The failure of Fribourg (Freiburg im Üchtland) to adopt the Reformation has long been a puzzle. A project supported by the Swiss national research fund in 2010 to investigate the city and its territory in the first half of the sixteenth century was suspended on the untimely death of one of its scholars, Katharina Simon-Muscheid. In 2012 the project was revived and entrusted to Rita Binz-Wohlhauser, whose results have now appeared. Meticulous archival research coupled with a critical reading of previous accounts has produced a study which is all the more compelling because it eschews gaudy reinterpretations and does not seek to pull rabbits out of hats. Binz-Wohlhauser's main achievement is to distinguish between the city council's public stance and legislation, on the one hand, and its actual practice, on the other. She is able to demonstrate that Fribourg's early commitment to Catholic orthodoxy was less than it appeared: throughout the 1520s the council was content to be guided by the debates in the Confederal diet. A true profession de foi was only promulgated in 1527, barely a year before Bern's decision to adopt the Reformation. Although it contained harsh provisions against ‘heretics’, prosecutions led in most cases to fines or banishment, rather than imprisonment or execution. This should be seen as prudence – a desire to forestall unrest – and not as a precocious sign of toleration.

Insofar as there was enthusiasm for the new doctrines, Binz-Wohlhauser gives short shrift to the notion of a humanist circle in the city (by contrast, in those Swiss cities which went Protestant humanists were invariably in the van), though had its most famous exponent, Peter Falck, not died on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem in 1519 things might have been different. She identifies some support amongst the lower secular clergy and some artisans, but no outstanding evangelical preacher was allowed to stir up the population. The council's chief difficulty was how to deal with the so-called ‘common lordships’ (gemeine Herrschaften) which Fribourg administered jointly with Bern. A mandate in 1532 followed the terms of the Second Peace of Kappel, whereby their inhabitants were given a free vote, the majority to prevail. But was such a decision reversible? Who was eligible to vote? And could a vote be repeated? In the largest common lordship, Grasburg, which the two cities had ruled since 1423, Fribourg was at a disadvantage since Bern retained rights of appellate jurisdiction and accordingly refused to recognise the vote there in favour of upholding Catholic rites. In the smaller lordships, Murten (Morat), Orbe-Échallens and Grandson, the administration alternated, so that there was much wrangling over confessional allegiance, with Fribourg being pushed increasingly onto the defensive.

Binz-Wohlhauser is at pains to stress that the policies of the Fribourg council were shaped by territorial ambitions as well as Catholic loyalty. That is why the city was prepared to acquiesce in Bern's annexation of the Vaud in 1536, for both Fribourg and the Valais communes profited hugely by themselves occupying chunks of the Vaud, albeit that the former was thwarted in securing an outlet on Lake Geneva thanks to Bern's double-crossing or overt political divisions between council and army (depending on one's point of view). In truth, Fribourg's room for manoeuvre was restricted. Bern was by far the more powerful partner; it is not irrelevant that Fribourg had only become (a not quite) full member of the Confederation in 1481, having been under Austrian and then Savoyard rule until granted the status of an imperial free city in 1477, whereas Bern was an imperial free city of long standing. Moreover, Fribourg was geographically too exposed to seek refuge in the arms of the (germanophone) Catholic Inner Swiss cantons, whose interest in the francophone Romandie was in any case limited. Instead, Fribourg chose to act as a mediator wherever possible. Catholicism became the badge of Fribourg's political identity and independence vis-à-vis Bern (and much the same is true of lowly Solothurn).

The author lays emphasis on Fribourg's well-attested economic decline towards the close of the fifteenth century, which may have deterred the council from embarking on a religious change of direction which contained political risks. In fact, by the end of her chosen period, Fribourg's fortunes had greatly improved as a result of mercenary service and French pensions – so much so that the city made overtures to acquire Neuchâtel and secure it as a western outpost of Catholicism. Bern hastened to stamp on this impudence.