Reformation and the German territorial state is a close study of religious change in the diocese of Bamberg in Upper Franconia. With the Reformation, the diocese was divided in two, with one part remaining subject to the bishop and Catholic in religion, the other part subject to the Franconian Hohenzollerns and Lutheran. Ambitiously conceived and meticulously researched, this book sets out to examine the ‘twin processes’ of religious reform and territorial formation. What distinguishes this work is its dual perspective and its nuanced approach both to the complexity of change and the thoughts behind the process. Working on the premise that social and political developments in this period were ‘secondary to or derivations of … spiritual aims’ (p. 4), the author reconstructs the compound relations of power in the respective political settings, the many different levels of sovereignty in the Empire and the territories, the tensions and fault-lines that undermined or deflected rule, and the methods and strategies at work in the territories that lay behind the actual exercise of power. Placing the two histories, Catholic and Lutheran, side-by-side is an effective way of demonstrating the general nature of the process of reform in this period, for while there were differences in intention and expectation, and above all discrepancies between the types of power that might be imposed, there were clear similarities as well. Both the bishops and the margraves set out to impose order and orthodoxy in their respective realms, and both were quickly confronted by the ‘limits of obedience’ when the introduction of religious norms threatened customs or liberties at the territorial level. In Bamberg, for instance, the friction between the different spheres and agents of rule could obstruct Catholic reform: aside from the age-old hostility between the civitas and the immunities, there were the quarrels between the chapter and the bishop as well as long-standing conflicts between knights, lesser nobles, canons, townsmen and peasants. Religion was inseparable, and had long been inseparable, from the praxis of power. It is with this relationship in mind that in one of the final chapters of the book the author refers to the Bamberg campaign against witchcraft as ‘the culmination of the process of territorial state building’, even if the rationale was religious and utopian (p. 185).

Approaching the ‘twin processes’ of reform in this manner reveals something about the campaign of confessionalisation that historians of early modern Germany frequently overlook. Government was largely local in this period; it was exercised at many stages removed from its ideological sources and was often at cross-purposes with the intentions of the state. The bishop of Bamberg, no less than the Hohenzollern margrave, had to delegate and devolve, and this often undermined the higher designs of statecraft. The other point that comes out of the analysis is just how closely connected religion and politics were in this age, and thus how the reform of the Church necessarily required the cooperation of the many local agents of governance that made up the matrix of rule. As the book illustrates, the reform of religion could act as a buttress to the making of the territory, but it could threaten its stability as well. Few recent works on the German Reformation have captured this sense of contingency as skilfully as Reformation and the German territorial state.