Crossing the Boundaries of Belief: Geographies of Religious Conversion in Southern Germany, 1648-1800

By Duane J. Corpis

In early modern Germany, religious conversion was a profoundly social and political phenomenon rather than purely an act of private conscience. Because social norms and legal requirements demanded that every subject declare membership in one of the state-sanctioned Christian churches, the act of religious conversion regularly tested the geographical and political boundaries separating Catholics and Protestants. In a period when church and state cooperated to impose religious conformity, regulate confessional difference, and promote moral and social order, the choice to convert was seen as a disruptive act of disobedience. Investigating the tensions inherent in the creation of religious communities and the fashioning of religious identities in Germany after the Thirty Years' War, Duane Corpis examines the complex social interactions, political implications, and cultural meanings of conversion in this moment of German history.

In Crossing the Boundaries of Belief, Corpis assesses how conversion destabilized the rigid political, social, and cultural boundaries that separated one Christian faith from another and that normally tied individuals to their local communities of belief. Those who changed their faiths directly challenged the efforts of ecclesiastical and secular authorities to use religious orthodoxy as a tool of social discipline and control. In its examination of religious conversion, this study thus offers a unique opportunity to explore how women and men questioned and redefined their relationships to local institutions of power and authority, including the parish clergy, the city government, and the family.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jun 3, 2014
• ISBN: 9780813935539

Book preview

Crossing the Boundaries of Belief

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN GERMAN HISTORY

H. C. Erik Midelfort,

Editor

Crossing the Boundaries of Belief

Geographies of Religious Conversion in Southern Germany, 1648–1800

DUANE J. CORPIS

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

© 2014 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2014

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Corpis, Duane J.

Crossing the boundaries of belief : geographies of religious conversion in southern Germany, 1648–1800 / Duane J. Corpis.

pages       cm. — (Studies in early modern German history)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3552-2 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8139-3553-9 (e-book)

1. Germany—Church history—17th century. 2. Germany—Church history—18th century. 3. Conversion—History—17th century. 4. Conversion—History—18th century. I. Title.

BR855.C67 2014

274.3'07—dc23

2013036817

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION

1 : Mapping the Religious Landscape

1648 and Confessional Geography

2 : Navigating between Confessions

Migration and Displacement

3 : Losing Faith

Doubt and Dissent

4 : Transgressing Jurisdictions

Disobedience and Disloyalty

5 : Breaking the Ties That Bind

Family and Community

6 : Starting Over

Relocation and Reincorporation

EPILOGUE

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book may never have reached completion without encouragement, support, and not-so-gentle prodding from a number of people. I would like to show my appreciation to all of them. As a dissertation, my first attempt to make sense of the unruly contents of my research was indebted to my amazing committee members: Antonio Feros, Penny Johnson, Karen Kupperman, and Darline Levy. My adviser, Ronnie Hsia, has remained a source of generous guidance, based on a productive tension, in which he has constantly pushed me and my thinking. I am extremely grateful for his mentorship through what is a vast but well-mapped landscape: the world of German religion and culture.

The research required to turn dissertation into book was made possible by many generous research fellowships, including a dissertation research grant from DAAD, a Bernadotte E. Schmidt Fellowship from the American Historical Association, summer grants from the History Departments of both Georgia State University and Cornell University, a Research Initiation Grant (Georgia State University), and a Junior Faculty Travel Grant from the Institute for European Studies at Cornell University.

For my research, I visited sixteen different archives and research libraries. I am indebted to the archivists and staff at each of these institutions: the city archives of Augsburg, Füssen, Kaufbeuren, Kempten, Memmingen, Nördlingen, Nürnberg, and Ulm; the City and State Library of Augsburg; the Bavarian State Archive in Augsburg; the Central Bavarian State Archive in Munich; the Bavarian State Library; the Central State Archive of Stuttgart; the Archive of the Bishopric of Augsburg; the Archive of the Diocese of Eichstätt; the Regional Lutheran Church Archives in Nürnberg and Stuttgart; and the Archive of St. Anna Church in Augsburg. Without the kind help of every archivist, librarian, and staff member in these institutions, I could not have completed the research contained in this book. In particular, I would like to thank Richard Bauer, Franz-Rasso Böck, Sigrid Buhl, Michael Cramer-Fürtig, Christoph Engelhard, Suzanne Faul, Manfred Heimers, Gerhard Lemmermeier, Renate Mäder, and Wilfried Sponsel.

While in Germany, I discovered more than dusty documents in archives. I also found guidance, camaraderie, and friendship with Heike Bock, Stefan Brünner, Allyson Creasman, Susanne Eser, Georg Feuerer, Alex Fisher, Florian Gloeckner, Helmut Graser, Mark Häberlein, Mitch Hammond, Michele Hanson, Jürgen Hanwalter, Bridget Heal, Markus Heinz, Carina Johnson, Christine Johnson, Boris Kaut, Hans-Jörg Künast, David Lederer, Kirill Levinson, Benedikt Mauer, Wolfgang Mayer, Erik Midelfort, Rosamarie Mix, Martin Ott, Wolfgang Petz, Beth Plummer, Edith Seidl, Kathy Stuart, Ann Tlusty, Helmut Zäh, and Michelle Zelinsky. Over the many years that I researched and wrote this book, these people inspired me and stimulated my interest in Germany and its history. Irmgard Maili deserves a very special thanks for the miles she added to her speedometer while showing me around so much of southern Germany.

This project has ultimately spanned three institutional settings, and I owe a debt of gratitude to many at New York University, Georgia State, and Cornell: Kristin Bayer, Dan Bender, Alejandro Cañeque, Peter Dear, Oren Falk, Ian Fletcher, Yael Fletcher, Durba Ghosh, Taja-Nia Henderson, T. J. Hinrichs, Kats Hirano, Itsie Hull, Paul Hyams, Jamie Melton, Stephen Mihm, Judith Miller, Melina Pappademos, Joe Perry, Kavita Philip, Jared Poley, Kirsten Schultz, Suman Seth, Christine Skwiot, Michael Stevens, Jonathan Strom, Joanna Waley-Cohen, and Rachel Weil, all of whom commented on the manuscript in part or in whole. I also benefited enormously from conversations about this project with Leslie Adelson, Joel Anderson, Ed Baptist, Holly Case, Derek Chang, Ray Craib, Denise Davidson, Seth Fein, Abi Fisher, Paul Fleming, Maria Cristina Garcia, Franz Hofer, Taran Kang, Jacob Krell, Ada Kuskowski, Dominick LaCapra, Dan Magaziner, Patrizia McBride, Tom McSweeney, Molly Nolan, Ryan Plumley, Guillaume Ratel, Camille Robscis, Aaron Sachs, Micol Seigel, Elke Siegel, Chuck Steffen, Eric Tagliacozzo, Robert Travers, and Claudia Verhoeven. In recent months, I have developed especially large debts for the unwavering support of Itsie Hull and Barry Strauss.

Colleagues and friends in the field helped clarify my arguments at conferences and workshops or in e-mails and late-night messaging, including Eva Bremner, Jason Coy, Jörg Deventer, Barbara Diefendorf, Emily Fisher Gray, Dagmar Herzog, Ute Lotz-Heumann, David Luebke, Ben Marschke, Matthias Pohlig, Lyndal Roper, Susan Rosa, David Sabean, Alexander Schunka. Bob Burchfield’s copyediting and Bill Nelson’s cartographic work were invaluable. Dick Holway, Erik Midelfort, and the anonymous reviewers contacted by the University of Virginia Press have been amazing readers and even stronger advocates, without whom you would literally not be reading this page.

Many more people deserve mentioning, so Verzeihung to those whom I may have neglected. Of course, while I have benefited greatly from the comments and insights of so many people, I alone am responsible for any shortcomings in the pages that follow.

Finally, when it came to my education, my parents always supported my crazy ideas, including my decision to study history (instead of biochemistry and medicine) in college and graduate school. To them I give unending love and thanks. In the first stages of this book, Louis Anthes provided enormous support and care for me. Once this project reached a certain level of maturation, it might have become stale had it not been for the laughter that Rick Thoman reintroduced into my life. And for Timo Herbst, "es gibt kein aber. . . ."

Crossing the Boundaries of Belief

Geographies of Religious Conversion

in Southern Germany, 1648–1800

Introduction

ON THE EVE OF AUGUST 14, 1658, IN ONE OF AUGSBURG’S MANY taverns, a Lutheran man known in the official record simply as Knapp began singing Psalm 25 to a confessionally mixed group of customers. A decade following the end of the Thirty Years’ War and the implementation of the Peace of Westphalia, Lutherans and Catholics were sharing drinks together. They did not, however, share in the singing. At first, Knapp forgot the song’s melody, but then Matthäus Schmid, another Lutheran, picked up where Knapp left off, singing the psalm to completion. After finishing, Schmid gave a spontaneous commentary on the lyrics. Unfortunately, his remarks are not recorded in the archival documentation. Still, the audience would have recognized the psalm’s central theme: the virtue of unwavering religious faith in the midst of treacherous, menacing enemies.

In you, Lord my God, I put my trust.

I trust in you; do not let me be put to shame,

nor let my enemies triumph over me.

No one who hopes in you will ever be put to shame,

But shame will come on those

Who are treacherous without cause.

Show me your ways, Lord.

Teach me your paths. Guide me

in your truth and teach me.

For you are God my Savior,

And my hope is in you all day long. . . .

Turn to me and be gracious to me,

For I am lonely and afflicted.

Relieve the troubles of my heart

And free me from my anguish.

Look on my affliction and my distress

And take away all my sins.

See how numerous are my enemies

And how fiercely they hate me!

Such verses would have definitely ignited tensions in a religiously diverse audience before 1648, when Calvinists, Catholics, and Lutherans were at war, but even after the Peace, in a city renowned for its political parity between Lutheran and Catholic confessional communities, the song sparked an unfriendly exchange between two men drinking together that evening: Melchior Zagelmaier, a Lutheran weaver originally from Donauwörth but now living and working in Augsburg, and Daniel Weilbach, a recent convert to Catholicism. The words they exchanged after Schmid’s performance resulted three days later in Zagelmaier’s arrest and interrogation by the Augsburg magistrates for violating the religious peace.

Zagelmaier explained to the Catholic and Lutheran magistrates how the squabble had ensued. He and the convert Weilbach began bickering after Weilbach challenged Schmid’s interpretation of the psalm’s lyrics.¹ Cautious not to seem too aggressive before the judges, Zagelmaier reported that he had simply tried to understand why Weilbach found fault with the content of the psalm. Over the course of their conversation, Zagelmaier wanted Weilbach to admit the superior virtue of those who remain steadfast in their faith, even when faced by religious enemies. Grasping for an analogy, Zagelmaier brought up Weilbach’s father, who was Lutheran, just like you were once, and who often said he would sooner let his head be chopped off than ever abandon the Augsburg Confession. Zagelmaier had known Weilbach’s father and had respected the man’s religious commitment. Mentioning Weilbach’s father intended to contrast the father’s Lutheran loyalty with the younger Weilbach’s inconstancy. Thus, Zagelmaier’s next question was pure provocation: So what do you believe in now? One can easily imagine the biting ring of sarcasm as Zagelmaier emphasized the word now.

According to Zagelmaier’s own testimony, Weilbach articulated a confessionally neutral answer: I believe in the Holy Trinity.

Zagelmaier responded, So do I, but you have others besides to intercede on your behalf.

Yes, said Weilbach, referring to the Catholic Church’s cult of the saints, the blessed Virgin Mary and others as well.

Zagelmaier admitted to pushing Weilbach further: I don’t think the Virgin Mary can pray on your behalf. Did you learn that from your father, who belonged to the Augsburg Confession? Again, Zagelmaier felt compelled to remind Weilbach of the divide between his newly adopted Catholicism and his father’s Protestantism.

To this, Weilbach answered simply, No.

At this point in the interrogation, the judges’ questions became more pointed and less patient, unwilling to let Zagelmaier so freely narrate the conversation:

Question 9: Did not the arrested Zagelmaier unleash the following calumnious [lästerlich] words, accusing Weilbach of getting his beliefs about the Virgin Mary from the devil (God protect us), and stating that all who have fallen from the faith belong to the devil?

Zagelmaier’s Answer: What I said was that Lucifer had fallen from God [seÿ von Gott abgefallen] and became a devil, and as a consequence, I believe that all who fall from God belong to the devil, but I did not have any particular religion in mind when I said this. . . .

Question 11: Does the arrested not know that in the Holy Roman Empire, and especially here in the city of Augsburg, people are permitted to convert from the Catholic to the Augsburg Confession and in the other direction to the Catholic Religion?

Zagelmaier’s Answer: Yes, I know well that such is not forbidden.²

Zagelmaier then claimed that he was under the influence of drink when he engaged in this unfortunate conversation and that he had never spoken a single evil word against anybody his entire life. He also pleaded, I condemned no religion, for Christ Himself said not to condemn anyone, lest you also be condemned. After his examination, the magistrates warned him never to appear before them again and then released him. This interrogation functioned mostly as a didactic mechanism to reinforce Augsburg’s law against insulting or offensive speech directed against one of the city’s confessional parties. The Q&A was a secular catechism on civic behavior, and by ultimately conceding the rules of confessional parity in Augsburg, Zagelmaier had performed his role as citizen-catechumen. The magistrates expected that the humiliation of his court appearance and the threat of future punishment would cause Zagelmaier to think twice before mouthing off again.

This incident highlights several central themes addressed in this book. First and foremost, it reflects the difficulty of sustaining the minimal religious tolerance guaranteed by the Peace of Westphalia after 1648. On the imperial level, Calvinist, Catholic, and Lutheran parties to the Peace grudgingly conceded reciprocal political recognition to one another, and in a handful of localities like biconfessional Augsburg, neighborly coexistence—indeed civic parity—was enforced between Protestant and Catholic citizens. Contemporaries understood this resolution to decades of religious strife as a temporary fix, designed to restore peace until a way to reunite the fragmented Christian Church could be found. Hence, the Peace only offered a limited, pragmatic form of religious tolerance. Nevertheless, an imposed but peaceful coexistence could only function if imperial polities also allowed their subjects to convert, at least among the three official confessional churches, although such conversions were, as we will see, carefully managed and policed. Despite its legality, conversion was often viewed by secular and ecclesiastical authorities, as well as by members of the local community, as a disloyal, dishonorable, and disruptive act. For instance, Zagelmaier’s references to Lucifer’s fall and to Weilbach’s staunchly Lutheran father reminded his audience in both the tavern and the courtroom that Weilbach’s conversion to Catholicism had transgressed divine and paternal authority.

Few, if any, Christian authorities in post-1648 Germany saw the freedom to convert as an inherent or natural right protecting the individual’s inviolable private conscience. At stake was not the integrity and liberty of the autonomous individual. Had the freedom to convert been defined this way, it would have been inconsistent with Christian doctrine on either side of the confessional divide. The absolute, exclusionary logics of each confession denied the spiritual commensurability of those who changed religions in different directions; the various confessions lauded the converts they gained and vilified the apostates they lost to other religions. Rather than a form of toleration rooted in ethical or philosophical commitments, the freedom to convert was a practical, political compromise to curb public conflict, since conversion was always a public matter with wide-ranging consequences for family, community, parish, and polity. Conversion was, as I argue throughout this book, a site where communal, familial, ecclesiastical, and state interests collided with the choices, actions, and identities of converts themselves.

Furthermore, the phenomenon of conversion makes visible the social milieu of religious life in which every Christian, even those who chose never to change their confessional loyalties, was embedded, making its impact far greater than the net numbers of converts. Conversion was a possibility available to all Christians in post-Westphalia Germany, whether or not they recognized or acted upon it. Take Zagelmaier, for instance, who had left his hometown of Donauwörth and moved to Augsburg. Donauwörth, a Protestant city for much of the sixteenth century, fell into the hands of Maximilian, the Catholic Duke of Bavaria, in 1607. Maximilian re-Catholicized the city over the course of the Thirty Years’ War, but Zagelmaier, an unwavering Lutheran, chose to abandon his hometown rather than join the Catholic Church. Zagelmaier probably disparaged Weilbach’s decision to change faiths because the convert embodied a different, competing alternative and outcome. Zagelmaier’s loyalty to confession resulted in great personal loss, which explains his suspicion of those he saw as weak and irresolute. Hence, he was just as much affected by the social phenomenon of conversion as the convert Weilbach himself, because Zagelmaier’s own decision not to convert exposes the range of possibilities open to both men when their religious choices conflicted with the confessional affiliation of their families, neighbors, and ecclesiastical and political authorities. As ideal types for particular Christian identities, the convert from one Christian confession to another, whose faith had at one point faltered, and the stalwart, with unbending religious loyalties, were foils, not incommensurable polar opposites. Their relationship was reciprocal and mutually constitutive, so that the implications of conversion extended widely into the social fabric and exceeded the parameters of individual biographies.

Modern liberal regimes understand religion today as a matter of private conscience, a belief system rooted in internal faith, a personal preference that should be free of external pressures from state and society. Consequently modern discussions of religious conversion often describe it as either an inner psychological transformation or an individual choice in a marketplace of religious options.³ We also presume to judge conversions based upon the converts’ authenticity—in other words, the degree to which the converts’ exterior piety corresponds to interior conviction. True and false converts have different personal motives. Material gain, external pressures, or outright coercion supposedly motivates the insincere convert, while the sincere convert experiences a real, personal, inward change of heart and mind. Similar judgments also existed in early modern Christianity, but then, they were complicated by the fact that religion was not solely a personal matter, not merely an expression of faith or belief. Instead, religion was a fundamental marker of social belonging and a system of practices that cemented one’s affiliation to one’s community. As a result, leaving one religion for another was not a socially or politically neutral act.

Indeed, converts often became embroiled in very public conflicts with former coreligionists. Many historians have assumed that the confessional system outlined by the Peace of Westphalia (1648) succeeded in cementing political stability in the aftermath of the religious turmoil that began during the Luther Affair and ended with the Thirty Years’ War.⁴ Seen as a triumph of Reason of State, the Peace of Westphalia put an end to religious war in early modern Europe and shifted religious conflict from the battlefield into the private sphere.⁵ The imperial recognition of Catholicism, Calvinism, and Lutheranism seemingly neutralized confessional differences within the structures of imperial politics and law, permitting the rise of tolerance and secularization, or what Ian Hunter called the desacrilisation of politics.⁶ Furthermore, the Peace fixed the confessional status of most territorial and civic polities, which entrenched the Holy Roman Empire’s religious geography. By freezing the confessional map and thus barring religious expansionism through arbitrary military conquest, the Peace aimed to defang confessional tensions throughout the empire. Accordingly, 1648 ostensibly brought about the end of the age of confessional violence.⁷ Jane O. Newman has rightly criticized this view that the Peace of Westphalia marked the early modern beginning-of-the-end of faith-based politics as a relentlessly teleological narrative.⁸ In contrast to this picture of a stabilized, neutralized, and pacified confessional landscape, I argue that those who changed their confessional affiliations after 1648 fundamentally challenged the confessional borders mapped by the Peace of Westphalia. At a time when state and ecclesiastical elites cooperated to impose religious conformity upon their subjects, conversion was an act of nonconformity that disrupted the empire’s post-1648 confessional landscape and laid bare the contradictory impulses of the peace settlement.⁹ Therefore, neither the relative stability of religious confessions nor the waning of public expressions of religious loyalties and rivalries should be taken as givens after the Peace of Westphalia.¹⁰

This book examines how early modern German subjects who adopted a new religion challenged their relationships to powerful institutions, including church, state, community, and family. Membership in any imperial polity— whether an imperial city or principality—required conformity to the balance of confessional norms imposed within that polity. The norm in most imperial regimes was monoconfessionalism. Monoconfessional states sanctioned only one public church, either Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. Other polities in the empire offered varying possibilities for multiconfessional coexistence, including full parity. Yet in both cases, when subjects converted, they ran up against prescribed territorial and jurisdictional boundaries, a fact that frequently turned converts into political, social, and religious outcasts from their original communities. Displaced onto society’s margins, converts struggled against hostile and repressive governing authorities, yet paradoxically the act of conversion itself limited the church’s and state’s jurisdictional reach over their subjects’ religious identities.

Scholars in the past few decades have mostly discussed the history of early modern German religious pluralism using an explanatory model called confessionalization (Konfessionalisierung), developed by German historians to explain how the three major religious confessions in the Holy Roman Empire deployed religious indoctrination and conformity as tools for building a disciplined, orderly populace.¹¹ The religious chaos unleashed by the Luther Affair had sorely tested both ecclesiastical and political legitimacy. According to the confessionalization model, however, as principalities and cities chose either to institutionalize Protestant reform or remain loyal to Rome, church and state closely collaborated by using the disciplining and homogenizing effects of religious policy to consolidate and centralize power. Secular and ecclesiastical authorities viewed religious orthodoxy and orthopraxy as requirements for political order. Loyalty to confession equated with loyalty to the government. This merger of religious and political interests promoted new and extensive moral and social regulations. State policing of sexuality, marriage, parenthood, popular culture, consumption, and charity expanded as part of a broader agenda linking religious conformity, political obedience, and social stability. Historians have argued that this sweeping process of confessionalization, which touched upon all spheres of human life, had an integrative effect by uniting subjects into political communities with shared religious affiliations.¹² For Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, confessionalization’s integrative effect was a modernizing force in Germany that helped push states beyond their previous medieval limits by reinforcing state formation and centralization.¹³ Confessionalization permitted authorities to insert themselves more deeply into local communities, family life, and even the consciences of those under their jurisdiction.

Some historians have revealed important weaknesses in this explanatory model, noting that its overly top-down, state-driven perspective neglects on-the-ground social dynamics.¹⁴ Others have critiqued confessionalization for reducing the distinct histories of Catholicism, Calvinism, and Lutheranism to a functionally identical, unified trajectory, moving relentlessly toward modern norms, beliefs, and institutions. They insist, instead, that we take seriously the specificity and differences of distinct Catholic and Protestant confessional cultures during the post-Reformation period.¹⁵ In addition, some scholars have questioned the underlying methodological approach that informs the confessionalization thesis. Frank Fätkenheuer suggests, for instance, that a microhistorical approach would disrupt confessionalization’s overly determinative grand narrative by demonstrating the room for disobedience in the quotidian lives of common folk.¹⁶ Finally, recent work now speaks of more porous confessional boundaries, employing terms like interconfessional, transconfessional, or supraconfessional to emphasize the interactive, entangled histories of Protestantism and Catholicism or religious phenomena that surpass narrowly confessional parameters.¹⁷

Taken together, these critical insights suggest that to understand early modern religious life, we cannot treat the ruling elite’s views, policies, and institutions as absolute or totalizing. Consequently, in this book my examination of religious conversion extends from the political and ecclesiastical centers to the boundaries of post-Westphalian German confessional communities. Conversions between rival Christian camps challenged sharp confessional borders erected by institutional authorities to contain and mold the religious identities of their subjects.¹⁸ As Dagmar Freist recently noted, the interfaces where confessions came into contact had greater influence on the emergence of religious identities than the normative separation of the confessions.¹⁹ The borders between the confessions—the zone of contact where conversions were most likely to take place—were the social spaces where religious life was most dynamic and most precarious. Thinking systematically about conversion allows us to consider the possibility that people could change their religious identities and loyalties despite, or perhaps even because of, the regulatory and disciplinary practices of churches, states, and communities. In other words, the very process of confessionalization produced paradoxical effects, for by creating clearly demarcated boundaries between rival confessions, confessionalization also produced an in-between space where people could challenge religious conformity by rejecting one confession and opting for another.²⁰

Furthermore, by examining conversion during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, precisely the period when many scholars assume confessionalization had already reached its culmination, we learn, in fact, that the process of confessional consolidation was far from complete. Conversion repeatedly complicated church and state attempts to fix people’s religious and political loyalties and instill obedience in them. As Anton Schindling suggests, confessionalization was a phenomenon that existed in its most precise sense at confessional border zones and spaces of [interconfessional] conflict, where the experience, perception, and meaning of neighborly competition led to unusual stresses.²¹ One such stress was the act of transgressing confessional boundaries by converting, and authorities often reacted vigorously to contain this threat when it occurred. By challenging confessional uniformity and homogeneity, converts constantly reminded the authorities of the dangerous yet inevitable existence of religious pluralism, diversity, and difference.

The multiple new institutions that developed after 1648 in response to the dangers of religious conversion, like Augsburg’s charitable Convert Chest or Bavaria’s administrative Convert Committee, exemplify this ongoing policing and management of religious difference, even after the Peace of Westphalia. The state’s constant need to fortify confessional boundaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries helps us understand why, in the West’s supposedly secular, tolerant, and liberal modernity, conflicts over religious difference continued to explode into the political landscape. Despite the development of greater intra-Christian ecumenicism in the West, the basic logic of religious exclusion still operates within modern liberalism’s pretense to a principled secular tolerance. We see this in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century hostilities directed against European Judaism and non-Western religions in former colonial territories, as well as in contemporary debates over the possibility of incorporating Muslims into European nations.²² Although these forms of intolerance have their own specific histories, they reveal that post-Westphalian models of state-mandated tolerance were premised on defining the boundaries of exclusion as much as opening the gates of inclusion.²³

The politics of religious conversion after 1648 show the limits placed on toleration and coexistence as formulated by the Peace of Westphalia, which intended to contain and manage religious differences rather than fully dismantle them. As a result, it created internal contradictions that troubled the confessionalized state’s shaky foundations. The central contradiction of the Westphalian settlement was as follows: while the Peace guaranteed the political right of imperial polities to impose religious norms upon their subjects and citizens, it also legally recognized the conditions of religious pluralism that necessitated tolerance among the three confessions in the empire. Despite sanctioning state policing of religious norms, the Peace also offered legal protection to Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran subjects living as religious minorities in polities where a rival church monopolized public worship, and furthermore permitted subjects to convert among the three official churches, regardless of their political rulers’ confessional affiliation. The tension between institutionalized intolerance and limited toleration coalesced in the right of emigration (jus emigrandi), which stated that recent converts and established religious minorities could leave their hometowns or territories if their religious beliefs came into conflict with the official religion of the state. In fact, this right was usually mobilized by imperial polities as a mechanism to police orthodoxy in their territorial boundaries by expelling residents charged with religious nonconformity, including converts labeled by the state as apostates. Toleration imposed by law did not neutralize the social hostilities of family, community, church, or state toward converts who abandoned their original religion. The Peace simply transferred such hostilities from social spaces to the administrative and judicial space of the courtroom, which consequently established a continuous state of simmering interconfessional conflict within the imperial realm. Precisely because most religious conflicts were channeled through state authorities for resolution, the policing of confessional difference institutionalized religious hostility, suspicion, and competition within the realm of law and politics. Thus, my findings question the assumption that the Peace of Westphalia laid the groundwork for a liberal, secular, and tolerant society by relocating religious debate and difference into the private sphere. Instead, quotidian religiosity continued to be a public and political phenomenon well into the late eighteenth century. In sum, the problem of post-Westphalian religious pluralism was precisely that tolerance did not end conflict but rather institutionalized it, thus rendering even more visible the boundaries of religious difference, which converts traversed when they decided to change their religion.²⁴

My discussion of boundaries implies a divided geographic space, so this book investigates both the local and translocal geographies of religious conversion.²⁵ The territorial center of my research is the diocese of Augsburg, a Catholic ecclesiastical jurisdiction that encompassed a number of secular jurisdictions, including Lutheran, Catholic, and biconfessional cities and territories. To the east of the diocese lay the Catholic Electorate of Bavaria and to the west the Lutheran Duchy of Württemberg. This Catholic diocese, wedged between two powerful territorial states with different religious alignments and sprinkled with Protestant urban polities, was a bustling stage upon which the drama of conversion was performed. Crisscrossing this stage were converts from the immediate region as well as from around the Holy Roman Empire and beyond. Acting like magnets that pulled converts toward them, the region’s cities offer the best window into the lives of women and men who chose to change their confessional affiliations.²⁶ Even monoconfessional cities that legally excluded confessional nonconformists from full civic membership had religious minorities living and working alongside the official confessional majority. The constant presence of religious diversity in cities, no matter how minimal, opened a space for conversions.

Exemplifying the hold that the confessionalization thesis has had on the analysis of religious conversion, two excellent studies of cities in the diocese of Augsburg have argued that despite the proximity of diverse religious communities in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, conversion was a cultural taboo that people rarely violated. Wolfgang Petz’s study of the double city of Kempten (an urban settlement politically divided between a Lutheran free imperial city and a Catholic monastic city and its surrounding territory) and Étienne François’s book on biconfessional Augsburg both discuss conversion, but dispose of the topic in brief sections within their larger analysis of Catholic-Lutheran relations. According to François, conversion was fully taboo (vollkommen tabuisiert), a betrayal (Verrat) and renunciation (Verleugnung) of family and confessional community.²⁷ Given the legality of conversion in biconfessional Augsburg, the surprisingly few converts that he discovered in the city archive were, for him, proof of "the insuperability [Unüberwindbarkeit] of the boundaries dividing the confessions and the powerful internalization of the respective confessional identities.²⁸ Petz describes the space between the confessions in Kempten as a social no man’s land, pointing out that a person who entered into that space by converting destroyed the bridge back to his community.²⁹ The very fact that in the archival sources conversions in either direction were unfortunately . . . not systematically recorded becomes, for Petz, proof of the rarity of converts: the lack of documentation is presumably because [conversions] so rarely occurred."³⁰

I fully agree with Petz’s and François’s astute observations that religious conversion was a deeply transgressive act and that confessional boundaries became most evident and visible in their very breach as converts crossed from one confession to another. I differ, however, from their shared conclusion that the taboo against conversion was effectively enforced and only infrequently violated. Their conclusions seem persuasive if we limit our perspective to a single urban locality, where it might appear as though few city residents abandoned their old faith to adopt a new religion. By broadening the geographic scope of my analysis beyond a conventional locality, the geographic mobility of converts comes into focus. More people converted than the evidence from any single city archive might suggest. Despite François’s and Petz’s impressive archival research, they underestimated the flow of converts who came through the city as well as their impact upon civic religious and political culture. This migratory flow is difficult to assess when historians limit their focus to one place, for migratory converts either do not appear in local records or only briefly until they move. Since experiences of dislocation and mobility were primary characteristics of changing one’s faith, the failure of previous scholarship to grasp the extent of converts’ migratory patterns left an important dimension of religious conversion unexplored.³¹

The geographic and temporal breadth of this book makes systematic statistical analysis of the rates of conversion difficult. Ideally, we would like to know the percentage of converts who chose one confession over another, the gender proportions among converts, or the average age and social status of those who decided to change their faiths. But I found few reliable serial sources that did not have significant gaps.³² Statistics aim to transform historical details into interpretive representations of larger social patterns. Certainly I found regular patterns among the choices converts made but also fascinating divergences and irregularities. These exceptional cases tell us as much as a statistically verifiable norm, by showing how dynamic and flexible the process of conversion was, how open converts were to a variety of possible, often unpredictable trajectories. Conversion took place according to rules established by the authorities, but converts had room to improvise.³³ How conversions unfolded was context driven and situational. Two converts with similar backgrounds—for instance, two servant maids who changed their confessional loyalties after moving to a new town—might make similar choices, but one might find spiritual comfort and succor from her new coreligionists, while the other might become a poor, unwanted social outcast. By telling these stories in microhistorical detail, I tease out a range of strategies and choices available to converts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries as they struggled to give shape and meaning to their own religious lives, but I also capture different possible outcomes, since similar decisions could lead to varied results.

In this regard, I heed Joan Scott’s warning against using narrative archival sources to derive general rules of historical causation. This approach to writing history undervalue[s] the richness of the stories from which [that history] is drawn and ignore[s] the stories themselves—their form and content.³⁴ More than mere anecdotes, the stories I tell here, in Scott’s words, "remind us of the strangeness that refuses to be systematized (or centered) by the order we want to impose on things. In their particularity they resist the simplicity of universal assumptions based on sameness; instead they remind us that difference is the very ground of our common humanity."³⁵ My microhistorical approach offers an interpretive key to explain how church and state managed confessional difference within and across their jurisdictions and how people on the ground thought, lived, and maneuvered within those differences. These stories emerge from an eclectic range of documents composed by converts, their relatives and neighbors, and the clergymen and secular magistrates who ruled them. While I mine these sources for empirical evidence, I also view these texts as products of early modern institutional culture and social practices. Take, for example, converts’ supplication letters asking church or civic officials for money or shelter. Such letters are incredibly useful sources filled with data for historians, but they functioned differently for the early modern actors who wrote and read them. For them, supplications were material objects that, once delivered to a charitable institution, helped forge a link between converts and the church or state. They were also rhetorical objects in which converts performed the role of humble subordinate to help soften the authorities’ reservations about foreign, migratory converts. Supplication letters might tell us where converts came from, who their parents were, and when and where they converted. But just beneath the surface, these documents reveal even more. They expose their authors’ social dislocation as well as their strategies for overcoming obstacles, suspicions, and even outright attacks on their character. At the same time, the submissive tone of supplications let charitable institutions reinsert migratory converts within a social hierarchy. Thus, to analyze the content of such letters, we must account for the social and political practices that turned the convert into a supplicant in the first place.

The supplication letters, courtroom testimonies, and administrative records, which narrate the stories of early modern conversions, highlight the immersion of converts within intricate power relationships and institutional contexts.³⁶ At first, as products imprinted with the authority of church and state, such archival sources seem to obscure the authentic voice of the convert. However, our urge to x-ray the soul and apply a strict standard of authenticity to measure a convert’s sincerity is a modern fantasy based on our own sense that religious belief is fundamentally internal, private, and personal. Authenticity presumes that a person’s external actions and expressions conform to an inner core set of beliefs. When converts appeared before figures of authority and played the specific roles expected of them to gain some social advantage—the pious but submissive supplicant, for instance—we too easily question their religious authenticity, since their religiosity seems a smoke screen for their real (that is, material) interests. The interplay between a convert’s needs, interests, and self-presentation, on the one hand, and the institutional demands placed upon the convert, on the other, seems to compromise the integrity of the conversion. Yet in the early modern period, conversions were far more likely to be measured and judged by their conformity to external religious norms than to the internal light of conscience. If we consider the many people involved and invested in just one person’s conversion, we see that the standard of authenticity wrongly reduces conversion to an individual act related solely to the convert’s personal experiences, inner beliefs, or self-interest. In fact, conversion generated and dissolved social bonds among multiple