Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia

By David M. Luebke

The pluralization of Christian religion was the defining fact of cultural life in sixteenth-century Europe. Everywhere they took root, ideas of evangelical reform disturbed the unity of religious observance on which political community was founded. By the third quarter of the sixteenth century, one or another form of Christianity had emerged as dominant in most territories of the Holy Roman Empire.In Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia, David Luebke examines a territory that managed to escape that fate—the prince-bishopric of Münster, a sprawling ecclesiastical principality and the heart of an entire region in which no single form of Christianity dominated. In this confessional "no-man’s-land," a largely peaceable order took shape and survived well into the mid-seventeenth century, a unique situation, which raises several intriguing questions: How did Catholics and Protestants manage to share parishes for so long without religious violence? How did they hold together their communities in the face of religious pluralization? Luebke responds by examining the birth, maturation, old age, and death of a biconfessional "regime"—a system of laws, territorial agreements, customs, and tacit understandings that enabled Roman Catholics and Protestants, Lutherans as well as Calvinists, to cohabit the territory’s parishes for the better part of a century.

In revealing how these towns were able to preserve peace and unity—in the Age of Religious Wars— Hometown Religion attests to the power of toleration in the conduct of everyday life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Feb 12, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813938417

David M. Luebke

David M. Luebke is Professor of History at the University of Oregon and has specialized in the history of social protest movements in early modern Germany as well as the formation of religious denominations during and after the Protestant Reformation. His publications include Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (2016) and, as co-editor, the Spektrum volumes Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany (2012) and Mixed Matches: Transgressive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (2014).

Book preview

STUDIES IN EARLY MODERN GERMAN HISTORY

H. C. Erik Midelfort, Editor

Hometown Religion

REGIMES of COEXISTENCE in EARLY MODERN WESTPHALIA

David M. Luebke

UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA PRESS

Charlottesville & London

University of Virginia Press

© 2016 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 2016

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Luebke, David Martin, 1960–

Title: Hometown religion : regimes of coexistence in early modern Westphalia /

David M. Luebke.

Description: Charlottesville : University of Virginia Press, 2016. | Series: Studies in early modern German history | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2015030174| ISBN 9780813938400 (cloth : alk. paper) |

ISBN 9780813938417 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Münster (Ecclesiastical principality)—Church history—16th century. | Münster (Ecclesiastical principality—Church history—17th century.

Classification: LCC BR358.M85 L84 2016 | DDC 274.3/56106—dc23

LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030174

For Yoshiko and Hana

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Order and Belief: The Nascence of a Biconfessional Regime

2. The Rites of Passage: Religious Pluralization and the Liturgies of Accommodation

3. Eucharist: Rites of Community and the Limits of Accommodation

4. Spaces: From Confessional Segregation to Marching Out

5. Clergy: Concubines, Books, and the Disciplining of Parochial Staff

6. Burial: Faith, Death, and the Defense of Plurality

Conclusion: Religious Regimes

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book began with an accidental discovery. I had been researching a related but different topic when I noticed a curious entry in the catalogue for some fiscal records housed in the Westphalian State Archive in Münster. The entry referred to a cache of documents bearing the title Iconoclasm in Warendorf, 1620 (Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Westfalen, Fürstbistum Münster [Prince-Bishopric of Münster] Hofkammer I 1, Bildersturm in Warendorf, 1620). Why, I wondered, was a bundle of papers about iconoclasm filed among fiscal records? Had they been misplaced? The date also struck me as odd. Westphalia, the region in which Warendorf is located, had seen its share of image breaking. But most of it had occurred almost a century before, in 1534 and 1535, when Anabaptism had flourished in Warendorf, Münster, and a few other Westphalian towns. What might explain this seemingly late outburst of religious violence? My curiosity piqued, I ordered up the bundle, and began reading.

What I found there surprised me in ways I had not anticipated. The bundle contained records of a formal inquest to find out who had destroyed a large stone crucifix called the Sassenberg Cross, which stood in a corner of the burial ground adjacent to the parish church of St. Laurentius. The attack had been discovered at dawn on Sunday morning, 15 March 1620. The cross had been toppled from its pedestal; beside it lay two statues, of Saint John and the Virgin Mary, also cast down. The protocol recorded that the town’s magistrates met immediately and agreed on measures to identify and seize the culprits. That afternoon, they launched a formal inquest and over the following week interrogated no fewer than eighty-four individuals, including thirteen night watchmen, three hostellers, and thirty-six publicans. Eventually a culprit was identified, but the miscreant had already skipped town by then, so the investigation fizzled.

The first surprise lurked in the religious inclinations of the magistrates, the priest, and the population at large. A little digging soon revealed that most, perhaps all, of the town’s magistrates considered themselves Protestant—Lutheran or Calvinist. Why were Protestant magistrates rushing to prosecute an image breaker who shared their faith? Surely not out of love for Johann Assmann, the priest at St. Laurentius, an orthodox Roman Catholic and stern opponent of the evangelical creeds. Were the Protestant magistrates secretly involved in the iconoclasm, as a few higher authorities suspected? Was their investigation all for show? Or was their zeal to prosecute genuine, motivated by some interest held in common with a Catholic priest? And what of the attack itself? In the decades since 1535, there had been little trace of religious violence in Westphalia. What had changed in 1620 to provoke this latter-day outbreak?

These rather small questions led to larger ones: how had Roman Catholics and Protestants managed to coexist in the Westphalian towns, apparently without serious disturbance, for nearly a century? What structures or behavior had held the disruptive force of religion in check? What rules, formal or informal, governed that behavior? If, indeed, it proved that a discernible set of practices had enabled peaceable relations among the Christian religions of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Westphalia, how might the existence of such a regime alter our understanding of religious conflict and toleration in early modern Europe more generally? One research trip led to another, and another, and by the time I was finished, what had begun as an idle foray into a case of iconoclasm had resulted in this book.

Along the way, this project has benefited enormously from the help and generosity of many institutions, colleagues, and friends. A grant from the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) enabled me to get a running jump on the research, the bulk of which I conducted in the archives of Münster—the metropolis of Westphalia, as it was once called. For their patience and generosity, I am indebted to the archivists of all of those institutions: the Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen; the Stadtarchiv Münster; the Bischöfliches Archiv Münster; and the Landesverband Westfalen-Lippe, as well as the Kreisarchiv Warendorf. At the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität in Münster I also encountered a vibrant community of young historians—Jan Brademann, Antje Flüchter, Bastian Gillner, Elizabeth Harding, Natalie Krentz, Andre Krischer, Tim Neu, Andreas Pietsch, Steffi Ruether, Michael Sikora, Sita Steckel, Reemda Tieben—who individually and as a group shaped my thinking more, I suspect, than they realize. But my greatest debts go to two professors at the university in Münster, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger and Werner Freitag, whose encouragement and generosity nourished this project from start to finish.

I have many debts on this side of the Atlantic, as well. A summer research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities enabled me to return to Münster in 2007. Another, similar grant from the University of Oregon supported my research in 2008. My academic department and its supporters, especially Spencer Brush and Julie and Rocky Dixon, helped to fund yet another research trip. The Oregon Humanities Center supported my research on two occasions, in 2004 and again in 2009, by providing the time and quiet space to impose some order on my notes and to get writing done. The Oregon Humanities Center also gave generous financial support for the publication of this book, as did the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of Oregon.

In collecting my thoughts and writing them down, I have relied on the advice and criticism of many colleagues. In addition to that of Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Werner Freitag, and their colleagues in Münster, I have benefited enormously from the advice of many colleagues, who have read all or part of this book in manuscript form. Jesse Spohnholz, whose work on religion in the river town of Wesel influenced my thinking profoundly, critiqued chapters 1–4. So did Duane Corpis, whose advice on conceptualizing spaces proved especially valuable. David Whitford helped me to sharpen several theological points; Karen Spierling and Michael Halvorson helped me with my chapter on baptism; Simone Laqua, who knows the history of women in sixteenth-century Münster better than anyone, shared invaluable advice on chapter 5; and my colleague at the University of Oregon, Vera Keller, read all of the chapters and strengthened every one. Thomas A. Brady Jr. encouraged me at every phase of this project. My thanks also go to the two readers who reviewed this book for the University of Virginia Press, who, like the others, pointed me in directions I might not have considered without them and spared me the embarrassment of dubious claims I might have made without their counsel. The errors that remain, of course, are all mine.

Finally, I owe a special thanks to my wife, Yoshiko. Long before I began this project, she introduced me to her native Japan and to the radically different, often decidedly instrumental, attitudes about the relationship between religion beliefs and ritual observances that prevail there. Every page of this book bears the stamp of that experience. For that, and for her unwavering support through every stage of this book’s evolution, I am forever devoted.

Introduction

On 18 October 1597, Goswin Betuleius sacrificed his career on an altar of religious conviction. The rector of a Latin school in the Westphalian town of Warendorf, he had been arrested and jailed a few weeks earlier on the suspicion that he was using his office to fill his pupils’ heads with Protestant doctrine.¹ Specifically, Betuleius stood accused of disobeying a diocesan Edict on Schools, promulgated in 1591, which obligated all schoolteachers, on their oaths of office, to adhere to the curriculum of the Jesuit cathedral school in Münster, the capital city. After Betuleius was released on bond, his employers—the mayors and town magistrates of Warendorf—demanded that he obey the Edict on Schools and conform to the Münster curriculum.² Otherwise, they wrote, the town council would have no choice but to release him from his duties. Betuleius mulled over the council’s ultimatum for a day or so, then gave his decision. May God preserve me, he wrote, from teaching from [Peter] Canisius and other such [Catholic] authors, against my conscience.³

In many ways, the schoolteacher’s tale epitomizes the politics of religious cohabitation and coexistence in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Germany—although not in the ways they might appear at first glance. Superficially, his story reads like a hometown reenactment of Martin Luther’s legendary confrontation with Charles V, the personification of supreme secular authority in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, at an assembly of the Imperial Diet in the city of Worms in April 1521. Forced either to repudiate his writings or to face an imperial ban, the great reformer is said to have spoken these words of heroic defiance:

My conscience is captive to the Word of God. Thus I cannot and will not recant, for going against my conscience is neither safe nor salutary. I can do no other, here I stand, God help me. Amen.⁴

Like the great reformer, Goswin Betuleius refused to deny his faith.

But any resemblance between the two ends there. For one thing, Warendorf’s magistrates were anything but the stern enforcers of Catholic orthodoxy. Most were Protestant and had known about Betuleius’s deviant pedagogy all along. When they hired him in 1594, Betuleius presented a curriculum replete with exercises from the hugely influential French Protestant rhetorician, Petrus Ramus (1515–1572), and his fellow Huguenot, Omer Talon (1510–1581).⁵ As for his oath of office, the council had allowed him to swear a modified oath that obligated him only to follow the Münster curriculum as far as possible.⁶ Throughout his tenure, however, the Catholic families in town had pressured the rector to refrain from teaching Protestant religion, and eventually diocesan authorities launched an investigation into his pedagogy.⁷ Warendorf’s magistrates faced a Hobson’s choice: either they could defend Betuleius and risk alienating the town’s Catholics, or, at the risk of alienating Betuleius’s Protestant supporters, they could force him to comply with Edict on Schools. Thus, the Protestant magistrates found themselves enforcing Roman Catholic orthodoxy against their own hireling.

Told in full, the schoolteacher’s tale is not about heroic defiance or bold theological stances. It is about pragmatic compromises, obfuscation, and porous boundaries between one creed and another. The aftermath of his firing, too, tells not of ruthless repression but of tacit agreements and accommodations. Following Betuleius’s departure, the council insisted that all rectors and schoolteachers follow the Münster curriculum to the letter to prevent further interference by diocesan authorities with the town’s internal religious affairs.⁸ Some rectors, such as Christopher Rhamanus (1600–1608), were Protestant; others, such as Johannes Hobelius (1608–16), were Catholic; all were under orders to refrain from badmouthing pupils on the basis of their religion.⁹ To keep the Protestants happy, the council also allowed private schools (Klippschulen) to operate, including one for the religious instruction of Protestant children, run by an evangelically inclined sacristan at the Catholic parish church of St. Laurentius.¹⁰ This arrangement probably grated on Catholics and Protestants alike. Awkward or not, however, it endured into 1630s.¹¹

This book is about communities, such as Warendorf, that harbored more than one Christian faith and how they coped with the vagaries of religious diversity during the century after Luther’s dramatic confrontation with Emperor Charles. Specifically, this book seeks to reconstruct the regimes of religious coexistence (as I will call them) that took shape in response to the great pluralization of beliefs and liturgical practices unleashed by the reforms emanating from Wittenberg and Zurich.¹² Most of these regimes strove to preserve at least the appearance of unity among parishioners. In the manner of worship, this could be achieved by modifying the rite to accommodate dissenters, or it could be achieved by segregating sacred time and space in such a way that Catholics and Protestants might at least worship in the same, common church. Other regimes sought to preserve formal unity by recognizing only one public rite while allowing the adherents of dissenting creeds to worship in private. Still others allowed distinct communities to worship openly in separate venues while regulating religious observance with the aim of smothering the violent potential of credal divisions. Sometimes these modes overlapped: in post-Reformation Amsterdam, for example, the masking of formally private Catholic worship was thin to the point of erasing the difference between private and public.¹³ All of these regimes built on what Willem Frijhoff calls the ecumenicity of everyday life (omgangsecumene)—the informal indulgence that neighbors showed one another, both in private and in public, in the face of disagreements over religion and despite the objections of purists.¹⁴

All of these regimes, in other words, were built not from the stones of principle but from weaker stuff, the thatch and daub of compromise and avoidance. Their architects sought to reconcile a plurality of Christian faiths with a corporatist understanding of society and politics—the notion that every community, great or small, formed an organic body, governed by a single mind, in which the well-being of every member depended vitally on all the others. This propensity to fuse religious and political community was strongest in walled cities and towns, where the legitimacy of government derived in large measure from the belief that magistrates bore some responsibility for collective spiritual well-being in the afterlife.¹⁵ Reinforcing it was the nearly universal assumption that one’s place of residence, not one’s religious inclinations, should determine the parish to which one belonged.

Conceptually, this reconciliation was no easy task: few ideas were more alien to sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe than the proposition that religious community was separable from civic community. Stranger still was the idea that religion could constitute a categorically subordinate form of association. Strangest of all was the proposition that two competing and mutually exclusive forms of Christian religion could legitimately inhabit a single political or civic space.¹⁶ By its very nature, therefore, the pluralization of religion threatened the unity of religious observance on which communal welfare was assumed to depend. How to domesticate religion, to paraphrase Thomas A. Brady Jr., was the dominant question of sixteenth-century communal politics.¹⁷

The shelves of university libraries groan under the weight of tomes devoted to the conflicts and tensions that religious pluralization generated at all levels of society and politics—from the stratospheric heights of diplomacy, dynastic rivalry, and imperial politicking to struggles over religious reform on a territorial scale within the individual estates of the Empire, and even down to the quotidian world of religion-inspired strife in cities, towns, and villages. At every level, too, the variety of allergic responses was as vast as the empire was diverse. Authorities might react to the pluralization of religious beliefs by aligning forcefully with one side or the other and by fighting pluralization with violence, judicial and otherwise—a response to which the corpses of some five thousand martyrs to religion bore witness.¹⁸ Others responded by driving heretics into exile—a kind of religious cleansing.¹⁹ Still others responded with the firm but gentler methods of persuasion and instruction.²⁰ Militants on both sides of the controversy over religion, as contemporaries called it, could draw on a vast reservoir of polemical texts in which one side denounced the other as agents of the Turk, the Devil, or both.²¹

In light of the conflict that pluralization could trigger, it is easy to imagine the Reformation’s aftermath simply as an epoch of strident confrontation between mutually exclusive, politically unified, and ideologically coherent movements (Bewegungen), each laying exclusive claim to the status of true religion, each making totalizing demands against the obedience of their members, and each locked with the others in constant battles (Kämpfe), tussles (Wirren), wrestling matches (Ringen), or unrest (Unruhen).²² Seen from this perspective, the history of religion in the post-Reformation era reads like a process of assimilation, in which local religious customs were coerced or cajoled into conformity with authoritative registers of orthodoxy and orthopraxy issued from the top down: for Catholics, the canons and decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63); for Reformed Germans, the Heidelberg Catechism (1563); and for Lutherans, the Book of Concord (1580).

In this sense, confessionalization, as historians call it, was fundamentally a matter of popular religious instruction. It is also a story about the consolidation of state power in early modern Europe: ecclesiastical authorities on both sides of the religious controversy forged conservative and mutually beneficial alliances with secular lords and magistrates, the better to mobilize political, social, and ideological resources for the struggle ahead. Those who in the midst of such battles strove to reconcile religious differences, who steered a middle path between them, or who adapted liturgies to accommodate a plurality of religious tastes among the faithful were easily dismissed as losers in the great game of history. Needless to say, the often deviant and syncretistic religious identities of ordinary parishioners were of little more than passing interest.²³

Yet we know that in countless villages and towns throughout the empire, parishioners who adhered to the old faith lived cheek by jowl, often for generations on end, with neighbors and kin who were more inclined toward the new. Time and again, ordinary parishioners exhibited an accommodating stance, in some cases indifference, toward confessional divisions.²⁴ We also know that processes of differentiation and segregation took generations to complete; full assimilation, arguably, was never achieved. And as a growing body of research has shown, priests and magistrates scattered throughout the empire answered the challenge of pluralization not with force but with accommodation.²⁵

How? Surely not by invoking some inclusive norm as an alternative to the exclusive truth claims embedded in the transcripts of confessional orthodoxy. Lest there be any confusion on this point: with few exceptions, the enablers of religious accommodation did not embrace the idea of religious toleration as a positive good or as the guarantee of free conscience. To be sure, the modern sense of toleration as a positive moral good was not unavailable intellectually to sixteenth-century Germans. The writings of Sébastien Castellio, for example, arguably the first exponent of religious toleration in the modern sense, circulated widely in Germany, including in Westphalia.²⁶ One who grasped the modern concept of toleration was an anonymous Austrian writer who, in 1624, likened the empire’s plural regime to a creature with many legs, all of which it needed to get around.²⁷ Pluralist metaphors were rare, however. Even sixteenth-century exponents of irenicism and moderation, such as Bishop of Naumburg, Julius Pflug, or the military commander and diplomat, Lazarus von Schwendi, ultimately regarded biconfessional regimes, no matter how durable, as temporary expedients.²⁸ If it was used at all, the term toleration was used most often to describe the social equivalent of a body’s capacity to withstand pain. A village or town tolerated the existence of religious subcultures much as a body might tolerate an ulcer or a case of gout. In this sense, as Jesse Spohnholz reminds us, toleration required the deep conviction that someone else’s beliefs were not only wrong, but dangerous.²⁹ There was, in short, no escaping the tension between religious pluralization and political unity.

As the chapters of this book show, that tension often generated conflict, and sometimes it was violent. In April 1594, for example, Protestants posted a lampoon to the door of St. Laurentius church in Warendorf defaming the priest, Johann Hoyer, as a traitor, a whore chaser, a marriage breaker, and a toady of Jesuits.³⁰ From 1595 on, the church and the adjacent burial yard were targets of repeated attacks, culminating in 1620 with an iconoclastic assault on the so-called Sassenberg Cross, a giant crucifix that stood in one corner of the churchyard. Nor was Hoyer spared further humiliation: in September 1598, in the midst of a plague epidemic, someone in the church tower poured fluid on him—was it blood? urine?—staining his garment.³¹ In Bocholt, tensions between Catholics and Protestants ignited a fistfight inside the church of St. George when town council elections for 1611 overturned an existing distribution of seats between the two religions.³²

Such outbursts, however, meant not that conflict over religion was the normal state of affairs but that it was one among many possible modes of interaction in everyday life.³³ Typically, regimes of cohabitation reproduced a calculation of potential costs and benefits, like the deliberations of Warendorf’s town council writ large, in which the destructive potential of conflict over religion was deemed to outweigh the advantages of imposing uniform belief and observance. Nor did controversy over religion exclude the possibility that magistrates might defend a tolerant regime, however distasteful, for reasons other than toleration per se. Proponents of accommodation might advance some compensatory norm, such as peace, friendship, or Christian love, all of which were invoked by the Imperial Religious Peace promulgated in Augsburg in 1555.³⁴ Or, like Julius Pflug and Lazarus Schwendi, they might appeal to German patriotism.³⁵ In villages and towns, mayors and magistrates might invoke custom and tradition in defense of biconfessional order. Thus in 1607, for example, the guildmasters of Münster insisted that the confessionists—a widely used term for adherents of the Augsburg Confession—should be tolerated here, as in times past.³⁶ Or they might invoke the norm of civic concord—concordia—as a substitute for credal unity and buttress it with the pragmatic argument that religious accommodation was the best defense of civic privilege and political autonomy.

The forms that such accommodation might take were as many and varied as the empire was diverse. Some of these regimes are well known—for example, Augsburg, the great southern German metropolis and imperial free city where neither creed prevailed over the other.³⁷ Through many tribulations, its governing elites worked out an intricate system for sharing power, distributing parochial resources, and, eventually, differentiating occupations among the two lawful faiths, Lutheran and Catholic. Similar regimes formed in several smaller imperial cities.³⁸ But few enjoyed the prominence of Augsburg’s elaborate scheme; few were so densely woven into the fabric of imperial law on religion or the balance of power between the Christian faiths; few persisted as long. Rather, most were small-scale, ad hoc responses to pluralization; some, like Augsburg’s regime and the informal arrangements that formed in the prince-bishopric of Osnabrück, eventually were codified in imperial law.³⁹ Many more were fleeting and, under pressure, eventually succumbed to conform in doctrine and observance.

At the center of attention in this book is the regime of religious coexistence that emerged in the Westphalian prince-bishopric of Münster, the largest ecclesiastical territory in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. There, as the first chapter shows, a combination of factors—historical precedent, dynastic ambition, aristocratic self-interest, civic privilege, and the constraints of imperial and territorial law—enabled the formation of a regime that allowed Protestants to live and worship peaceably among their Catholic neighbors. Its basic contours resembled the structures that were developing beyond the imperial frontier, in the northern Netherlands, only with the roles reversed: while it recognized only one official creed—the Roman Catholic—Münster’s regime also gave wide latitude to parish priests and patrons to experiment with church ritual. Parish priests could adapt Catholic liturgy to meet some, if not necessarily all, of their Protestant parishioner’s liturgical desires. To Protestant nobles and evangelically inclined monastic establishments, it offered the freedom to reform religion within the parishes under their patronage. Indeed, the very durability of this regime owed in no small measure to an institutional conservatism that, by preserving existing church structures and the dominance of nobility within them, both prevented any formal change in the territory’s credal status and left nobles free to reform religion on their own estates.⁴⁰

Fig. 1 (on following pages). The Prince-Bishopric of Münster, c. 1640. Colorized copperplate by Willem Jansz. Blaeu after Johannes Gigas. The map is oriented with west at the top. The towns discussed in this book were situated in the southern half of the prince-bishopric, on the left-hand side of the map. The prince-bishopric’s western border, visible at the top of the map, abuts the Dutch provinces of Zutphen and Twente. (Landesarchiv NRW-Abteilung Westfalen, Karten A 8681)

Nobles and monasteries were by no means the only beneficiaries of this system. It also nurtured privileged cities and towns, most of which contained large numbers of Protestants. As R. Po-Chia Hsia’s brilliant study of the capital city shows, a large crypto-Protestant minority continued to reside, even flourish, in Münster throughout the period.⁴¹ But the largest and liveliest concentrations of Protestants were found not in the capital but in the dozen or so medium-size towns, such as Warendorf, that dotted the Westphalian countryside. There, Protestant populations were not hidden but out in the open, not withering but growing in strength, as the sixteenth century wore on. There, too, existing structures of church governance reinforced, as often as not, lay control over religious affairs—a necessary precondition, in the context of that time and place, for peaceful cohabitation among plural Christian faiths. Through many trials and transformations, the princebishopric’s regime of religious coexistence persisted well into the seventeenth century.

There is an irony in this—namely, that Münster had been the scene of terrible religious violence and bloodshed. In January 1534, a militant faction of millenarian Anabaptists seized control of city government in the capital and attempted to transform the city in apocalyptic anticipation of the Second Coming of Christ. Under the charismatic leadership of Jan Beuckelszoon van Leiden, the revolutionary government made adult baptism obligatory, introduced plural marriage, and established community of goods. After a long and costly siege, a coalition of Catholic and Protestant forces defeated the Anabaptist Kingdom, tried and executed its leaders, and dispossessed and dispersed its adherents. The demographic consequences were catastrophic. Hsia estimates that the capital city lost between three thousand and four thousand inhabitants—approximately half of its population—as a result of the Anabaptist revolution.⁴² The damage to civic institutions was devastating, as well. As a result of pacification, the capital city lost its civic privileges and the incomes they generated.⁴³ Similar calamities befell a few of the smaller privileged towns, Warendorf among them, that had aligned themselves with the Münster Anabaptists.⁴⁴

And yet these spectacular events, too, helped to shape the bishopric’s regime of religious coexistence. For one thing, as the first chapter shows, its basic structures were prefigured in a treaty concluded back in 1533, before the Anabaptist takeover, between Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck and the largely Lutheran city council of Münster. In other words, the Anabaptist madness (as hostile contemporaries called it) wrecked not a Catholic monopoly over public worship but a nascent, biconfessional regime. The post-siege order restored several of its formal attributes—one official creed but with toleration for dissenters on the basis of law and privilege. More fundamentally, memories of the Anabaptist interlude recommended a regime that emphasized order and that distinguished among Christian faiths by law. On one side of this line stood the coalition that had prevailed over the Anabaptists in 1535, an alliance between the Roman church and princes who adhered to the Augsburg Confession—that basic transcript of common stances cobbled together by Philip Melanchthon at the imperial Diet at Augsburg in 1530. The Augsburg Confession won de facto recognition as a lawful religion at the Peace of Passau in 1552 and de jure recognition in the imperial religious settlement achieved at the Diet of Augsburg of 1555. Catholic jurists, to be sure, rejected the idea of legal parity between the two faiths until the Thirty Years’ War rendered such objections moot.⁴⁵ Still, their common lawfulness distinguished the creeds of Augsburg and Rome from Christian faiths that enjoyed no such recognition. Beyond the law stood heresy—Ketzerei—which in Münster usually meant the Anabaptist creeds, whose adherents had suffered so terribly in 1535. Imperial law on religion, in other words, reinforced the temporary alliance between Catholics and Lutherans in common cause against the revolutionaries.

The chapters of this book narrate the lifecycle of Westphalia’s biconfessional regime: its violent birth and development; its maturity and eventual death. Chapters 1 and 2 describe its basic contours; chapter 3 recounts the ambiguous reign of Prince-Bishop Johann von Hoya (1566–74), whom we have to thank for a great wealth of data on the rite of communion; and chapter 4 carries the story through shifts in the biconfessional regime that occurred during a long interregnum between Hoya’s untimely death and the election of Prince-Bishop Ernst, the first advocate of Catholic reform in the diocese, in 1585. Chapter 5 describes the first sustained efforts, undertaken during the reign of Bishop Ernst, to discipline the parish clergy in matters of doctrine, liturgy, and personal conduct. Chapter 6, finally, tells of Prince-Bishop Ferdinand, who in 1623 went to war against the biconfessional towns, dismantled the bishopric’s religious regime, and began erecting in its place a new and mono-confessionally Roman Catholic order.

There is more to this rather old-fashioned conceit, however, than mere chronology or the spurious coherence of biographical analogy. Each phase in the narrative is also associated, loosely, with passages in the arc of an individual life—baptism, communion, marriage, and burial—and for reasons that are bound up with the main claims I wish to advance.

The first claim concerns the relationship between beliefs and ritual actions. Too generously, perhaps, we historians attribute to ordinary people in premodern Europe what we would recognize as integrity of thought and action. With respect to the Reformation era, we tend to assume that Protestant (or Catholic) is as Protestant (or Catholic) does. But this assumption is misleading on two counts. For one, it assumes that ordinary parishioners ascribed the same meanings to the new teachings—or, for that matter, the old ones—as their teachers and their teachers’ teachers did. As we will see, ordinary Westphalians tended more toward the pragmatism of Warendorf’s town council than the doctrinal consistency of Goswin Betuleius. Moreover, it also takes as given that, even if they understood doctrine perfectly, ordinary parishioners drew the consequence that participation in the rites of one or another Christian religion necessarily signified credal adhesion—that someone who attended a Catholic Mass, say, put on display his or her inner convictions about the status of priesthood or the doctrine of transubstantiation.

This assumption was and is not neutral. Like many historians in the present day, authorities tasked with enforcing orthodoxy and orthopraxy took it for granted that liturgical behavior ought to flow easily from doctrine to ritual behavior. But as chapter 2 also shows, Protestants typically behaved in ways that defied this assumption, presenting their infant children for baptism to papist clergymen, for example. As we will see in chapter 6, Protestant parishioners demanded that the bodies of their dead be given a proper burial in the (Catholic) parish churchyard. Equipped solely with the assumption that beliefs drive ritual behavior, we would have to conclude, as the enforcers of orthodoxy did, that such behavior could only reflect duplicity or subterfuge. We would also have to foreclose on the possibility that parishioners distinguished differently from their overseers among the various rites of Christian observance and that they acted as they did for reasons that had little to do with the enforcers’ assumptions concerning the integrity of thought and action.

Uncovering these assumptions sometimes means reading evidence against the grain of categories defined by theology. As their recorded words and actions show, parishioners treated baptism, marriage, and burial primarily as rites of passage, signifying transformation in social being, and not as enactments of credal adhesion. This is not to suggest that parishioners were somehow incapable of recognizing the theological significance of certain ritual actions, such as elevating the host or receiving the communion wine. Rather, it is to point out that parishioners classified the rites of Christian religion differently from theologians, preferring instead to distinguish among rites according to their social function rather than, say, their sacramentality. Chapter 3 reveals, for example, that Westphalian parishioners did ascribe confessional meanings to the Eucharistic rite, in particular to the manner in which the communion elements were distributed: in one kind (according to the Catholic rite) or in two. Typically, the evangelically inclined parishioners refused to receive communion unless they were offered both elements, the bread and the wine.

It is also clear that in demanding double communion, parishioners were expressing a Protestant critique of late medieval Catholic liturgy. But critique did not preclude common worship. Chapter 3 also reveals that parish clergy were not insensitive to the liturgical demands of their evangelically inclined parishioners. Many of them were willing to adapt liturgy to meet them halfway, if by that means a priest could keep his parishioners together in a common rite. Many parishes accomplished this through a confessional division of labor in which the Catholic priest ministered to Catholic parishioners and left the care of Protestant souls to a like-minded chaplain or sacristan. Until the late sixteenth century, few Protestant-leaning parishioners were so insistent on liturgical purity that they could not participate in a common rite that had been adapted to satisfy their terms for participation. These liturgies of dissimulation, as I call them, preserved the ritual unity of villages and towns by obfuscating differences between adherents of the two lawful religions. The upshot is clear: a model of confessional relations that attributes rigid dogmatism to sixteenth-century confessional identities cannot capture the variety of pragmatic of responses to the pluralization of religion.

There were limits, of course, to the willingness of Catholic priests to adapt liturgy and of Protestant parishioners to participate in it. At various points during the late sixteenth century—sooner or later, depending on the community—confessional identities hardened to the point that common worship was no longer possible. Yet even this did not preclude all forms of biconfessional accommodation. During the late 1560s, for example, the magistrates of Bocholt tried to introduce a scheme for the sharing of sacred spaces; some years later, the town of Borken attempted a similar division; the town of Vreden may have tried it, as well. Segregation could take several forms. It might involve the partition of church interiors in Protestant and Catholic zones, for example, or it might involve dividing the day into Protestant and Catholic halves. Either way, the segregation of church interiors, like the hybrid accommodations that had preceded them, reflected an attempt to reconcile pluralization with civic unity. On the one hand, confessional divisions had rendered common worship in the one rite impossible, but on the other, the biconfessional towns had not given up on the ideal of civic unity: their segregations of