen,” Studia Rudolphina 3 (2003): 19–28; Olga Fejtová, “Německá diskuse ke konfesionalizaci v evropském kontextu,” Český časopis historický 109 (2011): 739–85.
Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith. Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 355; id., Cunegonde’s Kidnapping: a Story of Religious Conflict in the Age of Enlightenment (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), 1–17; id., Reformation and the Practice of Toleration (Leiden: Brill 2019). See also: Sascha Salatowsky, Winfried Schröder, ed., Duldung religiöser Vielfalt—Sorge um die wahre Religion: Toleranzdebatten in der Frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2016).
See Jean Bérenger, Tolérance ou paix de religion en Europe centrale (1415–1792) (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2000); Wojciech Kriegseisen, Between State and Church: Confessional Relations from Reformation to Enlightenment: Poland–Lithuania–Germany–Netherlands (Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang, 2016); Martin Dumont, ed., Coexistences confessionelles en Europe à l’époque moderne (Paris: Édition du Cerf, 2016).
Thomas Max Safley, “Introduction,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. id. (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 1–22, here 7.
Such a conclusion in: ibid. 15.
David M. Luebke, Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia, 1553–1650 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 18.
Ibid., 6, 15.
Joachim Whaley, Religious Toleration and Social Change in Hamburg, 1529–1819 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Etienne François, Die unsichtbare Grenze. Protestanten und Katholiken in Augsburg 1648–1806 (Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1991); Christiane Berkvens-Stevelinck, Jonathan Irvine Israel, and G.H.M. Posthumus Meyjes, eds., The Emergence of Toleration in the Dutch Republic (Leiden: Brill, 1997); Roni Po-Chia Hsia, Henk van Nierop, eds., Calvinism and Religious Toleration in the Dutch Golden Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Jesse Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration: a Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 2011); Howard Louthan, Gary B. Cohen, and Franz A.J. Szabo, eds., Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800 (New York: Berghahn, 2011); Victoria Christman, Pragmatic toleration: the politics of religious heterodoxy in early Reformation Antwerp, 1515–1555 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2015); Andrea Riotte, Diese so oft beseufzte Parität. Biberach 1649–1825: Politik–Konfession–Alltag (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer Verlag, 2017); Thomas Richter, “Coping with Religious Diversity in Everyday Life in the Borderlands of Western Europe. Catholics, Protestants and Jews in Vaals,” Acta Poloniae Historica 116 (2017): 149–69; Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Victoria Christman, eds., Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe (Leiden: Brill, 2018); Gábor Kármán, Confession and Politics in the Principality of Transylvania 1644–1657 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2020).
John Bossy, The English Catholic Community 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1976); Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge: Boydell Press 1993); Thierry Wanegffelen, Ni Rome ni Genève: des fidèles entre deux chaires en France au XVIe siècle (Paris: Honoré Champion Éditeur, 1997); Lisa McClain, Lest We be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559–1642 (New York: Routledge, 2004); Benjamin J. Kaplan, ed., Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009); Scott Sowerby, Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution (Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2013); Christine Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics during Holland’s Golden Age. Heretics and Idolaters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012); Andreas Pietsch, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, eds., Konfessionelle Ambiguität: Uneindeutigkeit und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2013); Johannes Paulmann, Matthias Schnettger, and Thomas Weller, eds., Unversöhnte Verschiedenheit. Verfahren zur Bewältigung religiös-konfessioneller Differenz in der europäischen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2016).
Keith P. Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early-modern France (Washington, DC: Catholic Univ. of America Press, 2005), 1–46; Philip Benedict, “Un Roi, Une Loi, Deux Fois: Parameters for the History of Catholic-Reformed Co-Existence in France, 1555–1685,” in Tolerance and Intolerance, 91.
Irene Dingel, Michael Rohrschneider, Inken Schmidt-Voges, Siegrid Westphal, and Joachim Whaley, eds., Handbuch Frieden im Europa der Frühen Neuzeit. Handbook of Peace in Early Modern Europe (Berlin: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2021). See: Irene Dingel, ed., Religiöse Friedenswahrung und Friedensstiftung in Europa (1500–1800): Digitale Quellenedition frühneuzeitlicher Religionsfrieden: http://tueditions.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/e000001/.
Irene Dingel, “Religionsfrieden,” in Handbuch Frieden, 273 (“Die Religionsfrieden bzw. Religionsfriedensregelungen der Frühen Neuzeit waren nicht mehr und nicht weniger als Koexistenzordnungen. Sie schufen langfristig ein Koexistenzsystem, das sich über geltendes kanonisches Recht hinwegsetzte. Das bedeutete aber nicht, dass sie etwa eine positive Anerkennung der jeweiligen, aus der Reformation hervorgegangenen Gruppierung einräumten. Sie approbierten diese keineswegs als eigene Religionsgemeinschaft, sondern verfügten lediglich die—vorerst zeitweise—Aussetzung des Ketzerrechts”).
Jiří Just, Der Kuttenberger Religionsfrieden von 1485, trans. Martin Rothkegel, in Religiöse Erinnerungsorte in Ostmitteleuropa. Konstitution und Konkurrenz im nationen- und epochenübergreifenden Zugriff, ed. Joachim Bahlcke, Stefan Rohdewald, Thomas Wünsch (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 2013), 838–50.
Armin Kohnle, Reichstag und Reformation. Kaiserliche und ständische Religionspolitik von den Anfängen der Causa Lutheri bis zum Nürnberger Religionsfrieden (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2001), 105–203.
Winfried Becker, ed., Der Passauer Vertrag von 1552 (Neustadt/A.: Degener, 2003).
Axel Gotthard, Augsburger Religionsfrieden (Münster: Aschendorff, 2004); Heinz Schilling, ed., Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden 1555: wissenschaftliches Symposium aus Anlaß des 450. Jahrestages des Friedensschlusses, (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007).
Whaley, Religious Toleration, 4.
See Hugues Daussy, Le parti Huguenot: chronique d’une désillusion (1557–1572) (Genève: Droz, 2014); Mark Greengrass, Governing Passions: Peace and Reform in the French Kingdom: 1576–1585 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).
See David Garrioch, The Huguenots of Paris and the Coming of Religious Freedom, 1685–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 24–44; Christian Mühling, Die europäische Debatte über den Religionskrieg (1679–1714): konfessionelle Memoria und internationale Politik im Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018); Geoffrey Adams, The Huguenots and French Opinion: 1685–1787. The Enlightenment Debate on Toleration (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier Univ. Press, 1991), 7–46.
Mihály Balázs, Judit Gellérd, Thomas Cooper, “Tolerant Country–Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation Concerning Religion,” The Hungarian Historical Review 2 (2013): 85–108; Maciej Ptaszyński, “Toleranzedikt, Wahlkapitulationen oder Religionsfrieden? Der polnische Adel und die Warschauer Konföderation,” in Ritterschaft und Reformation, ed. Wolfgang Breul, Kurt Andermann (Regensburg: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2019), 255–69.
Collins, “Redeeming the Enlightenment,” 618.
Howard Louthan, “Irenicism and Ecumenism.”
Howard Louthan, “Multiconfessionalism in Central Europe,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism, 369–92, here 379.
David Frick, Kith, Kin, and Neighbors: Communities and Confessions in Seventeenth-Century Wilno (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2013), 16. See also idem, “Five Confessions in One City: Multiconfessionalism in Early Modern Wilno,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism, 417–43.
Wojciech Kriegseisen, Die Protestanten in Polen-Litauen (1696–1763): rechtliche Lage, Organisation und Beziehungen zwischen den evangelischen Glaubensgemeinschaften, ed. Joachim Bahlcke, Klaus Ziemer, trans. Peter Oliver Loew, Rafael Sendek (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011); Michael G. Müller, Zweite Reformation und städtische Autonomie im Königlichen Preußen: Danzig, Elbing und Thorn in der Epoche der Konfessionalisierung (1557–1660) (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1997). See a collection of essays: Gottfried Schramm, Polska w dziejach Europy Środkowej: studia, trans. Ewa Płomińska-Krawiec (Poznań: Wydawnictwo Poznańskie, 2010).
Louthan, “Multiconfessionalism”, 374.
Gottfried Schramm, Der polnische Adel und die Reformation 1548–1607 (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1965).
On a “confessional hybridity” see: Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, “A View from the Choir: Forming Lutheran Culture in Pluriconfessional Westphalian Convents,” Past & Present 234 (2017): 189–211; David M. Luebke, “Ritual, Religion, and German Home Towns.” Central European History 47 (2014): 499.
Grell and Scribner ed., Tolerance and Intolerance, 1–3.