Religion Government And Political Culture In Early Modern Germany

The story of conflict in an island community offers a valuable case study for the analysis of early modern German political culture. Investigations range from interpersonal relations to dynamics of civic church and imperial government. Chronicled throughout are the interactions of two opposing principles in modern society 'secular' vs 'spiritual' and 'public' vs 'private'. These are found to operate both discursively and institutionally, and are deployed to help establish 'sovereign authority' ( Obrigkeit ), as well as to articulate resistance in the form of 'bourgeois republican ideology'.

This volume of essays by Heinz Schilling represents his three main fields of interest in early modern European history. The first section of the book, entitled 'Urban Society and Reformation', deals with urban society in northern Germany and the Netherlands from the fifteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. The author discusses social structure and changes, the problems of religion and mentality as well as political culture and thinking. The second section, 'confessionalization and Second Reformation', treats the paradigm 'Confessionalization', which denotes a fundamental process of social change within Old European society during the second half of the sixteenth and at the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. The third section, 'The Netherlands — the Pioneer Society of Early Modern Europe', deals with the Northern Netherlands as a model for early modern modernization and as a successful republican and 'bourgeois' alternative to the aristocratic Old European society. The essays collected in this book were originally written in German and published over the last fifteen years. The articles have been revised and the notes have been updated. This volume gives a broader English-speaking audience the possibility to read Heinz Schilling's research. It also provides a concise collection of the author's writings for those readers who are already familiar with his studies.

This book, first published in 1984, brings together three essays written by specialists in German history of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries whose important work is little known to English-speaking historians. Peter Blickle argues for a strong connection between the theology of the Reformation and the ideologies of the social protest movements of the period. Hans-Christoph Rublack takes a wider theme of the political and social norms in urban communities in the Holy Roman Empire and emphasises the ideas of justice, peace and unity held within the community despite the upheavals of revolution and protest. Winfried Schulze provides a comparative assessment of early modern peasant resistance within the Holy Roman Empire.

In premodern Germany, both the emerging centralized government and the powerful Catholic Church redefined gender roles for their own ends. Ulrike Strasser's interdisciplinary study of Catholic state-building examines this history from the vantage point of the virginal female body. Focusing on Bavaria, Germany's first absolutist state, Strasser recounts how state authorities forced chastity upon lower-class women to demarcate legitimate forms of sexuality and maintain class hierarchies. At the same time, they cloistered groups of upper-class women to harness the spiritual authority associated with holy virgins to the political authority of the state. The state finally recruited upper-class virgins as teachers who could school girls in the gender-specific morals and type of citizenship favored by authorities. Challenging Weberian concepts that link modernization to Protestantism, Strasser's study illustrates the modernizing power of Catholicism through an examination of virginity's central role in politics, culture, and society. Weaving together the stories of marriage and convent, of lay as well as religious women, State of Virginity makes important contributions to the historical study of sexuality and the growing feminist literature on the state. It will be of particular interest to students and scholars of political and religious history, women's studies, and social history.

From German unification in 1871 through the early 1960s, confessional tensions between Catholics and Protestants were a source of deep division in German society. Engaging this period of historic strife, Germany and the Confessional Divide focuses on three traumatic episodes: the Kulturkampf waged against the Catholic Church in the 1870s, the collapse of the Hohenzollern monarchy and state-supported Protestantism after World War I, and the Nazi persecution of the churches. It argues that memories of these traumatic experiences regularly reignited confessional tensions. Only as German society became increasingly secular did these memories fade and tensions ease.