Refugees and refugee accommodation became something of a phenomenon in early modern Europe. While earlier historical works examined the refugees’ economic impact, recent studies have turned to questions concerning their religious impact and the ensuing changes. Maximilian Scholz contributes to this growing literature with a study focused on Frankfurt am Main, which was a free city in the Holy Roman Empire, an economic hub, an early supporter of Luther's theology and, a generation later, a major destination for refugees. Elucidating Frankfurt's history is challenging because so many of its archival records were destroyed by bombing during World War II. Despite this limitation, Scholz has pieced together what is available – refugee petitions, civic and princely edicts and treaties, citizenship lists, consistory minutes, refugee letters, refugee memoirs – and produced an engaging historical account.
In Frankfurt's case the refugees originated in the Low Countries and also England. As subscribers to Calvin's theology, they fled when royal authority threatened any dissent to the Roman Church. Among them, twenty-four refugee families arrived in Frankfurt in March 1554, an occasion that marked the town's beginning as ‘a laboratory for a great Reformation experiment in welcoming and sheltering’ (p. 157) the persecuted from abroad. Initially, Frankfurt's leaders embraced the refugees and granted them use of the church of the White Ladies, located in the city's south-east corner. But already by 1555 the leaders grew uneasy. The clergy objected to liturgical practices in the refugees’ religious services. The city's patricians began fretting as thousands more refugees arrived in Frankfurt and as conflict and factionalism between the refugee groups seemed to destabilise the town's institutions and civic life (pp. 100–3). To add to the council's worry, strong, outside figures inserted themselves into the equation in the mid-1550s – Anne Hooper, the wife of the zealous Gloucester bishop, John Hooper, fled to Frankfurt and helped the English community there in networking; the outspoken theologians John a Lasco and John Knox took refuge in the city for a time; and John Calvin came to mediate a dispute concerning a minister's leadership. As for relations between the refugees and Frankfurt's wider population, the book is largely silent, presumably because of limited source material. In any case, in 1560 the council banned the refugees’ form of worship in the city and in 1561 ordered the church of the White Ladies closed. In the subsequent decades some refugees left Frankfurt while others stayed.
Scholz draws five main conclusions from this history. First, Frankfurt's rulers ‘inaugurated an era of refugee accommodation in the city’ (p. 157). Once settled, the refugees both competed with neighbouring exile communities in places like Strasbourg and Zurich over the correct practice of religion and coordinated with them to offer ‘consolation, counsel, and financial support’ (p. 158) to coreligionists. Second, although Frankfurt's leaders and the refugees initially viewed each other as Christians, the Frankfurt clerics, led by Hartmann Beyer, soon delineated sharp doctrinal differences between them and the refugees, principally concerning the eucharist. The refugees invoked the work of Martin Bucer and others that had reconciled the theologies of Luther and Zwingli and that had also formed a constitutional basis for Frankfurt's own church by 1542. Yet the Frankfurt clergy prevailed in framing the refugees’ liturgy as erroneous and not conforming to orthodoxy, meaning to the clergy's understanding of the 1530 Augsburg Confession (pp. 88–92). Consequently, two distinct camps formed. Third, the refugee accommodation in Frankfurt changed who controlled the town's churches. Initially, the patricians did, but after they ‘feared’ that the refugee congregations were stirring ‘religious and political upheaval’ (p. 163), they finally sided with the clergy, who led the charge to shut Frankfurt's churches to the refugees’ services and thereby ‘replaced the council as the ultimate authority’ (p. 163) over those churches. Some refugees resorted to worshipping in private homes or to Auslauf (‘walking out’ to attend services outside of Frankfurt). Elsewhere in Europe house churches and Auslauf were tolerant solutions to religious tensions, but here, Scholz notes astutely, they operated as ‘odious restrictions on previously generous terms of accommodation’ and ‘tools of expulsion’ that ‘heralded the advent of a more intolerant era in Frankfurt’ (pp. 126–8). Fourth, the exodus of some refugees from Frankfurt to nearby, accommodating cities and princely territories spread their religious beliefs and practices in the Empire. Their effort to secure ‘legal sanction for their faith’ where they immigrated produced ‘the refugee treaty as a common legal phenomenon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’ (p. 164). Finally, the refugees repurposed their ‘central religious institution’ (p. 164), the consistory, so that it not only instilled a moral discipline in the congregation but also orchestrated the refugees’ ceaseless effort into the early seventeenth century to find private space in which to worship.
These reasonable conclusions notwithstanding, there is the issue of naming. The book identifies persons in Frankfurt in the 1520s–50s as ‘Protestants’ and ‘Catholics’, and it calls the confessions, communities, and persons which formed out of the division between refugees and town clergy ‘Lutheran’ and ‘Reformed’. Of course, this has been the conventional naming practice for a very long time, and instead of assuming it reflexively and unthinkingly, as other scholarly histories usually do, Scholz offers a reason on p. xi for why the book uses these terms.
However, the book does not quote the historical actors themselves using the terms Protestant, Catholic and Lutheran, and if the actors did use them, then the book would need to explain what the terms meant and how they were used in that historical context, meaning one of Christian monism as opposed to the one of Christian pluralism that emerged later. All sixteenth-century groups of confessional adherents invoked sacred terms like reformed, Catholic and evangelical. They all called their confessions exclusively Christian and saw their world as populated by Christians (i.e. themselves) and by those who were not. They slapped an array of pejorative, discrediting names on the latter. Examples include heretics, fanatics, Anabaptists, Lutheran, Calvinist, Zwinglian, Papist, Luthero-Papist, Sacramentarians and unChristian. In my view, then, certain statements in the book are anachronistic and misleading, for example that ‘[b]y 1555, Protestants in Frankfurt could be categorized as either Lutheran (part of the civic church) or Reformed (part of the refugee community)’ (p. 73); that the refugee's religion was ‘a rival Protestant tradition’ (p. 90) to the religion administered by the Frankfurt clergy; that Frankfurt's civic church ‘became Lutheran, not merely Protestant, and Beyer claimed it had always been thus’ (p. 162). As later quotations of Goethe and F. Charles Schröder (pp. 129, 167) from the nineteenth century would indicate, the terms Lutheran and Reformed became naturalised and denominational designators sometime after the period of Scholz's study (I have argued that the key juncture came in 1648 with the Peace of Westphalia) and, from there, were projected back onto the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.
A similar critique extends to the title, Strange brethren, a phrase left unexplained in the book. With their binary worldview of error and truth, one can imagine the doctrinally-minded calling these persons strange and those persons brethren, but it is questionable whether they could conceptualise persons as, at once, strange brethren.
