This volume conceives of princely courts as hubs of religious plurality and spaces of interconfessional interaction. According to the editors, this aspect of princely courts has been ‘woefully neglected’ due to two interconnected historiographical developments. First of all, in the top-down approach of the confessionalisation paradigm, rulers were regarded as the drivers of confessional uniformity. Secondly, the ‘interdisciplinary myth’ that the Peace of Westphalia initiated a system comprising modern states – a myth to which the confessionalisation paradigm subscribed – downgraded the continuing importance of confessional religion among ruling dynasties after the Thirty Years’ War. As a result, the notion of princely courts as centres of interconfessional mingling both before and after 1648 simply did not fit the dominant interpretative framework. In an attempt to overcome this historiographical lacuna, this volume seeks to examine religious diversity at various princely courts in central Europe, largely in the early modern period (save for one exception). Nine chapters, divided in four parts, are devoted to this central topic. The last part, ‘Concluding Remarks’, consists of a comparative chapter in which European (marriage) patterns are studied in a global context, as well as a short conclusion written by the editors.

The first two chapters, respectively by Benjamin Marschke and Alexander Schunka, deal with one of the reasons for the existence of mixed-confessional princely courts: biconfessional marriage strategies. After studying several marriage contracts pertaining to scions of the House of Hohenzollern in the eighteenth century, Marschke comes to the conclusion that ‘marrying across confessional lines and confessional plurality at court became less and less of an issue’ (p. 17). These mixed marriages were largely the result of a classic trade-off for members of the (high) nobility when facing a lack of suitable spouses, namely religious or social-economic exogamy (i.e. marrying someone of different religion or social-economic status). In the case of the Calvinist members of the Hohenzollern dynasty, they opted for the former and married Lutherans hailing from other royal and noble families. Marschke points out that while the differences between Lutherans and Calvinists at the Prussian court diminished over time and mixed marriages between them became a ‘nonissue’ (p. 26), at the same time the boundary between Protestantism and Catholicism became more accentuated.

Interestingly, Schunka arrives at a partly different conclusion after examining several mixed marriages in the Holy Roman Empire in the ‘long eighteenth century’. According to him, Protestant irenicism, dynastic interests and the fact that ‘religion had increasingly become subject to political considerations’ (p. 51) spurred mixed unions between members of the various Protestant confessions but with Catholics as well. In line with Schunka, Jonathan Spangler, in his chapter on the changing attitudes toward conversion in the context of French royal marriages in the seventeenth century, concludes that ‘an attitude of realpolitik had crept in when it came to religious affairs’ (p. 127). Both historians rightly maintain that religion continued to be important for royal and princely dynasties, yet point out that the primacy of politics gradually was restored at the expense of confessional considerations. However, the partly contrasting conclusions of Marschke on the one hand, and Schunka and Spangler on the other, reveal that for some lineages particular religious boundaries retained their importance: why this was the case remains an interesting question to pursue.

The volume’s second part addresses another reason for the introduction of religious differences at princely courts: conversion. Conversions could present a host of challenges – among other things, they could undermine the religious identity a dynasty had carefully cultivated over the years. Dynasties, however, could resort to various means to manage their public relations, including printed publications and a range of material objects. Among other objects, Ines Peper and Marion Romberg use a set of coins to show how the conversion of Elisabeth Christine of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel was framed so as to ‘protect the participants’ public reputations’ and come to the conclusion that ‘omission was key to preserving both dynasties’ representational needs (p. 77). Sara Smart takes us back to the first half of the seventeenth century when confessional tensions, including those between Calvinists and Lutherans, were very much alive and caused frictions in high noble and royal families alike. Among other things, she shows the limits of the control dynasties enjoyed over their own public reputation as outsiders happily commented on and criticised the actions of their members. After the death of Anna of Prussia in 1625, for instance, two funeral sermons painted different pictures of the deceased princess and her conversion.

The chapters by Tryntje Helfferich and David Luebke form the volume’s third part, ‘Religious Plurality at Courts’. The former focuses on Moritz of Hessen-Kassel (1572–1632), who subjected his territories to a top-down programme of religious change in an attempt to supplant Lutheranism with Reformed Protestantism, the confession to which he had converted. While in this perspective Moritz can be (and has been) regarded as a proponent of the Second Reformation and a prime example of the confessionalisation paradigm, the ‘multiconfessional artistic and intellectual atmosphere’ that Moritz and his wife Juliane of Nassau-Siegen cultivated at their court runs contrary to this image. Clearly confessional commitment in one context did not rule out more permissive attitudes and behaviour in another. Luebke, on the other hand, focuses on a specific type of court, namely those of ecclesiastical principalities. These were, to use his term, ‘aristocratic republics’ dominated by regional noble families whose sons clung to prebends and the lucrative stream of income they provided. This gave noble families the impetus to maintain this institutional structure, in particular when it transpired that adhering to Lutheranism did not necessarily lead to the loss of a prebend. What resulted was a ‘nominally Catholic but confessionally ambiguous church structure’ that would survive until the eve of the Thirty Years’ War, when a programme of Catholic reform rendered the survival of this peculiar mix of institutional conservatism and confessional ambiguity untenable.

In the fourth and last part of the volume, ‘Religious Plurality beyond the Court’, Daniel Riches examines the marriage of Johann iii of Sweden and Katarina Jagellonica, arguing that this mixed marriage actually provided the former with the means to pursue his dynastic and religious ambitions. Samuel Keeley studies the activities and ideas of Christian Carl Josias Bunsen (d. 1860), a Prussian courtier and diplomat who cultivated close ties with the British and Prussian royal families and who advocated a limited form of religious toleration and ‘pan-Protestant harmony’ (p. 207). Bunsen’s views did not go unchallenged, however, and the court of the Prussian king Friedrich Wilhem iv became the setting for the clash between factions with different notions about religious toleration and the nature of the Protestant Church in Prussia.

The editors’ conclusion is preceded by a short comparative chapter written by Jeroen Duindam in which he emphasises the fact that that the monogamous dynastic marriages that became the dominant patterns in Europe were not replicated in other parts of the early modern world, where polygamy ruled large. In these parts of the world, Duindam notes, ‘no religious diverse pool of isogamous international marriage partners emerged that would give rise to negotiations about conversion or the acceptance of religious diversity’ (p. 235). In the conclusion, the editors stress that the volume’s findings should be seen as generative rather than conclusive and indicate various topics that invite further research, including the importance of dynastic marriages and the role of women at princely courts, the significance of various forms of mobility and the challenges confessionally mixed courts present to the interpretations prompted by the confessionalisation paradigm.

In addition to the further avenues of research highlighted by the editors, another worthwhile topic could be the influence exerted by mixed-confessional courts. Should we see them as relatively tolerant and permissive safe havens amidst a sea of confessional conservatism and did the interconfessional intermingling stop at the castle’s gate or palace door, or did their influence radiate more widely? In order to enhance our understanding of this particular aspect of mixed-confessional princely courts, there is the need to embed them more fully in their wider political, religious and economic contexts. Moreover, did princes, courtiers and even clergymen who spent periods of time at such mixed-confessional courts also bring more tolerant attitudes home, leading to a network of courts that were religiously plural to some extent? Lastly, the court ordinances issued by Juliane of Nassau-Siegen suggest that those residing at multi-confessional courts were sometimes subjected to policies of confessional conformity, which raises the question about the contexts, settings and spaces at such courts in which religious diversity was and was not expressed and encountered. These and other questions that arise when reading the rich contributions to this stimulating volume show that it is likely to succeed in its aim to foster new research on mixed confessional courts.