In March 1554, twenty-four families arrived in Frankfurt am Main. Originally from the Low Countries, flight from religious persecution had led them to England, but now, captained by the Walloon minister Valérand Poullain, they were forced into renewed exile by the premature death of King Edward VI. Poullain himself had been on the move for more than a decade, fleeing from one short-term refuge to another, up and down the Rhine River, from Strasbourg down to Wesel, before he moved across the Channel. Finally, in Frankfurt, they temporarily found safety and welcome. Unfortunately for Poullain, for his successor-ministers, and for many of the French- and Dutch-speaking Reformed who comprised what became the refugee congregation(s) in Frankfurt, the Lutheran city on the Main River proved less hospitable to their community than initially hoped.
As Maximilian Miguel Scholz shows in this well-written and lucid study, Poullain and his fellow Reformed found their refuge unsettled by the growing alienation between Reformed and Lutheran Protestants in the Holy Roman Empire and across Europe. As Scholz argues, it was, in fact, refugee groups like Poullain's who “provoked the creation of confessional boundaries” (4). Scholz's work thus intersects productively with recent work from Geert Janssen, Nicholas Terpstra, and others on exile experiences and the dynamics of confessional identity.
Starting with Poullain's small group, Frankfurt quickly became home to dozens and dozens of additional Reformed households, comprising French-, Dutch-, and even English-speakers. Drawn by the promise of toleration and economic opportunity, these refugees came in such numbers that by the end of 1556 they numbered over one thousand people. As Scholz notes, these numbers only grew in the course of the sixteenth century, as Frankfurt remained a destination for Reformed refugees. Even after years of ongoing outmigration to other destinations in the region, Reformed Christians constituted some ten percent of the city's population.
These refugees stirred concern among the local Lutheran clergy. Not only fears of Anabaptism—fears, Scholz demonstrates, which were quite out of place given Poullain's own intolerance—but also “a nearly constant state of intramural discord” (163) within the diverse community were sources of the ministers’ and soon the city council's concerns. Differences of language, custom, and sacramental theology undermined the council's initially idealistic tolerance of the foreigners. As Scholz shows in chapter 3, already in 1561 Reformed Christians had lost access to church space; baptisms and marriages were now conducted exclusively by Lutheran clergy. Frankfurt's Reformed Christians were forced to live a religious life on the margins, scrambling for makeshift worship space in and out of the city. Though still important for the city's economy, they remained religious outsiders, prompting efforts to arrange a new refuge, as Scholz describes in his fourth chapter. In 1562 and 1597, some of Frankfurt's Reformed entered into agreements with neighboring princes in Frankenthal and Hanau, where they enjoyed the right to work and the freedom of public worship. Still, as Scholz sketches in the fifth, closing chapter, Frankfurt remained home to an embattled but resilient Reformed community throughout the sixteenth century.
This story is offered in clean, polished prose over five well-structured chapters. Scholz's narrative has much to recommend it, but the book's scope is necessarily limited by the sources consulted. As Scholz explains, writing the history of Frankfurt is a daunting undertaking; the municipal archives were largely obliterated during the Second World War. Historians of early modern Frankfurt have thus had to devise creative workarounds. For his part, Scholz relies especially on documents collected and edited in earlier centuries, often for the Reformed community's own purposes. These records—ministerial, consistorial, and, occasionally, magisterial—permit some reconstruction of this era of Frankfurt's history, which Scholz has done successfully. But the perspective offered privileges the legal and political preoccupations of the Reformed community's leadership. From these sources, we get little sense of why the majority of Frankfurt's Reformed community did not follow the lure of more secure religious freedoms in Hanau and Frankenthal. From these sources, we get little sense of the extent to which the majority of Frankfurt's Reformed were or were not frustrated in their economic or social aspirations by the limitations on their freedom of worship. Scholz offers tantalizing hints of the importance of economic considerations for both Frankfurt's council and Reformed residents, but the issue remains largely under-illuminated. As a consequence, Scholz's story centers the frustrated hopes, disappointed Protestant fraternity, and determined survival that structure the Reformed community's leadership's own vision of their experiences. Pragmatism, everyday indifference, and messy compromise—suggested by some of the details Scholz shares from consistorial records—remain harder to appreciate.
Yet such absences should not detract from the appeal of what is present. The book succeeds in offering a clear, persuasive study of Reformed clergy's ability to withstand official intolerance and ensure community cohesion in this important imperial city. Scholars interested in early modern religious coexistence or in confessional tensions in the German lands will welcome Maximilian Miguel Scholz's book and profit from it.
