Beat KÖ¼min, ed. Landgemeinde und Kirche im Zeitalter der Konfessionen. Zurich: Chronos Verlag, 2004. 205 pp. EUR 24.80 (paper), ISBN 978-3-0340-0677-4.

Reviewed by Marc Lerner (University of Mississippi)
Published on H-German (November, 2005)

Local Autonomy in Communal and Parish Life in Early Modern Europe

This collection of essays emphasizes ongoing research on the spiritual and secular autonomy of the early modern peasant in Europe, specifically the relationship between the political commune and the parish. The contributors claim to bring a previously underdeveloped comparative perspective to the study of European parish life and rural political communities during this period. Although the focus is on communal life in German-speaking Europe the project presents wider case studies of local communal life as well, perhaps to test Peter Blickle's conception of communalism in other contexts and in an attempt to comprehend developments in Europe as a whole. This agenda is in response to what the editor refers to as the increasing complexity of Reformation era research (p. 15). As historians continue to challenge an outdated all-encompassing explanation as well as the confessionalization paradigm, this volume offers suggestions for new research and demonstrates what type of research is possible through a comparative perspective focusing on rural communal and parish life. Landgemeinde und Kirche im Zeitalter der Konfessionen makes the case for the necessity of confronting the structure of parish and communal life in order to understand the religious and (implicitly) political life of early modern Europe. More explicitly, Randolph Head, in his contribution, asserts that it is necessary to focus on the agency of the peasant because the village inhabitants of the early modern period had a clear understanding of their religious, spiritual, and political needs and were able to act accordingly (p. 48). Kümin, Head, and the other contributors attempt to show a European-wide commonality on this matter across national, regional, linguistic, and confessional lines. It is the defense of this last claim that ties this collection to the recent H-German forum on confessionalization and its surrounding historiographical debates. As Marc Forster commented in the opening book review of that forum, the challenges to the confessionalization thesis from fields of study, represented in this volume as well, such as Alltagsgeschichte and local history have done much to expand our understanding of the period.[1]

The collection can best be understood as consisting of three parts. Following an extremely useful introduction, there are four contributions that deal with the core territory of German-speaking Europe, two with the relationship between Gemeinde and church (part 1) and two cultural historical contributions (part 2). The last two contributions (part 3) expand the field of inquiry to an examination of English parish life and surprisingly to Russia in a bold attempt to include Orthodox lands in the study of parish life and in mainstream European historiography.

In the introduction, editor Beat Kümin clearly discusses his agenda and plan for the collection. The volume concentrates on the members of rural society, the numerically dominant population group in early modern Europe (p. 15). In addition, he includes a historiographical section in which he lays out his goals to stimulate similar research that crosses historiographical periods and geographical boundaries as a way to bring new perspectives to the investigation of how local communal structures relate to European-wide developments. In response to what he perceives as a growing challenge to an all-encompassing view of the Reformation, Kümin claims that the contributors to Landgemeinde are able to identify at least one constant: the importance of understanding parish and communal life in order to clarify the religious life of Europe (p. 15). Instead of our understanding of the period as being limited to a series of clearly distinct case studies, Kümin recommends an emphasis on the parish and rural communal perspective as a step towards creating a new coherent overview.

Randolph C. Head's essay on communalism in the Republic of the Three Leagues, present-day Graubunden, is the first contribution in the main body of the book. Head's "'Nit alss zwo Gemeinden, oder Partheyen, sonder ein Gmeind': Kommunalismus zwischen den Konfessionen in Graubünden 1530-1620" follows upon the goals outlined in the introduction, which makes for an effective volume of collected essays. Head observes three phases of communal and confessional development during his chosen period of examination in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. He looks at the pre-1530 period, "the period of communalization, par excellence" (p. 22), the 1540-1600 period, during which communes, regardless of confession, fully supervised local church life, spiritually and financially, and finally the last phase beginning at the turn of the seventeenth century which saw a transformation from communal to confessional identity. This periodization shapes Head's argument that communal developments continue to play an important role post 1525. Even in phase three, he asserts that there is not a complete decay of communalism, but in fact a replacement of a secularly based "Gemeindebegriff" with a confessionally oriented sense of community belonging.

One important point that Head makes, which is relevant for the whole collection, is that even before the appearance of reformed theology in the villages under study, the communes were exercising influence over the church institutions. He therefore rejects a previously argued link between Protestantism and communalism. For Head, in terms of the mid-sixteenth century communal influence on clerical institutions there was hardly a distinction between nominal Catholics and Protestants. Head points to the example of the Bishop of Chur for whom both sides were characterized as schismatics or heretics (p. 48). Instead of a division of communities according to the professed religion, Head proposes a distinction between secular and religious conceptions of community. This move is part of the volume's expansion of the confessionalization paradigm as something more than an immediate process in the first and second quarter of the sixteenth century, and not necessarily based on intervention from a centralizing state.

Another key to Head's argument is that the communal structure must have influenced the way in which the religious transformation took place. He points to how religious minorities argued in Graubunden by using the language of communalism and the rhetoric of political freedom and sovereignty that one can find in the communes. Head's examination of how religious minorities were treated within several communes in the region suggests that more religious diversity existed in daily life than older research has supposed. Certainly this is not a claim of modern religious freedom, but Head's examples of physically shared churches and biconfessional communes suggests that the principle of the collective communal sovereign setting only a single religion for the community had more flexibility than once imagined. According to Head, this was because of a particularly communal use of the principle of majority decision-making by members of different communes in Graubunden. The political community allowed a variety of religious practice. This practice, however, did not emerge from the Protestant resistance theory notion that an individual has the right and duty to insure the salvation of one's own soul, rather both camps relied on communal rhetoric and submitted to the collective decision making of the commune. The Graubunden case demonstrates for Head that a communal structure could diminish the aspects of conflict in the confessional period because of a limited secular tolerance, a tolerance which emerged because of communal structures (p. 49). Peasants clearly contributed to building their own state and confession without the intervention of a wider state.

Ulman Weiß follows Head's contribution on Graubunden with his own study on the Erfurt region. There was certainly less autonomy in Erfurt and its hinterland than in Graubunden, but nonetheless there was a clear influence of the commune on the Church in spite of the existence of princely and magisterial reformations. Weiß in "Gemeinde und Kirche in der Erfurter landschafft" concentrates his study on a series of institutions and offices in both the Gemeinde and Church. Erfurt was in the eastern part of the diocese of Mainz and the archbishop had spiritual authority over the city. However, until 1664 the archbishop of Mainz did not have temporal power. The Thuringian Landgrafen, however, were not able to triumph completely over the city patriciate. Almost slipping through the cracks of overlapping jurisdictions, Erfurt acted as what Weiß described as a "quasi Imperial city," without ever taking the steps to become a free city (p. 59). Communal consensus exercised great influence spiritually and politically and could, in fact, limit the princely power. Weiß argues that the communal principle remained strong in the Erfurt region even after the so-called Reduktion in 1664. He goes so far as to credit the rural communes in particular as making the acceptance of the Reformation possible in the region. The administration, if not sovereignty, of the city and the surrounding hinterland administered by the city rested in the hands of a patriciate which had the power to set statutes and hire priests. However, as Weiß implies, the patriciate was in somewhat of a bind. If the city authorities could not guarantee Frieden und Freiheiten, then a ready-made threat to authority existed in the Thuringian authorities or the Church in Mainz. It was the balancing act between territory and city that allowed room for the communes to maneuver. This space allowed for the communal management of church organization and property. Thus, Weiß confirms for Erfurt the volume's claims that local autonomy existed to a large degree for spiritual and temporal matters.

The second section of the book consists of two contributions that come from different perspectives in terms of demonstrating the importance of research on communal life. The first is Walter Salmen's discussion of folk dance and the second, by Peter Hersche, is on the building of parish churches during the Baroque era. Both of these contributions also extend the chronological scope of the collection by raising points of discussion up into the mid-eighteenth century. Salmen uses the subject of dance as a way to back up his claims that the Reformation does not represent so much as a turning point in European history as it signifies a period of more intensive church and secular institutional influence on the daily lives of burghers and peasants. He looks at a highly developed festival culture across confessional lines. Even in the face of prohibitions (both in Reformed and Catholic territories), this festival culture and its accompanying dances proved to be a means of asserting local autonomy and strength.

Peter Hersche, on the other hand, looks at parish church building in the Swiss Confederation during the Baroque era, taking aim at art historians who only study great monumental works without an understanding of the entire age. Hersche seeks to explain the building boom in Catholic areas such as Luzern without a corresponding boom in Protestant areas such as Bern in spite of similar topographical, constitutional and demographic conditions. Unlike many of the other contributors, Hersche sees clear distinctions at the communal level between the actions of Protestant communes and Catholic ones and seeks to explain the reasons for what he terms as "striking differences in confessional mentalities" (p. 116). Although he argues that a deep gap exists in Europe between fundamentally different confessional cultures, Hersche does not attribute this difference solely to a Protestant or Catholic mentality. Instead, he argues that political and economic factors must be taken into account and attributes at least part of the difference in church building to the rate of proto-industrialization and corresponding demographic growth in the region (pp. 118, 120).

The third section of Landgemeinde und Kirche seeks to expand the study of communal life beyond the bounds of German-speaking Europe. Beat Kümin contests the notion of English history as a "special case" not worth comparing to the continent and Petr Stefanovitch brings in the case of Orthodox areas, European lands too often left by the wayside in the historiography of the period.

Kümin uses church wardens' accounts, which he argues offer a direct look into daily life of English parishes. The church wardens occupied an important community office that had the authority to put parish spending under a microscope and generated financial records. Thus Kümin, like other contributors, looks at the Church through its lay control. Through these sources Kümin argues for a continuity, especially in terms of daily life at the parish level, alongside the discontinuity of the official theology of the English Reformation. Although the decision to introduce a reformed faith in England lay outside the scope of parish authority and there was no communal Reformation on the German model, Kümin demonstrates that understanding parish life remains essential. It is at the parish level that one can see an "institutionalization from below" (p. 153) and villagers seeking a regulated and stable religious life. Through the church warden accounts Kümin sees a return to pre-Reformation income sources and even festival culture. He interprets the lack of local resistance to the new ecclesiology not as a capitulation but as a prioritization on local lay administration of both the parish religious and temporal world. Though there is not much of a worthwhile comparison between the English and the German Reformations at first glance, at a communal and parish level, similarities of local administration exist.

More surprisingly this general trend is also true of Russia. Petr Stefanovitch claims that the Russian parish can only be understood in terms of the European context. Clearly there is a difference in confession and social conditions from the German and English examples, but Stefanovitch argues that the fundamental principle of collective religious life carries over. Also in sixteenth and seventeenth century Russia the spiritual, temporal and political community (mir) existed on the basis of collective religious observance and ties between the world of the dead and that of the living (p. 182). These ties were accomplished through the institutionalized administration of church property, pressure on cloisters, collective decision making on church building and other such processes that this volume demonstrates existed in a comparable way in German-speaking and English-speaking Europe.

It is this comparative viewpoint that is the strength of the volume. Too often collected essays do not reflect the coherence of the editor's vision or introduction and although not all the essays stayed within the outlined message as well as others, the volume as a whole certainly benefits from the editorial follow-through. The worth of the volume for other specialists lays in the possibilities of new research directions rather than finished products that provide polished new answers to questions of Reformation historiography, communalism, and confessionalization.

Note

[1]. Marc R. Forster, H-German review of Stefan Ehrenpreis and Ute Lotz-Heumann, Reformation und konfessionelles Zeitalter, April 5, 2005.

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Citation: Marc Lerner. Review of KÖ¼min, Beat, ed., Landgemeinde und Kirche im Zeitalter der Konfessionen. H-German, H-Net Reviews. November, 2005.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=11233

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