Michele Hanson's monograph examines the nature of religious identity in a religiously mixed community, namely the German city of Augsburg during the four decades following the start of the Reformation movement. In this setting, Hanson argues that we should see religious identity as fluid, multivalent, and complex rather than stable, simple and clear-cut. Hanson takes an unusual and creative approach to this question. Rather than examining sources that are explicitly religious in nature, she bases her claims on a close reading of forty years worth of interrogation records produced by functionaries of Augsburg's city councilors. In the course of carrying out its regular law-enforcement responsibilities, city officials routinely questioned suspects and witnesses in detail, and every interrogation session was transcribed by a city clerk. Hanson's research strategy, apparently, was to comb through mountains of these transcripts—she doesn't tell us exactly how much material there is—and to document and analyze every reference to religion or religious themes, even if tangential to the case at hand. Religious Identity in an Early Reformation Community represents a compact distillation of what must have been a massive undertaking indeed. In stories drawn from her archivalia, populated with a lively (and often funny) cast of characters, Hanson solidly demonstrates her central contention—that people in Augsburg in the first half of the sixteenth century did not think in terms of fixed religious identities (Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic, Anabaptist). Rather, they engaged in an ongoing process of constructing complex and nuanced identities for themselves, their families, and their neighbors. When they spoke about their own or others' religious lives, they tended to embed religious beliefs and practices in a landscape of other, often decidedly non-spiritual choices and affiliations.

In making her case, Hanson presents an impressively large cross-section of the official records. Her study includes evidence taken from perhaps fifty individual cases, some of which involved interrogations of many different people. These are ordinary folk, many of them women, who in most cases left behind no record of their existence other than these transcripts. In virtually every case, the voices of Hanson's subjects would otherwise have been lost to history. Early modern historians owe her a debt of gratitude for tackling this rich, but daunting trove of source material, for showing its vitality and research potential, and for doing so with such interest and originality. Despite some limitations in concept and execution, this work is a solid and valuable contribution to the field of early modern religious history.

What is perhaps most interesting in Hanson's work is the range of ways early modern people understood religious difference. In one notable episode, a Catholic man, a weaver named Hans Streler, came to the city council's attention in 1552 after making apparently seditious remarks while drunk in a tavern (156–61). Several suspicious guardsmen overheard him and subsequently turned him in. Streler's outburst had come after some friendly goading on the part of two drinking buddies, who had been teasing him about his political and religious loyalties. His friends were Protestants—which in itself is remarkable—and they regularly prodded him about his “papist” sympathies. The city council did not take the weaver's remarks so lightly, however, and after several rounds of interrogation, he was expelled permanently from the city. What is striking here, of course, is that we find Protestant and Catholics drinking and casually joking together about religion and politics in the first place—particularly in 1552, not a good year for inter-confessional relations in the Holy Roman Empire. Even more remarkable is the statement by one of Streler's drinking companions, called before council as a witness, who described Streler as “a good man but a big papist” (157). From this story, we learn that ordinary people were intimately familiar with religious difference, but that they were capable of treating it with humor and indulgence. Not only did Catholics and Protestants socialize together, they also saw no need to avoid talk of religion as potentially divisive or inflammatory.

One wonders how representative Streler's situation really was. How common or uncommon were such cross-confessional friendships? Certainly, not every Protestant in Augsburg at that time treated their “papist” neighbors and colleagues as good-naturedly as Streler's companions. Hanson documents cases where religious difference appears cheek-by-jowl with resentment, petty conflict, or open abuse. While some of Hanson's subjects may have seen fit to laugh about their differences, others took them very seriously. The carefully drawn case studies that make up the bulk of the book certainly provide a window into the repertoire of concepts and affinities out of which early modern Augsburgers built their religious identities. However, they also leave the reader wondering about the bigger picture. The book's usefulness for future historians would have been greater had Hanson included some basic statistics. How many individual interrogations generally took place per year during the period covered by the book, and out of those, how many involved religious themes? How many involved suspicions of Anabaptist sympathies, or anti-clerical incidents, or conflict between neighbors? What fraction of the interrogations examined in Hanson's research were included in the published monograph? Hanson's approach is strictly thematic, and accordingly, it is difficult to assess the overall significance of the cases she discusses.

One of the thorniest conceptual problems of Hanson's topic, and one that exposes a methodological pitfall of this kind of work, stems from her claim that well-defined, distinct “confessional” identities (that is, Lutheran, Catholic, and so forth) did not yet exist in the minds of the ordinary folk she studies, and that consequently to use such terms in describing their religious lives is anachronistic and misleading. Hanson presents this as a counterweight to the so-called “confessionalization thesis,” which holds that the Reformation was followed by the rapid hardening of confessional boundaries, usually with the support of territorial states. In support of her argument, she points out that individuals never use confessional language in describing their own views or sympathies (43). When questioned, someone might say that he or she liked to hear the sermons at, say, the Cathedral of Our Lady, but would not call him- or herself a Catholic (or use any other confessional designation). As Hanson puts it, people “did not express their religious commitments as being something (a Catholic, a Zwinglian, or an Anabaptist) but as doing something (going to Holy Cross, listening to Michael Keller)” (225). She makes this point clearly and convincingly. Surprisingly, however, she herself seems to be unable to avoid confessional categories completely. She regularly uses the words “Protestant” and “Catholic” to describe individuals and groups, speculating, for example, as to whether or not one party in an argument was a Catholic or not (71; see also 108–11, 125, 138, and elsewhere). Such usage almost implies that these categories exist in some absolute sense, independent of the people who employ them. In addition, as she shows, words like lutherisch (Lutheran) and gärtisch (a colloquialism for Anabaptist) formed a part of the religious vocabulary of Augsburgers (see 34–35, 40, and 51). However, they were used not descriptively but rather derogatorily, as an insult or as an allegation to be denied. This is an intriguing detail that suggests a more complicated picture than this study can give us. Hanson, in other words, has successfully shown that religious identities were fluid and complex during the period she examines; however, a precise analysis of those complexities, along with an appropriate conceptual vocabulary to describe them, awaits further development.