Veronika Albrecht-Birkner. Reformation des Lebens: Die Reformen Herzog Ernsts des Frommen von Sachsen-Gotha und ihre Auswirkungen auf FrÖ¶mmigkeit, Schule und Alltag im lÖ¤ndlichen Raum (1640-1675). Leipzig: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 2002. 603 pp. EUR 64.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-3-374-01919-9.

Reviewed by Mary Venables (Cork, Ireland)
Published on H-German (February, 2005)

Veronika Albrecht-Birkner's Reformation des Lebens addresses a question that has probably exercised few Anglo-American historians: does Herzog Ernst der Fromme of Saxe-Gotha-Altenburg (1601-1675) merit the adulations he has garnered over the past three hundred years? The non-German reader, however, should shy away from the book simply because they have not heard of Albrecht-Birkner's main figure. Once a few hurdles of Thuringian and Ernestine (by this time non-electoral) Saxon history are overcome, the book opens up a goldmine of information on the long-term course of the Lutheran Reformation and the effects of the Thirty Years' War.

The Herzog Ernst at the center of Albrecht-Birkner's research was the ninth son of Duke Johann of Saxe-Weimar. In 1640, Ernst and his two surviving brothers divided their territory into Saxe-Weimar, Saxe-Eisenach, and Saxe-Gotha. Ernst received the Gotha portion and resided in Gotha until his death in 1675. Following the cataclysmic destruction of the Thirty Years' War, Ernst had embraced what he considered a God-given responsibility to model his territory and its subjects along evangelical lines. To save his people from their present suffering and his sense of impending judgment, he introduced religious and social reforms, including a regular cycle of visitations, mandatory primary schooling for children, compulsory catechismal instruction for adults, and social ordinances affecting all areas of life. In exercising his temporal office, Ernst sought not just to regulate the externalities of his subjects' lives, but also to encourage renewed Christian faith in them. To the extent that he is known outside of Germany, it is usually in connection with Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff's Teutscher Fürsten Staat (1656), which was loosely based on Ernst's reign, or with August Hermann Francke's school in Halle, which may have been modeled on Ernst's educational reforms.

The assumption that the reader is familiar with Ernst makes it clear that Albrecht-Birkner is dealing with a figure who has an assured place in Protestant German historiography. For three centuries German Lutherans have heralded Ernst as the model of a Christian prince, a supporter of Christian schools, a founder of absolutism, and an anticipator of pietism. Rather than repeating honorific phrases, Albrecht-Birkner starts afresh and asks what Ernst was trying to accomplish and whether he succeeded. On the question of what Ernst tried to accomplish, Albrecht-Birkner mostly agrees with her historical predecessors.[1] In accordance with the standard accounts on Ernst, she finds that he aimed to introduce a Reformation des Lebens that would complete Luther's theological reforms. On the question of success, Albrecht-Birkner's views diverge from previous accounts, leading her to question whether Ernst's reforms had much effect on his subjects.

To assess the impact of Ernst's attempted Reformation des Lebens, Albrecht-Birkner examined church visitations records to see whether the received picture of Ernst as the instigator of lay education and popular renewal corresponded with what could be found in visitation reports. Her research is concentrated on three local studies and selected topical questions. For the section on the three villages (Fröttstadt, Mühlberg, and Molschleben), she collected all extant sources from the first twelve years of Ernst's reign. Although she steers clear of generalizing, trends can be seen: population levels, literacy rates, and school attendance all increased over the 1640s. More complete records from Fröttstadt allow Albrecht-Birkner to trace rising economic self-sufficiency characterized by greater ownership of fields and horses.

Since some of the sources are incomplete, the reader gains a series of snapshots into village life rather than a cohesive history of each village. Albrecht-Birkner's snapshots reveal her skill at interpreting visitation records. For example, she surmises that a parish register (a Seelenregister, the first item requested in the visitation ordinance) often represented the pastor's idealized version of the village rather than the village's actual physical condition. In Fröttstadt, a small town of seventy, the pastor reported that two women and nine children kept themselves through begging. Albrecht-Birkner posits that a small village like Fröttstadt could not support eleven beggars and suggests that the women and children had either just become beggars and would soon leave the village or they had left the village a while ago, but the pastor strove to keep the village whole on paper (pp. 132-135).

In her section on topical questions, Albrecht-Birkner demonstrates the usefulness of visitation records. From the church registers, she calculates that Christmas was the most popular time to receive communion. She also offers nuggets on the hymns and songs used in church services, the curriculum ordered for the schools, and sermons preached in the territory. Albrecht-Birkner's painstaking work opens the Gotha archives for future scholars, no small thing for an archive whose main finding aid was published in 1960.[2] It is easy to imagine that a historian working, say, on preaching in the years following the Thirty Years' War might take Albrecht-Birkner's inventory of sample sermons submitted to the consistory as a starting point for reading unpublished sermons.

Looking at the visitation records as a whole, Albrecht-Birkner concludes that while school attendance and literacy levels rose, the main goal of Ernst's reforms, to transform all of society into a Christian community, remained unfulfilled. She reports that Ernst's subjects never learned much of Luther's Small Catechism, which in Ernst's reasoning meant that they lacked a moral compass and could not lead Christian lives. Visitation reports of drunkenness, quarrelling, truancy, and blasphemy demonstrated to Ernst (and Albrecht-Birkner) that his subjects did not have a theologically advanced understanding of Christianity and did not order their lives by its precepts. In this regard, Albrecht-Birkner's conclusions for Gotha in the seventeenth century parallel what Gerald Strauss argued for other Protestant territories in the late sixteenth century--it was one thing for leading Lutherans to announce systematic reform, but quite another to plant great theological understanding among the local populace.[3]

Albrecht-Birkner's book is a solid study of Ernst and his reign, but its tight focus on visitation records is at once its greatest strength and its greatest shortcoming. In order to appreciate the strengths of the book and what Albrecht-Birkner does with the visitation records, the reader needs to read Albrecht-Birkner after having encountered Ernst elsewhere.[4] In addition, Albrecht-Birkner spends so much time on visitation records that she only cursorily covers intriguing questions on pietism and confessionalization that she raises at the beginning of the book. In the very last pages, she returns to the history of pietism and concludes that Ernst cannot be classified an early pietist because he expected the world to end any day (in contrast to early pietists who looked for better times ahead). The question of confessionalization remains mostly undiscussed.

Albrecht-Birkner's reliance on visitation questions also points to a more serious methodological trouble spot that many historians of early modern Europe face, namely how best to use visitation records. Albrecht-Birkner states that visitation records serve a double purpose On the one hand, they open up the "Intentionen des Herzogs beispielhaft," on the other they grant "einen umfassenden Einblick in das kirchliche und alltägliche Leben der Bevölkerung" (p. 75). Without denying the great potential visitation records hold for examining everyday life, it seems that it is particularly in this area that historians need to be cautious. Armed with works by Susan Karant-Nunn and James Goodale, the researcher is well prepared to examine visitation records and see whether there might be causes besides great ignorance or moral depravity that prevented subjects from giving the desired answers.[5] Albrecht-Birkner does offer an insightful reading of a compendium of lay shortcomings (Flores responsum), pointing to a number of possible reasons for "incorrect" answers (pp. 370-372), but for the most part, she uncritically accepts visitation answers. Visitors recorded that subjects did not know their catechism, therefore the Reformation des Lebens must have failed. Albrecht-Birkner leaves the difficulty of measuring attempts to "Christianize" a population unexplored. Perhaps it is simply not possible to assess the extent of a territory's Christianity by whether or not people know the catechism. Perhaps success or failure is a misleading verdict. In this case, relying on visitation records means that Albrecht-Birkner also relies on the interpretative framework of those who set the visitation questions. It remains for other historians to sort out whether it is possible to use visitation records without adopting the mindset of the visitor.

Albrecht-Birkner's intense work with visitation records from Saxe-Gotha should inspire early modernists. With her study of Saxe-Gotha's visitation records, she provides a glimpse into mid-seventeenth-century Lutheranism and territorial administration in a land recovering from the Thirty Years' War. Now the task is set for other historians to compile comparable studies from visitation records located elsewhere. Still others will inherit the job of tying territorial histories together in a composite "German" history of the seventeenth century.

Notes

[1]. The standard nineteenth-century works on Ernst are August Beck, Ernst der Fromme, Herzog zu Sachsen-Gotha und Altenburg: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des siebenzehnten Jahrhunderts (Weimar: Hermann Böhlau, 1865); and Johann Heinrich Gelbke, Herzog Ernst der Erste genannt der Fromme zu Gotha als Mensch und Regent (Gotha: Justus Perrthes, 1810).

[2]. Ulrich Hess, Übersicht über die Bestände des Landesarchivs Gotha (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1960).

[3]. Gerald Strauss, Luther's House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).

[4]. A good starting point is Detlef Ignasiak, Ernst der Fromme, Herzog von Sachsen-Gotha: Ein Zeit- und Lebensbild (Bucha bei Jena: quartus-Verlag, 2001).

[5]. Among their publications, see Susan C. Karant-Nunn, "Neoclericalism and Anticlericalism in Saxony, 1555-1675," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 24 (1994): pp. 615-637; and James A. Goodale, Rethinking the Rural Reformation: New Strategies for Reading the Saxon Visitation Transcripts (Ph.D. diss., University of California-Los Angeles, 1995).

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Citation: Mary Venables. Review of Albrecht-Birkner, Veronika, Reformation des Lebens: Die Reformen Herzog Ernsts des Frommen von Sachsen-Gotha und ihre Auswirkungen auf FrÖ¶mmigkeit, Schule und Alltag im lÖ¤ndlichen Raum (1640-1675). H-German, H-Net Reviews. February, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10237

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