The essays in this volume explore various aspects of religious plurality in early modern Germany and how that plurality was then interpreted, forgotten and remembered by historians over the centuries. The collection is as much about the writing of history as it is about the history of the Reformation itself. It is a product of the combination of two precepts that have guided much historical writing since the 1970s: that true objectivity in history writing is an impossibility and that much of the history of western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries needs to be explored in the context of the formation and maintenance of religious confessional identities, widely known as the phenomenon of ‘confessionalisation’.

The volume divides into three main parts, each of which contain four or five essays by different scholars. Part i, ‘Silencing Plurality’, provides examples of how in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of Germany's history of religious plurality was ignored or suppressed. The primary reason for these distortions was the need, in the post-Holy Roman Empire and post-Napoleonic era, to forge a unified cultural and national identity for a new German nation. With Prussia taking the lead that identity needed to be Protestant, and so the complexities and pluralities of the past were suppressed. Thus, Stan M. Landry demonstrates how the Reformation anniversary of 1817 was celebrated together by Catholics, Protestants and Jews, but argues that in order to for this to happen Martin Luther had to be presented as a pre-confessional, unifying figure, which required the suppression of memories of sectarianism and confessional strife. Part ii, ‘Recovering Plurality’, explores how eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century historians, heavily influenced by or reacting to the Enlightenment, ‘charted the truth of the confessions’ (p. 9) through vigorous research and writing. The editors view this period as one in which scholars acknowledged Germany's religious plurality but failed explicitly to endorse it. For instance, Richard Schaefer explicates a little-known aspect of confessionalism in the 1820s, when a group of Catholic writers attacked the reasoning and epistemology of leading philosophers like Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. By subjectivising reason and arguing for the absolute sovereignty of the individual, these Catholic authors claimed, Protestant philosophers divorced moral philosophy from ‘vital questions’ (p. 137) of salvation, human existence and religious belief. In making this argument, the Catholics were simultaneously condemning Protestantism and recognising Germany's biconfessionalism.

Most of the essays in these two sections are both persuasive and fascinating, but occasionally there are small weaknesses. Such is the case with David M. Luebke's analysis of nineteenth-century accounts of the village of Goldenstedt in lower Saxony. Goldenstedt was one of the last surviving examples of a village church with a ‘hybrid rite’, that is, a congregation of both Catholics and Protestants who shared not only a church building, but also a combined liturgy celebrated together on Sundays. In the years leading up to its final demise in 1850, German historians identified Goldenstedt as ‘unique’ and ‘radical’. Luebke argues that this is a primary example of nineteenth-century selective memory; Goldenstedt, in his view, was not unique or radical, because, in fact, numerous other hybrid churches existed in Germany. This argument is mostly convincing, except that by the end of the essay, it becomes clear that most of these other hybrid churches were formed in the sixteenth century and ceased to exist by the middle of the seventeenth century. Thus, Goldedstedt, while perhaps not unique, was indeed unusual in its hybridity because of how late the hybrid rite was put in place (early seventeenth century) and how long it lasted (mid-nineteenth century). With this realisation, Luebke's argument loses some of its punch.

Part iii, ‘Excavating Histories of Religion’, will be the most interesting for Reformation historians. Four essays demonstrate how both Lutheran and Reformed leaders consciously and unconsciously (often it is not clear which) falsified or distorted the recent past in order to solidify confessional identities. For example, Natalie Krentz's careful investigation into eyewitness accounts of Martin Luther's burning of the papal bull against him in 1520 shows that the burning of the bull was only a small part of a larger protest organised by Johann Agricola and Philip Melanchthon against books of canon law. Nevertheless, almost immediately, the role of Luther and his burning of the bull began to grow and become the focus of accounts of that day's events. Thus, Krentz asserts, late confessional historiography was ‘strongly predetermined already by the contemporaries and protagonists themselves’ (p. 221).

The single essay in the final section of the volume, ‘Remembering and Forgetting’, brings the collection full circle, back to the mid- and late nineteenth century and the ‘Kulturkampf’, in which Protestants seeking to promote a national identity for Germany launched fierce attacks on Catholics and Catholicism. The renowned scholar Thomas A. Brady Jr asserts a thesis that he has been building upon for years, which is that it was Germany's history and structure under the Holy Roman Empire, its ‘culture of biconfessionalism’, that prevented the realisation of a unified, Protestant, modern state in Germany and thus contributed to the outbreak of the world wars. It is a little hard to understand why Brady's contribution was not included in part i with the other essays about the nineteenth century, but perhaps it serves well as a coda. Similarly, the decision of the editors to go in reverse chronological order – starting with the nineteenth-century erasures of plurality and ending with the earlier, sixteenth-century beginnings of confessional history – is puzzling. The volume might have been more effective in chronological order and with more meta-analysis in the introduction or conclusion explaining why it was the eighteenth century that saw the most acceptance of religious plurality in Germany. Nevertheless, this is a thought-provoking volume that serves as an important reminder to all historians of just how flawed the historical record can be and how historical scholarship is almost always affected by the culture and politics of the time in which it is created.