Historians of religious belief and practice in the Habsburg teritories of early modern central Europe can find themselves – rather like the Habsburg rulers of the period – pulled in different directions. On the one hand is the impulse to attempt to integrate the Reformation experiences of the too-often overlooked Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian lands into the broader narrative of religious reform in early modern Europe as a whole. Not only are there areas suitable for fruitful comparison, such as the influence of court humanism on royal policy, or the decisive role of the nobility for the progress of local reform, but what happened in these territories was also of significance for Reformation Europe as a whole. The Turkish threat was felt particularly keenly by the rulers of the Habsburgs' eastern territories, resulting in concessions made to Protestants in the empire in return for military support. Protestantism thrived in significant sectors of the Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian territories in the early modern period, yet after the Thirty Years War the ruling Habsburgs managed to implement a level of reCatholicisation that would, by the eighteenth century, render their central European territories as bastions of Baroque Catholicism. As this volume's introductory essays from Holger T. Gräf, Heinrich Richard Schmidt and Robert Bireley suggest, however, these are also regions that do not easily fit into existing scholarly paradigms. Analysis of the development of state confessional control, for example, also needs to take into account the strength of influence of ‘foreign’ powers in the area, such as that of Habsburg Spain and the papal court. The supposed success of Counter-Reform needs to be tempered by recognition of the continued survival of pockets of Protestantism (the ‘Geheimprotestantismus’ of the title). And the heterogeneity of the whole area led to substantial regionalism of religious belief and practice. For historians of early modern religious belief and practice, then, the Habsburg territories of Austria, Hungary and Bohemia continue to demand very close attention in their own right, and the remainder of this thirty-essay volume, based closely on the proceedings of an international symposium held in Vienna in November 2004, acts as a showcase for some of the most recent work in this challenging yet important field.

Consciously interdisciplinary, Staatsmacht und Seelenheil employs a variety of approaches to the subject of Counter-Reformation, Catholic confessionalisation and the genesis of Catholic Baroque culture in the Austrian, Bohemian and Hungarian lands. There is certainly much scope for comparison with the rest of Europe here; the seven groupings of essays (communication; piety and ‘Wunderglaube’; religious mentalities; persecution and resistance; emigration; urban experiences; and regional case studies) beg comparison with parallels elsewhere. Yet the essays often also point to the distinctiveness of the area. In the section on ‘Comunication of the Counter-Reformation’, for example, we find not only contributions from Franz M. Eybl and the late István György Tóth on, respectively, the development, construction and reception of Counter-Reformation preaching, and on use of the image in Catholic propaganda, but there is also an enlightening essay by Alexander Koller on the development of the post-Tridentine papal nunciature, with its particular role in Habsburg affairs. The next section, on piety and belief in ‘wonders’, is comprised of four essays that are a microcosm of the variety of approaches employed by the contributors to this volume: a piece by Elizabeth Ducreux on pilgrimage practice in seventeenth-century Bohemia is based on a wide range of printed and manuscript material, including diaries, Jesuit Hausprotokolle and ‘Mirakelbücher’, while Irmgard Wirtz examines the relationship between Baroque Catholicism and stories of the supernatural published in contemporary encyclopedias and calendars. Elfriede Grabner's essay on the significance of the erection of the ‘Petrinerkreuz’ in eighteenth-century pulpits as a visual reminder of Catholic missionary activity combines the history of church art and architecture with that of religion, while Petr Mat'a describes his essay as a ‘microhistory of mass hysteria’. Based on a fascinating case from Pressburg in 1646–7, Mat'a's story concerns the hold that one Jesuit, Hieronymus Gladich, developed over a number of members of the court retinue of Ferdinand iii. Gladich's following developed as a result of his claim to be able to communicate with the souls of the dead, and in turn to advise their grieving relatives as to whether or not their loved ones were still suffering the flames of purgatory. The influence of Catholicism on religious mentalities also spills into the next section of the volume, with contributions from Thomas Winkelbauer on the Baroque confraternities of the Bohemian and Austrian lands, Rupert Klieber on the same in south German territories and Jörg Deventer on the subject of religious conversion.

A contrasting picture, however, emerges in the next two sections, when analyses of the persecution of Protestants, Protestant resistance and emigration, forced and otherwise, show a different face of the nature and success of Catholic reform. Rudolf Leeb's essay traces the origins of the ‘suffering disobedience’ of Protestants against Catholic authority in the early modern Austrian territories, while contributions by Alexander Schunka and Tomáš Knoz examine seventeenth-century patterns of Protestant emigration from the Habsburg lands. Stephan Steiner and Ute Küppers-Braun's contributions focus on the forced migrations of Austrian Protestants and the removal of their children in the eighteenth century, while the penultimate section, on the significance of the Counter-Reformation for the towns, includes a discussion of Catholicism in Vienna, 1580–1660, by Arthur Stögmann, and a particularly innovative approach to urban history by Andrea Pühringer who uses the civic building booms of the seventeenth century in Vienna, Krems, Linz, Steyr and Salzburg as a means of gauging the local status of the Catholic Reformation. Lastly, the volume contains a number of essays that offer regional studies as a point of comparison, including Eva Kowalská on Hungary, Josef Hrdlička on Bohemia, Joseph Patrouch on Upper Austria, Regina Pörtner on Inner Austria and Gustav Reingrabner on Lower Austria. It is a shame that this volume has no concluding essay to provide some reflections on the broader significance of the fresh and often innovative research it contains, for what is painted here is a picture of a complex pattern of Catholic reform, in some ways parallel to that seen elsewhere in Europe, but in other ways very much a product of local forces.