Andreas Holzem’s magnum opus – Christianity in Germany 1550–1850 – represents a stunning achievement, the fruit of “thirty years of research” (4) by one of the most respected historians of modern German Christianity.

The subheading indicates the book’s general orientation: it offers a layered recapitulation of the longstanding debate about how to understand confessionalism’s role in determining the course of not just in early modern Germany but of the nineteenth century (notoriously dubbed by Olaf Blaschke as the “second confessional era”) as well. Holzem opens the first volume by proposing confessionalization as a matrix to understand the emergence from pre-modern to modern forms of life in Germany. Through these turbid historiographical waters, Holzem maintains a steady hand, consistently able to convey a range of interpretations and narratives while also offering a compelling conclusions. With regards to confessionalization, Holzem underscores the variety within late-medieval devotional culture and explains how early modern confessional cultures – divided primarily between Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran confessions – shaped the self-understanding of individuals and the social discipline of communities (17).

The consequences of the setting for German church historiography are not lost on Holzem. Confessionalization meant, among other things, split faculties of Protestant and Catholic theology, resulting in the tendency to write Church history confessionally. A member of the Catholic faculty in Tübingen, Holzem does his best to avoid the tendencies that follow therefrom. His handling of the sixteenth century does not betray a Catholic slant and foretells the sympathy with which Holzem treats his leading subjects. He concludes one chapter by noting that the difference in confessional outcomes was not the given confession, but instead “the category of space” (153). Different levels of prosperity or external piety, in other words, could only partially be explained by doctrines of justification or predestination.

Through the book, Holzem often sets the stage for a subject by bringing to life an event from a particular village or city. He achieves particular success on this front in his section on witch hunts, where he begins by recounting the torture of Barbara Kurzhalsin for witchery and fornication with the devil (687ff). This widow came to the attention of the Reichertshofen citizenry because none of her seven children survived infancy. Through the process of her “examination,” she came to confess a range of sins, including her visit to the witches’ sabbath. Following his riveting section on the Thirty Years’ War, the details of the witch craze bring to life the brutality in the German realm during early modernity. Here, like so much of the first volume, Holzem brings into relief the distinct nature of early modernity by showing its medieval roots. In the case of witch hunting, after dispelling a number of myths – the practice was as much a popular outburst as means of authoritarian control, no more likely in Catholic areas than in Protestant ones – Holzem’s study leads the reader to see witch hunts not so much as the last gasps of a dark medieval age, but instead as portending a number of modern horrors.

Another masterclass of historical writing occurs in Holzem’s treatment of the secularization of the Holy Roman Empire (987ff.). He helpfully distinguishes between the secularization of authority and assets. Especially for readers with Catholic sympathies, it is easy to interpret such events as catastrophic, and correspondingly to attribute the most pernicious motives to those who carried it out. Yet Holzem patiently takes the reader through the various legal, political, and religious forces that both dissolved the thousand-year “empire” and imagined what would replace it. Although the Catholic Church lost an astounding number of assets, including 340 abbeys, Holzem dispels the “robbery theory,” wherein these lands were simply stolen as part and parcel of both the modern turn against strong religion and of Protestant power politics (985–987). On the other hand, Holzem pushes back against the narrative that the Empire was, economically speaking, a rotting corpse, one that expired of old age more than from a violent blow. The general effect of his judicious overview is to temper rather than enflame the reader’s reaction to any number of controversial and epochal events, from the fallout of the Reformation all the way through the events leading to the 1848 revolution.

Although Holzem’s magnum opus ends twenty years prior to the First Vatican Council, that event looms large in the background of the final sections of the book, as it constituted, especially through the decree of papal infallibility, a severe blow to German Catholicism. Both German Protestants and German Catholics, on the whole, shared a mutual disregard for those Ultramontane forces that gave quarter to a doctrine that both alienated Catholics from the general German cultural mood and oriented, ever so obliquely, a significant part of the populus toward an authoritarianism that would engulf Germany in the century to come. Nevertheless, Holzem’s effort to understand the central figures in Ultramontanism results in a revealing portrait of the political forces that made the surprising emergence of “social Catholicism” possible, and why Ultramontane arguments proved more persuasive to the average Catholic than the appeals of Enlightenment Catholicism (1132–1175; 1211–1222).

One should also say something about the volume itself. The translation reads well, although occasionally technical terms like Vormärz, referring to the decades before the 1848 Revolution, are translated literally “pre-March” when no English equivalent exists (998). Such quibbles aside, the translation represents itself a real achievement. The actual book ends with a bibliography nearly two hundred pages long (1379–1573), divided by chapter. While this division makes finding full references easier (the footnotes use abbreviated bibliographic information), it becomes cumbersome when reading the first volume, since the entire bibliographic sections are at the end of the second. In this light, it is better to think of the work as one book in two parts rather than as two separate volumes.

Lest there be any doubt, this book constitutes essential reading for anyone with a vested interest in modern German Christianity. Although the length may be daunting, the rewards are bountiful and will serve as a valued resource for decades to come.