The long eighteenth century remains murky terrain for historians of religion. This is largely due to the fact that in this period, the story goes, religion lost much of the political, intellectual and cultural significance that it had held in medieval and early modern eras. Two principal assumptions lay at the heart of this narrative. On the one hand, the conclusion of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648 is thought to have brought to an end the era of religious conflict that followed the sixteenth-century religious reformations. On the one hand, the eighteenth century – identified with the emergence of the Enlightenment – has for long been searched for origins of secularism and toleration. Altogether, these developments are thought to have rendered religion, if not irrelevant, then at least of secondary significance to eighteenth-century men and women. This in turn resulted in the tempering of earlier impulses to persecute the religious ‘other’ and instead fostered the emergence of societies that were more accepting of religious difference and variety.
The present volume, by Carolin Katzer, sets out to challenge this narrative. It argues that peaceful religious coexistence in the aftermath of the Thirty Years’ War should not be viewed as ‘an unquestionable, somewhat natural occurrence’ (p. 14). The volume thus adds to a growing body of scholarship which has sought to reclaim the eighteenth century as a religious age, questioning the narratives of linear progress of religious toleration. As her case study, Katzer uses the example of Worms, one of the free cities of the Holy Roman Empire, which throughout the early modern period was a home to several confessional communities. While a number of places in eighteenth-century Europe were characterised by religious pluralism, Worms, as Katzer argues, presents a particularly telling case for exploring the modes of religious coexistence. For decades, the city – a host to over one a hundred imperial diets – had been embroiled in the processes of political and religious change in the Holy Roman Empire; in 1521, the imperial diet gathered in the city condemned Martin Luther, prohibited dissemination of his writings and officially banned citizens of the Holy Roman Empire from disseminating and defending his idea, thus solidifying religious divisions that were to continue for the centuries to come. At the same time, Worms played a role in the spread of the Reformations; the city was the birthplace of the first Protestant Bibles, including Luther's German translation. In the sixteenth century, Worms also became a home to the Empire's three confessions – Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. By the eighteenth century, Lutherans had become the most numerous confessional community, amounting to at least three quarters of the city's populations. Their position, though, was not unchallenged. Despite their apparent weakness, Catholics and Calvinists, protected by the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, maintained a strong presence in the city. These confessional communities were naturally involved in power struggles which produced ‘a complex system of conflict, consensus, and coexistence’ (p. 18). These tensions were only exacerbated by the city's entanglement in imperial politics and international conflicts. This unique combination of factors makes Worms a microcosm for exploring how religiously diverse communities operated in eighteenth-century Europe.
Katzer scouts the religious landscapes of Worms through the lens of everyday practices of religious coexistence. The volume spotlights four different ‘realms’ where interactions between various confessional communities were particularly intense, often provoking involvement of municipal, imperial and ecclesiastical authorities. The discussion spans the politics of clerical appointments (chapter ii), sacred spaces (chapter iii), processions (chapter iv) and family life (chapter v). Katzer's analysis shines, in particular, in the case study of the Magnuskirche – a Simultankirche shared between the city's Catholics, Lutherans and Calvinists. While used by the city's three major confessions, the church remained under Catholic administration. In the eighteenth century, it became subject to intense legal struggles between Lutherans and Catholics, provoking the involvement of local magistrates as well as international powers. It is an excellent example of how even after the Treaty of Westphalia local disputes continued to resonate internationally.
Religious coexistence in eighteenth-century Worms was, as Katzer argues, far from an established, unchallenged reality, guided by the traditional, top-down models of authority. Instead, the example of Worms demonstrates how religiously mixed communities could quickly shift from tolerance to intolerance, depending on circumstances. The often contradictory attitudes of the city's Lutherans to their Catholic neighbours offer a telling illustration. For instance, the 1697 procession celebrating the Peace of Rijswijk, which concluded the Nine Years’ War, provided an example of how easily religious tensions could flare up. The procession ended up in a physical altercation between Catholics and Lutherans; the correspondence that was exchanged following the incident testified to the fears of the city's Lutheran magistrates and population that the procession was intended to widen the Catholic presence in Worms. However, the opposite was also true. The chapel of the Catholic branch of the Johannite Order offers a telling illustration of how the concerns of the Lutheran magistrate and the city's Lutherans did not always align. While initially serving for the private use of the members of the Order, the chapel opened up to the public in 1756. This provoked a strong response from the city's Lutheran magistrate, which threatened punishment for Catholics attending mass there. Despite the magistrate's position, however, the Lutherans living in the vicinity of the chapel seemed to remain neutral and uninvolved. This episode demonstrated that the city's Lutherans and its Lutheran magistrates did not always share the same concerns with regard to religious politics. Altogether, the case studies assembled in this volume highlight the instability, unpredictability and provisionality of the arrangements that in the eighteenth century underpinned the lives of religiously fragmented communities.
The volume thus effectively challenges the assumption that the eighteenth century saw the emergence of more stable forms of religious coexistence. Religion, as Katzer demonstrates, remained an important consideration which dictated the functioning of the city. Many of the realms discussed by Katzer where religion made itself felt, such as in the public sphere and education, came under intense scrutiny at the time by thinkers and statesmen associated with the Enlightenment movement. Members of the various Churches, including laymen as well as members of the clergy and religious orders who, too, influenced and were influenced by the Enlightenment, contributed to these debates. However, this link between contemporary debates surrounding the issues of religious coexistence in Worms and the Enlightenment is largely overlooked in the volume (the term ‘Enlightenment’ appears on only a few pages). Drawing out the interconnections between religion and the Enlightenment, especially in the discussions of the nature of the public sphere – a concept crucial to scholars of the period and to Katzer's analysis, would have enhanced the overall argument of the volume.
All in all, this volume is a welcome contribution to the field. Drawing on a wealth of material from municipal, regional, imperial and ecclesiastical archives, Katzer weaves together the various threads that made up the religious tapestry of Worms, creating a rich portrait of life in a religiously diverse city. As such, the volume will be of interest to historians of the Holy Roman Empire as well as to scholars of the eighteenth century and religion more broadly.
