This book's fourteen chapters attempt to come to terms with writing about the German past during the “long nineteenth century,” although several within the collection focus extensively on early modern historiography as well. Most of the chapters appear to have been originally presented at German Studies Association meetings, and they are grouped into four themed categories: “Silencing Plurality,” “Recovering Plurality,” “Excavating Histories of Religion,” and “Remembering and Forgetting.” An introduction by Carina Johnson explains this categorization and establishes links between the studies, although as is often the case in a collection of essays that has its origins in conference papers, these connections can at times appear forced and arbitrary.

Taken as a whole, these studies offer a snapshot of how recent changes in writing about the Reformation are transforming our understanding of early modern religious change and the historiography treating those changes. During the past several decades, many scholars have explored the vital role historiography played in shaping Lutheran, Catholic, and Calvinist identities in the wake of the Schmalkaldic Wars and the implications that disputes about the history of the church had for the eventual development of the modern historical discipline. Anthony Grafton, in particular, has pointed to the ways in which competition between the confessions inspired the creation of great libraries and archives, historical projects like the Magdeburg Centuries and the Acta Sanctorum, and new methods of analysis that required documentary proof to support doctrinal claims.

The focus of many of the authors in the present collection, though, falls on somewhat different terrain. In her introduction, Johnson locates much of the commonality of the collection's contributions in their response to recent questioning of the confessionalization thesis as an explanation for religious and social change in early modern Germany. That thesis, which stressed the parallel efforts of Catholic and Protestant states to discipline behavior and control religious belief, has now been largely superseded by a deeper understanding of the limits of state power. During the last two decades, a number of scholars have demonstrated the inadequacies of the confessionalization paradigm; their work has stressed, by contrast, the vital role that local communities, compromise, and a certain kind of limited tolerance played in shaping early modern Christianity.

The essays in this volume respond to these shifts in interpretation and often reveal the negotiated nature of early modern religious settlements. This is above all a specialist's collection, and scholars will likely turn to it, not to take in all its riches, but to satisfy specific research demands. It is consequently unfortunate that a short review like this can only suggest some of the wealth of this collection. The contributions of Merry Wiesner-Hanks, Ralf-Peter Fuchs, and David Luebke, for instance, demonstrate the ways in which the presence and roles of women, Catholics, and liturgical innovators could be effaced in the historical record. Other studies, among them those by Richard Schaefer, Alexander Schunka, and Michael Printy, examine how the Christian religion's ongoing fractures—orthodox and pietist, Protestant and Catholic, Lutheran and Calvinist, rationalistic and fideistic—continued to resonate in German history writing from the early eighteenth to the twentieth century. Still other chapters in this book explore significant episodes in the history of the Reformation—Luther's 1520 burning of the papal bull (Natalie Krentz), the execution of the Reformation's first heretics (Robert Christman), Stephen Agricola's “miraculous” escape from prison (Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer), and the making of the Reformation's first Mennonites (Jesse Spohnholz)—and the changing interpretations given to these events over time. These scholars’ historiographical interventions show in detail the ways in which Reformation historians of the past attempted to justify, minimize, and reformulate exceptionalities to fit shifting religious demands and historical sensibilities.

In sum, these pieces make for sobering reading, particularly in our own age, which has now been pronounced an era of “post truth.” The scholarship here demonstrates yet again that the nineteenth-century's quest for objectivity with its Rankean aims of recovering a history “wie es eigentlich gewesen war” was chimeric in its execution. Here and there, though, glimmers of hope shine through otherwise bleak pages. For, as Michael Printy shows, eighteenth-century pietists could rehabilitate heretics like Michael Servetus, and in the end, as Tom Brady reminds in the volume's final chapter, religious pluralism triumphed.