In many histories of the Reformation, political developments play second fiddle to religious changes. But David Luebke follows the venerable historiographical tradition of Leopold von Ranke, who claimed that “…church history cannot be understood without political history, and vice versa” (Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, Willy Andreas, ed., Essen: Emil Vollmer Verlag, n.d., 6). Thus, Luebke investigates “reformations” political and religious in the long sixteenth century, how they influenced, informed, and shaped one another. More specifically, he writes, “This book tells the story of … [religious] pluralization as it played out in a particular setting – [the] sprawling realm … [of the] Holy Roman Empire” (3). His argument unfolds in five chronologically arranged chapters.

Chapter Two, “Reformations of the Fifteenth Century” investigates reform movements foundational to the events of the sixteenth century. In the world of religion, these were largely “about making communities cohesive and sacred and subject to the oversight of local and overwhelmingly male political authorities” (25). In the sphere of politics, challenges to the Empire from within and without led to its consolidation and the increased permanence of its institutions, changes “profoundly associative … grounded in long-standing habits of dealing with common problems by bringing together stakeholders and dealing with them collectively, preferring negotiation, mediation, and mutual aid over force and coercion” (5).

In chapter three, “Insurgencies,” Luebke introduces Martin Luther and his theology and accounts for its appeal. The laity, he argues, generally accepted and applied Luther’s ideas in ways that met their own interests, better pastoral care, and more localized autonomy over religion. Here, theological reform met fifteenth-century religious impulses, themselves profoundly political.

The Luther Affair led to “new and distinct relationships between religion and politics” (5), most notably, “A Multiconfessional Empire,” the title of chapter four. Luebke demonstrates how the concept of the corpus christianum, the body of Christians, was deployed to accommodate multiple confessions and how administrative strategies were introduced, designed to blunt the contentious effects of religious conflict. With the goal of preserving unity, harmony, and spiritual well-being, the Empire’s “legal and political system that divided governance between a host of associative, imperial tribunals and assemblies” moderated religious differences (111).

Chapter five, “Coping With Diversity,” reviews the myriad ways that territories, cities, villages, parishes, and monastic institutions found ways to achieve peaceful religious coexistence, often by offering a plurality of religious spaces. But by the beginning of the seventeenth century, political will for such religious toleration was eroding, while on the ground, Protestants and Catholics increasingly drew sharp religious and social distinctions. From about 1580 on, religious plurality frayed and finally crumbled.

Chapter six, “Conclusion: Change and Continuity,” investigates the outcomes of the Thirty Years War (1618–1648). Despite the fact that the Peace of Westphalia (1648) legalized multiple confessions, just as the Peace of Augsburg (1555) had, it was now clear that two distinct entities existed: the Corpus Catholoricum and the Corpus Evangeloricum. This religio-political divide, both reflected and shaped the situation at the local level, as notes Luebke “it is likely that [by this point] a larger share of both urban and rural populations identified fully with one or another of the established creeds, that they did so on theologically informed grounds, and that they organized their social and political lives accordingly” (166). In sum, “the ideal of the Empire as a unified corpus christianum was certifiably dead” (162).

If Luebke is treading the path pioneered by Ranke, more recently, Thomas Brady, Jr. has considered what made religious reforms in the Empire unique. Not unlike Luebke, he locates the late medieval impulse for religious reform in a Christendom-wide desire for a more spiritual understanding of the Christian religion and a relative social equality of laity and clergy. Like Luebke, Brady locates the realization of a multi-confessional Empire in its political structures and institutions. Religious reforms became popular movements, claims Brady, only where a weak authority and localized power provided them substantial agency. The very political diversity gave scope and set limits to these reforms, resulting ultimately in a permanent, legally fixed plurality of confessions (German Histories in the Age of Reformations, 1400–1650. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, 4–6).

Luebke agrees: “In large measure, the Empire was able to absorb the effects of religious division because it was not [sic] a consolidated monarchy but an association, a complex and layered system of shared rule” (92). But building on Brady’s work, Luebke rounds out our understanding of how the concept of a corpus christianum was transformed and deployed, what administrative mechanisms and processes were developed to mitigate religious division, and how communities found ways to preserve unity in the face of multiple confessions.

The product of decades of his own and others’ work, these groundbreaking insights allow us to better understand the situation on the ground during the period between 1555 and 1618. Painstaking research has illuminated religious plurality at work in such varied contexts that we must now reassess the broader narrative of this period as leading inexorably to military conflict. Luebke’s book does just that and will be essential reading for scholars. But its concise, accessible style will be attractive to non-specialists and students as well.

However, despite the fact that Luebke’s fifteenth century is characterized by a “hunger for healing, sanctifying divinity,” his long sixteenth century is spiritually flat. Where religious motives appear, they are largely limited to a desire for moral instruction, local access to religious ritual, and a means to increase local autonomy. Princes and city councils, urbanites and countryfolk, men and women, all embraced the Reformation largely out of a desire for greater control in their given sphere. Sure, “Parishes everywhere harbored zealots” (121), and of course, “We must accept the possibility that some number of city people found Luther’s teachings appealing for more or less the same reasons he did” (65). But, “for the most part,” as Luebke notes with regard to urbanites’ response to religious plurality, “pragmatism reigned” (133). Given the nature of his subject, politics and religion, which by definition takes the focus off the intense spiritual longings of an age in which the eternal welfare of souls hung in the balance and places it on the here and now, this depiction of religious motives is not surprising. But one cannot help but wonder whether something essential has been lost. This takes nothing away from Luebke’s findings. It merely asks whether they begin to look too much like us.