Hometown Religion: Conflict and Coexistence in the Formation of Religious Identities in Germany, 1580-1650.

FAIN: FT-54713-07

David Martin Luebke
University of Oregon (Eugene, OR 97403-5219)

How did Christians in sixteenth-century Europe turn into “Lutherans,” “Calvinists,” and “Catholics”? How did this transformation affect the way people lived and worked together in community? This study analyzes the changing relationship between religious and civic identities within the mid-sized towns of the diocese of Münster, in northwestern Germany, between 1580 and 1650, when the Counter-Reformation was introduced and pressure to conform in matters of doctrine and liturgy increased enormously. Focusing on evidence from the town of Warendorf, it examines patterns of conflict and coexistence between the Protestant and Catholic faithful as these municipalities struggled to maintain their civic autonomy.

Associated Products

Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (Book)
Title: Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia
Author: David M. Luebke
Abstract: The pluralization of Christian religion was the defining fact of cultural life in sixteenth-century Europe. Everywhere they took root, ideas of evangelical reform disturbed the unity of religious observance on which political community was founded. By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, one or another form of Christianity had emerged as dominant in most territories of the Holy Roman Empire.In Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia, David Luebke examines a territory that managed to escape that fate—the prince-bishopric of Münster, a sprawling ecclesiastical principality and the heart of an entire region in which no single form of Christianity dominated. In this confessional "no-man’s-land," a largely peaceable order took shape and survived well into the mid-seventeenth century, a unique situation, which raises several intriguing questions: How did Catholics and Protestants manage to share parishes for so long without religious violence? How did they hold together their communities in the face of religious pluralization? Luebke responds by examining the birth, maturation, old age, and death of a biconfessional "regime"—a system of laws, territorial agreements, customs, and tacit understandings that enabled Roman Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans as well as Calvinists, to cohabit the territory’s parishes for the better part of a century.
Year: 2016
Primary URL: http://www.upress.virginia.edu/title/4875
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Type: Single author monograph
ISBN: 9780813938400
Copy sent to NEH?: No

Confessions of the Dead: Interpreting Burial Practice in the Late Reformation (Article)
Title: Confessions of the Dead: Interpreting Burial Practice in the Late Reformation
Author: David Luebke
Abstract: The essay discusses Christian burial practices in the bishopric of Münster, Germany during the Protestant Reformation, specifically focusing on efforts undertaken by the area's Protestants to obtain churchyard burials in a city aligned with the Catholic Church. In this way, the relationship between Christian burial and Catholic understandings of the sacraments is explained.
Year: 2010
Primary URL: http://www.degruyter.com.libproxy.uoregon.edu/view/j/arg.2010.101.issue-1/arg.2010.101.1.55/arg.2010.101.1.55.xml?rskey=BtKlmn&result=1
Primary URL Description: De Gruyter Online Journals
Access Model: Subscription only
Format: Journal
Periodical Title: Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History
Publisher: De Gruyter

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