Christianity and Society in the Modern World Series editors HUGH McLEOD AND BOB SCRIBNER Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550—1750 In the same series The Social History of Religion in Scotland since 1730 Callum Brown The Jews in Christian Europe 1400-1700 John Edwards A Social History of French Catholicism 1789-1914 Ralph Gibson Forthcoming Calvinism and Society The reformed tradition in Europe to 1700 Philip Benedict Popular Evangelical Movements in Britain and North America 1730-1870 Louis Billington Women and Religion in Early Modern England 1500-1750 Patricia Crawford The Clergy in Europe A comparative social history Gregory Freeze Religion and Social Change in Industrial Britain 1770-1870 David Hempton The Western Church and Sexuality in Europe 1400-1700 Lyndal Roper > Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe 1550—1750 R. PO-CHIA HSIA R Routledge LONDON AND NEW YORK SCHOOL OP THEOLOGY AT CLAREMONT C' r» lI ’i’f- ATinic First published 1989 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 © 1989 R. Po-chia Hsia Set in 11 on Garamond by Columns of Reading Printed in Great Britain by T. J. Press (Padstow) Ltd Padstow, Cornwall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Hsia, R. Po-chia Social discipline in the Reformation: central Europe 1550-1750 1. Europe. Christian Church, history I. Title II. Series 274 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Hsia, R. Po-chia, 1955— Social discipline in the Reformation: 155O-175O/R. Po-chia Hsia p. cm. - (Christianity and society in the modern world) Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-415-01148-5 1. Reformation — Europe, German-speaking. 2. Counter-Reformation — Europe, German-speaking. 3. Church and state - Europe, German speaking - History. 4. Europe, German-speaking — Church history. 5. Holy Roman Empire — Church history. I. Title. II. Series. BR307.H78 1989 274.3'06 - de 19 89-3538 Contents Acknowledgments vi Introduction 1 1 Lutheran Germany 10 2 Calvinist Germany 26 3 Catholic Germany 39 4 The confessional state 53 5 Cities and confessionalization 73 6 Culture and confessionalism 89 7 The moral police 122 8 Confessionalism and the people 143 Conclusion 174 Notes 186 Further reading 188 Index 213 Acknowledgments As with any synthesis, the work of many colleagues is indispensible. Instead of burdening the reader with numerous footnotes, I have listed my indebtedness in the suggestions for further reading. In addition to the collective multitude of scholars, I would like to thank Professor Heinz Schilling, Professor Hans- Christoph Rublack, Dr Georg Schmidt, and Dr Luise Schorn- Schütte of West Germany for sharing with me their ongoing researches. I wrote this book between moves and places; some semblance of continuity was created by the kindness of Marianne Hraibi and Patsy Carter - the interlibrary loan staff at Dartmouth College - who met my incessant requests with unfailing good cheer. Robert Scribner invited me to write for the series and carefully went over the manuscript. It is a special pleasure to acknowledge my appreciation of his cunning as editor and historian. Introduction In historical writing, the Reformation has long captured the imagination of scholars and students: the struggle for conscience, the clash of faiths, the disintegration of Christian unity, the rise of liberty and toleration have become commonplaces in history texts. Research tends to concentrate on late medieval conflicts leading up to Luther, and ends with the Religious Peace of Augsburg in 1555. This agenda characterizes also much of the current emphasis on social history. Historical interest, it seems, wanes with the passing of the Peasants’ War of 1524/5, the Anabaptist revolution at Münster in 1534/5, and the general retreat of the common people from the stage of religious drama. Until quite recently, the period after 1550 was an orphan of German historiography: Cultural and literary historians eagerly await the birth of Goethe; military and political historians hail the rise of Prussia; and for many modern historians, who cherish the twins “Reformation” and “German unification,” the complicated and confusing intervening centuries of confessionalism seem almost an illegitimate child of German history. All this has changed in the past decade. German historians have reassessed the significance of the “confessional age” for their own history, detecting central themes in subsequent developments of state and society. Above all, historians of religion and society have argued that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were not so much distinct, opposing historical phenomena, as structurally similar developments in the long-term transformation of the society of early modern Central Europe. The period from 1550 to 2 Social Discipline in the Reformation 1750, then, calls into question the nature of German history; it offers complex historical patterns for comparison with develop­ ments in Western Europe, particularly in regard to the relationship between state and religion; and lastly, the history of Christianity cannot be adequately understood without studying the consolida­ tion of official religions and their relationship with popular religion. Among German historians, the challenge to the traditional view has come from four directions. In the 1960s, Gerhard Oestreich introduced the concept of “social disciplining” to describe changes in early modern German society. The enforcement of church discipline, the consolidation of confessional identity, and the demand for religious conformity complemented developments in political and philosophical thought. Neo-stoicism, eloquently argued by the great humanist scholar, Justus Lipsius, served to elevate the authority of the prince; in Calvinist territories, military reform, state building, and neo-stoic philosophy went hand-in- hand. According to Oestreich, the rise of absolutism in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the creation of powerful military states, such as Prussia, rest upon this foundation of “social disciplining,” by which the people became obedient, pious, and diligent subjects of their German princes. A second impetus has come from the research of historians interested in the Catholic Reformation. Eager to correct the “bad press” of the Counter-Reformation in Rankean historiography, which tended to equate Protestantism with the development of the German nation, Ernst Walter Zeeden and his students advanced the concept of “the formation of confessions” (Konfessionsbildung) to denote the coequal developments of the Lutheran, Calvinist, and Catholic reformations. Their research emphasizes the structural similarity in the major confessions: Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Tridentine Catholicism all developed coherent systems of doc­ trines, rituals, personnel, and institutions in the intense competi­ tion for souls. A major achievement of Zeeden and his students is the opening up of new archival sources, the copious visitation records, for the comparative study of confessional formations. To enforce confessional conformity, the three major confessions instituted periodic “visitations” at the diocesan and parochial levels (in Calvinist areas, the synodal, classes, and communal records): Introduction 3 teams of officials from the central government, both ecclesiastical and lay, questioned local clerics, bailiffs, jurors, townsmen, and villagers on their religious life. They documented church finances, conditions of church buildings, the conduct of the clergy, figures on church attendance, baptism, weddings, communion, and bur­ ials, the presence of nonconformists and “heretics,” and a host of popular religious beliefs and practices. The systematic publication of inventories of these visitation records, although cut short by the lack of funds, has opened up vast resources for the historian of popular religion and confessionalism. Based on the study of visitation records, the cumulative effect of the many local case studies is to give us an accurate and profound picture of the impact of confessionalism in rural society. More recently, Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard have advanced the concepts of “social disciplining” and “confession formation” to new theoretical sophistication. They speak of the concept of “confessionalization” (Konfessionalisierung), thus under­ lining the process of changes that involved the religious, political, cultural, and social structures of early modern Germany. In an influential essay, Reinhard formulated three theses of confessionalization: 1 that the Reformation and Counter-Reformation were struc­ turally parallel, with the Counter-Reformation expressing many “modern” traits, such as individualism and rationality; 2 that confessionalization created social groups, “the three con­ fessions,” by a variety of means, including the formulation of dogma, confessional propaganda, education, discipline, rituals, and language; 3 that confessionalization strengthened political centralization when the early modern state used religion to consolidate its territorial boundary, to incorporate the church into the state bureaucracy, and to impose social control on its subjects. Schilling’s own research focuses on the interplay between politics in the empire and confessional conflicts. In a study on the city of Emden, he shows that in the 1590s Calvinism could mobilize citizens in defense of civic republicanism against the centralizing policies of a Lutheran prince, the Count of Friesland. The opposite pattern, however, characterized the struggle in Lemgo, a territorial 4 Social Discipline in the Reformation town in Westphalia, as Schilling demonstrates in a second study. When the Count of Lippe adopted Calvinism in 1605 and declared a “Second Reformation” for his land, the Lutheran citizens of Lemgo defied the will of their lord and defended their traditional religion and civic privileges all the way to the imperial courts. In his current research, Schilling systematically analyzes Calvinist church records to study the process of “social disciplining” in Calvinist north Germany, thus logically pursuing the avenues opened up by Oestreich and Zeeden. He has formulated a four- phase periodization of confessionalization between the 1540s and the late seventeenth century that will undoubtedly stimulate future discussions. Scholars of literature and folklore are responsible for the fourth, and last, direction of research. The vast repertoire of Baroque sermons, plays, paintings, and poetry, together with numerous Baroque and Rococco churches, express the cultural wealth and productivity of Catholic Germany. Similarly, Lutheran Germany created the forerunner of a national vernacular literature, in addition to a sophisticated musical tradition. Most importantly, we have to understand this cultural production as part of the structure of confessional society. Created out of a specific confes­ sional milieu for a particular purpose, printing, pilgrimage, and artistic objects acquired historic meaning only in the context of their reception. Far from the “cultural desert” depicted by some historians, the confessional age in Germany experienced a boom in cultural expression. Little of this research is available to non-specialists. The aim of my book is to offer a synthesis in English; an introduction to recent German scholarship. I have based my work on monographs, published primary sources, and many case studies, buried in scattered German local historical journals. The scope of this study covers the years 1550 - 1750, although the dates should be under­ stood as approximate signposts of a fluid historical landscape rather than as fixed boundaries. Geographically, the book draws examples from all German-speaking areas of Central Europe, including Austria and Switzerland, although the main focus is on the heartland of the Holy Roman Empire. Several concepts employed in the book require explication. By “confessionalism,” I mean the