Hometown Religion

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Synopsis

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.In revealing how these towns were able to preserve peace and unity--in

the Age of Religious Wars-- Hometown Religion attests to the power of

toleration in the conduct of everyday life.

प्रतिलिपि अधिकार:: 2016 the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia