Michele Zelinsky Hanson's revised dissertation contributes to a growing sense that the early Reformation period in Germany was experienced by common people in ways that differed sharply from the experience of theologians and magistrates. Among other important results, Hanson notes the fluidity of religious identity in this period, the inextricably interwoven nature of religious, cultural, political, familial, and economic interests (among others), and the non-confessional nature of a religiosity that was defined more by practice and choice of church or preacher than by creed or confession. Family ties, civic pride, economic self-interest, and the political ramifications—at least in the 1550s—of religious choices all figure prominently in Hanson's account of the reasons Reformation-era Augsburgers almost never quarrelled with each other over religion, but rather with the authorities (and vice versa). This not merely contradicts the dominant paradigm for the last thirty years, confessionalization, but it also continues and extends Robert Scribner's work on the common people and their experience during the age of Reformation and Counter-Reformation in the Empire. Not confessional or theological issues, but everyday religious experience and practice, in their rich and complex forms, are Hanson's subjects.

Hanson uses the cases of religious conflicts and religiously offensive or deviant behavior (from the point of view of the authorities) that made it into the records to answer important questions about how religious coexistence functioned in Augsburg. Was it merely, as some traditional literature suggests, a function of repression by the city council, anxious to preserve its traditionally strong relationship to the Emperor and its lucrative trading relationships with now-Catholic parts of the Empire and Europe (especially Habsburg Spain)? Hanson says that this explanation is inadequate, showing how civic, communal, familial, social, and honor-based considerations regulated religious conflict between ordinary laypeople in the city. Her account of early Anabaptism is a paradigm of how religious difference was negotiated, represented, and displayed in Augsburg: not with cut-and-dried confessional labels, but by reference to where one attended divine service, whose sermons one heard, etc. The fast and firm confessional identities of later centuries seem to have been very little in evidence.

Hanson has had the fullest imaginable access to the substantial archival collections in Augsburg, and has used them to advantage. She has also, through her distinguished supervisor, the Augsburg specialist Tom Safley, and the recently retired grand old man of Swabian-Bavarian regional history, Rolf Kießling, been steeped in Augsburg's particularities and peculiarities, allowing her to delve very deeply into local culture and religion. Yet as she herself admits at one point in the book (p. 146), the range of archival materials that survives (and it is better in Augsburg than almost anywhere else in Germany) has also determined the nature and content of her study to some extent. While council and court records allow the historian to study systematically and in great detail certain official, administrative, diplomatic, legal, and constitutional issues, it is much harder to use such sources to answer questions for which they were not designed to provide answers. As we see in the work of another accomplished historian of Augsburg culture and religion during this period, Lyndal Roper, we often have rather slight evidence of cultural, religious, and “identitarian” phenomena, so the records of individual cases of dissent, deviance, or heterodox behavior that came before a court or the city council must sometimes serve as evidence for several different arguments. Hanson also uses a number of richly textured and suggestive records of legal proceedings to illustrate a range of phenomena. Both historians are expert combers-against-the-grain of the huge but ultimately fairly uniform source base regarding the city of Augsburg, querying legal and administrative records for information about very different realms of human experience, and for information about the ordinary people whose lives were much more often described (and judged) from above than by themselves.

Having recently worked in the same archives but on the preceding period, I am struck by how continuous and consistent the modes of argument, accusation, punishment, and self-identification were between the fifteenth century and the sixteenth. Hanson's work shows how important the “medieval” urban economies of honor, neighborliness, civic cohesion, family ties, and peace were in Reformation Augsburg. Here is where Hanson's excellent credentials and connections as an Augsburg early modernist would seem, however, to have failed her. Neither the text nor the footnotes betray more than a passing acquaintance (Jörg Rogge) with scholarship on medieval or late-medieval Augsburg—the main cultural context that would have allowed her to situate her subjects' piety, social norms, and religio-civic identities historically. While Hanson does valiant battle with some old dragons of Reformation history (e.g., the focus on elites and theology, or confessionalization theory), she ignores the oldest and most pernicious one: the Protestant framing of the Reformation as deeply discontinuous with the past. This framing is both a precondition and a product of a whiggish conception of the Reformation that Hanson and her academic sponsors would certainly reject—and yet it continues to blind us to anything larger in scope than “Ranke's Reformation,” a strictly sixteenth-century phenomenon.

By way of disclosure, I edit a “sister” Brill monograph series, and I would have been happy to publish this book there as well. There are some serious problems with the book, however, that come from the trend away from copyediting and proofreading at all academic publishing houses. Brill often is able to provide those services when they are necessary; they would have helped here. Hanson makes dozens of undergraduate errors, from commas between subject clauses and predicate verbs (twice) through “what” and even “who” for “which”; words such as “intricatedly”; missing articles, pronouns, conjunctions, and other words; to “the Schwarz” for “the Schwarzes” and “the Thum's” for “the Thums.” Books this expensive should not need corrections on one page in five (as a rough average). There are too many clumsy sentences and a few mistranslations of early modern German texts: for example, p. 203, note 94, urphed is translated in the text as “bond,” but “sworn oath or undertaking” would be better; p. 152, note 24: “du hast gern das man das huetlin [zieh]” becomes “you like tipping your hat,” which might fit the context better but is simply wrong.

Despite these annoying shortcomings, Hanson's book is a welcome contribution to a growing (corrective) cultural history of the Reformation, as well as to the older genre of the history of common people. She twice mentions the other seven free Imperial Cities that were biconfessional (Biberach, Dinkelsbühl, Donauwörth, Kaufbeuren, Leutkirch, Ravensburg, and Ulm), and one wants to know a bit more about them for the sake of comparison. As Hanson persuasively suggests, Augsburg and those other cities seem to have posed not so much an exception to religious uniformity as a viable and positive alternative.