Over the last twenty years, studies of multi-confessional communities have become an innovative trend in Reformation history. So far, the majority of works on multi-confessionality have been carried out on a local scale, for good reason. The laser focus of micro-history allows for detailed, granular analysis of religious coexistence in a specific context that helps reveal the problematic assumptions behind sweeping paradigms such as the confessionalization thesis. What is still missing, however, are sustained attempts to study the phenomenon of multi-confessionality on the regional or supraregional level. David Luebke's new monograph Hometown Religion provides such a study by focusing on the mechanisms of religious coexistence in multiple, religiously diverse communities in the Westphalian prince-bishopric of Münster. By examining multiple cities side-by-side, Luebke's book opens up new avenues for understanding how patterns of religious coexistence operated in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Luebke examines multiple cities subject to the prince-bishop of Münster through the lens of what he calls “regimes of religious coexistence” (2), or the mechanisms by which communities tried to mitigate conflict between inhabitants of different religious confessions. Because of their smaller size, the internal dynamics of these cities forced inhabitants to confront issues of religious plurality on a frequent basis. As Luebke notes, most hometowns in Münster had only one parish, which made accommodation among inhabitants who adhered to different confessions essential to maintaining social order. Beyond this, Münster's local nobility were powerful. The strength of the nobility provided a major impediment to any type of territory-wide reform, Catholic or Protestant, while giving cover to local efforts at religious reform, so long as those undertakings did not attack the existing ecclesiastical power structure.
Within this environment, Luebke explores how Münster's inhabitants sought to minimize conflict while accommodating religious differences. Many individuals, including members of the local clergy, sought to create outward unity that could maintain the appearance of “ritual cohesion” while downplaying tensions caused by religious differences (50). The core of Luebke's argument revolves around how this concern caused parishioners to differentiate between different types of rituals: those that marked the life cycle, such as baptism and marriage, versus those that marked central confessional ideals, such as the Eucharist. Regarding the first category, which Luebke labels “rites of passage,” parishioners saw these rituals as serving important integrative functions into the community. Their willingness to have all children baptized by a Catholic priest, regardless of the confession of the parents, dovetailed with a desire on the part of parish priests to maintain the ritual unity of their community. This desire led many curates to make accommodations for Protestants by altering the manner in which they performed a specific ceremony. While attitudes hardened during the first decades of the seventeenth century, Luebke emphasizes that, for generations, such efforts at “compromise and accommodation” remained the modus vivendi of Westphalian life (73).
In the case of the Eucharist, however, theological differences proved harder to overcome, even as some skillful local priests found ways to dissimulate in the distribution of communion in order to keep all members of the community worshipping in the same church. They accomplished this feat by adjusting the liturgy of the host in ways that nodded to evangelical concerns, such as offering communion in both kinds, while maintaining the Catholic core of the ritual. These arrangements often survived until central authorities in the prince-bishopric attacked them as too heterodox. The same process occurred for practices of spatial accommodation, such as creating different spaces within the same church for Lutheran and Catholic worship. Luebke argues that these arrangements tended not to provoke conflict in local communities until central authorities questioned them. Even then, such accommodations were slow to break down, as they served the purpose of creating a socially cohesive entity out of religious plurality. Accordingly, Luebke highlights key tensions between central and local authorities that account for the persistence of multi-confessional communities within an ostensibly Catholic state.
A good case study of how these issues played out comes in Luebke's analysis of burial practices. While Catholic diocesan officials increasingly sought to bar any non-Catholic from receiving burial in consecrated churchyards, Protestants continued to agitate for inclusion in communal graveyards. Burial outside the parish churchyard carried connotations of dishonor that many Protestants saw as anathema to their status as upright citizens. For civic officials, moreover, the Protestants’ right to churchyard burial sat at the heart of the Peace of Augsburg's bi-confessional regime. The persistence of Protestant burials in Catholic churchyards into the seventeenth century, despite the lack of a clear theological justification for burial in consecrated ground, points to one of Luebke's main arguments: that coexistence's success rested on a sense that certain religious actions were fundamental to the larger social cohesion of the community.
Ultimately, Luebke argues that Münster's regime of religious coexistence broke down during the Thirty Years War, as confessional identities hardened. It remains an open question, therefore, how much Luebke's findings undermine the larger narrative of confessionalization, especially as it applies to the second half of the seventeenth century. What Luebke's book does show, however, is that religious plurality at the local and even regional level was the rule, rather than the exception, before the Thirty Years War. This insight, shown here on the territorial level rather than restricted to one specific locale, therefore makes a major contribution to our understanding of how communities and individuals dealt with the religious aftershocks unleashed by the Reformation. Luebke's superb study reveals in great detail how many people sought to hold on to the unity of their communities in the face of potentially divisive religious plurality.
