This volume of collected essays is the product of two conferences—at the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota and the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at the University of Alberta—on religion and authority in early modern central Europe. In recent decades, this problem has been examined primarily from the standpoint of the state, with a corresponding emphasis on rulers' claims to regulate the religious lives of their subjects and on the divisions between faiths. The concept of “confessionalization” and the large body of valuable scholarly work arising from it is the best-known result of this line of inquiry. This volume takes a refreshingly different approach, however, by shifting the focus from the top down to the view from below: how did widely divergent social and religious groups come to terms with the variety of confessions and the pressure to choose? This recalls the recent sea change in our understanding of early modern “absolutism” as scholarly attention turned to the question of how the norms and directives flowing from the chancelleries of government were actually implemented (or not) in remote urban areas and in the countryside. The situation on the ground could differ remarkably from what policy makers and central administrators assumed or desired. As many of the contributions in this volume convincingly show, sharp doctrinal differences might lose their edge and religious practice become more fluid as the distance to the locus of power or the church hierarchy increased. The paradoxical fluidity of religious self-understanding in the Age of Religion furthermore complicates the historian's task of establishing confessional identity, sometimes even of leading members of society.

With its fractured political landscape and great variety of creeds, early modern central Europe offers an ideal laboratory for exploring how religious difference was negotiated. The twelve essays in this volume stake out a remarkably large part of the area, from Strasbourg in the west to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the east, and from small-town Westphalia in the northwest to the valleys of the Austrian duchies in the southeast. By thus opening up comparative perspectives, the volume overcomes the still often narrow boundaries of national historiography, though most of the contributions do not themselves transcend them.

The anachronistic appellation “empire of the German nation” (p. 73) to refer to the Holy Roman Empire indeed evidences the revival of national perspectives on early modern Germany. In his look at the higher nobility of Bohemia, Petr Mat'a notes that for much of the sixteenth century the “ideal of clear divides, so much wished for by the church leaders, was more notional than real” (p. 21). Even after the Habsburgs had turned up the heat, the kingdom's complex religious history and the ambiguous confessional identities thereby engendered remained apparent in the literature confiscated from dissenters nearly two centuries later. In contrast, as Regina Pörtner shows, the high literacy among crypto-Protestants in the Alpine valleys of the neighboring Austrian lands “supported a tradition of religious beliefs that might be described as orthodox Lutheran with a strong regional flavor” (p. 181). Unlike the Habsburg territories, the later sixteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth has often been portrayed as a haven of religious “toleration,” an interpretation qualified by Paul W. Knoll in an important way. He reminds us that religious variety was not seen as good in itself, but rather mirrored the notorious “strength and independence of the nobility” (p. 42), which impeded attempts to impose religious uniformity. Indeed, the force of confessional sentiment in the area was apparent in the controversial Union of Brest (1596), which was promoted by the Polish king and sought to heal the schism between the Orthodox and Roman Churches. The union's bitter rejection by many contemporaries is plausibly attributed by Mikhail V. Dmitriev to the inability to compromise—the actors on both sides of the religious divide “spoke two different confessional languages” (p. 130)—rather than to the national and social factors that have often been seen at the heart of the conflict. Post-Reformation rulers in the Holy Roman Empire, in contrast, have traditionally been regarded as having had the right to determine the faith of their subjects according to the famous formula cuius regio, eius religio. In their patrimonial lands, the emperors implacably enforced this right, if with mixed success. But as Robert von Friedeburg demonstrates, a hard interpretation of the formula was not universally accepted among early seventeenth-century (Lutheran) imperial jurists. The empire's urban spaces moreover offered astonishing opportunities for deviation from orthodoxy. Burghers in the prince-bishopric of Münster found ways to accommodate plurality that included, according to David M. Luebke, “blurring confessional divisions internally while maintaining high walls against the outside world” (p. 59). Even when they conformed to the established church, local people managed to maintain their own, received forms of piety, as Bridget Head's fascinating look at Marian veneration in Cologne reveals. Using the example of the religiously mixed city of Strasbourg, Debra Kaplan reintegrates Jews into the story of “confessionalization” by calling attention to the profound impact on them, ironically, of the hardening of lines among Christians. Thomas A. Brady, Jr.'s cautiously positive assessment of Jewish experience in the Empire, which he characterizes as moving “from expulsion to discrimination” (p. 94) and which reflects a broader trend in the German-language historiography, would perhaps have been less optimistic if the story had been brought down to the Emperor's ejection of Jews from his own residential city in 1670. Confessional divisions remained crucial to the maintenance of political authority deep into the eighteenth century, as Alexander Schunka's account of the failure of efforts at rapprochement among Protestants around 1700 makes clear.

Among its other merits, this volume reminds us that confession and political authority remained a potent mixture long after the supposed end of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.