Christian History in Rural Germany: Transcending the Catholic and Protestant Narratives 900452648X, 9789004526488

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Christian History in Rural Germany

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Studies in Central European Histories Founding Editors Thomas A. Brady Roger Chickering

Edited by David M. Luebke (University of Oregon) Celia Applegate (Vanderbilt University)

Editorial Board Steven Beller (Washington, D.C.) Marc R. Forster (Connecticut College) Atina Grossmann (Columbia University) Peter Hayes (Northwestern University) Susan Karant-Nunn (University of Arizona) Mary Lindemann (University of Miami) H.C. Erik Midelfort (University of Virginia) David Sabean (University of California, Los Angeles) Jonathan Sperber (University of Missouri) Jan de Vries (University of California, Berkeley)

Volume 72

The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/sceh

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Christian History in Rural Germany Transcending the Catholic and Protestant Narratives

By

David Mayes

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Portions of Chapters 2 and 6 were originally published in “Triplets: The Holy Roman Empire’s Birthing of Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed in 1648,” in Names and Naming in Early Modern Germany, editors Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Joel F. Harrington (Oxford: Berghahn, 2019), 62–84. Portions of Chapters 6 and 8 were originally published in “Divided By Toleration: Paradoxical Effects of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and Multiconfessionalism,” in Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History vol. 106 (2015): 290–313. Cover illustration: The church in Wolfshausen, likely built in the eleventh century, along with surviving historic gravestones and the Linden tree (left) on the churchyard. Image: Hydro/Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Mayes, David Christopher, author. Title: Christian history in rural Germany : transcending the Catholic and Protestant narratives / by David Mayes. Description: Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2023] | Series: Studies in Central European histories, 1547-1217 ; volume 72 | Includes bibliographical references and indexes. Identifiers: LCCN 2022045497 (print) | LCCN 2022045498 (ebook) | ISBN 9789004526488 (hardback) | ISBN 9789004526495 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Christians–Germany–Hesse–History. | Peasants–Religious life–Germany–Hesse–History. | Rural population–Germany–Hesse–History. | Communalism–Religious aspects–Christianity–History. | Hesse (Germany)–Church history. | Hesse (Germany)–Religious life and customs. Classification: LCC BR857.H4 M35 2023 (print) | LCC BR857.H4 (ebook) | DDC 284/.3094341–dc23/eng/20221006 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045497 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022045498 Typeface for the Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic scripts: “Brill”. See and download: brill.com/brill-typeface. ISSN 1547-1217 ISBN 978-90-04-52648-8 (hardback) ISBN 978-90-04-52649-5 (e-book) Copyright 2023 by David Mayes. Published by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Brill Hotei, Brill Schöningh, Brill Fink, Brill mentis, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Böhlau, V&R unipress and Wageningen Academic. Koninklijke Brill NV reserves the right to protect this publication against unauthorized use. Requests for re-use and/or translations must be addressed to Koninklijke Brill NV via brill.com or copyright.com. This book is printed on acid-free paper and produced in a sustainable manner.

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For Erika, and for Myriam, Adam, and Martin

∵

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Contents Acknowledgements xi Note on the Translation xiv List of Figures and Maps xvi Introduction

1

Part 1 Surges: The Civil and the Sacred United Introduction to Part 1

13

1

The Animating Forces of Christian History in Rural Germany, to 1648 16

2

Rural Gemeinden in an Age of Pluralization, 1517–1648 47 1 Scales of Corpus Christianum, and How Each Fared in the Sixteenth Century 51 2 The Christian Confessions and the Imperial Territories 61 3 Rural Gemeinden Navigate through Pluralization 75

3

Mounting Another Surge, 1648–1800s 108 1 Betterment by Localizing 116 2 Maintenance of Custom and Status 127

4

Characteristics of Rural Christian Culture, 1648–1900s 141 1 Crafting the Perspective 141 2 Ordering the Church 144 3 Repurposing the Particulars 155 4 Sacralizing the Local 160 5 Localizing the Cemetery 169 6 Inscribing the Culture 176

5

Surging toward Crescendo, 1648–1900s 198 1 Betterment by Switching 199 2 Betterment by Devolving 208 Conclusion to Part 1

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Contents

Part 2 Divergence: The Civil and the Sacred Disunited, 1648– Introduction to Part 2

237

6

The Division of Local Sacred Communities, 1648–1817 239 1 Alleviating Disunity and Priming Disunity 241 2 The Empire’s Birthing of Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed as Triplets in 1648 246 3 The Onset of Anachronistic History and Its Early Local Effects 255

7

Ministerial Conflict, 1648–1817 262 1 Alleged Encroachments 265 2 Financial Interests 268 3 Personal Honor and Dignity 270 4 State Authority and Order 272 5 Persons of the Tertiary Denomination

274

Toleration Transformed, 1648–1817 278 1 Emigration and Exile 279 2 Auslauf 281 3 House Churches 284 4 New Church Buildings 289 5 Simultaneum 294 6 Freedom of Conscience 299 7 Rural Collaborations and Unifications

303

8

9

Rural Fulda amid the Evangelical Union, 1817–1850s 308 1 The Evangelical Union 309 2 Sacred Communities Divided Anew in Rural Fulda 320

10

Rural Hanau amid the Evangelical Union, 1817–1860s 330 1 Sacred Communities United and the Gemeinde Restored 330 2 Authorities’ Anxiety about the Use of Multiple Churches 336 3 A Switch in Strategy 342

11

Rural Upper Hesse amid the Evangelical Union, 1817–1900s 352 1 The Union’s Inauspicious Start in the Region 352 2 The Union Attempted in Frankenberg 357

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Contents

3 4 5

Collaborations and Unifications Continue in Rural Upper Hesse 364 The Union Thwarted in Frankenberg 375 Collaborations and Unifications Thwarted in Rural Upper Hesse 389

Conclusion to Part 2 Epilogue

405

410

Bibliography 413 Index of Place Names 445 Index of Subjects 451

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Acknowledgements This book builds on the previous one I wrote. Each of them regards Christian history in rural Germany to be principally not a Catholic and Protestant story but rather a Christian, agricultural, local, and communal one. The first book focused on rural Upper Hesse from 1550 to 1730. Curious to find out what transpired in the generations that followed and also how history unfolded in rural areas elsewhere, I began reading through sources in subsequent centuries and expanding the geographical scope so that it included the nearby regions of Lower Hesse, Fulda, and Hanau, along with Upper Hesse. After the first several summers working on this project it became apparent that the further forward in history the archival research extended, the further back in time the book’s parameters had to be set in order to account for the animating forces that were principally informing the course of Christian history in rural Germany. Eventually, the book was bringing into dialogue the centuries from the fifth to the twentieth. This felt ambitious, to put it mildly, and it differed from the discipline of history’s habit of studying the past within a narrow period. Such a wide scope was also logical. The countryside pulsated more by generations and centuries than by months and years. I hope that offering a historical account on a grand scale will more than make up for the criticisms that doing so invites. The abundant support of my home institution, the Department of History at Sam Houston State University, made this project possible. A Faculty Development Leave, an Enhancement Grant for Professional Development, and funding from the university gave me time and resources to work on the book. My gratitude to the university for this support is deep and abiding. The Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst provided a stipend for one of the summer research stays in Hesse. A National Endowment for the Humanities summer seminar on persecution, toleration, and coexistence in early modern Europe sharpened my understanding of the subject. I thank the staff at the various archives in Hesse for their unfailing help, their professionalism and courtesy, and the welcoming research environments they maintain. The scholarship of Heide and Dieter Wunder is surpassed only by their kindness and generosity. On numerous occasions they gave of their time in support of my work. Gerhard Menk, Angus Fowler, and Aloys Schwersmann, three fellow historians in Marburg who helped me greatly over the years, passed away during the writing of this book. I miss our conversations about Hessian history and archival sources and village churches. Occasions to present one’s ideas to peers and to receive critical feedback are invaluable. It is my good fortune to have had them over the years at meetings

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Acknowledgements

of the Sixteenth Century Society & Conference, the German Studies Association, and the Früheneuzeit Interdisziplinär, as well as the Oberseminar of Prof. Dr. Christoph Kampmann at Philipps-Universität Marburg, the Verein für Hessische Geschichte und Landeskunde in Marburg and Frankenberg, and my history department’s reading group. To the chairs, commentators, and fellow presenters on the panels in which I participated and to the organizers of the gatherings, please accept my appreciation for your work on those occasions and also for the pushback and questions that compelled me to think through the sources in new ways. I ask the same of the manuscript’s anonymous reviewers. Thank you for the time you set aside to read it and to write down your criticisms and suggestions. I carefully considered them while revising the text. The book is better for your input. I am honored that David Luebke and Celia Applegate have accepted the book into their distinguished series, which Brill so handsomely produces. I had the immense pleasure of writing most of the manuscript at the foothills of the Swiss Jura. The séjours there afforded me valuable experiences. Some of these delighted—harvesting cherries, soaking in the sight of rapeseed and sunflower fields, celebrating la désalpe and other festive occasions in the agricultural calendar with local communities. Some experiences startled the senses. Dairy farmers in their cars zipped by my bedroom window every morning, at 4:00 a.m., to tend to the day’s first milking. After they shoveled cow manure in the barn and piled it outside each day for months, they then fertilized the surrounding fields with it while neighbors groaned under the stench wafting through their streets. Some experiences sobered. Newspapers and documentaries chronicled regional agriculturalists’ precarious financial standing. A lakeside sign about being a parish minister in centuries past reminded one of the hazards involved in the work, including how, in the second half of the seventeenth century, two hundred wolves and twenty bears had been shot in the valley. Some occurrences were tragic. A rolled hay bale in a loft caught fire and incinerated a barn, tractors, and cows that I had frequently seen on walks during writing breaks. A disease purged half of another dairy farmer’s herd. A summer hailstorm devastated many crop fields and nearby vineyards. A boy lost his life in a farm equipment accident. All these kept the realities faced by Europe’s peasants of the past more immediate as I was writing about them. I am grateful to the people in the Jura communities, and especially to the Della Casa family, for their hospitality and generosity. As always, my parents, my brother, my sister-in-law, and their family have been an encouragement. One should be so fortunate to have such principled and lifelong support. Lastly, and above all, this book is for Erika, who graciously endured too many conversations about eighth-century settlement patterns

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Acknowledgements

xiii

and thirteenth-century parish devolution and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and the 1817 evangelical Union; and it is for Myriam, Adam, and Martin, who have been the reason for so many smiles. Et voilà le livre! Enfin! Quelle aventure! D.C.M. Spring 2022

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Note on the Translation Vital to an understanding of Christian history in rural Germany is the Gemeinde (plural: Gemeinden). The Gemeinde was the local, corporate body of Christian residents, and it existed in two aspects or dimensions—a civil dimension and a sacred dimension. For this reason trying to translate the term into English with both precision and elegance sets one on the horns of a dilemma. One option, “commune,” connotes the political and state-like functions that enfranchised members carried out on behalf of the local civil body, but it lacks the religious sense of sacred association and communion of Christians. “Community,” in the historic sense of the term, connotes that sacred association and communion of Christians who had common interests, a shared society, and fellowship both inside and outside a church, but it lacks the state-like notion of enfranchised members deliberating and deciding on matters, especially political ones. Other options also have merits and shortcomings. “Congregation” connotes a flock herded or assembled, and it captures the notion of a subordinate group within a structure of ecclesiastical authority. But, etymologically, it implies points in time when they did (i.e., inside a church) and did not (i.e., outside a church) exist in that form. Intrinsically, as well, “congregation” fails to convey a Gemeinde’s decision-making capacity and processes in civil affairs, and perhaps even ecclesiastical ones. “Parishioners” fails to do this, too, and it lacks the connotation of a living and breathing corporation, although, when actors occasionally used the word parishioners (Pfarrkinder) in the documents, the text below translates it as such. Further options beyond these have similar strengths and weaknesses. After much wrangling with the dilemma’s horns, I settled for what appealed to me as a Solomonic solution. I use the original German term Gemeinde for the local body so long as that body’s civil and sacred dimensions continued to be united or overlapping, and I cease to use the term when the two dimensions were uncoupled and became disunited. I translate Gemeinde as “commune” when its usage indicated only the local civil body as led by enfranchised members, and I translate Gemeinde as “community” when its usage indicated only the, or a, local sacred body. This approach also happens to have advantages that other options do not. It structures in a reader’s mind when the local civil and sacred dimensions were united, when they became disunited, and what significance this difference carried. Similarly, the approach sharpens the contrast between the history of rural Gemeinden in Part 1, which retained their civil-sacred unity, and those in Part 2, which lost that unity at some point after 1648. My hope is that the reader will find the selected approach helpful.

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Note on the Translation

xv

The German word Konfession is translated as “confession” when its usage related to a statement of belief or a creedal adherence to a religion and as “denomination” when its usage related to an ecclesiastical category, group, and organization. The German word Abendmahl, commonly worded as the Eucharist or Communion or Lord’s Supper, is translated here as the Eucharist. I have rendered certain place names, such as “Hesse,” “Thuringia,” “Westphalia,” “Prussia” and “Cologne” according to their English spelling and, otherwise, generally left names of territories, towns, and villages in their original German spelling. I write “City Fulda” and “City Hanau” when it concerned the specific towns that bore those names and “Fulda” and “Hanau” when it concerned the wider regions that went by the same names.

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Figures and Maps Figures 1 2 3 4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11 12

Ludwig Knaus, Fire in the Village, 1854. Image: public domain 10 The church in Schreufa. Image: Wikimedia Commons 14 Gravestone, likely fifth or sixth century, found in Wiesbaden. Image courtesy of © Reichert 17 View of Amöneburg and surrounding countryside, 1640. image from matthaeus merian, topographia hassiae et regionum vicinarum/landesgeschichtliches informationssystem hessen 23 Family plowing and sowing seed in a Hessian field, likely circa 1940. Image courtesy of © Helmut Serowy, Waldsolms-Brandoberndorf/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 25 Grain harvest in Roth, circa 1950. Image courtesy of © Anni Dienstbach, Weimar-Roth/Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 26 The Linden tree in Himmelsberg. Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, Karten no. b 158; image courtesy of Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 40 View of Schweinsberg and neighboring villages, 1631. Artist: unknown; image from Daniel Meisner/Eberhard Kieser, Thesaurus Philopoliticus Oder Politisches Schatzkästlein vol. 2/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 77 Detail of a 1574 map of Fulda abbey. Artist: Wolfgang Regerwill, from Regerwill’s map “Der Buchavia Oder des Hochstifts Fulda”; image: public domain 83 View of Hersfeld, circa 1592. Artist: Joist Moers; image from Werner Engel, “Joist Moers im Dienste des Landgrafen Moritz Von Hessen,” Hessisches Jahrbuch für Landesgeschichte 45/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 87 The mill in Argenstein. Photo, date: Harald Busch, 1955; image courtesy of © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY 113 View of Fronhausen, early nineteenth century. Artist: unknown; Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg, slg. 7/c no. 499, image courtesy of Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 117

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Figures and Maps 13 14 15

16

17 18 19

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24 25

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xvii

The timber-framed church in Rossberg. Image: Hydro/Wikimedia Commons 124 Ludwig Knaus, The Baptism, circa 1850. Image: public domain 133 View of the Lahn River and the countryside surrounding Roth, 1949. Image courtesy of © Anni Dienstbach, Weimar-Roth/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 135 Confirmation in Lohra, 1922. Image courtesy of Landesamts für Denkmalpflege Hessen, Außenstelle Marburg/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 137 Otto Piltz, Sunday School, 1880. Image: public domain 147 In the balcony of a village church. Artist: Otto Piltz, Before the Worship Service in the Village Church, 1881; image: public domain 152 Wedding couple leading a procession to the church in Nausis, 1938. Photo: Carl Eberth; image courtesy of © Museum der Schwalm, Schwalmstadt-Ziegenhain/Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 161 Confirmands in procession, heading to the church in Großseelheim, 1936. Photo: Ludwig Ph. M. Marck; image from Mathilde Hain, Das Lebensbild Eines Oberhessischen Trachtendorfes. von Bäuerlicher Tracht und Gemeinschaft/Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 161 Women in procession along a path outside Mardorf, 1936. Photo: Ludwig Ph. M. Marck; image from Mathilde Hain, Das Lebensbild Eines Oberhessischen Trachtendorfes. von Bäuerlicher Tracht und Gemeinschaft/Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 162 “Peasant baroque” in the Ronshausen church sanctuary. Image courtesy of © Gemeinde Ronshausen 168 The local church in Ebsdorf nestled in the agricultural world, estimated 1935. Photo: Braun-Elwert; image courtesy of © Landesamts für Denkmalpflege Hessen, Außenstelle Marburg/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 175 The 1696 gravestone of the Steinhausens in Stausebach. Photo, date: author, 2015 180 Inscription above the door of a 1585 communal building in Sachsenberg. Photo, date: Ludwig Bickell, 1888; image courtesy of © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY 185 Kratzputz on a barn in Holzhausen. Photo, date: unknown, 1939; image courtesy of © Bildarchiv Foto Marburg/Art Resource, NY 193

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xviii 27

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29 30 31 32

33 34 35 36

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38 39

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Figures and Maps The church and the tavern. artist: adriaen van ostade, peasants carousing outside, in front of an inn, 1670. Image: public domain 202 Villages in and around parish Oberweimar. Detail of Schleenstein’sche map, 1705–1715; image courtesy of Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 205 Ludwig Knaus, Hessian Funeral in Winter, 1871. Image: public domain 210 Otto Piltz, In a Hessian Village School, 1882. Image: public domain 212 The church in Haddamshausen. Date of photo: 2016; image: Hydro/ Wikimedia Commons 228 Construction of a bridge over the Lahn River by Roth, 1902–1903. Image courtesy of © Anni Dienstbach, Weimar-Roth/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 229 Ludwig Knaus, Visit with the Village Minister, date unknown. Image: public domain 267 Carl Bantzer, Sacrament in a Hessian Village Church, 1892. Image: public domain 275 Schlüchtern and its cloister. Artist and date: unknown; image courtesy of © Stadtarchiv Schlüchtern 288 The Catholic and evangelical churches in Burghaun. Image courtesy of © Bildersammlung, Elisabeth Sternberg-Siebert, Burghaun krs. Fulda 292 View of Frankenberg, looking southward, 1581. Image from Georg Braun/Franz Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum/Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 295 The church in Roda. Photo: roland pieper; image courtesy of © Landesamt für Denkmalpflege Hessen 305 View of Buchenau, 1833. Artist: G. Francke; georg Landau, Die Hessischen Ritterburgen und Ihre Besitzer vol. 2/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 323 View of Ramholz and the Steckelberg ruins, 1850. Illustrated by Karl Christian Köhler, engraved by Friedrich Foltz; image from Das Kurfürstenthum Hessen in Malerischen Original Ansichten/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 331 The parish house and church in Gronau in 1814. Artist: Carl Philipp Fohr; image courtesy of © Kupferstichkabinett. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin 335 View of Windecken, circa 1800. Artist: Ludwig Wörner; image courtesy of © Städtische Museen Hanau 337

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Figures and Maps 43 44 45

46 47 48

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Reinhard’s church in Altenhaßlau. Photo, date: Rudolf Stricker, 2011; image: Wikimedia Commons 350 Otto Piltz, Women Praying the “Our Father,” 1882. Image: public domain 354 Frankenberg’s Town Church, 1850. Illustrated by August Wenderoth; engraved by Friedrich Foltz; image from Das Kurfürstenthum Hessen in Malerischen Original-Ansichten/ Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 361 Otto Piltz, Boys’ Choir, 1880. Image: public domain 382 The church in Haubern. Photo: unknown; image courtesy of © Horst Hecker 391 Dedication of a new cemetery and a soldiers’ memorial in Allendorf, 1928. Photo: unknown; image courtesy of Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen 409

Maps 1 2

3 4

Places mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2 (Created by author) 18–19 Abandoned and surviving settlements around Schreufa (Created by author; Based on “Schreufa, Landkreis Waldeck-Frankenberg” in Landesgeschichtliches Informationssystem Hessen) 31 Places mentioned in Chapters 3–5 (Created by author) 110–111 Places mentioned in Chapters 6–11 (Created by author) 244–245

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Introduction In 1648, in the war-torn middle of Europe, peasants racked by decades of devastation faced another long road back to a surging Christian life. Getting there was not something they would do individually. The way forward remained, as ever, a corporate one via the local civil and sacred body of Christian residents, known as the Gemeinde. A Gemeinde was based in each village and rural town in the central German regions where these peasants lived. Collectively, the Gemeinden played a vital role in a distinct course of Christian history that ran in the rural areas and that stretched back more than a millennium. As for the rural Gemeinden at the middle of the seventeenth century, or what remained of them, they eventually replenished their numbers and resources, and as before, they pursued their expressed objective. That objective was, to use their wording, to better the condition or well-being of their souls. They pursued it in three principal ways. One was by Christianization. For rural Gemeinden, Christianization meant associating local residents with their Gemeinde, foremost on the occasion of baptisms, which christened newborns and joined them to the local body of Christians. Christianization meant affirming that Christian status on corporate occasions, such as at confirmation with other youths in front of the community, at worship services, and at burial alongside other Christians. It meant pursuing the appointment of their preferred ministerial candidate in the confidence that he would fulfill duties pertaining to their souls, and seeking another to replace him whenever a minister did not. It meant sacralizing or consecrating their everyday world in order to solicit God’s protection and blessing on their agricultural existence. It meant local residents affirming their Gemeinde as Christian when opportunity arose. Christianization was principally a communal endeavor. It underlined the interdependent nature of the lives of rural inhabitants. The second way was by localizing as much regular Christian practice and ministration as they could maintain. Most rural locales did not have a minister in residence, and even for those that did, the minister was often away tending to obligations in the wider parish. Fostering Christianization proved challenging so long as physical impairment or hazardous terrain or foul weather or demanding schedules inhibited Gemeinde and minister from accessing each other. Urban parishioners, nobles, and royal families, as well as clerics and monastics, typically did not have to worry about this. They had ready access to ministrations. But rural Gemeinden commonly did not. The struggle to local-

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_002

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2

Introduction

ize was documented far back in the distant past, and in rural areas it continued through the generation after 1945. The third way was by communalizing parish affairs by ordering them according to communal norms, values, and customs. Rural Gemeinden crafted these principles from the agricultural and corporate existence in which they were immersed. The principles were intended to promote flourishing in mundane affairs, and almost as a matter of course the Gemeinden applied them to their sacred affairs too. Doing so infused local content into their notion of Christianity. The principles also inclined them to appropriate and repurpose things ecclesiastical, from pews and postils to schools and clerical marriage, so that they served communal interests. Naturally, the more Gemeinden had localized something, such as the exercise of Christian religion, the more they could communalize it. In this way Christianization, localization, and communalization were woven together and worked conjointly. The degree to which the rural Gemeinden rose toward their objective of bettering their souls, or receded from it, was the measure by which their Christian life was surging, or diminishing. Over the centuries they orchestrated surges and reeled from setbacks. The Thirty Years War (1618–1648) crushed one of the surges. Regiments and campaigns crisscrossed their regions numerous times, lashing the peasants with plundering, pestilence, and deprivation. The capacity of Gemeinden to increase localized ministrations vanished almost instantly. They could barely muster enough to pay their parish minister his annual income, and as the war took a greater toll, they frequently fell short of that obligation. Wartime taxes deepened the crisis. Parish records and infrastructure were often damaged or destroyed. Roughly half of the local population died. Some villages lost more than 80 or 90 percent of their inhabitants. Those who survived had little if any livestock after armies had stolen their horses and slaughtered their animals. No event in history, before or after, including World War II (1939–1945), so devastated the local populations materially and demographically. Yet many rural Gemeinden went on to fully reinvigorate their Christian life by the middle third of the eighteenth century. They then raised it to its highest peak in the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century and briefly resumed the trend after the World War period (1914–1945) had stalled it for a time. Christians in the same locales in the mid-fourteenth century had also stared at daunting prospects after the Black Death (1347–1353) inflicted heavy losses.1 However, they enjoyed favorable market conditions after the plague 1 Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s History (London: Allen Lane, 2016), 493–95.

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Introduction

3

and diversified the economic landscape. By the turn of the sixteenth century, as populations and production were approaching their pre-plague levels, rural Gemeinden could again entertain their localizing endeavors. A generation or two into their resurgence, Martin Luther sparked a powerful religious reform movement, which was followed, most notably, by those of Anabaptism, Calvinism, and the Roman Catholic Church. Together these movements convulsed and shattered Latin Christendom as well as the Imperial church in the Holy Roman Empire. The rural Gemeinden, meanwhile, kept pursuing Christianization, localization, and communalization. They did so in princely territories of the Empire—Hesse, Hanau-Münzenberg, and Fulda abbey2—that happened to become heartlands of the Protestant Reformation and frontlines of the Catholic Counter-Reformation. Both reform movements contributed to the surge of rural Christian life. But the rural Gemeinden, as a rule, did not divide. They stayed intact. On the back of an expanding agrarian cycle and demographic growth they rose toward their Christian objective, until the Thirty Years War arrived at their doorstep in the early 1620s.3 Earlier still, the mid-ninth century signaled a mild setback in the emerging grassroots course of Christian history in these German lands. The previous eighth and early ninth centuries brought an increase in population and expansion of settlement. Then the break-up of Charlemagne’s empire, decentralization of authority to local lords, and incursions of Vikings, Magyars, Muslims, and others on the continent disrupted that pace. Population numbers leveled

2 The landgraviate of Hesse existed from 1264 to 1567, when it was divided, upon the death of Philipp the Magnaminous, into four territories—the landgraviates of Hesse-Kassel, HesseMarburg, Hesse-Darmstadt, and Hesse-Rheinfels. Hesse-Kassel was elevated to the status of electorate of Hesse in 1803 and grand duchy in 1806. It was annexed by Prussia in 1866 and joined the German Empire in 1871. The county of Hanau-Münzenberg came into being in 1458 when the county of Hanau was divided in two; the other half became the county of Hanau-Lichtenberg. The two counties merged from 1642 to 1685 and from 1712 to 1736. In 1736 Hesse-Kassel inherited the county of Hanau. The abbey of Fulda was founded in 744 by St. Sturm, a disciple of St. Boniface. From 1170 the Fulda abbots had the status of Imperial princes. In 1220 Fulda was elevated to the status of prince-abbacy, and in 1752 to a prince-bishopric. In 1802–1803 it was secularized and the ecclesiastical principality dissolved. Subsequently, the region was placed under a series of secular jurisdictions and then passed to Hesse-Kassel in 1815 (under which it acquired the status of great duchy in 1816 and then Fulda province in 1821). Today the lands of these Imperial territories form part of the state of Hesse in central Germany. 3 Sheilagh Ogilvie, “Germany and the Seventeenth-Century Crisis,” in The General Crisis of the Seventeenth Century, 2nd ed., ed. Geoffrey Parker and Lesley M. Smith (London: Routledge, 1997), 57–85; Rosemary L. Hopcroft, Regions, Institutions, and Agrarian Change in European History (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1999).

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if not dipped, more peasants came under greater servitude to nobles, and parish development tended to stall.4 But after things settled by the later tenth century, and growth rekindled, the tide for the localization of Christian practice started to swell in the eleventh century. It surged powerfully through the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and accelerated the devolution of parishes. But then harsh climatic spells and harvest failures afflicted much of Europe in the early fourteenth century, including these central German lands. In the late 1340s the Black Death swept through and piled catastrophe atop hardship. As Chapter 1 illustrates, the provenance of these surges lay in animating forces, predominantly local ones, which formed across many centuries. Their origins date to a time soon after the Romans retreated from the area and German-speaking peoples began setting up kingdoms in it. Concurrently, Christianity was established along the Rhine River by the fourth century and subsequently spread across present-day Hesse. Other forces steadily joined the dynamic to make for a Christian history distinct to rural settlements. Among them were the pattern of settlement, an agricultural economy, and parish relations. Critical, too, was the evolution of communal forms of organization across the eleventh to fifteenth century. Exemplifying them above all was the Gemeinde. The Gemeinde materialized at the local level across German-speaking areas of Europe. It did so in two dimensions. One was in a temporal or secular dimension as a civil body. This took shape as the commune, which possessed political, state-like functions and administered affairs concerning local households. The other was in a spiritual dimension as a sacred body. This took form as the Christian community, meaning, the corpus of local Christians. These two dimensions or aspects of the Gemeinde synergized as a unitary concept—in what this book will call, for short, a civil-sacred unity—long before the sixteenth century. The same phenomenon occurred at scales above the local level. One of them stretched across the whole Latin Christian world. By the eleventh to twelfth century the people in it were thought of as a corpus christianum or societas christianitas,5 a corporate Christian society commonly known as Latin Christendom (also called western or medieval or Catholic

4 B. H. Slicher van Bath, The Agrarian History of Western Europe, A.D. 500–1850 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1963), 77ff. 5 The term “christianitas” originally meant the baptized, and then its meaning evolved over time from “the christened” and “christening” to “Christianity” and “Christendom.” John H. Van Engen, “Conclusion: Christendom, c.1100,” in Early Medieval Christianities, c.600–c.1100, vol. 3 of The Cambridge History of Christianity, ed. Thomas F. X. Noble and Julia M. H. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 641.

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Christendom). Latin Christendom, a unitary concept, signifies that the temporal dimension and the spiritual dimension overlapped, that members of the one and members of the other were, at once, the same. Latin Christendom continued to expand, and, ultimately, it extended from the Baltic and Balkans to Iberia and the Nordic lands. A rural Gemeinde was a corpus christianum writ small. It paralleled Latin Christendom in being a universal whole, only it did so locally and more compactly due to the members’ everyday proximity, kinship ties, and substantial interdependence. The Gemeinde projected the notion of overlapping temporal and spiritual dimensions universally across the local world, just as theorists of the Latin Christian world projected the notion of a Christendom universally across the wider global world. Historians have written about how the corpus christianum was a norm in European settings. Certainly, in the rural areas examined here, the corpus christianum that was the Gemeinde constituted Christianity’s principal building block. It provided the context in which rural Christians lived out the bulk of their religious experience into the twentieth century. Rural Gemeinden interacted, often intensely, with well-known historical trends and events over the centuries, including the emergence of the modern state, the Reformations, the Enlightenment, nationalism, and secularization. Yet the Gemeinden tacked a course guided principally by their own cues and cadence on matters of communal concern. They commonly operated with a consensus despite internal tensions and disparities in wealth among their members. Having one communal body that embodied the local civil and sacred corporations, and one local or neighboring church building where they as parishioners attended worship services, encouraged that. Such moderating conditions tended to channel energies toward the Gemeinde’s preservation and restrain pressures that might threaten to pull it apart. Whereas the corpus christianum was more aspirational at larger scales, especially the vast one of Latin Christendom, members of rural Gemeinden arguably came closest to experiencing the ideal as a reality. Chapter 2 explains why, for these rural Christians, corpus christianum did not break apart or die out across the sixteenth to early seventeenth century. The civil-sacred unity of their local Gemeinde did not shatter even though it did encounter the same irreconciliable religious disputes that broke up the corpus christianum of Latin Christendom. On the contrary, the fact that each territorial sovereign typically and exclusively enforced what he believed to be the true Christian religion in his principality’s parishes played to the advantage of rural Gemeinden. It tended, strongly, to preserve the civil-sacred unity.

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Introduction

Parishioners did not fracture into Catholics and Lutherans and Reformed because such persons did not come into existence prior to 1648. None of the sacred terms—Christian, Catholic, reformed, evangelical, apostolic—was the exclusive preserve of one party. All confessionalized parties, meaning those who signaled their adherence to a creedal system of doctrinal belief and religious practice, declared themselves Christians and made exclusive claim on all of the terms. Meanwhile, the name “Lutheran” was charged and readily disputed, and “Calvinist” garnered widespread derision. The term “Protestant” did not appear in records involving rural Gemeinden and was very likely unknown to them. It passed instead among the governing and literate circles. Moreover, it carried a connotation based in the pre-1648 world of Christian monism— a world where the reality of Christianity’s divinely approved, lived experience was understood to be singular and whole and that a person attained salvation within it. These rural Gemeinden operated in Imperial territories that were a hotbed of religious disputes from the early sixteenth century onward. But in contrast to the elites and urban populations, they were not drawn into a discourse of true religion and false religion, and the fabric of their Christian monism was not frayed by pluralization. They neutralized that polarizing discourse, preserved their world of Christian monism, and were surging once again toward their own objective into the seventeenth century. They did so, in part, by capitalizing on the kind of top-down reforms that are familiar to Reformation histories. In 1648 delegations at the Congress of Westphalia (1643–1648) finalized statutes that ended the war as well as shifted the Empire from a polity of Christian monism to one of Christian pluralism, that is, one in which Christianity had multiple realities of divinely approved, lived experience and a person could attain salvation within any of them. The shift was made not in a theological or ecumenical way but rather in the Imperial way: the Empire recognized the exact equality of the Imperial estates that adhered to the three main confessions, which today are called Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed. The delegations arranged for the Empire to become multiconfessional in order to promote peaceful coexistence between the opposing parties of confessional adherents.6 Yet the historical record reveals unintended consequences as well as intended ones, and in this case the statutes ironically had the

6 As Thomas Max Safley defines it, multiconfessionalism was “the legally recognized and politically supported coexistence of two or more confessions in a single polity.” “Multiconfessionalism: A Brief Introduction,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 7.

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opposite effect. The various confessional parties could no longer make exclusive claims to Christianity, and consequently the statutes caused the terms Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed to become naturalized and categorized. A similar phenomenon played out with the words evangelical, Protestant, and, to a degree, Calvinist. In other words, people came into the 1517–1648 period as Christians and remained Christians throughout it. They became Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed in the wake of 1648. The Empire birthed the three as triplets at the signing of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Territorial authorities then steadily codified the three terms into people’s everyday life such that things ecclesiastical became denominated as Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed, including parishioners, clergy, and administrations as well as church buildings, schools, and other components of parish infrastructure. Moreover, the same three terms, along with the newly naturalized and categorized terms of Protestant and evangelical, were projected back onto the pre-1648 record. The habit of doing so inaugurated a pattern of anachronistic historical thought and analysis that has dominated the writing of religious history for centuries, and because religion was suffused in all aspects of life, the pattern has deeply informed the writing of political, social, economic, cultural, and other kinds of history. Such at least was the case in the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian territories. This book does not assume that what happened in them also happened elsewhere. Yet, at the same time, these territories were not atypical. The chapters below suggest reasons to think that the changes they underwent might have occurred during the same years in other areas of the Holy Roman Empire. By causing authorities to classify every local Christian community and every person with one of the three labels, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia set in motion, for the first time ever, the possibility that the Christian community could become divided into multiple sacred communities. Such an eventuality would disunite the civil and sacred dimensions at the local level. This meant that all rural Gemeinden heading into the post-1648 period had to pursue their Christian objective not only in a peasant world that lay in shambles from the Thirty Years War but also within territories whose rapidly changing conditions, due to the onset of Christian pluralism, threatened the very integrity of the Gemeinde itself. Following 1648 the path taken by the rural Gemeinden bifurcated, and consequently the course of Christian history unfolding in these rural German lands split in a two-part tale. One part, covered in Chapters 3–5, concerned the many Gemeinden—roughly half in number—that passed through time unaffected by the potentially divisive effects of the 1648 Peace. Bureaucratic authorities did denominate the local Christian community as Catholic,

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Lutheran, or Reformed, and sooner or later the locale may have had a smattering of residents who bore a different denominational classification. Yet crucially that sacred community remained the only one locally. No second denominational community was founded in the locale, and therefore the rural Gemeinden’s civil-sacred unity remained intact. In order to indicate that ongoing unity, Chapters 3–5 continue to refer to them with the same term, Gemeinden. They aspired principally to the same goals as they had in the centuries leading up to 1648. After they slowly recovered from the war in the second half of the seventeenth century, their efforts surged again by the early eighteenth century. Rural Christian life then reached a crescendo in a season that stretched from the mid-nineteenth century to early twentieth century, was largely interrupted by the World Wars, and resumed to a degree in the decade or two after 1945 before ebbing rapidly. The season marked the pinnacle of rural Christian history in these German lands as measured by communal standards. Part 2 contrasts this account with what happened to the other rural Gemeinden. This second group succumbed to the potentially disuniting ramifications of codified Christian pluralism. To indicate this historical change, Part 2 translates the term Gemeinde as “commune” when it concerned enfranchised members operating in a civil capacity and translates it as “community” when it concerned a sacred body operating in a sacred capacity. As these other rural Gemeinden passed through the post-1648 period, their commune remained intact but their Christian community formally divided into multiple sacred communities at the moment when a second denominational community was founded in the locale. That is, there came to exist locally a Lutheran community and a Catholic community, or a Catholic community and a Reformed community, or a Reformed community and a Lutheran community, or, eventually in certain urban settings, all three. In civil matters members of the commune continued to function as a single corpus, but in sacred matters the same members operated out of sync in opposing denominational communities. The division of the sacred community necessarily decoupled the civil and sacred dimensions of the local Gemeinde. The local Gemeinden that suffered this, which meant many rural ones and usually every urban Gemeinde, hobbled along a course littered with strife and grievances between the rival denominational communities and ministers as well as tensions within the commune. The whole dynamic became an additional animating force. Yet the same rival communities might decide to collaborate in a pragmatic effort to satisfy pressing parish needs. On such occasions their actions approximated those of the pre-1648 local Gemeinden and of the post-1648 local Gemeinden described in Part 1. Potentially, too, the civil-

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Introduction

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sacred unity could be restored if the sacred communities ever united and thereby made it possible for civil society and sacred society to overlap once again. Rural Gemeinden invite one to frame their history without the familiar outlines provided by ecclesiastical evolutions, breaks, and beginnings—that is, apart from narratives about the gradual development of the Orthodox East and Catholic West, the division of the West into Protestant and Catholic, the fragmentation of Protestantism into Lutheran, Reformed, Anabaptist (or Radical), and Anglican subgroups, and finally their splintering into the myriad denominational and nondenominational offshoots. Undoubtedly, these outlines organize a vast record of Europe’s diverse regions into a coherent historical account. They make possible stimulating interpretations of the past. Yet rural Gemeinden invite one to calibrate their history with gauges reflecting a different set of interests. The Gemeinden members linked their souls’ condition not to particular sacramental forms but to concerns about snow and fears of sending their children out in it to school or catechumenal instruction. They voiced interest not in apostolic succession but in successfully summoning the resources needed to better their parish relations. They worried not about doctrines concerning the bread at Eucharist but about how the increasing decrepitude of aging parishioners’ bodies made it virtually impossible for them to go to a neighboring village church for worship services. They petitioned church authorities not about whether baptism ought to be administered from a stone or copper font but about the waters that rose over riverbanks and that flooded the roads between them and their minister. The rural Gemeinden talked about such matters with language and metaphors derived from a world of crop and animal husbandry and of barns vulnerable to fire and decay. The stretch of time through which they did so, set to the rhythms of the countryside, flowed over the conventional medieval–early modern–modern divides. If anything, it encompassed what might be called an age of agriculturalists. This book is not the Christian history of rural Germany, as if its outlines and conclusions would presume to speak for all rural German regions. It is Christian history in rural Germany, a title that implies that the setting produced a historical experience distinct from that in other settings. At the same time, the animating forces in the rural regions examined here were common in other German lands and also in areas beyond them, and the same CatholicProtestant framework that has misconstrued these rural Gemeinden’s Christian history has been used to examine the history of Western Christians at large. In this way the book suggests the possibility of broader application.

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Figure 1

Introduction

Ludwig Knaus, Fire in the Village, 1854

To sum up, the book’s thesis is two-fold: first, that animating forces indigenous to the agricultural and communal environment principally guided the course of Christianity’s history in rural Germany; and second, that rural Gemeinden principally coordinated their Christian affairs not according to Catholic and Protestant considerations but rather in consonance with an old, native path from which they did not diverge so long as they retained their civil-sacred unity in the centuries following the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. It is a history that transcends the Catholic and Protestant narratives that have shaped much understanding of the past in Europe.

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Part 1 Surges: The Civil and the Sacred United

∵

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Introduction to Part 1 Schreufa resembled many other villages in Europe in the sixteenth century. It was modest in size, reliant on subsistence agriculture, linked to aristocratic patronage, and part of a parish that included other locales. The village nestled alongside the Eder river, whose waters flowed northeastwards through Hesse before joining other rivers and emptying into the North Sea. The nearest regional town, Frankenberg, stood an hour’s walk to the south. Marburg lay a day farther south, and if one kept walking a few days more one would pass the town of Gießen before eventually reaching the Imperial city of Frankfurt am Main. Schreufa has garnered little attention as compared to these historically more recognizable locales, and yet, until the twentieth century, the vast majority of people in Europe lived in such rural settings. Records concerning Schreufa’s parish life in the sixteenth century are few, but those that survive reveal discernible trends. The earliest reference to a chapel in Schreufa appeared in a 1515 record. A 1558 letter also mentioned it and stated that Schreufa belonged to parish Viermünden.1 One can presume the chapel had been built and was in use prior to the sixteenth century and probably long before then too. However, clues suggest it fell into disrepair and disuse. The minister in 1558 complained that a nobleman from the Dersch family in Viermünden had taken Schreufa’s bell and hung it in his house. In 1590, amid a scourge of pestilence, the Dersch family forbade the Schreufa Christians to bring their dead to the mother church at Viermünden for burial.2 Resourcefully and pragmatically the Gemeinde of Schreufa settled on a local tract of land in which to bury them. Then they purchased an old local residence, renovated it into a so-called prayer house, and set up a cemetery on the surrounding churchyard. Finally, they arranged for the Viermünden minister to come every two weeks to conduct Christian services in exchange for a salary and increased labor services in the parish fields. By doing so, Schreufa, with its roughly sixty inhabitants, reestablished itself as an affiliate of Viermünden. The Dersch family gave them a bell, which was likely the same one they had taken from Schreufa in 1558. Schreufa displayed initiative in the early seventeenth century as well. In 1616 members grew disgruntled with their Viermünden minister after he had neglected too many duties toward them for too long.3 Restless, sensing the 1 Hessisches Staatsarchiv Marburg (hereafter: HStAM), 22a no. 8:28. 2 HStAM, 315f no. 580. 3 HStAM, Protokolle II Marburg Konsistorium (hereafter: PMK) vol. 5 (3 July, 3 August, and 7 August 1616). © David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_003

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Figure 2

Introduction to Part 1

The church seen today in Schreufa was constructed in 1690–1692 and enlarged in 1903. While some villages across present-day Hesse erected stone churches, others built timber-framed churches and frequently utilized slate shingles in part of the construction

unlikelihood of a resolution, and wanting a minister who would faithfully carry out local Christian services, Schreufa turned to the schoolmaster in Frankenberg and contracted him to minister to them instead. That also meant they redirected to him the parish salary they had been paying the Viermünden

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Introduction to Part 1

minister. Schreufa had become, in effect, largely independent in its parish life. But the autonomy was ephemeral. The one ministering to Schreufa died in 1622, and authorities returned the village to its previous status within parish Viermünden, not least because the Dersch family and the new Viermünden minister earnestly petitioned for it.4 4 HStAM, PMK vol. 9 (1 June and 11 December 1622); HStAM, 22a no. 4e:51.

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Chapter 1

The Animating Forces of Christian History in Rural Germany, to 1648 Such fragments are what can be teased from the archives concerning Schreufa’s pre-1648 parish history. Yet packed tightly into fragments like these were a dozen profound animating forces whose roots reached into the past, some a century or two and others more than one thousand years. These forces invigorated the confluence of Christianization, localization, and communalization, and by providing both constancy and stimuli, they influenced the course of Christian history in rural Germany through centuries marked by comparatively rapid change and rupture in urban and intellectual circles and in higher levels of government. First among these animating forces was Christianity itself. Older narratives tended to credit Boniface with having done much to advance the religion in Hesse in the early eighth century. They cited his description of Fulda in a letter to Rome in 751: “There is a wooded place in the waste of a vast wilderness and in the midst of the peoples to whom we are preaching, where we have placed a group of monks, living under the Rule of Benedict, who are building a monastery…. This place I have acquired by honourable effort, through the help of pious and God-fearing men, especially of Carloman, formerly prince of the Franks, and have dedicated it in honour of the Holy Saviour.”1 Boniface, one would imagine, was bringing the light of Christianity into an utterly dark and pagan world. But recent scholars caution against taking Boniface’s words at face value. He was telling Romans what they would have wanted to hear, for in the pope’s own previous letter to Boniface, he had described the inhabitants as “the German people who live in the shadow of death, steeped in error.”2 In truth Fulda lay near two main roads, had once been a Merovingian fort, and contained a deserted stone church.3 Christianity had already been present in the wider area for several centuries. Settlements along the Rhine were critical to the process. Christian

1 As quoted in Janneke Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, c.744–c.900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 1. 2 As quoted in Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: triumph and diversity, A.D. 200–1000, 10th anniversary rev. ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 420. 3 Raaijmakers, The Making of the Monastic Community of Fulda, 28–29.

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_004

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The Animating Forces

Figure 3

17

Gravestone, likely fifth or sixth century, found in Wiesbaden. The text states “Here lies Ingildo in peace” and is accompanied by a cross and the Greek letters, Alpha and Omega. The name Ingildo was of Germanic origin

communities existed in Cologne and other leading cities by the beginning of the fourth century; in Mainz, Worms, Speyer, and Boppard by the midfourth century; and in Kreuznach, Alzey, Bingen, Koblenz, and Andernach by the mid-fifth century. Across the Rhine from Mainz, fifth or sixth century gravestones in Wiesbaden indicate that the faith had extended there, and likely to nearby Kastel, by that time.4 The bishopric of Mainz, after a hiatus, was reestablished around the mid-sixth century and, under Bishop Sidonius, expanded its ecclesiastical organization into present-day Hesse. It sent Christian missions through the Main River region and Wetterau by the turn of the seventh. Row graves with an east-west orientation and gravestones 4 Karl Heinemeyer, “Hessen im Fränkischen Reich,” in Das Werden Hessens, ed. Walter Heinemeyer (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1986), 133–35; Karl Heinemeyer, Die Anfänge der Diözese Mainz, vol. 1 of Das Erzbistum Mainz in römischer und fränkischer Zeit (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1979).

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Chapter 1

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Places mentioned in Chapters 1 and 2

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Map 1

The Animating Forces

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Chapter 1

with Christian symbols evidence the missions’ success. Around the same time other missions from the bishopric of Trier worked along the Lahn River toward present-day Wetzlar and Gießen. In Dietkirchen near Limburg they established a church that became an important hub. In Thuringia, to Fulda’s east, members in the royal family were Christians by the 530s, and the dukes and great nobles had become Christians by 700.5 In the early eighth century the Mainz bishop dedicated a church in Aschaffenburg and broadened ecclesiastical jurisdiction over regions south and north of the Main, including the Vogelsberg to Fulda’s west. Soon after, when Boniface worked in the region, he was less a missionary than a Christianizer who utilized the tools of teaching, organizing, and reforming.6 He geared his efforts toward depaganizing Christians, clearing up anomalies, putting an end to long habits of compromise, and ending the age of symbiosis between pagans and Christians.7 Historians have framed the Christianity of this era in different ways. Christopher Dawson had it as Roman Catholic thanks to the efforts of the papacy.8 J. M. Wallace-Hadrill categorized it as part of the world of the Frankish church.9 Others have argued against any kind of unified Christian world at the time. Despite the ample literature on the Frankish church, Patrick Geary notes of the Merovingian world that, “[i]n reality, no such thing existed.”10 Geary has pointed instead to an episcopal church within the Frankish kingdom, that is, to numerous churches each headed by a bishop, as well as multiple monastic churches, each with its own traditions and ties to local aristocracy. Whatever sense of unity the Frankish kings may have fostered among the bishops, the episcopate remained “factious.”11 Chris Wickham has sounded a similar note: “[T]he political fragmentation of the western empire had fragmented the church as well.”12 The church in the West may have had

5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12

K. Heinemeyer, “Hessen im Fränkischen Reich,” 136–37. Ian Wood, The missionary life: saints and the evangelisation of Europe, 400–1050 (New York: Longman, 2001), 59. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 423. John-Henry Clay offers a similar view: “Boniface in Hessia and Thuringia,” in A Companion to Boniface, ed. Michel Aaij and Shannon Godlove (Leiden: Brill, 2020), 270–98. Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe: an introduction to the history of European unity (London: Sheed & Ward, 1932). J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, The Frankish Church (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). Patrick Geary, Before France and Germany: The Creation and Transformation of the Merovingian World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 123. Geary, Before France and Germany, 123. Chris Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome: Illuminating the Dark Ages 400–1000 (New York: Penguin, 2009), 171–72.

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a common identity, but its institutional unity was nominal. Those in Spain, Francia, and even northern Italy looked little to Rome, and papal correspondence indicates that the popes focused principally on central and southern Italy and on the East. “A structured western church focused on Rome in any serious way,” concludes Wickham, “did not develop until after [1000].”13 Peter Brown has posited the phenomenon of “micro-Christendoms” in places like Ireland and Saxon Britain and in areas on the continent around the seventh century. By this Brown means “the particular combination of local autonomy with loyalty to the idea of a wider Christendom.” With it an autonomous region could be assured that it “possessed, if in diminished form, the essence of an entire Christian culture.”14 Brown depicts Boniface as bringing from the micro-Christendom of Saxon Britain a template of “correct” Christianity to continental Europe, and he argues that Boniface was prepared to impose it on the ancient Christianity he encountered there.15 Thomas Noble, taking up the idea, has stated that the Carolingians then “gathered those microChristendoms into one large and meaningful whole.”16 By adopting a variety of Roman liturgical, architectural, and legal models, they put a “European stamp” on Christianity by creating what Noble calls “Carolingian religion” and having “Romanized Christianity well before the papacy attempted to do so.”17 Common to these works has been an approach from the vantage point of governance, ecclesiastical institutions, and prominent figures. Yet from the local perspective of a village such as Schreufa, the most salient point is also the most elemental one—while one might debate whether the Christianity was sooner papal or Frankish or episcopal or micro or Carolingian, or whether it might be contextualized geographically in the German-speaking world with its linguistic and ethnic dimensions,18 it was, in any case, Christianity. The same holds true later, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when the archbishopric of Mainz wielded great influence over Hesse before the Thuringian-Hessian

13

14 15 16 17

18

Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 171–72. The same idea—that, in the western empire, there was an absence of real authority exercised by Rome over churches, such that they led entirely separate and independent lives—is expressed in Judith Herrin, The Formation of Christendom (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987), 115, 121. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 15, 364. Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom, 423. Thomas F. X. Noble, “Carolingian Religion,” Church History 84, no. 2 (2015): 307. Noble, “Carolingian Religion,” 287–307, here p. 287; Rosamond McKitterick, Charlemagne: The Formation of a European Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 292–380; Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 172. Lesley Abrams, “Germanic Christianities,” in Noble and Smith, Early Medieval Christianities, c.600–c.1100, 107–29.

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landgraves wrested much of it for themselves by the mid-thirteenth century.19 It held true, too, during the confessional controversies over true Christianity that raged in the sixteenth through early seventeenth centuries. Noteworthy about Schreufa’s ambitions described in the vignette above was that the Gemeinde expressed them seamlessly across successive forms of Christian religion, as installed by ecclesiastical adherents of Roman theology, Luther’s theology, the 1580 Book of Concord’s confessional standards, Calvin’s theology, and the Book of Concord once again. A second animating force, the pattern of settlement, is hinted at in the Schreufa accounts via mention of nearby locales, Viermünden and Frankenberg. From the mid-third to early eighth century the status of populated sites around Hesse, as in many German-speaking areas, was generally fluid and unstable as peoples migrated into some areas and abandoned others.20 The Chatti, for example, resided in areas of present-day northern Hesse but then tended to leave their modest number of small settlements instead of branching out and founding new ones. The Romans had extended their settlement zone beyond the Rhine to points that reached the present-day city of Hanau and nearly to Gießen. But they receded back to the Rhine in the third to fourth centuries, due partly to the repeated Alemanni attacks around the Main River.21 By the latter half of the fifth century Franks were moving into the Rhine-Main region, and by the beginning of the sixth century they had established their authority in southern, middle, and western regions of Hesse. These trends roughly paralleled the broader demographic and economic transitions experienced by the western empire and the siphoning of populations to the East and North Africa.22 Still, certain core settlements did form in Hesse in the sixth and seventh centuries, particularly in pockets around Wetzlar, Amöneburg, Fritzlar, Eschwege, Fulda, and the regions stretching along the Main and its tributaries.23 These took the shape of permanent nucleated 19

20 21

22 23

Karl Heinemeyer, “Geistliche und weltliche Kräfte im Ringen um den Aufbau der Landesherrschaft in Hessen,” in Nordhessen im Mittelalter: Probleme von Identität und überregionaler Integration, ed. Ingrid Baumgärtner and Winfried Schich (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 2001), 53–77. Jean Chapelot and Robert Fossier, The Village and House in the Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 54–64. Gerhard Mildenberger, “Die Germanisierung Hessens,” in W. Heinemeyer, Das Werden Hessens, 46–51; Dietwulf Baatz, “Die römische Epoche,” in W. Heinemeyer, Das Werden Hessens, 55–82. Michael McCormick, Origins of the European Economy: communications and commerce, A.D. 300–900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 237–61, 733–77. Karl E. Demandt, Geschichte des Landes Hessen, 2nd ed. (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1972), 101–19; Klaus Andrießen, Siedlungsnamen in Hessen: Verbreitung und Entfaltung bis 1200 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1990).

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Figure 4

View of Amöneburg and surrounding countryside, 1640

or compact settlements, at times comprising a handful of farmhouses. The Franks’ colonization of Hessian regions strengthened in the late seventh and eighth centuries, not least via military seizures. They built hilltop fortifications, such as Frankenberg, which guarded against the encroaching Saxons, and also a row of courtyards protected by walls and ditches, such as those by Dreihausen near Ebsdorf and also atop the Schloßberg, which would become the site of Marburg.24 A third force, the establishment and normalization of agriculture, spurred this emerging pattern of settlement.25 Farming had been developed already in areas west and south of the Rhine and Danube. Now, increasingly, it was so to the east and the north of them. To have more arable land, settlers slowly cleared forests, which were largely deciduous and extensive in German lands at the time. They also drained certain marshlands and brought them under cultivation. The arable fields could only be so far from a settlement’s core because residents needed reasonable access to them with plows and draft animals.

24

25

Matthias Hardt, “Siedlung als Integrationsfaktor. Zur Veränderung der Kulturlandschaft bei der Eingliederung des nördlichen Hessen in das Frankenreich – mit einem Ausblick auf die mittelalterliche Ostsiedlung,” in Baumgärtner and Schich, Nordhessen im Mittelalter, 9–28. Edith Ennen, Walter Janssen, Deutsche Agrargeschichte: Vom Neolithikum bis zur Schwelle des Industriezeitalters (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner, 1979), 106–44.

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In the eighth to ninth centuries local agricultural and broader commercial economies strengthened as the wider world, from Persia to the British Isles, recovered from two centuries of a pandemic commonly known as the Justinianic plague.26 Settlements grew in population, from the center outward, until the daily commute for some peasants and animals to increasingly distant agricultural fields and pastures became unfeasible. Peasants then cleared new ground in the vicinity of the older, core areas and founded new settlements.27 The pattern accelerated discernibly after 800, a period of greater economic and demographic expansion that occurred, according to Wickham, because of the steady subjugation of independent peasants at the hands of an aggrandizing aristocracy.28 Schreufa, for example, was first mentioned, as “Scroufi,” in an 850 document.29 South of Fulda, farmsteads (Höfen) dotted the Kalbach tributary during Carolingian times until larger settlements formed from them and cohered into multiple villages. At the latest three villages—Nieder-, Mittel-, and Oberkalbach—had formed in the eighth century. Growth and large-scale development accelerated especially in the eleventh through early fourteenth centuries. The extension of arable land, innovations in agricultural equipment and methods, and the absence of severe pestilences fueled population growth.30 By the fourteenth century compact settlements filled out most of Hesse and were typically spaced three to four kilometers apart. The vast majority of people lived by an intense localism in self-sufficient villages and rural towns.31 This reality had a direct bearing on the course of Christian history down to the twentieth century. When the Schreufa Gemeinde labored to improve parish relations to better their Christian life, they did so within the constraints set in place by the pattern of settlement. A fourth animating force pertains to the parishes and parish relations that developed on the back of the nucleated settlements. In Roman times the Christian ecclesiastical organization formed on the framework of urban centers and the civil administration. As the Christian Church ventured beyond

26 27 28 29 30 31

Lester K. Little, ed., Plague and the End of Antiquity: The Pandemic of 541–750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Alan Mayhew, Rural Settlement and Farming in Germany (London: B. T. Batsford, 1973), 37ff. Wickham, The Inheritance of Rome, 529–51. Andrießen, Siedlungsnamen in Hessen, 248. Georges Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West, trans. Cynthia Postan (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1968), 61–167. Such towns, whose economy was based on agriculture, are described in German scholarship as ackerbürgerlich.

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Figure 5

25

Family plowing and sowing seed in a Hessian field, likely circa 1940. The tilling method seen here—a wheeled plow being pulled by draft animals and driven by a farmer—was largely the same one that had been used for over a thousand years. Photos document that it remained common until at least the 1960s

the Roman world, that diocesan arrangement, with its “fixity and territoriality,”32 had to adapt itself to sands that tended to shift. It did so successfully in the fifth and sixth centuries in Ireland, which had no towns but rather mobile tuatha, or kinship groups.33 By means of monasteries, education, and penitentials the Church established an ecclesiastical organization across the island. It did so, too, amid the difficult transitions experienced in Gaul and Spain in the fifth through seventh centuries, a time when kings and their retinues, some of them adherents of Arianism, were brought into the Catholic Christian fold. As the Church ventured into central and eastern Europe, bishops adapted particularly by attaching themselves to wealthy royals and nobles. But whereas the dioceses in Italy were typically small, those founded in most other European

32 33

Richard Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion: From Paganism to Christianity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 451. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, 78–96.

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Figure 6

Grain harvest in Roth, circa 1950. Photos indicate that rural Hessian farmers through the mid-twentieth century routinely used scythes, sickles, and pitchforks and bundled grain into sheaves before setting them up to dry and pitching them onto a cart. Machines for use in agriculture did not appear in some rural Hessian locales until a decade or more after 1945

regions, such as Hesse, were quite large.34 In them episcopal ministrations could only be intermittent. The solution was devolution, meaning, to multiply churches below the level of a cathedral church and to devolve the episcopal monopoly over the right to administer the sacraments, especially baptism. Devolution helped spawn a vast network of parish churches across the Christian world. Richard Fletcher aptly described the network’s formation as “one of the most significant, as it was one of the most enduring, achievements of the emergent civilization of medieval Europe.”35 All such parishes owed their existence and structure to the pattern of settlement and cultivation of an agricultural economy. Parishes were composed of

34

35

For a discussion of literature: Enno Bünz, “Die mittelalterliche Pfarrei in Deutschland. Neue Forschungstendenzen und -ergebnisse,” in Pfarreien im Mittelalter: Deutschland, Polen, Tschechien und Ungarn im Vergleich, ed. Nathalie Kruppa (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 27–66. Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, 479.

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neighboring settlements and the people and resources a parish encompassed supported its staff and infrastructure. Parishes also, like the larger institutional church, possessed an internal hierarchy. The archbishopric of Mainz, for example, was organized in 1084 into eighteen archdeaconries, including St. Stephan, Fritzlar, and Hofgeismar, and within the archdeaconries lay the region’s primary or original parishes (today called Urpfarreien). A parish’s ecclesiastical administrative seat (Sedes) at the parish church (Pfarrkirche) had top status. Historically, this was also called the “mother church” (Mutterkirche), and the parish itself was named after the settlement where it was located. Many parish churches across Hesse through the twelfth century were consecrated to patron saints, such as St. Martin, St. Peter, and St. Michael. In the thirteenth century St. Mary became a popular patron saint as well. In certain locales of a parish an affiliate church building (Filialkirche) was constructed. The cleric came to hold services in it a certain number of times per month or year. Locales without a church building have been identified often as incorporated (eingepfarrt).36 The parish church held the rights to baptize, collect tithes, and oversee affiliate churches. Christians were obligatory members of the parish in whose district they resided (Pfarrzwang). They attended services within it, received sacraments at the mother church, and buried their dead at the parish cemetery, which was located at the mother church. Distinct from these classifications was a vicariate (Vicariat). A vicariate operated autonomously as its own church district. The minister did not reside in the vicariate but rather came to it from a neighboring mother church in order to conduct services. Normally the Christians at vicariates financed and maintained their own local, parish affairs and rendered no funds or services to the mother church of the parish from which the minister came. The formation of a parish network that spanned the countryside was essential to Christianization,37 not least because of the considerable time that could pass between ministrations and also the ease with which locals could still amalgamate or hybridize Christianity with traditional rituals and beliefs.38 The goal was achieved by the ninth century. Nevertheless, distances between most settlements and their parish priest remained great, lands continued to be

36

37 38

In the documents the terms “affiliate” and “incorporated” were sometimes used interchangeably. For the sake of clarity and consistency I am using them in this book as defined here. Geary, Before France and Germany, 135; Clifford R. Backman, The Worlds of Medieval Europe, 3rd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 82–86. Ramsay MacMullen, Christianity and Paganism in the Fourth to Eight Centuries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997).

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cleared to make way for many new settlements, and populations grew, especially in the eleventh through thirteenth centuries. Settlements other than the mother church exhibited an innate drive to augment their autonomy within the parish, to localize Christian services and ministrations, as much as they reasonably could. Taken to its logical conclusion they sought to make a clean break from the parish by carving from it a new parish. Within the new one they could satisfy their Christian interests more easily. To be the mother church location of the new parish was ideal, not least for reasons of stature and immediate proximity to ministrations. Prompted by the growth of settlements, the Council of Tribur near Mainz resolved in 895 to create new parishes whenever locales stood more than four miles from the parish church.39 Residents of Hodal in the diocese of Halberstadt stated around 1166–1170 that they were too far from their parish church in Eilsdorf and, therefore, neglected. After they successfully beseeched the bishop for permission to build their own church, he consecrated it and granted it the rights of baptism, burial, and selection of a priest.40 In Hessian records the most often cited reason for founding a new parish was related to distance. The archbishop granted parish rights to the Elnhausen church in 1235 because the village lay far from the Michelbach and Weimar parishes.41 The church in Josbach, a village that had become very populated, was granted the same in 1196.42 Beltershausen, which built a church on aristocratic property by 1137 and had a residing cleric, broke permanently from parish Ebsdorf in 1151.43 Devolution in Hesse, like elsewhere, kept accelerating through the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries before being slowed by the Black Death and by the decimation of numerous villages in the early fifteenth century at the hands of feuding armies of Mainz and regional nobles.44 It finally 39 40 41 42

43 44

Michael Borgolte, Die Mittelalterliche Kirche (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2004), 53. Borgolte, Die Mittelalterliche Kirche, 54–55. HStAM, Urk. 134 no. 1. Cornelius Will, Regesta archiepiscoporum Maguntinensium: Regesten zur Geschichte der Mainzer Erzbischöfe von Bonifatius bis Uriel von Gemmingen 742?–1514, 2 vols. (Innsbruck: Wagnerm, 1877–1886), II:XXX no. 361, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. HStAM, Urk. 1 no. 2848. Helmuth K. Stoffers, et al., Kulturdenkmäler in Hessen. Landkreis Marburg-Biedenkopf. I: Gemeinden Amöneburg, Kirchhain, Neustadt und Stadtalltendorf (Stuttgart: Theiss, 2002), 18; Peer Zietz, Kulturdenkmäler in Hessen. Landkreis Werra-Meißner-Kreis. I: Altkreis Eschwege (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1991), 43. Enno Bünz has called the twelfth through fifteenth centuries the “decisive phase of expansion” for parish organization. “Pfarreien und Pfarrgemeinden im spätmittelalterlichen Deutschland,” in Pfarreien in der Vormoderne: Identität und Kultur im Niederkirchenwesen Europas, ed. Michele C. Ferrari and Beat Kümin (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2017), 32.

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started regaining some momentum in the late fifteenth century. Numbers from regions in present-day Hesse testify to this. Of the 203 parishes that lay, in 1585, in the domain once encompassed by the archdeaconry of St. Stephan, 19 had received first documented mention by 1200, 46 between 1201–1250, 45 between 1251–1300, 50 between 1301–1400, 14 between 1401–1527, and 29 between 1528–1585. The domain that was once the archdeaconry of the Fritzlar collegiate church (Propst) tells a similar story. Of the 205 parishes listed in it in 1585, 18 had received first mention by 1200, 42 between 1201–1250, 54 between 1251–1300, 45 between 1301–1400, 36 between 1401–1527, and 10 between 1528–1585. The former archdeaconry of the Hofgeismar collegiate church, a smaller district, parallels the trend. Of the 47 parishes in it in 1585, 2 had received first mention by 1200, 8 between 1201–1250, 10 between 1251–1300, 18 between 1301–1400, 6 between 1401–1527, and 3 between 1528–1585.45 Neighboring regions told the same story. Out of parish Fulda, for example, had formed parish Kämmerzell by the mid-fourteenth century. Out of nearby parish Margretenhaun, which itself had separated from association with Petersberg in 1093, formed the parishes of Hofbieber and Goßhart (later: Schwarzbach) by the mid-fifteenth century. A spate of church construction coincided with these trends. Settlements that became towns typically satisfied the desire to become their own parish by the early fourteenth century. People in Upper Hesse have long recalled that Marburg, with its present-day population of eighty thousand, was once part of parish Weimar, the seat of which, Oberweimar, has six hundred residents. It is estimated that parish Weimar existed by the early eighth century. When Marburg emerged later, its residents were to go to Oberweimar for all baptisms, weddings, and burials and to contribute labor and materials to its parish maintenance. According to an early eighteenthcentury report, the path along the crest of hills from Marburg to Oberweimar “is still called the ‘Dead Way’ to the present day,” and the last quarter-hour of it was called “the Parson Way” because a local priest, in ages past, met the funeral procession at the Allna tributary and led it the rest of the way to Oberweimar.46 Marburg had become a town by the 1140s and—a half century later and likely to announce its burgeoning stature—built the so-called Kilian’s chapel to the exact dimension of Oberweimar’s church. Marburg’s economy and civic consciousness waxed stronger in the subsequent decades

45 46

Wilhelm Classen, Die kirchliche Organisation Althessens im Mittelalter, samt einem Umriß der neuzeitlichen Entwicklung (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1929), 45–46. Kassel Gesamt Hochschule Bibliothek (hereafter: KGHB), Handschriftenabteilung, 2° Ms. Hass. 119.

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until it finally broke from the mother church in 1227 and formed its own selfstanding parish.47 Thereafter all baptisms and burials were to be done locally. In 1243 the Hessian landgrave gave the parish to the German Order, but later, in the fourteenth century, the town of Marburg acquired the parish rights for itself. The town of Frankenberg trod a similar path. Originally it was part of parish Geismar, but in 1254, citing the long distance the Gemeinde traveled for the sacraments and wielding the noble patron’s approval, Frankenberg cut ties with Geismar.48 With its chapel, Frankenberg became the seat of a new parish. Three decades later the town completed construction of a high Gothic church that was modeled after the St. Elisabeth church outside Marburg. Schreufa, like Frankenberg, was also originally part of parish Geismar. But due to distance and having to cross the Eder River, Schreufa was likely to detach from it. That break occurred at some point before the 1558 letter. By 1558 Schreufa was an affiliate in parish Viermünden, which itself had devolved from parish Geismar at some point in the past. The great religious upheavals in the sixteenth century have deflected scholarly and popular attention away from the history of devolution and localization, but it was a history that was far from over. While towns such as Marburg and Frankenberg achieved parish independence by the thirteenth century, villages such as Schreufa struggled chronically for greater autonomy. At times they succeeded, and at others they lost ground. The connections between mother church, affiliate, incorporated, and vicariate locales formed a vital node through which Christian history played out into the twentieth century, regardless of the form of Christian religion practiced in a parish. Classic accounts of Christian history, and many current ones, have relied on an ecclesiastical story in which the Roman Catholic Church oversaw parishioners for centuries until Protestantism fractured Latin Christendom and created many ecclesiastical branches. Alternatively, Peter Brown has described an “ancient Christianity” up to the seventh century that was characterized by a focus on bishops’ power and doctrines, public penance, an urban monasticism under their control, and on an identification with Roman ideals and the Mediterranean heritage. Succeeding it, says Brown, was a “modern Christianity” characterized by closer identification with God’s people of the Old Testament, an emphasis on private penance and purgatorial pains to deal with sin, and a rural monasticism patronized by landed aristocrats who endowed generously. Presented in this chapter thus far were the makings of a locally determined course of Christian history. It was becoming discernible by the eighth century and waxed and waned for centuries until it bifurcated following 1648. 47 48

HStAM, Urk. 37 no. 45. HStAM, 23 Kloster Georgenberg no. 4827.

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Map 2

Abandoned (in italics) and surviving (in bold) settlements around Schreufa

A fifth force, unmentioned in the Schreufa account but whose effects mattered a great deal, was lost villages (Wüstungen). These were settlements— villages, hamlets, mills, fortresses—that were deserted or abandoned for various reasons. They lay in waste until overgrown by trees, or converted to agricultural use, or absorbed by an expanding locale. Hesse had many lost villages.49 Altogether they made up an impressive constellation of might-have-beens. In parish Geismar over thirty settlements became lost over time. A map showing abandoned settlements and sites in the area surrounding Schreufa reveals

49

Among others: Georg Wilhelm Justin Wagner, Die Wüstungen im Großherzogthum Hessen (Darmstadt: G. Jonghaus, 1865); Kurt Scharlau, Siedlung und Landschaft im Knüllgebiet. Ein Beitrag zu den kulturgeographischen Problemen Hessens (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1941); Heinrich Reimer, Historisches Ortslexikon für Kurhessen (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, repr. 1974).

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how they exceeded the number of surviving settlements by a factor of three to one. One of the abandoned was Niederschreufa, which was even older than Schreufa but vanished during the Thirty Years War. Abandoned settlements had a direct bearing on relations within the wider parish and, therefore, on the souls of neighboring rural Gemeinden. Any surviving settlement’s potential to achieve a greater degree of localization and autonomy within the parish depended on many factors, including its own demographics and resources, its distance from the mother church, the topography between the two, and the number, population, and resources of other settlements in the parish. The desertion of any one settlement meant neighboring settlements could absorb its inhabitants and lands. It also reduced by one the number of settlements among which a minister had, or might have had, to split his time and energy. In short, a lost village enhanced the potential of other Gemeinden in the parish to better their parish status and their souls. When the village deserted was a mother church, as happened to Beltersberg in the fourteenth century, a neighboring village could capitalize by becoming the parish seat in its place. The trends reversed any time a lost village was resettled. Battenhausen had been a parish seat in the thirteenth century, was deserted after the Black Death, and then was rebuilt, although this time it joined its former parish affiliates as an affiliate of parish Armsfeld. The number of lost villages varied from parish to parish. The Ebsdorf and Weimar parishes each lost approximately fifteen settlements over time. One of them, Udenhausen, had a tiny, eighth-century hall church with an apse and, probably, had been a parish seat before the seat moved to Ebsdorf. Udenhausen was abandoned by the late fourteenth century. A sixth force in the Schreufa account concerns the Dersch family. Their presence highlights the fact that aristocratic families had close ties to many churches for many centuries. The power of the rural aristocracy over churches was strongest early on, when they set up a “church of the nobility.” As Fletcher writes, “[p]arish boundaries reflect the proprietary origin of rural churches. The provision of churches by lords for their dependents meant that when parish boundaries hardened they tended to do so along the lines of the estate. It is demonstrable in many cases that parish boundaries are identical with the estate boundaries as described in documents of the ninth, tenth, or eleventh centuries.”50 Accordingly, up to the eleventh and twelfth centuries, manorial lords exercised greater influence on church affairs as compared to the ecclesiastical establishment. The lords orally conferred the parish’s proprietary

50

Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, 475.

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right, its church, and its properties to a cleric who had been examined by a bishop. They also enjoyed other rights, including claims over church incomes and a portion of the cleric’s inheritance.51 Commonly a manorial church was built on the front of the site that contained a noble family’s courtyard and dwellings. Many of these proprietary churches came under ecclesiastical oversight amid church reform movements in the eleventh to twelfth centuries. Geary has ascribed the transfer less to an imperious Church and more to a general lay recognition that the Church was better able and suited to maintain those churches.52 Laypersons thus turned to the Church, which increasingly appropriated administration of churches and asserted control over them. Moreover, from the Church’s view, right derived from episcopal conferment and not from the founding of the parish. As the founder’s status was rolled back from that of lord (dominus) of the church to, essentially, its patron, the ministerial office and curation of souls came under the jurisdiction and oversight of the Church.53 Noble patrons generally continued to endow parishes, at times significantly. Yet in later centuries their material support of the parishes often diminished, causing the Gemeinden in particular to shoulder that responsibility. Sometimes the lineage of a local noble family ended. The Dersch family in Viermünden died out in the eighteenth century. Thereafter, Schreufa along with the wider Viermünden district, half of which had gone to the landgrave in 1588, belonged wholly to the Hessian sovereign. A seventh animating force was monastic establishments. Their number in Hesse was modest prior to circa 1000. By then the dense pattern of peasant settlement proved decisive for the economic foundation of monastic communities, just as it did for the towns, both of which began to proliferate after circa 1000.54 Settlements, or portions of them, were often involved in endowments or exchanges between proprietors such as nobles and cloisters. In 826 the minister Germunt endowed Fulda abbey with a third of his lands along the Kalbach, complete with the serfs and others tied to them. Abbot Hadamar in the tenth century donated fifty measures of land located in the same area.55

51 52 53 54

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Classen, Die kirchliche Organisation Althessens im Mittelalter, 49. Patrick Geary, Living with the Dead in the Middle Ages (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 89–92. Classen, Die kirchliche Organisation Althessens im Mittelalter, 50–51. Winfried Schich, “Der hochmittelalterliche Landesausbau im nördlichen Hessen und im Raum östlich der mittleren Elbe im Vergleich – mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Klöster und Städte,” in Baumgärtner and Schich, Nordhessen im Mittelalter, 29–52. Archiv des Bischöflichen Generalvikariats Fulda (hereafter: AGV) EGN/A/4/09-02.

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Bits of Schreufa’s past also bear witness to this tendency. Bishop Burkhard I (d. 1025) of Worms willed Schreufa to a nunnery in 1016, and a certain count named Kunimund gifted it to the Imperial abbey of Hersfeld in 1107.56 Parishes could be deeply woven into this web of relations. In parish Ebsdorf two noble patrons founded a cloister of the Premonstratensian order in Hachborn in 1186 and dedicated its church to St. John the Baptist.57 The cloister soon wielded wider influence. Gradually it provided the ecclesiastical ministrations for the village population, and according to a 1210 contract it possessed the right to administer parish Ebsdorf.58 Its ecclesiastical overseers, St. Stephan’s Stift (an endowed chapter of clergy housed in a building complex) in Mainz, had the right of ecclesiastical patronage, although incrementally the Hachborn cloister seemed to exercise this, too, for in 1348 the prior and cloister referenced the Ebsdorf church as “our church.”59 An eighth force was the labor obligations toward and material support of the parishes.60 The ecclesiastical institution and parish network in Hesse, like elsewhere, operated predominantly on provisions from the local economy. Certainly, an appreciable portion of these could come from aristocratic patronage, although their wealth was itself generated by peasants via land production. The arrangement was mutually beneficial: the church provided Christian ministrations and services for local parishioners, and the parishioners provided for the material sustenance of the church, meaning, the institution, its staff, and parish church buildings, as well as monasteries, hospitals, and other ecclesiastical corporations. The demands of material provision increased over the centuries as the ecclesiastical establishment grew in complexity and as more ecclesiastical buildings were constructed or needed repair. From the laity’s standpoint these relationships helped establish “a series of practices and rules for both obligatory and voluntary contributions,” thereby “creating a complicated framework of links and interdependences” between them and the church’s many institutions.61 In short, the Christian life of rural Gemeinden had direct ties to the local economy and the capacity of the Gemeinden to provide materially.

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HStAM, Urk. 26 no. 22. Haupt Hessische Staatsarchiv Wiesbaden, 11 no. U 5. HStAM, Urk. 25 no. 3–4. HStAM, Urk. 25 no. 56. The content here follows: Brigitte Resl, “Material support I: parishes,” in Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100–c.1500, vol. 4 of Cambridge History of Christianity, ed. Miri Rubin and Walter Simons (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 99–106. Resl, “Material support I: parishes,” 99.

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The Gemeinden’s payments of parish expenses came in the form of tithes, taxes, and fees. The tithe had been voluntary earlier in church history, but over time it was made compulsory and increasingly regulated. Late in his reign Charlemagne directed all Christians in his empire to give their tithes to their parish church.62 Canon fifty-four of the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 directed tithes to be paid before any dues or rents so as to prevent harm to churches and danger to souls.63 The so-called death tax was designed to make up for arrears of payments over a person’s lifetime. Especially relevant at the parish level, and necessary for a sufficient clerical income, were fees for such things as baptisms, weddings, funerals, and church feasts at the more significant Christian holidays. More generally, local Christians funded numerous parish expenses, including infrastructure, the priest’s income, and poor relief, as well as certain ecclesiastical costs beyond the local parish. Scholarly consensus has held that laypeople offered no opposition to the tithe system but might have tried to evade certain taxes and fees, not least because ecclesiastical legislation produced ambiguity and contradiction over which services the church should administer freely, which lay payments were obligatory or voluntary, and which customary offerings the laity should not refuse to give. Noteworthy, too, is that parishioners’ pattern of giving shifted over time. Whereas earlier on they channeled considerable resources into a benefice system that supported monasteries and ecclesiastical chapters, in later centuries they directed more toward their own parish expenditures and pastoral needs.64 Parish labor services also fueled a Gemeinde’s desire to localize. Members who lived at the mother church, affiliate, and incorporated locales were all obligated to help maintain the parish church and its properties, such as the church wall, cemetery, and agricultural fields. Upkeep of an affiliate church fell to that local Gemeinde and any incorporated locales tied to it. This system gave rise to tensions, grievances, and aspirations. While incorporated and affiliate Gemeinden had a natural interest in tending to their souls by providing for their parish church, they could experience the labor services as a burden and the deference to the mother church an indignity. Around 1600 the Gemeinde of Niederweimar, though an affiliate, rejected the Oberweimar mother church Gemeinde’s demand that they contribute to work being done on the parish house. Niederweimar argued that a documented agreement from

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Borgolte, Die Mittelalterliche Kirche, 52. Norman P. Tanner, Decrees of the Ecumenical Councils (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1990). Marc R. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 156.

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1573 absolved them of such duties and that, moreover, “we have our special church at Niederweimar, and must maintain it.”65 Rural Gemeinden could, like Niederweimar, reduce their labor burdens by becoming more autonomous within the parish, or channel them dramatically to local benefit by founding their own parish, as Marburg, Frankenberg, and many others did. Gemeinden that remained in the original parish could fear such a change. Their parish would lose sources of income, and their own parish burdens would mount. They could also have reason to welcome the change because the reduced demands on their minister meant they had greater opportunity to increase localized ministrations. A ninth and especially important animating force was the Gemeinde itself. As Heide Wunder notes of rural Germany, “the medieval Gemeinde” cannot be neatly and sharply defined.66 Instead, starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, a series of communal forms took shape. The forms materialized not in a vacuum but rather from a dynamic interaction between multiple factors. One was the loosening and breaking up of the old manorial system. Without surrendering their rights and returns, lords pragmatically encouraged peasant settlement as well as communal methods and communal freedom of action to develop the land. They had done much the same when they largely compromised with urbanization and managed it to benefit themselves financially and to fortify their political authority.67 Moreover, for self-interested reasons— among them, the expense of paying official overseers, the greater productivity of independent peasant agricultural economies, the greater affordability of hired labor as compared to forced labor, and the desire to prevent their serfs from fleeing to freedom in the towns—lords began converting the older, exploitative manorial system of servile obligations into a system of rents.68 Although peasants still had compulsory services and fees to render, their status transitioned to one of tenant leaseholder, and land tenure became heritable. The focus of their labors shifted more toward the family economy, and the manor steadily transformed into a village in a process known as “villagization” (Verdorfung).69 Governing authorities themselves began conceiving the village as a unit in the structure of administration and cataloguing villages in 65 66 67 68

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HStAM, 17e Oberweimar 15. Heide Wunder, Die bäuerliche Gemeinde in Deutschland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 34. Emphasis Wunder’s. Benjamin Arnold, Princes and territories in medieval Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 154–55, 170–76. Thomas Robisheaux, “The World of the Village,” in Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko Oberman, James D. Tracy, Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, 2 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 1:79–112. Wunder, Die bäuerliche Gemeinde in Deutschland, 33.

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a survey known as a “village book.”70 The transition from manor to village also freed and intensified the agricultural economy, which could be oriented more toward rising market demands.71 Urban development and communalization and the peasants’ interaction with them, not least via the market, offered a social model to peasants regarding how they could organize themselves.72 It enticed them to administer their local affairs at a time when they enjoyed a greater degree of personal liberty.73 The crisis of the mid-fourteenth century also expedited the Gemeinde’s emergence. The plague that swept through Europe in the late 1340s cut both ways. While it halted the founding of further settlements and unleashed demographic devastation, it also dissolved the old manorialism. Various tasks and political responsibilities fell to the Gemeinde, whose members took them up. That is, as the vertical forces of hierarchy weakened, the horizontal forces of communalization strengthened across the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Communal responsibility and autonomy gradually expanded. As those affected by the manors’ gradual dissolution searched for new social, economic, and legal forms, they found them in the local Gemeinde, which became the “new social form.”74 Peasants with communal landholdings secured a favorable bargaining position vis-à-vis the manorial lords and sovereigns and banded together in more organized fashion to promote their shared economic conditions. Emerging field rotation systems that necessitated communal organization and corporate decisions regarding matters of maintenance compelled them to collaborate too. Local connection and the urge for economic and local autonomy took on greater importance for Gemeinde members. Alone a peasant could not withstand a lord, but together peasants could fashion a hedge against forms of seigneurial encroachment that nobles tended to thrust on the peasants.75

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John Theibault, German Villages in Crisis: rural life in Hesse-Kassel and the Thirty Years’ War, 1580–1720 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1995), 16ff. Wilhelm Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe: From the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, trans. Olive Ordish (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), 23; Alfred Haverkamp, Medieval Germany 1056–1273, trans. Helga Braun and Richard Mortimer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 172–80. Thomas Robisheaux, “The Peasantries of Western Germany, 1300–1750,” in The Peasantries of Europe: From the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries, ed. Tom Scott (London: Longman, 1998), 110–42. Wunder, Die bäuerliche Gemeinde in Deutschland, 61. Wunder, Die bäuerliche Gemeinde in Deutschland, 63–67. Peter Blickle, “Kommunalismus – Begriffsbildung in heuristischer Absicht,” in Landgemeinde und Stadtgemeinde in Mitteleuropa: ein struktureller Vergleich, ed. Peter Blickle (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991), 12.

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Names for the nascent village Gemeinde reflect this rising trend. Documents of the early thirteenth to early sixteenth centuries referred to it as universitas ville, communitas ville, universitas villanorum, universitas villae, gemeyn, gemeynde, and communitas ville.76 The Latin forms started to be joined by the German forms in the fifteenth century and eventually were largely supplanted by them. The German ones appeared in various formulations such as gantze gemeine des dorffes and gemeine dorffschaft.77 The Gemeinde thus became the common form of rural organization by circa the thirteenth century, and it remained the organizational principle in rural settings for many centuries.78 Similarly, the term “common man” (der gemeine Mann) had surfaced by the late thirteenth century and kept occurring in discourse for a long time.79 Communal government was based on households. Thus, the enfranchised members of the Gemeinde, usually men but occasionally widows too, were each the head of a household who held or possessed local land. They were responsible for family members and individuals organized into their households, and in this sense the civil dimension of the Gemeinde tacitly included the nonenfranchised of local society. The enfranchised displayed their shared interests and, theoretically, their equal standing by calling each other neighbor (Nachbar) or member (Mitglied) of the Gemeinde. Despite the stratification among them due to disparities in their landholdings, taxes, and security as leaseholders, they each swore an annual oath and had one vote on a given communal matter. With that system the Gemeinde administered and financed a number of local offices and institutions. One was the communal assembly.80 Assemblies, both in towns and villages, typically gathered somewhere near the

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Herbert Reyer, Die Dorfgemeinde im nördlichen Hessen: Untersuchungen zur hessischen Dorfverfassung im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1983), 13–14. Peter Blickle, “Kommunalisierung und Christianisierung,” in Kommunalisierung und Christianisierung: Voraussetzungen und Folgen der Reformation, 1400–1600, ed. Peter Blickle (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989), 14. Heide Wunder, “Die ländliche Gemeinde als Strukturprinzip der spätmittelalterlichfrühneuzeitlichen Geschichte Mitteleuropas,” in Blickle, Landgemeinde und Stadtgemeinde, 386. Peter Blicke, “Communalism as an Organizational Principle Between Medieval and Modern Times,” in Peter Blickle, From the Communal Reformation to the Revolution of the Common Man, trans. Beat Kümin (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 1–15. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 499–500. Werner Trossbach, “Die ländliche Gemeinde im mittleren Deutschland,” in Blickle, Landgemeinde und Stadtgemeinde, 265–66.

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church.81 As records indicate, most often this meant on the churchyard and occasionally before the churchyard, before the church, or by the church wall or gate, which marked off the church grounds. Churchyards commonly doubled as cemeteries. Records thus state that certain assemblies gathered at the cimiterio, as examples from 1199 in Merlau and 1239 in Wetter bear witness.82 The church and the canopy of a tree, usually a linden, framed the topographical core for a village. The setting also provided an open venue for the Gemeinde to engage in local political processes as well as a court setting for local judicial proceedings. Members had the duty to attend assemblies. Summoning and achieving them was easier in a village than in a town.83 Commonly placed under the tree were benches or stones on which to sit, and perhaps a table. A record from Allna in 1380 shows that two gardens under and near the linden tree were sold to help create a proper churchyard, an indication that members believed it important to have one.84 The yard in Himmelsberg was first mentioned in 1289, and assemblies there through the centuries were held under a linden tree which still stands today and is estimated to be as much as one thousand years old. Finally, as documents, paintings, and photographs attest, social occasions such as village dances took place on the same open venue. Certain members served as the local communal officers (Vormünder, Viermänner, Vorsteher), and together with the village head (Schultheiß, Grebe) they helped administer the village. How these men were selected can be unclear, but likely the village head was appointed by a lord and the officers were elected by the Gemeinde. Members could dispatch the officers to speak for them before authorities. They also elected one of their own to be the warden (Opfermann, Küster, Glöckner). The earliest documented mention of a warden in Hesse came in 1250 for the since-lost village of Altengrüsen near Gemünden

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Among numerous examples across Hesse are ones from Vollnkirchen and from Aßlar: E. Wiese, Urkundenbuch der Stadt Wetzlar, 1141–1350 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1911), vol. 3, no. 257 (14 September 1373) and no. 729 (7 June 1417), respectively; from Wahlen: K. A. Eckhardt, Die Oberhessischen Klöster, Regesten und Urkunden, vol. 3 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1977), no. 413 (19 June 1455); and from Altenschirf: E. E. Becker, Die Riedesel zu Eisenbach: Geschichte des Geschlechts der Riedesel Freiherrn zu Eisenbach, Erbmarschälle zu Hessen (Offenbach: Gerstung, 1923–1927), vol. 2, no. 1371 (1 May 1483). Ulrich Weiss, Die Gerichtsfassung in Oberhessen bis zum Ende des 16. Jahrhunderts (Marburg, 1978), 209; H. B. Wenck, Hessische Landesgeschichte, vol. 2, Urkundenbuch (Frankfurt, 1789), no. 139 (24 September 1239), Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum Digitale Bibliothek. Blickle, “Kommunalismus,” 8–9. Albrecht Eckhardt, Die Oberhessischen Klöster, Regesten und Urkunden, vol. 2 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1977), no. 192 (14 December 1380).

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Figure 7

The Linden tree in Himmelsberg in a dotted, encircled plot (center), with the church and churchyard (Kirche Hof ) to its immediate southeast, 1812

an der Wohra.85 The warden typically maintained the church building and properties and rang the church bell (or bells) to signal an assembly, services in the church, and the hours of a day. Members reared the younger generation to guard the communal order and to uphold communal principles that maintained internal solidarity. Peasants also utilized the Gemeinde as the organizational focal point for their protests, at times violent, against abuses and injustices. They did so in the fourteenth through sixteenth centuries in German-speaking Europe, above all amid the German Peasants War in 1525, and perpetuated the trend into the nineteenth century.86 Concurrently with the communalization of local mundane affairs came the communalization of the local church and parish affairs. The Gemeinde existed

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HStAM, Urk. 87 no. 55. Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: the German Peasants’ War from a new perspective (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1981); Werner Trossbach, Bauernbewegungen im Wetterau-Vogelsberg-Gebiet, 1648–1806 (Darmstadt: Hessischen Historischen Kommision, 1985).

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in a sacred dimension as well as the civil one and the two were essentially identical. The same enfranchised members who decided on political matters also decided on spiritual ones. Early surviving sources reflect the overlap. For example, members of the village Gemeinde Hüddingen in Waldeck, today in western Hesse, identified themselves in 1267 as “parish members” (Pfarrangehörige).87 The sacred dimension of the Gemeinde incorporated the baptized, nonenfranchised Christians of local society as well. The symbiosis of Church and Gemeinde at the local level was visible in routine ways. Prominent among them was usage of the term “the Christian Gemeinde” (die christliche Gemeinde), meaning the corpus christianum. “In all and every Christian Gemeinde of our lands, towns, hamlets and villages,” proclaimed the 1610 consistory ordinance of Hesse-Kassel.88 “For the propagation of His Holy Name, for especially the edification of our Christian Gemeinde,” declared Frankenberg in 1622.89 In the early seventeenth century Biedenkopf petitioned for the Eckelshausen minister—a native son of their town—to return home and become their minister, but he would not leave “his Christian Gemeinde … to which he is currently called” and take up their vacant parish post until authorized to do so.90 Normally, both in spiritual and temporal matters, a Gemeinde signed their petition as “the Gemeinde” of their locale, which they named. In parish contexts, when contemporaries made reference to “the Gemeinde” or “the Christian Gemeinde,” they did so in the sense that these were one and the same.91 The symbiosis was commonly visible. A Gemeinde in 1563 petitioned that it would be a “good Christian work” for their cleric to stay and minister to our “poor Gemeinde.”92 Another in 1566 said the minister “builds nothing Christian in the Gemeinde” and requested a minister who would be “beneficial and useful to the Christian Gemeinde.”93 Two Gemeinden in 1611 sought for a candidate to be appointed as the “minister and caretaker of souls of our Gemeinden.”94 Yet another in 1611 sent

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Eckhart G. Franz, ed., Kloster Haina, Regesten und Urkunden, vol. 1, 1144–1300 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1962), no. 503 (24/30 June 1267). HStAM, 22a no. 4a. HStAM, 22a no. 9:3. HStAM, 19b no. 1788. From 1588, HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1370; from 1597, HStAM, 17e Röddenau no. 10; from 1606, HStAM, 4i no. 162; from 1607, HStAM, 17 I no. 5133; from 1611, HStAM, 17e Oberrosphe no. 2; from 1624, HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 621. The example of Gladenbach, HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 629. The example of Wittelsberg, HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 750. The example of Ober- and Niederrosphe, HStAM, 17e Oberrosphe no. 2.

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its officers to represent all members in parish affairs like they did in political affairs.95 The term Gemeinde could be multipurpose. On very seldom occasions the local Gemeinden that made up a rural parish were referred to collectively as a “parish Gemeinde.” Larger-sized towns that conceived of themselves as a corpus christianum contained multiple churches, each with its own body of parishioners that might be referred to as a Gemeinde. These complexities underline the point that, of all the scales at which there was a civil-sacred unity, it was clearest, strongest, and most durable at the scale of a rural locale. Every Gemeinde within a rural parish wanted to have their own church building and to localize Christian ministrations as much and as regularly as their resources permitted them. In 1357 locals in the since-lost village of Wolfterode near Eschwege pressed the Frankershausen minister repeatedly for a weekly service in their church in exchange for two measures of grain, three of oats, and one chicken annually from each household.96 Around the Palatinate and Baden rural Gemeinden in the century up to 1517 made substantial financial sacrifices to fund a 20 to 30 percent rise in the number of rural ministerial posts.97 The same phenomenon occurred in the Thurgau and Schaffhausen regions of Switzerland during the same period.98 In many Swiss and Tyrolian regions the local Gemeinden secured the right to appoint their minister. Those in inner Switzerland enjoyed rights over the church to the point where “in actuality, they had the parishes in their hand.”99 In sum, developments in rural German-speaking Europe gave rise to a sense that “a village without its own parish church … was in fact not a true, complete, growing village.”100

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The example of Amönau, HStAM, PMK vol. 1 (22 May 1611). Likewise, church authorities summoned communal officers to speak with them. Instances abound, for example, in HStAM, PMK vol. 1–11; e.g. vol. 2 (7 March 1612). Albert Huyskens, ed., Die Klöster der Landschaft an der Werra: Regesten und Urkunden, vol. 9, part 1 (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1916), no. 1082 (2 June 1357), 422. Rosi Fuhrmann, “Die Kirche im Dorf. Kommunale Initiativen zur Organisation von Seelsorge vor der Reformation,” in Zugänge zur bäuerlichen Reformation, ed. Peter Blickle (Zurich: Chronos, 1987), 147–86; also, Rosi Fuhrmann, Kirche und Dorf: religiöse Bedürfnisse und kirchliche Stiftung auf dem Lande vor der Reformation (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1995). Hans von Rütte, “Bäuerliche Reformation am Beispiel der Pfarrei Marbach im sanktgallischen Rheintal,” in Blickle, Zugänge zur bäuerlichen Reformation, 55–84; Peter Bierbrauer, “Die Reformation in den Schaffhauser Gemeinden Hallau und Thayngen,” in Blickle, Zugänge zur bäuerlichen Reformation, 21–53. Blickle, “Kommunalisierung und Christianisierung,” 23. Karl Siegfried Bader, Dorfgenossenschaft und Dorfgemeinde (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1962), 198, also p. 200.

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Gemeinden, led by members who staffed communal offices, asserted responsibilities for parish operations. These included monitoring the minister’s dutifulness. In 1507 the Heyerode Gemeinde insisted that the Berneburg minister carry out the sacraments and worship services in the Heigenrad church as his predecessor did.101 The responsibilities included making sure the parish post remained staffed. When the one at Lohrhaupten stood vacant for too long in 1545, the parish Gemeinden cried how they were being “robbed of godly and Christian oversight, administration of the sacraments, baptism, and home visits of the ill.”102 The responsibilities also included making sure the post was vacated and reappointed if need be. Those in parish Oberweimar passionately called in 1563 for “Christian order” and “Christian instruction” in their successful lobbying for the minister’s removal.103 Gemeinden helped the parish cleric manage the tithe and often pressed to be the ones to administer it. They did likewise with collections and donations for the church building, Eucharistic bread and wine, a variety of instruments used in worship, and local poor relief. Monetary fines stemming from penance were directed to local church expenses. The practice could instigate disagreement, as it did in 1355 in the since-lost village of Schlierbach near Eschwege when dispute flared over allocations for candles, Eucharistic wine, and the provision of oblates.104 Aristocratic patrons could involve themselves in local parish finances, too, as the nobleman Christian von Völkershausen did in 1483 when he directed penance fines toward the making of bells.105 A tenth animating force was communal norms, values, and customs. Rural Gemeinden derived them from their members’ everyday world of interdependence and from their agricultural and pastoral economies. Their discourse pertaining to their Christian life was also steeped in these principles. The Gemeinden paired them in opposites, the one to affirm that which promoted the condition of their souls and the other to raise alarm whenever something endangered it. They pursued the soul’s well-being via building and betterment (Bau und Besserung) and grew worried when abuse or neglect threatened to ruin it or cause it to perish (verderben). They cherished order (Ordnung)

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Huyskens, Die Klöster der Landschaft an der Werra, vol. 9, part 1, no. 190 (17 Feb. 1507), 77–78. HStAM, 83 no. 6099. HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1368. Karl August Eckhardt, Quellen zur Rechtsgeschichte der Stadt Eschwege, vol. 1, Urkunden und Stadtbücher (Marburg: Historische Kommission für Hessen, 1959), 13/5, no. 66 (30 November 1355). K. A. Eckhardt, Die Oberhessischen Klöster, Regesten und Urkunden, vol. 3, no. 539 (1483).

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and hated disorder (Unordnung). They valued peace (Friede) and agitated to quell discord (Streit, Zanck, Unfriede). They preserved custom (Herkommen) that had been around from time immemorial (von undenklichen Jahren, seit undencklichen Zeiten) and objected to a novelty (Neuerung) which did not arise from the communal will. They championed the common good (Gemeinnutz) above the private good (Privatnutz).106 While historians have debated whether communal solidarity was genuine or merely apparent, the fact that Gemeinden set standards for themselves and reaffirmed them for generations leaves less room for argument.107 Records through the centuries attest that members deliberated and decided local parish affairs corporately. Whenever a handful deviously invoked the communal will to steer a matter according to their personal interests, the ongoing process typically exposed them, earned them reprimands, and deterred others from attempting it in the future. An eleventh force was temporal and ecclesiastical authorities. As the Gemeinde came of age, both secular and ecclesiastical authorities increasingly relied on it. They structured their operations and compiled their records with Gemeinden as vital actors in political and spiritual life.108 The Gemeinde thus facilitated temporal governance’s transition from systems based on invested symbols of power, feudal society, and the manorial economy to ones based on state-like administration, bureaucratic officialdom, and taxation. These steadily thickened over time. Along the way, temporal authorities composed ordinances that affirmed the local Gemeinden as key cogs in the maintenance of peace and order. Church authorities, too, issued ordinances that depended more explicitly and substantially on them for the order and operations of parish life.109 Finally, a twelfth animating force driving the confluence of Christianization, localization, and communalization was the initiatives of the Reformations of the sixteenth century. The initiatives tended to suit rural Gemeinden. Luther and other reformers accentuated the Gemeinde’s standing by translating the word ecclesia (church) as Gemeinde, making an early call for the 106 107 108 109

David Mayes, Communal Christianity: the Life and Loss of a Peasant Vision in Early Modern Germany (Boston: Brill, 2004), 23–63. James Tracy, Europe’s Reformations 1450–1650: Doctrine, Politics, and Community (Rowman & Littlefield, 2006), 241–42. Randolph Head, “Knowing Like a State: The Transformation of Political Knowledge in Swiss Archives, 1450–1700,” The Journal of Modern History 75, no. 4 (2003): 745–82. Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts, 24 vols. (Leipzig, 1902–). In one example from these edited volumes, a 1533 Hessian ordinance charged the Gemeinden with providing much of the labor and financial costs for parish upkeep. Vol. 8:80.

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election of ministers to be done through its members, and charging the members with judging correct doctrine.110 These resonated with, and were at least partly prompted by, Gemeinden’s rising desire in the fifteenth century to select and judge their minister, something they expressed repeatedly in articles during the peasant unrest in 1524–1525.111 In the wake of the Reformations pews were placed in church sanctuaries. Gemeinden communalized them in the sense that the placement of seats indicated standing in the Christian Gemeinde.112 They had already appropriated the “sermon worship service” (Predigtgottesdienst) that the Church, prior to the Reformations, had provided.113 The sixteenth-century emphasis on the sermon or homily intensified that trend. Authorities deployed various institutions to effect ecclesiastical reform, including visitations, superintendents, synods, and consistories as well as presbyteries and other village-based disciplinary bodies. Gemeinden opportunistically utilized them to petition, complain, self-discipline, selfChristianize, and otherwise inform themselves and the authorities.114 The Reformations emphasized literacy and learning and thus the need for local schools. Gemeinden treated education as useful for building up their civil and sacred society and the founding of schools as an impetus for localizing more Christianity. The secularization of cloisters, where it occurred, redirected considerable energies and resources for communal use in the local parish. In 1527 Hachborn’s Premonstratensian cloister was secularized, and in 1528

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Blickle, “Kommunalismus,” 30. Tom Scott and Bob Scribner, ed. and trans., The German Peasants’ War: a history in documents (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1991). In an example from 1607–1608, the few dozen Brotterode Gemeinde members hotly objected to the creation of a new pew by the village head and communal officers, arguing that it had been made secretly and subversively and that all pews were communal instead of individual in designation. HStAM, 22a no. 8:4. Sermons and preachings were already a feature of religious life before Luther and reformers elevated their importance, and in them the Word of God was referenced. Anne Thayer, Penitence, Preaching and the Coming of the Reformation (Florence: Routledge, 2002); Thomas L. Amos, Eugene A. Green, and Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ed., De ore Domini: Preacher and Word in the Middle Ages (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1989); Rudolf Cruel, Geschichte der deutschen Predigt im Mittelalter (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1966); Karl Dienst, Geschichte des Lutherischen Gottesdienstes der Freien Reichstadt Frankfurt am Main (Ph.D. diss., University of Mainz, 1955), 26ff. Jay Goodale, “Pastors, Privation, and the Process of Reformation in Saxony,” The Sixteenth Century Journal 33, no. 1 (2002): 71–92; Bruce Tolley, Pastors and Parishioners in Württemberg during the Late Reformation, 1581–1621 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Heinrich Richard Schmidt, Dorf und Religion: reformierte Sittenzucht in Berner Landgemeinden der frühen Neuzeit (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1995).

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Hachborn itself was returned to parish Ebsdorf.115 The parish minister moved from Hachborn to Ebsdorf several decades later. The animating forces of Christianity in rural Germany proved resilient across the centuries. “Communal structures implied no predisposition for a certain theology,”116 and so, they functioned largely the same regardless of the confessional religion installed in the local parish. Whenever church authorities instituted changes to religious practice, the rural Gemeinden’s uninterrupted impulse to Christianize, localize, and communalize kept prompting them to build and better their souls’ well-being.117 The non- or aconfessional, communal Christianity which they cultivated did not depend on a particular ceremonial or material form. With the religion they exercised in their local church, one that was Christian in name and practice, members affirmed themselves as Christians and their Gemeinde as Christian, as their ancestors for centuries had done. That is, they located Christianity not in this or that form of confessional religion advocated by ecclesiastical authorities but in being associated with the local Gemeinde and in its notions about Christian religion. 115 116 117

HStAM, Urk. 25 no. 10; HStAM, 22a no. 9:49. Beat Kümin, Landgemeinde und Kirche im Zeitalter der Konfessionen, with a foreword by Peter Blickle (Zurich: Chronos, 2004), 18. Blickle, “Kommunalisierung und Christianisierung,” 26–27.

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Rural Gemeinden in an Age of Pluralization, 1517–1648 For some time now works of history have portrayed the early sixteenth century as a watershed in the Latin Christian world. They tell a story of how opposed notions of the Christian religion sundered Latin Christendom into multiple groups or factions and how the Protestant Reformation and Catholic CounterReformation wrought epoch-making transformations, leaving legacies in their wake.1 Crucial to the process was the writing of confessions—creedal statements of faith that carefully defined true religion and identified false religion.2 Confessions, beginning most prominently with the 1530 Augsburg Confession, witnessed to the fact that Christianity was pluralizing in the sixteenth century and that the confessional versions of it were mutually exclusive. Confessions in the Holy Roman Empire, most notably those of the leading three parties, which historians have called Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed, were composed by theologians. But due to media, institutions, and tightly collaborating ecclesiastical and political authorities, people in the Empire as well as across Europe actively engaged in the confessionalization of religion

1 Examples from more recent decades abound. Lewis Spitz presents Protestantism as a modernizing force in The Protestant Reformation 1517–1559 (New York: Harper & Row, 1985). Hans J. Hillerbrand argues that religion lay irreducibly at the core of Christendom’s rupture, and that “[b]y the twilight of the sixteenth century, everything had changed. The unity of Western Christendom had vanished … Christendom in the West was divided—not into two factions, Catholic and Protestant, but into no fewer than six: Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, antitrinitarians, and Anabaptists.” The Division of Christendom: Christianity in the Sixteenth Century (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2007), 406. Diarmaid MacCulloch cites the split that set into the Western Church after 1517, the reunion that was deferred starting in 1530 and then scorned by 1570, and the new and divided Europe that emerged after 1570. The Reformation: A History (New York: Viking, 2003). Carlos Eire describes Europe as “On the Edge” due to reformist pressures in the generations before Luther. He argues that Protestants and Catholics then fashioned much of their respective religion in reaction to each other, and that this ongoing dynamic of reform heavily influenced the course of history in European lands as well as in some areas of the wider world. Reformations: The Early Modern World 1450–1650 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 2 Lee Palmer Wandel, “Confessions,” in Safley, A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, 23–43.

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_005

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or were impacted by the pluralization that confessions facilitated.3 Histories relay this impression. They commonly state that the territories in which persons resided, the princes and nobles who ruled over them, the church services they attended, the ecclesiastical personnel who spiritually shepherded them, and the ministrations they received were Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed (or, alternatively, Catholic and Protestant, or Catholic and evangelical, or Catholic, Lutheran Protestant, and Reformed Protestant).4 Color-coded maps that label areas of the Empire in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed visually accentuate the point. This Catholic-Protestant ordering of the historical record has also deeply informed how historians have analyzed persons who lived during the 1517–1648 period. Some have identified them straightforwardly as Catholics and Lutherans and Reformed, or as Catholic and Lutheran and Reformed laity. In the same way, they have identified villages and villagers as Catholic and Lutheran and Reformed.5 Framing the whole of society, those toward the top as well as those toward the bottom, by the Catholic and Protestant categories sets the categories in a thoroughly commanding position when it comes to characterizing contemporaries’ actions and to narrating the course of history. Other works have also identified persons as Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed but have argued for greater complexity by asserting that persons sometimes traversed a confession’s boundaries instead of operating strictly

3 Heinz Schilling, “Confessional Europe: Bureaucrats, La Bonne Police, Civilizations,” in Brady, Oberman, Tracy, Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, 2:641–75. 4 An example of each, respectively: Werner Freitag, Pfarrer, Kirche und ländliche Gemeinschaft (Bielefeld: Verlag für Regionalgeschichte, 1998); C. Scott Dixon, The Reformation of Rural Society: The parishes of Brandenburg-Ansbach-Kulmbach, 1528–1603 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Meinrad Schaab, ed., Territorialstaat und Calvinismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1993). 5 A sampling: Hans-Christoph Rublack, “New Patterns of Christian Life,” in Brady, Oberman, Tracy, Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, 2:585–605; Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling: Shaping the Religious Emotions in Early Modern Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 68, 216, 250; Thomas A. Brady, Jr., German Histories in the Age of the Reformations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 281, 289, 315. Analyses in Marc Forster’s works concerning pre-1648 rural populations have relied on an identification of them as “Catholics” and “Protestants” and on a Catholic-Protestant reading of the record. The Counter-Reformation in the Villages: Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 1–177; Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque, 1–60; Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 43–46.

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within them.6 These analyses do, though, like the ones they critique, still reify the Catholic and Protestant categories as tools for explicating the historical record. Still other works of history have labeled persons in more mundane ways— as parishioners, burghers, peasants, laypeople, laity, folk, flock, and the masses, in addition to calling them women, men, wives, husbands, girls, boys, adults, children, families, and neighbors. The terms are not wrong, but absent any mention that said persons were Christians or any consideration that they may have possessed their own Christian culture, the terms tend to frame them in the mode of response and also limit the range of their agency.7 Persons are described as having enthusiastically adopted and actively supported the confessional program propagated by their clerics, in which case either it is stated or the reader is led to infer that they were Catholics or Lutherans or Reformed, depending on the religion.8 Or persons are depicted more passively on the receiving end of their clerics’ confessional program, which then presses to the fore questions about the program’s imprint, the degree to which the programs produced social change in the laity, and also the pace at which the laity took

6 For example, the introduction and chapters in Kaspar von Greyerz, Manfred JakubowkiTiessen, Thomas Kaufmann, and Hartmut Lehmann, ed., Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität – binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität. Neue Forschungen zur Konfessionsthese (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2003); Martin Christ, Biographies of a Reformation: Religious Change and Confessional Coexistence in Upper Lusatia, 1520–1635 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). 7 For example: Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 402–35. In the chapter titled “Reformers and Laypeople,” Cameron initially identifies persons as “Lay Christians” (p. 402), and then, in the rest of the chapter, opts for many of the nonreligious, mundane terms as well as for other descriptors such as “proletariat” and “simple country people.” Cameron describes reformers as setting out to build a religious culture and the laypeople as acquiring “a daunting new range of religious duties” and having “to learn about their belief” (p. 402, emphasis Cameron’s). 8 Christopher Boyd Brown, Singing the Gospel: Lutheran Hymns and the Success of the Reformation (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005). Bodo Nischan, “Ritual and Protestant Identity,” in Protestant History and Identity in Sixteenth-Century Europe, ed. Bruce Gordon (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 2:142–58. Robert J. Christman depicts a slow, labored, and partially successful effort by churchmen “to instill Lutheranism in their parishioners,” whom Christman at times calls “Lutherans,” in “The Pulpit and the Pew: Shaping Popular Piety in the Late Reformation,” in Lutheran Ecclesiastical Culture, 1550–1675, ed. Robert Kolb (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 259–303. In Doctrinal Controversy and Lay Religiosity in Late Reformation Germany: The Case of Mansfeld (Leiden: Brill, 2012) Christman argues that laypeople also contributed something to the confessional program.

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up the religion.9 Or persons are presented as resisting change due to their religious apathy or recalcitrance, a view which especially plays up the idea that authorities needed to resort to stiff measures of indoctrination or confessionalization.10 Whether a historian judges it to have occurred by some point in the sixteenth century or early seventeenth century, there is a scholarly consensus that confessional boundaries penetrated into society within the Empire and took root in “the cities and villages, even individual houses and families.”11 They continued to operate as deep structures in German history, becoming essential to any proper understanding of it.12 By the time early modern historians hand the baton to modern historians toward the end of the eighteenth century, it is assumed that Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed had been around as a trio in the Empire for roughly two and a half centuries.

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Ronnie Po-chia Hsia, Social Discipline in the Reformation: Central Europe, 1550–1750 (New York: Routledge, 1989). Ulinka Rublack describes an often frustrated effort to reform parishioners’ everyday lives in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 146–91. James Tracy similarly writes of “the relative success of urban Reformations” and “the painfully slow acceptance of new religious ideas in the countryside,” while adding that “[r]ural folk whose religious identity had once been decided by princely fiat eventually did create for themselves a religious culture based on the new beliefs, but only over a very long period of time.” Europe’s Reformations 1450–1650, 271. “It is clear,” writes Bruce Gordon, “that the Lutheran Reformation eventually managed to leave its stamp on local communities, thus effecting the creation of a Protestant identity…. This victory came, as [Gerald] Strauss has said, ‘owing to the hard work done by ruling elites in state, church, academy, and publishing house whose concrete interests these discourses defined in intellectual terms.’” Gordon, “The Changing Face of Protestant History and Identity in the Sixteenth Century,” in Gordon, Protestant History and Identity in SixteenthCentury Europe, 2:17. Quotation of Strauss from: “Comment on ‘Jewish Magic’ and ‘The Devil and the German People,’” in Religion and Culture in the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Steven Ozment (Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1989), 130. For example, “Lutheranism was not going to convert the peasantry with words, at least not during the first century of reform. This was not due to a lack of effort on the part of the pastors…. If Lutheranism were to make inroads, it had to force itself upon the parishioners, it had to be the only alternative in the field of religious action.” Dixon, The Reformation of Rural Society, 143–202, here p. 162. Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Heinz Schilling, “Confessionalization in the Empire: Religious and Societal Change in Germany between 1555 and 1620,” in Schilling, Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society. Essays in German and Dutch History (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1992), 230. Joel Harrington and Helmut Walser Smith, “Confessionalization, Community, and State Building in Germany, 1555–1870,” The Journal of Modern History 69, no. 1 (1997): 77–101.

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This chapter offers a contrasting account. It does so by doing two things. First, it removes anachronistic naming practices that have misconstrued the historical record, restores persons along with their actions to the context of Christian monism, and discerns the extent to which opposed notions of Christian religion did and did not pervade society during the 1517–1648 period. Second, it considers the period as principally a story of what happened to the corpus christianum, which operated at various scales. The civil-sacred unity occurred at scales other than the rural one. Among them were Latin Christendom itself, cities in the German-speaking world, the Holy Roman Empire, and territories within the Empire. At the scale of the first three of these the unity broke down in the sixteenth century as religious partisans collided over opposed notions of religion. But at the scale of the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian territories of the Empire it tended to survive if not tighten, and at the scale of rural Gemeinden it even strengthened. In spite of the religious bellicosity in the Empire and Latin Christendom and the ravages of the Thirty Years War, rural Gemeinden prevented confessional boundaries from penetrating and dividing the local body. In sum, they were not merely peasants or laity, and they did not become Catholics or Lutherans or Reformed during the 1517–1648 period. They were Christians throughout it. Accounting for this changes the historical calculus. This chapter does not assume that the conclusions reached also apply to other areas. But it does explain why, in the cases of Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda, the long-standing practice of discussing and analyzing persons along CatholicProtestant lines is fundamentally flawed. In this way the chapter suggests that the conclusions may have broader heuristic application.

1

Scales of Corpus Christianum, and How Each Fared in the Sixteenth Century

Latin Christendom came into being after a centuries-long process. Vital to it were developments that transformed the Christian world across the Mediterranean into distinct, western and eastern entities.13 By the fourth century a body of Latin church fathers was forming in the West and Greek fathers in the East.14 Theological and canonical schism between Christians, West and East,

13 14

Peter Brown, The World of Late Antiquity (New York: Norton, 1989), 114–87. Arnaldo Momigliano, Alien Wisdom: The Limits of Hellenization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).

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in the sixth and seventh centuries accentuated their growing cultural differences,15 and then in the early eighth century the two sides differed over the use of icons in worship.16 Concurrently, Christians in the West faced Islamic forces advancing around the Mediterranean’s western end while those in the East faced them around its eastern end. By the mid-eighth century the papacy in Rome had pivoted away from its ties to Constantinople and allied with the Carolingian Franks in a mutually beneficial partnership. In the seventh through tenth centuries lands north of the Adriatic Sea gradually demarcated the western and eastern Christian worlds.17 The well-known schism of 1054, in which the pope of Rome and patriarch of Constantinople excommunicated each other, came after disunity had already set in deeply.18 Latin Christendom’s coalescence into a comprehensive order around the eleventh to twelfth centuries engendered characteristic developments over subsequent centuries. Popes and Holy Roman emperors asserted competing claims of divinely appointed authority over it.19 A commonwealth of Christian princes networked across it. Christians sojourned on pilgrimages to a constellation of sacred sites within it and in the Holy Land.20 Latin connected its literate via a common language. Crusading began and matured as fighting occurred on a plurality of fronts for the faith which Latin Christendom championed.21 Waves of new monastic orders and lay movements inspired by poverty and preaching coursed through it, compelling devotees first to move away from revitalized towns and their revived commercialism and then to

15 16

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Herrin, The Formation of Christendom, 129–290. Gillian R. Evans, The Church in the early Middle Ages (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); Thomas F. X. Noble, Images, Iconoclasm, and the Carolingians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009). Fletcher, The Barbarian Conversion, 327–68. Henry Chadwick, East and West: The Making of a Rift in the Church: From Apostolic Times until the Council of Florence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Uta-Renate Blumenthal, The Investiture Controversy: Church and Monarchy from the Ninth to the Twelfth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988); Kathleen G. Cushing, Reform and the Papacy in the Eleventh Century: Spirituality and Social Change (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2005); Brett Edward Whalen, The Two Powers: The Papacy, the Empire, and the Struggle for Sovereignty in the Thirteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Diana Webb, Medieval European Pilgrimage, c.700–c.1500 (New York: Palgrave, 2002). Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades: a history, 3rd ed. (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014); Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, 3 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951–1954); Christopher Tyerman, God’s War: A New History of the Crusades (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006).

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move into the towns in order to confront the profit economy.22 Romanesque and then Gothic swept everywhere as lay and ecclesiastical groups funded the construction of tens of thousands of churches in the popular architectural styles.23 Universities formed to train students in theology, church law, and administration, and also in eliminating heresies so that the Christian body would be uninfected and homogenous.24 Latin Christendom successfully dealt with other internal challenges.25 Disputes over church governance erupted in the fourteenth century. One controversy swirled around the Great Schism between the Roman and Avignon papacies (1378–1415). It engendered “the twins of contention and discord” and was referred to as the “abominable Schism,”26 yet it did not call into fundamental question the contemporary notion of things Christian. At issue were rivaling “obediences” within the Latin church and not the doctrinal understanding of the Church or the Christian religion itself. Ultimately, the crisis was resolved in favor of the papacy in Rome. So, too, was the one posed by conciliarism, which advocated an alternative form of ecclesiastical government with a general council serving as supreme authority. By the mid-fifteenth century the papal monarchy had defeated it. Meanwhile, dissident groups such as the Lollards and Hussites formed and were potentially radical, though not widespread.27 Certain limiting factors such as their national character prevented them from threatening the unanimity of Latin Christendom. Finally,

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Lester K. Little, Religious poverty and the profit economy in medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1978); Giles Constable, The Reformation of the Twelfth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). John Harvey, The Gothic World, 1100–1600: a survey of architecture and art (London: Batsford, 1950); Georges Duby, The age of the cathedrals: art and society, 980–1420 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Charles Homer Haskins, The Rise of Universities (New York: H. Holt and company, 1923); Alan B. Cobban, The Medieval English Universities: Oxford and Cambridge to c.1500 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988); Gordon Leff, Paris and Oxford Universities in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries: an institutional and intellectual history (Huntingdon, NY: R. E. Krieger, 1975); Heinrich Fichtenau, Heretics and Scholars in the High Middle Ages, 1000–1200 (University Park: Pennsylvania University Press, 1998). Norman P. Tanner, The Church in the later Middle Ages (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008). Karlfried Froehlich, “New Testament Models of Conflict Resolution: Observations on the Biblical Argument of Paris Conciliarists during the Great Schism,” in Conciliation and Confession: The Struggle for Unity in the Age of Reform, 1415–1648, ed. Howard P. Louthan and Randall C. Zachman (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004), 14–15. Mishtooni Bose, Fiona Somerset, and J. Patrick Hornbeck II, ed., A Companion to Lollardy (Boston: Brill, 2016); Thomas A. Fudge, The magnificent ride: the first reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Brookfield, VT: Ashgate, 1998).

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the Renaissance in Italy raised classicism and humanism to a level of authority comparable to Christianity.28 Still, whatever the Church’s vulnerabilities,29 its staff of parish clergymen baptized persons into the Christian corpus and affirmed their place in it via the other sacraments, all of which conveyed salvific grace to the person. Christian monism remained normative in Latin Christendom. One spoke, synonymously, of “the Christian religion,” “the Catholic faith,” “the religion of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and the like.30 Opposite it stood, in Spain for example, “the Mosaic heresy” of certain Jews “who were calling themselves Christians but were Jews,” as well as the “faith” of Muhammad, who was “the unfaithful and damned apostate.”31 His “religion,” or “foolish belief,” was “an insult to God.”32 Its adherents were “pagans,” “infidels,” and “the enemies of the Christian faith,” who “blasphemed the name of Christ.”33 That they “remain in occupation of your land,” wrote Pope Honorius III to King Fernando III in 1225, is “to the very grave injury to all Christendom.”34 The line of demarcation, then, in Latin Christendom contraposed a “Christian” to “a Jew, a Moor, or a heretic,”35 and to the Germanic and Slavic “pagans” and “heathen peoples” beyond the northeastern frontier.36 A person could be a Christian and become one of these others, or vice versa. “Christians should endeavor to convert the Moors,” read a thirteenth-century Castilian law, so that by “causing them to believe in our religion” they “become Christians.”37 As for cities in the German-speaking world, historians have noted that “[t]he late medieval German city inclined to understand itself as a ‘Christian body [corpus christianum],’”38 and that “[t]he late medieval burghers had 28

29 30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Charles Trinkhaus, In Our Image and Likeness: Humanity and Divinity in Italian Humanist Thought, 2 vols. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970; repr., Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995). Cameron, The European Reformation, 11–98. Jarbel Rodriguez, ed., Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 331–34. Lu Ann Homza, ed. and trans., The Spanish Inquisition, 1478–1614: An Anthology of Sources (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2006), 7; Joseph O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade in Medieval Spain (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 84. Rodriguez, Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages, 331. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 27, 30, 56; Rodriguez, Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages, 329. O’Callaghan, Reconquest and Crusade, 85. Rodriguez, Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages, 334. S. J. Allen and Emilie Amt, ed., The Crusades: A Reader (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2014), 255–85, here pp. 259, 272. Rodriguez, Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages, 332. Bernd Moeller, Reichsstadt und Reformation (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1987), 15.

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come to treat their city as an intensely sacral community.”39 As Ulrich Zwingli put it, “[a] Christian is nothing other than a faithful, good citizen; a Christian city nothing other than a Christian Gemeinde.”40 Among the cities, the eighty-five free ones of the Empire stood out for their rights, economies, and allegiance to no one except the emperor.41 The confluence of political, social, and religious currents within a city strongly promoted “the unification of political and religious jurisdictions,” for the belief was that “religious discipline and civil regulation [policey] could not be separated from one another.”42 On the strength of this hope magistrates instituted earnest reforms to bring urban society into line. Scholarship has shown, though, that a host of factors characteristic of cities could create a discrepancy between the ideal of corpus christianum and the reality of it.43 The Holy Roman Empire could boast of having already had a civil-sacred unity for many centuries. From the time of Charlemagne (r. 768–814), the power from the emperors of classical Rome was transferred northward, where German-speaking kings, most notably at the time of Otto I in the tenth century, assumed it permanently. In this respect the Imperial office enjoyed a supreme secular status. The Empire possessed a sacral status as well. Most emperors from the early tenth to early sixteenth century were coronated in the chapel in Aachen. Invested in the emperor’s office were both secular symbols, such as the Imperial crown and an orb, and sacred symbols, such as relics. At Henry IV’s coronation in 1056 hymns would have addressed him as “vicar of the Creator,” “the image of God,” and the king appointed by God “to rule the whole world.”44 The empire’s titles—Imperium Romanum, Imperium Christianum, Imperium mundi—expressed its Christian nature as well as its notion of universality.45 By this point many asserted that the emperor “was not merely sanctified, but intrinsically sacred.”46 Frederick I (r. 1152–1190) added the word 39 40 41 42 43

44 45 46

Berndt Hamm, “The Urban Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire,” in Brady, Oberman, Tracy, Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, 2:193–227, here p. 199. Amy Nelson Burnett, Emidio Campi, ed., Die schweizerische Reformation: Ein Handbuch (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 2017), 93. The eighty-five free cities in 1521 diminished in number to sixty-five by 1555. Hamm, “The Urban Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire,” 197. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Ruling Class, Regime and Reformation at Strasbourg 1520–1555 (Leiden: Brill, 1978); R. Po-chia Hsia, Society and Religion in Münster, 1535–1618 (New York: Yale University Press, 1984). I. S. Robinson, Henry IV of Germany, 1056–1106 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 14. Joachim Whaley, Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493–1648, vol. 1 of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 18. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 30.

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“holy” to the title of Roman Empire in part so that, of the two pillars of Latin Christendom, the Empire and the papacy, he could claim superior power for the Empire in the back-and-forth tussle between them. Emperors during this age could imagine it as a “worldly” or “protective shell of the Church Universal” or “Body of Christ.”47 The temporal and the sacral were thus fused in such a way that the “Empire and Church were not two distinct entities but two aspects of a single body.”48 Imperial ideology imagined the Empire to be coterminous with Latin Christendom itself, and because of the Empire’s universal, divine mission, it made theoretical claim to authority in dominions beyond its own. In reality, though, emperors did not exercise any in the realms of other royals. Their effective rule extended across the domain of the Empire, and the “Church” was effectively the Imperial church in its domain. In practice the unitary concept of Empire and Church also had traction because more than two-thirds of the Imperial princes were churchmen. Calls for church reform in the Empire rang out during the fifteenth century.49 Some fancied the caesaropapist model. King Sigismund (r. 1433–1437) could still claim the emperor had rightful authority over temporal and spiritual affairs, and he could imagine, realistically or not, the reform of Empire and Church in singular fashion. Others premised their call on nationalist passions. German anti-Romanism peaked in the early sixteenth century, and nationalists envisioned a church free of papal interference. Still others believed that healing relations between clergy and laity was the way forward, but this communalist model foundered for lack of sovereignty to effect it. None of these visions provided an applicable breakthrough in the longing for reform. Meanwhile, Empire and Church were susceptible to desynchronization. During the fifteenth century the secular development of territorialization— that is, the formation of dynastic territorial states in the Empire due to the tightening connection between princes and landholdings—tended in that direction. Hesse, Hanau-Münzenberg, and Fulda abbey were examples of these. The transition constituted a “new reality, an Empire composed not of royal followers and servitors but of territorial rulers.”50 Concurrently, the appellation “the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation” began to appear. It signified that some contemporaries began to conceptualize an Empire limited in geographical scope instead of one whose authority extended univer47 48 49 50

Brady, German Histories, 82. Brady, German Histories, 80. Brady, German Histories, 131–44. Brady, German Histories, 81.

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sally. These old and new visions competed. Whereas Emperor Maximilian (r. 1493–1519) desired “a warlike Imperial Christendom” after the fashion of past grand emperors, many estates wanted “a peaceful German kingdom.”51 Furthermore, each of the Imperial territories within the Holy Roman Empire increasingly cohered into a de facto corpus christianum.52 Due to territorialization and to the growing notion that sovereigns had an ordained duty to protect the Church in their respective domain, standard belief held that God charged the ruler to care for the souls of his subjects. Sovereigns steadily assumed the mantel that came with the transformation as they issued decrees and ordinances designed to reform territorial life, at once, in a temporal and spiritual sense. Such duties became normalized in the fifteenth century and were steadily formalized in the sixteenth century. A prince’s notion of a civilsacred unity of Church and territory emulated the one emperors had held for Church and Empire. Territories had, in fact, become a more viable vehicle of public life than the Empire, and territorial authorities stood a much better chance of reforming Church and territory in singular fashion than the emperors did of reforming Church and Empire.53 In late 1517 Martin Luther initiated what became a movement to reform core doctrines and teachings of the Christian Church. He based it on the Bible as the supreme authority on all matters. Many churchmen and humanists quickly joined and became fellow reformers. By the 1520s they were spreading their message regarding sin and salvation, the sacraments, the Church, and Christian authority among cities, villages, and princely courts. They developed a theology that differed from Roman Church orthodoxy, although they also disagreed among themselves on important issues such as the Eucharist and the presence of images in worship settings. The irreconciliable differences between these theologies and liturgies did not give rise to Christian pluralism. Rather it produced a pluralization, that is, an expression of the religion in a plurality of forms even though Christian reality was understood to be a singular whole. This pluralization wielded the unprecedented capacity to fracture the sacred dimension of corpus christianum at all scales and thereby dismantle its civil-sacred unity. The phenomenon occurred at certain levels over the following decades.

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Brady, German Histories, 116. Thomas Kaufmann, “Das Bekenntnis im Luthertum des konfessionellen Zeitalters,” in Zeitschrift für Theologie und Kirche 105, no. 3 (2008): 281–314, esp. pp. 287ff. William Bradford Smith, Reformation and the German Territorial State: Upper Franconia, 1300–1630 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008).

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One was Latin Christendom. Luther expected all people to embrace his message, but they did not. The resultant fissure gave rise to the notion of “our religion,” only this time it was not Christians who invoked the words against Jews and Muslims, as Latin Christians had done in previous centuries. Rather, corpora of self-described Christians in Latin Christendom each invoked it to differentiate their “true” religion from the “false” religion of other corpora of self-described Christians in Latin Christendom. This schism, in contrast to the Great Schism, concerned doctrinal understanding of the Christian religion and Church. Christians still received baptism, but, unlike before, they were not all baptized into the same Church because the opposing groups defined the Christian Church on fundamentally different terms. The disputes were much less likely to be resolved as compared to those of the Great Schism. They also circulated much faster due to mass publications and broadsheets churned out by printing presses.54 They gave rise to religious particularism and narrow orthodoxies, which became embedded in the power of states. Instead of members across Latin Christendom upholding ideals and institutions that would foster peace and commonweal among them, as they had in previous centuries, they repurposed these and developed new ones in order to oppose one another. Instead of princes and parties across Christian society crusading together in defense of their common faith against the infidel, they warred against each other in part over mutually exclusive claims to the true Christian faith. In time, “[i]t was no longer meaningful to speak in terms of a corpus Christianum sitting above the distinctions of time, place, people, or language. Christendom, in this sense, had been pulled down to earth by events, and in its place we see the onset of the fragmentation of the confessional age.”55 A series of settlements by the mid-seventeenth century resolved the conflicts enough so that societies could move on.56 Europe, which had been emerging as a geographical projection, took Christendom’s place.57

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Andrew Pettegree, Brand Luther: How an Unheralded Monk Turned His Small Town into a Center of Publishing, Made Himself the Most Famous Man in Europe—and Started the Protestant Reformation (New York: Penguin Press, 2015). Dixon, The Church in the Early Modern Age, 208. See the essays by Thomas A. Brady, Jr., J. J. Woltjer and M. E. H. N. Mout, Philip Benedict, W. Ian P. Hazlett, Christian Hermann, and Michael F. Metcalf in Brady, Oberman, Tracy, Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, 2:347–550. Mark Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517–1648 (New York: Viking, 2014). Of course, “Europe” was more fluid and complex than any simple definition would have it: Anthony Pagden, ed., The Idea of Europe: From Antiquity to the European Union (Washington, DC: Cambridge University Press, 2002).

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At the same time, the civil-sacred unity of many cities across the Germanspeaking world broke up. The culture of a sacral urban society had carried into the sixteenth century, where it harmonized with the reformers’ message concerning godly law, biblical commands, and pure worship. The cities’ exceptional blend of literacy, humanism, printing, artistic production, preachers, and legal structures made them fertile grounds for that message. Burghers and their guilds, along with other laypeople, pushed for changes that would complete the sacralization of their world. Many free Imperial cities played a prominent role in advancing the Reformation during its first decades.58 Yet their urban milieu, and the movement of people and ideas into and out of cities, caused them to have more cosmopolitan populations with differing beliefs. Jousting between ecclesiastical corporations and institutions, and between these and a civic council, commune, and guilds, accentuated tensions. The 1555 Peace officially protected both religions, that of the Roman Church and that of the Augsburg Confession, in the cities of Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg, and Dinkelsbühl (others such as Donauwörth, Kaufbeuren, Leutkirch, and Ulm identified similarly).59 Historians have called them “biconfessional” cities, although the term may well be another anachronism. Officially the 1555 Peace identified the two as “our old religion” and the “religion of the adherents of the Augsburg Confession,” suggesting that the Roman Church had not arrived at a point of having written a confession. Indeed, the Tridentine Creed was composed and promulgated by Pope Pius IV (r. 1559–1565) a decade later. In any case, such cities had to work out relations between their majority and minority religious bodies, including their membership on city councils, use of churches and schools, welfare institutions, and codes of behavior. The civil-sacred unity of the Holy Roman Empire also shattered. Although Emperor Charles V (r. 1519–1556) took seriously his role of guarding the faith, his belated response to the Luther affair as well as the Imperial troops’ sack of Rome in 1527 gave reason to question his commitment. The Augsburg Confession of 1530 struck a particularly serious blow to the unitary concept of 58 59

Christopher W. Close, The Negotiated Reformation: Imperial Cities and the Politics of Urban Reform, 1525–1550 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009). The “city articles” or article twenty-seven, Hanns Hubert Hofmann, ed., Quellen zum Verfassungsorganismus des Heiligen Römischen Reiches Deutscher Nation 1495–1815. Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 13 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1976), 105; Paul Warmbrunn, Zwei Konfessionen in einer Stadt: das Zusammenleben von Katholiken und Protestanten in den paritätischen Reichsstädten Augsburg, Biberach, Ravensburg und Dinkelsbühl von 1548 bis 1648 (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1983).

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Church and Empire. In the same year Charles V became the last emperor to be crowned by a pope and for whom claims of universal monarchy were made.60 His role as protector of Christendom was breaking apart. Moreover, religious schism had changed the very understanding of the words Church and Empire. It fostered disagreement, left unresolved at Augsburg in 1555, over the sacred nature of the Empire. The two sides officially recognized that the religion that used to unite the Empire was now divided.61 Sprinkled throughout the 1555 Peace were references to the parties’ religions and their respective adherents.62 The 1555 Peace was intended as a stopgap to “prevent a permanent division and the ruin of our German nation” until “Christian, friendly, peaceful means and paths” produced “a unanimous, Christian understanding and conciliation.”63 The stated goal was “the essential and healing conciliation and unity in the disputed religion and matters of faith.”64 By the time of Charles V’s abdication in 1556 the Empire no longer stood as one of the two pillars of Latin Christendom. The two parties at Augsburg established a public peace (Landfriede) on the basis of parity. It enabled them to coexist and preserved the unity of the Empire. Technically the Church remained a single entity in Imperial law until 1648.65 But effectively the two parties cultivated an ongoing dialogue of churches and religions instead of the Church and religion. The spread of Calvin’s reforms into the Empire by the late 1550s and certain territorial sovereigns’ adoption of them into the seventeenth century complicated matters further. One viewed the Empire increasingly as temporal and particular instead of sacral and universal.66 The Thirty Years War and the 1648 Peace of Westphalia finished off whatever was left of that process. By contrast, the civil-sacred unity at the level of Imperial territories and especially of rural Gemeinden fared comparatively better in the sixteenth through early seventeenth centuries.

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Greengrass, Christendom Destroyed, 13. Examples of the wording—die spaltige Religion, Spaltung der Religion, die streitige Religion—are in articles 13, 15, 21, and 25. Hofmann, Quellen, 98–128. Examples of the wording—beyderseits Religionen, beeden Religionen, beyderseits Religions-Verwandte—are in articles 17, 20, 26, and 27. Hofmann, Quellen, 98–128. Ruth Kastner, ed., Quellen zur Reformation 1517–1555. Ausgewählte Quellen zur deutschen Geschichte der Neuzeit, vol. 16 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1994), 526. Hofmann, Quellen, 127. Whaley, Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493–1648, 264. Brady, German Histories, 84.

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The Christian Confessions and the Imperial Territories

Luther astutely recognized the shift toward a conflation of Imperial territory and Church. In his 1520 Address to the German Nobility he appealed to the territorial princes to institute his reforms. By mid-decade unrest from the German Peasants’ War compelled princes to strengthen their grip on territorial order. By the late 1520s some of them, including Landgrave Philipp of Hesse (r. 1518–1567), were breaking ties with the Roman papacy, legislating reforms, and issuing church ordinances to enforce them. The 1526 Diet of Speyer affirmed each estate’s responsibility to determine religious life by acting “in such a way as he will be responsible for to God and the emperor.”67 Protesting estates at Speyer in 1529 asserted ius reformandi, the right to impose a reform of religious practice on their lands. The 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg enshrined the right. It was summarized later in the principle known as cuius regio eius religio (whose the region, his the religion), which meant the territorial sovereigns were responsible for their churches’ governance and subjects’ consciences. Normative thinking regarded the exercise of true religion as intrinsic to territorial order and viewed dissension and especially rebellion as a threat to it. The same unity of territory and Church incentivized some sovereigns, starting with the Palatinate in the late 1550s, to adopt Calvin’s reforms. Calvin’s emphasis on moral discipline and the creation of institutions to effect it appealed to princes who wanted or needed to extend control over their territories.68 In sum, while the Church and Empire were disaggregating, Church and territory were aggregating more tightly.69 Though a prince was strictly a layperson, the ecclesio-political dynamic intensified the sacralization of temporal power. Subjects had to conform to their sovereign’s chosen religion or else emigrate. Standard histories have stated that a sovereign’s religion was either Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, and that Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed (or, alternatively, Catholics and Protestants) populated the princely territories of the Holy Roman Empire.70 Grand interpretations have been predicated squarely

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As translated in Brady, German Histories, 215. Philip Benedict, Christ’s Church Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), 202–29. Dixon, The Church in the Early Modern Age, 111–30. In one instance, Steven Ozment opened a book by declaring that “[d]uring the course of the sixteenth century, hundreds of thousands of people became Protestants.” Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution (New York: Doubleday, 1992), ix. Robert Scribner echoed the idea, though he tipped it more as a negative process: “When we speak of the exten-

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on the foundations of this understanding. But on closer scrutiny, in the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian territories at least, it unravels and yields to a different understanding, one that elucidates why the rural Gemeinden in particular did not break apart over faith. The religion in each principality up to 1648 was not Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed but rather Christian. Likewise, Christians populated the territories until the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and then Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed did so in the wake of it. Although the three terms Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed circulated in the territories prior to 1648, they did so typically in adjective form and carried a powerful charge because they were disputed, mutually invoked, contested, rejected, purposely not used, or used pejoratively as terms of abuse. Similar patterns apply to the terms evangelical and Protestant, whose post-1648 meanings, like that of the other three, have been applied to the pre-1648 Empire, thereby distorting its history. Moreover, evidence suggests that most sixteenth-century people seldom trafficked in the terms; rather, they were employed by those in governing, ecclesiastical, aristocratic, and urban circles. Not until the Empire officially transitioned from a polity of Christian monism to Christian pluralism in 1648 did the three names gradually become naturalized and codified and also penetrate further into common discourse. The three parties today called Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed had formed by the later sixteenth century as pressures compelled each to compose a confessio or confession. Although the confessions are now known by these denominational names, at the time each was simply Christian in name, exclusive of other claimants, and formulated to denote and fashion true Christians. Those called Catholics by people today spoke of themselves as Catholische Christen (Catholic Christians), their religion as “the true Catholic religion founded in Christ,” and their church as “the holy Christian Catholic Church.”71 But adherents of the 1530 Augsburg Confession invoked the name Catholic as well. For them, persons who belonged to the “universal, Catholic, Christian, holy Church” were those across the world who truly believed in Christ.72

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sive hold ‘Protestantism’ had on Germany by the second half of the sixteenth century (Ranke once estimated that 80 per cent of the population was Protestant at this time), this was because there were large numbers of ‘involuntary Protestants’ created by the princes’ confessional choices.” Scribner and C. Scott Dixon, The German Reformation, 2nd ed. (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 34. HStAM, 4i no. 68, 241; HStAM, 92 no. 226. See “Apology of the Augsburg Confession,” in Concordia Triglotta: The Symbolical Books of the Ev. Lutheran Church, German-Latin-English, ed. Friedrich Bente (St. Louis, 1921), Art. III–IV, VII–VIII, XII, and XX, Google Books.

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As the two parties drafted the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg, neither let the other call itself Catholic because of the word’s superior connotation of holy and universal.73 Those outside the Empire operated similarly. Bruce Gordon has asserted that John Calvin “would have hated the idea of Rome being called Catholic.”74 Peter Marshall has noted that, in England, “‘Protestants’ … [a]s subscribers to the ancient creeds … were professedly Catholic, and they formally denied their opponents any legitimate share in the ancient title.”75 Zurich minister Johann Jakob Breitinger, in a 1640 publication that explained the “Reformed-Catholic” faith, stated: “In Greek and Latin the word is ‘Catholic.’ … The word Catholic means universal in our German language. As it is translated into German, so we say: I believe [in] one holy universal Christian Church.”76 At the Diet of Augsburg in 1555, the two sides settled on identifying the one as “the estates adhering to the old religion” and “the old church” and the other as the “adherents of the Augsburg Confession.”77 Names they employed away from Augsburg, however, were a different matter. While adherents of the Augsburg Confession tried to prevent adherents of Rome’s religious authority from claiming Catholicity by derisively calling them Papists and Romanists, Roman authorities after 1555 grieved that a German prince adhering to the Augsburg Confession could no longer be prosecuted for heretical wickedness. Undeterred, Rome’s adherents kept pressing their religion’s exclusive claims to sacred terms. In 1576 the archbishop of Mainz affirmed his as the “true, ancient Christian and Catholic religion.”78 In 1582 Emperor Rudolph II demanded that all subordinates in Upper Lusatia confess “the holy Catholic and Apostolic Roman Church” and also “damn, reject, and curse” as “heresies” anything that opposed it or the decrees of the Council of Trent.79 Four

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Alex Gotthard, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden (Münster, 2004). Still, Gordon conceded that the idea of Rome being called Catholic “is a modern convention that aids clarity” and therefore chose to follow it. For the same reason Gordon’s work opted to use the other conventional names of “Protestant,” “Reformed,” “Lutheran,” “Zwinglian,” and, for the reform movement in France, “evangelicals.” Calvin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), xi. Peter Marshall, “The Naming of Protestant England,” Past and Present 214 (2012): 87–128, here p. 108. Johann Jakob Breitinger, Der reformiert-catholische Glaub oder bescheidenlicher unnd wolgegründter Bricht, wer eigentlich alt- oder nuewgläubig, auch wo vor der Reformation die evangelische Kilchen gewesen ([Zurich], 1640), Post-Reformation Digital Library. Hofmann, Quellen, 98–128. HStAM, 4i no. 68. HStAM, 4i no. 241.

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years later officials in Habsburg Austrian lands had to do likewise, publicly denouncing “dangerous and misleading religions and doctrines” and “confessions and sects, whatever they be called,” that had been damned by the holy councils.80 Near City Fulda, Simon Ruppert in 1576 put name to one of those damned sects in a letter of contrition to Prince-Abbot Balthasar von Dernbach (r. 1570–1576, 1602–1606). He repented of having “given myself to the fleshly lusts of Lutheran teaching” and having “led my lambs [at the Thulba cloister] astray” from “the correct, true Catholic [doctrine]” and therefore “from the right path.”81 Like other coreligionists Ruppert counterposed Lutherisch with Christian, thereby condemning the former as not Christian. Similarly, the Neuhof minister in 1599 set the “Catholic religion” against the “Calvinist heresy.”82 Accordingly, Fulda authorities in the early seventeenth century stated how some subjects “have not aligned themselves with our true religion” but rather “set themselves obstinately against it.” They prohibited the recalcitrants from attending “the forbidden un-Catholic church” and took measures “so that the seduced souls at this locale may therefore be won sooner and brought back to … the Christian Church.”83 Across the early seventeenth century they aimed to carry out a “reformation” so as to remove any semblance of erring religion, and they spoke of subjects, parishes, and clerics who conformed to true religion as “reformirt” (reformed) and persons who had not as “disobedient Christians.”84 Integral to that reformation was the Bible. Rome’s adherents, like their adversaries, invoked “God’s Word” and believed their adversaries had opposed the Holy Scriptures.85 For this reason the Hammelburg cleric in 1606 followed

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HStAM, 4i no. 241. HStAM, 92 no. 394. HStAM, 92 no. 439. HStAM, 92 no. 658 and 378. HStAM, 92 no. 92, 373 and 375; and HStAM, 92 no. 208, 239, 390, 416, 658, 660, and 745. For a reference to a Reformation from a Rome adherent, see Adam Tanner, Ketzerisch Luthertum, Wider deß falschgenandten vncatholischen Papstumbs, so Jacob Heilbrunner PfaltzNevburgischer Predicant, zuendt nechstuerschinen 1607 Jars in Truck geben, ersten vnd fünfften Articul, von der Gerechtfertigung deß Sünders, vnnd gewißheit eigner Gerechtigkeit (Ingolstadt, 1608), 16–17, Post-Reformation Digital Library. For example, Valentin Leucht, Ein Christliche Catholische/ in Gottes Wort wolgegründete Predigt/ von dem ernsten baldkommenden Jüngstengericht/ vorhergehenden erschröcklichen zeichen … Allen Teutschen Christen zur ernsten warnunge/ und trewhertziger vermanunge zur Buß gestellet und gepredigt (Mainz, 1583), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; Albertus Hungerus, Defensio scripturae sacrae, contra pseudoscripturarios Lutheranos et Calvinianos (Ingolstadt, [c.1582]), Post-Reformation Digital Library; Wolfgang Högner, Christ Catholische Prödig: Darin[n]en auß heiliger Schrifft/ und den Orthodoxischen Vät-

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the Fulda prince-abbot’s decree and, according to the local official, warned his parishioners to rid themselves of “Lutheran, Calvinist and other forbidden heretical books.”86 The Imperial territory of Fulda, like Hesse-Kassel, HanauMünzenberg, and others across the Empire, was behaving in the same way Latin Christendom did in centuries past, by aiming to eliminate heresy, purge contamination and infection from the Christian corpus, and safeguard homogeneity. Key to that end, as the Flieden cleric worded it when describing a local official, was for each person “to place himself as Catholic.”87 During the same period the parties today called Lutheran and Reformed continued to claim the term Catholic for themselves.88 Among the latter group Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel (r. 1567–1592) heralded “the ancient Catholic and Apostolic Religion” in a 1575 letter to the Palatine elector.89 Heidelberg professor David Pareus in 1593 explained how “true Catholic doctrine” existed in the Electoral Palatinate churches because they had been purged of “papal leaven,” a statement that would have provoked not only Rome’s adherents but also subscribers to the 1580 Book of Concord.90 Conrad Bergius in Frankfurt an der Oder iterated the same notion a generation later.91 Among the former group, Tilemann Heshusius sought to defend “our Christian, Catholic faith, and confession” and the remnant on earth that constituted the “holy, universal, Catholic Church of God” against “the papal superstition, error, and atrocity.”92 “The true Christian Church,” added Dresden court min-

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tern der Kirchen gründlich erwisen wirdt/ das der Catholische Römische Glaub der rechte/ wahre/ seeligmachende/ der Lutherisch dargögen der unrechte Glaub seye (Ingolstadt, 1627), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. HStAM, 92 no. 745. HStAM, 92 no. 438. For example: Bente, Concordia Triglotta, 56–58, 92–94, 112, 118; “Question 54,” in German Reformed Church in the United States of America, The Heidelberg Catechism, in German, Latin and English: with an historical introduction (New York, 1863), 152, 186, Google Books. HStAM, 4i no. 68. Similarly, for the Palatine elector’s 1606 letter to Duke Philipp Ludwig of Palatinate-Neuburg (r. 1569–1614), see HStAM, 4i no. 165. David Pareus, Summarische Erklärung/ Der wahren Catholischen Lehr/ so in der Chur Pfaltz … / vnnd andern vom Bäpstlichen Sawerteyg geseuberten Kirchen bestendig … (Heidelberg, 1593), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Conrad Bergius, Grund und Haupt Summa deß waren Christenthumbs/ und recht alten Catholischen oder allgemeinen Glaubens … (Frankfurt an der Oder, 1628), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Tilemann Heshusius, Kurtzer Vnterschied zwische[n] Christlicher Lehre, zu der sich die Catholische Kirche oder gemeine Jesu Christi bekennet, vnnd der lesterlichen jrthumen, greweln vnd Abgöttereyen der Pebstlichen Antichristischen Rotten (Eißleben, 1564), esp. Ch. IIII, XIII, and XIX, Post-Reformation Digital Library. Similarly, Aegidius Hunnius,

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ister Matthias Hoë von Hoënegg, in a publication declaring the “so-called Lutheran” faith to be rightly Catholic, “is called Catholic because it has doctrine which is Catholic, that is, which Christ commanded to be preached to all creatures.”93 A Hersfeld minister in 1606 urged that ecclesiastical rites not oppose “holy, divine Scripture and the Catholic Christian Church.”94 In this way the adherents of the Augsburg Confession countered their critics’ use of Lutheran by persistently asserting their right to the term Catholic. In 1631 Lübeck superintendent Nicolaus Hunnius complemented these rhetorical approaches with one of his own. He likened the “papists” to the dog in Aesop’s fable that lost the meat in its mouth after grasping for the meat’s shadow in the water. They “gape so much at the name Catholic (which, without true faith, worship service, and life, is nothing more than a shadow) [that] they have lost the correct, Christian, Catholic faith and worship service.”95 Did they not realize, he wondered, that the Lord’s disciples were, at Antioch, first called “Christian” and not “Catholic,” and that scholars in Mainz (in 1513 and 1551) and Basel (in 1512) had translated the word “Catholica” into German as “Christlich”? Like other opponents of Rome, Hunnius did not regard the “Roman Church” as Catholic. He insisted that no Christian, at risk of losing his eternal salvation, should consider it “the Christian Church,” from which the Papists had long since departed.96 Naturally Rome’s adherents denied that those called evangelical (Evangelischen) were Catholisch or that “the Pope had fallen away from or suppressed God’s Word.”97 The “old, Catholic, Roman Church is the true Christian Church,” proclaimed the Jesuit theologian Adam Tanner, and it “alone has borne and preserved the Catholic name,” the name “by which it is called by the whole

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Catholische und Christliche Abfertigung der Uncatholischen und ubel gegründten thesium oder Schlußreden D. Joannis Pistorij Niddani De Justificatione (Wittenberg, 1595), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Matthias Höe von Höenegg, Evangelisches Handbüchlein: Darinnen Unwiderleglich/ Auß einiger Heiliger Schirfft erwiesen wird/ Wie der genandten Lutherischen Glaub/ recht/ Catholisch: Der Bäpstler aber Lehr/ im grund irrig/ und wider das helle Wort Gottes sey … (Leipzig, 1603), 16, 19, Post-Reformation Digital Library. HStAM, 4i no. 174. Nicolaus Hunnius, Gründlicher Beweiß, daß die Römische Kirche nicht sey die wahre Christliche Kirche (Lübeck, 1631), Vorrede, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Hunnius, Gründlicher Beweiß, 7. Johann Hammer, Predicanten Latein/ Das ist/ Drey Fragen/ allen genanten Euangelischen Predicanten von vielen Catholischen offtmals auffgeben/ aber nie bißhero gründlich beantwortet … Allen Christenmenschen nutzlich und notwendig zu lesen (Cologne, 1608), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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world.” 98 His coreligionists aimed to project that “universal and apostle-like Church” across the globe via missionary endeavors.99 Those called Lutherans by people today titled their confessional standard, issued in 1580, the Christian Book of Concord and prefaced it with the claim that it was the embodiment of “pure” and “Christian doctrine” of the “truly believing Church.” Although conventionally it has been known as the compiled confessions of the Lutheran church, Lutheran (Lutherisch) was a designation the religion’s adherents could readily reject. That included Martin Luther, who issued this directive in 1522: “I ask that men make no reference to my name; let them call themselves Christians, not Lutherans (Lutherisch)…. St. Paul … would not allow the Christians to call themselves Pauline or Petrine, but Christian. How then should I—poor stinking maggot-fodder that I am— come to have men call the children of Christ by my wretched name? … [L]et us abolish all party names and call ourselves Christians, after whose teaching we hold. The Papists deservedly have a party name, because they are not content with the teaching and name of Christ.”100 The Book of Concord, at least, heeded his injunction. Every mention of Luther in it pertained to the person Martin Luther, except for one instance, namely, in article fifteen of the Apology of the Augsburg Confession, written by Philipp Melanchthon in 1531. There, while criticizing adversaries for not preaching the Word of God, he wrote: “This blessed doctrine, the precious Gospel, they call Lutheran (Lutherisch).”101 Charles V had reinforced the label by calling himself “Christian emperor” and “defender of the Church” and associating Lutherisch with “sect” and “heretical.”102 Adversaries thus employed Lutherisch abusively and to denote illegality. As Jacob Andreä commented in 1589, his party had not given themselves the name. The papists had hung it on

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Adam Tanner, Manu-ductor, oder Wegweiser. Das ist: Zehen klare/ gewise/ und unfählbare Kennzeichen/ und Beweiß/ Das allein die alte Catholische Römische Kirch/ die wahre Christliche Kirchen/ und demnach/ der alte Catholische Glaub/ der allein seeligmachende wahre Christliche Glauben seye. Allen der Warheit/ und ihrer aingenen Seeligkeit liebhabern zum besten gestellt (Ingolstadt, 1630), Ch. I, Post-Reformation Digital Library; and Tanner, Ketzerisch Luthertumb, 25. Peter Marshall, The Reformation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 36. Helmut T. Lehmann, ed., Luther’s Works, vol. 45, The Christian in Society II (Philadelphia, 1962), 70–71. Concordienbuch: das ist, die symbolischen Bücher der ev. Luth. Kirche, 2nd ed. (St. Louis, 1881), 158, Internet Archive. Walter Friedensburg, Der Reichstag zu Speier 1526 im Zusammenhang der politischen und kirchlichen Entwicklung Deutschlands im Reformationzeitalter (Berlin, 1887), 524.

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them and his party had to suffer being called it. Yet, he wrote, his people did not shame themselves because of it, for what mattered was not the name but the doctrine.103 Sovereigns who adhered to his party’s doctrine unabashedly proclaimed “our true and Christian religion” and “our true Christian religion of the Augsburg Confession.”104 Their territorial authorities called themselves “Christians” and directed pastors and visitors to report on any “Calvinists, Papists, Anabaptists, Schwenckfelders and other erring people.”105 After Calvin’s theology made inroads in the Empire in the 1550s, those who had been adhering to the Augsburg Confession sharply demarcated their Christian faith from it. At the Diet of Augsburg in 1566 Duke Christoph of Württemberg (r. 1550–1568) denounced the 1563 Heidelberg catechism as “heretical.”106 In 1578 Andreä and coreligionist theologians condemned the “Calvinist heresy” amid efforts to procure princely subscribers to the 1577 Formula of Concord.107 They also claimed the word reformed for themselves. The Formula of Concord recalled the Christian electors, princes, and estates of the 1520s who had “embraced the pure doctrine of the Holy Gospel and had their churches reformed in a Christian manner according to God’s Word” and who presented at the 1530 Diet of Augsburg a “common confession of the reformed churches, whereby our reformed churches are distinguished from the Papists and other repudiated and condemned sects and heresies.”108 In the early seventeenth century, when Landgrave Moritz of Hesse-Kassel (r. 1592–1627) instituted reforms premised on Calvin’s theology, a nobleman of the Rau of Holzhausen family objected that the wider regions had already been “reformed” and “informed and instructed in the evangelical truth” by Moritz’s grandfather, Landgrave Philipp.109 Moritz’s reforms, echoed a Hersfeld minister, implied that “our ancestors, we, and all reformed churches at the time of Luther” did not serve the Eucharist correctly.110 For them, what had needed reform was reformed.

103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

Jacob Andreä, Kurtze gründtliche Antwort (Tübingen, 1589), 30, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Such expressions occur often in Sehling, Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen. See, also, HStAM, 4i no. 68. Sehling, Kirchenordungen, vol. 7, 1192 and vol. 13, 310. As cited in Brady, German Histories, 239. HStAM, 4i no. 85. Bente, Concordia Triglotta, 846, 850. HStAM, 22a no. 9:6. Moritz’s reforms were known as “points of improvement” (Verbesserungspunkte). HStAM, 4i no. 174.

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Those called Reformed by people today, however, disagreed. They believed their religion was true Christianity. Electoral Palatinate authorities in their 1563 church ordinance delineated the “main articles of our Christian faith.”111 In 1604 Moritz objected that a cleric was forcefully bringing the “false teaching” of the Roman religion back into “our Reformed Christian churches.”112 In 1606 he described his reforms as “for the honor and furtherance of all matters of God and his elected Christian Church.”113 His territory’s 1610 consistory ordinance championed “the pure and whole teaching, and ceremonies of our Christian Religion,”114 and subsequently the consistory worked to bring everything into alignment with it, including a minister who “asked to be taken up again in the Christian communion of our Church” after having left “popery.”115 In 1643 the City Hanau authorities touted “the true Christian Reformed religion.”116 By “Reformed” the adherents meant that they had removed leftover “papal dung” from the church and religion and completed a biblical reform of them. Adversaries, by contrast, slandered the adherents as Calvinist or Calvinists (Calvinisch, Calvinisten) and, at times, Zwinglians (Zwinglianer). In 1584 Landgrave Georg I of Hesse-Darmstadt (r. 1567–1596) conflated the slur with the apocalypse. Writing to his confessional coreligionist, Landgrave Ludwig IV of Hesse-Marburg, he relayed how Count Wolfgang of Isenburg (r. 1596–1633) intended to remove all ministers and adopt “the Calvinist Religion.” “The time of which the Lord Christ spoke is near,” Georg continued, “that namely in the last days, false Christs and prophets will arise and perform signs and wonders,” enough that “were it possible, the elect might become ensnared in error. Would that the Almighty gracious God at all times preserve us and our descendants further with his truth.”117 In 1594 a Windecken minister wished not to be harassed as a “Calvinist” or vexed by having the baptism and Eucharist derided as “Calvinist, as one calls it.” Christ and His Word were what had moved them, they stated, and it was these that they had followed.118 At Haimbach near City

111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118

Sehling, Kirchenordungen, vol. 14, 397. HStAM, 4f Staaten M Mainz no. 1354. HStAM, 4i no. 162. HStAM, 22a no. 4a. HStAM, PMK vol. 9 (6 July 1622). HStAM, 83 no. 3 and 105. HStAM, 4i no. 50. HStAM, 83 no. 4618. Leonhard Hutter expressed much the same concerning baptism for his coreligionists, in Wolgegründte Widerlegung Der Schweren/ aber doch vnwarhafften Bezüchtigung/ wieder der Lutherischen Kirchen Confession … (Wittenberg, 1597), 29, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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Fulda the minister in 1600 made note of “Calvinists” in the parish who, he alleged, did not believe in the resurrection of the dead.119 The Eschwege mayor told interrogators in 1608 that the breaking of the bread was not customary in any “Christlichen evangelischen” (Christian evangelical) church, rather it was so in the “Calvinist” one alone.120 Around the same time the nobles around the Boyneburg district, opponents of Moritz’s reforms, mocked the five local ministers as old and “Calvinist” and one of them as “a wicked Calvinist cleric.”121 The ministers begged the landgrave that, at the next synod, he link them not to Calvin or any other men but rather to Christ and his true Word alone, that Calvin be understood as merely a conduit between the two. Then one could say they were instituting the Christ-like and apostolic breaking of the bread instead of something that could be “called Calvinist or its analog.”122 Electoral Palatinate court minister Daniel Tossanus decried how people slapped such degrading names on his religion. He claimed most of those doing it, including ministers, had read “neither the Augsburg Confession nor our books” but rather had picked up the habit from somewhere else.123 His coreligionists, however, proved just as willing to defame adversaries. Efforts were made to reconcile the two parties that subscribed to or invoked the Augsburg Confession, and in 1594 Herborn theology professor Wilhelm Zepper mourned how the “disunity” between them played to the great advantage and tyranny of the Turk and the Pope.124 However, irreconciliable points of the119 120 121 122 123

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HStAM, 92 no. 380. HStAM, 4i no. 158. HStAM, 4i no. 163. HStAM, 4i no. 163. Daniel Tossanus (der Ältere), Christliche erinnerung an einen Ersamen Rath und Gemeinde der churfürstlichen Pfaltz Statt Amberg, von wegen jüngster mit jhnen gepflögener handlung zu fortpflantzung unnd erhaltung Gottseliger einigkeit in Kirchen und Schulen ([Heidelberg], 1575), 7, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Aegidius Hunnius read their works, though he did so to dissociate Zwinglians and Calvinists from the Augsburg Confession: Gründtliche und außführliche Beweisung, daß die Zwinglianier unnd Calvinisten der wahren Augspurgischen Confession … niemals zugethan gewesen, und sie sich derselbigen noch heutiges Tags fälschlich berühmen (Frankfurt, 1591), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Johannes Crocius later countered that an Imperial assembly had never excluded them from the Augsburg Confession: Summarische … daß die Evangelischen Reformirter Religion zugethane / … Niemal … von gesampten Ständen der Augspurgischen Confession … verdampt … (Grebenstein, 1636), Post-Reformation Digital Library. Wilhelm Zepper, Christliche Bedencken/ Vorschlag vnd Raht/ Durch waserley mittel vnd wege dem hochbetrübten zustand der Kirchen Gottes/ wegen der vnchristlichen/ ergerlichen spaltungen/ lästerns/ verketzerns vnd verdammens zwischen den Euangelischen Kirchen vnd Lehrern … abzuhelffen seyn möge (Herborn, 1594), esp. Chapter VIII, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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ology alone perpetuated accusations between them of “unbelieving, unclean, damned heretics” and “un-Christian.”125 It did so even, or especially, amid the Protestant Union they formed pragmatically for defensive purposes in 1608. In 1620 Pareus lamented the great mistrust between the “Evangelischen” and how the “Lutherischen” called “the Reformed Church ‘Calvinist’ out of hatred.” He alleged that they sooner trusted and would “have community” with the “Papists” and “Roman Antichrist” even though these were the “rejected enemies of the Gospel.”126 The mutual rejection between so-called Lutherans and Calvinists, however, continued. On one side were those such as Landgrave Georg II of Hesse-Darmstadt (r. 1626–1661), who issued a Visitation ordinance in 1628, which required all ministers and schoolmasters in Upper Hesse to sign articles that denounced “Calvinist error,” and which bound them to “our Christian religion.”127 On the other side were those such as Count Friedrich Casimir of Hanau-Lichtenberg (r. 1641–1685). When he inherited the throne of HanauMünzenberg in 1642, church authorities in City Hanau feared he would set up an opposing religious exercise and grieved that the court minister had begun “to hold Lutheran schooling.”128 The lord of Fleckenstein added to their alarm in 1643, noting how “Lutheran citizens” wanted or had their children baptized “Lutherisch.” If it continued, then “our current, irresponsible negligence” would endanger the glory of God, squander the heathen-sanctifying truth, and precipitate the decline and demise of the pure church until it damned future generations to Hell.129 Adherents of the two confessions suspended the namecalling only occasionally, such as at the 1631 Leipzig Convent of the “evangelical and Protestant electoral princes and estates,” where they managed to collaborate, but not unite.130 In settings where Rome was publicly opposed, the term Evangelisch circulated typically among governing, clerical, and aristocratic circles. They applied it as an adjective to modify nouns such as religion, truth, minister, sermon,

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HStAM, 4i no. 165. See also: Howard Hotson, “Irenicism in the Confessional Age: The Holy Roman Empire, 1563–1648,” in Conciliation and Confession, Louthan and Zachman, 228–85. David Pareus, Erwegung Deren Theologen meynung/ die sich nicht schewen/ Evangelische Herrschaften zu bereden/ daß sie lieber mit den Papisten/ und dem Römischen Antichrist/ als mit den Reformirten Evangelischen/ die sie aus haß Calvinisch nennen/ Gemeinschaft haben sollen (Heidelberg, 1620), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Hessisches Staatsarchiv Darmstadt (hereafter: HStAD), E5, A1:11,2; HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10336. HStAM, 83 no. 3. HStAM, 83 no. 3. HStAM, 4i no. 208.

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princes, estates, reformation, and parish post.131 If they denoted persons with it, then they did so in keeping with the pre-1648 context of Christian monism, that is, to denote true Christians as opposed to false claimants. Hence, the Marburg consistory contrasted things “Evangelischen” to popery.132 Church visitors in Kassel asserted “evangelical truth” against “idolatry,” “anti-Christian errors,” and “papal abhorrences.”133 The Hesse-Darmstadt landgrave pitted the evangelical religion against the papal religion.134 Their usage of Evangelisch reflects the word’s status in a context of Christian monism and not the denominational descriptor it would become after 1648. Although Rome’s adherents might occasionally call their adversaries socalled Evangelische, more often they did not because the word signaled unassailable authority and, above all, because they viewed themselves as caretakers of the holy Evangelium and protecting it against false Christians. As those of the St. Clare convent in Nürnberg stated, “No one would consider and call [a thing] Euangelium that slanders the Pope, Emperor, bishops, priests, [and] monks.”135 They noted how some locals had praised them as “good Christians” and “evangelical persons” (Euangelische Menschen).136 Similarly, Franciscus Agricola condemned “the apostate, carnal heretics, who, untruthfully, call themselves Euangelisch,” and Johannes Nas countered Rome’s adversaries with the “evangelical truth.”137 They and their coreligionist theologians, including contemporaries of Luther, claimed Evangelium and its cognates exclusively for themselves.138 Usually they called their adversaries Lutherisch, Calvinisch, and Zwinglianer and linked the names to “sect,” “heresy,” “falsity,” “error,” and 131

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Respectively, in HStAM, 92 no. 745; HStAM, 22a no. 8:6; HStAM, 92 no. 740; HStAM, 17e Oberrosphe no. 2; HStAM, 92 no. 416; HStAM, PMK vol. 6 (21 October 1617); HStAM, 17 I no. 5135; and HStAM, 92 no. 423. HStAM, PMK vol. 8 (28 March 1621). HStAM, 22a no. 8:6. As in a 1584 letter to the Hesse-Marburg landgrave. HStAM, 4i no. 50. Jakob Gretser, Historische Erzehlung Von dem Jungkfrawkloster S. Benedictordens zu Rigen … Mit Angehencktem gleichmessigem Argument und Tractat von dem Jungkfrawkloster S. Clare zu Nürnberg von den Lutherischen selber beschriben und auß dem Lateinischen Truck getrewlich verteutscht (Ingolstadt, 1614), 51, 54, Google Books. Gretser, Historische Erzehlung, 45. Franciscus Agricola, Biblischer Fastenspiegel. Das ist Grundtlicher … bericht: was das recht Euangelisch/ … Christlich/ und in H. Biblischer Schrifft gegrundtes … fasten sey (Cologne, 1579), Vorred, Post-Reformation Digital Library; and Johannes Nas, Secvnda Centvria, Das ist/ Das ander Hundert/ der Euangelischen warheit/ an welchen … vnserer widersacher jrrige lehr/ betrug vnd thorhait menigklich entdecket wirdt (Ingolstadt, 1570), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Kaspar Schatzgeyer, Von der warn Christlichen und Evangelischen freyheit/ ein außgedruckte erklärung/ mit zwelff Cristliche[n] leeren. Und nachuolgend mit zwaintzig irrsalen den leeren widerstrebente[n] (Munich, 1524), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; Martin

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“the community and gathering of the Antichrist.”139 They also excoriated the Augsburg Confession as not true Christianity.140 So-called Anabaptists also considered themselves the true Christians. In defenses written in 1577–1578 and sent to Hessian authorities they called themselves “newborn Christians, as children of God from another world, who are currently scattered here and there.”141 Their words implied that the church establishments and most neighbors were not truly Christian. They signed their statements with phrases such as “Certain newborn and despised Christians which one presently calls Anabaptists,”142 and “Who shall bring any charge against God’s elect? Rom. 8 [v.33].”143 Christian was the name they applied to themselves, Anabaptist the name applied to them by others. The precedent for such rhetoric lay in the 1520s and 1530s, when so-called Anabaptists called themselves “Christians” and condemned infant baptism as “idolatry” while Hessian authorities varyingly described the “Anabaptists” as “erring,” “heretics,” an “un-Christian” and “anti-Christian sect,” and as those who “hate God’s Word and the church.”144 Caspar Schwenckfeld, one might add, engaged in the same discourse as the other parties. He focused on recovering the “actual,” “true, everlasting Evangelium,” on seeing a “divine, blessed Reformation and edification,” and on defining the “true,” “Christian,” “Apostolic,” and “universal Catholic” church according to how it had been rightly established.145 Certain names underwent a discernible shift, a development that oppositional terminology helps elucidate. Although Augsburg Confession adherents still invoked the term Catholic up to the Westphalian proceedings, Rome’s adherents tended to gain the upper hand in the public relations battle over

139 140 141 142 143 144 145

Eisengrein, Warer vnd in Gottes wort gegründter Bericht. Von dem ampt eines getrewen recht Evangelischen vnd Catholischen Hirten vnd Seelsorgers … zu ingolstaat geprediget … in Truck verfertiget (Ingolstadt, 1566), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; Johann Ferus, Postill oder Predigbuchs. Evangelischer warheyt und rechter Catholischer Lehr/ über die Evangelien … Dem Einfältigen gemeynen Christlichen Volck zu nutz/ wolfart/ und trost, 2 vols. (Mainz, 1556), Post-Reformation Digital Library. Tanner, Ketzerisch Luthertumb, esp. p. 8. Adam Tanner, Avgvstanae Confessionis Et Apologiae Falsiloqventia ([Dillingen], 1631), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. HStAM, 22a no. 1:12. HStAM, 22a no. 1:12. Günther Franz, et al., ed., Urkundliche Quellen zur hessischen Reformationsgeschichte, 4 vols. (Marburg: Elwert, 1951–1957), 4:472, and pp. 4:98, 4:101, 4:105–6, 4:165. Franz, Urkundliche Quellen, 4:98, 4:101, 4:105–6, and 4:165. Caspar Schwenckfeld, Vom Euangelio Christi Vnd Vom Misßbrauch des Evangelii ([Ulm], 1552), fol. V, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; Schwenckfeld, Bekanntniß und Rechenschafft von den Hauptpuncten des christlichen Glaubens (n.p., 1548), fol. VIII; Schwenckfeld, Von der Christlichen Kirchen Etliche Fragen … (Ulm, 1553), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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it, just as the so-called Reformed did with the name Reformed. The Marburg consistory normally labeled Rome’s adherents as papists but could also be heard calling them “Catholische.”146 Protesting Imperial estates in 1631 identified opponents at times as “those who call themselves Catholic” and at others as “the Catholic estates.”147 In the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian territories, whenever “Catholic” became associated with the religion headed by Rome, adversaries might demonize Rome’s adherents with the name itself. In 1599 Johann Beier of Rommerz allegedly told a Neuhof carpenter that his “Catholic religion is false,” tacitly ceding the name Catholic to the other’s religion but simultaneously denying its orthodoxy.148 A Völkershausen priest in the late 1620s reported how opponents called his coreligionists “Catholic dogs,” thereby linking the name Catholic with a sub-human creature.149 Rome’s adherents played the same game. As Augsburg Confession adherents seemed to gain the upper hand on the term Evangelisch, Rome’s adherents used the term against them. Georg Witzel, a former coreligionist with Luther, warned of the deadly contagion of “new evangelical sects,” and Ingolstadt professor Gregory of Valencia pilloried his opponents as the “leaders of new evangelical sects” before assailing their theology as false and un-Christian.150 In the context of Christian pluralism a Christian can associate freely with the name Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed (or Calvinist). Orthodoxy has been baked into each of them. In a context of Christian monism such terms were anathema if divorced from true Christianity. From the standpoint of adversaries, persons linked to them would be spoken of not as coreligionists—glaubens genossen; unsere Confessions verwandten; unsere Christliche mitgliedern, mitbruder und schwestern—but rather as unbelievers or beasts. As the archbishop of Mainz instituted his religion in the Eichsfeld in 1575, the distressed nobility wailed, “[o]ne will not dignify us with an honorable, Christian burial and therefore will scarcely esteem us any better than

146 147 148 149 150

HStAM, PMK vol. 6 (21 October 1617) and vol. 11 (7 January 1624). HStAM, 4i no. 208 and 207. HStAM, 92 no. 439. HStAM, 92 no. 373. Georg Witzel, Preseruatiu, Cur vnnd Seelen-Artzney, wider die gifftige jetzo schwebende Seuch der NewEuangelischen Secten, bevorab deß hochschädlichen Lvtherthvmbs (Ingolstadt, 1581), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; and Gregorius de Valentia, Feyerabend/ Aller Neweuangelischen Sectenführer, Das ist: Etliche Außerlesene vnnd vnwiderlegliche Argumenta … mit Fleyß zusammen gezogen: Allen/ so der Lateinischen Sprach unerfahren/ zu sonderm Gefallen inn das Hochteutsche verwendet (Ingolstadt, 1591), Post-Reformation Digital Library.

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Jews, Turks, Tartars and other non-Christians.”151 Just as the adversaries of Rome’s religion might call its adherents Catholic dogs, so the Eichsfeld nobility reported how deceased, fellow Christians were dragged into open fields and buried there without the singing of a Christian psalm, as one would an “irrational animal.”152 A Hessian superintendent in the 1530s likened the “Anabaptists” to the pigs of Gadarenes (Matt. 8:32), for they, being blinded and possessed by the Devil, “go so willingly to death, fire, and water.”153 Associating persons with beasts in the sixteenth century suggested that they were not only subhuman but also demonic or spiritually malevolent.154 Some who made such associations also filled the posts of universities and territorial churches, and they filled the printshops with polemical publications. Their views went on to structure much historical understanding. In sum, parties that disputed true Christian religion prior to 1648 exclusively claimed the sacred terms Christian, Catholic, apostolic, reformed, and Evangelium. Sovereigns of the Hessian landgraviates, the county of HanauMünzenberg, and Fulda abbey adhered to what they believed to be true Christianity. Their chosen religion, regardless of the confession or any confessional change they made, was officially Christian. The name Christian continued, seamlessly from previous centuries, to be the legal, codified category in their territories.

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Rural Gemeinden Navigate through Pluralization

The actions of territorial subjects, meanwhile, followed a consistent pattern. Those who adhered to a confessionalized notion of Christianity and objected to the introduction of a differing confessionalized notion came predominantly from a small minority of the population: the ecclesiastical ranks, aristocratic families and their personnel, government officials and their family members,155 urbanites in leading towns, and the scattered Anabaptists. In the town of Marburg a confessionalized culture marked by adherence to doctrines in the Book of Concord prevailed by the early seventeenth century. When Moritz began implementing his reforms there in 1605, a throng of Gemeinde

151 152 153 154 155

HStAM, 4i no. 68. HStAM, 4i no. 68. Franz, Urkundliche Quellen, 4:98, 4:101, and 4:105–6. R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of the Common Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). For officials around Fuldian lands: HStAM, 92 no. 402, 92, 195.

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members sparked a tumult by storming into the parish church and severely assaulting the superintendent soon after he began preaching. The prevailing culture in Marburg remained steadfastly opposed to the reforms.156 Neither could princely authorities make headway against opposition in the town of Schmalkalden.157 In Fulda abbey objection manifested in towns like Burghaun as successive prince-abbots steadily eliminated elements of the Augsburg Confession from the territory.158 The Flieden cleric relayed twice to Fulda in 1606 how a local official harried him while he carried out various ministerial services.159 In 1612 an official reported that persons who staffed Fuldian secular posts, including, apparently, some appointed earlier by adherents of a differing religion, were divided fairly evenly into three groups: those who had not yet declared their religion, those who were “not willing to commit themselves to the Catholic religion,” and those who adhered and related to a religion “outside of the Catholic religion.”160 In Upper Hesse two noble families, the Schenk of Schweinsberg and of Hermannstein and the Rau of Holzhausen, bitterly opposed Moritz’s reforms. Nobles from a half dozen families in the Werra district of Lower Hesse did too.161 In 1631 the prince-abbot in Fulda directed aristocrats to back his reformation and conform to the “Catholic faith” or else leave the territory in fourteen days.162 In response two noble brothers at Weyhers abjured any heresy and confessed to the “right, true, ancient Catholic, unaltered Augsburg Confession–aligned faith.” Nobles in Büchen likewise replied that they were “not guilty of any heresy” which they knew about, but rather freely and publicly confessed to a “universal Christian Catholic faith and worship service, which is founded in the Scriptures of the holy prophets and apostles,” and which they could not depart from lest they lose their souls’ salvation.163 By contrast, those who acted principally according to Christian interests without adherence to a confession came predominantly from the great majority of the population, the rural Gemeinden. The overarching storyline regarding them is that their sacred and civil dimensions remained united through the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and, consequently, they 156 157 158 159 160 161 162 163

Mayes, Communal Christianity, 97–101, 151–55. HStAM, 4i no. 173. HStAM, 92 no. 375, 385, 584, 658, 659. HStAM, 92 no. 438. HStAM, 92 no. 398. HStAM, 4i no. 163, 164; HStAM, 17 I no. 4888; HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv, no. 1526. HStAM, 92 no. 660. HStAM, 92 no. 660.

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Figure 8

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View of Schweinsberg and neighboring villages, 1631

kept pursuing Christianization, localization, and communalization as previous generations had done. Their modus operandi of locating Christianity in the Gemeinde, and the animating forces that kept working irrespective of the confessional religion installed, rendered the three confessions functionally equivalent. They affirmed themselves and their Gemeinden as Christian regardless of the confessional religion being practiced in their parish.164 Some did so in parishes that had multiple layers of lordship or dominion (Herrschaft), that is, where both noble and sovereign held certain rights. Commonly the sovereign possessed the rights over the church (ius episcopali), including the right to reform it (ius reformandi), and nobles the right of patronage and to nominate a minister (ius patronatus, ius presentandi). If the two parties adhered to differing confessions, then conflict between them typically ensued. As for Gemeinden in these parishes, the record in certain

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The notion that reform movements spread during much of the sixteenth century, that state churches’ consolidated confessional religion around the turn of the seventeenth century, and that movements of renewal sprang up through the eighteenth century presents a coherent, well-organized history of religion in Europe. Merry E. WiesnerHanks, Early Modern Europe, 1450–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 148–83 and 364–401. Yet this chapter and more widely this book offer a contrasting account from the rural parishes of the central Imperial territories.

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instances tells how they were either not communicating or doing Auslauf (“walking out” of one’s parish to attend the services of one’s chosen confession elsewhere). A Catholic-Protestant reading of history would interpret these instances as confessional objection or resistance. Instead, Gemeinden in such parishes were tip-toeing carefully lest they run afoul of one or both authorities, and they played one party against another to elude recriminations. They linked any non-attendance or non-compliance to this predicament. The noble coreligionist of the Fulda prince-abbot reported critically in 1604 about citizens at Herbstein who had not conformed to the abbot’s religion, yet the letter reveals that the citizens balked at the respective authorities’ contrasting orders about which religion to follow.165 Schenk family members traveled from Schweinsberg to parishes which the noble family patronized, such as Oberweimar, and admonished Gemeinden there not to abide by Moritz’s reforms. The Gemeinden, however, continued striving toward their own communal, Christian objectives. When Moritz in 1618–1619 imposed his religion on the very home parishes of the Schenk of Schweinsberg and of Hermannstein and the Rau of Holzhausen, the irate noble families steadfastly refused to conform and hampered the process as much as possible. The Gemeinden there found it especially challenging to navigate through the tensions, but they, too, had positive relations with the new ministers in subsequent years and received ministrations from them.166 Similar storylines unfolded during the same decades in Lower Hesse.167 Nobles in the Werra district publicly shamed ministers with name-calling. In a 1607 letter to the landgrave the nearby Eschwege superintendent sharply distinguished between parishes belonging solely to the landgrave, where reforms met with “no obstruction or difficulty,” and those connected to nobles, where they met with “a whole lot.”168 Ministers’ reports from those parishes, including Willershausen, Nesselröden, and Wichmannshausen, confirmed his words. Layers of lordship affected rural Gemeinden in other ways. In 1601 Rothenkirchen, composed of subjects of Hesse-Kassel, Fulda, and Haun, petitioned for Johann Dietz to succeed their deceased minister.169 Dietz was appointed 165 166 167 168

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HStAM, 92 no. 374. Mayes, Communal Christianity, 162–71. HStAM, 4i no. 154, 163. HStAM, 4i no. 163. Parishioners in Himmelsberg, who had been attending services led by the Rauschenberg chaplain, also had to tread carefully in 1594 when the Mainz archbishop asserted rights against those of Ludwig IV over the village and threatened the parishioners’ punishment if they did not stop attending. HStAM, 4f Staaten M Mainz no. 1337. HStAM, 92 no. 79.

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yet had to vacate soon after because of rivaling jurisdictions over the parish. Fulda also had one of multiple layers of lordship over the village of Völkershausen, and most residents were not attending services in 1629, one year after Johann Bernhard imposed his religion there.170 When asked why, they responded that the prince-abbot had failed in his duty to provide defense and protection (Schutz und Schirm) from threats during the Thirty Years War,171 and therefore he could not order them to do anything.172 They also implied that seeking defense and protection from another lord might well be justified. Their severe hardships temporarily, and exceptionally, disunited a rural Gemeinde between a minority who attended services and a majority who did not. That, in turn, incited the very rare instance when one local layperson maligned another layperson with the term Catholic, Lutheran, or Calvinist— in this case, Catholic—in a pejorative manner.173 The other rural Gemeinden, located in parishes where the sovereign alone held the rights, also maintained their civil-sacred unity. When Ludwig IV of Hesse-Marburg confessionalized his territorial religion according to the 1577 Formula of Concord and 1580 Book of Concord, the Anabaptists mounted a confessional defense of their beliefs and, therefore, authorities forced them to leave the territory. By contrast three hundred rural Gemeinden organized into one hundred parishes across Upper Hesse continued to pursue their communally defined, Christian interests.174 When their parish post became vacant in 1597, Ebsdorf wished to honor “God’s will” and “his sacred pastoral office” while seeking the appointment of a “neighbor’s son” from the affiliate Leidenhofen.175 Röddenau, after a pestilence claimed their minister’s life in 1597 and then struck ill the Frankenberg chaplain who temporarily shouldered the post’s duties, despaired of having a “faithful shepherd and minister” who could “lead us out to healing pasture, and comfort us with God’s Word.”176 The parish Bottendorf Gemeinden petitioned in 1604 for the “pious and peaceful” Rengershausen minister to fill their post and “instruct us” in the same way that he had “richly served” the Rengershausen church in “sermons and sacra-

170 171

172 173 174 175 176

HStAM, 92 no. 208. Thomas Robisheaux, Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Theibault, German Villages in Crisis, 134–220. HStAM, 92 no. 373, 411. HStAM, 92 no. 373. This is the only instance I have found in the records. Detailed in Mayes, Communal Christianity, 64–93. HStAM, 17e Ebsdorf no. 2. HStAM, 17e Röddenau no. 10.

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ment.”177 Rural Gemeinden tended to related concerns with the same fervor. In the 1580s the eleven villages in parish Grüsen, which in times past had had three church buildings instead of only one, petitioned for the construction of a new church in Mohnhausen and pledged their labor and delivery of materials to the project.178 Half of the villages thereby created their own church district (Kirchspiel). At another point in time, the district parishioners yearned “to honor God” by having their small church bell repaired and asked the landgrave to take up a collection from his subjects, their “neighbors and fellow Christians.”179 In 1594 the parish Grüsen Gemeinden petitioned three times for their ministerial assistant to be appointed, so that “we may more fruitfully hear and integrate God’s Word,” and they lobbied that the noble patron’s preferred candidate not “be forced upon them.”180 When Moritz changed the confessional religion and imposed his reforms on Upper Hesse (which he inherited following the death of Ludwig IV in 1604), on Lower Hesse, and on the exclave of Schmalkalden, the rural Gemeinden seamlessly affirmed themselves as Christians.181 Ebsdorf signaled this intention at the outset when the members responded agreeably to a January 1606 sermon delivered by the same superintendent whom Marburg citizens had assaulted six months earlier. After their parish minister departed instead of accepting a change to the Eucharistic administration, Ebsdorf successfully landed the second of two ministerial candidates they proposed.182 Into early 1624 rural Gemeinden busied superintendents and the Marburg consistory with petitions for ministerial and schoolmaster candidates, complaints about negligent or disreputable ones who occupied their parish posts, and, on other occasions, pleadings against the transfer of them elsewhere.183 In several cases 177 178 179 180 181

182 183

HStAM, 19b no. 1173. HStAM, 17e Mohnhausen no. 1. HStAM, 17e Mohnhausen no. 1. HStAM, 17e Grüsen no. 8. Detailed in Mayes, Communal Christianity, 104–51. The point made here disagrees with the conclusion that “congregations,” at least rural ones, found “appropriat[ing] official ritual … doubtless more difficult in the Reformed setting, where changes were dramatic and unmistakable,” as compared to changes made “in Lutheranism, where enough of the traditional, the Catholic-derived, remained.” Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997), 192–93. HStAM, 4i no. 153. The first candidate, a parish native, could not leave his ministerial post in Altenhaßlau. A sampling: Dodenau, HStAM, PMK vol. 1 (16 November, 20 November, 27 November, 28 December 1611), vol. 2 (8 January, 7 March, 12 August, 4 November, 18 November, 20 November 1612); Eckelshausen, HStAM, PMK vol. 8 (7 March, 14 March 1621), vol. 10 (3 September 1623), HStAM, 19b no. 1788.

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rural Gemeinden utilized the consistory either to thwart the ambitions of a few members who had falsely invoked communal authorization or to clarify that their support of a parish matter was, in fact, unanimous.184 The Gemeinden also faithfully participated in baptisms, the Eucharist, and funerals, and they raised objection only when the minister’s handling of them ran afoul of communal standards.185 When Ludwig V of Hesse-Darmstadt acquired Upper Hesse in early 1624 and replaced Moritz’s religion with one aligned with the 1580 Book of Concord, the rural Gemeinden did the same thing once again.186 Some petitioned the new authorities not to remove their minister, for he had been “our faithful minister … in instruction, life, and divinely blessed conduct” wrote the Gemeinden Krumbach and Frankenbach. His labors would lead to their “spiritual edification,” pleaded those in parish Simmersbach. Leaving this “God-fearing, righteous, learned and … especially gifted minister” at his post would “build up [God’s] church,” claimed those in parish Battenfeld.187 Others seized on the opportunity to secure the removal of a minister whose instruction “had produced little fruit (fruchtt)” and who repeatedly tried to install new customs.188 Still others pleaded for the appointment of a specific minister because they already had “a special love and affection” for him and, moreover, did not want a “stranger.”189 Later, in 1632, when a certain few persons tried to get the Königsberg minister ousted, the parish’s two Gemeinden gathered and testified that they wanted him to remain “the rest of his life.”190 Rural Gemeinden demonstrated the same initiative toward schoolmasters they wanted removed, retained, or appointed.191 In summary, communal Christianity navigated through each of these confessionalizations installed by authorities.

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186 187 188 189 190 191

For Röddenau, HStAM, PMK vol. 1 (8 May, 22 May 1611); Viermünden church district, HStAM, PMK vol. 9 (1 June 1622); Harle, HStAM, PMK vol. 1 (3 April, 6 April, 10 April, and 24 April 1611); Rollshausen, HStAM, PMK vol. 4 (3 February 1613). For baptisms, HStAM, PMK vol. 1 (4 December 1611), vol. 6 (8 March 1617). For the Eucharist, HStAM, 22a no. 4a:6; HStAM, PMK 2 (12 February 1612), vol. 9 (25 September 1622), vol. 10 (16 July 1623). For funerals, HStAM, PMK vol. 1 (24 November, 1 December, 4 December, 14 December, and 21 December 1611), vol. 4 (6 October 1613). Detailed in Mayes, Communal Christianity, 173–204. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 632, 643, and 601, respectively; also the Oberhörlen and Roth Gemeinden: HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 641. The example of Wallau: HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 645. The example of Dautphe: HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 607. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 651. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 32, 537, 594, 999.

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The same occurred among rural Gemeinden in parishes where the Fulda prince-abbots replaced the religion of the Augsburg Confession with one that conformed to the standards of the Roman Church.192 In 1599 the Neuhof cleric relayed to authorities in Fulda that four hundred persons attended services diligently and had recently communicated; only two men abstained and had tried to prevent others in the process.193 In 1600 the Haimbach cleric reported that eight noblewomen were not attending church, a statement that, by implication, can be read to mean that other parishioners were.194 In early 1603 Fulda Prince-Abbot Balthasar expressly upped his ambitions to reform the abbey territory,195 and around Easter in 1604 he solicited reports on those who had and had not communicated. In the nine locales of the Haselstein district nearly 1,500 persons had communicated. “God be praised,” wrote the confessionallyminded local official, “except for two Jews, no one was found” to be disobedient or a heretic.196 Of the nearly 150 persons in Rasdorf, almost all communicated, and as the cleric explained, the handful who did not were either detained by illness or away from home but signaled their intention to communicate once they returned.197 An official in Eiterfeld relayed how the princely mandate had been proclaimed to every man and woman, and virtually all communicated. Of the six who abstained, one was a former official, one a nobleman’s servant, and one the former cleric who had served the Eiterfeld parish for fifty years and wanted to abide by the Augsburg Confession. Similarly, of the five who refused in nearby Fürsteneck, two were officials and one was the old minister who intended to emigrate.198 An official in the rural town of Hünfeld reported to Fulda much the same kind of thing. Of the thirty-two persons he cited as having not communicated, twenty affirmed they would communicate at Easter; one of these had

192

193 194 195 196 197 198

According to Thomas Kaufmann, “confessional Lutheranism” or “Lutheran Protestantism” was produced via a process of identity formation amid crises, controversies, and conflicts between Luther’s death and 1618. Thomas Kaufmann, Konfession und Kultur: Lutherischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Hälfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2006). Across the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian regions, rural Gemeinden which had, for at least some stretch of time, been in the ecclesiastical bounds of the confession did not contribute to this process or appropriate an adherence to the confession after it had formed. HStAM, 92 no. 439. HStAM, 92 no. 380. HStAM, 92 no. 226. HStAM, 92 no. 396. HStAM, 92 no. 384. HStAM, 92 no. 390.

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Detail of a 1574 map of Fulda abbey

not yet done so because of anger stemming from his desire to put a hole in the head of another who had put one in his. Of the remaining dozen, three implied they would communicate; four hesitated but echoed numerous others who declared they would do as others did; one nonnative replied he had always done as others did in locales where he lived; and one intended to join his brother in another territory. Two other persons, including a councilman, expressed the need for more time to think the matter over.199 Oddly, the official categorized nearly half of the persons as “recalcitrant” and the others as “willing.” Today, historical thinking would tend to label them as Protestant and Catholic. Yet the official’s view was misrepresentative and today’s view is anachronistic. All of the persons were Christians, and regardless if they stayed or emigrated to another territory they would be a member of a local Christian Gemeinde. A couple further reports from rural Fulda echoed the pattern. The Flieden cleric’s 1606 letters stated that the official tried but failed to prevent the parishioners from attending services.200 In 1628 the Fulda Prince-Abbot Johann

199 200

HStAM, 92 no. 398; also, HStAM, 92 no. 378. HStAM, 92 no. 438.

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Bernhard (r. 1623–32) ordered nobles in and around Mansbach “not to oppose the reformed cleric” he had appointed to that parish.201 They and their servants were abstaining from services, hindering the cleric’s access to the parish house, and had seized parish registers and instruments. Meanwhile, the Gemeinde members, who attended the cleric’s services well, cited the high costs they had paid toward such parish infrastructure, and with Easter two weeks away they boldly protested the nobles’ efforts to obstruct their access to services. The one outlier to this dominant trend in Fulda abbey was in Hammelburg, a town on the distant, southern edge of the territory. There, noble families, their personnel, the town council, and many citizens expressly adhered to the Augsburg Confession. Over one hundred families emigrated before the Roman religion returned in 1604; others left later that year.202 Fulda kept a steady pressure on Hammelburg over the subsequent decade. Through the first few decades of the 1600s Fulda authorities solicited reports on noncommunicants in the territory. Notices yielded the names of little more than a few dozen. Into the 1610s authorities threatened three Hünfeld persons with fines and imprisonment for not having communicated, and in 1611 Prince-Abbot Johann Friedrich (r. 1606–1622) did the same to thirty-nine others who resided in Bad Brückenau, Dippach, Untereschenbach, Obereschenbach, and Wartmannsroth.203 Whether these persons had not communicated for confessional reasons or unresolved personal matters was not indicated. The evidence above suggests that theologians’ efforts to utilize sensory culture in order to align parishioners with their respective confession was having very little impact among the rural Gemeinden, even after several generations’ time. The “sensory production of religion” being crafted by theologians in philosophical, commercial, and literary environments was ushered to the general populace via the parishes,204 and it appears to have gained some ground among Christians in urban churches. But in rural parishes it petered out as it interacted with a religious sensibility bred in the agricultural and communal environment and maintained by the rural Gemeinden. The Eucharist, for example, was a key cog in the theologians’ machinery of acculturation in their competition for souls; yet the Gemeinden, from one confessional change in religious practice to another and sometimes back again, kept communicating at Eucharist. Their actions and words contrasted with those seen and heard in

201 202 203 204

HStAM, 92 no. 416. HStAM, 92 no. 162, 239, 399, 665, 745, 746. HStAM, 92 no. 398, 746. Jacob M. Baum, Reformation of the Senses: The Paradox of Religious Belief and Practice in Germany (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019).

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urban settings. In the town of Marburg, for example, a few years after Moritz’s reforms had been installed, interrogators investigated why so many still had not communicated.205 A tailor testified that he believed “he receives, by mouth and heart, the body of Christ.” Many others replied similarly. A goldsmith added that the ministers’ message in the church, “that one receives the body of Christ in a spiritual way, ran counter to his faith.” A procurator abstained from the Eucharist because he noticed a “discrepancy in doctrine [Discrepantia … in doctrinis] between the former and current preachers.” A shoemaker said the previous teaching about Christ’s nature followed by the current teaching about how “the Lord Christ is as far from the Eucharist as heaven and earth are from each other … had confused him.” The interrogators recorded another goldsmith as saying that he “was not of our religion,” and an old bookmaker said he had been “raised from youth according to the Augsburg Confession.” Interestingly, certain interrogatees in Marburg originated from villages in the surrounding region. They mentioned how they had heard the minister there preach on these matters, yet records indicate that the Gemeinden in those villages had not aligned with any confessional doctrines. Likewise, whereas persons in Marburg used confessional words and expressions such as doctrinis, Christ’s nature, his faith, our religion, and the Augsburg Confession, village Christians did not; and whereas persons in Marburg made mention of having spent time in cities such as Straßburg, Heidelberg, and Kassel, none among the rural Gemeinden did so. With this in mind, it is an odd argument that historians ought to “reconstruct peasant society” so extensively from visitation protocols, even if their problematic nature—their strong biases in favor of elite, urban values and against the villages, and the fact that “[p]arish visitors perceived only an absence of restraint among the people, which produced un-Christian excesses”—is first acknowledged.206 When the 1517–1648 period is pitched as

205 206

HStAM, 4i no. 153. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, 197, 199. A similar critique would apply to the confessional clerics’ pastoral programs aimed at reforming feeling. These likely had an effect on churchmen as well as any persons, such as nobles and urban Christians, who demonstrably adhered to confessions, but otherwise lost traction among rural Gemeinden and their Christian culture. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Feeling. It would be as skewed and incomplete to reconstruct peasant society from visitation records as it would be to reconstruct the ecclesiastics’ or burghers’ society from records based on the peasants’ perspective and biases. Alternatively, Paul Freedman has taken contemporary favorable and unfavorable images of medieval peasants and, holding them simultaneously in a certain tension, considered how ecclesiastics and lords and peasants of the time engaged that tension amid efforts to press their respective interests. Images of the Medieval Peasant (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

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one where “the side with enforcing power is made the standard by which all else is judged,” then the interpretation of how that side tried to reform “popular traditions” easily becomes about how the people “made their concessions to officialdom,” as if “[t]hey had no choice.”207 Yet the period was not simply a time when churchmen poured the content of confessional religion into the rural Gemeinden, or rural Gemeinden shaped their religious culture and adherence according to that religion, or Gemeinden were brought, with much inertia and ecclesiastical discipline, to an acceptance of confessionalization’s intentions. It was, rather, a time when the Gemeinden’s notion of Christian religion interfaced with the content of confessional religion, and the former typically repurposed, neutralized, deflected, or otherwise ignored the latter. Certain forms of toleration did materialize in these territories. While house churches and Simultaneum (understood here as alternating worship services in a single church building) apparently did not occur, a small handful of records mention persons who emigrated or did Auslauf prior to 1648. In Hanau-Münzenberg a 1577 visitation revealed that certain individuals in two locales along the eastern border crossed into neighboring lands to join processions corresponding to Rome’s religion.208 In the 1640s certain persons in Weichersbach had done Auslauf to the village of Zeitlofs and some from Steinau an der Straße communicated in Büdingen.209 In Hesse-Kassel the Marburg consistory in 1611 summoned the leading participants among those from Fronhausen who had reportedly communicated in nearby HesseDarmstadt.210 Viewing history through the Catholic-Protestant prism has yielded a threefold problem concerning these cases. First, they are cited as indicative of a society torn asunder by religious division. On the contrary, even in these territories, where the three main confessions and the fourth one of the Anabaptists all circulated, and where confessional changes of religion occurred, such incidents were a tiny exception to the rule among populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands. They were so especially against the backdrop of the rural Gemeinden, which did not show an inclination to operate confessionally.211 Moreover, the same records that mentioned Auslauf commonly noted that the other parishioners attended services. The administrator who cited the Weichersbach Auslaufers, for example, also exclaimed “God be praised”

207 208 209 210 211

Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual, 199–200. HStAM, 83 no. 353. HStAM, 83 no. 397. HStAM, PMK vol. 1 (10 April 1611). HStAM, 4i no. 158.

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View of Hersfeld, circa 1592

at the fact that “the common man” in Mottgers, Weichersbach, and Oberzell was communicating and only a handful of persons were not.212 Similarly, an official in nearby Breitenbach roused great anger in the Gemeinde because he was not attending services or communicating.213 After an estimated eight hundred in Hersfeld attended a 1608 Eucharistic service in which the breaking of the bread was introduced, authorities followed up to ensure that Moritz’s reforms continued apace. Of the several hundred persons questioned, many expressed having no qualms with the Eucharist and made nonconfessional declarations to the effect of “Whatever his Lord Christ commanded him and taught, he will follow, (for) then he is, yes, a Christian.”214 Some cited their conscience as reason for their reservation, although they typically added or implied that they would communicate. The sole exception, a smith guildmaster, testified that he “will never accept it, will sooner go fifteen miles away for the Eucharist.”215 Purgation as a means of religious reform and the creation of religious refugees certainly occurred in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries. But if the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian lands are any indication, expulsion was comparatively rare. The idea that events such as Spain’s expulsion of Jews in 1492 were as much of a driving force in history as Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses 212 213 214 215

HStAM, 83 no. 397. HStAM, 83 no. 397. HStAM, 4i no. 174. HStAM, 4i no. 174.

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or English King Henry VIII’s break from Rome perpetuates a common trend.216 It privileges the historical experience of a small percentage at the expense of the great majority. Second, those emigrating or doing Auslauf have been called Catholics and Lutherans and Reformed, or Catholics and Protestants, or Catholic and Protestant peasants. On the contrary, one who adhered to the Book of Concord and emigrated from a territory because Calvin’s teachings were being installed was not a Lutheran leaving a Reformed territory but rather, in her own eyes, a Christian leaving one that did not exercise Christianity. One who adhered to Rome’s religion and emigrated because the religion of the Augsburg Confession or, later, the Book of Concord was being installed was not a Catholic leaving a Lutheran territory but rather a Christian leaving one that did not exercise Christianity. One who adhered to Calvin’s teachings and emigrated because Rome’s religion was being installed was not a Reformed leaving a Catholic territory but a Christian leaving one that did not exercise Christianity. Those who remained and attended services were, likewise, affirming themselves as Christians. Those who emigrated as religious refugees had options. They might go to a coreligionist territory, where they would blend in with a local Christian Gemeinde. They might go to a free Imperial city such as Frankfurt am Main, or to a city such as Wesel, which had a largely autonomous government under a weak territorial prince.217 Wesel accommodated religious refugees principally for the economic benefit and thereby became a home to a plurality of religious groups. In these urban settings the refugees joined a coreligionist community that had either official legal standing or dissenting status. Whatever the case, circumstances in a city like Wesel “encouraged … urban inhabitants to become even more aware of their confessional identity than they ever had been.”218 Circumstances in territories governed by a strong prince who enforced the cuiusregio principle tended to work in the other direction. Among rural Gemeinden especially, where confessional differentiation had little if any opportunity to get a toehold, conditions discouraged the formation of confessional identity,

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218

Nicholas Terpstra, Religious Refugees in the Early Modern World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 2. Once in Frankfurt, however, refugees such as adherents to Calvin’s theology encountered restrictions against their public worship, causing some to look elsewhere. Maximilian Miguel Scholz, “Religious Refugees and the Search for Public Worship in Frankfurt am Main, 1554–1608,” Sixteenth Century Journal 50, no. 3 (2019): 765–82. Jesse Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 20.

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or, to phrase it in terms familiar to contemporaries, discouraged adherence to and association with a confession. Furthermore, the immigration of known religious dissidents into the Gemeinden was virtually unheard of. While that kind of thing happened in cities such as Frankfurt am Main and Wesel, it did not in territorial rural Gemeinden.219 Third, the Catholic-Protestant approach would determine that the individuals who left and the Gemeinde that remained were at odds with each other. They were not. Polarization had not formed between them. Rather, the individuals who left operated with confessional adherence and interests that opposed the religion being installed by a sovereign. The polarization formed there. The individuals, before leaving, did not consider founding a second sacred community locally that incorporated persons who adhered to their confession. Arguably, given the context of Christian monism and the sovereign’s enforcement of the cuius-regio principle, they could not even conceive of doing it. That kind of local world would not be possible until later, after 1648, when Christian pluralism took hold. Until then, no “action-spaces” or “contentious objects” that could become centers for negotiation between two distinct parties ever formed because a secondary corpus did not form locally and because the local sacred community did not face any confrontation.220 Prior to 1648 no occasion materialized, in these rural German lands, in which “communication” needed to turn potentially explosive religious disputes into “stabilizing conflicts.”221 Positive associations with Catholisch, Lutherisch, and Reformierte prior to 1648 are to be interpreted in this context of Christian monism. For example, in the early seventeenth century a nobleman of Boyneburg indicated where one could “hear a good Lutheran sermon,” a resident in Hammelburg and another in Marburg each said he had been raised in the “Lutheran religion” and held it to be true, and a handful from Burghaun wrote that they had been “baptized

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220

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Martin Christ has suggested that “[a]reas where a strong top-down confessionalization was visible, were … perhaps the exception, rather than the rule,” and that cases of “religious toleration” and “flexible confessional boundaries” were more the norm in many areas of the Holy Roman Empire. Biographies of a Reformation, 228. Historians have, indeed, unearthed considerable nuance and complexity in the Empire’s religious landscape, and Christ’s notion ought to be taken into consideration. Yet in Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda, especially at the level of the governing authorities and of rural Gemeinden, pressures favoring a homogenous Christian body predominated. Daniela Hacke, “Church, Space and Conflict: Religious Co-Existence and Political Communication in Seventeenth-Century Switzerland,” German History 25, no. 3 (2007): 285–312, here p. 311. Hacke, “Church, Space and Conflict,” 312.

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in the Lutheran religion and instructed in its teaching since youth.”222 When read today one reflexively calls such persons Lutherans and would cite them as indicative of a Lutheran identity and dedicated Lutheran laity, yet doing so misses the historical connotation of the usage. Adherents associated with Lutherisch on grounds that it was associated exclusively with Christ, Christianity, and the name Christian. On this understanding Wittenberg professor Leonhard Hutter based his 1597 response to “the Calvinist devil,” who, while reiterating Luther’s 1522 directive, declared that “a pious Christian cannot and should not in any way call himself Lutherisch.”223 “We agree with the Calvinists,” replied Hutter, “that one should not call oneself Lutherisch but Christian,” for “we have been baptized not in Luther but in Christ” and “have … our new birth not from Paul, Cephus, Apollos, much less from Luther,” rather “solely and alone from Christ.” Yet, Hutter rationalized, “a Christian can call himself Lutherisch” and do so “with a good conscience” because it would “dissociate him from Sacramentarians, Papists, Anabaptists, and other heretics.”224 Daniel Jacobi expressed it this way in 1615: “Calvinists do not have a correct foundation and basis, and because of it the true Reformed Lutheran church cannot be agreed upon with them.”225 The fluidity of the names Catholisch, Lutherisch, and Reformierte was on display in the early seventeenth century when Moritz’s interrogators demanded conformity to the landgrave’s reforms. Georg Beck replied that his father “had been a minister [and] commanded him to abide by [the] lutherischen faith and doctrine[;] nevertheless, whatever his neighbors and Christians would do, he would do too.”226 Conventional discourse would have it that Beck was a Lutheran yet willing to become a Reformed or that he was merely shifting from one spot under the umbrella of Protestantism to the other. Both are anachronistic. Beck was and intended to continue as a Christian, and, hypothetically, 222 223 224 225

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Respectively, in HStAM, 92 no. 398; HStAM, 4i no. 173; HStAM, 92 no. 162, HStAM, 4i no. 153; and HStAM, 94 no. 374. Hutter, Wolgegründte Widerlegung, 28–29. Hutter, Wolgegründte Widerlegung, 28–29. Daniel Jacobi, Zwei unterschiedlichen Bedencke: Das Erste/ Ob den Reformierten Gemeynden binnen Franckfurt jhr Religions-Exercitium zu verwäigern oder zu verstatten sei (n.p., 1615), Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum Digitale Bibliothek. Ironically, it was the socalled Reformed who abided by Luther’s 1522 directive. While they, on occasions such as the Reformation centennial in 1617, expressly appreciated how God had brought the light of the gospel via Luther, they did not invoke the name Lutherisch. HStAM, PMK vol. 6 (21 October 1617); Abraham Scultetus, Newe Jahrs Predigt: Das ist, Historischer Bericht, wie wunderbarlich Gott der Herr die verschienene hundert Jahr seine Kirche reformiert, regiert und biß daher erhalten (Frankfurt, 1617), 7ff, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. HStAM, 4i no. 157.

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if Lutherisch were not associated with the name, then he would associate instead with whatever was. Other members, including widows and also those who positively associated with Luther’s catechism and Bible, expressed the same vital interest to continue as Christians and not be severed from the name amid the confessional change of religion. A hesitant Georg Freund stated that he “cannot say [whether] he would become un-Christian” by communicating with the breaking of the bread.227 Freund’s response strategically bought him time while he was waiting on the Gemeinde. He knew, like the others, that he would be a Christian if he continued to do whatever the Gemeinde did, and because the Gemeinde did not operate with confessional lines, at no point in the process would the members’ actions constitute conversion. As Martha, a widow, put it, “she had lived her whole life as a pious Christian and will continue to do so” by communicating.228 “Whatever his lord Christ commanded and taught him,” testified Hans Landau, in a statement that would have harmonized with any confessional or nonconfessional notion of Christianity at the time, “that is what he will follow, for then he is certainly a Christian.”229 Emmanual Baum said similarly, “In every instance [I] will do what is proper for a Christian [to do].”230 Curt Bosold, like so many others who testified, expressly looked for a cue from the body of Christians around him so that he could continue to be counted among them: “[W]hatever other Christians do, that’s how [I will] direct myself.”231 Orthia Weissen replied that “when she dies as a Christian,” she hoped one would, “as with other Christians, inter her in the earth.”232 Anna Wacker added that if she should “not receive a Christian burial, then she will have to commend it to God.”233 Their testimonies point to a certain paradox. Gemeinden in these territories showed no compulsion to hoard all sacred terms to themselves like theologians and sovereigns did. Consequently, evidence suggests that oppositional terminology as well as positive associations with, for example, the charged name Lutherisch may have first started to become standardized at the grassroots level, particularly in towns, long before the Peace of 1648 authorized the three disputing religions and thereby set them on course to become formal denominations. Those such as Andreä and Hutter, by contrast, had a complicated association with Lutherisch. Yet whereas they would suffer the name 227 228 229 230 231 232 233

HStAM, 4i no. 158. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 174. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155.

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so long as they believed the doctrine associated with it to be Christian, a rural Christian might readily slip in and out of any association with the name and, all the while, seamlessly remain Christian and part of the local Christian Gemeinde. Enabling and encouraging them to do this, amid stasis as well as any confessional change of the religion exercised in the churches of a parish, was a Christian monism that was not confessionally but rather communally defined and locally based. The point is vividly illustrated in the cases of Eschwege and Hersfeld, two small towns where, exceptionally, the consensus of each Gemeinde cleaved and stalled in limbo after Moritz inserted his reforms. Some went ahead and communicated while others waited. Interrogators summoned the latter individually to press them on the issue. Some replied that they had not communicated because of a long-standing, personal conflict they had with another person. Overall the responses revealed that whatever the local Christian Gemeinde did with regard to Moritz’s reforms was Christian, and that they would direct their actions accordingly. Many men and women plainly stated this notion in similar refrains such as “whatever [the] whole Gemeinde and pious Christians do, so would she,” “wherever the whole Gemeinde leaned, there he would have to follow, too,” “whatever other citizens and (the) Gemeinde did, so he would also do,” and “whatever his neighbors above and below him would do, he would do too.”234 As Claus Schmerfeld put it, he had not communicated “because there has been discrepancy in the religion,” meaning, members were, for the moment, not exercising religion as a corpus. As Valentin Schnabel and Curt Dietzmann, among others, explained, once things had come to a consensus point, they would “position themselves as a Christian.”235 After all, as Hans Heinemann said, “he wants to live here in Eschwege,” and so “whatever others do, he must also follow after.”236 History framed confessionally with Catholic and Protestant categories would conclude that the individuals were converting, or indifferent, or ambiguous, or just politically savvy,237 or it might conclude that they had a

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HStAM, 4i no. 155, 156, and 157. By “above and below” was meant those members who ranked higher and lower in sociopolitical status. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155. Ute Lotz-Heumann, Jan-Friedrich Mißfelder, and Matthias Pohlig, ed., Konversion und Konfession in der Frühen Neuzeit (Göttingen: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2007); Daniela Hacke, Konfession und Kommunikation: Religiöse Koexistenz und Politik in der Alten Eidgenossenschaft (Die Grafschaft Baden 1531–1712) (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017), esp. pp. 297–371; Nicola Grochowina, Indifferenz und Dissens in der Grafschaft Ostfriesland im 16. Und 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt am Main: Lang, 2003); Martin Mulsow, “Mehrfachkonversion, politische Religion und Opportunismus im 17. Jahrhundert – Ein Pläyoder für

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generic and fungible identification as Christian, as opposed to a specific and an authentic one as a Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed Christian. A communally framed view free of these anachronistic categories, by contrast, would conclude that they sought to affirm themselves as Christian as they understood it, and to affirm their place in the Christian Gemeinde. While keeping an eye on their sovereign’s demands they took care not to distinguish themselves from the local Christian corpus and therefore looked for a cue from it. Schmerfeld said he had nothing against the reforms and they aligned with God’s Word, only he could not have brought himself “to be the first” to signal his conformity to them.238 Gotthard Reiger wanted to “be a follower of the Christian Gemeinde” of Eschwege, yet “it would be disconcerting to him” should he be the first to conform.239 Margrethe Senperin said she had not yet communicated because she was “looking,” that is, waiting “on the people.”240 The widow Gehla Müller explained how “her neighbors had not gone” and therefore she also had not. The shepherd Reinhard Hartmann said “because his neighbors had not gone, he also had stayed.”241 He added that “if his neighbors went, then he would, too,” and “if one person went, then he would be like the other.” Interrogators tried to get interrogatees to fault themselves for not having communicated, but the latter frequently deflected those charges by invoking the wider Gemeinde. Hans Kirchhain could not say whether he had done right by not communicating but did say he had not because “he conducted himself according to (what) other citizens (did).”242 Curt Borngreber would not say whether he had done right either, but if the whole citizenry had communicated, then he would have done so too.243 Furthermore, while interrogatees in Eschwege and Hersfeld sometimes cited their conscience to justify why they had not yet communicated, that conscience did not operate in isolation. Both those who invoked it and those who pleaded an inability to judge the reforms often tied their ultimate decision expressly to the local body of Christians. In his conscience, said Hans

238 239 240 241 242 243

eine Indifferentismusforschung,” in von Greyerz, Jakubowki-Tiessen, Kaufmann, and Lehmann, Interkonfessionalität – Transkonfessionalität – binnenkonfessionelle Pluralität, 132–50; Andreas Pietsch, Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, ed., Konfessionelle Ambiguität: Uneindeutig und Verstellung als religiöse Praxis in der Frühen Neuzeit. Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 214 (Heidelberg: Gütersloher, 2013), including Kaspar von Greyerz, “Konfessionelle Indifferenz in der Frühen Neuzeit,” 39–61; Ethan H. Shagan, Popular politics and the English Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 157. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155.

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Herwig, he could not consent “to this reformation,” but “if his conscience prompted him, and his neighbors would go [to communicate], then he would go.”244 A handworker confessed he “was not knowledgeable enough” to speak about the reforms and “referred himself once again to the Gemeinde.”245 Hans Chorsleben, a self-described “poor shepherd” who said he “had no cause” for not having communicated, ultimately “referred himself to the other citizens.”246 In a word, Christianity was wherever the Gemeinde was and whatever its members did. Local Christians denounced neither the former religious practice nor the current one but rather affirmed both, either by recognizing both forms or by rejecting the notion that they essentially differed. Emmanuel Baum agreed that, when the Eucharist was instituted, the Bible stipulated to break the bread, “but [I] meant, that [the] former [rite] was also right (recht).”247 Whereas confessional adherents treated the two rites as mutually exclusive, rural Gemeinden did not.248 Jeist Schäffer said “there is no difference” between the rites.249 Orthia Neben did not reproach the instruction against images and idolatry, was not going to abandon the former teaching, yet did not condemn the breaking of the bread.250 To the ecclesiastics her statement would have been theologically incoherent, but to Neben it kept her squarely within the bounds of the Gemeinde. She added that if those around her who understood these matters better than her began to communicate, then she would too. The widow Katharina Göbel stated that she abided by what she was baptized and consecrated in, but, as to the present, she would do whatever her

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HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 156. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155. An early seventeenth-century case in the Swiss county of Baden offers a chance for comparison. The county was jointly governed by eight Confederate states that had, by 1531, divided over the question of true religion. An article describing the case explains how the opposing states jousted over the installation of a second baptismal font in Zurzach’s church (the use of which was shared by two local congregations), discoursed with the notions of “old faith” and “new faith,” and disputed claims to “true” religion. It offers very little, however, on what the local congregations themselves thought of the conflict or the language they used. Analysis in the article may also be compromised by its assumed use of terms—e.g. denomination, conversion, Catholic, Reformed—that, for the rural Gemeinden examined here at least, would not apply until Christian pluralism had arrived. For the Imperial territories, that arrival came in the wake of 1648. Hacke, “Church, Space and Conflict.” HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155.

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neighbors did.251 Hans Senger wished to abide by what came before but had nothing against “this reformation” or the teaching about images in the Ten Commendments, and he confirmed that his children would learn it.252 Celiox Ziegenbach likewise replied that he had learned “the Lutheran Catechism” but had no scruples about sending his children to school and having them learn “the reformed catechism.”253 Whereas the Catholic-Protestant prism would have it that those reared in the former were Lutherans and those in the latter Reformed, his answer, like those of the others, conveyed that he and his children were Christians whether they learned the one or the other, or both. Gemeinden in rural towns such as Eschwege and Hersfeld, not to mention in villages, treated the two catechisms, like the differing confessional rites administered by their former and current ministers, as existing within a singular whole instead of delineating Christianity from non-Christianity. Due to their confessionalized Christian monism, ecclesiastics and coreligionist laypersons drew a vertical line demarcating true religion, which church authorities installed in the parishes, from false religion. The nonconfessional Christian monism of rural Gemeinden caused them, in their parish affairs, to operate horizontally without that line, even though they interacted with churchmen and nobles who tried to draw that line in the members’ realm of experience. The Gemeinden, like parishioners in Westphalian towns, treated “baptism, marriage, and burial as rites of passage, signifying transformation in social being, and not as enactments of credal adhesion.”254 However, the rural Gemeinden had not developed into multiple, local religious corpora as is depicted in the Westphalian towns, and so, evidence concerning the Gemeinden is to be read not “against the grain” of what comes with those categories but rather without the categories and without the grain altogether.255 That includes cases such as the sole person in Hünfeld, the weaver Hans Göbel, who invoked the term Lutheran amid the prince-abbot’s confessional change of religion in the early seventeenth century. Hans said he was “a Lutheran man” and married to a woman who “is of the old view,” meaning, that of the Roman Church. He was “very content with her” and would communicate once his conscience settled, though he asked for an extension until Pentecost if needed.256

251 252 253 254 255 256

HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 155. David M. Luebke, Hometown Religion: Regimes of Coexistence in Early Modern Westphalia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 13. Luebke, Hometown Religion, 13. HStAM, 92 no. 398.

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Theologians of the day warned against a “mixed” marriage in which a “Christian” married an “unbeliever” who adhered to a “false religion,”257 and historians today, taking such norms of the period in hand, would describe the Göbels as having a mixed marriage or transgressive union.258 But from the vantage point of the rural Gemeinde, it was neither mixed nor transgressive. Operating within an undivided sacred Gemeinde made it possible for Christians to regard such things as “the old view” and “Lutheran man” as existing within the bounds of Christianity, just as those in Eschwege and Hersfeld did with the “Lutheran” and “reformed” catechisms and rites around the same years. Confessional adherents back then, and scholarship today that approach the past with Catholic-Protestant categories, might regard these cases as indicating syncretism, a borrowing and exchange of differing elements and a blurring of confessional lines such that laypersons were reconciling systems of belief and producing something different from the original components.259 But the rural Gemeinde did not adhere to a confession and had not drawn any confessional lines. Restoring the members to the context of that corporate body’s actions suggests that they were affirming themselves as Christians and affirming the seemingly differing elements as Christianity. It is no accident that confessional adherents made all documented references to “true” and “false” religion, and to “alone salvific religion.” Rural Gemeinden did not make any. They did not establish rival or adversarial groups like the adherents did. Unlike ecclesiastical personnel, who avidly wrote of “error” and “erring” and “errant” belief, rural Gemeinden left no written or recorded instance of the kind. Likewise, churchmen and other confessional adherents made all written references to the words “heresy” and “heretical.”260 None were made by members of rural Gemeinden. Those within

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Georg Dedeken (1564–1628), an adherent of the Augsburg Confession, stated this in Thesauri consiliorum et decisionum volumen III mixta & inprimis matrimonialia continens: das ist: vornehmer Universiteten hochlöblicher Collegien, wolbestalter Consistorien auch sonst hochgelährter Theologen und Juristen Rath, Bedencken, Antwort, Belehrung, Erkentnüß, Bescheide…. (Jena, 1671), 3:172–74, Post-Reformation Digital Library. Franciscus Agricola, an adherent of the Roman Church, admonished that “above all things the bride and groom must have the true unfalsified Catholic faith, and hold to it their whole life,” for if one of them were a heretic or blasphemer or sectarian, then they could not expect God’s grace and blessing and could not participate in unity in the range of religious exercises. Ein Catholische Braut- oder Ehepredig (Cologne, 1609), 17–22, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. David M. Luebke and Mary Lindemann, ed., Mixed Matches: Transgessive Unions in Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (New York: Berghahn, 2014). For more: Christ, Biographies of a Reformation, esp. pp. 16–17. A sampling: HStAM, 4i no. 85, 165, 241; HStAM, 22a no. 1:12; HStAM, 83 no. 5649; HStAM, 92 no. 373, 396, 439, 660, 745; HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 447, 765.

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Latin Christendom who disputed true religion in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries adopted a discourse that calls to mind the aforementioned one used by Christians in the thirteenth century against Jews, Muslims, and others. Yet that discourse did not permeate the rural Gemeinden. The latter did not enter the orthodox-heterodox thought world of theologians and confessional adherents as it concerned the Christian religion, and therefore they had no occasion to denounce a person or a form of religion practiced in a parish church as heresy.261 Whatever their thoughts about the apocalypse might have been, they did not mention it. As for other revealing clues, in a vast body of handwritten territorial records from the sixteenth to eighteenth century just over a dozen references to “Satan” occur. Ecclesiastical and secular authorities made all of them.262 Of the nearly one hundred and sixty references to the “Devil” in the same documents, ecclesiastical figures made a great majority of them and did so often in accusatory fashion amid acrimonious exchanges with other persons.263 Laypersons made only a small fraction of them. Many of these occurred amid marital strife and reflected the word’s usage in comparatively benign colloquialisms such as “She swore by the Devil that she would never again leave him” and “May the Devil fetch (me) if (I) spoke unjustly.”264 How names appeared and circulated within books and pamphlets in the pre-Westphalian Empire could differ from how they did in everyday life within an Imperial territory. Around a town or, perhaps, a village people used the adjective forms Lutherisch and Catholisch, for example, but in publications both the adjective and noun forms of the names regularly appeared (e.g., Lutheraner, Lutheristen, Lutheranos, Catholicos).265 One explanation may be 261

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Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christensen, “Introduction: Orthodoxies and Heterdoxies in the Early Modern German Experience,” in Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture: Order and Creativity, 1550–1750, ed. Randolph C. Head and Daniel Christensen (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 1–24. Most instances occurred after 1648. A sampling: HStAM, 4i no. 154; HStAM, 22a no. 8:9, 9:4, 10:2; HStAM, 260 no. 558; HStAM, 315e no. 400, 424; Franz, Urkundliche Quellen, 4:101. A sampling: HStAM, 17e Kleinschmalkalden no. 10; HStAM, 83 no. 4738; HStAM, 97i XXVII no. 3; HStAM, 315e no. 400. Here, HStAM, PMK vol. 7 (29 April 1620). Also, HStAM, PMK vol. 4 (4 September 1611); HStAM, PMK vol. 6 (24 July 1616); HStAM, PMK vol. 6 (9 November 1616); HStAM, PMK vol. 7 (16 February 1620); HStAM, PMK vol. 7 (27 May 1620); HStAM, PMK vol. 7 (10 June 1620); HStAM, PMK vol. 7 (2 August 1620); HStAM, PMK vol. 7 (18 October 1620); HStAM, PMK vol. 10 (30 August 1623); HStAM, 4i no. 155; HStAM, 17e Kleinschmalkalden no. 10. For example, Balthasar Raida, Concordia und vergleichung der Papisten, Widderteuffer, Rotten, Witzelianer und Lutheraner jnn vnnd mit der heilgen catholischen Christlichen kirchen/ an die zween Ept zu Fulda vnd Herssfelt (Erfurt, 1539), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; and Johann Paul Windeck, Controversiae de mortis Christi efficacia, inter catholicos et Calvinistas hoc tempore disputatae: in quibus 286 argumentis, Calvinistarum errore destructo, confirmatur Veritas catholica (Cologne, 1603), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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that the medium of print provided a space less constrained by the strictures of Christian monism found in a territorial church. In print the names could start to become normalized if only because they were used, time and again, by confessional devotees and in a relatively open venue. Publications advocating irenicism or coexistence accentuated the trend.266 By the early 1600s printed works on Lutheraner, Catholicos, and the like had become common. These were steps the names could not plausibly take in territories where the cuius-regio principle reigned. There, an ongoing polemical war of words had less opportunity to exist; authorities scorned irenicism, and religion, in their eyes, was undisputed. The contrast between the print world and territorial world was more glaring with the term Protestant. It is commonly held that Protestants emerged in 1529 when five princes and envoys of fourteen cities rejected the Diet of Speyer’s majority vote to revoke the Diet’s 1526 decision, which had left the religious issue to the individual estates. The princes and envoys deployed the word protestirn (to protest, or dissent) in their 1529 Appellation.267 They understood themselves to be not Protestants in the Christian pluralism sense of the term, but rather Christians, in the Christian monism sense of the term, who were protesting against the Diet’s recess. They self-identified the same way in the 1530 Augsburg Confession.268 For this reason, too, the Wittenberg theologians while at Torgau in October 1530 called them not Protestants but “Christian Estates.”269 In published works the word protestierende (protesting) emerged by the late 1530s and then more regularly over the next century.270 Compared to Evangelisch, protestierende was used even more exclusively in print by governing and intellectual elites and usually as an adjective for specific nouns: electors, princes, and estates. In handwritten records across the 266

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For an example of irenicism, see Georg Cassander, De Articvlis Religionis Inter Catholicos Et Protestantes Controversis Consvltatio, Ad … Imperatores Avgvstos Ferdinandvm I. Et Maximilanvm II. Eius Svccessorem (Cologne, 1577), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. In Zwei unterschiedlichen Bedencke, Jacobi opposed the pragmatic argument that the dominant “Lutheran citizenry” of Frankfurt am Main should allow “the Reformed Gemeinden” to exercise their religion and conduct schooling because they had brought prosperity via trade and manufacturing. Julius Ney, ed., Die Appellation und Protestation der Evangelischen Ständen auf dem Reichstage zu Speier 1529 (Leipzig, 1906), Google Books. Concordia Triglotta, 37–95. Hofmann, Quellen, 78. For example: Konrad Braun, Ain Gesprech aines Hoffrachs mit zwaien Gelerten, … von dem Nurnbergischen Fridstandt, Regenspurgischen Kayserlichen Mandat, der Protestierenden Stendt ausschreiben wider das Kaiserlich Camergericht, und dem Abschide jüngst zu Franckenfurt bethaidingt (n.p., [1539]), Google Books.

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Hessian, Hanauian and Fuldian territories protestierende appeared very rarely. Two exceptions were in correspondence pertaining to the 1631 Leipzig Convent and in a 1626 anonymous history of the Hessian church in which the author identified those gathered at Naumburg in 1561 with the word.271 In publications the Latin noun Protestantes surfaced by the mid-sixteenth century while the German noun Protestanten seems to have come later and comparatively less often.272 Tellingly, none of the three—protestierende, Protestantes, Protestanten—appeared in the recorded parlance of pre-1648 territorial subjects, who likely would not have recognized the terms or regarded them as relevant. In the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian regions, to interpret the religious interests of local Gemeinden, especially peasant ones, as Protestant would misconstrue them and further ossify an institutionalized trope. The Christian monism and the civil-sacred unity at the territorial and local scales also clarify the language surrounding certain terms and expressions. One was the word subjects (Untertanen). Subjects were, self-evidently, to be Christians, and therefore authorities simply called them subjects or our subjects. Occasionally they elaborated. The protesting estates at Speyer in 1529 cited “our Christian subjects.”273 Marburg church authorities in the 1610s noted “subjects who show themselves to be Christian” and who “are to behave in a Christian manner.”274 Landgrave Georg II of Hesse-Darmstadt wrote in 1635 of “all our subjects, as obedient Christians.”275 Subjects themselves typically selfidentified in the same way. Hammelburg town councilors, adherents of the Augsburg Confession, called themselves “Christian subjects” in a 1604 written plea to their sovereign, the Fulda prince-abbot.276 One finds an occasional exception. The Völkershausen priest in 1629 mentioned the “Catholic subjects” there and a party at the 1631 Leipzig Convent wrote about certain “evangelical subjects.”277 But here, too, each author viewed them as Christians in contrast to those who were not. The priest contrasted the Catholic subjects with 271 272

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HStAM, 4i no. 164, 179. For a sixteenth-century example, see Paulus III. Papa, Enth. Außerdem: Pavli III. Pontificis Romani Epistolae duae, ad Heluetios, & aliquot eorum Episcopos atq[ue] Abates, quibus & instituti Concilij Tridentini, & suscepti co[n]tra Protestantes belli ratio continetur ([Basel], 1546). For a seventeenth-century example, see Piquerin Voton, Bekehrung, Herrn Piquerin Votons, eines Engellendischen Freyherrns, … Von der Ketzerey der Protestanten, zu dem … Catholischen … Glauben (Ingolstadt, 1606), Münchener DigitalisierungsZentrum Digitale Bibliothek. Ney, Die Appellation und Protestation der Evangelischen Ständen, 30. HStAM, PMK vol. 2 (13 June 1612); and HStAM, 22a no. 9:1 (7 May 1619). HStAM, 17 I no. 3967–3970. HStAM, 92 no. 745. HStAM, 92 no. 373; and HStAM, 4i no. 208.

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those who displayed “heretical obstinance,” and in the Leipzig case evangelical subjects were allegedly oppressed by the “tyranny” of Catholic estates and aggrieved in body and possessions in the most “un-Christian” fashion. Illuminating, too, was the language connected to the word zugetan, which connoted being affixed, committed, bound, or attached to something. Contemporaries utilized it in various ways, from speaking of being bound to a lordship via oath and duty, to being given to alcohol addiction.278 In religious discourse one hears of a person committed to “our religion,” “our true religion,” “a false religion,” “our confession,” “the public exercise of the standing religion,” “the ten commandments,” and the “Augsburg Confession.”279 Rome’s opponents wrote negatively of “a number of estates committed to the Roman religion,” while Rome’s adherents affirmed those who were “committed to the Catholic religion.”280 Hammelburg officials declared themselves “Christians” in that they were committed “to the evangelical, unfalsified religion and none other.”281 When Moritz instituted his reforms he demanded that one not refuse them but rather commit or join oneself to them. A married couple who “would not consent to communicate” were described as ones who had not committed.282 Pre-1648 usage of zugetan, then, typically denoted persons who had consciously and publicly committed themselves to a religion or confession. Furthermore, Christian monism clarifies the couple instances where the comparative expression “sooner … as” (“lieber … als”) appeared, as in “sooner Calvinist than Catholic” or “sooner Catholic than Lutheran.” In 1599 the Neuhof cleric testified about parishioner Adam Henkel and an alleged conversation Henkel had with others concerning religion in a local tavern in Rommerz. When the owner said he and his wife were considering going to the Eucharist, Henkel allegedly countered “he would sooner be Calvinist than Catholic.”283 In 1623 a Wallau minister told the Marburg consistory about a conversation he had with a local lieutenant. The minister said the lieutenant declared his intention to abide by the old church ordinance, a copy of which was in the church. When the minister opened the Bible to prove he and those with him adhered to the Ten Commandments as laid out in it, the lieutenant allegedly retorted he “would sooner become Lutheran than Catholic.”284 278 279 280 281 282 283 284

HStAM, 22a no. 9:1; HStAM, 22a no. 9:4. In HStAM, 22a no. 8:19; HStAM, PMK vol. 10 (8 January 1623); HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10336; HStAM, 22a no. 8:12; and HStAM, 318 no. 437. HStAM, 4i no. 79; and HStAM, 92 no. 398. HStAM, 92 no. 745. HStAM, PMK vol. 4 (17 March 1613). HStAM, 92 no. 79. HStAM, PMK vol. 10 (16 July 1623).

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A few points are worth making on these two instances. The person who allegedly said the words did not record them. The Wallau account came second hand and the Rommerz account third hand. No pre-1648 document directly recorded a commoner using the expression “sooner … as,” and thus there is reason to be skeptical whether Henkel or the lieutenant said the alleged words. Moreover, conventional historical thinking would conclude that Henkel was a Calvinist (or Reformed) and that he considered the juxtaposed terms Calvinist and Catholic an either-or proposition: one could be either a Calvinist or a Catholic, and if a person were not the one, then the person would be the other. The juxtaposition does reveal a polarizing charge between the terms Calvinist and Catholic, and the same existed between each of those terms and Lutheran. However, because they were associative and voluntary, Henkel was not a Calvinist or Reformed in any post-1648 sense of those terms. He, like others before 1648, was a Christian who could freely associate with any of the terms and risked nothing if he dissociated from any or all of them. Finally, ministers, who recorded the accounts, were among the literate minority who trafficked in the print world. In books the words Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed appeared regularly, in both adjective and noun form, but in petitions and recorded testimonies of territorial subjects the words did so considerably less often and, without exception, in adjective form. In handwritten sources the noun form of any of the three names appeared only a handful of times, and the Marburg superintendent and the Marburg consistory were the ones who wrote them. In each case they used the noun Lutheran, and usually they were referring to a cleric.285 A fourth noteworthy term was worden (become, became). Prior to 1648 the word was linked to a term like Lutherisch in only a few, handwritten records. Ministers uttered it in each case. In 1607 a minister reported how certain parties accused him of having “fallen away and become a Calvinist.”286 In 1609 the Amöneburg dean described a cleric as having “fallen away from Lutheranism and become a Calvinist.”287 Around 1628 a minister implored the Fulda prince-abbot to protect, from the heretics, the lives of “poor destitute people who became Catholic.”288 The language, like other terms, reveals that, prior to 1648, it was possible to conceptualize a person as having been one thing and become another. Conversion existed, but it did so only among

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HStAM, PMK vol. 1 (8 May 1611); vol. 5 (10 Aug. 1616); HStAM, PMK vol. 9 (15 June 1622); HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 707. HStAM, 4i no. 162. HStAM, 105c no. 577. HStAM, 92 no. 373.

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the confessional adherents. For this reason, the language associated with conversion appeared in their discourse and did not appear in the discourse of the rural Gemeinden. The latter did not make recorded mention of “religions” like confessional adherents did. They made mention only of “religion.” Unless, hypothetically, rural Christians considered becoming Jewish or Muslim, they did not encounter a scenario of conversion or experience conversion prior to 1648. The same pattern extended to wording related to “tread” or “go” (treten) and “lead” (leiten). In the 1580s twenty-three ministers signed a confessional statement declaring they would not misdirect or mislead (verleiten) anyone in the “old and new heresies” which opposed “the embattled symbols” of the “old, right-believing church, the Augsburg Confession together with the Apology, the Schmalkaldic Articles, the articles of the Wittenberg Concord, and both catechisms of Luther.”289 In 1607 five ministers facing stiff aristocratic opposition in the Boyneburg district described how they had been accused of having “departed” or “strayed from the true-believing churches that adhered to the Augsburg Confession” and had “gone to the Calvinists.”290 In 1603 a town councilman at Hünfeld testified he “had been led away (abgeleitet) from the old faith in his youth.”291 These few, pre-1648 recorded instances were uttered by confessional adherents, usually ministers. A final term with revealing language was “confirmed” (confirmiert). Prior to 1648 laypersons made a recorded statement concerning their confirmation in several instances, all of them during 1608–1609 amid Moritz’s efforts to gain conformity to his reforms. Three persons resided in the urban center of Marburg, where confessional adherence was noticeably strong. To interrogators, a tailor, who had not yet communicated, said he had been confirmed in Frankenberg and promised to hold to that teaching. A bookbinder said he had listened to the former ministers’ instruction for fifty years, was confirmed in it, and if possible, wanted to abide by it in his remaining years of life. A shoemaker said he had spent twenty-one years with the former minister, was confirmed by him, and promised to remain with the same.292 When read today one writes reflexively that such persons were Lutherans who had been confirmed as Lutherans in the Lutheran religion. But placing them in the context of Christian monism reveals that the men were Christians confirmed in the Christian religion, as stipulated in the creedal confessions and church ordi289 290 291 292

HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 765. HStAM, 4i no. 163. HStAM, 92 no. 398. These three examples: HStAM, 4i no. 153.

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nances. The same was true for those confirmed in the religion being instituted by Moritz. They were being confirmed as Christians in the Christian religion, not as Reformed or in the Reformed religion. Four other persons resided in the comparatively smaller, more rural town of Eschwege, where forces keeping the sacred community undifferentiated and less wedded to a particular confession were prevailing over forces that would produce confessional adherence and, potentially, differentiation. When one man testified that he had been “confirmed in the other ceremonies” and a second that he had been “confirmed in the former [ceremonies],” they did not declare or imply these erred from the mark of true Christianity, as their interrogators did, nor did they insinuate the new ceremonies were un-Christian.293 To do either required a confessionalized modus operandi. A third man, Curt Throm, did not operate that way. He had not communicated because he had promised to abide by what he had taken up some years before. History viewed anachronistically through denominational lenses would lead one to think that Throm, based on his statement, was Lutheran and intended to hold fast to Lutheranism. History viewed from the context of Christian monism and the local Gemeinde arrives at a different conclusion. As Throm stated, he declared himself “a member of the Christian Church.” Moreover, in Throm’s Europe, to violate a pledge or an oath was a very serious matter and he carefully articulated that reality when testifying. Other interrogatees did the same, and by doing so they shrewdly maneuvered the interrogators onto soft ground because compelling subjects to disregard a pledge would undermine the integrity of oath-taking and thereby weaken one of the authorities’ own bases for governing. Continuing his reply Throm stated that he “could not reproach the breaking of the bread,” that it “was correct,” and that “if he found it in his conscience” to do so, he would go to communicate “and conduct himself at all times as a Christian.” Throm was not converting but rather affirming himself a Christian through times of stasis and change. The fourth man, Ciriax Decker, did likewise. He “would gladly abide by the old ceremonies, but because that cannot be, he must do as every other citizen [does].”294 His children were not yet school age, but once they were, he would send them. Such accounts offer a contrast to developments in certain Swiss areas.295 In the late sixteenth century in Graubünden, the laity, who for decades had 293 294 295

HStAM, 4i no. 155. HStAM, 4i no. 157. Randolph C. Head, “Catholics and Protestants in Early Modern Graubünden,” German History 17, no. 3 (1999): 321–45. Starting in 1526 each local Gemeinde in Graubünden secured the right to appoint or depose a minister, thereby setting the legal foundation for the opposing forms of Christian religion—that of the Roman Church and that

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been prioritizing local communal solidarity above their religious differences, started to prioritize their religious interests instead. The solidarity broke down as a result. Why exactly the “tension over religion began to rise” at this time is not clear.296 One possibility is that the nomenclature of “Catholic” and “evangelical” had been sufficiently categorized in the local fabric by the late sixteenth century and its polarizing potential—one hears mention of “religions” (Religionen), for example—had taken firm hold.297 In the village Zizers, an agreement had to be struck so that “the inhabitants might be ‘not two communes, or parties, but rather one commune.’”298 In Bischofszell, around the start of the seventeenth century, both sides of a religiously mixed population began repurposing an annual festival to demarcate their party from the other by means of processions, sites, and music.299 Differentiations and developments of the kind seen in these Swiss examples did not occur in rural Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda. Local Gemeinden there remained undifferentiated through the first half of the seventeenth century, just as they had been in previous centuries. The close of this chapter returns to the insatiable drive of rural Gemeinden to enhance their parish relations, localize Christian services, and mull the possibility of parish devolution, which they demonstrated in the centuries up to 1648. Neuhof, south of City Fulda, serves as a useful example. The Catholic-Protestant approach to Neuhof’s history in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries sets it in the wider context of Fulda abbey.300

296 297

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of the Reformers—to coexist in the Three Leagues. A patchwork developed in which, according to a majority vote, some Gemeinden opted to exercise one form while other Gemeinden opted to exercise the other. Locally speaking, this enabled a Gemeinde’s secular and sacred dimensions to remain united. Decades passed that were characterized by the quick calming of any unrest after a vote was taken and by an “easy cooperation” between persons who exercised the differing forms (p. 330). During that time clerics tried to stir the laity of one side in religious opposition against the other, but the Gemeinden showed no interest. Head, “Catholics and Protestants in Early Modern Graubünden,” 334. Head, “Catholics and Protestants in Early Modern Graubünden,” 333, 338. For the juxtaposition of “Catholic” and “evangelical” and mention of “religions” in Graubünden records from the 1580s to 1610s: Constanz Jecklin, Urkunden zur Verfassungsgeschichte Graubündens (Chur, 1883), 116, 117, 128, 130, 132, 135. Head, “Catholics and Protestants in Early Modern Graubünden,” 340. Frauke Volkland, Konfession und Selbstverständnis: Reformierte Rituale in der gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt Bischofszell im 17. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005), 49–97. Ullrich Christoph Hanke, Fulda in Hessens Hand: Die Besetzung des Stifts Fulda durch Hessen-Kassel (1631–32–1634) (Fulda: Parzeller, 2007), 28–67.

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It describes how the outbreak of Luther’s Reformation knocked successive prince-abbots back on their heels. Already in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries they had tried unsuccessfully to keep Hesse’s predatory influence at bay. After Landgrave Philipp embraced Luther’s teaching, he enforced reforms on the town and district of Vacha, the rule of which he shared with Fulda abbey, and secularized its cloister around the mid-1520s. Many landed nobles and town councilmen were coreligionists of Luther. They asserted parish rights to appoint coreligionist clerics, and they mounted political opposition to the prince-abbot. Certain pandering, ineffectual, and religiously pliable abbots made their efforts easier. One of them, Philipp von Schweinsberg (r. 1541–1550), simultaneously tried to halt the spread of the Augsburg Confession religion and instituted reforms such as clerical marriage, permitting the laity to partake of Eucharistic wine, and having the Mass and sacraments done in German. Prince-Abbot Balthasar (r. 1570–1576, 1602–1606), an ardent supporter of Tridentine reforms and of the Jesuits, and Imperial administration (1576–1602) resolved to reverse this trend by setting the Catholic Counter-Reformation in motion.301 When Balthasar summoned Jesuits to Fulda in 1571, Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel advised his councilors that “we may want to put our foot in Stift Fulda.”302 He and three neighboring princes sent envoys to Fulda to argue that terms in the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg granted religious freedom to coreligionist Fuldian nobles. Balthasar rejected the interpretation in a pointed letter to Wilhelm. The landgrave, who may have had intentions of wresting control of Fulda, utilized the response to stoke the Fuldian nobles’ opposition to the prince-abbot. In 1576 Fuldian nobles, some towns, and the cathedral chapter met with Balthasar in Hammelburg and ousted Balthasar from his post. They also arranged for the aggressive Würzburg Prince-Bishop Julius Echter (r. 1573–1617), who was colluding with them in order to extend his episcopal authority into the Stift, to become the new administrator. In return Echter recognized the freedom of religion of the Stift’s three estates: the nobility, the towns, and the cathedral chapter. Balthasar was alloted the Neuhof castle but ultimately fled in exile to Mainz. Landgrave Wilhelm was stunned, interpreting the contract as opposing Hessian encroachment and enabling Jesuits to remain in City Fulda. There, they set up a pontifical seminary by 1584, though, as in other German lands, the Jesuits’ reach did not

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When viewed from Balthasar’s vantage, Fulda abbey’s history during this period bore resemblance to the account in Regina Pörtner, The Counter-Reformation in Central Europe: Styria, 1580–1630 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). As cited in Senta Schulz, Wilhelm IV., Landgraf von Hessen (1532–1592) (Ph.D. diss., University of Leipzig, 1941), 136.

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extend into the countryside.303 Later, the Empire and Imperial Diet arranged for the emperor’s nephew to assume the seat of administrator. Around the turn of the seventeenth century, in a decision reached by the Imperial court council, the Imperial administration finally restored Balthasar to his office. The nobility had to pay one hundred thousand florins in reparations. Balthasar reached agreement with the minority coreligionist nobility and saw to it that his religion was exercised in the region’s parishes. The Catholic-Protestant approach would also be applied to individual parishes in the region. As for Neuhof, an early attempt to appoint a Luther coreligionist to its clerical post failed when the emperor denied it in 1521. But around the middle of the century nobles put, in succession, two coreligionist ministers in Neuhof. In 1581, Abbot Balthasar ordered six hundred armed men to remove the post’s minister before replacing him with a priest. His intent to conduct various Roman ceremonies apparently angered the nobles, who held to the Augsburg Confession. Reportedly, on multiple occasions the church door was broken open and a new lock fastened to it. By 1594 the priest had left, and the nobles von Berlepsch and Specht capitalized by installing a coreligionist minister. Balthasar again intervened by incarcerating the minister until he swore to refrain from all activity in the parish. A priest is known to have been at the post around 1617–1621, but Hessian occupation of Fuldian lands in 1632–1634 allowed Landgrave Wilhelm V of Hesse-Kassel to appoint a coreligionist in the Neuhof post. Following the emperor’s victory in Nördlingen in 1634, the minister was captured, robbed, and escaped only by fleeing to an ignominious death. By the latter seventeenth century Catholic priests occupied the post. However, amid the back-and-forth jousting between parties embroiled in religious dispute, another storyline—the much older one of Christianization, localization, and communalization—was building momentum again around Neuhof. The early seventeenth century in fact marked Neuhof’s coming-ofage. The locale had formed from a consolidation of the settlements of Ellers, Neustadt, and Opperz, which, as a 1165 record concerning Ellers reveals, were part of parish Flieden. A castle for the prince-abbot had been built at the Neuhof site by 1241. In 1305 a chapel was constructed within the castle and the chaplaincy established there became an affiliate of parish Flieden. Its status rose over the first centuries: in 1330 it became a vicariate thanks partly to a priest’s endowment; for more than a century the castle chaplain curated the area faithful as they recovered from the Black Death; in 1490 Michael’s

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chapel was built in Opperz and a vicariate was founded there; and in 1500 the chapel benefice was joined to a ministerial post in Neuhof. In 1503, with permission from the Flieden priest and Mainz archbishop, a baptismal font was placed in Michael’s chapel, and a chaplain relocated from Flieden to Neuhof. In 1515 the vicariate of the castle chapel was united with Michael’s chapel and a parish house built next to the latter. These were the beginnings of Neuhof’s own parish. Then, in the later sixteenth century the benefice was joined to Michael’s chapel at the same time that Balthasar elevated Neuhof to parish status and designated Michael’s chapel as the parish church. The parish encompassed approximately ten locales. In 1603 the prince-abbot merged the incomes of the Opperz, castle, and Rückers chapels in order to fortify the new parish. To compensate Rückers’s loss, Balthasar authorized the Neuhof priest to hold Mass in Rückers on Saturdays. By 1620 parish Neuhof numbered seven hundred communicants. Due to such growth, a new church in Opperz was completed in 1621 and consecrated by the Erfurt bishop. For Neuhof many centuries of localization and devolution had arrived at a point of completion. By circa 1620 Neuhof did exude “a sense of confidence,”304 yet the explanation for it was not a “Catholic” one but rather had to do with indigenous animating forces. Neuhof’s achievement in turn opened a door of opportunity for other Gemeinden in the parish to improve their own circumstances. The Thirty Years War slammed that door shut on them as well as others, but eventually the rural Gemeinden cracked it open again. 304

Forster, Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment, 37.

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Mounting Another Surge, 1648–1800s The period from the late seventeenth century to the twentieth century constituted another season of surge for many rural Gemeinden. This reinvigorated effort to better their Christian lives occurred at a time when the burgeoning modern state further integrated the Gemeinde as a local administrative institution. Natural law theorists strengthened the relationship by arguing that authority rested in a mutually beneficial social contract that facilitated order in society.1 The agricultural economy after 1648 endured several decades of depression, one that struck landlord and peasant alike and that left roughly one-third of the pre-1618 arable land still unplowed.2 By the middle third of the eighteenth century that economy had recovered, was turning profits, and had spurred the reclamation of less productive soils. Demand due to population growth in German lands elevated foodstuff prices as market forces led to a flourishing of agriculture which lasted to the turn of the nineteenth century. The rural population was spared the severe demographic setbacks suffered by their fourteenth- and seventeenth-century predecessors. Excesses in Hessian population by the later eighteenth century were mitigated partly by filling mercenary armies with young soldiers. They, in turn, brought some wages back to the villages.3 Strengthened by these developments, rural Gemeinden mounted another surge. The volume of documentation increased enormously after 1648, and so, in order to manage it sensibly, chapters three and five will focus principally on certain rural Gemeinden and the parishes to which they belonged. In chapter four the scope will widen at times to illustrate certain points by drawing in evidence from neighboring areas. To begin, there were the elongated parishes, Willershausen, Neuhof, and Margretenhaun. Parish Willershausen, southeast of Kassel and Eschwege and just west of Eisenach, included the mother church along with affiliates Archfeld, Breitzbach, and Markershausen, and incorporated Frauenborn.

1 Ian Hunter, Rival Enlightenments: Civil and Metaphysical Philosophy in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). 2 Abel, Agricultural Fluctuations in Europe, 158–219; Walter Achilles, Landwirtschaft in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1991). 3 Charles W. Ingrao, The Hessian Mercenary State: Ideas, Institutions, and Reform under Frederick II, 1760–1785 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_006

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Breitzbach lay on a gentle plain but also on the parish’s west end; Willershausen stood six kilometers away—as the crow flies—on the east end. Worse, between Breitzbach and Willershausen weaved a range of knotty hills and valleys. To reach their mother church, those in Breitzbach had to walk not six kilometers but rather four kilometers eastwards, then three northwards and uphill through Frauenborn, and then three eastwards and down to Willershausen. Breitzbach had its own church but the minister came only occasionally due to distance and other parish obligations. Moreover, the noble family Treusch von Buttlar held patronage rights over parish Willershausen. While Breitzbach aspired to better parish circumstances, any maneuver had to receive aristocratic approval. In a final piece of cruel irony Breitzbach parishioners passed the mother church of parish Nesselröden a mere kilometer into their trek to Willershausen. Documents from 1840 reveal that Breitzbach previously tried and failed to sever ties with Willershausen and join parish Nesselröden.4 “[S]o many disadvantages fester,” the members groaned, because of the “great distance” to Willershausen. They yearned for better arrangements. Parish Neuhof had its mother church located toward the north end. To Neuhof’s northeast were Dorfborn and Tiefengruben and to its west Rommerz, three modest villages within the parish. Departing southwards from Neuhof the parish gradually ascended through Niederkalbach, Mittelkalbach, and Eichenried before climbing and descending a hill to reach Veitsteinbach, which, along with nearby farmsteads, lay eight kilometers away at the parish’s southern end. Niederkalbach built a chapel in 1447 and, at the time, was an affiliate in parish Flieden. Mittelkalbach also belonged originally to nearby parish Flieden and, like Niederkalbach, switched to parish Neuhof in 1582. Apparently, it had no chapel prior to the sixteenth century. If certain bells poured in 1515 were for Mittelkalbach, then one can presume it had a chapel by then. The first record of a chapel there came in 1656. Veitsteinbach existed by the tenth century, but after the year 1350 residents abandoned the site for a century due to the plague and then to its recurrence and due to feuding nobles, who plundered harvests and burned houses and stalls. Dornsteinbach and Leibholz, settlements near Veitsteinbach, were permanently abandoned. Yet over time peasants from neighboring villages cultivated the Steinbacher Mark, as the area was known, and the counts of Hanau and prince-abbots of Fulda vied over it. Exceptionally, Veitsteinbach along with nearby Kiliansberg was joined with Eichenried as a single Gemeinde, perhaps because Eichenried residents had spearheaded the revitalization of Veitsteinbach. So long

4 HStAM, 315e no. 5308.

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Places mentioned in Chapters 3–5

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as Veitsteinbach had Neuhof as its mother church, the parishioners had to go there for ministrations such as baptism and weddings. On a good day the walk took two and a half hours. Circumstances east of City Fulda in parish Margretenhaun were even more daunting. The parish included approximately fifteen villages, including Steinau, Steinhaus, Bernhards, and Dipperz. On average parishioners needed more than two hours to reach the mother church. For those in the eastern-most village of Wolferts, it took four and a half hours.5 There were the more circular parishes of Ebsdorf and Oberweimar, both south of Marburg. Each had a centrally located mother church, yet villages in them yearned just as earnestly for better parish relations. Rossberg’s path to the twelfth-century mother church at Ebsdorf stretched nearly six kilometers over undulating terrain and the walk took, by their measure, an hour and a half. Along the way they passed by Leidenhofen and Dreihausen (which comprised Ober-, Mittel-, and Niederhausen). Dreihausen ranked as a parish Ebsdorf affiliate in 1630, and was identified as Hausen until the early nineteenth century, when it became known as Dreihausen. Both reminded Rossberg of its lowly incorporated status in a parish that also included vicariate Hachborn with Ilschhausen and affiliates Bortshausen and Heskem with Mölln. The Eucharist was administered in Rossberg once annually to the “old and weak persons” who were unable to travel to Ebsdorf. Although they claimed to have had their own cemetery “from time immemorial,” the village’s very modest size—twenty-seven houses in 1580, eleven in 1681—and limited material means prevented them from having their own church building and thus kept them at the status of incorporated.6 Any funeral sermons held in Rossberg had to be done “under open skies,” a source of shame as well as a health hazard “in bad weather and wintertime.”7 The mother church Oberweimar had tense parish relations with Cyriaxweimar, Haddamshausen, and Hermershausen to its north, Allna, Weiershausen, Nanz-Willershausen, and Germershausen to its west, Kehna to its south, and Niederweimar, Gisselberg, and Ronhausen to its east. Ronhausen was hemmed in by hills to its east and the Lahn River to its west. Both the 5 The account concerning parishes Neuhof and Margretenhaun offered in this chapter contrasts with confessionally-oriented scholarship. The latter includes examinations of post1648, ecclesiastically Catholic areas that, like Fulda abbey, had had a significant number of adherents to the Augsburg Confession prior to 1648, and which are framed according to whether the Roman Church consolidated a recatholicization of it. For example: Trevor Johnson, Magistrates, Madonnas and Miracles: The Counter Reformation in the Upper Palatinate (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009). 6 HStAM, S no. 40; KGHB, Handschriftenabteilung, 2° Ms. Hass. 115; HStAM, 315f no. 270. 7 HStAM, 315f no. 270.

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The mill in Argenstein, constructed 1691

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hills and river ran north-south. For many centuries Ronhausen parishioners reached Oberweimar, four kilometers west across the Lahn, by walking or wading through the water at “our ford,” as they called it.8 But the territorial state’s construction of a mill just downstream at Argenstein around 1691 raised water levels and made the crossing impossible. They could traverse the Lahn only by paying to be ferried across and only when water levels were lower, and even then it took an hour and a half to get to Oberweimar. When the river swelled, they had to walk north through Cappel and over a bridge by Marburg before heading south for Oberweimar, a trek of about fourteen kilometers which took “four hours.”9 Often they could not reach Oberweimar at all. Moreover, Wolfshausen to their south galvanized them to seek better parish relations. Wolfshausen originated as a settlement around a knightly courtyard. A pilgrimage church was built locally in, likely, the eleventh century and dedicated to St. Alban. It belonged to the Premonstratensian cloister in Hachborn from 1186 on and had acquired vicariate status by the thirteenth century. In 1469 the Schenk family assumed its right of patronage, and in 1527 the church went over to the university of Marburg upon the institution’s founding.10 In earlier centuries Wolfshausen was linked to parish Oberweimar and was boxed in by the same hills and river as Ronhausen. In later centuries, whenever Wolfshausen’s status was in doubt or disputed, the members always remembered the autonomy to which Wolfshausen had claim. They fiercely repudiated any notion that Wolfshausen was an affiliate and asserted instead its rank of vicariate. They believed Wolfshausen was its own parish and proudly invoked the classification of “parish Wolfshausen.” In the early seventeenth century Wolfshausen was linked to parish Niederwalgern, which lay west across the Lahn, yet Wolfshausen plainly hoped to be linked to a nearby parish on the river’s east side. Sensing an opportunity after authorities removed the Niederwalgern pastor from his post in 1614, Wolfshausen initiated its successful transfer to parish Hassenhausen.11 But already in 1623 authorities transferred it back to Niederwalgern when the Hassenhausen minister moved to Niederwalgern and arranged for Wolfshausen to go with him. In 1661 Wolfshausen was joined to parish Fronhausen, an even worse predicament since Fronhausen lay on

8 9 10

11

HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 315f no. 230. Christina Vanja, Besitz- und Sozialgeschichte der Zisterzienserinnenklöster Caldern und Georgenberg und des Prämonstratenserinnenstiftes Hachborn in Hessen im späten Mittelalter (Darmstadt: Hessische Historische Kommission Darmstadt und Historische Kommission für Hessen, 1984); HStAM, Urk. 134 no. 58. HStAM, PMK vol. 4 (24 Nov. 1613); HStAM, 17e Niederwalgern no. 29.

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the Lahn’s west side and even further than Oberweimar and Niederwalgern.12 Wolfshausen’s fortunes were tied to the fact that it lay in the parish jurisdiction of the noble Schenk family, which patronized the parishes Fronhausen, Oberweimar, and Niederwalgern. Despite these constraints Wolfshausen kept aspiring to autonomy, and Ronhausen took note. The last case studies illustrate still other contexts in which Gemeinden wrestled to better their spiritual well-being. There was parish Böddiger, which lay twenty kilometers south of Kassel. It contained only the mother church and the affiliate Niedervorschütz and level terrain between them. There would seem to have been little cause for agitation. But parish relations between mother church and affiliate were as charged as ones in other parishes. Finally, there were the villages of Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein, which lay on flood plains west of the Lahn and south of Marburg. In the settlements’ early years workers inhabited them during the summer and harvest months and abandoned them during the winter months. By 1577 Wenkbach and Argenstein were incorporated into Roth, and, unusually, the three apparently formed and operated as a single Gemeinde in civil and church affairs (although later they each became their own Gemeinde).13 At that time, too, they lay in Schenk domain (Eigen) and were bound to Schenk parish jurisdiction. Ecclesiastically they were linked to Fronhausen, which broke away from the Oberweimar church district circa 1120 and formed its own parish.14 A church was built in Wenkbach in the twelfth to thirteenth century, yet as late sixteenth-century records show, their parish relations with Fronhausen were charged with friction due to the three villages’ unusual origins and historically murky relationship to the mother church. Occasionally, like during times of pestilence, they buried their dead locally, but more often they did so in Fronhausen, and they contributed to the churchyard’s upkeep “out of good neighborly will and not legal obligation.”15 But Fronhausen griped that the three villages also had to contribute to other parish construction and financial matters. The mother church’s cries grew louder around 1610 when the Fronhausen church desperately needed repair.16 In the mid-seventeenth century relations continued to be strained, and the three villages pressed for something better. Due to the Peace of Westphalia the three confessions operating in the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian territories were transformed into the Catholic,

12 13 14 15 16

HStAM, 315f no. 618. Reyer, Die Dorfgemeinde im nördlichen Hessen, 16; HStAM, 180 no. 2155. Classen, Die kirchliche Organisation Althessens im Mittelalter, 104–6. HStAM, 19a no. 402. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 691.

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Lutheran, and Reformed denominations. In the wake of 1648, therefore, parishes Neuhof and Margretenhaun became denominated Catholic, parishes Ebsdorf and Oberweimar and the villages Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein became denominated Lutheran, and parishes Willershausen and Böddiger became denominated Reformed. Likewise, the parishioners in those parishes became codified, ecclesiastically speaking, as Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed, respectively. The ecclesiastical network governed from Fulda became denominated Catholic, the one governed from Marburg became Lutheran, and the one governed from Kassel became Reformed. However, these bureaucratic labels did not automatically displace the aconfessional Christian ambitions of a rural Gemeinde or make it impossible for members to pursue them. Whether the members channeled their energies in the same general direction as before or rerouted them to other purposes depended on whether their Gemeinde remained the only one locally. Later, in Part 2 of this book, we will see a second sacred community forming in many rural locales. As a matter of course, it rivaled the original sacred community. In those cases the original community appropriated its codified name—whether Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed—in opposition to the new community and redirected many of its energies toward coping with the rapid onset of local division. But for the rural Gemeinden in the remainder of Part 1, no local rival formed, and therefore nothing catalyzed a fusion of their communal customs and denominational label. Instead, the local animating forces gradually regained vigor and they, in conjunction with the Gemeinden’s coordinating efforts, continued to guide the course of Christianity in these rural German areas into the twentieth century.

1

Betterment by Localizing

As in the centuries before the Thirty Years War, rural Gemeinden in the centuries that followed sought to better their souls by localizing Christian ministrations and to maintain their souls’ well-being by preserving their customary ministrations and parish status. As for betterment, Gemeinden in the half century after the Thirty Years War typically did not have the demographic, material, or economic strength to aspire to much. Usually they arrived at that point sometime in the early eighteenth century. One exception to this trend were the Fronhausen affiliates of Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein. In 1661 the governing authorities combined the nearby Oberwalgern and Niederwalgern parishes, both of which had been administered for a while as a vicariate from Fronhausen. The decision

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Figure 12

View of Fronhausen, early nineteenth century

left Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein quite neglected. The Marburg superintendent noted that parishioners in the three villages “did not hear any [local] sermon on Sunday,” perhaps because the minister could not squeeze more duties into his busy schedule, “and so they went to the neighbors’ [churches] because the distance to their mother church [Fronhausen] is long.”17 Shortly after the Fronhausen pastor died, the three villages officially complained about their situation and asked whether the new Fronhausen pastor would deliver sermons to them as he did at Oberwalgern.18 Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein kept pressing to remedy their predicament over the subsequent decades. From 1664 to 1700 they collaborated and ambitiously proposed several times to break from Fronhausen and found their own, independent parish.19 Those efforts failed but others succeeded. First, the three villages had Fronhausen pastor Johannes Linker come and preach every Thursday, an arrangement that was current by 1664 and affirmed in a 1671 statement.20 Then in 1684, Roth, “having longed for more edification” in their “Christianity,” upgraded and added to those ministrations in a new contract. It stipulated that the weekly Thursday service was to be held instead on every other Thursday and every other Sunday; that the Eucharist was to be administered on the Sunday instead of the Thursday after a holiday; that the 17 18 19 20

HStAM, 315f no. 588. HStAM, 315f no. 588. HStAM, 315f no. 618, 2275. HStAM, 315f no. 617.

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minister was to prepare for Eucharist Sunday with a Saturday sermon; that he was to preach on the third day following the four main religious holidays; and that he was to hold a catechism lesson following a Sunday service. In exchange Roth was to pay him much the same as did Wolfshausen according to its 1661 contract, which included five measures of grain, five measures of oats, a goose, a rooster, and a chicken.21 More often rural Gemeinden added localized ministrations by dint of ministerial assistants or adjuncts, who became more prevalent in parishes after 1648, especially as demographic pressures mounted and desire for localized worship service rose. In parish Neuhof, as the cleric’s 1754 letter indicates, Mittelkalbach and Eichenried had gone to the Neuhof mother church “from time immemorial.”22 His two predecessors had voluntarily held, at most, eight services in Mittelkalbach per year in exchange for several measures of barley. For years the two Gemeinden had wanted regular worship services in Mittelkalbach but balked at entering contractual obligations, for as he explained, “cleric and parishioners [would] drive themselves together into the ground” with the amount they would pay and he would receive.23 Instead, the two sides agreed, in writing, that he would come on Sundays and holidays as often as he could. For each visit he would be paid a certain, higher amount from each member and a lower amount from each non-member. Then, after further petitions from the Mittelkalbach, Eichenried, and Veitsteinbach Gemeinden, parish Neuhof secured a chaplaincy in 1763. The chaplain traveled to Mittelkalbach to lead Sunday and holiday services there.24 For the three Gemeinden and residents sprinkled among nearby farmsteads, the chaplaincy marked, arguably, the most significant betterment of their parish lives in the one thousand years since Boniface. The same could said for Rommerz, which built its first chapel in 1737 and secured regular ministrations from a Franciscan starting in 1759. Tiefengruben also upgraded its status in parish Neuhof from incorporated to affiliate after building its first chapel in 1757. A Catholic-Protestant framing of history would conclude that such localizing endeavors were, during this period as in the one prior to 1648, a matter of Catholic identity.25 Yet the communal control of parish life was no more an aspect of Catholicism than it was of Lutheranism or the Reformed religion. It was a function of the

21 22 23 24 25

HStAM, 315f no. 618. AGV, EGU/B/4/11-01. AGV, EGU/B/4/11-01. AGV, EGU/B/4/11-01. During the first year, not uncommonly, payments by the Gemeinden of the chaplaincy had to be clarified. AGV, EGN/A/4/03-01. Forster, Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque, 152–84.

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well-established animating forces driving Christianization, localization, and communalization. In parish Ebsdorf, soon after J. G. Leschhorn became the minister in 1718, he arranged for his son, J. L. Leschhorn, to be adjunct. Evangelical ministers capitalized on these growing opportunities to promote their sons’ ministerial careers. From the standpoint of the church and its staff this trend buttressed the wider one of professionalization of the clerical estate.26 From the parish Gemeinden’s standpoint it provided a prime opportunity to localize more ministrations. Dreihausen and Rossberg noted their “growing population” and how the considerable distance to Ebsdorf prevented “many people” from attending services there, especially because of the “poor road” and “inclement weather.” Thus they struck an accord with the younger Leschhorn around 1721 to come and preach every Sunday and holiday in Dreihausen in exchange for a salary.27 Moreover, with “Christian foresight,” the members wrote, they had the Dreihausen church repaired “at great expense.” “In this way,” they stated, “old and young, rich and poor could listen to God’s Word and … Sunday was well honored.”28 As Dreihausen and Rossberg reiterated elsewhere, the “poor locals, whose lack of appropriate clothing prevents them from going to Ebsdorf, were able to listen to God’s Word and edify their souls.”29 Increasing the number of local ministrations spawned new realities. These could encourage one party involved and disconcert another, but in all cases they wove added dynamic tensions and complexities into a parish. For one, they impinged on other Gemeinden within the parish. By 1689, for example, Fronhausen had issues with the new arrangements made by Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein. The members complained that although Fronhausen was the mother church, more often than not Sunday services started much too late in their church because services in Roth or Wolfshausen had not ended on time. They proposed a revised schedule of services in summer and in winter, one that would ensure theirs did start on time.30 However, the Marburg consistory kept the status quo and admonished the Fronhausen minister to be more diligent. In Neuhof in the late eighteenth century a local

26

27 28 29 30

Luise Schorn-Schütte, Evangelische Geistlichkeit der Frühneuzeit: deren Anteil an der Entfaltung frühmoderner Staatlichkeit und Gesellschaft, dargestellt am Beispiel des Fürstentums Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, der Landgrafschaft Hessen-Kassel und der Stadt Braunschweig (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996). HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 319. HStAM, 315f no. 319. HStAM, 315f no. 617.

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nobleman claimed many older people remembered well how a “second mass” on Sundays and holidays used to be read. He wondered aloud why it had stopped and then answered his own question. The local chaplain now read his Mass in Mittelkalbach rather than Neuhof because he earned seventy-five florins more for it, yet because of it, “so many thousands are left without the holy Mass…. [Prior to] the time when our second mass was lost … the Mittelkalbachers came to our church…. And should it, for one conniving locale, be regarded as just? Which brings such great disorder, and which, through its ill consequences, is so disadvantageous to our religion! The local Gemeinde … longs for an early Mass.”31 He provided supporting documents, including fifteenth-century ones that indicated the endowed chaplaincy was for the reading of the Mass in the Neuhof castle chapel and not in Mittelkalbach. Tellingly, then, stipulations in the endowment were pressed into service in the eighteenth century because of Mittelkalbach’s localizing pressures. A second new reality was the sometimes tenuous nature of the new arrangements. Just as Gemeinden equated the addition of localized ministrations with spiritual betterment, the loss of them equaled a dimunition of it and stirred anxiety after standards had been raised. In parish Margretenhaun the chaplain was holding services and Christian instruction (likely catechism) in the Dipperz chapel during 1758–1764, but in 1782–1785 Dipperz sought for them to be reinstituted after they had stopped for a time.32 Dipperz declared that most inhabitants wanted nothing more and were prepared to contribute their share. Noting that a few “hard-headed” ones opposed it, the members would let each decide freely whether to participate in the services. Persons who declined would attend the ones in Margretenhaun. Dipperz commented that the path to the Margretenhaun church was “very arduous, the elderly and children cannot make it there at all.”33 The minister conceded that the walk took over two hours, and snow in winter made the path even worse. He was willing to the idea of Dipperz having a specially assigned cleric. With that, the Gemeinde requested and secured a cleric, who held the service and Christian instruction on Sunday. The arrangement continued unabated until late 1809, when Dipperz grieved that the cleric’s departure meant they “lost their customary, special worship service” of “nearly 30 years.”34 It was bad enough, they wrote, that the parish church lay far away and that the catechetical youth had to make the trek 31 32 33 34

AGV, EGU/A/4/03-01. AGV, EBS/A/4/03-01. AGV, EBS/A/4/03-01. AGV, EBS/A/4/03-01.

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there twice on Sundays. Worse, every third Sunday the parish worship service took place in an affiliate church two hours from Dipperz, compelling them, “like wayward sheep,” to go to another parish’s church to access a service, a situation by which “especially our youth must suffer.”35 In 1820 a Fulda official remarked that the “miserable” Dipperz chapel, a mere fourteen feet long and nine wide, was woefully unable to accommodate service attendees.36 In the early 1820s Dipperz built a new church and partnered with neighboring Gemeinden to have a cleric come and hold regular services on Sundays and holidays. Dipperz paid him twenty-four kreuzer annually per communicant, Wisselsrod and those at farmsteads and mills near Dipperz nineteen kreuzer, and Friesenhausen, Feckenhain, and Wolferts sixteen kreuzer.37 When the younger Leschhorn succeeded his father as the parish Ebsdorf minister in 1735, he stopped the weekly services for Dreihausen and Rossberg, citing too many other duties. The two Gemeinden claimed Leschhorn had offered them a deal: if they provided a good testimony of him to include in his application for the parish post, then he would arrange for a qualified student to continue the weekly sermons. However, they protested, Leschhorn forgot his promise, reducing Dreihausen and Rossberg to their previous status and leaving any locals who wanted to hear a Sunday sermon to go to Ebsdorf. Young people might find the walk easy, the two Gemeinden wrote in a refrain often uttered across the centuries, but not so the elderly. No care was taken for the Gemeinden’s “Sunday worship service and their edification,” particularly in times of cold and snow, when going about in tattered clothing especially endangered them.38 A third reality was that contracting an assistant stirred the ecclesiastical concern of safeguarding a parish minister’s rights against encroachment. Ministers had demanding schedules, which sometimes prevented them from tending to parishioners in timely fashion. This could cause another minister to enter the picture. Across the 1730s to 1750s, Dreihausen and Rossberg scrambled to find someone who could take up the duties Leschhorn had vacated. They first appealed to the Marburg superintendent for help but then blamed him for scuttling their effort after he had advised the Marburg consistory to permit another minister to perform baptism in case of emergency and to administer the Eucharist to the ill. Due to his “apparent interferences,” Dreihausen and Rossberg claimed, the consistory denied their request. They 35 36 37 38

AGV, EBS/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 51. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 341. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 805.

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then turned to the neighboring parish Wittelsberg’s minister, and he verbally agreed to assume the duties. This caused Leschhorn to change his stance and become willing to do them, too, but according to the two Gemeinden, he then backtracked after his wife “stared him down.”39 Later the two Gemeinden sought authorization for the Dreihausen schoolmaster to read a sermon during Sunday afternoon prayer hours. Such readings occurred at nearby Wehrda, Niederwald, and Bracht, in addition to the morning services there, the Gemeinden noted. How much more should a sermon be read “for us, for on no Sunday is a [sermon] preached here.”40 Leschhorn again seemed amenable to the idea yet the two parties differed over the book. Whereas he wanted the theological and mystical True Christianity by Johann Arndt, they wanted readings from a certain postil designed for domestic edification and practical application. One “hoped [Leschhorn] would not have anything against [our request],” they commented, “in that he did not assume responsibility for letting so many souls go without listening to godly Word on Sunday. With hopes falling to us to find some way or another,” they had an unspecified person read several chapters from the postil on two Sundays. Leschhorn complained to the consistory, which prohibited the book to be read from again. “For all these reasons,” the Gemeinde members vented, “it is readily apparent how necessary it is to better the worship service here on Sunday. How great the ignorance in Christianity is, and daily more dominates, is easy to imagine.” Of the ninety-eight households and 575 souls among them, they wrote, at least sixty-five old persons as well as those tending to cooking and children could never hear a sermon on Sunday. Hence, Sundays passed “without edification.”41 Dreihausen and Rossberg eventually asked Leschhorn to appoint one in ministerial training to read sermons during prayer hours, for which they would pay twenty-four reichsthaler annually.42 They assured Leschhorn that his ministerial standing would not be compromised, but he was unwilling. The members were at wit’s end. In their words he should have not only not refused it but willingly authorized it, considering “so many souls” were involved. “Such then is the true nature and conditions of our Sunday worship services; we have plenty of reason to ask for their needful betterment. The hope lives that our humble and harmless request will be met.”43

39 40 41 42 43

HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 805. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 805. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 805. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 805. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 805.

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A fourth new reality was that adding ministrations fueled the communal desire for more. Rossberg, frustrated after groping about for two decades, succeeded in a few major ventures in 1753. “[B]ecause of the strong growth of the Gemeinde,” members wrote, they built their own, timber-framed church— apparently their first ever—with wood harvested from the communal forest and inscribed the year on a balcony beam.44 With the leverage to better their spiritual edification, they arranged for the Ebsdorf minister to come and administer the Eucharist twice annually to local communicants as well as deliver a sermon on each occasion. In exchange they gave him each time an “honorarium” of eleven groschen and a meal. Rossberg also established its first-ever local school. They no longer sent their children to the Dreihausen school. Instead, the schoolmaster came regularly to lead it in their own village.45 Rossberg also arranged for him to come on those Sunday mornings when the weather was harsh and lead a prayer hour in their church as well as read to them a “pre-written” sermon from a book authorized by the church authorities. In 1756 and already hungry for more, Rossberg entreated the consistory for the schoolmaster to lead a prayer hour and catechization on every Sunday between Easter and early autumn (Michaelmas) as well.46 The schoolmaster could do these after he had completed the same in Dreihausen. In this way “not the slightest hinderance” would be posed to the worship service in Ebsdorf or Dreihausen. The arrangement would be “to the glory of God” and a joy to the “dying” people in Rossberg, for they could “say their prayers in a congregational gathering and also listen to God’s Word to be versed in it; indeed, it would grant them an opportunity to gather in this church.”47 Rossberg twice repeated its request for the sake of “edification out of God’s Word” and the physically “decrepit” people of their village.48 Members individually signed one letter and the Dreihausen schoolmaster signed the other, presumably to drive the point home with the authorities. Then, in 1757 the Ebsdorf minister died. In such moments Gemeinden often tried to better their parish circumstances with his successor. Whereas an older minister might not be willing or able to take on greater responsibilities, a younger one was likely to be both. Dreihausen wanted the new minister to lead services locally on three successive Sundays, and Rossberg wanted him to lead one on the fourth Sunday

44 45 46 47 48

HStAM, 315f no. 270. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 906. HStAM, 315f no. 319. HStAM, 315f no. 319. HStAM, 315f no. 319.

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Figure 13 The timber-framed church in Rossberg, built in 1753

instead of merely the two Eucharist services annually.49 Their members now numbered one hundred and thirty, they emphasized. They repeated that the children and old people could not make the journey to the mother church during wintertime and therefore “cannot carry out their worship service exercises as they want to.”50 Finally, Gemeinden that accumulated localized ministrations commonly developed a more emboldened and brazen attitude. The previously marginal 49 50

HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 805. HStAM, 315f no. 276.

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ones within the parish could especially revel in their new self-attained significance. Rossberg, whose eighteenth-century maneuvers had freed it from obligations toward the Dreihausen church and school, was steadily morphing from an incorporated into an affiliate and swelled with autonomous aspirations. Others wanted to put Rossberg back in its place. Rossberg “is indisputably incorporated in [parish] Ebsdorf,” commented a church administrator in Marburg in 1789. It received “permission to build a cemetery church” he wrote, using a condescending description, and “on this pretense seems to have the intention to want to break away step by step from the mother church Ebsdorf.”51 Archfeld behaved similarly. By the mid-nineteenth century they had secured all services and ministrations in their church except for prayer days, confirmation, and certain holidays, for which they went to Willershausen. In 1861 they protested having any obligations toward the mother church and cited a 1766 consistory statement in their defense.52 A lower court, however, rejected their appeal. Veitsteinbach exuded a similar swagger. A key catalyst was the increasing localization of schooling in the parish. After Neuhof acquired a school in 1770, Mittelkalbach noted in the 1770s how they, too, set up schooling so that their children would not have to walk an hour to Neuhof’s school. Later, when Mittelkalbach lodged a host of complaints against the Neuhof schoolmaster and he responded to the parents through their children that “they should, with all due respect, kiss his rear end,” they signaled their intention to select a new schoolmaster and asked Fulda to approve it.53 Objections raised by Mittelkalbach, Niederkalbach, and Eichenried in 1787–1788 over a church property repair in Neuhof only fanned the flames for localization and self-determination.54 Veitsteinbach and Eichenried broke from the Mittelkalbach school in 1793 and founded their own in Eichenried. Yet Veitsteinbach agreed to help build the Eichenried schoolhouse, completed in 1805, and pay the schoolmaster’s salary on the condition that he teach two half days per week in their own village. They also promised to provide him a schoolroom and necessary supplies. Meanwhile, Veitsteinbach residents received ecclesiastical ministrations at Eichenried’s church, but as numbers from 1838 indicate, Veitsteinbach had approximately 63 percent more inhabitants than Eichenried (270 to 170).55

51 52 53 54 55

HStAM, 315f no. 270, 275. HStAM, 315e no. 5315. HStAM, 97i no. 337; HStAM, 97i no. 346. HStAM, 92 no. 153, 282. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 1032.

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They bristled at their inferior state of parish dependence on the smaller village. Across the years 1819–1843 they contested certain contributions to schoolhouse construction in Eichenried.56 In 1825, when an Eichenried schoolmaster plotted to absolve himself of duties in Veitsteinbach, Veitsteinbach objected in an appeal to Fulda: “We expect, rightfully, that [you] will leave the arrangement as is. And besides … Eichenried has only 15 schoolchildren, whereas Veitsteinbach has 40.”57 Fulda denied the appeal, believing only certain individuals stood behind it and arguing, dubiously, that the residences around Veitsteinbach were too dispersed for the schoolchildren to be assembled reasonably. The authorities misread the feisty Veitsteinbach members. In 1836 two members organized a collection toward the keeping of their “own minister for Veitsteinbach.”58 They also wanted their own school and to have the minister teach the local children. After gathering the money the Veitsteinbach men marched over to Eichenried and announced their intentions to the mayor there. “They had papers under their arm,” he noted. These included a register that stated the Veitsteinbach heads of household, including several widows, had resolved to erect “a Gemeinde and also a school.”59 Each was asked to contribute of his or her own free will. Forty-eight gave between thirty kreuzer and eight florins toward the costs associated with the schooling and worship services on Sunday, holidays, and workdays. Another twenty-four, either nonenfranchised or those from Kiliansberg and nearby farmsteads, contributed similarly. The Eichenried mayor continued: “[T]hey declared that they wanted to obtain permission from the highest ecclesiastical authority. The residents of Veitsteinbach are resolved to separate from the Gemeinde Eichenried, yet the Gemeinde council and I will never be able to consent to it. It is truly a shame that the people in this Gemeinde do what they want, make syndicates, take up collections, and who knows what else, by which they mock me and the standing laws.”60 Likening the two Veitsteinbach men to rebels, he bade the authorities punish them and back him as mayor. Nevertheless, Veitsteinbach succeeded before the century was out. In 1837 Veitsteinbach established its own Gemeinde independent of Eichenried. The two still maintained a school in Eichenried, but already across 1838–1842 those in Veitsteinbach eyed having their own local school.61 They finally succeeded in 1891, complete with a newly 56 57 58 59 60 61

HStAM, 100 no. 8476. HStAM, 100 no. 2468. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 400. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 400. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 400. HStAM, 100 no. 2899.

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built schoolhouse, which contained the village’s first ever water lines.62 The Eichenried schoolhouse was suddenly much too large for its village’s needs. The building was sold and Eichenried constructed a new schoolhouse.63 Contracting a ministerial assistant did not satisfy all local spiritual needs. As Dipperz stated in 1825, they still did not have a minister readily available for the oft-needed help and succor. The all-too-great distance to the parish seat of Margretenhaun made travel arduous for any baptisms, last rites, funerals, and the like, and locals almost never made it there for workday worship services. One could become sick and even “forfeit” her life when attempting it “in time of winter, through the cold, and other nasty weather.”64 For these reasons, too, children going to communicants’ school in Margretenhaun, especially those in frail condition, “not seldom” became sick, to the anguish of their parents. Nevertheless, seven and a half centuries after the creation of parish Margretenhaun, Dipperz and the four other Gemeinden had taken a big step by setting up regular services in Dipperz, which sat at the geographical center of the parish and made ministrations much more accessible for half of the parish’s population.

2

Maintenance of Custom and Status

Rural Gemeinden’s other main impulse was to maintain the customary localized ministrations and their parish status. Whereas they equated an increase of them to a betterment of spiritual well-being, they saw a loss of them as a worsening of it. Any number of factors, profound or mundane, could disrupt a contractual or customary ministration. A minister’s growing infirmity was a common one. The Fronhausen minister, Roth insinuated in 1731, willfully did not lead Thursday services over his last few decades of life because of his age and physical limitations. After the minister’s son, J. P. Blank, succeeded to the post in 1731, two members were dispatched to him with a written complaint that the services had been and still were the custom. Blank, however, refused to do them because “they have not been held for over thirty years.”65 The reverse process in Mittelkalbach led minister and Gemeinde to a similar point of contention. Neuhof minister Jekel appealed to Fulda in 1815 that his predecessor and the 62 63 64 65

HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 2668. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 5270. HStAM, 100 no. 1917. HStAM, 315f no. 617.

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parish chaplains had, he alleged, made concessions to Mittelkalbach. Because of them Mittelkalbach believed it the minister’s duty to hold worship services on certain holidays.66 Other factors could jeopardize local custom and standards. For Dreihausen, disruptions due to warfare led to detailed contestations in 1762 between Dreihausen and their Ebsdorf minister on issues ranging from sermons following prayer day services and start times for Sunday services to Eucharistic administration and the site of baptisms.67 By 1846 random funerals started to muddle what Bortshausen regarded as a custom, namely, that Ebsdorf minister Kähler hold services every fourth week.68 Even if a local funeral occurred during the week before a scheduled service, insisted Bortshausen, he was to postpone the monthly service by a week and notify them about it. Despite reminding him about the custom, Kähler had not fulfilled his obligation. The 1680s construction of a church wall in Margretenhaun sparked decades of protest from Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards regarding any obligations toward it.69 Additionally, on the heels of having rebuilt the Steinhaus church and cemetery in 1665, the three Gemeinden demanded the minister perform their baptisms and burials locally and not in Margretenhaun. Similarly, in 1754 Niedervorschütz objected to claims, including ones made by the lords and patrons, the Dalwig family, that it was merely an affiliate in parish Böddiger and not a vicariate.70 The 1790s construction of a new parish church yielded decades of stiff protest from Niedervorschütz about its customary obligations toward the mother church in Böddiger.71 When a new minister arrived in 1802, Niedervorschütz insisted that he be formally introduced to them just as he was in Böddiger, for Niedervorschütz was a vicariate.72 Gemeinden not only preserved localized ministrations but also guarded against the formation of any practice that jeopardized them. An annual delivery of wood posed just such a threat to Rossberg. After Rossberg built its church in 1753 and agreed on the honorarium with Ebsdorf minister J. L. Leschhorn, he requested, in addition, that Rossberg deliver freely and annually two measures of wood from the state forests to the Ebsdorf churchyard. The members esteemed him “as a peace-loving man” and were eager to secure

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AGV, EGN/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315f no. 324. HStAM, 315f no. 320. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315e no. 400. HStAM, 315e no. 418. HStAM, 315e no. 400.

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the ministrations in their new church. Therefore, they agreed to it, but did so on the understanding that it was a kind gesture and not contractual. When J. G. J. Schmidt succeeded Leschhorn in 1757, he held Rossberg to the same conditions. He also persuaded them to buy altar instruments at a cost of forty gulden. However, by the last year of Schmidt’s life in 1787 he regarded the wood delivery to be a “right.” If they did not agree to it, then he would administer the Eucharist only to the sick and elderly and do so, as Rossberg quoted him as saying, in a modest peasant hut instead of the church. If adding localized ministrations fostered a brazenness among Gemeinden, then maintaining them could readily provoke testy relations between members and minister. They did so, above all, because members equated locally based customs with their Christian edification and souls’ well-being. “This work that redounded to the instruction and maintenance of the Christian faith” and “to the glory of God,” declared Roth in late 1731, “had been neglected for some time.”73 After Blank did not show on the second day of Christmas holiday or Three Kings’ Day, nor still on Thursdays, Roth demanded in early 1732 to be reimbursed and that Blank be fined one hundred reichsthaler.74 Blank, for his part, demanded a hearing. In nearby parish Ebsdorf, Dreihausen insisted that the Marburg consistory set aright the minister’s “novelties,” for they were detrimental to “us and our posterity.”75 Rossberg characterized Schmidt as a “rather contentious” minister who had the audacity to demand the wood’s delivery. Ministrations in a “proper church” as opposed to a hut, they asserted repeatedly, promoted “greater edification and glorification of God’s name.”76 After the Margretenhaun minister alleged that only three and not all members of Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards had known about certain petitions and filed them, Fulda authorities in 1722 summoned members to inquire directly. All knew about the complaints and supported them, they testified. “If the minister would do what he is obligated to do,” added Hans Kalb, “no one would complain.” Instead, the members continued, because of his failure to carry out baptisms and burials locally one would see “how much we suffer to our honor, and [how] innocent we are of the ill brought on by our minister.”77 In the 1846 Bortshausen case Kähler charged the mayor with having “crudely reproached” him about the matter in front of Gemeinde members.78 Bortshausen services

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HStAM, 315f no. 617. HStAM, 315f no. 617. HStAM, 315f no. 324. HStAM, 315f no. 270. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315f no. 320.

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were, according to him, originally intended for the elderly, who could not scale the high hill between their village and Ebsdorf to attend services at the mother church. For this reason he commented about the recent poor attendance of Bortshausen villagers at Ebsdorf services, something which Kähler spitefully ascribed to their “lack of religious interest.”79 Gemeinden expressed the custom/novelty discourse in language familiar from previous centuries. “It is customary and conventional” for Ebsdorf minister Kähler to lead services every four weeks, wrote Bortshausen.80 The Margretenhaun minister, stated Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards, was to come to Steinhaus and baptize newborns there, “like his predecessors” had done.81 As for the church wall, it was ruined because the adjacent path had been transformed for use in transport and as a territorial road instead of for emergencies only, as it had been “for ages.”82 Dreihausen fumed that Schmidt tried introducing “novelties” related to services and administration of the sacraments, ones that went “against custom.”83 As the dust from war settled, Dreihausen called upon the Marburg consistory. “We have remained silent about it up to now,” they wrote, “for during the turbulent times up to now everyone had enough on his own hands to deal with, and one drew hope that [the minister] would change his mind. Yet he remains the same after as before, and will not correct his novelties, nor set everything as it once was.”84 Gemeinden also expressed the notion of custom by utilizing newer language such as “observance” (Observanz) and “right” (Recht). Bortshausen explained how local parishioners had been receiving the Eucharist twice annually in their church at a 11:00 a.m. service, but in 1825 Kähler wanted to shift the time to 12:00 p.m. Bortshausen objected. “The whole Gemeinde is not happy that we should be separated from our old right,” the members told the local village head, whom they pestered ceaselessly because of it.85 “In order to protect our rights” they demanded that Kähler do things as his predecessors had. Marburg reasoned that the change was minor and, despite Bortshausen’s appeals, authorized it. In 1820 Niedervorschütz objected to the Böddiger minister and Gemeinde’s intention to cast doubt on what were clearly “our rights” as a vicariate. The minister did so most notably by refusing to hold monthly prayer services in Niedervorschütz on grounds that they were an affiliate.86 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86

HStAM, 315f no. 320. HStAM, 315f no. 320. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315f no. 324. HStAM, 315f no. 324. HStAM, 315f no. 320. HStAM, 315e no. 400.

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The Kassel consistory again dug into documents from the previous two centuries and rejected Niedervorschütz’s claim. Ministers also employed the language of legal rights. After Eichenried sent two deputies to object to how Jekel, the Neuhof minister, was directing things, Jekel appealed to the Fulda authorities to punish the members for the insults, which were not the first they had hurled at him.87 Eichenried did not have an absolute right to the services, he insisted; rather, a minister might do them out of goodwill. In a sign of the shift toward bureaucratic litigation, Dreihausen and the Ebsdorf minister each contracted a legal counsellor to plead their case. The same happened in other disputes. Gemeinden and ministers typically offered opposing accounts regarding what had happened and what was supposed to happen. Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards seemed to disagree on everything with their Margretenhaun minister.88 He claimed affiliates in other parishes contributed to their mother church’s wall, but they countered that affiliates in Fulda abbey more often did not do so. Moreover, they added, the other parish Margretenhaun affiliates did not object to building Margretenhaun’s wall without them. The Gemeinden claimed they had never contributed to the wall’s construction, but the minister said they had contributed one hundred florins to it in past years. They claimed the minister was to lead a service for them every third Sunday yet occasionally had not for stretches of five and even eight weeks. But he said he had never missed for that long; rather, he had only missed a couple services because of life-threatening high waters. They claimed they had their own lords. Their mother church was at Steinhaus, and all three villages buried their dead in the Steinhaus churchyard. In sum, it would run “counter to equity” and was “[i]mpossible” for them to bear double the burden as compared to others in the parish.89 But the minister said Traisbach and Dipperz maintained their own churches and burial sites and also contributed to the Margretenhaun mother church. Those two did not have their own worship services except for on the annual church festival (Kirchweih), on patron festivals, and, in Dipperz’s case, on a few holidays. Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards claimed the baptismal font for their newborns was in Steinhaus. The minister was to come and baptize newborns there instead of requiring them to take their “poor children a good hour to Margretenhaun” for it.90 But he said the Steinhaus font had not been used for fifty years. He claimed he had baptized only two of thirteen newborns in Margretenhaun, but they said it was seven, not two, and one of 87 88 89 90

AGV, EGN/A/4/03-01. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01; AGV, EGI/A/4/10-01. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01.

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them went without baptism for three days until they finally had to take the child up to Petersberg for baptism. The exchange between the Dreihausen Gemeinde and Ebsdorf minister Schmidt flared hot too. Dreihausen ranted about how Schmidt had not been delivering a sermon after each monthly prayer day service. Only one year had he done so more than a half dozen times. He could not shirk this duty, the members insisted, for according to their memory his predecessors always did it. Schmidt retorted that they were pushing a “groundless custom,” and that they had begun litigating to force him to hold weekly Sunday services before he even set foot in his parish post.91 He did the monthly sermons, he wrote, though not the three or four during harvest times, for the Hessian church ordinance had prohibited it. If he had done those, then surely some “who love work more than God’s Word” would have accused him of violating the ordinance.92 His predecessor, J. L. Leschhorn, might have done them but Schmidt himself was not obligated. He would never in good conscience heed a custom merely to please his parishioners when it opposed laws written by the “pure and good” intentions of princes. Dreihausen also objected to Schmidt’s treatment of customs concerning the Eucharist. The members demanded that he use the instruments they had purchased, but he dismissed them as “pitiful and very small.”93 He brought instead the silver chalice and plate from Ebsdorf. Besides, he added, the mother church purchased the Eucharistic wine for Dreihausen. The members invoked the custom that he administer the Eucharist locally three times a year instead of two. But Schmidt said “the invalidity of this levied complaint is apparent.”94 From 1651 to 1732 ministers had served the Eucharist at most twice annually in Dreihausen. In 1733 Leschhorn started doing so thrice annually. However, when Schmidt let it revert to twice annually, the members never protested, he claimed, for they knew they could not rightfully demand it. Nor should he, Schmidt, be held to Leschhorn’s standard because Leschhorn had permitted fornicators to sit in their pews and also, against ordinance, decreased weekday penance. The members castigated Schmidt’s pronouncement, made deliberately from the Ebsdorf pulpit, that only the elderly and infirm in Dreihausen should receive the Eucharist locally while the rest were to do so in Ebsdorf. Schmidt rebutted their charge. Every time he administered the Eucharist in

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HStAM, 315f no. 324. HStAM, 315f no. 324. HStAM, 315f no. 324. HStAM, 315f no. 324.

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Ludwig Knaus, The Baptism, circa 1850

Dreihausen he told them that he was doing so voluntarily and not out of obligation, for they belonged to the mother church in Ebsdorf. They also had to be content if he administered it during the week, for without an assistant to help him and with the disquiet of war times, Eucharist Sundays were busy enough in Ebsdorf and the vicariate Hachborn. He could not administer the Eucharist to all the affiliates, too. In light of such limitations, he recommended that the younger people come to Ebsdorf to receive it on Sundays, and that the elderly in Dreihausen remain there to receive it on weekdays. Whereas other affiliates were content with this explanation, he wrote, Dreihausen was not. Similarly, Dreihausen protested Schmidt’s handling of customs regarding baptism. The Gemeinde insisted local newborns be baptized locally, as in the past. Schmidt should not expect one to take a tender newborn to Ebsdorf in brutal winter weather or blazing heat. The Ebsdorf warden need not accompany him because Dreihausen had its own schoolmaster to assist at baptism and did not want him deprived of fees. Schmidt sternly countered with the claims of the mother church. Affiliates might have church buildings in which, at times, services were held, songs sung, and prayers offered, yet as the daugh-

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ter is naturally subject to the mother, he argued, so the affiliates were to the mother church. Dreihausen and other affiliates had to honor Ebsdorf’s right and pride of place by receiving their sacramental administrations there, meaning, baptism for newborns and the Eucharist for those confirmed. If Dreihausen were a vicariate and authorized to maintain a minister of its own, then the story would be different. But it was not. Dreihausen locals had brought their infants to Ebsdorf for baptism until the time of his predecessor. J. L. Leschhorn might have started baptizing infants in Dreihausen, as his widow testified; yet, according to Schmidt, Leschhorn had warned the midwife and locals that his successor might not continue it. On such occasions Leschhorn borrowed a mantel from a local and baptized the infant in the parents’ house and not, as Dreihausen now claimed, in the local church. What Leschhorn had done was not a regulation, Schmidt asserted. Doing due diligence to religion meant fulfilling such ministrations according to ecclesiastical regulation and with Ebsdorf’s warden, who was to carry his mantel. Finally, Dreihausen and Schmidt locked horns over the start times of Sunday services. Dreihausen wanted him to have the bells rung in Ebsdorf to start worship on time at 9:00 a.m. instead of varyingly at 11:00 a.m. or 11:30 a.m. or 12:00 p.m. The later times rippled negatively through Dreihausen, throwing off mealtimes and causing the prayer hour to be held late. Sometimes it was not held at all because the schoolmaster could not lead singing and reading when it was dark. Neither did locals care for it when their prayer hour service began in daylight but ended after sunset, leaving them to walk home in darkness. The members wanted the Marburg consistory to rectify these “novelties,” the antithesis of custom, for they were detrimental to “us and our posterity.”95 Schmidt, however, ridiculed Dreihausen’s accusations. Such falsehood betrayed the members’ ignorance. They had no idea how things transpired in Ebsdorf because they never came to services there. In fact the first tolling of bells for Sunday services in summer was at 7:00 a.m. and in winter at 8:00 a.m., when he began his day by leading a service in vicariate Hachborn. He then returned to Ebsdorf by or before 10:00 a.m. and finished the service there by 12:00 p.m. before moving on to an affiliate. He started services in Dreihausen at a different time each Sunday because he could not do any better. Between holding worship services and prayer hours in various parish locales, administering the Eucharist to hundreds of people on certain days, traveling from place to place, visiting the sick, burying the dead, and squeezing in an hour’s meal, it was impossible to begin services in Dreihausen at a precise hour every

95

HStAM, 315f no. 324.

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Figure 15

View of the Lahn River and the countryside surrounding Roth, 1949

time. Nothing was being hindered, he wrote in closing. Every service was being completed in full. Nobody was suffering negative consequences. Dreihausen, however, disagreed. The members insisted that Schmidt affirm their complaints and reimburse them a half reichsthaler for expenses incurred. Each party contracted a legal counsellor to plead their case. Parties in dispute resorted to written sources in defending their claims. A leading source was documentation. In late 1731 Roth included copies of Marburg consistorial decrees from 1671 and 1684 to prove the Gemeinde’s point.96 According to the 1684 contract, their Fronhausen minister was to carry out services every other Thursday and Sunday in Roth. In parish Margretenhaun the minister trotted out copies of documents that proved that Margretenhaun was consecrated as the mother church in 1098, and that those in Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards were parishioners of it.97 He said if they had ever had their own minister, then the minister would have lived by them, yet no one could show any piece of land where a parish house once stood. Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards retaliated with 1698 records from the local noble family. These indicated the castle chapel in Steinau was too small for services, and therefore services were to alternate between Steinau and Steinhaus’s

96 97

HStAM, 315f no. 617. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01.

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larger church. In 1703 a new, larger castle church was built. As to the parish church wall, the minister copied 1605 records and said the three Gemeinden were bound to contribute toward it. But they said the same records, plus ones from 1608, in fact proved the church wall was not pertinent to the Margretenhaun church. Furthermore, they did not utilize the churchyard. For ages, they had not contributed to church maintenance but rather had been solicited for voluntary contributions.98 In their words they could not fathom why they should contribute to it. Niedervorschütz asked the Kassel consistory to search the old aristocratic documents to verify their claim. Meanwhile, their Böddiger minister cited a passage from Konrad Wilhelm Ledderhose’s authoritative 1781 publication on the church in the lands of Hesse-Kassel. It stated in clear terms that Böddiger was the mother church of Niedervorschütz and that the affiliate status of the latter was a decided matter which had been confirmed by the consistory back in 1652.99 Another important source of defense was oral testimonies. The Margretenhaun minister said he had ridden to Hünfeld in 1714 to ask his predecessor, N. Göllner, if a Margretenhaun minister was obligated to baptize in Steinhaus.100 Göllner replied negatively, but when asked why he had done some baptisms there, Göllner admitted that he had gone to Steinhaus and baptized if they summoned him, just as he had for Traisbach and Dipperz. Capitulating to the pressure applied by Gemeinden elsewhere in the parish allowed the custom to take root. Nevertheless, Göllner added, he would have gladly changed the trend. A third source was reason and the force of argumentation. Ebsdorf minister Kähler had not done certain services because Bortshausen’s “custom” was based “not on ecclesiastical reason but rather a pedantic sense of justice.”101 For one, he claimed a Sunday service in Bortshausen was not postponed but rather nullified whenever a funeral sermon occurred there in the week prior. For another, both his long-serving predecessor and he, after his twentythree years in parish Ebsdorf, had never been and could never be bound to a monthly sermon in Bortshausen. Sheer demands on his time would make it impossible. In case anyone doubted him Kähler detailed his many inflexible Sunday obligations, the eighty-five funerals he had conducted already that year, and the wearying catechization and confirmation of youths.

98 99 100 101

AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315e no. 400. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315f no. 320.

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Confirmation in Lohra, 1922. The entrance to the church is decorated with two conifer trees and a garland of fir branches

Gemeinden’s fight to maintain local custom inclined them to inventive solutions. Niedervorschütz intended outright parish independence in 1801, though they did not achieve it.102 Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards wanted something similar. They petitioned Fulda to sever them from costs associated with the Margretenhaun church, to contract a Franciscan to assist in ministerial matters and administer the sacraments, and to have their own schoolmaster.103 Their minister scoffed at these. If other affiliates were also severed, he wrote, then the mother church, parish, and schoolhouse would become decrepit and collapse. Similarly, if Traisbach and Dipperz secured more services via a Franciscan, then Margretenhaun would have no need of a minister, but would do better with a shoemaker or tailor who could support himself via his trade. In Rossberg’s case the members expressly feared that Schmidt’s successor would expect the continuation of wood delivery. Feeling trapped by their ancestors’ generosity to a former, “beloved” minister, the members implored the Marburg consistory either for the ministrations to continue in exchange for the honorarium but not the “all-too-hard, onerous” wood delivery, or for a neighboring minister to handle them, on the understanding that Rossberg would remain bound to the Ebsdorf mother church.104 After Schmidt

102 103 104

HStAM, 315e no. 426. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315f no. 270.

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died, the vicariate Hachborn worried its Maundy Thursday service would be neglected. Hachborn arranged, however, to have the neighboring minister from parish Hassenhausen come and conduct it.105 Authorities typically favored the mother church in their decisions. Fulda ruled in 1686 that Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards were to contribute to the church wall. Fulda reaffirmed it in 1722 but also directed the minister to continue the services every third Sunday and to baptize according to a 1714 directive.106 In a 1732 resolution concerning Roth, the Marburg consistory upheld its 1684 decision, yet the parties agreed to some modifications.107 Roth relinquished claims to Thursday sermons, but in exchange the minister would preach in Roth on certain other days every year, including three days around each of the four main holidays, all other holidays and apostles’ days, and one church anniversary, two advent week occasions, and three passion week events. Roth lost its custom according to the letter of the 1684 contract, yet leveraged it for something equivalent. In this way they continued to look after their souls according to their standards. In 1846 the Marburg consistory affirmed Bortshausen’s claim that Kähler was obligated to hold monthly services there, yet it also affirmed Kähler’s argument that he did not have to whenever he had given a funeral sermon the week prior.108 As for Dreihausen, the case demonstrated how rising demands in a parish could modify relations or compel a minister to make concessions, thereby giving an affiliate such as Dreihausen the notion that they had ground to stand on. But in its decision the consistory protected the rights of the mother church Ebsdorf against Dreihausen’s claims.109 Dreihausen lost its case, yet the local yearning for greater parish autonomy did not abate. Losing a case rarely deterred a Gemeinde. Before long they agitated again to preserve local standards and assert perceived rights. The arrival of a new minister offered a particularly good opportunity. “It is scarcely imaginable that so few written guidelines could exist at a parish,” exclaimed Ebsdorf minister J. C. Ortwein in 1790 as he settled in.110 Things were being done “[according to] oral tradition … which is accepted as an axiom. There is also nothing here to indicate the order of worship services except for oral tradition. Thus, Hachborn purports to have weekday sermons during passion week, Heskem

105 106 107 108 109 110

HStAM, 315f no. 320. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315f no. 617. HStAM, 315f no. 320. HStAM, 315f no. 324. HStAM, 315f no. 320.

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and [Dreihausen] claim a tradition of having certain weekday sermons, and the mother church at Ebsdorf receives such de jure.”111 With so many services each week and upwards of an hour’s distance between the locales, scheduling conflicts were bound to happen. He cited Maundy Thursday, in which he was to preach and administer the Eucharist in both Ebsdorf and Heskem, deliver a third sermon in Hachborn, and do them all in a half day’s time. “It’s just not possible,” he concluded. Moreover, the various Gemeinden disputed each other’s claims. “Ebsdorf and Heskem say that from time immemorial a sermon and the Eucharist on Maundy Thursday had not been held at Hachborn but had at Ebsdorf and Heskem.”112 Naturally, Hachborn protested that they had received it in times past. The failure of Ortwein’s predecessor to carry it out was an injustice. They wanted it to start again. However, “one can’t find anything written down about it,” Ortwein moaned as he repeated himself.113 He solicited the Marburg consistory for help but this time the consistory was empty-handed. It could only order the oldest villagers to give sworn testimony on what the observance had been regarding weekday and passion week services. The consistory then ruled on that basis. Niedervorschütz also rose up again in an 1834–1837 spat with the Böddiger minister. He demanded that they build a fence around his parish garden, but Niedervorschütz refused to do so. The minister alleged that the members’ refused “under the pretense” that he did not hold Wednesday services in their church during the Advent and Easter seasons for free, as his predecessors had prior to his arrival in 1826.114 He decried their “stiff-necked” attitude. Niedervorschütz demanded that the registration and ceremonial rite of their children’s confirmation be done locally. They had stopped attending monthly and annual prayer days in Böddiger ever since they fell into discord with Böddiger amid the construction of Böddiger’s new church in 1799. They withheld their church elders from presbyterial meetings at the mother church as well. The minister portrayed them as wanting to “tear themselves loose even more from all ecclesiastical ties to the mother church Böddiger…. All my objections can’t move the communal council to change its mind, rather it doggedly insists that the Gemeinde Niedervorschütz is in possession of the rights of a vicariate.”115

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HStAM, 315f no. 320. HStAM, 315f no. 320. HStAM, 315f no. 320. HStAM, 315e no. 427. HStAM, 315e no. 427.

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Steinhaus and Steinau also kept pressing. For stretches in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries a Margretenhaun minister held services every third Sunday in either Steinhaus or Steinau. Insolvency compelled the Gemeinden to let go of them at least once, but in one instance, in the mid-1770s, they sought for the “custom” of local regular services and baptismals to be restored.116 After extensive renovations of the Steinhaus church in the early 1820s,117 a chaplaincy began there by mid-decade and sparked a dispute between Steinhaus and Steinau concerning obligations toward the Steinhaus church properties. Steinhaus and the Margretenhaun minister claimed Steinau was a Steinhaus affiliate and therefore had such duties. But Steinau said it had its own affiliate church building and no other obligations except to Margretenhaun.118 Fulda ruled that Steinau had to contribute, proportionately, to Steinhaus, though only to the churchyard and bells. 116 117 118

AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 100 no. 8460. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-02.

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Characteristics of Rural Christian Culture, 1648–1900s Rural Gemeinden left an imprint of Christianization, localization, and communalization through an array of sacralizing endeavors. Some they wrote down on paper, and others they inscribed on site. Some originated within the Gemeinden, and others they appropriated and repurposed. Some can be mistaken as the work of ecclesiastical institutions, and others can be overlooked as marginal in importance. But they were characteristics of a rural Christian culture that eluded Catholic-Protestant classifications. The culture’s communalist and agrarian structures bred a historical experience that rural Gemeinden sooner shared in common despite the Gemeinden having been denominated with opposite names following 1648.

1

Crafting the Perspective

To begin, Gemeinden continued to craft a communal perspective. The governing authorities communicated using the codified denominational categories of Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed when referring to a superintendent or minister or ecclesiastical body. They developed this naming practice and organizing principle after 1648 as a bureaucratic reflex. It epitomized how they viewed and managed their world. The rural Gemeinden in Chapters 3–5 of this book did not normally communicate with the categorical names. When identifying themselves, they routinely signed their correspondence with, say, “the Gemeinde of Oberweimar,” “the Gemeinde of Dipperz,” and “the Gemeinde of Willershausen,” just as those prior to 1648 had done. Their perspective was one from time immemorial, one which expressed a civil-sacred unity still intact. Absent additional information, it can be difficult to discern in their correspondence whether they lay in an ecclesiastically Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed parish. Rural Gemeinden, as they did before 1648, also operated with a historical consciousness and orientation different than those of the well educated in urban areas. In time scholars and bureaucrats regularly framed history according to dates that became key markers. Among them were 1517, 1555, 1648, and 1871. The Gemeinden in Part 1 framed history according to dates

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_007

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that were important because they marked communal initiatives and achievements. These were locally unique, and so they varied from one locale to the next and imparted a distinct storyline to each. For Dreihausen, it was dates such as 1651, 1721, and 1858, and for Rossberg, 1753 and 1858. For Steinhaus, 1665, 1826, and 1885 were significant. For Niedervorschütz, 1652 mattered. Multiple Gemeinden could hold a date as important in common because of its significance to their parish. Additionally, while the thickening bureaucracy of church and state may have contributed to the authorities’ capacity to regulate internal affairs, increased administration also strengthened communal customs and rights by anchoring them in writing. The same records kept and used by administrators were regularly leveraged by the Gemeinden as evidence for their claims. Furthermore, rural Gemeinden continued to circumscribe Christianity to the universal orbit of their local environs and the Christians within it. Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein in 1664–1700 yearned to better their parish relations so that “we may offer God greater glory and [an] examination of our Christianity,” as they put it in 1700, “and [so] that the eternal well-being of the soul from it may generate greater diligence among young and old.”1 In 1689–1691 Wolfshausen peppered authorities with complaints that the Fronhausen minister during the winter season conducted worship services in the afternoon instead of at the customary morning time. Wolfshausen associated such services with “the betterment of our Christianity.”2 Without them, “many souls, young as well as old” were “unnecessarily neglected in the fruit and furtherance of God’s Word.”3 They petitioned for “our customary old practice [to] be left to us unopposed” and for the minister to fulfill the duties. If he would not, they implored, then he ought to resign and another minister assume them.4 Church authorities and rural Gemeinden both focused on the soul but held different theologies regarding it. Luther directly tied the soul’s justification and purification to the Word of God and to faith.5 Likewise, concerning the “soul’s salvation,” stated the 1577 Formula of Concord, the human is like “a pillar of salt” or “block and stone.” The soul was “completely destroyed,” and only through

1 2 3 4 5

HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 17e Reizberg 26. HStAM, 17e Reizberg 26. HStAM, 17e Reizberg 26. Martin Luther, Von der Freiheit eines Christenmenschen (Wittenberg, 1520), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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the Holy Spirit can the human be “regenerated” and “born again.”6 Calvin, similarly, believed the mind, as the “citadel” of the soul, needed biblical knowledge in order to prompt liberation of the bound will, conversion, and thus salvation.7 In short, for ecclesiastics, while salvation involved a process, it was also an event. In the late seventeenth century Pietists such as August Hermann Francke elevated “the watershed character of this event” and encouraged a variety of conversion narratives amid Pietism’s new approach to Protestant theology.8 Rural Gemeinden approached salvation, instead, like they did a field or pasture or building. They did not leave any record indicating a conviction that souls are at risk in the immediate sense because of erroneous belief. They viewed their souls’ condition as needing to be bettered by regular Christian practice and ministration and as becoming endangered gradually from the irregularity or absence of these. In a 1594 request, Blasbach equated having a minister in residence and the reliability of being able to access regular ministrations, which they had once enjoyed but since lost, with the “preservation of our souls’ salvation and well-being.”9 Gemeinden took the same discourse that they used to describe their agricultural and material conditions, with its concern to “cultivate,” “build,” and “maintain” so that things do not become “neglected” and “perish,” and applied it to their spiritual conditions. Around 1690 Wolfshausen linked the absence of winter morning services directly to the notion that “the youths perish into the ground and soon know nothing more of God.” Ronhausen’s self-described “miserable” situation within the Oberweimar parish, exacerbated by the 1690s construction of the mill, raised their anxiety. In inclement weather “there is no minister or schoolmaster to be had,” and therefore those needing baptism or the sick wishing to confess sins “had to perish.”10 When the members approached the Cappel minister in February 1725 and inquired about possible arrangements with him, they said

6 7

8

9

10

Concordia: Christliche … Bekenntnus nachbenannter Churfürsten, Fürsten und Stände Augsburg. Confession (Dresden, 1580), 265–75, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. John T. McNeill, trans. Ford Lewis Battles (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1960), 1.1.1., 1.6.1., 1.15.7, 1.15.8, 2.2.12, 2.2.19, 3.2.34, 3.2.36, 3.3.5. Markus Matthias, “Pietism and Protestant Orthodoxy,” and Jonathan Strom, “Pietist Experiences and Narratives of Conversion,” in A Companion to German Pietism, 1660–1800, ed. Douglas Shantz (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 17–49 and 293–318, respectively; quote here, p. 301. HStAM, 19b no. 1783. At the time Blasbach exercised religion according to standards in the Book of Concord. Previously Blasbach did so according to those of the Augsburg Confession. HStAM, 315f no. 230.

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that “the danger our souls [are in is] great.”11 They believed this not for reasons of confession; the denominational form of Christianity being practiced in Oberweimar and in Cappel was the same. They, like other rural Gemeinden, believed it for reasons of access.

2

Ordering the Church

Gemeinden also took care to order the local church according to communal principles. They did not possess the right to appoint a minister but they earnestly tried to influence the process. “[T]here is no greater fortune for a Christian Gemeinde,” wrote Dreihausen and Rossberg in 1823, “than to be entrusted with a minister who combines in himself everything that one can rightly demand and desire from [a minister].”12 Their pithy expression resonated with those made by Gemeinden in centuries past. The stakes surrounding a ministerial appointment were high, as the church elders and communal officers in parish Oberweimar knew well in 1711. On behalf of other parishioners they asked the Marburg consistory, “for God’s sake and also for our and our souls’ sake, that you not let our … vote be rendered ineffective, but rather forward … the confirmation of our hitherto parish adjunct.”13 Representatives from parish Ebsdorf stated the same in 1757. With “no other intention than the glory of God and the edification of our souls,” they sought for Johann Georg Sartorius, assistant in Cappel, to be their next minister.14 In 1858, when the elderly Ebsdorf minister, G. Kähler, could no longer physically manage various duties and his assistant left for a neighboring parish post, Hachborn and Leidenhofen lamented the “spiritual state of emergency” in their “sorrowful, orphaned church district.”15 It had become “manifest [and] needed no explanation,” and to one with “only a degree of spiritual need and understanding, appeared as a weighty judgment of the Lord. To avoid it we will, as much as it is up to us, gladly do what is necessary.”16 They remained hopeful for “the spiritual edification of our church.”17 So, too, did Dipperz in 1809. The loss of their minister, whom they had contracted, meant they “lost their custom-

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HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 315f no. 277. HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 277. HStAM, 315f no. 277. HStAM, 315f no. 277.

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ary, special worship service,” which they had had for “nearly 30 years.”18 They entreated Fulda for two professors to lead local services until “we can secure another minister.”19 Instead of waiting on the authorities, Gemeinden took the initiative to ensure their souls’ well-being. The success rate of their lobbying efforts for a candidate varied. The example of parish Ebsdorf illustrates this well. In 1692 the authorities considered two candidates, Heuser and Conrad, for the vacant post. The communal officers of Ebsdorf went to Marburg and told the superintendent how they liked the two men, yet “the whole church district, down to the last person” favored a third, named Becker.20 Authorities appointed Heuser instead, but after he died in 1717 and the authorities considered two candidates, the parish Gemeinden successfully lobbied for one of them, J. G. Leschhorn, who was known to the members already as the minister at nearby parish Wittelsberg.21 After J. L. Leschhorn’s death in 1757 the authorities nominated Treisbach minister J. G. J. Schmidt and the Hassenhausen minister as candidates.22 Representatives across Ebsdorf church district informed themselves of the authorities’ intentions, approached local officials regarding their own, and sent letters and deputized members to Marburg. They objected to the candidates and asked for another, the ministerial assistant J. G. Sartorius at nearby Cappel, but Schmidt was appointed. They successfully petitioned for the adjunct K. L. Ortwein to succeed his father in 1803.23 When the son died on the eve of Easter in 1823, parish Gemeinden quickly arranged for their children to receive confirmation instruction at neighboring parish Wittelsberg. A few weeks later they pressured Marburg for Winnen minister F. L. Soldan to fill their vacant post.24 Church authorities acknowledged their requests but believed older, accomplished ministers should be favored over the young Soldan. The parish Gemeinden sensed the authorities’ disinclination and filed one more appeal signed by two hundred members, but to no avail.25 In the 1858 case opinions in the parish were, exceptionally, divided. Some proposed that Kähler be pensioned with funds from the communal chest and that Schlüchtern minister L. Kolbe succeed him, with a bump in the parish salary. Others opposed

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AGV, EBS/A/4/03-01. AGV, EBS/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 277. HStAM, 315f no. 277.

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the pension idea, wanting to keep Kähler as minister and bring on Soldan, who had become the minister at neighboring Wittelsberg, as an assistant.26 As signed petitions from parish Ebsdorf kept arriving in Marburg, the authorities summoned mayors and communal representatives to Ebsdorf to discuss the matter. Rural Gemeinden normally came to a consensus, but in this case they arrived at an impasse. In early 1859 the Marburg consistory opted for a ministerial candidate named Heldmann to serve as ministerial assistant in Ebsdorf. Soon after, they reported, “to our delight,” that all were happy with him.27 Later in 1859 it appointed Kolbe as the new pastor. Gemeinden’s reasons for wanting a certain candidate were the same as those in centuries past. Gemeinden in parish Oberweimar petitioned in 1701 for one named List because of his diligence, good conduct, and faithfulness.28 Those in parish Ebsdorf desired Sartorius in 1757 because they knew him well. For two years, while Leschhorn was sick and preached poorly, parishioners had ventured into nearby parishes to survey potential successors. At services in neighboring Cappel, Ronhausen, and Wolfshausen they heard Sartorius’s “beautiful and edifying sermons and catechetical lessons” for the children, which “have for a while been entirely neglected here.”29 In 1803 they asked for Ortwein to be appointed because they knew him, trusted him, found him able, and did not know of another who met such criteria.30 They wanted Soldan in 1823 because he had won over all members of the church district due to his “admirable, honorable and respectable conduct” as well as his “recitations of religion.”31 After their “dear shepherd” of forty-eight years died in 1869, eighteen church elders, mayors, and financial officers from across parish Oberweimar wanted the neighboring Weitershausen minister. He had served his parish in “all faithfulness and assiduousness and much blessing,” they wrote, and “[w]e believe we have found in him the man who is capable in spirit and body to carry out with blessing the office of minister in our large church district.”32 Seventy-eight men from the upper parish Neuhof Gemeinden appealed in 1888 for their Mittelkalbach chaplain’s transfer elsewhere to be canceled. “Through God’s providence a change occurred and the chaplain [had been] sent to [us] as a minister, who, after a short time, won

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

HStAM, 315f no. 277. HStAM, 315f no. 277. HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 277. HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1390.

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Otto Piltz, Sunday School, 1880

the trust and love of those entrusted to him…. What guilt have we incurred, that our gracious lord bishop wants to take away our universally respected and loved minister?”33 33

AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01. The Gemeinden’s sentiment calls to mind Margaret Anderson’s description of the kind of sociological closeness that a congregation during this period,

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For similar reasons Gemeinden also registered strong objections to certain candidates. Those in parish Ebsdorf objected to the Hassenhausen minister in 1757 because they had known him for twenty years, never cared for his speaking abilities or preaching, nor believed he, in his older and weaker bodily condition, could “preside effectively and constructively over our widely dispersed church district.”34 Neither did they want Schmidt. He was “completely unknown” to them, and the members of his present Gemeinde, whom he had served for only a year, were “not at all happy with him” and “wanted his release.”35 They hoped the landgrave would not impose on them a minister “whom [we] do not know, nor have heard, and who does not please others.”36 Elders and communal officers in parish Oberweimar brusquely appealed in 1711. Initially the Marburg consistory directed the superintendent to present Blank as the new minister there. But then it told him to wait after the elders and officers sent appeals and personally appeared before the consistory to ask for Busch, their adjunct of eleven years, with whom they were pleased. They claimed the Hessian church ordinance, which they cited, stipulated that their consent was a substantial and legitimate requisite for such an appointment. They also accused a senior Schenk of the parish’s patron family of wanting “to force [Blank] on us” and of violating ecclesiastical ordinances by trying to “steal Oberweimar tithes from our parish goods and place them at [his] disposal.”37 The church ordinance, they insisted, explicitly forbade a Collatur (one who held rights over the parish) from depriving the minister or church chest of any parish goods, rents, taxes, or tithes. “It would grieve us to the utmost,” they continued, “if [Busch] … were taken from us and another placed at his post against our will and without need.”38 In the same year of 1711 Böddiger and Niedervorschütz successfully ousted their minister, Ilsen.39 He did not hold the church or school to order, did not respond to those seeking counsel for their souls, neglected to care for the church properties and treasury, and did nothing when a drunken man blasphemed God and angered the Gemeinde by defiling God’s house. Troubling, too, were Ilsen’s many bizarre and annoying behaviors: writing with his finger on the wall, sticking his fingers in his

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especially a rural one, could feel toward their priest, as if he had originated from the people. “The Limits of Secularization: On the Problem of the Catholic Revival in NineteenthCentury Germany,” The Historical Journal 38, no. 3 (1995): 662. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 315e no. 400.

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mouth, laughing boisterously, playing with dogs by the altar during readings and catechism, and shrieking and bellowing in his house. Some laughed at his actions, but many others cried over them. The village head and elders found them “unedifying.”40 Ilsen had fallen so far into a melancholy condition, a church administrator conceded, that “no edification of the Gemeinde” could be hoped for.41 The Kassel consistory directed an adjunct, Riemann, to assume more responsibilities, causing Ilsen to become jealous and Riemann to fear even for his life. In 1712 the consistory intended to restore Ilsen to full duty. But the two parish Gemeinden protested the prospect of Ilsen’s return, and at their behest the consistory appointed Riemann instead. The initiative of rural Gemeinden regarding their minister extended to his familial relations, especially when the family was in distress. Gemeinden appropriated the burden as part of their Christian responsibility.42 As pre1648 examples testify, sobering, even harsh realities were not uncommon for ministers’ families. Around 1589 Rengershausen wrote to the Marburg superintendent to appoint “a good, poor, God-fearing, learned fellow” who would marry the eldest daughter of Johann Sprenger, who had been their “dear minister” for twenty-six years. The parish income, they explained, would then continue to come to her, her widowed mother, and the other orphaned children.43 Such would be a “Christian work of love and mercy,” they wrote, one for which “Almighty God will reward [you] many times over.”44 Rothenkirchen, after their minister died in 1601, successfully petitioned for the post to be filled with his son-in-law, who pledged to care for the minister’s widow and two children.45 In 1624 Gemeinden at the Oberhörlen mother church and its affiliate Roth pleaded on behalf of their minister when a new sovereign instituted a confessional change to the region’s religion and required all ministers to consent or leave. Their minister had assumed the parish post only the year before, they explained. Thanks to the war they could not pay his salary, and he had to

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HStAM, 315e no. 400. HStAM, 315e no. 400. The Gemeinden, for communal reasons, broadly shared the ecclesiastical authorities’ desire that clerical marriages maintain moral standards and discipline. Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (London: Taylor & Francis, 2012). By interacting daily with a minister’s family in need, and wanting to care for them, the Gemeinden brought some of their own concerns to bear on clerical marriage and its effects. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 395. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 395. HStAM, 92 no. 79.

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relinquish some possessions to soldiers. Considering his wife, two small children, and the “great deprivation in his house,” they were moved in “Christian sympathy” to petition for him to stay. Such would lead to the “furtherance of God’s church,” they wrote to the superintendent, and “almighty God will richly bless you” for it.46 Communal concern for a minister’s family continued after 1648. In 1691 Oberweimar minister Maternus Köhler arranged for his son, Jonas, to become his adjunct. However, Jonas died in late 1700, leaving a widow and three orphans. The communal officers and parishioners soon appealed, along with Maternus, for their material support.47 A century later in 1802 the communal officers and elders across parish Ebsdorf favored having their minister’s son succeed him partly out of concern for the son’s material condition. He would not be able to care for his family after his old and weak father passed away. “A separation of us and our children from him,” they wrote, “would be disadvantageous.”48 In 1823, after the Ebsdorf minister died, the parishioners turned their concerns to his surviving family, a widow with six dependent children and a seventh on the way. Twenty-one elders and representatives wanted not only a “diligent, able-bodied successor” but also the successor to oblige himself to provide one hundred reichsthaler annually to the “poor widow and her unfortunate family.”49 A few weeks later they asked for Soldan. Along with tending to who stood in their pulpit, Gemeinden also monitored seating in the pews. It was not a minor matter. Plans for the construction of a larger church in Oberweimar in the early 1730s brought the point to light. Lutheran and Reformed ecclesiastics in the Empire, by then with more than a century of church architecture behind them, emphasized the location of the pulpit. As the Marburg consistory said, amid plans for the Oberweimar church, “among the evangelicals, churches are built so that one teaches and hears God’s Word, [and] so one must primarily consider the interior and situation of the pulpit.”50 Ulm superintendent Konrad Dieterich (1575–1639), who was raised in the Upper Hessian rural town of Gemünden an der Wohra before residing in urban settings for the rest of his life, also cared that pews

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HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 641. HStAM, 315f no. 2775. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 277. HStAM, 315f no. 2307. Numerous church constructions across ecclesiastically Lutheran and Reformed regions of Hesse reflected, architecturally, the emphasis placed by ecclesiastics on the location of the pulpit. Dieter Großmann, Protestantischer Kirchenbau (Marburg: Trautvetter & Fischer, 1996).

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be “comfortable.”51 But rural parishioners’ expressed concern about pews lay elsewhere. Due to a growing population in Oberweimar, roughly half of the attendees there had no access to a seat in the very old, modest-sized church. Quarreling and strife often erupted during services as a result and many would not contribute to the maintenance of the church and school because they could not have a pew. While all Christians were part of the local Christian Gemeinde, a pew seat tangibly affirmed the place of a person and a person’s family in it. A marvelous report about pews and seating around Upper Hesse was made in 1764 by the Lutheran superintendent in Marburg after he solicited reports on them.52 In what he described as a historical sketch of pew regulation in the region since the Reformation, he admitted that past superintendents had scarcely taken any measures regarding pews, and this despite various decrees, including the 1656 Pew Ordinance. He noted two exceptions: a 1671 query concerning pews in Marburg’s parish church, and a token 1698 government initiative. Both were quickly disregarded. Instead, in Upper Hesse, especially in rural churches, the Gemeinden principally determined pew seating and regulation. Parish ministers’ responses to the superintendent’s questions revealed how local customs had determined pew regulation much more than any ministerial initiative. Pews were not being consigned or registered in about fifty-three identifiable locales, though the actual number was likely considerably higher because not all locales were reported on. In some of the fifty-three, parishioners had linked pews to house and property (Haus und Hof ) and arranged for them to be inherited or acquired accordingly. In certain locales men simply seated themselves according to the order in which they entered the church, generally with the older men in the forward pews and younger men behind them. In Winnen the single and married men seated themselves according to age. As anecdotes from around rural Upper Hesse suggest, some stood during a service because more wanted to attend than could be seated. Fearing a number of attendees would be shut out if the pews were registered, some Gemeinden had some people sit and others stand during one service, and then switch the arrangement at the next. The 1764 report revealed that other Gemeinden did not have a satisfying arrangement. For them, pews were a source of controversy. In 1746 certain men

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As cited in Philip Hahn, “Lutheran Sensory Culture in Context,” Past & Present 234, supplement 12 (2017): 90–113, here p. 105. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 541.

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Figure 18

In the balcony of a village church: men taking their pew seats and choirboys tolling the bells to signal the start of the worship service

of rank in Caldern argued over several pews, causing the pews in question to be empty for several years. A few parishioners bade the minister to resolve things by consigning one of the pews. But he could not, he wrote, because doing so would have gone against custom and been accomplished only with great difficulty. When he forwarded the matter to the Marburg authorities, Caldern became nervous and asserted custom. Ultimately, Marburg imposed the pew ordinance on the whole sanctuary, but then the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) disrupted life and put things in limbo again. Many ministers clarified that they had not consigned the pews because the idea provoked curt responses from the Gemeinde. The parishioners “do not want it,” or “will not allow it,” or invoked a legal standard to preempt the ministers from consigning pews.53 They often declared “that is my pew,” and if no pew register existed, as was usually the case, then, as the Wittelsberg minister wrote, “I have to believe [them].”54 Some rural churches, such as the one in Allna, had persons’ names written on pews so that there would be no room for confusion or doubt.

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HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 541. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 541.

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The construction of a new church or renovation of an old one made possible a change in the status quo. Yet lay Christians apparently did more to assert themselves in these instances than did ministers, and as a result they perpetuated or reformulated local customs regarding pews. They did so especially by building their own pews, whether individually from their own pockets or collectively from communal funds. When the former was the case, they considered the pews to be in their possession and subject to their prerogative, which typically meant bequeathing the pews to kin. In the latter case, the Gemeinden supervised pew seating and ministers palpably hesitated to tell them what to do. The minister in Josbach managed to get pews registered following the construction of a new church. But in Oberweimar the consignment of pews had not been done and no pew book had been kept. After the church had been newly built by the 1730s the parishioners resumed their customs regarding pews. The 1764 report and a 1784 superintendent visitation record both stated that no consignment had occurred or pew book been kept.55 The 1764 report revealed other patterns. Some ministers occasionally began a pew register following a church construction or renovation but then failed to keep it updated. Other ministers missed these windows of opportunities altogether. After Elnhausen built a new church in 1743, most pews were not registered in the new pew register. The local minister often prodded his parishioners about it. Some ignored him while others obdurately refused, declaring they need not register the pews because they had paid for them and considered them heritable property. Pews that exchanged hands without a minister’s knowledge made it even harder for him. Disruptions in the status quo could favor communal regulation of pews in other ways too. For a time, women’s pews in Ebsdorf were being registered, but after the church was renovated and the costs were paid by the church district, the practice fell dormant. Consignment began in Caldern and Gemünden an der Wohra shortly before the Seven Years’ War, but then the war disrupted it and things reverted back to old form. In only seventeen locales were pews being faithfully registered according to the pew ordinance. In three others they were done partly according to the ordinance and partly to custom. Finally, in seven local churches some pews were registered while others were not: in three cases the women’s pews were but the men’s not; in two, only certain pews were and these in irregular fashion; in one, some of the men’s were; and in one, a few of the women’s were. In virtually all churches where a pew was registered the chest received a small fee, and in most instances the minister did too. In a majority of cases the fee

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HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 541; HStAM, 315f no. 2321.

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was based on custom; in some, partly on custom and partly on the pew ordinance; and in a few, on the ordinance. A well-detailed case from parish Ebsdorf from the 1740s reveals how pews, especially women’s pews, could be highly complicated and contentious and also how local customs prevailed against top-down regulations.56 Ebsdorf members and the widow of the Hachborn village head quarreled over a women’s pew of eight seats. Both sides sent a volley of letters to the authorities. She alleged that denominational difference—she was the Reformed widow of an official in a Lutheran-populated village—played a role. The members’ defense demonstrated that it did not: the mother church had a right to its own church’s pews before affiliates did; the widow possessed a whole bench in a church that had only fifty women’s benches; and not only did Ebsdorf shoulder double the costs and labor for the church’s 1743 repair and enlargement as compared to the affiliates, but also she gave nothing toward it. Ebsdorf petitioned for the minister and elders to consign the pew. They also wanted her to be given one seat in the pew in question and another seat elsewhere. The widow protested that her mother contributed on her behalf to church repairs, and as for the pew in question, it had belonged to her mother-in-law. After she died the minister registered it to the widow and her family. The consistory denied Ebsdorf had any prerogative over the affiliates when it came to pews but otherwise did rule in its favor. It allowed the widow one seat from the pew and, at most, two seats elsewhere. The widow’s case came amid church authorities’ plan to register the Ebsdorf pews. The consistory directed the minister and elders to conduct it under the direction of officials. Upon the death of parents, stipulated the consistory, first rights to the father’s pew belonged to the eldest son and the mother’s pew to the eldest daughter. But the church elders of parish Ebsdorf objected. Sons and daughters sometimes married outside the locale or church district and, thus, did not always remain in the parents’ residence. For them to retain pew rights would be impractical. Furthermore, if those moving into the parents’ residence did not have any pews in the church or could not acquire the ones inherited by the eldest son and daughter, then the consistory’s directive would do more to kindle strife than bring order. The elders wanted instead for first rights to go to the possessor of the residence. Their request reveals how house, inheritance, and localized interests—and communal monitoring of them— ordered priorities. The village head echoed the elders. The Marburg consistory concurred even though doing so opposed its own initial directive as well as

56

HStAM, 315f no. 312, 313.

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the 1656 Pew Ordinance, which had prohibited pews from being assigned to certain houses.

3

Repurposing the Particulars

Rural Gemeinden appropriated the means created by other parties, whether in the distant or recent past, and repurposed them to advance their own notion of Christianization. Doing so nurtured a culture that transcended Protestant and Catholic concerns. As Steinhaus, Steinau, and Bernhards demonstrated, some Gemeinden did so with a baptismal font. A nobleman in 1569 successfully arranged for it to be placed in the local Steinhaus church. This satisfied his family’s interests yet it was an exceptional arrangement given Steinhaus’s affiliate status. In response to a 1720s query about it, the Margretenhaun minister puzzled over the font, not knowing how or why it ever came into the church.57 Nonetheless, by the later seventeenth century the three Gemeinden had appropriated the font as indicative of an elevated status. In the 1770s Steinhaus spoke of local children having been baptized in their chapel “from time immemorial.”58 They kept parlaying the font into successful localizing efforts until these culminated in parish devolution. Second, Gemeinden utilized monasteries or the legacy status of secularized ones to serve communal interests. Wolfshausen became a vicariate in the thirteenth century, in an era when nobles and monastics held powerful sway over its affairs. In the seventeenth to twentieth centuries Wolfshausen repeatedly capitalized on the vicariate status for their spiritual betterment, arguing “our parish is an exceptional parish and no affiliate.”59 Hachborn did similarly. Though relegated back into parish Ebsdorf in 1528, Hachborn’s previous history as the site of a Premonstratensian cloister afforded it vicariate status. Members jealously guarded and asserted this whenever necessary. They did so, for example, to back their claim of having the first worship service in the parish on all Sundays and holidays.60 In Fuldian lands cloisters were not secularized or dissolved as happened in Hachborn’s case. Nevertheless, Gemeinden within reasonable range of them satisfied their craving for localized pastoral care by contracting cloister personnel for ministrations. 57 58 59 60

AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01; AGV, EGI/A/4/10-01. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 315f no. 276, 311, 315, 317.

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A third way was how Gemeinden leveraged aristocratic standing. Niedervorschütz cited aristocratic properties when they invoked vicariate status. For “at most two hundred years,” they wrote in 1820, they had shared a minister with Böddiger. Prior to circa 1620 a minister had lived in Niedervorschütz, and “according to an old saying,” their parish post was the post of aristocratic patrons, the lords von Dalwig. The local church and school stood on the lords’ property, they insisted, and therefore the noble family was, at one time, the church’s patrons. Church authorities, however, turned away their claim. Markershausen did not have or claim vicariate status, but it did, like Steinhaus and Niedervorschütz, parlay things of their aristocratic patrons to an advantage for themselves. Markershausen was apparently an affiliate of parish Nesselröden prior to 1583 but then became one of parish Willershausen by 1585, after the Treusch von Buttlar-Willershausen family arranged for the Willershausen minister to lead private services in the Markershausen manor house. After more and more local parishioners attended it, Markershausen helped finance the construction of its first ever church in 1743. In 1828 they replaced it with a neoclassical one.61 On this note, rural Gemeinden commonly capitalized on the construction of a church building, be it their first one or a new one to replace the old, to galvanize communalization and Christianization. Roth built a new church in 1716. Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein had never possessed vicariate status, but in the 1730s and 1760s the nearly one hundred members still tried to claim that status and leverage it. In an ardent, legal defense regarding obligations toward Fronhausen, they signaled their willingness to contribute to a small percentage of the mother church’s cemetery costs but nothing to its church or school buildings.62 They had established a schoolmaster and almost all sacrament ministrations and church services locally, and they had virtually no communal association or bond (keine gemeindschafft) with the Fronhausen parishioners. Therefore, they insisted, they were not an affiliate but a vicariate.63 The authorities rebuffed them, ruling in 1770 that they had to pay one-fourth of the Fronhausen church’s expenses and one-third of those related to parish properties and school buildings. Losing such appeals rankled the members, who proved intransigent about the payments in the 1770s and 1780s. The experience soured them and added to their yearning for parish independence, just as it did for Niedervorschütz.

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Zietz, Kulturdenkmäler in Hessen. Landkreis Werra-Meißner-Kreis. I, 145–52. HStAM, 22a no. 4:249. HStAM, 22a no. 4:388.

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Oberweimar also grew bolder during a major reconstruction of its church. The church had stood since at least the eleventh century, an era when noble patrons were integral to the financing and running of parishes. By 1589 the church had fallen into desperate disrepair. Contributions for its reconstruction were drawn from the parish and approximately seventy locales. The patron Schenk family of Schweinsberg solicited the landgrave for a donation of timber.64 The project, however, was never started. By 1730 the church was in a thoroughly wretched condition. Initially church authorities and parish Gemeinden agreed it should be razed and succeeded by a totally new, larger church. The church’s construction, wrote the Gemeinden, would be to “God’s honor.”65 In another example of rural Christians collaborating in projects of mutual interest despite disparities in their wealth and influence, the Gemeinden’s members agreed to give in equal measure, for as Hermershausen argued, “no subject should be burdened more than another.”66 Each of the immigrant residents (Beysitzer) in the parish contributed equally too. Additional funding came from the church chest and from collections gathered in other parishes.67 The Gemeinden clamored about the galling lack of contribution from noble families in the parish. The landlords Heydwolff at Germershausen eventually gave eighty florins, apparently from controversial sources, and built their own pew. The parish patrons, the Schenk family, gave nothing and ordered a pew to be built for them.68 They also had a board displaying their family coat of arms nailed to a pew designated for local officials. Locals were incensed, and when someone clandestinely ripped the board off and scribbled “W. L.” with chalk on the empty space, authorities gasped in shock.69 The crest was nailed back in place, this time with five big nails and nineteen smaller ones, each of which was purposely bent. Ultimately, the price for an entirely new church in Oberweimar would far exceed the gathered funds. Each local Gemeinde voiced its sensible and strong preference for the more cost-efficient option. It involved a great reconstruction of the building and the installation of two balcony levels in order to maximize available space. Its completion signified further com-

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HStAM, 318 Marburg-Oberweimar no. 1; HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1369. HStAM, 315f no. 2307. HStAM, 315f no. 2307. HStAM, 315f no. 2307. HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1382; HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1383. HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1384. The meaning of the two letters is unknown.

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munal strength and discipline as well as the gradual enervation of seigneurial sway over parish and temporal matters.70 A fifth example of communal appropriation was seen with the Bible and also with church services that included a sermon (Predigt). Invocations of Holy Writ were revealing. In 1609 Himmelsberg sought to “enjoy … the Word of God” just like some neighboring villages, which they named, and to do so in their own church instead of attending elsewhere.71 In 1722 Steinau and Bernhards appealed for parishioners to contribute to parish church repairs in part “because they … listen to the Word of God in it.”72 Behind the 1913 pulpit in Dipperz was inscribed “He who is of God hears God’s word” from John 8:47. In light of scholarship from recent centuries, which has applied categories of Protestant and Catholic to the historical record and associated invocations of “God’s Word” and the Bible primarily with Protestantism, one might reflexively think that these cases occurred in Protestant settings. But instead they came from parishes governed by the Roman Catholic Church. Similarly, in an 1851 case those of one denomination allegedly taunted the other to join them in their church, “where you can also hear sermons, and that not from a paper, as by you.”73 An emphasis on hearing sermons has, conventionally, been associated principally with Protestantism, but here those doing the taunting were Catholics in Burghaun and those being taunted their evangelical neighbors. The Burghaun Catholics’ statement was likely meant not as a jab at the fact that the Burghaun evangelicals were using what appears to be a postil—by the nineteenth century the Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed all had a tradition of postils74—but as leverage in a game of one-upsmanship, because in all circles a sermon preached ranked above one that was merely read aloud. What rural Gemeinden called their worship service is also revealing. Those in ecclesiastically Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed parishes alike normally referred to it with the same, centuries-old word: Gottesdienst. Ecclesiastical figures or nobility were usually the ones who used the term Messe (Mass).75 Rural Christians also treated their minister in ways that reflected their own inclinations and not necessarily those assumed by ecclesiastical authorities. In 70 71 72 73 74 75

Robisheaux, “The Peasantries of Western Europe, 1300–1750,” 141–42. HStAM, 105c no. 577. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01. HStAM, 315g no. 437. John M. Frymire, The Primacy of the Postils: Catholics, Protestants, and the Dissemination of Ideas in Early Modern Germany (Leiden: Brill, 2010). Instances of churchmen using the word “Mass”: HStAM, 83 no. 4739; HStAM, 92 no. 402, 585; AGV, EFU/A/4/09-01; AGV, EBK/A/4/09-02; AGV, EIL/A/4/09-01; AGV, EGU/A/4/03-01; AGV, EGU/B/4/11-01; AGV, EGI/A/4/03-01; AGV, EBS/A/4/03-01; AGV, EGN/A/4/03-01.

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1823 the parish Ebsdorf Gemeinden regarded Soldan, their preferred ministerial candidate, as their “fatherly director and guide,” even though he was only twenty-two years old.76 When Mittelkalbach in 1888 asked for their chaplain, named Etzel, to be left at his post instead of being transferred, they commented how he had “proved himself to be like a father and friend of souls.”77 Gemeinden in both cases ascribed paternal attributes to the ministers. The language is commonly associated with Catholicism, and the Mittelkalbach case was in an ecclesiastically Catholic parish, yet Ebsdorf was ecclesiastically Lutheran. Additionally, Mittelkalbach defined what they meant by a father and friend. The guiding principle of Etzel’s predecessor, they wrote, was that “peasants must know that they are there because of the cleric, and not he because of them…. Through God’s providence a change occurred and the chaplain was sent to them as a minister, who, after a short time, won the trust and love of those entrusted to him.”78 Mittelkalbach’s notion of a “fatherly” minister, like that of the parish Ebsdorf Gemeinden, reflected peasant notions instead of ecclesiastical ones. A final example were concepts rural Christians would have heard their minister speak about on occasions such as a sermon. Grace, the divine sort, was a much-debated doctrinal concern among the confessionally minded. According to Roman Church adherents the sacraments communicated it to a person.79 According to adherents of Luther’s or Calvin’s theology it was God’s special favor or goodwill. God had chosen people to receive the grace of justification so that their sins might be remitted.80 But rural Gemeinden mentioned the term rarely in their written records, and when they did, they used it in a nondoctrinal way. Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein beseeched the noble patrons in 1700 to grant their request to have their own minister. “The praiseworthy undertaking,” they wrote, would “[stir] God’s grace and blessing.”81 They linked grace to parish autonomy and to the increase of localized Christian practice and not to a confessional understanding premised on an ecclesiastical canon or biblical interpretation. Owners of certain farming structures cited divine grace. In the inscription on an 1812 Niederweimar barn the man and his wife wrote that Through God’s grace and blessing they had built it. After a fire around the mid-eighteenth century burned down 76 77 78 79 80 81

HStAM, 315f no. 274. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01. Miri Rubin, “Sacramental Life,” in Rubin and Simons, Christianity in Western Europe, c.1100–c.1500, 219–37. Cameron, The European Reformation, 95–96, 147–51. HStAM, 315f no. 2275.

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fifty houses in Lutheran-populated Landau, a new structure declared, God’s wrath cast us down God’s grace built our houses anew.82 On his barn in 1881 a Dreihausen owner wrote to God alone be the glory and thanks be to His grace Amen. In these cases they linked grace to material provision.

4

Sacralizing the Local

Rural Gemeinden sacralized their local universe in many ways. Ceremonial processions were a particularly visible means.83 Christians conducted one of them, known as the Grenzgang, along the borders of a village or town. Centuries old and usually carried out every year or two, the border procession commonly began and ended at the church and occurred on a religious holiday. The parish minister led it on horse or by foot. Just as peasants ordered the hours of their day with a church’s bells, so they solicited God’s order and blessing on their world via the Christian Church, which stood at its center. Temporally, the border procession marked one locale’s boundaries against those of neighboring locales, and it kept knowledge of them fresh, not least because the procession passed by dozens or hundreds of border stones, which had been set in the distant or recent past. Spiritually, the procession demarcated and dedicated the local domain to God. Christians in ecclesiastically Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed parishes each carried out the border procession because it had been cut from the same cultural cloth, woven by the same deep historical forces—above all, settlement patterns, an agricultural economy, and communalization. Christians engaged in processions for other occasions too, including weddings, village festivals (Kirmes), funerals, and confirmation. According to one author’s detailed description in 1904, their forms did not bear any meaningful denominational distinctions. He grouped them, along with other aspects of peasant culture, according to regional trends.84 In the Schwalm region chil82 83

84

Oswald Curtze, Die Hausinschriften im Fürstenthum Waldeck: Ein Beitr. Zur epigrammatischen Volkspoesie (Arolsen, 1871), 13. Bernhard Streck, “Grenzgang Ethnologie,” in Literatur der Grenze, Theorie der Grenze, ed. Richard Faber, Barbara Naumann (Würzburg: Königshausen und Neumann, 1995), 185–95. Carl Heßler, Hessische Landes- und Volkskunde: Das ehemalige Kurhessen und das Hinterland am Ausgange des 19. Jahrhunderts, 2 vols. (Marburg: Elwert, 1904). Reflexively, Heßler captioned some photos with Catholic and Protestant. However, in the text itself Heßler made no mention of why one was Catholic and another Protestant or how Catholic and Protestant had any relevance.

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Figure 19

Wedding couple leading a procession to the church in Nausis, which lay in an ecclesiastically Reformed parish, 1938. The highly ornate headdresses as well as the colorful fabrics around their upper arms, often woven into a floral bouquet, identify them as the wedding couple

Figure 20

Confirmands in procession, heading to the church in Großseelheim, which lay in an ecclesiastically Lutheran parish, 1936. Each girl wore an adult’s Eucharistic dress, indicating her passage into adulthood

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Figure 21

Women in procession along a path outside Mardorf, which lay in an ecclesiastically Catholic parish, 1936. The women, like the rest of the Gemeinde, wore simple church dress for the occasion

dren led a wedding procession from the wedding house and were followed by the bride with two bridesmaids, the groom with two groomsmen, the men, and finally the women.85 Children also led a funeral procession from the deceased’s house and were followed by the minister and schoolteacher, pallbearers (customarily the four nearest neighbors), relatives, and then friends, neighbors, and acquaintances. In Upper Hesse the wedding procession was led by the bride accompanied by two boys, and they were followed by the groom accompanied by two girls, the relatives, and finally the wedding guests. After the wedding service the groom led the way out of the church.86 During funeral processions mourners followed the coffin according to their degree of relation to the deceased and did so in a long, single-file line, not in columns two, three, or four wide.87 In Lower Hesse the wedding procession was led into the church by the groom, and the funeral procession was led by schoolchildren and the schoolteacher, followed by the minister and mourners.88 Photos from the first

85 86 87 88

Heßler, Hessische Landes- und Volkskunde, 2:286–87, 2:294–95. Heßler, Hessische Landes- und Volkskunde, 2:149–52. Heßler, Hessische Landes- und Volkskunde, 2:152–53. Heßler, Hessische Landes- und Volkskunde, 2:69, 2:74.

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half of the twentieth century attest to both the close resemblance of the various regions’ processions and the subtle variations from region to region and village to village as a rich array of locally-based customs produced nuance and distinction.89 Christians conducted processions while wearing elaborate dress (Tracht). The dress worn by them depended on their sex, age group, and the particular occasion, such as a regular Sunday service, confirmation, Eucharistic service, festival, dance, wedding, funeral, or a particular type of workday such as a harvest. Ossified convention has categorized dress according to Catholic and Protestant, but they had little to do with these groupings. Across Upper Hesse a fairly uniform dress appears to have predominated in the eighteenth century, and the so-called Catholic dress around the Amöneburg district was merely a slight traditional variation on the one in predominantly Lutheran-populated Marburg.90 Then, in the early nineteenth century, a dazzling array of diverse styles of dress burst forth. If Napoleon’s march into the Holy Roman Empire played any causal role, then it catalyzed not nationalist fervor, as seen in urban circles and among the educated elites,91 but rather peasant creativity and an intensification of local pride. Villagers had a variety of dresses, each to be worn for a particular event or activity. The dresses across most of Upper Hesse have been grouped mainly into the so-called Marburger (which might have originated in the village of Ebsdorf), Schönsteiner, Hinterländer, Frankenberger, Rauschenberger, and Schwälmer dress. Although these are labeled Protestant, they owed their development to geographical and political influences and not denominational ones. Protestant Marburg’s own fashion had, in fact, been enamored with rococo, which was associated first with Catholic areas in Europe. Portions of the Hinterländer’s clothing recalled the coloring of the sixteenth-century black Spanish dress. Marburg was divided topographically

89 90

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For example: https://www.lagis-hessen.de/de/ > Ansichten > Bilddokumente. Karl Rumpf, Hessen: Text und Bildersammlung von Karl Rumpf, Deutsche Volkskunst: Neue Folge (Marburg: Simons, 1951), 7–8. Rumpf, a great expert on Hessian folk culture and art, astutely discerned that dress did not abide by Catholic-Protestant categorizations. He noted that the Catholic dress were “so-called” and he also placed the word Catholic in quotation marks. For example, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852) became known as Turnvater (father of gymnastics) after combining open-air physical exercise and an emphasis on health and strength to promote a collective morality and national restoration. Associations modeled after the gymnasium which Jahn founded in Berlin soon spread across the German lands. Christiane Eisenberg, “Charismatic nationalist leader: Turnvater Jahn,” International Journal of the History of Sport 13, no. 1 (1996): 14–27.

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from Catholic-populated Mardorf by the hilly Lahnberge, while Mardorf and the Reformed-populated Schwalm region to its northeast both rested on a wide agricultural plain. Yet the Marburger dress had, as its base colors, black and white, while the dress of Mardorf and the Schwalm region shared the same green and red base colors. That is, the latter two were part of a common cultural zone despite their differing Catholic and Reformed classifications. So, too, were Mardorf and the ecclesiastically Protestant villages of the Ohm to its immediate southeast, both of which had the same black-colored mourning mantel and, through most of the nineteenth century, the same black-colored wedding dress. Around 1830 the Catholic villages around Amöneburg ceased having a bridal crown with loose hair and adopted the bridal cap associated with so-called Protestant dress.92 Decades later they started absorbing characteristics of the Fulda dress until the latter died out by 1890, after which the villages opted for certain styles from Marburg.93 Most significantly, from a local standpoint residents themselves recognized immediately the distinctions between a neighboring locale’s dress and their own, just as they did differences in the highly decorative, local varieties of a bridal chair, cradle, staircase, window box, spoon basket, salt box, and other household creations that showcased peasant art.94 The dresses were the purposeful handiwork of communal peasant society. They exercised a great capacity to organize local life not into a rigid uniformity but a rich tapestry that affirmed a person’s and a family’s place in the Gemeinde.95 Gemeinden also localized sacred practices that ecclesiastical authorities intended to be wider affairs. Margretenhaun clerics reported in 1823, 1838, and 1841 about the disorder that annually spoiled the springtime pilgrimages to Frauenberg north of City Fulda and, later, to Petersberg east of it.96 They enthused about the genuine religious intent and robust participation but despaired over things that occurred alongside the pilgrimages, including incidents of debauchery, bloody melees between residents of neighboring parishes, and people voluntarily getting sidetracked into business matters. Those who left taverns drunk to join processions disrupted the worshippers’

92 93 94

95 96

Mathilde Hain, Das Lebensbild eines oberhessischen Trachtendorfes: Von bäuerlichen Tracht und Gemeinschaft (Jena: Eugen Diederichs, 1936), 73. Hain, Das Lebensbild eines oberhessischen Trachtendorfes, 75. Karl Rumpf, Eine Deutsche Bauernkunst: Herkunft und Hochblüte des Volkstümlichen Strich- und Kerbschnittornamentes und Seiner Sinnbildformen (Marburg: N. G. Elwert, 1943). Hain, Das Lebensbild eines oberhessischen Trachtendorfes, 81. AGV, EGI/A/4/03-03.

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prayer. A majority, by one estimate, lost their way on the return trip. By nighttime few accompanied the children back home. The clerics’ proposed solution each time was to conduct the pilgrimage within each respective parish instead of having multiple parishes participate in one together. Here, then, exceptionally, negative forces precipitated localization instead of the usual positive ones. The localization of pilgrimages proved best elsewhere too. The Steinhaus church board explained in 1886 that duties and obligations prevented men from joining a pilgrimage procession; old women and children constituted almost all participants. Furthermore, they noted that “a disinclination to make a pilgrimage [that involves going into] other parishes reigns everywhere here.” They proposed instead a procession to and worship service in the Wendelinus chapel atop the nearby Werthesberg, which would certainly yield “diligent participation and great good.”97 The strength of rural Gemeinden in ecclesiastically Catholic areas to Christianize according to localizing and communalizing interests surpassed any capacity a regional cloister had to confessionalize in its sphere of influence.98 Gemeinden in ecclesiastically Catholic parishes handled wayside shrines, chapels, and crucifixes in much the same way. In the Mainz exclave containing Amöneburg and sixteen locales around it, sixty-five shrines and seventy-two crucifixes were erected in the mid-seventeenth century through twentieth century. Owing to the predominant Catholic-Protestant filtering of the historical record, scholarship has depicted them as an affirmation of Catholic identity and a flowering of Catholic piety. Placing them against the backdrop presented here lessens those impressions and accentuates residents’ efforts to localize Christian practice and to Christianize their agricultural world.99 The shrines and crucifixes principally served the interests of the peasants’ landscape, not the ecclesiastics’ or denomination’s agenda. In almost all known cases the benefactor of shrines in the exclave was the local Gemeinde, a group of individuals, or a single resident; in only one known case—a 1791 shrine erected in a chapel just outside Amöneburg—was the benefactor a cleric. When shrines needed repair, Gemeinden most often paid the expense. 97 98

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AGV, EIM/A/4/09-02. The argument for a cloister’s confessionalizing capacity appears in Petrus A. Bayer, Konfessionalisierung im klösterlichen Umfeld. Die Entwicklung frühneuzeitlicher Religiosität in den Pfarren des Stiftes Schlägl (1589–1665) (Münster: Aschendorff, 2016). This may help explain a very late emphasis on Marian figures in the sixteen locales around Amöneburg. Of the eleven images dedicated to her, only two date from before 1900, including one atop the Catholic beacon of Amöneburg itself. The fact that over half of the crucifixes in the exclave date from after 1900, and Marian grottos after 1945, also suggests a late rise in Catholic sensibility.

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More than half of the shrines in the exclave, as in the Fuldian region, were erected outside of the residential areas.100 Of these, the vast majority were set at key entry and exit points of a locale’s roads or paths and at points among agricultural fields, groves, and forest floors. Outside the village core of Roßdorf and Rüdigheim shrines were placed at historically significant lookout points atop hills.101 Residents of Emsdorf erected a shrine in a southeast meadow where they grazed livestock. Of shrines within the exclave’s residential areas, a great majority were set at historically forged points along the edge of the village core and on church and cemetery grounds in the middle of that core. Many shrines stood as stations in local processions carried out by Gemeinden; only a few shrines were linked to pilgrimages. Crucially, a majority of shrines in the exclave were positioned so that they had an uninhibited view of the local church. Members of rural Gemeinden utilized them to accentuate localization and Christianization. The desire to thank Christ for His redeeming power and to bid God to safeguard life and possessions on earth were decisive factors in the commissioning of shrines.102 A resident of Schröck dedicated two shrines in 1733 in gratitude for the house and barn he had just built. The villages of Bauerbach, Ginseldorf, Erfurtshausen, and Mardorf, and likely Schröck and Niederklein, each had an ensemble of four shrines displaying the scenes from the passion of Christ, evidence, it would seem, primarily of Catholic piety. Yet in each case the shrines were erected at the periphery of the residential core and oriented toward the four cardinal directions, reflecting, arguably, the agricultural concern to operate in sync with the natural world and to have God’s blessing and protection on the material well-being which residents derived from that world. Similarly, it is difficult to interpret shrines and crucifixes as an assertion of Catholic identity against Protestantism. For one, apparently none were set up along the exclave’s borders with Hessian locales. Border markings there were done, like everywhere else, typically with stones. For another, a shrine or crucifix was occasionally placed on the border between Catholic locales themselves, such as shrines on the border between Anzefahr and Stausebach and also, to the east, between the Mainz villages of Seibelsdorf and Ruhlkirchen. Curiously, only one-quarter of the shrines in the exclave were dedicated to

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Annekathrin Sitte-Köster, Bildstöcke in den katholischen Exklaven in Oberhessen. Geschichte und Funktion einer memorialen Bildgattung von der frühen Neuzeit bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkriegs (Ph.D. diss., University of Mainz, 2009). Stoffers, Rentschler, Schneider, Kulturdenkmäler in Hessen. Landkreis MarburgBiedenkopf. I, 81. Sitte-Köster, Bildstöcke in den katholischen Exklaven in Oberhessen, 201ff.

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saints, and although Boniface has been profoundly associated with Amöneburg and Fulda over the centuries, no shrine in the exclave depicted him, and rarely did the saint appear in shrines in the Fuldian region. Inscriptions on shrines in the exclave appeared seldomly, and in the half-dozen instances when they did, the text simply stated to the glory of God. In sum, the shrines and crucifixes attest principally to a peasant program that affirmed the framework of their rural world, which grassroots forces had been molding for a millennium. They contrast with the way baroque artists put their hands on Rome’s or Karlsruhe’s or Fulda’s cityscape and revised streets to create avenues for processions and fashioned stages and dynamic centerpieces for displays of sovereign power. Artists and craftsmen who were based in Fulda and in cities governed by Mainz authorities produced works for rural Gemeinden in Catholic parishes. Scholars have noted that although they did so in the baroque, rococo, and Romantic styles, the finished works themselves took on a distinctive rural flavor.103 So-called “rural” or “peasant baroque” (Bauernbarock) in church sanctuaries also reflected the sway exerted by the peasant environment on artistic and religious expression. Examples of the genre occurred in an array of rural churches either built or renovated around the eighteenth century. The Lutheran ones of Oberweimar, Ebsdorf, Lohra, Kirchvers, and Ernsthausen were among them. So, too, were numerous Reformed and Lutheran churches in the border area between Hesse-Kassel and Thuringia, which together blossomed into their “own common cultural zone” despite the territorial and denominational borders running through them.104 Inside, one beheld sanctuaries that, like those in baroque Catholic village churches nearby, were highly ornate.105 Distinctions among them did exist. A Pietà scene on the ceiling of the Lutheran Schmillinghausen church in Waldeck depicted a white-robed and bearded God the Father cradling the Son alongside the Spirit as a dove and two angels. By contrast, on the ceiling of several of the Reformed churches either a golden sun or the name Yahweh appeared instead of an image of God. That Yahweh was written in Jewish letters attests to the fact that ecclesiastics determined some of the visual content created by artists inside the churches.

103 104 105

Stoffers, Rentschler, Schneider, Kulturdenkmäler in Hessen. Landkreis MarburgBiedenkopf. I, 71. Großmann, Protestantischer Kirchenbau, 26. Churches in Möhra, Schweina, Steinbach, Dermbach, and Herpf were among those in Thuringia that were part of this cultural zone. Rolf Bothe, Kirche, Kunst, und Kanzel: Luther und die Folgen der Reformation (Cologne: Böhlau, 2017), 163ff.

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Example of “peasant baroque”: balcony and ceiling of Ronshausen church sanctuary (artwork from the early eighteenth century)

Yet the baroque yearning for painted images and scenes contravened or transcended denominational constraints. Christians entering baroque churches in Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed rural parishes all viewed painted ceilings with, commonly, clouds or a star-studded night sky in a heavenly setting, along with some combination of angels playing instruments and Old and New Testament figures worshipping, and the four evangelists or the twelve apostles. The sight of them in Reformed churches was noteworthy considering that Reformed theology forbade images in sanctuaries. The Reformed church of Nentershausen abided by that prescription in one sense by not depicting Christ at the crucifixion, but violated it by displaying, symbolically in its stead, a painted scene of the sacrifice of Isaac. The balcony panels in the 1730 Reformed church of Ausbach violated it too, with paintings of seventeen biblical figures, Luther, and, most ironic of all, Calvin. Among the figures were the apostles, each one accompanied by a portion of text from the Apostles’ Creed. This “Apostles’ Creed” program, also painted around the same time in the nearby Weiterode church, had a lasting tradition elsewhere in Europe dating to the centuries before 1500. The scholarly penchant for denominational categories would accentuate nuances between Lutheran and Reformed sanctuaries or frame peasant baroque as a Protestant counter to baroque Catholicism. To the degree that

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ecclesiastics had a hand in their content that may be plausible. But a fixation on those aspects overlooks the wealth of imagery and adornment of sacred space that, when opportunity allowed for it, suited rural Christians’ affinities—scenes, colors, and earth tones from the natural world, native animals, fruits, trees, leaves, plants, twines, bouquets of flowers, and floral patterns. They featured prominently throughout the sanctuaries, and frequently dominated them. They contributed greatly to the “creation of a type of village church” that did not try “to compete with the cities” or with a “type of city church” but rather catered to peasant tastes.106 Lutheran theologians and urban churches used baroque furnishings such as altars and altarpieces as confessional or denominational markers to distinguish their places of worship from Calvinist ones and from Calvinist iconoclasm. They did so to the degree that the Lutheran “development of a devotional culture … was dangerously close to that of the Catholics.”107 By contrast, when baroque was channeled into village churches such as those in Wichmannshausen, Richelsdorf, Ronshausen, Odensachsen, and Mansbach, it produced a visual splendour on the ceilings, walls, balconies, pillars, pews, and panels that did much to reduce distinctions between Lutheran and Reformed sanctuaries.

5

Localizing the Cemetery

Rural Gemeinden also sacralized their world by localizing cemeteries and funeral services. In the late eighteenth to early twentieth centuries many allocated their available resources until, by the second quarter of the twentieth century, most every village had a site for the burial of their deceased. Even the smallest of villages, such as Ilschhausen, Frauenborn, and Weiershausen, could boast of having established “[our] own cemetery.”108 They did so typically by reassigning a communal plot of land or purchasing a private one for the purpose and then transforming and maintaining it as local burial ground. For a millennium or more, the rural Christians’ ancestors had been burying their dead at the mother church cemetery. For them inclement weather and poor road conditions made funerals as challenging as any other parish activity. They had not only to travel to the mother church for the funeral service but also to expose themselves to additional hazards, such as transporting the 106 107 108

Großmann, Protestantischer Kirchenbau, 21–31. Bridget Heal, “‘Better Papist than Calvinist’: Art and Identity in Later Lutheran Germany,” German History 29, no. 4 (2011): 584–609, here p. 588. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1480.

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deceased person and attending the graveside burial under open skies. While doing so they risked falling ill or, in time of pestilence, contracting disease. But pressure for available space at mother church cemeteries started to build in the eighteenth century as population levels exceeded numbers last reached in the early seventeenth century. Changes at the mother church cemetery could set off a chain reaction in the affiliate and incorporated villages. Parish Oberweimar talked about enlarging its graveyard in 1816 but opted to add more burial sites by removing fruit trees.109 By 1841 little space again remained for a parish now numbering 1,500 souls, and Oberweimar debated how to enlarge its cemetery. Weiershausen, Allna, Hermershausen, Gisselberg, Haddamshausen, Cyriaxweimar, and, a little later, Niederweimar declared that should Oberweimar decide to go forward with it, they would set up their own cemeteries. “[F]or when water levels are high,” wrote the Hermershausen mayor, “it has often been the case that a funeral cannot be started at the scheduled time in Oberweimar, and in general the distance (nearly an hour’s trek) and path from Hermershausen to Oberweimar makes it difficult to carry the deceased there.”110 The minister complained that those without a chapel and, thus, without church bells and a warden should not be allowed to have a cemetery because funeral services could not be conducted there in a customary manner.111 Oberweimar wanted the affiliates and incorporated to contribute proportionately, according to the tax rate (Contribution), on grounds that population differences were negligible. The effort failed, but by 1845 Oberweimar’s cemetery was enlarged. As church law stipulated, the parish’s Gemeinden contributed proportionately according to their parish maintenance obligations. Yet, true to their word, seven of the Gemeinden established their own cemeteries before the decade was out.112 Subsequently they continued fulfilling their obligations toward the Oberweimar cemetery’s maintenance. The affiliate Kehna waived any claim to found its own cemetery in the 1840s. Kehna did entertain the idea of establishing one in 1867, at a time when Oberweimar’s cemetery was again running out of space, but opted for the status quo.113 By 1890 Kehna’s time had come. Members, including a widow, officially decided in favor of it, picked out a communal property, and had their first ever ceme-

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HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1242. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2454. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2454. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2232. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2440.

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tery ready by 1891.114 Parish Oberweimar entered the nineteenth century, like it did the ninth, with one cemetery. It exited with nine of them. The Oberweimar case points to another instructive point. In the sixteenth century Protestantism prescribed extramural instead of intramural cemeteries for theological reasons.115 By the early nineteenth century the prevailing desire among governing authorities, as a Fulda official put it in 1820, was “that … all cemeteries may be distanced from the villages” as they are “almost everywhere in Germany.”116 Yet, through the same centuries, rural Christians’ penchant for custom, for having the cemetery within the residential part of the village, modified or scuttled the authorities’ unambiguous directions. Those already with a cemetery displayed a striking propensity to maximize their burial space, even to the point of overflow. Officials’ reports from Dipperz, Oberweimar, and elsewhere contained graphic descriptions to accentuate their urgent calls for a remedy. They recoiled at the “unbearable” stench in churchyards warmed on summer days and how bones and even “whole skeletons” protruded from the ground, especially after excess rains.117 Gravediggers, they noted, repeatedly unearthed corpses in their effort to find a place for a new grave. Rural Christians knew well such inconveniences yet their senses tolerated them because sacral, local, communal, and familial interests intersected at the churchyard cemetery. By the early nineteenth century authorities had officially prohibited family graves and decreed a universalization of row graves.118 Later correspondence indicates the ordinance took hold in some places but did so only sluggishly or not at all in others.119 In certain cases burials reverted back to old form due to communal pressure, especially if a minister neglected to bother. Church authorities then had to try and reinstitute row graves. Regardless, sentiment for the customary way of doing things held strong. “I don’t care,” retorted a Dreihausen man when the local cemetery became waterlogged in 1889 and discussion ensued about locating a new cemetery elsewhere. “[I]f my father lies in a wet grave in the old cemetery, then may it be that I also am buried in a wet grave.”120 Seven mayors at a meeting in Margretenhaun in 1836 described how their ancestors “had built up savings in happier times” and

114 115 116 117 118 119 120

HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2440. Craig Koslofsky, The Reformation of the Dead: Death and Ritual in Early Modern Germany, 1450–1700 (London: Macmillan, 2000). HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 51. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 51; HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2454. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2437. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2437. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1342.

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invested them in the cemetery so that “we and our descendants should find earthly rest in the area surrounding our house of God.”121 The same intersecting interests plus financial ones motivated Gemeinden to establish their own cemetery instead of burying their dead at the mother church. Mittelkalbach said they could seldom carry out the “Christian duty” of remembering the dead in prayer, best done at the gravesite, because they rarely went to Neuhof.122 Analyzing such claims through the confessions would isolate their interest as Catholic and situate it in a larger Catholic-Protestant narrative. Analyzing that same history alongside rural Gemeinden in differing denominational regions, by contrast, would emphasize the Christianizing, localizing, and communalizing efforts they had in common, and it would note that members utilized means at their disposal in order to achieve their communal objective. Moreover, explained Mittelkalbach, they had, for a time in the past, buried their dead locally. They worried how the heavy burden of rising funerary costs made burials increasingly prohibitive for families in the upper part of parish Neuhof. Mittelkalbach knew, like others, how to communicate with their ecclesiastical authorities so as to incline them favorably to their cause. When no further burial space on a cemetery could be found, the corpses could be exhumed to make way for new ones. Willershausen opted for this in the late eighteenth century.123 The Catholic-populated Büchenberg, Döllbach, and Zillbach, which shared a cemetery district, were doing so about every dozen years by the 1830s, Lutheran-populated Caldern every ten, and Catholicpopulated Rückers every eight.124 Gemeinden frequently favored an alternative, namely, enlarging the existing cemetery by annexing a property adjacent to it. Wolfshausen opted for this solution. So did Oberweimar in the 1840s, Dipperz in 1867, and Rossberg in 1878.125 In Oberweimar’s case the members selected a small plot, revealing that they sided with continuity over any longterm solution. So, too, did Roth when they enlarged the local cemetery in 1852, for not only did they start running out of burial space already a dozen years later but also the site had always stood at risk of flooding from the nearby Lahn River.126 Some Gemeinden had to expand their cemetery more than once.

121 122 123 124 125

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HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 1257. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01. HStAM, 315e no. 5322. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 4523, 3392; HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1242. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 3389; HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2232, 2458. Cemetery annexations occurred at nearby locales such as Niederasphe in 1902 and Caldern in 1843, 1859 and 1882. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2447, 1242. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2459.

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Margretenhaun did so in 1844 and 1866.127 Hachborn did so in 1829 and 1847 and proposed it again in 1875.128 Nineteenth-century documents indicate others, such as Leidenhofen, Heskem, Dreihausen, and Cappel, wished to enlarge their existing cemeteries, too, but could not for lack of suitable, adjacent lands.129 Like Ronhausen in 1875,130 they settled on converting into a new cemetery some other plot typically among or bordering the village’s residences. Gemeinden founding their first-ever cemetery frequently did the same. Examples include Frauenborn, Weiershausen in 1848, Ilschhausen in 1906–1908, and, in a nearby parish, Nanz-Willershausen in 1923.131 In certain instances members chose to set up a new cemetery at a distance from the village. Niederweimar and Allna opted for this in the late 1840s and Kehna a half century later. Others did so out of pragmatism or necessity. Haddamshausen and Cyriaxweimar collaborated on a shared cemetery and situated it in a field halfway between them. By the early 1870s, when Roth again ran out of burial space, members finally conceded. They built a new cemetery across the Lahn and up on the Geiersberg hill, where there was no risk of flooding.132 While communal pride rose with the establishment of a Gemeinde’s first ever cemetery, ministers often balked at the prospect. At the heart of their objection lay an unwillingness to intensify their workload. In the wake of securing a minister from Fulda for its chapel in 1865, Catholic-populated Rothemann requested in 1866 “a separation of our Gemeinde from the previous cemetery district and the construction of [our] own cemetery.”133 The members stood ready to shoulder the costs. “The laying of a new cemetery in the district of the Rothemann Gemeinde would foster a new burden for a minister here,” countered the Hattenhof cleric, “in that each year on average he would take on an additional 12 burials” at a half-hour’s distance away. “One must all the more keep in mind that in this parish there are already … cemeteries in [Hattenhof], Kerzell and Büchenberg.”134 The Fulda authorities appear to have turned down the members’ request at this time, but Rothemann did get its cemetery later. In 1848 Oberweimar minister Clemen moaned about the proposed, elevated site for Hermershausen’s new cemetery. Now he would not only have to go to 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134

HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 1257. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1480. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2442, 1480, 1342, 1255. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1866. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2462. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2459. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 4526. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 4526.

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Hermershausen for their funerals but also hike an additional quarter hour up a road to their cemetery. It was too far and impassable, and “it is no small thing that one walks another good half hour through manure and then with wet feet enters a … dank church to preach, and thereby jeopardizes one’s life and health.”135 He requested exemption from having to accompany the corpse to the cemetery in harsh weather. The irony of his words was not lost on the Hermershausen mayor. “From time immemorial we’ve been allowed to imagine the three-quarter-of-an-hour path to the Oberweimar cemetery as being not too far,” he quipped in a blunt letter to Marburg. “The Gemeinde will not get involved in this proposal. It is much more hoped that the cleric in question will fulfill his duty in exchange for an honorarium.”136 In 1867 the Oberweimar minister complained that Kehna, if it acquired its own cemetery, would not have a sufficient number of schoolkids to sing at any local funeral. Plus, its chapel would be unsuitable for such a service. To gain leverage with the Marburg authorities, he invoked a comparison: if, as Kehna contended, epidemics were linked to the long transport of the deceased from their village to Oberweimar, then why would the same not apply to the city of Marburg, which established a new cemetery in nearby Ockershausen?137 Christian impulse and practical sensibilities also characterized other communal efforts regarding cemeteries. Leidenhofen in 1848 took offense at Peter Schreiner’s treatment of the old churchyard cemetery. Ebsdorf pastor Kähler permitted Schreiner to use the ground, but members protested that in the tax registers it belonged to the Gemeinde and not the pastor. For a pious man to allow Schreiner to place a manure pile on ground where the dead lay buried was “not Christian and against all Christianity.”138 In 1906 neighboring Ilschhausen wanted to break from the Hachborn cemetery district and build its own cemetery after Hachborn purchased a new cemetery field and demanded Ilschhausen contribute a high sum toward it.139 But the Ebsdorf minister issued a host of objections to Ilschhausen’s intention: the small village did not have a church, meaning the funeral service would have to be done graveside, nor bells to ring, nor a building in which a schoolmaster and choir could gather.140 These could be remedied if Ilschhausen built a hall or chapel

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HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2232. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2232. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2440. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2442. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2439. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2439.

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The local church in Ebsdorf nestled in the agricultural world: barn, shed, house, wagons, woodpiles, and manure pile (behind girl on the left) near the church and its grounds in Ebsdorf, estimated 1935. At times, agricultural structures stood adjacent to the wall of a churchyard

but the cost would surely exceed funds which members had set aside for the cemetery. Moreover, demands on him would be magnified. Instead of meeting Ilschhausen’s funerary procession at the entrance to Hachborn and holding services there, he would have to go all the way to Ilschhausen. Ilschhausen quelled each concern. The lack of venues could be remedied by having the

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minister lead a devotional in a home and deliver a message there.141 Various clerics, Ilschhausen continued, had already done so as a matter of custom in locales that had magnificent houses of worship just down the street. In winter and bad weather the choir children could simply stay home. The minister need not worry about the extra travel either, for there were only one or two deaths per year in Ilschhausen anyway, and the Gemeinde would gladly transport him from and to Ebsdorf or cover his costs if he wished to travel by his own means. Besides, “in cases of a contagious illness (the epidemical kind), it is definitely better when the funeral procession is not too long.”142 The argument was persuasive. Marburg issued its approval and by 1908 Ilschhausen had its own cemetery. As for the lack of a belfry, incorporated villages could find solutions. In Frauenborn, for example, a free-standing bell was hung at the local cemetery. The proliferation of village cemeteries and localization of burials exemplified brilliantly the crescendo in Christian life powered by rural Gemeinden in the nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Whereas Marburg residents buried their dead in Oberweimar until the early thirteenth century, Kehna residents kept doing so until they founded their own cemetery in 1891. The impulse in either case was not “medieval” or “Roman Catholic” or “modern” or “Protestant.” It was, in both cases, a Christianizing and localizing one.

6

Inscribing the Culture

Parishioners’ gravestones conveyed the same impulse. Those that survive date most often from the 1650–1750 period, with occasional others from earlier and later centuries. The iconography, imagery, and texts on some historic stones have become partially or totally effaced but on others remain legible. Gravestones from the 1650–1750 period strongly suggest that the institutional church determined certain content. On one side of the stone the book, chapter, and verse from the Bible used for the funeral sermon was usually inscribed. Sometimes the biblical text itself accompanied them. Christ can be seen depicted on stones in ecclesiastically Catholic and Lutheran cemeteries, but not on those in ecclesiastically Reformed ones. When the Virgin Mary appeared on stones in Catholic cemeteries, she did so with an aureole. Stonecutters who created the gravestones, it is worth remembering, typically lived

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HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2439. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 2439.

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in towns under the supervising eye of nearby ecclesiastical authorities and delivered the finished work to the rural cemetery. Most other content on gravestones strongly suggests parishioner input and determination. Christians in rural locations foregrounded certain things in particular. One was the familial scope of their gravestones, which offered a contrast to the individual gravestones of nobles. On family gravestones the text indicated the man’s name and then, usually, his wife’s name. It also contained various descriptors such as how many years they had been married, the year of or age at death, and the number of sons and daughters produced by the marriage. At times a gravestone stipulated how many children survived them, suggesting a familial or peasant concern for family and property to carry on another generation. Occasionally a gravestone stated the cause of the person’s death. One in Ebsdorf and another in Catholic-populated Stausebach indicated the woman died in childbirth, for example.143 An adult who had not married typically had his or her own gravestone. Epitaphs emphasized the local and the communal. They frequently mentioned that the person had lived and died in the village or town, which was named. Occasionally they mentioned the person’s place of birth elsewhere in the wider region. In Burghaun’s cemetery Catherina Stoffelin’s 1719 stone relayed that she was born in Hartershausen and Anna Maria Neuin’s 1736 stone that she originated in nearby Großenmoor. In a nod to the value rural Gemeinden placed on local order and peace, a stone proudly stated when a man had served as a communal officer, church elder, financial officer, or district juror. Examples of these include the 1703 stone of Christoph Preis in Stausebach, the 1728 stone of Georg Gläsner in Archfeld, the 1690 and 1747 stones of Johannes Heinrich Brunner and Johann Ludwig Krafft in Oberweimar, the 1734 stone of Johannes Schmidt in Burghaun, and the 1670, 1701, and 1702 stones of Johann Bodenbender, Hans Heinrich Weber, and Martin Höff in Ebsdorf. Occasionally, the text identified, in word or symbol, what the deceased man’s trade had been. Like other content on gravestones, it pointed to rural Christians’ keen interest in the duties, roles, and responsibilities that maintained the existence which their predecessors had bequeathed.

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Stausebach lay in the ecclesiastically Catholic parish of Anzefahr, which stood in close proximity to Amöneburg and several other Catholic parishes in Upper Hesse. The local Gemeinden in these Catholic parishes vigorously pursued the same localizing objectives across the same centuries as the others examined in this chapter. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10324; HStAM, 16 no. 5443; HStAM, 19g no. 779, 780; HStAM, 105c no. 597, 1590; and HStAM, 180 no. 2790.

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Epitaphs also asserted Christian, though not confessional or denominational, self-identification. Whereas the terms Lutheran, Catholic, and Reformed did not appear in them, the words Christian, God, Jesus, and the Lord regularly did. Johann Conrad Möller’s stone in Wolfshausen indicated that he died with God’s rich blessing on August 10, 1740, Johann Dietrich Knirim’s in Burghaun that he rests here in God after having blessedly passed away in the Lord in 1701, and nearby Valentin Schirm’s that he passed away blessedly in the Lord in 1754. In Stausebach a gravestone stated: ANNO 1696 the 10 Jan. the honorable Johannes Mangel, resident here in Stausebach, departed in rest from this world, lived with his housewife Margretha in marriage twenty-one years and raised three children, two sons and one daughter. His age 46 years. To him was this erected in Christian reflection. Commonly found, too, was the Christian expectation of God’s calling the deceased heavenward. When it pleases you, come Lord Christ, you know well when it is best, read a woman’s stone in Catholic-populated Himmelsberg, Call me and merrily wake me up, Let me be at the blessed worship, The Eternal will gaze on you, and take joy and delight in you. A 1703 tombstone in Himmelsberg said Hans Jacob Straübin had fallen asleep in the Lord and God will be gracious to his soul. The epitaph on a Stausebach man’s 1696 gravestone read, Christ’s suffering Christ’s death, such is called the heavenly inheritance, I have lived as long as God will, In my life I held steady to God, In my death I was ready, To go into the eternal blessedness. The epitaph on Straüblin’s gravestone assured the living: All of you who cross over here, See how it is around us now, as you are now so were we on earth, as we are now so you also will be, when you arrive in the earth. This Anna Straübin leaves in memory to her deceased husband as a last honor, erected in Himmelsberg. The cross, six-pointed star, and spiral appeared on numerous gravestones across Hesse. They were iconographic, geometric symbols seen in Christian Europe for over a millennium. A crown was placed, usually by an angel or the hand of God, on the heads of unwed women, who also had a lily bloom hewn onto their stone. A heart shape appeared on the stone of married women. In the upper panels were commonly displayed carved images of each family member, including the stillborn and deceased infants in swaddling clothes. The figures were organized with males to the viewer’s left and females to the right. In a 1689 case a Himmelsberg woman named Anna remarried after her first husband died in 1659, and therefore she appeared twice on the gravestone, once with members of her first family and once with those of her second. On

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some stones, the name of each person was inscribed next to his or her figure. In ecclesiastically Lutheran and Catholic parishes the crucified Christ was situated between the males and females. The standing or kneeling figures—the family beneath the cross—gazed reverently at him in devotion. The panel on an Ebsdorf woman’s tombstone depicted family members looking on Christ rising triumphantly from the grave in a scene of Christian worship and affirmation. Often a panel contained a scene that harmonized with the rural, agricultural world in which the gravestone was set. The back of Anna Straüblin’s final memorial to Hans portrayed the garden after Christ’s resurrection. Mary Magdalene kneels next to flowers and a container of spices. Her right arm crosses her abdomen in honor of the one she faces, the risen Christ, whom she initially mistook for the gardener. Christ, standing, is shown leaning on a shovel with his left hand and gesturing toward her with his right. Near them are two angels next to the empty tomb or sarcophagus. Heaven, demarcated from the garden by an ascending, wooden fence held together with rope, sits in the background. It radiates with the glory of an eternal sun and the three crosses of Calvary, on which two women reverently gaze. In nearby Stausebach Johannes Trier honored his wife in 1700 with a gravestone containing a similar version of the garden scene. Near it, the back panel of a stone showed the Bethlehem manger scene with sheep and a shepherd. Across the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, when changing classical, Empire, and Biedermeier styles led to shifting popularity in monument forms and symbols, the peasant penchant for custom kept earlier forms stable. In Upper Lahn locales, gravestones into the nineteenth century still depicted women in their short, head-covering mourning mantels and men in their long mantels and round felt hats.144 The agriculturally rich Schwalm region had its own distinct group of gravestones, and in the Reformed-populated Hersfeld district peasant custom informed gravestones into the late nineteenth century.145 Gravestones relayed the biblical understanding that the Lord giveth and taketh away. Great trials may be part of the divine plan for one’s life, as they were for Christ himself. A Christian was to bear them, knowing afflictions would not keep her from a blessed afterlife.146 Here lies Anna, read

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Rumpf, Eine Deutsche Bauernkunst, 98. Rumpf, Eine Deutsche Bauernkunst, 98. For more on the subject, see: Arthur Imhof, Lost Worlds: How Our European Ancestors Coped with Everyday Life and Why Life Is So Hard Today, trans. Thomas Robisheaux (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996).

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The 1696 gravestone of the Steinhausens in Stausebach. The name of each family member, including the four children who were stillborn or died in infancy, is inscribed next to them

a 1741 stone, born here in Wolfshausen, the daughter of Georg Hormel and Catharina née Mathein on 30. May 1706, lived in good health and bodily strength into [her] 29. year, when God beset her with great headaches and an ensuing blindness, which she suffered with patience until her blessed death. She died 3 November 1741 age 35 years 4 months and 3 days. Near Anna’s gravestone was that of Johannes Hättge, who died even younger but

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likewise passed away blessedly in God, 23. June 1695. [He] lived in this world 25 years. God be gracious to his soul. In a nearby village was an 1851 epitaph for a twenty-four-year-old woman, who died a day after giving birth and whose newborn died ten days later. It closed with a text based on John 16:21–22 to imply an earth-heaven parallel: just as a woman suffers pain during childbirth and then forgets it because of the ensuing joy of having the child, so the grief one suffers during life on earth is succeeded by a joy no one can take away. In Schönberg the 1740 stone of thirty-two-yearold Johannes Schmidt, son of a church elder, both comforted and exhorted: Dearest parents and relatives, brothers, brother-in-law and friends, live well to the end Thank God it is accomplished Be faithful until death. The epitaph on Anna’s 1689 stone in Himmelsberg implored assertively: My reader, go now, fight, run and have faith, As this woman did[,] so no one will steal from you, Achieve the beautiful crown of heaven which she now has. An Archfeld gravestone for two brothers who died in infancy in the later 1660s assured tenderly: The children call back, Parents dearest parents, pray to quiet yourselves, God will be your comforter and bear all pain, Though we are separated from you by death, do not mourn, we live well with God and are full of joy. A 1683 stone for an infant in Lutheran-populated Niederwalgern stated, Let the little children come to me, The crown of honor shall be theirs. On the 1680 stone of Johannes Engelbach in Lutheran-populated Wollmar, who died age nine, an angel descending from the clouds brings him the crown of honor and virtue. Angels did the same on the stones of other children. Ornate hangings on walls and bannisters in church sanctuaries were, by all indicators, Totenkronen—“crowns of death” created and hung by parishioners in honor of deceased single adults and children.147 Elsewhere on the local landscape rural Christians carved their culture onto timber-framed constructions, which abound across Hesse. Most often they carved words in the horizontal wooden beams situated between a building’s two stories. Surviving inscriptions testify to a growing discrepancy between urban and rural culture. Early ones in urban areas evidence a Christian culture. In Marburg a 1589 Latin inscription in stone above a door read: Christ, protect the house: defend the father’s children so that fires, robberies, plundering and winds won’t do any harm. This is

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Rumpf, Hessen, 98–99. Totenkronen are visible in Figures 18, 34, and 44.

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the duty of the Lord: may He who blessed the vine and the furrows of the ground protect his work. In 1600, on his house on the Marburg marketplace, Conrad Klein had written above the door, Whoever trusts God, he has built well, and next to it, Whomever God wants to bless, none can do evil against. In Alsfeld surviving examples from the same period parallel the message. A 1628 beam quoted Psalm 127:1—Unless the Lord builds the house, they labor in vain who build it—and a 1657 house declared, The Lord’s blessing has built this house through us In His protection we have also entrusted it He also keeps above us those who have departed from us And then lets us finally know them again in heaven. By the nineteenth century urban culture had shifted as residents linked divine providence to national interests. On a Hersfeld house and also on an 1884 Marburg house, opposite Klein’s on the marketplace, it read, German house, German land, shield it God with a strong hand.148 When the owners of a brewing house near the Marburg university church renovated their building in 1871, the year the German state and empire formed, they borrowed an inscription from a Munich brewer: Good German beer, hearty German bread, a heart full of old forthrightness, grant us, O Lord God, graciously this season. An 1897 house also invoked the German nation, though not the divine: German house, German land, Homeland. Other Marburgers’ inscriptions went in other directions. One was minimalist: Built 1894 A. Werneck. Another from 1899 displayed the main Masonic symbol, which may well have garnered the ire and suspicion of clerics and residents. Still another from that period reflected the rising concern with hygiene among urbanites and elites in Europe—With soap one measures culture Therefore bathe and scrub and lather yourself—and also the virtue of harmony, Peace brings plenty, discord brings want. In rural locales inscriptions on houses and barns shared certain characteristics through the centuries. Most included names. The 1783 home of Georg Diedrich in Böddiger bore only his name. The 1781 house of Johann Heinrich Ehrlich in Lutheran-populated Lohra proudly added that he was the local organist. Occasionally they indicated a person’s place of origin, which was usually the locale itself or one within a few hours’ distance. Inscriptions rhymed if written poetically; most included the building’s date of completion, and some the carpenter’s name too. Communal structures also bore

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J. Hallenberger, Haussprüche aus Hersfeld und Umgebung, Hessenland, vol. IX (Kassel, 1895), 49.

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inscriptions. A 1797 one in Breitzbach had the names of the village head and communal officers. In Lohra the elected communal leaders oversaw the construction of a 1713 council hall and had their names written into its beams. The lay officers of the local church in Kehna and Niedervorschütz had their names inscribed above the door of their later eighteenth-century churches. Those in Lutheran-populated Kirchvers had theirs painted on the wall next to a church window after an 1833 renovation. In Lutheran-populated Niederwalgern a beam on a 1782 schoolhouse said the Schoolhouse was built by the Gemeinde Niederwalgern under the supervision of Johannes Kohl and Hans Johan Hormel as well as Grebe Hans Ernst Kaletsch. Churches also testified to communal initiative. Above the doors of the 1782 Allna church was inscribed: In the name and to the honor of the Trinity was this house of God built by the Gemeinde Allna. Rural inscriptions attest to a culture that remained Christian into the twentieth century. Expressions about divine assistance in the building’s construction commonly appeared in Catholic-, Lutheran-, and Reformed-populated locales alike. The 1767 church in Kehna began it as This church was built with God’s help, an eighteenth-century house in Willershausen as With God’s help and counsel, and an 1862 construction in Catholicpopulated Bauerbach as This building was built with God’s help by Andreas Bieker and his wife Maria Elisabetha. Among many examples, certain nineteenth-century buildings in Catholic-populated Mardorf and Bauerbach, in Lutheran-populated Niederweimar and Dreihausen, and in Reformed-populated Rommershausen and Michelsberg each stated how the homeowners have trusted in God and built this barn or house. Buildings completed in 1790 and 1835 in Catholic-populated Emsdorf and Stausebach, and an 1823 house in Reformed-populated Mengsberg, each indicated that the owners have built this barn or house in God’s name. Owners of an 1862 Dreihausen barn and an 1853 one in Catholic-populated Anzefahr stated they had built the structures With God and His power. And the owner of an 1837 house in nearby Stausebach clarified that he had done so With God and not with my power. Some owners elaborated on the idea. At my work I go about building, inscribed a Kehna villager on his house, may God grant the bodily strength and vigor[,] with Him I begin the work and through Him I can complete it. An eighteenth-century house inscription in Haddamshausen stated The beginning I make with God and the end I make also with God. I have built this house in God’s hand. Finally, God’s blessing was often cited and solicited. The 1748 residence of Johann and Anna Elisabeth Kegel in Dreihausen thanked God’s

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goodness and blessing once their house was built. May the blessing of God rest on this house now and always, pronounced an 1845 house in Lutheran-populated Münden. Residents wanted God to abide after their home’s completion. Praised be God in heaven for the help and health granted during the construction of this house and barn, declared a 1912 Rossberg house, and may He command the same always in His gracious protection and shelter. A resident of predominantly Lutheran-populated Schiffelbach put it imperatively in 1836: Jesus, live in this house [and] don’t ever depart from it. A Wolfshausen house wished divine favor upon all who passed through it: Built in year 1904 by Johann Heinrich Weisbrod and [his] wife Martha, born Kapp. May God’s blessing abide by this house and all, who go in and out of it. A house inscription in Lutheran-populated Altenvers exhorted those who went in and out to recall that our Redeemer Jesus Christ has become the way to life. Rural Christians tended to craft an inscription’s message around certain themes. The root word for honor or glory (Ehr), in the sense of revering or being humble before and usually in relation to God, served as the basis for one of them. Examples from 1702 and 1818 in Lohra ended with to God alone be the glory written in German (Gott allein die Ehre) and Latin (Soli Deo Gloria). J. S. Bach used the phrase to express a deep Lutheran understanding, and because Lohra was ecclesiastically Lutheran, one might imagine that the homeowners possessed a devout Lutheran adherence. However, a 1728 house in nearby Catholic-populated Mardorf also proclaimed This building stands in God’s hand God protect it from fire and blaze Soli Deo Gloria, and a house in Reformed-populated Hilmes bore, simply, the words Soli Deo Gloria.149 A 1738 house in Neuhof rendered it, in German, as To God the glory, I have built this house, whenever He wills [it], so I must leave here, whomever He indulges, to him He will give it, to me, hereafter, a better life. An 1809 barn in Allna tweaked it as to God alone glory in the highest. Similarly, above the entrance doors to the 1828 church in Wiera and 1903 church in Archfeld, both populated by Reformed, it read, respectively, To the Glory of God (Zur Gottes Verehrung) and Glory to God in the Highest (Ehre sei Gott in der Höhe). Residents sometimes tacked on words after to God alone be the glory. On mid nineteenth-century houses in Ebsdorf, Dreihausen, and

149

Hallenberger, Haussprüche aus Hersfeld und Umgebung, 48.

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Inscription above the door of a 1585 communal building in Sachsenberg, near Schreufa

Altenvers, these were and none to any other. Above the Hachborn church entrance was added Repaired and lengthened in the year 1838, marking another expansion of the building after the earlier one completed in 1696 became insufficient for their growing needs. That church attendees ought to enter with reverent fear (Ehrfurcht meinem Hause) was inscribed

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above those of Mittelkalbach’s 1898 church and Neuhof’s church, which had to be enlarged in 1831 and again in 1909. In related fashion, above the doors of the late eighteenth-century church in the ecclesiastically Lutheran village of Frohnhausen, which was rebuilt after a 1778 fire burned the whole village to the ground, the inscription admonished, Guard your step when you go to the House of God and come that you might hear. The same words above the Kehna church door greeted parishioners for many generations. Rural Christians also linked honor and glory to nourishment. Whoever honors God and his succor will be provided with daily bread, declared a Bergheim house. Honor the furrow, read a 1648 inscription in Gemünden in the Taunus region, it gives us bread. The word “build” served as the basis for other themes. Rural residents’ frequent use of it in inscriptions was no accident. The noun “building” or “construction” (Bau) along with the verb “to build” (bauen) adorned many buildings in residential areas and the surrounding fields. The peasant world remained anchored to agricultural demands, laboring with human muscle, and stewardship of an inherited, family farming operation. An 1856 Niederweimar beam esteemed the task of building as a beautiful passion even though it demands much effort and labor. On their house an Ebsdorf couple declared that they had built it for themselves and their descendants. The centuries-old discourse of build/ruin and preserve/perish, which rural Gemeinden applied to their material and spiritual conditions, prevailed into the twentieth century. With God and not with my strength is this house built, in toil and troubles we have done it, and always trusted in him, read a Stausebach house inscription. It continued: He, who maintains the whole world with his omnipotence, will rule as God and Father and also preserve this house. An Ebsdorf resident’s house declared, Christ is the true foundation of Christianity until the end. Another in the village echoed: The base on which I build is Christ and his blood Yea him whom I trust I find the everlasting good. An 1859 house in Heskem promised a positive result for those who did find Christ: Everything goes well when one does it with God. And a 1740 Ebsdorf house attested, well [it goes] to him who trusts God. In sum, villagers used their earthly house’s construction as a metaphor for their understanding of spiritual reality. In like fashion, a balcony railing in Hermershausen’s 1884 church offered a spiritual exhortation by linking the agricultural and architecture domains in the beings of Christian attendees themselves: You are God’s fieldwork and God’s edifice.

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Villagers sometimes inscribed their homes with a scriptural passage. Appropriately, they most often chose ones that pertained to dwelling and houses. Well it goes to him who with David dedicates his house and trusts Christ alone he will be blessed and has built well, proclaimed an 1845 Ebsdorf house. A 1732 corner house in Hachborn drew from Colossians 3:16—Let the word of Christ richly dwell within you, with all wisdom teaching and admonishing one another with Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing with thankfulness in your hearts. Verses from the book of Psalms were popular. A Hermershausen house cited Psalm 127:1 and included the latter part about how unless the Lord guards the city, the watchman keeps awake in vain[,] speaks King David in the hundred seven and twentieth psalm. Two eighteenth-century houses in Lutheran-populated Landau and Lengefeld quoted Psalm 121:7–8 and its assurances for the soul: The Lord will keep you from all harm; he will watch over your soul. The Lord will watch over your going and coming both now and forevermore. Verses from Proverbs were popular too, especially those, like the Psalms and other biblical passages, that touched on dwellings. An inscription in Lutheran-populated Usseln borrowed from Proverbs 24:3–4—By wisdom a house is built, and through understanding it is established. Through knowledge its rooms are filled with rare and beautiful treasures. A Breitzbach house quoted from 2 Timothy 1:7—God has not given us a spirit of fear but of power and love and a sound mind. Biblical verses also appeared inside churches. Along the balcony railing in Allna a passage from Romans 12:12 stated, Be joyful in hope[,] patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Owners carved hymnal verses onto their houses as well. They did not select confessionally oriented ones, the kind that would have stirred approval from one denomination and objection from another. They opted for stanzas that spoke to the circumstances that persisted in rural Germany.150 A popular choice that resonated among them was Whoever trusts in God

150

Beth Plummer has noted how even nuns of differing confessions—persons who, in contrast to the peasants here, lived a consecrated, monastic life according to their confession’s directives—sang songs that came from the other confession’s songbook. At such times, songs “lost confessional specificity” due to their “multilayered interpretations.” Such “[a]daptation” resisted “attempts to establish strict confessional separation and boundaries.” Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, “A View from the Choir: Forming Lutheran Culture in Pluriconfessional Westphalian Convents,” Past & Present 234, supplement 12 (2017): 210–11.

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has built well, as seen on a later nineteenth-century inscription in Kehna as well as an 1880 Lohra house, which added Whoever trusts God has built well in Heaven and on Earth. The expression, from the opening lines of a sixteenth-century hymn written by Joachim Magdeburg, was championed in Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic publications alike.151 A building in Lutheran-populated Rhoden quoted the opening verse of the early seventeenth-century hymn attributed to Sigismund Weingärtner, In my beloved God I trust in every need, a hymn which also appeared in Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic songbooks.152 A later nineteenth-century Dreihausen inscription—taken from the eighteenth-century poetry of Elisa von der Recke, which had been set to music—offered, I hope in God with steadfast courage, He will give me help. However God desires it, so it is good, His [way] is my whole life. A house in Ebsdorf quoted the same but modified the second word—I build on God—to better suit rural affinities. A 1751 inscription on a house in Allna, displaying the opening lines of Bartholomäus Ringwaldt’s sixteenth-century hymn, also captured those inclinations: On God alone set your trust, on men’s help you should not build, it is God alone who keeps the faith.153 So, too, a building in Lutheran-populated Vasbeck quoted the first verse from Georg Neumark’s 1641 hymn titled “He who allows dear God to rule him.” It ended with Whoever trusts God the Most High, has not built on sand. Other verses complemented trust in the divine with a conscientious need to hedge against earthly indulgence and to bear up under hardship. A house in Lutheran-populated Weipoltshausen prayed the lines from Johann Heermann’s seventeenth-century hymn “O God, Thou Faithful God,” which

151

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Johann Crüger, Praxis Pietatis Melica. Das ist: Übung der Gottseligkeit / In Christlichen und trostreichen Gesängen / Herrn D. Martini Lutheri fürnemlich … (Frankfurt am Main, 1662), 690, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; Ambrosius Lobwasser, Neu verbessertes und vermehrtes Pfalz-Zweibrückisch-reformiertes Gesangbuch, 2 vols. (Zweibrücken: Hallanzy, 1748), 2:392–93, Post-Reformation Digital Library; Johann Michael Leonhard, Kanzelreden an eine katholische Landgemeinde. Für alle Sonn- und Feyertage eines Kirchenjahres, vol. 4 (Vienna: Anton Doll, 1823), 377, Google Books; Felix Rendschmidt, Lesebuch für die mittlere Klasse katholischer Stadt= und Landschulen (Breslau: Leukart, 1841), 44, Google Books. Paul Wagner, Gesangbuch, 8 vols. (Leipzig, 1697), 8:18, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek; Ambrosius Lobwasser, Neu verbessertes und vermehrtes Pfalz-Zweibrückisch-reformiertes Gesangbuch, 2:393–94; Wilhelm Gärtner, Te Deum laudamus! Großes, katholisches, geistliches Lieder-Buch auf Grund katholischer Gesangbücher, Anthologie’n und literarischer Denkmäler aus allen christlichen Zeiträumen gesammelt, vol. 3 (Vienna, 1857), 306, Google Books. Crüger, Praxis Pietatis Melica, 538.

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found its way into Lutheran and Reformed songbooks: if you want to give me anything, wealth, property and money, so give this also with it, “that no unjust goods are mingled among them.”154 Echoing a related Christian conviction, a later nineteenth-century Dreihausen inscription, quoting from a hymn by the seventeenth-century Lutheran and irenicist Johann Michael Dilherr, intoned: Better [that] Heaven and Earth would come to nothing, than [that] those who hate the cares of the flesh should be abandoned. An adjacent beam of the same resident’s house inscribed a text that continued the train of chastened thought. It was written by the seventeenth-century hymnwriter Joachim Neander, who was Reformed and also influenced by Pietism: Give the body food, clothes; Drive off illness [and] pains Lord, yet according to what is your Will, Lord, I will keep still.155 These Dreihausen residents expressed the timeless human longing to live without physical affliction. At a time when medical advances began seeding the modern hope to rid human existence of physical suffering, the residents, like other rural Christians, kept that longing subject to divine purpose. None of the extant rural inscriptions expressed nationalist concerns or invoked the word “German,” although a 1782 one in Reformed-populated Herleshausen did contrapose the spiritual and divine to the temporal and imperial: God is and remains a just God The more He gives the more He has He gives much more in one day than can a whole Empire. In what may have been a conscious rebuke of the rising nationalist fervor in Germany, an 1882 inscription in Niederwalgern quoted the second verse of “Salvation now has come for all,” a 1524 hymn by Paul Speratus: Our fatherland is not here, Only up there by you, God, that is the place where your hand stores up joy for us. It contrasted with the nationalist urban inscriptions, which harmonized with Ernst Moritz Arndt’s 1813 poem, later a popular choral song among the nineteenth-century German bourgeoisie, “What is the German’s fatherland?”156 Indeed, more generally, whereas urban dwellings steadily became the private domestic sphere of the

154

155 156

Crüger, Praxis Pietatis Melica, 606; Ambrosius Lobwasser, Neu-verbessertes KirchenGesang-Buch. Verfassend die 150 Psalmen Davids … durch den Christlichen Synodum Generalem der Reformirten Kirchen in den vereinigten Ländern, Cleve, Gülich, Berg und Marck (Cleve, 1781), 91–92, Post-Reformation Digital Library. J. Fr. Iken, ed., Joachim Neander. Sein Leben und seine Lieder. Auf Veranlassung seines 200. Todesjahres nach bekannten und neuendeckten Quellen (Bremen: C. Ed. Müller, 1880), 407. Ryan Minor, Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity, and Nationhood in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 8–9.

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“bourgeois family” starting in the later eighteenth century,157 rural dwellings retained the ideal of a public household and the moral economy of agriculturalists.158 Neither did any rural inscription indicate the confessional interests of a particular denomination. They professed views held commonly across the Christian world. This included Christianity’s critical appraisal of human nature and capacity. Texts from Psalm 118:8 and Isaiah 36:6 inspired the writing on an 1883 house in Leidenhofen: Set your trust in God alone, Do not build on the help of men, God is the only one who keeps faith, there is no other faith in the world. A house in Allna offered a remedy: If malevolent men do you ill via betrayal and deception, Ponder devoutly on what the Lord endured. Yet an 1896 house in Heskem, invoking a saying known in other German lands, dispelled fear about the harm man could actually do: I regard those who hate me the same as the rainwater that flows off the roofs and though they already shun me so must they bear that God is my helper. A Dreihausen homeowner said the same on his 1845 barn, though he, at least, remarked kindly about those others: Here, I love my enemies, though they envy me much, so they must bear that God is my helper. A Weipoltshausen beam borrowed from a hymn to pledge a more tactful approach: so far as it is Christian [to do] let me live in peace and friendship with every man. Immersed as they still were in an agricultural world, rural Christians tied their farming efforts to God. O God, grant a constant flourishing, so that the master, the mistress, the children, the horses cows and oxen may rejoice, entreated the inscription on an eighteenthcentury barn in Kirchvers. Whoever gathers in summer does well, one reads above a 1797 Hermershausen barn door, and whoever sleeps during harvest, he scatters, but on God’s blessing everything rests. A 1792 Lohra barn quoted Proverbs 3:9, Honor the Lord from your wealth And from the first of all your produce. A 1781 barn in nearby Lutheran-populated Rollshausen added verse 10 to it: So your barns will be filled with plenty and your vats will overflow with new wine. And to both verses Deuteronomy 11:14 was added and slightly

157 158

O. Mörke, “Social Structure,” in Germany: A New Social and Economic History, vol. 2, 1630–1800, ed. S. Ogilvie (London: Arnold, 1996), 156–57. Otto Brunner, “Das ‘ganze Haus’ und die alteuropäische ‘Ökonomik,’” in Otto Brunner, Neue Wege der Verfassungs- und Sozialgeschichte, 2nd ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1968), 103–27.

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modified by a 1788 Weipoltshausen barn: He will give the rain for your land in its season, the autumn and the spring rains, so that you may gather in your crops[,] your grain harvest. A 1745 Wolfshausen barn door also quoted a verse concerning sustenance and how the creatures of earth depend on divine provision: These all look to you, to give them their food in due season. When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are filled with good things. Psalm 104. Various inscriptions reminded the viewer of everyone’s dependence on the peasant. One in Burghaun summarized this as, If God does not bless, [and] the peasant does nothing, I ask who then has [anything] to eat? Another in Bauerbach and Lutheran-populated Holzburg noted that, when the prince demands his tribute, the nobleman, minister, schoolmaster, soldier, and poor man all explain why they need not render anything, to which the peasant says, let them go their way, I must maintain all six of them anyway. A rural inscription might ask God to bless both the urbanite and the peasant, but others, as in Lutheran-populated Sterzhausen and Bürgeln, highlighted a peasant disdain for the city dweller. While the peasant is a poor child of the earth who must agonize day and night with cares and griefs, it stated, what does the citizen in the city do? He laughs at the peasant and drinks himself full. Another in the Schwalm region quipped that The most lovely weapon in the world is the plow in the field. Peasant attitudes toward the state similarly rang with agriculturalist pride. The country man stands in high honor, declared a house in Lutheranpopulated Ruttershausen, he is the first man of the state, for only he can feed the people if he obtains God’s blessing. Another in Lutheran-populated Holzhausen near Fronhausen denounced any who treated that man contemptuously. The peasant is a man of honor, it read, for he orders the field. Whoever would ridicule a peasant is a bad model, for the sweat of a peasant sustains the entire state. On this note, an 1883 Dreihausen building admonished that one must sweat and not be lazy to earn one’s bread, that if he wanted not to languish because of hunger, then he must set off afresh to the work. He is to spurn the way of the idle and as a man stand before God. An 1878 barn nearby clarified that such actions and undertakings are to be done in the name of Jesus Christ, he will be praised early and late until all our actions have an end. Rural Christians applied metaphors regarding animal husbandry to their spiritual lives as keenly as their ancestors had. The Lord is my faithful

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shepherd, he keeps me by shelter and pasture, said an inscription in the Reformed-populated Schwalm region, borrowing inspiration from Psalm 23, therefore I will never want for any kind of joy. One carries me to the grave there I gently sleep in peaceful tranquility until God shepherd of all souls, will awaken me again, an 1878 house in Lohra noted solemnly, adding: O Father let your children enter into eternal life. An inscription in Lutheran-populated Rhena quoted John 10:27—My sheep listen to my voice and they know me and follow me. Over a door entrance to Lutheran Mohnhausen’s 1911 church was written The Lord is my Shepherd, and over the one on Dipperz’s church was an image of Christ and a sheep with I am the good shepherd! quoted from John 10:11. The same agriculturalists whose livelihood depended directly on the forces of nature commonly beseeched God to safeguard their material conditions against natural phenomena and human accident. The prayer reverberated through time. A 1669 Ebsdorf inscription stated it as This house stands in God’s hand, God protect it from fire and blaze. A 1699 house in Lutheran-populated Schweinsberg put it this way: This house stands in God’s hand. God protect it from fire, hail, and storm that it does not fall unattended into ruin. And an 1818 Dreihausen house expressed it as Protect us and our property from hail, fire, flood, above all. Damage, leave us in peace. Shelter us with a gracious wing.159 Given their thin margin of security and vulnerability to the earth’s elemental forces, agriculturalists could not indulge in the illusion that they could create for themselves a safe space in which to retreat. An 1857 Niederweimar building thus addressed the divine with Now, we bid you dear God that all fire and flood graciously be averted. Down the street a farmer pleaded the same on his 1902 barn. A 1903 house in Rossberg declared it had that divine defense: This house stands in the hand of God, who protects it against fire and burning, against hail and storm, so that it does not collapse unawares. Rural Christians balanced those petitions with a recognition of life’s severities and uncertainties and a wish to be content whatever the circumstance. Give, from the wealth of this world, as much as is useful to me and pleases You, [and] with little satisfaction from my efforts, cheerfulness, declared a late nineteenth-century Dreihausen

159

Stoffers, Rentschler, Schneider, Kulturdenkmäler in Hessen. Landkreis MarburgBiedenkopf. I, 65.

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Kratzputz (decorative patterns and images created in plaster) along with an inscription containing the opening words of Matthew 7:14 (“Small is the gate, narrow is the road”) and an exhortation, on a later eighteenth-century barn in Holzhausen near Fronhausen. Hessian Kratzputz had local varieties, the patterns of which went by the names of locales. It originated in the seventeenth century and exemplified the agriculturalists’ artistically rich material culture

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inscription. A Leidenhofen structure from the early 1880s put it more starkly: Fear, Misery, Adversity, Affliction and Need, [are] the daily bread of all Christians such that here on this earth they will always be fed in pain. Another down the street prescribed a course of action: Let us therefore be diligent to do right, until our respite comes and work is no more. Above all each one must see to it, that he does not fall short of heaven. A barn in Heskem, a 1775 Rollshausen house, and an 1880 Lohra house stated the same in positive terms: Whoever trusts in Jesus Christ will be in heaven. While tensed between bounty and privation, peasants over the centuries kept to the Christian understanding about the transience of life on earth and the permanence of the afterlife in heaven. Everything that lives is mortal read a 1518 Bringhausen inscription. Time is passing, Death is coming; O man, do right, and fear God, admonished one in Berndorf. The Lord gave, the Lord has taken away, The name of the Lord be praised, relayed a Willingen inscription from Job 1:21. An 1880s barn in Leidenhofen cried, following Michael Franck’s 1652 hymn, O how vain, O how fleeting, are the days of Christians who are dragged through time swung into eternity.160 Houses in Lutheran-populated Mornshausen and Mellnau drew an agricultural metaphor to communicate the point: Think on two fields, the one you only plant, in the other God’s fatherly hand will lay you to rest. Today and tomorrow therefore see to it a good crop of grain. An inscription in Lutheran-populated Oberrosphe, inspired by 1 Peter 1:24–25, drew a horticultural metaphor: A human is like a flower, fresh and full of bloom in the morning, but in the evening, when the bell rings, faded and withered it sinks to the ground. A house in Bortshausen extended that metaphor to the afterlife in heaven: Beautiful is the flower sprouting from the earth, it withers under your

160

The house inscription modified the words “days of mankind” in favor of “days of Christians.” The hymn appeared in Lutheran and Reformed songbooks. Crüger, Praxis Pietatis Melica, 835–36; Kirchengesangbuch für die reformierte Gemeinde Göttingen. Nebst einem Anhang (Cassel: Hof und Waisenhaus, 1894), 277–78, Google Books; Lobwasser, Neu verbessertes und vermehrtes Pfalz-Zweibrückisch-reformiertes Gesangbuch, 2:79. The scripture on which the hymn was based, Ecclesiastes 1:2, also inspired Catholic songwriters, who fashioned wording that hewed closely to Franck’s: “Earthly joys are so vain, Our Life [is] short and fleeting, Everything [is] sheer vanity. If I have God’s friendship, [then] I rejoice with the greatest gift In this age and eternity.” Katholisches Gesangbuch für das Bisthum Speyer (Speyer: Daniel Kranzbühler, 1842), 357, Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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hand; with hope in the sanctum of the heart cultivate the crops for a better land. So, too, did a house in Caldern: I know a better way: I want to go to the garden where the roses of heaven stand, where radiates the bed of flowers that my Redeemer has painted. Life spent daily among plants in field and garden inclined the agriculturalists naturally to this imagery. Rural Christians treated residence and inheritance metaphorically too. One variation of a common expression read: I have a house that is not mine. Neither will it be his who is second. The third says: I’m not staying here! The fourth reckons: The same applies to me as to you. The fifth also departs. Now tell me, to whom does this house belong? A 1625 inscription in Mengeringhausen also reminded the reader of life’s transience: This earthly house, o pious Christian, is your lodging for a short while, The heavenly house, secured for you through Jesus Christ, is your dwelling in eternity. A 1751 house in Lutheran-populated Amönau addressed God about that heavenly inheritance: O You Creator of all things, move and lead us [in] our senses and undertakings here on earth until we become heirs of heaven. A 1768 board fastened to a Borthausen house also serenely sought divine providence to lead through this world and into the next: Bless our going out, God, our coming in, too, bless our daily bread, bless our activity and rest, bless us with peaceful death and grant us heaven’s inheritance. An 1855 stable in Kehna assured that Whoever has established his farm in this world and not forgotten the salvation of his soul, can depart it in peace, for in the other world is prepared already his house, which God has built. Others across the seventeenth century rendered this as Here we build everything firmly, and yet [we] are foreign guests. Then they would explain, as a Kehna inscription did, how though we build up so little in heaven while here on earth, we will live eternally there, and so we ought to pray to store up treasure in it. Across these same centuries, certain devout parties in Europe and North America had chiliastic aspirations of fashioning a model society based on scriptural notions of the Heavenly Jerusalem.161 Later, the more radical Enlightenment secularized the Christian metanarrative, and the worldly ideologies that ensued endeavored to achieve heavenly outcomes on earth

161

Claus Bernet, “Expectations of Philadelphia and the Heavenly Jerusalem in German Pietism,” in A Companion to German Pietism, 1660–1800, ed. Douglas Shantz, 139–67.

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without the influence of religion.162 Progressive movements inspired by these secular ideologies assumed redemptive and salvific tones to varying degrees. When their adherents found the discrepancy between the ideal and reality too troubling, they intensified the demand on politics and the state to produce utopian outcomes. Rural Christians, meanwhile, affirmed the Christian metanarrative they had inherited and left heavenly aspirations for life after death. They regarded the discrepancy as well as the occasional tragedy as part of earthly existence. If surviving examples are indicative, then inscriptions abounded on buildings in Lutheran and Catholic parishes across southern Upper Hesse and in neighboring Reformed parishes of southern Lower Hesse. Farther east they appeared noticeably less often in the Reformed parishes of Böddiger and Willershausen and in the Catholic parishes of Margretenhaun and Neuhof. Occasionally they appeared to the south in the county of Hanau-Münzenberg. They thus reveal not denominational but regional patterns of culture. Similarly, if surviving housefronts in rural Hesse are indicative, then a regional explanation ahead of a denominational one may also clarify patterns regarding statues of Mary. Whereas niches and stands for the statue were set up for some home exteriors in the Catholic-populated locales in the Fuldian region, they are seldom seen in the Catholic-populated villages of Upper Hesse. Moreover, when viewed from the Catholic-Protestant vantage, the statues are read principally as evidence of a strong Catholic adherence and association. The vantage presented here in Part 1 leads one to wonder whether rural Christians’ concern for their agricultural and communal life, and their habit of bringing Christian means to bear on it, weighed more heavily. Homeowners also apparently hired carpenters irrespective of denomination. Of four nineteenth-century houses in Catholic-populated Stausebach, two were built by carpenters from the nearby Lutheran- and Reformedpopulated rural towns of Rauschenberg and Kirchhain, and two from the nearby Catholic-populated villages of Anzefahr and Amöneburg. The inscriptions were common ones. In God’s name have Georg Adam Fritsch and his wife Anna Margretha built this house, read one of them. With God and his power have Christoph Höck and his wife Maria Theresa brought this house to hand, read another. Similarly, an 1862 house in Catholic-populated Bauerbach was built by a carpenter from

162

Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1966).

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Lutheran-populated Moischt. Cross-denominational hiring worked in other directions as well. Nineteenth-century house inscriptions in Ebsdorf offer the names of carpenters who came not only from villages in and around the parish but also from nearby, Catholic-populated Schröck, Niederklein, and Amöneburg. Church construction followed the same pattern. The architects Georg Ungewitter and Carl Schäfer designed churches in nearby ecclesiastically Catholic and evangelical parishes during the same period. They followed in the century-old footsteps of Charles du Ry (1692–1757), the Kassel court architect who designed the Catholic churches in the Upper Hessian villages of Schröck and Allendorf after his Huguenot family was taken in by Reformed Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel (r. 1670/1677–1730).163 163

Stoffers, Rentschler, Schneider, Kulturdenkmäler in Hessen. Landkreis MarburgBiedenkopf. I, 73–76.

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Chapter 5

Surging toward Crescendo, 1648–1900s This closing chapter of Part 1 returns to the primal impulse of rural Gemeinden to better their souls by increasing localized ministrations. They had two further options to this end. One was to switch affiliation by attending services in a neighboring parish or by transferring their association from one parish minister to a neighboring one. The other was to devolve the parish—that is, to carve out and found a new parish from an existing one. Both involved working not inside but outside the constraints of their parish. Agricultural fluctuations again played an important role. The population in early nineteenth-century German lands tended to grow despite an economic depression and a rise in poverty. Then the agricultural economy went on a long-term boom, minus certain temporary setbacks, as it expanded to a level of unprecedented output.1 An intensification in agricultural and livestock production through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries abetted the trend.2 The population of Germany rose vigorously because of it, nearly doubling in size between the mid-nineteenth century and early twentieth century as measured in the lands within Germany’s 1871 borders. Some rural Hessian locales grew at a significant pace too, while others did so more modestly due to waves of emigration to the burgeoning German cities and to other lands.3 Whatever their situation, rural Gemeinden intensified the localization of Christian ministrations and the construction of sacred venues to host them, driving both to an unprecedented peak. It would be incorrect to characterize the trend as a revival or renewal. Those terms imply that rural Christian life had been dying or needed to be restored to the existence it once had. This was not the case. Neither did communal efforts mark a sacralization or re-Christianization after a spell of secularization or dechristianization. They

1 David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: the Long Nineteenth Century (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 143, 238. 2 Walter Achilles, Deutsche Agrargeschichte im Zeitalter der Reformen und der Industrialisierung (Stuttgart: Eugen Ulmer, 1993), 209–85. 3 Simone A. Wegge, “Inheritance Institutions and Landholding Inequality in NineteenthCentury Germany: Evidence from Hesse-Cassel Villages and Towns,” The Journal of Economic History 81 no. 3 (2021): 909–42.

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_008

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were not ebbing and flowing between the one and the other.4 Rather, the trend marked a crescendo of Christian life among rural Gemeinden, the escalation of a surge they had begun to mount a generation or two after 1648. The crescendo culminated starting in the second half of the nineteenth century on the strength of animating forces that had been at work in rural Germany for more than a thousand years.

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Betterment by Switching

Gemeinden had various reasons for wanting to switch affiliation, be they more gradual pressures or immediate causes, or both. Among Wolfshausen’s 1689–1691 complaints, the members emphasized that “[o]ur church in Wolfshausen is not an affiliate of Fronhausen, but a mother church just like [the one in Fronhausen].”5 They cited, too, how the waters blocked them from each other for six weeks or more at a time. Infants died without baptism, and, as they put it, many died bereft of the pastoral care that relays God’s comfort.6 They wanted the Fronhausen minister to be replaced or a nearby minister to be assigned to them. But after Cappel acquired a minister in residence, the dozen or so Wolfshausen commune members capitalized on this change in 1691 by seeking their Gemeinde’s dissociation from parish Fronhausen and association with the Cappel minister. After the authorities granted the request, the approximately seventy Wolfshausen parishioners—the commune members along with those in their households—walked through Ronhausen on some Sundays to attend services in Cappel. The sight of it must have motivated Ronhausen parishioners to want the same, especially after the construction of the Argenstein mill in the 1690s made crossing the Lahn to reach Oberweimar significantly more hazardous. Before long, they, too, were attending services in Cappel. The arrangement was meant to be temporary, but Ronhausen desired to make it permanent by trying, several times, to break officially from Oberweimar and join Cappel.7 One occasion was in 1711 when the Oberweimar minister died and authorities prepared to appoint a successor. As Ronhausen

4 Wolfgang Schieder, “Säkularisierung und Sakralisierung der religiose Kultur in der europäischen Neuzeit. Versuch einer Bilanz,” in Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa: Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung, ed. Hartmut Lehmann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997), 308–13. 5 HStAM, 17e Reizberg 26. 6 HStAM, 17e Reizberg 26. 7 HStAM, 315f no. 2275.

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later described it, Cappel was “barely a half hour away and always [accessible via] dry earth.”8 The members enclosed a hand-drawn map to illustrate the point. In the mid-eighteenth century, Dreihausen and Rossberg tried and failed to be transferred to parish Wittelsberg, and in 1823 the village heads and church elders from both planned out a transfer to parish Rauischholzhausen.9 They cited changing demographics. The local population had “been increasing for 20–30 years, as have the duties of ministers and schoolmasters. Thus for many years already we have not been able to hold our customary monthly services.”10 Gemeinden painstakingly detailed how their predicament jeopardized their access to Christian ministrations and, therefore, their souls. Dreihausen and Rossberg groaned about the full hour’s walk to Ebsdorf. Some locals had broken-down bodies, the children ruined their clothes and health along the way, and when everyone did arrive they often disturbed the worship because the church was already full of people.11 “[C]oncerning our and our children’s spiritual well-being,” wrote the thirteen Ronhausen commune members in 1725, “none [of the ten villages in the Oberweimar parish] was so unfortunate as ours in that [we] alone [are] separated from the parish by the Lahn River…. Not only are we to attend worship service in Oberweimar, but also we must bring our children there for baptism and school.”12 They had already lamented in 1706 how the Lahn, during flooding and torrential rains, “placed us and especially our children in the greatest of danger.”13 The threat worked in both directions. The water and distance, they wrote, also made it difficult for their minister or his adjunct to reach Ronhausen and administer the Eucharist to women who were lying in after giving birth (Kindbett) or to sick persons in agony. Correspondence in 1711 said many such childbearing women died without receiving a pastoral word of solace or the Eucharist.14 Wolfshausen knew these troubles well. Members there a generation earlier described how a minister of Fronhausen “often cannot [hold services here] during wintertime, when the waters freeze or surge.”15 Breitzbach knew them well too. When par8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15

HStAM, 315f no. 203. HStAM, 315f no. 274. HStAM, 315f no. 274. HStAM, 315f no. 274. HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1482. Tensions between Ronhausen and Oberweimar due to burials were not new. The Marburg consistory had to settle a dispute concerning them in 1613. HStAM, PMK vol. 4 (6 Oct. 1613). HStAM, 315f no. 2275.

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ents sent their children to confirmation lessons in the cold season prior to Easter, members explained in 1840, they agonized at watching their confirmands head out on the hilly and, at times, impassable path to Willershausen. A child often turned back because she became ill on the way. A child who completed the journey often suffered a sickness, which manifested later in a physical ailment. When a local needed to fetch parish register extracts or a minister’s attestation, the “great distance means the loss of half a day, indeed, in wintertime a whole day, which, given our labor relations, is a great disadvantage.”16 When a man needed ministerial counsel on life matters of critical importance, he could not because his labor relations prevented him from leaving work for a half day. His heart thus remained “disquieted.” When an illness worsened and became life-threatening, the person desired comfort by praying and receiving the Eucharist from one’s minister. Instead, the pain of “death of our beloved” was often doubled, for “we are not in position” to meet the person’s last wishes.17 “In this way,” they grieved, “our spiritual and bodily wellbeing suffers because of the great distance of our minister.”18 Gemeinden intuitively employed such rhetoric, often with disarming candor, to rouse the authorities’ concern. Dreihausen and Rossberg remarked that whenever their people arrived in Ebsdorf too early or could not go because of rough weather conditions, they slipped into the taverns instead. “What use, then, is even the best sermon?”19 After the minister was overtaxed from conducting so many services all over the parish, he allegedly exclaimed, “Oh s- - -, I’ve totally ruined myself these past eight days.”20 Church authorities knew the demands were real. A generation earlier they read how, every year in the Ebsdorf parish, there were two hundred and sixty scheduled sermons, twentyseven Eucharistic administrations, and six schools to oversee, besides other duties.21 Furthermore, Dreihausen and Rossberg declared in 1823, “[t]he official worship of God in our churches is of the greatest importance to every man, including the highborn and refined, in so far as he still professes Christianity.”22 The provocative comments were a thinly veiled, condescending criticism of the budding skepticism and abandonment of traditional Christianity promulgated by some well-educated elites and urbanites. The Gemeinden also

16 17 18 19 20 21 22

HStAM, 315e no. 5308. HStAM, 315e no. 5308. HStAM, 315e no. 5308. HStAM, 315f no. 274. HStAM, 315f no. 274. HStAM, 315f no. 276. HStAM, 315f no. 274.

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Figure 27

Locally, tension between the church and a tavern or inn, and how the latter could attract people away from the former, had a long history in Europe

likely designed them to curry favor with church authorities, who fretted over that trend. Breitzbach anguished that while they could see “the joy of other parents as the time approaches when their children are to be taken on as members of our Christian Church,” they themselves could only be saddened and distraught.23 Gemeinden also used compelling logic. Ronhausen pleaded in multiple letters “for our and our children’s spiritual well-being” and to “take pity on our and our children’s spiritual well-being.”24 Detaching Ronhausen from parish Oberweimar, they reasoned, would still leave the latter “9 villages strong,” whereas parish Cappel “consists of only 2 villages, namely Cappel and Wolfshausen, in whose midst we lie.”25 Gemeinden seeking a switch had already worked out the solution and eagerly proposed it to church authorities. Both Ronhausen and the Cappel 23 24 25

HStAM, 315e no. 5308. HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 315f no. 230.

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minister attested in writing that members had inquired of him in February 1725 about transferring to his parish and that he was willing.26 The move would end five centuries of residents and their minister crossing the Lahn to reach each other. A customary worship service and children’s instruction in Cappel would eliminate worry about the river, the members wrote eagerly. They offered assurances that the Cappel minister would not administer sacraments to them or admit their children until the authorities consented. Wolfshausen had received such authorization in 1691, but simmering rancor between Wolfshausen and Cappel boiled over in 1737 when Cappel demanded that Wolfshausen contribute to parish and school buildings.27 By 1768 Wolfshausen members became restless once again. Getting to Cappel took an hour and a half, and because “our village is very small and cannot maintain [its] own schoolmaster,” the children missed out on the compulsory school lessons because those under age nine and ten “are not able to make it there.”28 Moreover, in times of “high water and the cold and snow of winter we do not have the heart to send them there and place them at risk. Thus, not only do the children suffer under this, but also the parents have to be in constant distress.”29 Their ancestors said Wolfshausen had once belonged to parish Hassenhausen. Members asked to be joined again to it as well as its school, which “lies scarcely a half hour from us and has no water [flooding or crossing] to worry about.”30 For Breitzbach a transfer to the Nesselröden parish meant they would be “scarcely 10 minutes away from our minister. This has already been our desire for a long time.”31 Breitzbach pursued it “urgently and unanimously” again in 1840 when the Willershausen parish post became vacant. The transfer would ensure the Breitzbach children’s confirmation. “How desirable it would be for this reason alone,” members wrote, “to have our request fulfilled.”32 The Nesselröden minister was willing to it, they reported. So, too, “to our greatest joy,”33 were the parish patrons, the Treusch von Buttlar family. The nobles, in addition, said circumstances prevented the Willershausen minister from monitoring the morality of the Gemeinde. Dreihausen and

26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1487. HStAM, 315f no. 203. HStAM, 315f no. 203. HStAM, 315f no. 203. HStAM, 315e no. 5308. HStAM, 315e no. 5308. HStAM, 315e no. 5308.

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Rossberg also devised a solution. “So you see, most honorable lords!” they exclaimed in rhetorical closure to their 1823 petition. “This and the aforementioned, authorized reasons cause us humbly to request that you join our two Gemeinden to [Rauisch]Holzhausen.”34 Not only would they have local services every other week instead of once a month, but also they knew and liked the Rauischholzhausen minister. In the transfer, “we see, for us and our children’s salvation, a brighter future.”35 Seeking a switch, however, usually whipped up frenzied opposition. The Ronhausen case illustrated this brilliantly. Oberweimar minister Busch sharply objected to the members’ 1725 petitions. The Ronhausen residents, like all their ancestors, including those before the Reformation, he wrote, were obligated to attend worship services in Oberweimar.36 Nobody could cast doubt on the spiritual condition of their ancestors’ souls, Busch continued, and in no way had the current parishioners been neglected of any pastoral ministrations. Moreover, it was totally unfounded to argue that one was unable to wade through the river, for those with fields and meadows on the west side could reach and tend them as before. But Ronhausen exposed Busch’s misrepresentations. The fields and meadows were worked in summer, only on days when the water was low, and by able adults. By contrast, all people of all ages had to attend worship services during all seasons and children had to attend school even during winter. Moreover, the Lahn flooded onto some of their meadows, not merely up to Ronhausen, as Busch alleged, and whereas he never paid for ferry boat passage, they always did except when going to mill their grain. Busch also disputed Ronhausen’s time measurements. Everyone knew the journey from Ronhausen to Oberweimar was only a “little hour,” not an hour and a half, and it took less time than for attendees who came, willingly and faithfully, from Weiershausen and Gisselberg.37 But the members claimed attendees from the other villages in the parish always walked on a firm path. Moreover, one does “not recognize how the water is a danger until one has drowned.” Once, the minister failed to deliver a child’s funeral sermon because he and the singers, upon seeing the river level, returned to Oberweimar. “We had to bury the dead by ourselves,” wrote Ronhausen. Busch disputed Ronhausen’s other estimates, too. “[A]ll truth-loving people,” he declaimed, had to acknowledge that Ronhausen to Oberweimar via Marburg was “only 2 little hours,” not four, and Ronhausen to Cappel “one hour,” not one-half.38

34 35 36 37 38

HStAM, 315f no. 274. HStAM, 315f no. 274. HStAM, 315f no. 230; HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1482. HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 315f no. 230.

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Figure 28

Villages in and around parish Oberweimar

Besides, he added, no one from Ronhausen had ever traveled to Oberweimar via Marburg for a baptism, for the pastor had crossed the Lahn even when the water peaked. But Ronhausen, led by the local mayor and district official, replied that many infants had been baptized locally by women, for the river’s water level, even when low, still came up to one’s “belt.”39 Busch dismissed the claim as spurious and a “complete fiction,” but Ronhausen stood by it. Busch also tried to frame Ronhausen’s reasoning as flawed by citing nearby Wenkbach and Seelbach. They also had hour-long treks to a mother church but were content and did not seek transfers to another parish. However, records indicated otherwise. Both were seeking earnestly to improve their parish relations.40 Ronhausen claimed everyone wanted the transfer to Cappel, not merely some, as had been alleged. They spoke truthfully. All thirteen members individually signed a letter to confirm it; six of them, including a widow, could only sign with “+++.”41 Some locals and particularly the elderly, the members added, had not been to church in two to three years. Indeed, some “had not gone to the Oberweimar church in fifteen years” due to physical incapacity or the risk involved, “yet attended service in Cappel because of its close prox-

39 40 41

HStAM, 315f no. 230. Wenkbach’s case is detailed here in Chapters 3–5. For Seelbach: HStAM, 17e Lohra no. 42; HStAM, 17e Seelbach no. 2. HStAM, 315f no. 230.

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imity.”42 Ronhausen attributed Busch’s unwillingness to a lack of sympathy and appreciation. “The minister at Oberweimar does not understand how we live, for no one among us goes to Oberweimar if he doesn’t have to.” In brief, “[Busch] will not take it upon himself to safeguard our souls.”43 Salary matters and personal differences between the Oberweimar and Cappel ministers complicated Ronhausen’s transfer. Busch detailed how the loss of Ronhausen would be a financial blow to him and the Oberweimar schoolmaster. He then accused Cappel minister Stausebach of having violated Busch’s ministerial jurisdiction by baptizing a Ronhausen infant in 1720. Busch also accused Stausebach of inciting Ronhausen to seek the transfer. Stausebach retaliated. Busch’s income comfortably exceeded his own, paltry salary. Plus, even without income from Ronhausen the Oberweimar schoolmaster would still live better than even some pastors, whereas the Cappel schoolmaster could not live on his salary alone. Stausebach acknowledged having baptized the infant, but only because Busch had asked him to. Moreover, if Stausebach had provoked Ronhausen to this petition in part because of the baptism, then why did members say nothing about it for five years? “Who was the one to get the ball rolling,” Stausebach repeatedly asked, “when it was the Gemeinde who sought me out? … If I cannot peacefully take on this Gemeinde, then [Busch] can keep his responsibility for them, in which case it’ll be quite burdensome for him on judgment day.”44 Such acrimonious quarrels typically ran between ministers when the addition or loss of a Gemeinde was at stake. The Schenk family had no qualms with the transfer so long as Ronhausen remained within a parish they patronized and their rights as patrons of Oberweimar and Cappel were unaffected.45 However, the other nine Gemeinden of parish Oberweimar opposed it. They accused Ronhausen of trying to escape obligations toward parish buildings, especially the dilapidated Oberweimar church. Letting Ronhausen move to parish Cappel would necessarily amplify the burden carried by the remaining nine. Busch parroted their claim to bolster his case. But the Marburg consistory paid little mind to these concerns, sympathizing instead with the realities facing Ronhausen. Gemeinden sometimes secured the transfer they sought. By January 1726 authorities in Kassel approved Ronhausen’s transfer.46 The year 1726 thus 42 43 44 45 46

HStAM, 315f no. 230; HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10226; HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1482. HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 340 Schenk zu Schweinsberg Samtarchiv no. 1482; HStAM, 315f no. 230. HStAM, 315f no. 230.

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stands as, arguably, the banner date in Ronhausen’s Christian history. Thereafter the parishioners’ souls enjoyed much easier and more regular access to ministrations. Breitzbach also achieved considerable success. The Treusch von Buttlar permitted the Nesselröden pastor to minister to them on the condition that their family retain the right of presentation at Breitzbach and that Breitzbach continue to fulfill obligations toward the mother church Willershausen and its parish buildings.47 Other times Gemeinden failed. The Marburg consistory rejected Wolfshausen’s 1768 request to be joined to the Hassenhausen minister.48 Cappel’s modest parish income could not withstand the loss of Wolfshausen, and the Hassenhausen minister already had his hands full with affiliate Erbenhausen and vicariate Bellnhausen. Besides, the Schenk family held certain patronage rights over Wolfshausen and parish Cappel but none over parish Hassenhausen. Those belonged to the landgrave. The Marburg consistory suspected Wolfshausen’s intentions were to dodge having to contribute one-eighth toward a parish house construction in Cappel. In the nineteenth century Wolfshausen continued to fight with Cappel over obligations to parish properties at the mother church locale.49 Into the twentieth century Wolfshausen routinely tried to better their parish circumstances. Dreihausen and Rossberg’s 1823 petition also fell flat after an official’s onsite investigation. The other Gemeinden in the parish had no misgivings about letting the Rauischholzhausen cleric minister to Dreihausen and Rossberg. They viewed it as a betterment of their own parish circumstances, for, as Bortshausen remarked, the Ebsdorf church often overflowed, especially on holidays.50 The attendance of Dreihausen and Rossberg elsewhere would enable more of their own parishioners to attend in Ebsdorf. The new Ebsdorf minister agreed. The transfer would better the morality and religious instruction of Dreihausen and Rossberg. It would also enable him to shepherd a more reasonably sized body of parishioners in a less sprawling parish. However, none of the Gemeinden were willing to release Dreihausen and Rossberg from obligations toward the Ebsdorf church building, parish structures, or organist’s residence, for then the burden would fall too heavily on them. At this point the audacious intentions of Dreihausen and Rossberg came to light. As four representatives testified, they wanted the Rauischholzhausen cleric to be their minister, but they did not want to be joined to parish 47 48 49 50

HStAM, 315e no. 5308. HStAM, 315f no. 203. HStAM, 315f no. 228. HStAM, 315f no. 274.

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Rauischholzhausen or contribute to its parish expenses. They believed themselves totally free of these obligations. If this were not possible, then they would rather remain with parish Ebsdorf. Dreihausen had grown strong across the 1700s and comported itself as Ebsdorf’s equal. Vexed by its affiliate status, Dreihausen desired greater autonomy. As the Dreihausen village head wrote, the Gemeinde “wished to have its own minister.”51 They and Rossberg intended to be like a vicariate, to be outside of parish Ebsdorf and independent within parish Rauischholzhausen, with more local ministrations but no obligations to either parish’s maintenance. Marburg dismissed their plea, but only a generation later Dreihausen and Rossberg achieved something even greater.

2

Betterment by Devolving

Devolving a parish by dividing it in two was the most challenging and rewarding way for Gemeinden to edify their souls. Two such attempts, by Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein across 1664–1700 and by Niedervorschütz in 1800–1801, were ambitious and apparently feasible, but also unlikely to convince authorities. Dreihausen, Rossberg, and Heskem together bid successfully for independence from parish Ebsdorf in 1858. Parishes Margretenhaun and Neuhof each devolved multiple times in the nineteenth to twentieth centuries, although occasionally they did so more in spite of the central authorities’ poor timing and bungled management of the transitions. Even parish Oberweimar eventually devolved. Transforming one parish into two immediately placed greater burdens on all Gemeinden involved. Yet the end result also greatly enhanced localization for those in the new parish, made localization more attainable for those in the original parish, and enticed those in both parishes to seek more localization in subsequent years. In cities in the nineteenth century, it has been argued, a restructuring of church and society opened new vistas for religious and social activities.52 In rural areas the flourishing of Christianity occurred along structural lines familiar to the Gemeinden’s ancestors for centuries past. Pointing to hardships brought on by topographical obstacles, seasonal weather, and parishioners’ frailties remained Gemeinden’s signature arguments for a new parish. Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein never tired of enu51 52

HStAM, 315f no. 274. Lucian Hölscher, “Secularization and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century: An interpretive model,” in European Religion in the Age of Great Cities: 1830–1930, ed. Hugh McLeod (London: Routledge, 1995), 261–85.

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merating them.53 The mother church Fronhausen stood “a good hour” away, and traversing the path could be hazardous to the point of life-threatening.54 The elderly, sick, pregnant, and children could not arrive there during colder and hotter spells, regardless of the path’s condition. The minister was to lead services every Thursday in Roth, Tuesday in Wenkbach, and then alternate Sunday services between them; yet the Sunday services started sometimes early, sometimes late, and sometimes not at all. The Thursday and Tuesday services were sometimes not held either. When the Lahn flooded, neither minister nor parishioners outside Fronhausen could reach each other. In such times catechism was not held locally, which meant, as they wrote in 1664, that people could not be as well informed “in their Christianity” as compared to if they had their own minister.55 Fronhausen parishioners, they reasoned, would be better catechized if the parish were freed of its affiliates. Finally, it grieved them to have to build and maintain the Fronhausen mother church building, which was in better shape than their own, as well as the Roth and Wenkbach churches, which overflowed with service attendees. Gemeinden in parishes Margretenhaun and Neuhof faced equally daunting challenges two centuries later. Dipperz’s construction of a new church in 1825 improved matters as Dipperz, Wisselsrod, Wolferts, Finkenhain, and Friesenhausen contracted a chaplain to hold regular services in it.56 Yet sobering and sometimes prohibitive impediments remained. In 1840 residents in parish Margretenhaun’s eastern locales could only seldom attend services at the mother church and summoned the minister only in cases of illness.57 Proximity to a Catholic parish in a neighboring territory did not help them either because parish and clerical jurisdictions prevented them from going there. In upper parish Neuhof, the Mittelkalbach, Eichenried, and Veitsteinbach Gemeinden, along with those at Kiliansberg and Sparhof, told a similar tale of woe. Attending the parish’s winter holiday services in Neuhof was “very burdensome” for all and “wholly impossible” for the elderly and feeble.58 The Gemeinden went to the regular services in Mittelkalbach led by the Neuhof chaplain. Yet, they emphasized, the parish’s only burial ground and baptismal font were in Neuhof. For a funeral, one had to leave the upper parish before daybreak to transport the deceased to Neuhof in time for the burial, which

53 54 55 56 57 58

HStAM, 315f no. 618. HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 315f no. 588. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 341, 5031. HStAM, 100 no. 1917. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01.

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Ludwig Knaus, Hessian Funeral in Winter, 1871

took place at the customary, early worship service. The sometimes threehour trek meant that few people, including immediate family members, could accompany the caravan. By the mid-nineteenth century transformative events and movements had transpired across many centuries. Among them were plague and recovery, Reformations, confessionalizations, recurring warfare, the ebb and flow of demographic and economic trends, the rise of modern states, the Enlightenment, Napoleon’s invasion, the end of the Holy Roman Empire, secularization of ecclesiastical principalities, shifting political borders, the rise of nationalism, and the very beginnings of industrialization. Despite these, in parish Margretenhaun just outside City Fulda, parishioners and clerics required the same amount of time and effort to reach each other, if they could at all, as when it had been founded eight centuries earlier. As in earlier eras, rising demographic trends and an expanding agrarian cycle powerfully incentivized Gemeinden to pursue devolution. In the late seventeenth century Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein had a less urgent number of five hundred souls; in 1800–1801 Niedervorschütz also lacked a compelling

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demographic case. But in subsequent decades parish demands started outstripping a minister’s capacity. Parish Margretenhaun had, in 1840, 3,000 souls stretched across its fifteen villages and thirty-seven farmsteads and mills.59 Parish Ebsdorf had almost 4,000 souls in 1857.60 Parish Neuhof had grown from 2,422 souls in 1770 to a whopping 5,200 in 1848. Populations kept growing despite many hundreds of lives lost in 1812–1814, when military regiments passed through the region. The parish church in Opperz was enlarged by 1831. Yet the Fulda cathedral canon remarked in 1848 that one simply had to consider forming a second parish for Mittelkalbach, Eichenried, and Veitsteinbach along with the farmsteads.61 The parish’s population dipped over the subsequent decade but the situation remained critical. Something had to give. Creating new parishes became imperative. Noble patrons, unlike in distant centuries, scarcely factored in the process, though Gemeinden did continue parlaying footholds established by nobles to their own advantage. They utilized schools as a catalyst too. The nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed the explosive growth of local schooling. Some villages, typically smaller ones or those located especially close to a larger one, founded their first ever school. Others created additional schoolmaster posts to accommodate the ever-growing number of students. In contrast to secularizing currents of the day, rural culture sought to preserve the fusion of Christianity and education. “By withdrawing religious instruction,” wrote the parish Lohra Gemeinden in the mid-nineteenth century, “a school would become a profane institution, and no longer remain a Christian [one].” They had learned of the governing authorities’ intentions to divorce religion from education and emphatically objected to them. “Should it come to the point that the school would be separated from the church, that our children would no longer be instructed in Christian learning in the public schools, or that, after the removal of the minister’s oversight, we would no longer have the surety that the schools are Christian, so we would have to adjudge it a measure destructive of school, church, families, Gemeinden, and, as a consequence, the state, too.”62 For parish Lohra Gemeinden, as for others in this part of rural Germany, church and school, and more broadly the sacred order and civil order, were still to work in concert. The converging trends explain the crescendoing tone and content of communal petitions to form a new parish. Up to circa 1800, Gemeinden tended 59 60 61 62

HStAM, 100 no. 1917. HStAM, 315f no. 273. AGV, EGU/A/4/09-03. HStAM, 319 Marburg D: Lohra no. 52.

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Figure 30

Otto Piltz, In a Hessian Village School, 1882

to be strident while petitioning with a good though not overwhelming case. Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein said they were “resolved” to have “our special minister.” “[W]e want nothing more to do with the minister and schoolmaster of Fronhausen,” they wrote. “[W]e ask that we be severed and detached from parish Fronhausen, have our own minister, and may for this purpose attain confirmation from [you regarding it].”63 They rejected their affiliate status in a 1700 missive because, as they put it, they and especially their church buildings were as old as, and even older than, those of Fronhausen. They also cited having their own chest, chest financial officer, and schoolmaster along with the distinct ecclesiastical standing these supposedly denoted.64 Similarly, Niedervorschütz members staunchly insisted on their vicariate status. In 1801 they pleaded with Kassel to have their own minister.65

63 64 65

HStAM, 315f no. 618. HStAM, 315f no. 2275. HStAM, 315e no. 426.

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By contrast, mid-nineteenth century communal petitions for a new parish evinced a burgeoning presumptuousness. The Gemeinden felt no need to build a case on alleged historical status or seniority. They were realizing their potential and enjoying leverage. They knew it, and they knew the governing authorities knew it. Unsurprisingly, they addressed the authorities with self-confidence. “Right now we three Gemeinden are ready to help found a self-standing parish post at Dreihausen,” declared Dreihausen, Heskem, and Rossberg in the late 1850s.66 “It has often been thought and said from many parties that church district Ebsdorf is too large for a minister to be able to carry out all the spiritual pastoring. And so it is in truth,” they also wrote.67 “Thus it happens that an ill person in a village, for example in Heskem, Dreihausen or Rossberg, desires the presence of his minister, and requests that he come,” they continued. “The minister however has a burial to carry out or visits the sick in Hachborn, Ilschhausen or Bortshausen. By the time the messenger reaches the minister, and the minister in turn makes it to the ill person, two, three and even four hours have passed, during which time the death of the ill person can accelerate without him having relayed the burden of his heart to the minister.”68 They described it as impossible for a minister to meet their needs and fulfill the obligations as he would want. Worse, the Ebsdorf minister’s elderly condition by the 1850s did nothing to reassure them. The Ebsdorf minister affirmed their appraisal. The parish was indeed busting at the seams. Seating in the Ebsdorf church for parish-wide services was clearly insufficient. He himself could not tend to concerns such as visiting the sick when the other demands filled his day’s schedule. Because people could not get all their ministerial needs met by him, he explained, the soil became fertile for sects and alternative religious views to take root. An 1858 record did note a small handful of Baptists and members of the New Apostolic group (Irvingianer) within parish Ebsdorf.69 As for parish Margretenhaun, “[i]t goes without saying,” announced the Fulda district office in 1840, “that such an important parish cannot be overseen from one locale [and] that the most diligent minister [does not have] the capacity” to handle it.70 When the cathedral chapter in Fulda responded six months later, it cited the parish’s pressing realities and need for confessional integrity. Sheer necessity, beyond the population numbers, required the division of parish Margretenhaun, for parish-

66 67 68 69 70

HStAM, 315f no. 273. HStAM, 315f no. 273. HStAM, 315f no. 273. HStAM, 180 Marb. 1518. HStAM, 100 no. 1917.

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ioners had a one-hour, two-hour, even four-and-a-half hour walk to the parish seat. Their reasoning was bewildering given that, by their standard, it could have been categorized a sheer necessity at any point in the previous eight centuries. In any case, the church authorities in Fulda said a person traveling in the parish over hills and ravines during dark hours and wintertime found the trip risky if not life-threatening. “Only a few” parishes in the state could compare, they explained to the state authorities in Kassel, “for the cleric must wade through standing water and deep snow in the damp spring and autumn days as well as the raw, wintertime morass to administer baptism in the houses to newborn infants [that] cannot be brought to the church in Margretenhaun without endangering their lives, [or] to administer the holy sacraments of the dying to the sick, something that should never remain undone among Catholics.”71 Gemeinden seeking to form a new parish either took the practical steps to make it happen or explained how they would. Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein notified their parish patrons, the Schenk family, in 1664 that they would build or buy the minister a parish house and barn. They also committed to work the parish fields and meadows, to make and deliver hay for him, and to give him an annual allotment of grain.72 They believed parish Fronhausen would get along fine without them if the Schenk family directed the Fronhausen residents to compensate for the lost income. Over the next sixteen years their minister could not and, reportedly, still would not carry out certain duties in their villages. Thus, in their 1680–1681 petition, the eighty-plus members upped their offer: free firewood, free fodder, an annual allotment of money, geese, and chickens, and yields from the Roth and Wenkbach farmyards to the minister. They also proposed to repair the two churches, in Roth and Wenkbach, in order to meet demographic demands.73 In the second half of the 1850s Dreihausen, Rossberg, and Heskem fleshed out similar particulars. They offered to house the minister in a temporary residence in the schoolhouse until they could build a parish house, to provide the new parish with three agricultural fields taken from former forest land, and to finance annual parish heating expenses by having Dreihausen and Heskem each provide two measures of wood and Rossberg three reichsthaler in firewood funds. In exchange the Dreihausen minister would conduct early services in Heskem every Sunday and holiday. He would also continue the Ebsdorf minister’s routine of administering the Eucharist in Rossberg twice annually

71 72 73

HStAM, 100 no. 1917. HStAM, 315f no. 588. HStAM, 315f no. 618.

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and holding services there on the first Sunday of every month and on every other holiday, though the six gulden payment for the ministrations would be dropped. Naturally, the three Gemeinden would no longer contribute to parish Ebsdorf expenses.74 Then, in 1856, Dreihausen simply tore down its old church and constructed a neo-Gothic church, a magnificent building befitting a village that was rising in stature. The members apparently paid the hefty construction bill without any external subsidy or collection. In this new parish of Dreihausen, Rossberg would help maintain the church building. Heskem would be exempt from that because of its vicariate status. When necessary, Gemeinden resourcefully seized on nearby means to arrive at a viable proposal. Wolfshausen’s transfer to parish Cappel in 1691 diminished the chance for its participation in any new parish, yet Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein still aimed for it. “[T]he youths, which increase in number from day to day,” they wrote, “are being neglected because we don’t have our own minister.” And “the old people,” they continued, “are not able [to go to Fronhausen] because it is so far.” When the three mobilized for a new parish in 1711, they called for Wolfshausen to be joined with them. But Wolfshausen opposed the proposal and Marburg authorities did not endorse it, although they did consider transferring Wolfshausen to Hassenhausen so that the parish Fronhausen minister could better tend to Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein. Niedervorschütz wanted the nearby Felsberg rector to assume ministerial duties at Niedervorschütz in exchange for the 170 reichsthaler they were paying the Böddiger minister. For Roth, Wenk, and Argenstein, independence meant having their schoolmaster, instead of Fronhausen’s, hold the local church warden post as well as catechism lessons when the minister could not. Gemeinden not yet able to form a new parish set their sights on a stepping stone toward it. In 1852 those in upper parish Neuhof had a compelling demographic case: they totaled a sizeable 1,400 souls in a parish with well over 4,000. The mayors and officials knew they did not have sufficient resources to establish their own parish, but moving the parish chaplaincy from Neuhof to Mittelkalbach and thereby creating “a local chaplaincy with its own churchyard and baptismal font would be very appropriate.”75 Doing so would alleviate great burdens. The younger, stronger folk of both sexes took to the taverns, where they fostered drunkenness, discord, strife, and skirmishes. A perpetrator even suffered fatal injuries in an 1849 incident. The older people remembered well that, for a time, a full-fledged worship service was held in Mittelkalbach.

74 75

HStAM, 315f no. 273. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01.

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Moreover, the mayors stated, “sooner or later the chaplaincy will become its own parish.”76 Gemeinden linked the founding of a new parish directly to a betterment of their Christianity and their souls. “[We] bring this matter before [you] … out of Christian zeal,” wrote the members at Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein. A majority of the residents there were very young or old, and their “attendance at worship services, which would lead to the edification of Christianity and the comfort of heavenly goods and promised eternal salvation, is difficult.” To have their own parish and minister would “promot[e] the propagation of the Christian Gemeinde here on earth,” “confer richly on our Lord Christ as the head of the Church,” “redound to God’s glory and to the salvation and well-being of old and young people yonder and eternally,” “glorify God the Almighty,” and encourage a “better exercise of Christianity.”77 Those in upper parish Neuhof put it similarly almost two centuries later. Because “our cherished Christianness (Christlichkeit)” had its ties to Neuhof, reachable only via “the poor roads,” and because of the “deteriorating morality,” the mayors petitioned for a cemetery, baptismal font, and local chaplaincy to be set in Mittelkalbach, or at least for Mittelkalbach to host principal holiday services.78 Dreihausen’s new church in 1856 was reminiscent of Kilian’s chapel built by Marburg in the late twelfth century; and like Marburg did in 1227, Dreihausen aspired to become its own parish. “[R]ight now the most wonderful opportunity” presented itself, the members wrote, due to the grand church and organ they had built and furnished for worship services, yet it was being used thus far only “as a funerary chapel.”79 Interestingly, even though devolution in parish Margretenhaun was also, by the late 1830s, virtually an imperative, the upper parish Gemeinden took no steps toward it. Standing financial arrangements explain why. Dipperz had 660 inhabitants, three times the number in Margretenhaun. Parties discussed it as the obvious choice for the new parish seat. The other upper parish locales of Wolferts, Finkenhain, Wisselsrod, and the “right half” of Friesenhausen 76 77 78

79

AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01. HStAM, 315f no. 588. The Gemeinden’s invocation of Christlichkeit and desire to increase access to services and ministrations contrasts with the pessimism of some at the time that Kirchlichkeit—meaning a readiness to attend church and abide with ecclesiastical ministrations—was, in the wake of the French Revolution, losing out to Entkirchlichung or a decreased readiness and willingness. Lucian Hölscher, “Semantic structures of religious in modern Germany,” in The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000, ed. Werner Ustorf, Hugh McLeod (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 186–87. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1517; HStAM, 315f no. 273.

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agreed to contribute toward the construction of a parish house and auxiliary structures but not toward the parish salary. Since 1825 they had received the Eucharist in Dipperz and paid the cleric a set sum per communicant but were exempt from contributing to the Margretenhaun parish salary. Stubbornly, they would not consent to the founding of parish Dipperz unless they retained their exempt status and also no longer paid the per communicant sum. For the proposed parish to become reality, then, Dipperz not only had to contribute toward construction costs but also provide 271 1/2 florins, the bulk of the new minister’s salary. It was a daunting proposition even with certain subsidies. The four other Gemeinden would account for close to half of the new parish’s population, yet Dipperz would bear the brunt of its burdens. Discouraged by the prospect and cognizant that conditions had not yet ripened, Dipperz demurred at the idea of a new parish. As for the church authorities, their handling of these sundry cases was inconsistent, and their final rulings varied. Authorities in Marburg repeatedly voiced skepticism about Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein’s proposals. Carving out a new parish, they reasoned, would yield problems and undercut parish Fronhausen’s standing. They once summoned the minister, communal representatives, and Schenk family members for a hearing. They also consulted documentation on the parish fence, women’s pews, contributions made by the three Gemeinden and Wolfshausen to the minister’s salary, and the condition of Fronhausen’s parish buildings and properties. The Fronhausen minister lashed out at the nobles’ local officials. “There is no piety and fear of God” among the officials, he wrote, rather they were often “roaring drunk from brandy, running amok, brawling, [and] boasting about.”80 The officials disrespected him, they hassled the subject heads-of-household, and they impeded worship services by holding court, while inebriated, on Sundays and Tuesdays. “[N]o one can make objection to it,” the minister vented.81 In any case, church authorities rebuffed communal pleas across 1664–1700 to found a new parish. Once Wolfshausen transferred to parish Cappel in 1691, Roth, Wenkbach, and Argenstein remained especially hamstrung by the constraints of topography, demography, material resources, and the nobles’ patronage rights. In the Niedervorschütz case responses from the three locales involved also made it easy for Kassel church authorities to reject the petition in 1801. The Felsberg mayor and council, fearing pedagogical standards at their school

80 81

HStAM, 315f no. 618. HStAM, 315f no. 618.

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would slide, flatly objected to letting the rector take up additional duties at Niedervorschütz. The Böddiger communal officers and elders did not want to lose parish income and obligations from Niedervorschütz. Should the latter’s proposal be approved, then they asked for financial subsidies and for Niedervorschütz to continue fulfilling one-third of the obligations toward parish Böddiger’s maintenance. Niedervorschütz’s communal officers and elders stiffly exclaimed that they, if dissociated from Böddiger, would not contribute anything to the Böddiger parish barn or bakery, though they would offer one-third toward its parish house repairs. Kassel could not foresee how the finances would work out. It ruled instead for the status quo. Authorities in Marburg supported the Dreihausen, Rossberg, and Heskem initiative for a new parish, though only if they funded half of the 300 reichsthaler parish salary and built a parish house. Together they could pool 115 reichsthaler annually in hard money and do so proportional to their respective tax rate, meaning Dreihausen would pay 50 reichsthaler, Heskem with Mölln 50 reichsthaler, and Rossberg 15 reichsthaler. A further 37 reichsthaler in material income boosted their contribution to over 152 reichsthaler. The state then subsidized the 148 reichsthaler difference. The three Gemeinden also agreed to render their new minister the fees they had been paying the Ebsdorf minister, though they asked that the amount be reduced considering how much they had already given to the project. Moreover, they added, “other Gemeinden of our fatherland” had received greater state subsidies.82 Their choice of words is illuminating. They invoked the fatherland in an earthly and not a heavenly sense, yet they did so as a means to achieve localizing endeavors that would better their souls.83 Among urbanites a so-called modernizing current with nationalist rhetoric was drawing their affection and affiliation to a supralocal body and identity.84 Rural Gemeinden exploited the same rhetoric to intensify association with their own corpus. 82 83

84

HStAM, 315f no. 273. Rural Gemeinden were not the only ones to capitalize on such rhetoric for their own purposes. Robert von Friedeburg notes that in the seventeenth century territorial estates used a new rhetoric, which described the jurisdictions of princes as a fatherland, in order “to define their new fatherland as governed by laws that protected their own privileges.” “Why Did Seventeenth-Century Estates Address the Jurisdictions of Their Princes as Fatherlands? War, Territorial Absolutism and Duties to the Fatherland in SeventeenthCentury German Political Discourse,” in Head and Christensen, Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies in Early Modern German Culture, 169–94, here p. 172; also, von Friedeburg, “The Making of Patriots, Love of Fatherland and Negotiating Monarchy in SeventeenthCentury Germany,” The Journal of Modern History 77, no. 4 (2005): 881–916. Hugh McLeod, “Protestantism and British National Identity, 1815–1945,” in Nation and Religion: Perspectives on Europe and Asia, ed. Peter van der Veer and Hartmut Lehmann (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 44–70.

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Dreihausen, Rossberg, and Heskem communal officials, wishing to have the new three-thousand-reichsthaler parish house ready by the autumn of 1858, pestered authorities through 1857 to approve the new parish. In 1858 the authorities inaugurated parish Dreihausen with its 310 families and 1,700 souls. Dreihausen, Rossberg, and Heskem petitioned, “if it is God’s will,” to have appointed as their minister the Ebsdorf assistant, Heinrich Schedtler, “who already has shared with us joy and suffering for seven years, knows the ins and outs of our relations, and has earned an eternal love with us.”85 Their effort succeeded. They also overcame a couple stumbling blocks. A dozen men, including Baptists and New Apostolic group members, objected to the new parish because of its costs. Communal officials opposed their objection, citing the new parish as “a work of the Lord” and remarking that “wherever the Lord builds a church, the Devil builds a chapel next to it.”86 When the state sliced its annual subsidy from 148 reichsthaler to 66 reichsthaler in 1859, the Gemeinden immediately appealed for the state to uphold its end of the bargain. Similarly, out of parish Margretenhaun and parish Neuhof formed, respectively, parish Dipperz and parish Mittelkalbach. However, the governing authorities interfered, to the detriment of their devolution, pushing for parish Dipperz’s founding prematurely and authorizing the founding of parish Mittelkalbach belatedly. The Dipperz case stands unique because the authorities, not the Gemeinden, initiated the formation of the new parish. The process also sparked financial brushfires which Dipperz could not control. After the Margretenhaun minister died in 1840, Fulda asked the state to divide the parish in two.87 Dipperz and the other upper parish locales would constitute the new one with 1,196 souls. The other villages—Melzdorf, Rex, Steinau, Steinhaus, Armenhof, Böckels, Traisbach, Wiesen, and Wissels—would remain in parish Margretenhaun and total 1,815 souls. Fulda resolved to overcome any obstacles to the creation of the new parish Dipperz. From parish Margretenhaun to parish Dipperz it moved some properties and also 57 reichsthaler to help finance the new minister’s salary. Fulda also successfully appealed for a state subsidy of 71 reichsthaler to bring the parish Dipperz salary to 300 reichsthaler. Remarkably, even though three thousand persons would now have two ministers between them, Steinhaus and Steinau helped ensure the continuation of a parish chaplain as well. They retained his services, an arrangement for which they had struggled in previous centuries, and which they would parlay into their own parish by the 1880s. 85 86 87

HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1858–1891. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1518. HStAM, 100 no. 1917.

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Meanwhile, Fulda eventually persuaded Dipperz to the idea of a new parish. On the one hand, the members would have been inclined already. Given the large size and difficult terrain of parish Margretenhaun, Dipperz could anticipate that, one day, the parish would devolve and Dipperz become the seat of a new parish. On the other hand, Dipperz and the other financially poor upper parish Gemeinden had not initiated the proposal by 1840 because the resources needed to pull it off, especially during a struggling economy, had not sufficiently matured. Yet Dipperz saw how Fulda authorities wanted the new parish and offered subsidies toward its creation. For rural Gemeinden, which equated the localization of Christian ministrations and services with a betterment of their Christianity, such a deal could be too alluring to pass up. A district official in early 1840 encouraged Dipperz to embrace it. As he put it, “I’ve already found opportunity to incline the residents of Dipperz to [the idea of a new parish], and they are ready to contribute [toward it] as well as build a parish house from their own means. Only the neighboring locales are raising difficulties [concerning payments toward the parish salary].” Despite the warning signs Fulda sallied forth and made the new parish Dipperz official in July 1841.88 Thus compelled, the parish’s five mayors gathered with Dipperz councilors in October. They decided on a plot of land and building materials for the parish house as well as borrowing money from the state credit office to meet ensuing costs and maintenance. The Fulda authorities’ hasty action set deep flaws in the parish’s foundation, which burdened Dipperz, above all, for decades. Parish house construction costs ballooned by late 1842. Dipperz had made “great sacrifices” to complete the project, grumbled the local mayor, while the other four “stiff-necked” Gemeinden refused to contribute above the original estimate, “even though they enjoy the considerable advantage of the much greater proximity of the parish [seat].”89 Tempers worsened by the mid-1840s after those four and the residents at farmsteads and mills refused to contribute toward the parish salary. The former claimed the original deal at the parish’s founding did not obligate them, while the latter claimed they were not part of the Dipperz Gemeinde. Fulda rejected the residents’ arguments, which meant they had to contribute, but it upheld the exemption of the four Gemeinden. In 1847, after Dipperz fell 195 florins in arrears with the parish salary, Fulda threatened to fine the mayor and communal administrators if Dipperz failed to pay. When Dipperz signaled its refusal, the state cited the Gemeinde for violation

88 89

AGV, EGI/A/4/09-03. HStAM, 100 no. 1917.

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of article eighty-nine of the communal ordinance and threatened them again. Dipperz pleaded about how they had consented—“not authorized, by the way, rather complied simply out of passive obedience”—to the responsibilities associated with the establishment of a ministerial post in so far as the other Gemeinden did not shirk their own.90 But those others had shirked them. The “rich,” well-endowed mother church at Margretenhaun had not once come to Dipperz’s aid, leaving the deficit to fall on them. Meanwhile, other expenses steadily mounted for Dipperz: 1,200 florins in communal debts; a debt of 200 florins, 600 florins, and 4,000 florins for a compulsory bridge, a bakery, and parish buildings, respectively; a 1,800 florins estimate to build a communal house for the homeless; and the prospect of shouldering much of the 1,000 florins repairs to the church tower. They cited, too, a lack of economic stimuli—businesses, trade, thoroughfares, sheep farming, livestock, lumber—that could pull them out of the financial mire. “With each passing day,” wrote the members, “we become more certain that the Gemeinde is not in position to carry out the [parish] salary contribution alongside its other commitments and burdens.” “We do not hate the minister,” they clarified, and they reassured that everyone “will remain steadfast in faith,” but “we curse the parish salary! … which was imposed on us [by a district official] without even our knowledge and volition!”91 They feared the hardships would drag Dipperz under, turn needy parishioners against the minister, and steer “pious and good” intentions against the ecclesiastical order. Dipperz also exploited contemporary notions about productive citizens by linking the “loathed” and unsustainable parish salary to their utility as citizens: “Whenever the state citizen is burdened too heavily, he eventually becomes dispirited, his prosperity becomes increasingly blighted and he at length stops being a useful member of the state.”92 In an 1848 letter, signed individually by sixty-two members, Dipperz implored the cathedral chapter in Fulda for a wealthy chapel or church to channel them funds of at least four thousand reichsthaler, or for Dipperz to be reincorporated into parish Margretenhaun.93 The cathedral chapter, however, feared that Dipperz “threatened to kick their minister out of the house and thereby give the world an example of brute force and disrespect against a priest commissioned by God’s son Jesus Christ.”94

90 91 92 93 94

HStAM, 100 no. 1917. AGV, EBS/A/4/09-01. AGV, EBS/A/4/09-01. AGV, EBS/A/4/09-01. AGV, EBS/A/4/09-01.

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By 1867 Fulda authorities had completed their revisionist history of parish Dipperz’s founding. In that year Dipperz begged for an annual one-hundredreichsthaler state subsidy toward the parish salary, hoping Prussia would grant the aid which Hesse had not. Fulda forwarded the letters to Berlin and included its own correspondence.95 Fulda briefly mentioned its participation in the parish’s creation but attributed the initiative and responsibility to Dipperz. Members in 1825 had “wanted” their own worship service. When Fulda proposed a new parish in 1840, they wanted that too. They “seized” the opportunity and “even obligated themselves” to pay the minister the same twenty-four kreuzer per communicant plus additional salary costs. Fulda described how Dipperz was willing to bankroll a new parish house and parish buildings even if the other four Gemeinden were not. Yet those others stepped up by contributing to the parish house, Fulda noted, and declined only to contribute to the salary, for they had been freed of it previously in parish Margretenhaun. Still, Fulda acknowledged, most Dipperz locals subsisted meagerly on linen weaving and day labor. With Dipperz still needing to enlarge the cemetery at a cost of 7,000 florins,96 build a new schoolhouse, and satisfy a 1,606 florins outstanding debt, Fulda recommended to the Prussian authorities a reduction in the amount paid by Dipperz toward the parish salary. King Wilhelm I’s government, however, rejected it. Fulda church authorities also mishandled the upper parish Neuhof Gemeinden’s petitions in the 1850s to establish a local chaplaincy, itself a logical stepping stone to the creation of a new parish. As in the parish Margretenhaun case, the Neuhof cleric played a critical role. In an 1857 response he acknowledged the stark realities of distance and topography within the parish but still objected to their request. If they interred their dead in Mittelkalbach instead of Neuhof, then who would administer the burials? No parish minister would want his rights and fees curtailed. Neither would it be just if the chaplain did them for free. He accused individuals in the upper parish of being severely drunk at times when parish services were being held. The Gemeinden of the lower parish, he wrote, went quietly to and from services in Neuhof. As for the claim by those in the upper parish that they once buried their dead in Mittelkalbach, he dismissed it, arguing they had done so out of urgent need during pestilence. They “long for advantages, but are far from carrying greater burdens…. Lacking is the strength and also good resolve.”97 His judgment appears to have persuaded Fulda. 95 96 97

AGV, EBS/A/4/09-01. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01.

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Nevertheless, over subsequent decades the upper parish Gemeinden continued to build momentum toward autonomy. At some point Eichenried and Veitsteinbach started to bury their dead in Mittelkalbach. Many families moved into the area after a factory opened in Niederkalbach and large properties in Mittelkalbach were divided up. In 1884 authorities authorized the chaplain to reside in Mittelkalbach instead of Neuhof, a concession to the pressing reality. In 1885 the three Gemeinden funded the construction of an official, fenced cemetery in Mittelkalbach. When certain parties in the upper parish allegedly did not pay their share toward it, Eichenried and Veitsteinbach— momentarily and in protest—buried their dead in Neuhof once again. By February 1886 the parish chaplain articulated what the Gemeinden had already stated three decades earlier. “Parish relations,” he remarked, “are no longer as they once were.”98 The demands of four thousand souls had pushed parish Neuhof to the breaking point. The chaplain noted the “high hills” of the upper parish, the area’s frequently turbulent weather, and the “dangerous” pathways. Earlier in the day he passed through the “five feet of snow” blanketing the upper parish; even when one cleared it away, the snow all returned within an hour. Schooling for confirmands residing in the upper parish had been held in Mittelkalbach for many years but the children near the border needed three hours merely to reach it, if they did at all. Sometimes children did not come for three weeks. Recently, deep snow kept him from reaching Mittelkalbach for six weeks. A residence for a cleric in Mittelkalbach, he wrote in closing, “seemed to be necessary.” Fulda authorities acknowledged that a ministerial station in the upper parish was “an urgent need.”99 They “fully severed” the upper parish locales from the lower parish ones and had them “form their own ministerial district.”100 Mittelkalbach served as its seat and a register was started for the district’s baptisms and burials. Yet the district still had ties to parish Neuhof. The upper parish Gemeinden wanted to complete the devolution, but the parish as a whole had an outstanding bill of 5,500 marks to pay for repairs to the Neuhof parish church. Mittelkalbach, Veitsteinbach, and Eichenried disavowed their obligation to help pay, for if the parish were created, then they would have their own challenging costs to reckon with. The other seven Gemeinden, however, were unwilling to let the three off the hook. Doing so would exacerbate their own repair debt by approximately 26 percent.

98 99 100

The quotations here and in this paragraph: AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 5270. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01.

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Such tensions could stave off the inevitable only so long. In 1893 parish Neuhof’s growing population included landowning farmers, many day laborers, and others who worked in construction in the Frankfurt am Main area. Fulda upgraded the creation of an independent parish in Mittelkalbach from an urgent need to “such an urgent need.”101 In 1895 parish Mittelkalbach officially formed after the state subsidized it. The chaplain already stationed there was appointed its first minister. Mittelkalbach spoke of itself in 1888 as having long been the “Cinderella” of parish Neuhof and gone without all advantages.102 Now, in the mid-1890s it facilitated the devolution of parish Neuhof. Parish Mittelkalbach faired better than parish Dipperz by not suffering chronic insolvency. In 1898 a neo-Gothic church was built in Mittelkalbach, a symbol of what the Gemeinden achieved.103 On display in these local Gemeinden was, indeed, a “high valuation on solidarity and mutual dependence.”104 But the argument here is that their communal achievements had little to do with a culture being Catholic and more to do with it being an older, deeper, communal one bent on localization. The Gemeinden in parish Neuhof had this in common along with those in ecclesiastically Lutheran and Reformed rural parishes. There was no indication that those in the parishes of one denomination did so to define themselves against another denomination. There was no apparent anti-Catholic or antiLutheran or anti-Reformed motivation involved. The dynamics were internal to the parish. Rural Christian culture also did not seem to absorb certain intellectual or urban trends. By the later nineteenth century the German Protestant bourgeoisie had positioned their religion as superior and the Catholic religion as inferior. Their effort, which championed national identity and conflated German Protestantism with it, caused Catholics living in the same urban setting or milieu to feel oppressed and discriminated against. Catholic elites and clerics countered it in a number of ways, one of which was to form the Catholic Center Party and fight politically for their place in German society.105 Rural Christians did not seem much affected by this Kulturkampf (“clash of cultures”) of the 1870s. Neither did they become assimilated by an urban culture characterized by “irreligion,” “a decline in church life,” or “anti-church liberal

101 102 103 104 105

HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 5270. AGV, EGN/A/4/09-01. HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 5269; AGV, EGN/A/4/09-02. Anderson, “The Limits of Secularization,” 668. Jonathan Sperber, Popular Catholicism in Nineteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 156–276.

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and socialist ideas,” as arguably happened near industrialized centers elsewhere in Germany.106 Whereas some segments of society grappled with the big questions surrounding religion’s relationship to modernity and the crisis brought on by it,107 the rural Gemeinden did not seem to take notice of them or have need to. Their focus, in whatever denominational parish they were located, remained on Christianization. On this score, the devolution of rural parishes in the nineteenth century opened the door for Gemeinden within them to localize even more ministrations and services. When they could do so was, as always, a question of critical components reaching maturity together. Due to vigorous economic and demographic growth into the 1900s, the pace of localization sped up. The degree of devolution was most reminiscent of the long thirteenth century. Gemeinden in parish Ebsdorf capitalized quickly after Dreihausen, Rossberg, and Heskem departed in 1858. The parish minister’s schedule, previously full, now became more flexible. In 1859 the new Ebsdorf pastor, Kolbe, wrote to Marburg about how locals began asking for weekday services “as soon as I arrived at my post.”108 In December 1861 the church elders approached Kolbe about having services on New Year’s Eve. With lighting in place for the Christmas services the sanctuary would already be set up for December 31. In 1864 Ebsdorf members requested more Eucharistic administrations. Nine of the ten per year were bunched between the Advent season and Pentecost. The members wanted two more during the summer months. The local presbytery authorized funds to be raised annually for it. Marburg approved each of these requests. Within parish Margretenhaun, Steinhaus and Steinau successfully achieved devolution. In 1825 their communal officials met with the minister to discuss ways to fund and restart the chaplaincy. Their efforts succeeded by 1826. Services on Sundays and holidays alternated between the two. As before, keeping the chaplaincy solvent remained a challenge. As the minister noted in 1833, so many parishioners were chronically poor, had to beg for food, and could scarcely fulfill their material obligations to the authorities due to their meager

106

107 108

Hölscher, “Secularization and Urbanization in the Nineteenth Century,” 277; on this subject, Antonius Liedhegener argued that attendance and participation remained healthy among Catholics in Bochum and Münster but declined steeply among Protestants there. Christentum und Urbanisierung: Katholiken und Protestanten in Münster und Bochum 1830–1933 (Paderborn: F. Schöningh, 1997). Thomas Nipperdey, Religion im Umbruch: Deutschland 1870–1918 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1988). HStAM, 315f no. 321.

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trade.109 By the later nineteenth century conditions had improved. In 1876 the parish minister suggested converting the parish chaplaincy to a local chaplaincy, based in Steinhaus and Steinau, in order to alleviate the burdensome distance between chaplain and parishioners. In 1882 the mayors and local church board in the two locales requested that everything possible be done to transfer their burdensome obligations from the “upper parish” to the “lower.”110 Once Steinhaus and Steinau knew, in 1884, that they had the resources to build a parish house, the church board decided in favor of founding their own parish. Thus, in 1885 parish Margretenhaun underwent its second devolution within a half century as Steinhaus became the new parish’s seat, although this devolution, in contrast to what happened with parish Dipperz, went smoothly because the Gemeinden initiated it instead of the central authorities.111 Services were to alternate weekly between Steinhaus and Steinau. Weddings were to be conducted in either locale, depending on the bride’s preference. Baptisms were to be performed principally in Steinhaus, although, in keeping with customary practice, they could be done in Steinau if administered right after a worship service. A local cemetery, which the two Gemeinden had already established, became the cemetery for the new parish. The next year four families at Werthesberg successfully lobbied for transfer from parish Margretenhaun to parish Steinhaus because of its closer proximity. Steinhaus capped off the culminating surge with the construction of a new church in 1891. Steinau enlarged its church in 1898. Parish Neuhof also devolved a second time in a matter of decades. In the late nineteenth century Rommerz had services on Sundays and holidays led by a cleric from the cloister in Frauenberg or the one in Fulda. The local schoolmaster regularly led a prayer hour as well. The mayor and council pushed for more, voting in favor of a local chaplaincy in 1876, although Rommerz’s poverty hampered its viability.112 Finally, Rommerz secured a ministerial station in 1911 and became the seat of a new parish in 1920. Meanwhile, too, Veitsteinbach achieved chapel Gemeinde status in 1915. Opperz voted in favor of a second Neuhof chaplaincy in 1912, and the Fulda bishop finally approved it in 1919.113 The chaplain had duties toward Niederkalbach until the latter acquired a min-

109 110 111 112 113

AGV, EGI/B/4/11-01. AGV, EIM/A/4/09-02; AGV, EIM/A/4/09-06. AGV, EIM/A/4/09-02. AGV, EGU/B/4/11-01. AGV, EHA/A/4/09-01; HStAM, 180 Fulda no. 2134.

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isterial station in 1924.114 Finally, Dorfborn built a church, its first, in 1956 and became an affiliate of parish Neuhof. Gemeinden in parish Dipperz also elevated their standing. Wolferts, which entered the nineteenth century with, as ever, highly unfavorable parish circumstances, built a local chapel in 1898 and established a chaplaincy, which included afternoon services on Sunday and holiday afternoons.115 Friesenhausen followed in 1920 by acquiring a local chaplaincy too.116 After a village fire in 1892 destroyed the parish church, Dipperz spearheaded the completion of a neo-Romanesque church by 1896. In summary, Gemeinden in the ecclesiastically Catholic parishes of Margretenhaun and Neuhof entered a particularly dynamic period starting in the early nineteenth century, though it was not because the Imperial church’s termination released energies and resources.117 Rather, the indigenous, animating forces strengthened their capacity. Even parish Oberweimar, with its clutch of modest-sized villages, underwent further localization and also devolution. A decade after seven of them had established local cemeteries in the 1840s, six of them coordinated for confirmands to receive instruction locally instead of sending them to Oberweimar.118 After a new church was built in 1884 for the two hundred Hermershausen parishioners, the Gemeinde petitioned multiple times into the 1890s to have the Oberweimar minister hold services in it every two weeks, instead of a weekday service once per month. Neighboring Weiershausen and Haddamshausen joined them in it. Authorities denied the request a few times, recommending at first that the six farmers with horses transport the physically unable in wagons to Oberweimar services. The Gemeinden replied, in metaphorical and agricultural language, that having the services would lead to the “uplifting and planting of their souls’ salvation.” In 1893, as a consolation, authorities permitted the schoolmaster to conduct a reading on Sunday afternoons, and by 1905 they had authorized one monthly Sunday service.119 Haddamshausen, which apparently had had a church before 1517, finally acquired a new one in 1951. After a family bequeathed its properties

114 115 116

117 118 119

AGV, EHA/A/4/09-01. HStAM, 166 no. 4417. The increase in pastoral care in the parishes of Fulda’s bishopric owed more to the initiative of local Gemeinden than to actions taken by church authorities. The latter is argued in Dagobert Vonderau, Die Geschichte der Seelsorge im Bistum Fulda zwischen Säkularisation (1803) und Preussenkonkordat (1929) (Frankfurt am Main: Knecht, 2001). Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 136. HStAM, 180 Marburg no. 1795. Pfarrarchiv Oberweimar, A88 (1835–1922).

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Barn, in Haddamshausen, reconstructed into a church in 1951

into ecclesiastical hands, the barn’s upper story was renovated into a sanctuary. Cyriaxweimar had a similar story. The village once had a church, first mentioned in 1345, but the building fell into disuse prior to 1577 and was repurposed in the late nineteenth century for agricultural use. Cyriaxweimar finally constructed a new church in 1963 and held its first local services in at least four centuries. In the late 1940s and 1950s Niederweimar along with Gisselberg steadily completed a break from the Oberweimar mother church and founded parish Niederweimar. By 1962 Niederweimar had installed three

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Figure 32

Construction of a bridge over the Lahn River by Roth, 1902–1903

bells and its first organ in the church, which had been built in the thirteenth century, destroyed in 1758 amid war, and rebuilt by 1782. In 1975 Gisselberg crowned the new parish’s devolution by building a chapel on its local cemetery. Finally, after the idea was explored in 1896, Roth achieved a centuries-old ambition of becoming, in 1957, the seat of a new parish, which included Wenkbach, Argenstein, and Wolfshausen and had 1,500 parishioners.120 Wolfshausen, after nearly three centuries in parish Cappel and five years after a church renovation, was now an affiliate of Roth. To reach their new mother church, Wolfshausen parishioners traveled a mere quarter of the distance that they had traversed to Cappel. On the way they crossed a bridge over the Lahn River. 120

HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 49.

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Conclusion to Part 1 It can be disarming, even disconcerting, to read a narrative of Christianity’s history in Europe that is not rocked and rerouted in the sixteenth century by what scholars have called the Reformations and Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed confessionalizations. It is so especially when the narrative plays out in lands where these movements clashed heavily. Yet to account for the civilsacred unity at not one but multiple scales, and for the fact that it held together at smaller scales through periods when it unraveled at larger scales, is to pull back the curtain on another storyline. Likewise, it can be disorienting to follow this story down to the twentieth century without steering one’s thoughts principally according to Protestant and Catholic categories or according to teleologies culminating in Nazism. Yet loosening the rural Gemeinden’s record from misrepresentations created by the Protestant and Catholic categories is the first step toward discerning the path they trod. Two centuries ago Leopold von Ranke argued that Luther’s Reformation would have joined together a distinct culture and the German state, both of which Germans had carefully crafted across the Middle Ages, if only Catholic opposition had not thwarted the Protestant movement.1 Ranke was right to ascribe historical significance to culture and state and to their dynamic with each other. But contra Ranke, Luther’s Reformation did not work toward the fusion of the culture and state that rural Gemeinden were concerned about. Neither therefore did Catholic opposition to the Reformation foil any such fusion. Rather, rural Gemeinden had their own locally curated Christian culture and locally established equivalent to the state—the commune—and the two had already fused long before 1517. Later in the nineteenth century Protestant nationalists in Germany and England fashioned the Reformation as a national movement that partially and entirely freed their respective nations from medieval Catholicism and quickened their unification under the banner of a superior Protestant church.2 In rebuttal Catholic scholars in Germany usually said church and state related 1 Leopold von Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation (Berlin: Duncker and Humblot, 1839–). 2 Heinrich von Treitschke, Deutsche Geschichte im Neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 5 vols. (Leipzig: Hirzel, 1879–1894); Friedrich Schneider, ed., Universalstaat oder Nationalstaat. Die Streitschriften von Heinrich v. Sybel und Julius Ficker zur Kaiserpolitik des Mittelalters (Innsbruck: Wagnerm, 1941); Max Lenz, Luthers Tat in Worms, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, vol. 134 (Leipzig: Kommissionsverlag von M. Heinsius nachfolger, 1921). German Protestant scholars were more likely to qualify the triumphalism than their English counterparts because only some of the German lands broke from the Roman Church and the © David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_009

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harmoniously in the Middle Ages and elevated the German people to prominence until Luther’s Reformation weakened and ruined the nation’s culture.3 The view from the village steeple offers a third—and quite different— perspective. Contra the neo-Rankean Protestant historians, the Reformation did not birth a national, confessional movement which spanned “from Luther to Bismarck.”4 For, rural persons operated not as Germans or as members of the German nation or in an effort to unify such a nation in a Protestant church, but rather as Christians, as part of rural Gemeinden, and in an effort to localize Christian ministrations. Contra the Catholic historians, neither the Church prior to Luther nor the so-called German people in the sixteenth century, as nineteenth-century scholars anachronistically imagined them, maintained the unity of civil and sacred society. Therefore, Luther’s Reformation did not wreck it. Rather, rural Gemeinden principally coordinated the congruence themselves as it pertained to local society. Their civil and sacred dimensions, regardless of any changes to religion, remained united through the sixteenth century and first half of the seventeenth. The leading critique of Reformation histories from the standpoint of Gemeinden in these rural German lands is that the critical juncture lay not in Wittenberg in the early sixteenth century but in Westphalia in the mid-seventeenth. The same vantage point offered here provides scant evidence for the Weberian theory that the origins of the modern world lay in theological and religious change in the sixteenth century.5 Studies supporting the idea claimed Latin world it embodied. Wilhelm Scherer, Geschichte des geistigen Lebens in Deutschland und Österreich (Berlin: Weidmannsche, 1874), especially “Die deutsche Spracheinheit,” 45–70; Julian Schmidt, Geschichte der deutschen Literatur von Leibniz bis auf unsere Zeit, 5 vols. (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1886), 1:v–xi; Johann von Droysen, Briefwechsel, 2 vols. (Stuttgart and Berlin: Deutsche verlags-anstalt, 1929). 3 Ludwig Pastor, Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, 16 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1886–1933); Johannes Janssen, Geschichte des deutschen Volkes seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters, 8 vols. (Freiburg: Herder, 1876–1894). 4 Karl Kupisch, “‘Von Luther zu Bismarck’: Zur Kritik einer historischen Idee,” in Kupisch, “Von Luther zu Bismarck”: Zur Kritik einer historischen Idee—Heinrich von Treitschke (Berlin and Bielefeld: Haus und Schule, 1949), 1–47. 5 Max Weber, Wissenschaft als Beruf (Munich: Duncker & Humboldt, 1917). Ernst Troeltsch differed by arguing that the Protestant Reformation prolonged the Middle Ages because of its emphasis on salvation and church-state partnership, though it also set in motion processes that removed obstacles to progress: Protestantism and Progress: A Historical Study of the Relation of Protestantism to the Modern World (London: Williams & Norgate, 1912); The Social Teaching of the Christian Churches, trans. Olive Wyon (New York: Macmillan, 1931). A recent set of essays largely affirms the idea that the Reformation is directly ancestral to modernity for how it dramatically broke new ground in metaphysics, law, science, learning, and church-state relations: Thomas Albert Howard, Mark A. Noll, ed., Protestantism after 500 Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

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Protestantism distinguished itself from Catholicism by desacralizing the world and rationalizing religion. Further, they argue that ascetic Protestantism such as Calvinism distinguished itself from Lutheranism with its ethic of discipline and by applying the ethic to life’s activities. The effect transformed the medieval, Catholic ideal of Christendom into the modern reality of Europe with a budding, capitalist economy.6 But the history of Christianity in rural Germany cripples certain assumptions of that theory. For one, it exposes how the theory parses within the selective and myopic parameters of the Protestant and Catholic tropes, which, moreover, are anachronistic. For another, the civil and sacred dimensions at the local level owed their synergy to local initiative and stewardship, not to clerical theology or ecclesiastical orchestrations. A change of confessional religion and church administration did not alter this fact. Additionally, the Protestant Reformation did not differentiate the two dimensions of a rural Gemeinde, and therefore theories lose traction when trying to identify signs of modernization and secularization at the local level. Finally, it does not follow, at the scale of rural Gemeinden at least, that the confessionalizations in the second half of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries catalyzed a de-differentiation of those two dimensions.7 The dimensions had not been undergoing a differentiation in the first place. Christianity in rural Germany points instead to the dynamism and resilience of local animating forces. Concerning Weber’s thesis, for example, the Gemeinden thrived with Calvinism not because the disciplinary bodies it instituted effected a reform of parishioner behavior and belief but because members utilized such means opportunistically to satisfy their own communal norms, values, and customs and to edify the local Christian Gemeinde. Similarly, communitas and the maintenance of peace were, indeed, fundamental concerns in the Christian world prior to circa 1500.8 But rural Gemeinden, instead of pinning such virtues principally on rituals pertaining to sacraments and sacramentals, conserved these via their own deliberative processes and mechanisms of conflict resolution and via opportunities to affirm one’s place in the Christian Gemeinde. Neither creedal orthodoxy nor doctrinal instruction displaced communitas and communal forms as the means to achieve peace. Communal members kept Christianity locally grounded instead of

6 Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der “Geist” des Kapitalismus (Tübingen and Leipzig: J. C. B. Mohr, 1904); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism: a historical study (London: J. Murray, 1926). 7 Philip S. Gorski, The Protestant Ethic Revisited (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2011), 241. 8 John Bossy, Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

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experiencing it as a “shadowy abstraction” looming above a multiplicity of religions and systems of belief by 1700.9 The principal storyline about confessional religion in these rural German areas was not what it did to local parishioners but what rural Gemeinden did with it. A familiar line of thought has it that “[b]y 1648 it had become all too clear to far too many Westerners that religion was no longer a social glue binding civilization together, but rather something corrosive and explosive which in the long run would have to be circumvented, perhaps even ignored…. After 1650, religion did not lose its dynamism or its power to effect real change in individuals and societies. Far from it. But it did definitely begin to play an increasingly diminishing role in shaping ‘the world’ it had so intensely hoped to transform.”10 Other literature concurs that, as confessionalism failed to achieve its aims and skepticism germinated by the seventeenth century, Christianity risked losing its uncontested status as belief became a matter of scientific evidence and empirical argument.11 Piety, missions, and awakenings among Catholics and Protestants countered the trend, and institutional churches continued to usher parishioners from cradle to grave with a set of ministrations.12 Yet, through the eighteenth century, rising scientific, philosophical, commercial, and global pursuits stoked secularizing trends that permeated quotidian life in Europe.13 The long nineteenth century mounted even greater challenges as revolutionary politics, nation-state ambitions, and modernizing forces threatened to overshadow movements of Christian renewal and to marginalize or co-opt Christianity in Europe.14 Then the horrors, dislocations, and political experiments of the twentieth century, coupled with disillusionment

9 10 11

12

13

14

Bossy, Christianity in the West, 170. Eire, Reformations, 718. Israel, Radical Enlightenment; Ethan Shagan, The Birth of Modern Belief: Faith and Judgment from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018). David Hempton, The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2011); W. R. Ward, Christianity under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999); Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett, ed., Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution 1660–1815, vol. 7 of The Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Margaret C. Jacob, The Secular Enlightenment (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019); P. M. Harman, The Scientific Revolution (London: Routledge, 2009). Older works portraying this: Carl L. Becker, The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1932); Paul Hazard, The European Mind [1680–1715] (London: Hollis & Carter, 1953 [orig. 1935]). Hugh McLeod, Religion and the People of Western Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Frances Knight, The Church in the Nineteenth Century (London: I. B. Tauris, 2008).

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over the church’s failings, depleted Christianity’s relevance until it ceased to be the default for many.15 Whether because of a more linear or more complex process,16 ties between church and society had effectively been loosed. Toward the end of the second millennium ad, one could plausibly speak of Europe as post-Christian. Conversely, for rural Gemeinden, religion in the roughly three centuries after 1648 was as much and more of a focal point of their energies, a bonding agent of their civilization, and a means to shape their world than ever. If one may call them rural Christendoms—in the way that the corpus christianum at the scale of the Latin Christian world has been called Latin Christendom and at the scale of the Holy Roman Empire has been called Imperial Christendom—then one might regard these rural Gemeinden as the “last Christendoms” in Europe. 15

16

Hugh McLeod, ed., World Christianities, c.1914–c.2000, vol. 9 of The Cambridge History of Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), and particularly the essays by Michael Snape, Martin Conway, Andrew Chandler, and Hugh McLeod in the volume; Alistair McGrath, Christian History: An Introduction (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 285–348; Hugh McLeod, The Religious Crisis of the 1960s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010). Ustorf, McLeod, The Decline of Christendom in Western Europe, 1750–2000.

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Part 2 Divergence: The Civil and the Sacred Disunited, 1648–

∵

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Introduction to Part 2 Schreufa passed into the post-1648 era on the same track and trajectory as the rural Gemeinden discussed in Part 1. Due to the 1648 Peace, the Gemeinde and Christians of Schreufa would become classified with one of three names: Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. Due to another agreement, the 1648 Accord signed between Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Darmstadt, the ecclesiastical system in the region in which Schreufa rested, Upper Hesse, became classified as Lutheran after 1648, even though the region lay within the larger Reformed landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel.1 Consequently, Schreufa’s sacred community became denominated as Lutheran. This change did not automatically dismantle the civil-sacred unity. The two dimensions remained united like they did for the Gemeinden in Part 1. Schreufa still called itself the Gemeinde in civil and sacred affairs. Members still aimed to localize Christian ministrations. Already in the 1650s and 1660s they repeatedly contested parish obligations toward the mother church of Viermünden.2 Twice they turned away from the Viermünden minister and arranged to receive ministrations from the Frankenberg schoolmaster, just as Schreufa members in 1616 had done. But in 1685 the Gemeinde of Schreufa underwent the most important development in its history. The parish minister in Viermünden requested a new parish house and barn, and when affiliate Schreufa refused to contribute, the governing authorities, led by the imperious Reformed Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel, fined the members. When an official later offered to cancel the fine if the members would cross from the Lutheran to the Reformed religion, a great majority of them, thirteen in number, agreed to.3 They severed ties with their Viermünden Lutheran minister, refused to attend Lutheran services, and arranged for a Frankenberg Reformed minister to come regularly instead. The church chest officer once mockingly read aloud a church ordinance that dated from the pre-1648 period of Christian monism but now, in the new era of Christian pluralism, was associated with the name Lutheran. The Reformed men’s wives remained Lutheran, as did three old members of the commune. At the next service led by the Viermünden Lutheran minister in the Schreufa church, the women and children wailed with cries and tears. The Reformed men forbade their children from attending the local school until a Reformed

1 HStAM, 4c 4 no. 971, 988–91; HStAD, E5, A1 20:3 and 24:2. 2 HStAM, 17e Schreufa no. 6; HStAM, 22a no. 9:10. 3 HStAM, 315f no. 585.

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schoolmaster replaced the Lutheran one, which happened only a short time later. The Schreufa Reformed also then barred the Lutherans from the local church. On one occasion they made sure the keys were withheld from the Viermünden Lutheran minister. On another they nailed the church door shut, causing their own wives, children, and others to weep again during a Lutheran service, this time held in deep snow and bitter cold on the churchyard. Before long the Lutherans held services in a local barn, earning them the pejorative nickname “barn Christians.” In 1686 they totaled forty-six persons and the Reformed twenty-three. The latter probably combined the thirteen men and a smattering of Reformed, likely state-appointed officials, from nearby locales who started attending Reformed services in Schreufa. Members had used the term “the Gemeinde of Schreufa” in a parish context from time immemorial. But with the local sacred community now divided, one corpus referred to itself as “the Reformed community of Schreufa” and to the other as “the Lutheran community of Schreufa.” Prior to 1648 Schreufa had prevented the line of confessional division from piercing and cleaving the local Christian community, but after 1648 the line of denominational division severed that sacred corpus in two. It remained that way until Schreufa’s Lutheran and Reformed communities united as an evangelical community in the 1950s. Schreufa was not alone. Many other rural Gemeinden lost their civilsacred unity, too, when their local Christian community fractured into rivaling denominational communities and thereby caused the local civil and sacred dimensions to decouple. This caused the rural Gemeinden described below in Part 2 to be diverted from the path trod by those in Part 1. Neither the Reformations in the sixteenth century nor the confessional disputes that raged through the first half of the seventeenth century induced the phenomenon. Rather, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia inadvertently conceived the circumstances that made it possible.

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Chapter 6

The Division of Local Sacred Communities, 1648–1817 At the Congress of Westphalia (1643–1648) discussions began in early 1646 on how to settle religious conflict in the Empire. By June 1647 the two parties involved in the 1555 Peace established a parity between their religions—that of the old church, referred to in the concluding 1648 Peace of Westphalia as Catholic, and that of the Augsburg Confession—that the 1555 Peace had not. The so-called Reformed earnestly sought inclusion in the arrangement. By March 1648 they succeeded in getting the other two parties to recognize those “called Reformed.”1 By declaring the exact equality of the estates that adhered to the three confessional religions, the 1648 Peace effectively recognized the exact equality of the religions themselves.2 If Luther’s words starting in 1517 and the response to them broke a century-long deadlock over reform in the Empire,3 then the 1648 Peace broke an equally long deadlock over mutually exclusive confessional claims to Christianity. As for the exercise of religion,4 the 1648 Peace laid out the “normal year” (Normaljahr) rule, meaning the reference point for religious practice and the permanent possession of ecclesiastical properties.5 The rule restored the status quo of January 1, 1624. Any lawful confession exercised publicly on that date was to be restored to its former condition, and adherents of the official religion were to enjoy the rights of public worship. Others were allowed the right of private worship in chapels without spires or bells. Finally,

1 The former in art. 7 § 1 and the latter in art. 5 § 1 of the Peace of Osnabrück (Instrumentum Pacis Osnabrugense), which, along with the Peace of Münster (Instrumentum Pacis Monasteriense), constituted the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Konrad Müller, ed., Instrumenta pacis Westphalicae—Die Westfälischen Friedensverträge (Bern: Herbert Lang, 1975). For more: Franz-Josef Jakobi, “Zur religionsgeschichtlichen Bedeutung des Westfälischen Friedens,” in 350 Jahre Westfälischer Friede: Verfassungsgeschichte, Staatskirchenrecht, Völkerrechtsgeschichte, ed. Meinhard Schröder (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1999), 83–98. 2 Articles 5 and 7 of the Peace of Osnabrück, in Müller, Instrumenta pacis Westphalicae. 3 Brady, German Histories, 149, 156. 4 Articles 5 and 7 of the Peace of Osnabrück, in Müller, Instrumenta pacis Westphalicae. 5 Peter H. Wilson, The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009), 716–22; Derek Croxton and Anuschka Tischer, The Peace of Westphalia: A Historical Dictionary (Westport: Greenwood, 2002), xviii–xix.

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those who had not enjoyed rights of worship prior to January 1, 1624 were permitted the right of domestic devotion. On October 24, 1648 the emperor signed the Peace of Westphalia. The 1648 Peace marked the official end of the Empire as a singular Christian realm and the beginning of it as a multiconfessional one. Scholarly consensus has regarded the 1648 Peace as a landmark resolution to the Empire’s religious disputes. It restored, seemingly, the peaceable arrangement that had been instituted by the 1555 Peace, but which had been broken down through subsequent developments. It opted, like the 1555 Peace, for compromise and pragmatism on matters of religion and thereby facilitated the Empire’s continuing political existence until the early nineteenth century.6 The 1648 Peace provided protection by freezing the status quo. It incorporated general lessons learned from past successes and failures about how to manage religious conflict, and it reflected diplomatic efforts to arrive at durable frameworks that would allow for “the peaceful coexistence of the major Christian denominations” in the Empire.7 It facilitated agreements so that a “new stability was reached, one that lasted until the next powerful force of change in the last third of the eighteenth century.”8 As Voltaire wrote in 1763, “Germany would be a desert strewn with the bones of Catholics, Protestants, and Anabaptists, slain by each other, if the peace of Westphalia had not at length brought freedom of conscience.”9 For rural Gemeinden across Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian lands, the 1648 Peace was, indeed, a historic caesura, but for opposite reasons. Its ramifications yielded none of the above salutary effects. Instead, they threatened to divide the local sacred community and thereby break up the unitary concept of the local civil commune and sacred community, a concept that the 1555

6 Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “Settlements: The Holy Roman Empire,” in Brady, Oberman, Tracy, Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, 2:373–74. 7 Whaley, Maximilian I to the Peace of Westphalia, 1493–1648, 11. Benjamin J. Kaplan, “Coexistence, Conflict, and the Practice of Toleration,” in A Companion to the Reformation World, ed. R. Po-chia Hsia (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004), 496–98; David Luebke, “A Multiconfessional Empire,” in Safley, A Companion to Multiconfessionalism, 130–54. Ralf-Peter Fuchs elucidates the double-edged nature of the normative year for the politics of conversion yet sounds a similar chord about the overall positive effects of the 1648 Peace: “The Right to Be Catholic—the Right to Be Protestant?” in Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany, ed. David M. Luebke, Jared Poley, Daniel C. Ryan, and David Warren Sabean (New York: Berghahn, 2012), 69–86. 8 Heinz Schilling, Aufbruch und Krise: Deutschland, 1517–1648 (Berlin: Siedler, 1988), 462. 9 François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire, “On Toleration,” in Freedom of Religion: Foundational Documents and Historical Arguments, ed. Stephen A. Smith (Oxford: Oxbridge, 2017), 263.

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Peace had so strongly tended to preserve. They jeopardized the integrity of communal structures. They endangered the status quo and stable frameworks. They, for the first time, primed the conditions for rural Christians to be set against one another because of religion and to struggle to coexist. The rural Gemeinden in Chapters 3–5 were equally susceptible to these consequences yet passed through time unaffected by them. The rural Gemeinden discussed below, by contrast, succumbed to them. If one can speak of those in Part 1 as the “last Christendoms,” then the ones in Part 2 might be called the “lost Christendoms” for how they, at a point in time particular to each, ceased to exist as they had been.

1

Alleviating Disunity and Priming Disunity

The consequences of the 1648 Peace rippled their way from the Imperial to the local level. For the Empire the transition to Christian pluralism compelled each confessional party to concede that the other two parties could also invoke the name Christian. This step was effectively the sine qua non for Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed to come into existence in the eyes of the Empire and the Imperial territories discussed here, Hesse-Kassel, Hanau-Münzenberg, and Fulda abbey. The confessional parties did not arrive at this point ecumenically or naturally on their own accord. Their polemics were as earnest and exclusivist into the 1640s as in earlier generations. Rather, the Imperial estates initiated it out of political necessity to preserve their Empire after three decades of war. In time the names Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed became naturalized, legalized, and codified. The 1648 Peace itself started to bear witness to this. One party of adherents was identified as Catholic, one as the adherents of the Augsburg Confession, and one as those called Reformed. The word Lutheran did not appear in the 1648 Peace, perhaps because it was too charged. Nevertheless, the 1648 Peace effectively caused the name Lutheran to become naturalized too. Whereas, for example, in 1647 the Hanau Count Friedrich Casimir wrote of his “evangelical called Lutheran religion,” a year later he stopped using the word called.10 A similar phenomenon steadily played out at the scale of the territories. A prince’s religion was no longer Christian in contrast to another prince’s false religion. Rather, it bore the codified name Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed and the other prince’s religion bore one of the other two names. Denominations were starting to form. As they did, their respective nomenclature spread 10

HStAM, 83 no. 25.

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through territories and labeled as Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed things that, in previous centuries, had been conceptualized as Christian in a context of Christian monism. Among these were the territory’s ecclesiastical institution and its ministers, parishes, parish networks, parish registers, church buildings, schools, and cemeteries. So long as that ecclesiastical institution remained the only one in a territory, and so long as the territory’s parishioners, generally speaking, bore its same denominational classification, the territory’s civilsacred unity would remain. But realistically, as Part 2 explains, that became all but impossible. By the early eighteenth century multiple ecclesiastical institutions and parishioners of multiple denominations existed in HanauMünzenberg, Fulda abbey, and the region of Upper Hesse within Hesse-Kassel. Thus, the civil-sacred unity at the scale of these territories broke apart in the post-Westphalian period. In the cases of Fulda and Hesse-Kassel it occurred de facto with the power and backing of partisan sovereigns. In HanauMünzenberg the process was formalized in the 1670 Resolution, the Religionshauptrecess. Since the late 1640s Lutheran ministrations and education had spilled beyond City Hanau’s castle church, where Count Friedrich Casimir established them, and into City Hanau itself. Coreligionists in a couple other county towns, including Windecken, started taking similar steps or expressly desired to. Strained relations between the Reformed and Lutherans compelled Friedrich Casimir to convene territorial subjects as well as delegates from Imperial estates in 1664 in order to permanently settle Reformed-Lutheran differences. The effort culminated in the 1670 Resolution. Most importantly, it granted Lutherans in the county the same “free” and “unrestricted” exercise of their religion that the Reformed had (Coexercitium Religionis) as well as the accompanying “rights and liberties.”11 Lutherans were free to build their own churches and schools. Article thirteen authorized a Lutheran consistory, which would have the same privileges to administer Lutheran church, school, and financial affairs in the county as the Reformed consistory did for Reformed ones. The Resolution completed Hanau-Münzenberg’s shift toward multiconfessionalism. However, as time would reveal, it only problematized relations between Reformed and Lutheran, and by formalizing the distinction between the two, the Resolution established conditions for the rest of the county to be swept into the same categorizations—and into the same division and rancor. The same phenomenon could potentially happen at the local scale of towns and villages. Prior to 1648 every local sacred community was, as a matter of course, lawfully Christian. After 1648 each one became ecclesiastically denominated as Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed, depending on its parish context. 11

The 1670 Resolution is in HStAM, 83 no. 425. The quotations here come from article six.

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So long as that original sacred community remained the only one locally, as happened in Part 1, the civil and sacred dimensions remained united. But wherever a corpus of denominational others coalesced locally and formed a second sacred or denominational community, as happened in the cases below in Part 2, the civil-sacred unity was lost and the two local sacred communities squabbled over rights and claims to properties and space. Prior to 1648 members of a local Gemeinde decided on civil matters and sacred matters. After 1648 those same members would still, as a commune, decide on civil matters, but on sacred matters they made decisions separately as members of their respective denominational communities. The polarizing dynamic could become more complex wherever a third denominational community was founded locally. All such developments were novel. Anabaptists in the pre1648 period, for example, neither incorporated and asserted themselves nor made claims on local property for the purpose of religious exercise; after 1648 new secondary (or tertiary) denominational communities at the local level did both. As a result, the Gemeinden below in Part 2 developed a historical consciousness different than those in Part 1. For the former, the year when the local sacred community officially divided became the definitive date of importance. At this point, when the sacred and civil dimensions parted ways, they ceased to be Gemeinden in the holistic sense outlined in Part 1. For the same reason, I will shift my language as this point is reached, referring to them as communes or communities, depending on which aspect, civil or sacred respectively, is at play. For Schreufa, that point was 1685; for Willersdorf, 1682; for Frankenau, 1700; and so forth. The process of a local sacred community dividing into two sacred communities catalyzed a fusion of each community with its bureaucratic label, be it Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. The communities aggressively appropriated their respective names. The original community did so while largely redirecting energies away from ambitions it had pursued prior to 1648 (ones that Gemeinden in Part 1 were still at liberty to pursue) and focusing them in opposition to the nascent, secondary community. This caused custom and confessional label to unite—for instance, if an original community became categorized as Lutheran, then asserting communal custom against the secondary community’s novelties and asserting the denominational name of Lutheran worked in tandem. The same was true for an original community that became categorized as Catholic or Reformed. Meanwhile, the secondary community appropriated its new legal classification not in defense of custom, since its corpus was new and did not have any custom to defend, but rather by pressing legal protections that were explicit or implicit in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and in subsequent territorial statutes. Generally, the more

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Map 4

Places mentioned in Chapters 6–11

The Division of Local Sacred Communities

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intensely the two communities polarized and fought, the more intensely each community and its denominational label merged. If members of the rural Gemeinden had harbored confessional adherences before 1648, and if the legal classification of “Christian” had merely been masking them, then in the first years after 1648 the members would have done certain things. They would have invoked and discoursed regularly with the newly codified names, and they would have quickly separated into denominational corpora so that, say, a Lutheran community and a Reformed community, or a Catholic community and a Lutheran community, formed locally. Those things happened, typically, by the late 1640s to early 1650s in locales where confessional adherence had surfaced prior to the Westphalian proceedings—that is, in leading urban centers of the regions, such as Marburg and City Hanau. But in the villages they did not start happening until the 1680s and 1690s. By then, the lawful denominational classifications had had a few decades to work their way through ecclesiastical channels and into the fabric of life in a territory. Locales that eventually possessed a denominationally mixed population felt the pressures of polarization. The phenomenon of multiple denominational categories operating at a local level and restructuring its world became an animating force in addition to those described in Chapter 1. The phenomenon took hold and worked powerfully among the rural Gemeinden described below in Part 2, but it found no root among those in Chapters 3–5 since no rival sacred community materialized in opposition to the original community. In sum, the 1648 Peace at once alleviated the upheaval suffered from the disunification of the civil and sacred dimensions of the Empire and primed the disunification of them at the territorial and local levels within the Empire. For the rural Gemeinden at least, the legacy of the Westphalian settlement was not that it “proved successful in resolving more local, everyday disputes” but that it planted the seeds for them to germinate.12

2

The Empire’s Birthing of Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed as Triplets in 1648

Making it possible, in the first place, for a second denominational community to form locally was the fact that not all parishioners in the Imperial territories became denominated with the same name. Prior to 1648 a person went about as a Christian. When she resided in a certain locale, she did so as part of the

12

Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire, 130.

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Christian community there. If she moved to another territory, then she did so as a Christian to a locale that had a Christian community. By contrast, as the effects of the 1648 Peace wended their way through a territory, a person went about classified as a Catholic or Lutheran or Reformed. If he were a Reformed and moved to a locale that had only a Reformed community, then he was not a menace to the civil-sacred unity there. But if he went to a locale that had only a Lutheran or Catholic community, then his arrival did pose a threat. If more Reformed came and settled with him, or if any locals converted and became Reformed, then the threat grew. The same applied if the person in question were classified a Catholic or Lutheran and moved to a locale whose community had been denominated differently.13 Moreover, no longer could the prince enforce the exclusive exercise of or conformity to his religion. By legalizing the public exercise, private exercise, or devotional practice of multiple religions within territories, the 1648 Peace effectively nullified the cuius-regio principle established in 1555. Prior to 1648, if a prince interpreted the right granted in the 1555 Peace exclusively in his favor and strictly enforced it, then the territorial border doubled as the line of separation between his religion and another. The 1648 Peace allowed this line to be shifted to within a territory. A Catholic, like a Lutheran and a Reformed, might not need to go outside the territory to exercise her religion. Such circumstances fostered a development antithetical to the onethousand-year evolution of parish formation, namely, the formation of a new or secondary parish network in addition to the original one. The secondary network spread partly or entirely across a region or territory until it had its own set of parishes and overlapped the original network. Typically, the secondary network’s parishes had a greater geographical range, sometimes significantly so, than those of the original network, making it highly demanding for clerics and parishioners in distant locations to reach one another. For them the 13

A similar pattern of “confrontation,” as Frauke Volkland calls it, occurred in the Palatinate at the end of the seventeenth century. If the framework of this book also applies there, then it would argue that the explanation lies not with the process of so-called “Reformed” confessionalization having finished after more than a century and the processes of Catholic and Lutheran confessionalization having only just begun. Rather, it would argue that, locally, the original sacred community acquired a codified name in the wake of 1648, causing a newly forming corpus with a different codified name to be a threat; and that what appears as “a late coexistence” was, instead, a nascent world composed of Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed, which the Peace of Westphalia had made possible. “Konfessionelle Abgrenzung zwischen Gewalt, Stereotypenbildung und Symbolik: Gemischtkonfessionelle Gebiete der Ostschweiz und die Kurpfalz im Vergleich,” in Religion und Gewalt: Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800), ed. Kaspar von Greyerz and Kim Siebenhüner (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 343–65.

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ramifications of the 1648 Peace reversed localizing efforts by as much as one thousand years, to the time when the original parishes came into being and accessing ministrations required traveling long distances. Unsurprisingly, their impulse to localize kicked in quickly. Clerics struggled mightily with the new reality. Regions now had multiple sets of ministers instead of one. Prior to 1648 ministers usually beheld their clerical counterparts across territorial boundaries as confessional adversaries. After 1648 they increasingly faced one another within a territory as denominational rivals. Each set of ministers possessed the right to perform ministerial acts (actes ministeriales). Consequently, rivaling ministers whose parish jurisdictions overlapped perceived each other as a potential threat to that right and frequently battled over the right to baptize or marry or bury a certain parishioner. “It would have been a blessing had the [Peace of Westphalia] not allowed one to be Reformed,” lamented B. Schirling in Frankenberg in 1670, but because it did the Reformed had to “suffer as did those during the times of Diocletian and the persecutions.”14 Schirling was rector of the Lutheran school but subsequently became Reformed. The Lutherans, irate as a result, forced him out of his post. Other contemporaries would have sympathized with Schirling’s preference for the Christian monism of pre-Westphalian times. The measure concerning religion that caused the greatest disturbance among them was not a sweeping reform or confessional mandate during the 1517–1648 period but rather the historic step of religious toleration taken at the end of it: the Empire’s recognition of the exact equality of the estates which adhered to the three confessional religions. It proved to be more of a double-edged sword than the panacea it was intended to be.15 The effects of the Peace of Westphalia also produced changes in the words and expressions discussed in Chapter 2. The root forms Cathol-, Luther-,

14 15

HStAM, 22a no. 8:9. These developments may contribute to the explanation as to why, after 1648, differing religious adherences and perceived boundaries sharpened in those areas where they had taken hold prior to 1648, and why hostilities and intolerance increased elsewhere: Emily Fisher Gray, “Celebrating Peace in Biconfessional Augsburg: Lutheran Churches and Remembrance Culture,” and Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, “Parish Clergy, Patronage Rights, and Regional Politics in the Convent Churches of Welver, 1532–1697,” in Topographies of Tolerance and Intolerance: Responses to Religious Pluralism in Reformation Europe, ed. Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer and Victoria Christman (Leiden: Brill, 2018), respectively, 176–200 and 223–47; Christian Mühling, Die europäische Debatte über den Religionskrieg (1679–1714). Konfessionelle Memoria und international Politik im Zeitalter Ludwigs XIV (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018).

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and Reformiert- appeared more often, by an order of magnitude, in post1648 territorial documents than in pre-1648 ones. In a related development, certain qualifications around these root forms—such as “called,” “so-called,” and “that one calls”—disappeared, and also the root forms began appearing regularly with noun endings. The word Lutheraner surfaced in Frankenberg and in Schreufa in the later seventeenth century, for example, amid the festering strife between them and the Reformed.16 Likewise, Burghaun Catholics in the 1690s and early 1700s charged local “Luteraner” with disturbing holy days by doing noisy work.17 The name Catholicen also emerged, as in a 1664 letter from the Hanau court minister to the city council.18 So, too, did Catholicken, as in a 1670 investigation in Frankenberg and a 1753 dispute between the Hanau Reformed and Lutheran consistories in which were mentioned the “Catholicken” at Osnabrück in 1648.19 The same word was also spelled “Catoliquen” or “Catholiquen,” especially in the Fulda region.20 The noun Reformierten—Reformed—underwent the same transition as the other two.21 One can, however, easily discern discrepancies in the names’ usage. Authorities operated bureaucratically with categories of Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed. Similarly, locals described below also commonly employed the names. But locals examined in Chapters 3–5 did so far less. They did not lapse into the habit. Nevertheless, a new era had dawned. Nothing testifies more to the failed universalist intentions of the pre-1648 Christian confessions than the fact that the Holy Roman Empire birthed Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed as triplets with the 1648 Peace and that they steadily materialized in the territories in the wake of it. It was a world the confessional devotees never wanted to see. It was also, apparently, an accident. The delegations at Westphalia did not seem to realize they were engendering it. In any case, before 1648 the terms Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed had been anathema when divorced from what speakers presumed to be true Christianity. Persons attached to them risked association with unbelievers or beasts. As the post-1648 era unfolded,

16 17 18 19 20 21

HStAM, 17e Frankenberg no. 38; HStAM, 22a no. 9:3 and 8:9; HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362; HStAM, 315f no. 580. HStAM, 94 no. 285. HStAM, 83 no. 5516. HStAM, 22a no. 8:9, and HStAM, 83 Schubl. 1276 no. 20. In HStAM, 315f no. 2476; HStAM, 94 no. 285; and HStAM, 92 no. 85. Instances abound; see, for instance, the 1654–1670 conflict between Lutherans and Reformed in Rosenthal in HStAM, 22a no. 9:9.

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a Christian could associate with any of them because each was considered orthodox. Locally, a population of undifferentiated Christians became, after 1648, either a denominationally homogenous population, as seen in Chapters 3–5, or a denominationally differentiated one, as seen here in Part 2. This development accentuated again the contrast in the historical experience of theologians and of rural communities. In the decades around 1700, when some theologians explored the possibility of reconciliation and ecclesiastical union among Lutherans and Reformed and even Catholics,22 many rural Christians were being divided into Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed and their sacred community was splitting into multiple communities. As for the term evangelisch, it became denominational and standardized. Catholics were heard benignly calling their opposites the Evangelischen. Moreover, whereas before 1648 one might hear the adjectives evangelisch and Lutherisch used coterminously and exclusive of other claims to Christian orthodoxy, in the post-1648 period they formed a singular, sometimes hyphenated appellation, evangelical-Lutheran, which stood alongside one of its two coequal rivals, evangelical-Reformed. The appellations evangelical-Lutheran and evangelical-Reformed became affixed to things across the ecclesiastical landscape, especially in regions where the two ranked as the most prominent religious groups and where Catholics lagged far behind as a tertiary presence. In another respect the word evangelisch passed from a contested state to a still unsettled one. One heard mention in 1722 of the “church of the so-called evangelicals,” for example.23 Amid an effort to establish a union of the evangelical Imperial estates in 1717–1722, the two sides were enjoined not to use “sectarian names” among each other but rather to “call themselves evangelicals or members of the Augsburg Confession.” If they had need to differentiate among themselves, then one was to use the terms Evangelisch-Lutherischen and Evangelisch-Reformierten.24 The 1648 Peace also catalyzed shifts to the term Protestant and words related to it. Mention in article seven of the 1648 Peace of “the estates which one calls Protesting” reflected the disputed status of protestierende during the pre-1648 period.25 But the word then became naturalized and also no longer

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Alexander Schunka, “Union, Reunion, or Toleration? Reconciliatory Attempts among Eighteenth-Century Protestants,” in Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500–1800, ed. Howard Louthan, Gary B. Cohen, and Franz A. J. Szabo (New York: Berghahn, 2011), 193–208. HStAM, 4i no. 217. HStAM, 4i no. 217. Article 7 § 1 of the Peace of Osnabrück, in Müller, Instrumenta pacis Westphalicae.

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appeared typically before the nouns of electors, princes, and estates. Rather, it had broader connotation and application, such as mention in 1722 of a “union of both Protesting sides.”26 Equally significant, Protestanten and the adjective protestantisch appeared in post-1648 territorial life, although authorities were the ones who usually employed the terms. One heard mention of Protestants and the adjective Protestant was placed before nouns such as princes, married couple, wife, mother, parish, guild members, clerics and schoolteachers, and exercise of religion.27 The term Protestant was understood to encompass the Lutheran and Reformed religions. Therefore the Marburg consistory wrote about the “distinction between the two Protestant religions” and the “necessary unity among Protestants” in a case involving Lutherans and Reformed in Schreufa.28 Similarly, the adjectives Catholische, Lutherische, and Reformierte now regularly preceded the word Untertanen—subjects. Governing authorities thus recognized that their territories were no longer populated by Christian subjects along with non-conformists. Rather, they differentiated between “Lutheran subjects,” “Catholic subjects,” and “Reformed subjects” and mentioned “Protestant subjects,” “evangelical subjects,” “evangelical-Lutheran subjects,” “evangelical-Reformed subjects,” “Roman Catholic subjects,” and “subjects of the Augsburg Confession” in correspondence and other records.29 Territorial populations were also heard expressly recognizing the plurality of Christians. Catholics in eighteenth-century Burghaun defended the erection of a certain cross as edifying “to all Christians irrespective of religion.”30 Religious terminology surrounding zugetan—“committed to” or “attached to”—also changed. While certain expressions continued (e.g., how persons were committed to the Augsburg Confession) many new ones appeared and, moreover, occurred more frequently.31 Persons were joined to “the Reformed

26 27

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HStAM, 4i no. 217. Respectively, in HStAM, 92 no. 83; HStAM, 94 no. 311; HStAM, 92 no. 103; HStAM, 318 no. 1007; HStAM, 318 no. 1001; HStAM, 92 no. 83; HStAM, 92 no. 83; HStAM, 315f no. 1562; and HStAM, 92 no. 83. HStAM, 22a no. 4b:9; and HStAM, 315f no. 555. For examples of each terms in order, see HStAM, 318 no. 142; HStAM, Prot. II Hanau A23 vol. 1 (13 Oct. 1661); HStAM, 315f no. 555; HStAM, 315f no. 2470, 2476; HStAM, 83 no. 403; HStAM, 92 no. 81IV and 392; HStAM, 83 no. 5302; HStAM, 92 no. 80III; HStAM, 315f no. 1643; HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10325; HStAM, 318 no. 256; HStAM, 92 no. 80III and 392; and HStAM, 94 no. 285. I did not find any instances of “subjects of the Augsburg Confession” in pre-1648 documents. HStAM, 92 no. 83. HStAM, 22a no. 9:1.

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religion,” “the Reformed confession,” “the Lutheran religion,” “the Ev. Lutheran religion,” “the Lutheran confession,” “the Catholic religion,” and “the Roman Catholic religion,” and one hears of “subjects respectively committed to both religions.”32 Furthermore, the discourse surrounding zugetan expanded the word’s connotation beyond a willful, conscious adherence to a religion. Persons were now attached to one by virtue of being born to a father and/or mother of that religion. Church ordinances summed up the new association by stipulating that offspring were to follow in the religion which the father or mother was “zugetan.”33 Association with the names Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed, which had been voluntary and fluid prior to the 1648 Peace, steadily became involuntary and fixed after it. The expression “sooner … than” appeared considerably more often after 1648.34 This may be due partly to a greater volume of documentation but more likely to the onset of Christian pluralism and denominational categories. The same applies to the word “become” or “became” (worden), which was linked to the terms Catholic and Lutheran and Reformed (or Calvinist) a great deal more often in territorial records. Moreover, not only clerics but also laypeople now expressed it because denominations drew everyone into a discourse of describing persons who had been one thing and then became something else. For example, amid growing tensions in Upper Hesse one heard statements such as “you were Lutheran and became Reformed” and “all Reformed parents’ children have become Lutheran.”35 The very fact that denominational lines came into existence among Christians in rural Gemeinden and started running through their everyday experience, and that people could transgress or cross over them, was entirely novel among rural Gemeinden. Conversion, indeed, “threatened to shatter a family’s internal coherence and stability,” and to a Gemeinde it could well be “fundamentally treacherous and threatening to the everyday order of things.”36 But as far as the rural Gemeinden were concerned, the point about the 1648 Peace was not that it “aimed to absorb conversion’s destabilizing effects,” nor did it “manage—rather than erase—the

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See these examples in HStAM, 22a no. 9:1; HStAM, 318 no. 333; HStAM, 318 no. 256; HStAM, 318 no. 767; HStAM, 318 no. 256; and HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362. HStAM, 83 no. 61; and HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 256 and 1007. For example, HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362; HStAM, 315f no. 567; HStAM, 318 no. 273 and 1050; HStAM, 22a no. 8:10; HStAM, 83 no. 5051, 5329, 5370, and 5749; HStAM, Prot. II Hanau A23 vol. 1. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362; HStAM, 315f no. 2476. Duane J. Corpis, Crossing the Boundaries of Belief: Geographies of Religious Conversion in Southern Germany, 1648–1800 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2014), 146, 83.

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tensions of religious pluralism in the empire.”37 Rather, the 1648 Peace created the makings for conversion itself and for the tensions and destabilization that accompanied denominational categories. The same occurred to the word treten, to “tread” or “go.” Whereas confessionalism prior to 1648 enabled confessional adherents to conceptualize a person treading from true religion to something damnable, the rise of denominations after 1648 enabled everyone, laypersons included, to articulate a person treading or going from one lawful religion to another. In 1670 two Frankenberg officials recorded how a certain Daniel Arnold allegedly lived in disunity with his brother and consequently “trod from the religion,” meaning, from the Lutheran to the Reformed.38 They also wrote that the Frankenberg Reformed minister recalled having been with a man named Eiertanz in David Garten’s house. Religion was discussed, and allegedly Seibert insinuated to Eiertanz that he “should go to the Reformed religion.”39 In a 1677 testimony a Gemünden an der Wohra councilman said the brother of the local Lutheran minister once told a Reformed official “he wanted to go to the Reformed religion.”40 In 1713 the Lutheran community in Wolferode mentioned that, of the five Reformed members of the commune, four had “trod from the Lutheran religion and to the Reformed [religion].”41 Beyond these examples clerics and officials in Frankenberg used the past tense “trod” a half-dozen instances between 1668 and 1705 to describe persons who had gone from one denomination to another.42 The term “fell away” (abgefallen) surfaced on one occasion in common discourse. Amid a massive bloody tumult between Lutherans and Reformed on the Frankenberg churchyard in January 1705 a widow named Elizabeth allegedly yelled out the window to a man named Wilhelm, “[t]hat’s how it’s going to go for the Reformed…. [You] had a good faith, which [you] abandoned and fell away from.”43 The terms “misled” (verleitet) and “led away” (abgeleitet) continued to appear after 1648, although the ecclesiastical rank and file were still the ones who used them.44

37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Corpis, Crossing the Boundaries of Belief, 117. HStAM, 22a no. 8:9. HStAM, 22a no. 8:9. HStAM, 22a no. 9:4. HStAM, 315f no. 2476. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362; HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10142; HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10145; HStAM, 22a no. 8:9; HStAM, 22a no. 9:4. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362; HStAM, 83 no. 414; HStAM, 83 no. 5051; HStAM, 83 no. 5384; HStAM, 83 no. 2864.

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Finally, language surrounding the word confirmiert (confirmed) changed after 1648 as well. One read and heard statements such as confirmed “in the evangelical Lutheran religion,” “in the evangelical Reformed religion,” “in the Roman Catholic religion,” “will undoubtedly let their [children be] confirmed Reformed,” “confirmed in the Reformed religion,” “be confirmed in the Lutheran religion,” and “being allowed to let her son be confirmed in the evangelical Lutheran religion.”45 “I was baptized and confirmed Reformed,” stated a young man in 1705.46 In 1731 the Catholic wife of a Reformed man in Marköbel took their oldest daughter to a locale where she was “taught and … confirmed in the Roman religion.”47 “I myself do not dare confirm the children of Reformed fathers in the Lutheran religion,” wrote the Kirchhain Lutheran minister in 1764.48 Clerics and laypeople alike spoke this way as it became commonplace. Wherever a local Christian community divided into multiple sacred communities, laypersons were heard denigrating each other with pejorative names. Amid division in Frankenberg in the second half of seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the majority Lutherans lumped their rivals, the Reformed, together with the handful of local “Papists.”49 The same was true in other Upper Hessian locales undergoing the same division,50 and Landgrave Karl was also heard calling Catholics “Papists.”51 As for Calvinist, in theory because the Peace of Westphalia had recognized the Reformed religion the name Calvinist should no longer have been a term of abuse. In practice it was sometimes used benignly. Such instances tended to occur in and around the Burghaun district,52 where a sprinkling of Calvinists posed no substantive threat to the larger Lutheran and Catholic corpora. But in Upper Hesse, where in some locales the Christian community divided into Lutheran and Reformed communities, the name Calvinist frequently remained an insult. Lutherans chastised the Calvinist “error” and slandered the Calvinists as rogues, dogs, and thieves.53 Furthermore, in 1669 a top Reformed official in Rosenthal said 45

46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53

Respectively: HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 1104; HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 333; HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 256; HStAM, 318 Marburg 333; HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 256; HStAM, 318 Marburg 256; HStAM, 318 Marburg 256. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362. HStAM, 83 no. 4739. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 1001. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362; HStAM, 22a no. 8:9. HStAM, 22a no. 8:9; HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10145 and no. 3362. HStAM, 315f no. 2468. For example, many can be found in HStAM, 92 no. 370 and HStAM, 92 no. 80I. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362 and 10142; Lutherans in Frankenberg also threatened to have an image made and called “Calvin’s.” HStAM, 22a no. 8:9.

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the local Lutheran minister defamed a regional Reformed minister as “not Reformed, rather Deformed.”54 In sum, the phenomenon of “othering” existed not only between rural Christians and Jews but also now between rural Christians who became dominated differently. Mockery and derision of this kind were new to rural discourse. Prior to 1648 confessional adherents were the ones who typically hurled such pejoratives, and quite often ecclesiastical figures were on the giving or receiving end. Given the context of Christian monism, the boundary between mockery and raw violence could, indeed, be porous and unclear, and brandishing accusations such as blasphemy could escalate tensions to bloodshed.55 Incidents in Marburg and in the Eichsfeld attest to it. Due to the virtual absence of confessional adherence among rural Gemeinden, very rarely did one rural layperson mock or deride another layperson with such terms of abuse. The shift to Christian pluralism after 1648 did, for confessional adherents, clarify the lines so that mockery became separated from blasphemy.56 The chance for bloodshed diminished as a result. But the codification of denominational names caused mockery and derision to become a familiar reality for those rural locales with multiple sacred communities. In certain cases, as noted below, incidents introduced the threat of physical harm, even to the point of bloodshed.

3

The Onset of Anachronistic History and Its Early Local Effects

In time, authors, churchmen, and laity projected the denominational names anachronistically onto pre-1648 history. Generally unaware of the historic change in the names’ meaning and usage, they paved the way for the framing, analysis, interpretation, and writing of pre-1648 history according to post-1648 categories. “[B]ecause in those Catholic times,” wrote Kirchhain secular officials in 1711, as they recollected the town’s distant past when only a church and defensive wall stood.57 Their wording betrayed a new historical consciousness and periodization in which Catholic had been resigned to the Roman Church and Catholic times, for them, were the pre-1517 era. By the later seventeenth century authors had linked Lutheran to the 1580 Book of Concord.

54 55 56 57

HStAM, 22a no. 9:9. Christophe Duhamelle, “Wandlungen des Spotts,” in von Greyerz and Siebenhüner, Religion und Gewalt, 329–30. Duhamelle, “Wandlungen des Spotts,” 330–33. KGHB, Handschriftenabteilung, 2° Ms. Hass. 119.

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By the eighteenth century they had modified its title with the name.58 A 1694 record states that wood from the Hochstadt communal forest had been part of the Reformed minister’s salary “from time immemorial,” and a certain agricultural field in Eschersheim had belonged to the parish’s Reformed minister for “over 80 years.”59 Yet those records misled as much as they clarified, for the classification of ministers as Reformed, or as Catholic or Lutheran, had been around for less than a half century. In 1737 subjects of the Burghaun Lutheran church district and Fulda authorities dialogued matter-of-factly about the status of things “Catholic” and “Lutheran” in parish Burghaun in 1624.60 Around 1762 a minister wrote concerning Steinbach that “the Reformed worship service had already been practiced before [1670], as the 1596 financial record of this Niedereschbach parish reveals.”61 Similarly, in 1773, when the Hanau Reformed consistory copied the 1570 proposal of the Bruchköbel bell-ringer, they anachronistically labeled its recipient as the “Reformed” consistory.62 Slanderous names were not spared this kind of anachronistic usage either. Early eighteenth-century reports from Frankenberg, Winnen, Lohra, Wetter, and other locales described how “Papists” had consecrated or held Mass in the local churches centuries earlier.63 As for evangelical and Protestant, the terms were also deployed anachronistically. Whereas a 1720 report from Treis an der Lumda identified Siegfried Happel as “the third evangelical Lutheran minister” when he was ordained in 1545,64 Happel himself would not have recognized the classification or numbering system. Neither would sixteenth-century peasants of Röddenau or Schreufa have understood a minister’s 1772 letter, which distinguished between

58

59 60 61 62 63 64

Abraham Calovius, Wiederholter Consens des wahren lutherischen Glaubens in denen LehrPuncten, welche wieder die reine und unveränderte augspurgische Confeßion und andre in dem christlichem Concordien-Buch begrieffene Glaubens Bekäntnüß, … Umb derer willen, welche den Unterscheid und die distantz D. Calixti, der Rinteler, und anderer Neulinge von den wahren Lutherischen Glauben, in einem kurtzen Außzuge, sehen und erkennen wollen (Wittenberg, 1666); Christian Weiß, Christliches Concordien-Buch, das ist der Evangelisch-Lutherischen Kirche sämmtliche gewöhnlichste Symbolische Schrifften … mit denen vorigen Ausgaben sorgfältig zusammen gehalten, und mit nöthigen Registern und Schluss-Rede (Leipzig, 1739), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. Similarly: Johann Nicolaus Anton, Geschichte der Concordienformel der Evangelisch Lutherischen Kirche (Leipzig, 1779), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek. HStAM, 83 no. 398. HStAM, 92 no. 80II. HStAM, 83 no. 61. HStAM, 83 no. 3175. KGHB, Handschriftenabteilung, 2° Ms. Hass. 115. KGHB, Handschriftenabteilung, 2° Ms. Hass. 119.

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those churches, like Röddenau’s, that had, “at the time of the Reformation, fallen with its revenues to the Protestants,” and those, like Schreufa’s in 1590, that had “been built by one or the other Protestant religion with their own means.”65 The practice of anachronistic historical writing carried right on into nineteenth-century documentation. In 1830 authorities in Kassel wrote about the “errant ideas of dark Catholicism from the 14[th] and 15th century.”66 Around 1838 the Fulda bishop wrongly imagined there having been a “Catholic community of Uttrichshausen” and “Catholics” in its surrounding area in the pre-1648 period.67 According to an 1867 document “the Reformed confession reigned exclusively in the Isenburg Gemeinden from 1606 onward.”68 Archivists down to the present day have reinforced these addled habits by titling records with the names Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed and also Protestant and evangelical.69 Anachronistic historical labeling did more than contribute to a false understanding of the past. It also placed a thumb on the scale of certain local disputes that first materialized after 1648. It did so in the matter of parish properties and access to them. Because local Christians prior to 1648 had standing within the civil-sacred unity, they had claim or access to the church building, baptismal font, Eucharistic table, cemetery, and so forth. In the wake of 1648, as those same parish properties became denominated, persons would continue to have access to them if they bore the same denominational name. But if persons were denominated with a different name, then their access could be jeopardized or lost completely. In 1666, four years after the Reformed community in Frankenberg was founded, the Reformed Johann Stipp alleged that the Lutheran Wilhelm Reitz told him, “[we] are keeping the churchyard to [ourselves], and no Calvinist is worthy of lying next to [us] on the … cemetery.”70 Expressions of this kind were not heard prior to 1648 because denominational conditions did not exist. Amid a 1730s dispute between Reformed and Lutherans in Windecken, Reformed minister J. A. Engel exclaimed that no one could possibly “doubt that our church and community here are much older than theirs.”71 He was wrong. In 65 66 67 68 69

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HStAM, 315f no. 580. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. AGV, EIV/A/4/09-01. HStAM, 16 no. 4286. For a recent work on the importance of critically assessing archives and the archiving of sources: Jesse Spohnholz, The Convent of Wesel: The Event that Never was and the Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017). HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10142. HStAM, 83 no. 4674.

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the generation after 1648 the Christian community of Windecken split into the Reformed and Lutheran communities, and the local church acquired the name Reformed. Consequently, those who became denominated as Lutheran effectively lost their claim on the church, compelling them to establish a secondary local venue for Lutheran services by the early 1670s. But in his thinking Engel imagined that the local Reformed church and community existed as such long before 1648, presumably since the 1590s when Count Philipp Ludwig II (r. 1580–1612) installed his chosen religion in Hanau-Münzenberg. A flawed understanding of history also favored Reformed claims in Rüdigheim when the local cemetery needed to be expanded in the early 1810s. Reformed, Lutherans, and Catholics had been burying their dead in it for some time, but then question arose about who in fact had rights to it. The Lutherans, argued the Reformed, had none. “It is undeniably certain that the church along with the cemetery” were, in the sixteenth century, given to the Reformed community to use. “One did not yet think on any Lutheran community,” for “the first Reformed minister existed here already,” meaning there was “the Reformed community a good one hundred years” before Lutherans started conducting ministrations locally in the late seventeenth century.72 Such anachronistic judgments could aggravate hostilities that local sacred communities may have quieted. Denominational differentiation and historical anachronism had ramifications on communal funds too. Prior to 1648 members of the commune contributed to the communal chest and, as needed, channeled funds from it toward parish expenses. So long as the civil-sacred unity remained after 1648, as it did for the rural Gemeinden in Chapters 3–5, those members kept channeling funds from the chest to their one and only set of parish expenses. By contrast, whenever the local sacred community divided in two and the new community started generating its own parish expenses, conflict over use of the communal funds could easily erupt within the commune.73 In 1763 the minority Lutherans in Bruchköbel complained about monies from the communal 72 73

HStAM, 83 no. 3356. A sampling: for 1733–1777 cases in Bruchköbel over the use of communal funds toward the Reformed and Lutheran churches, HStAM, 83 no. 3123; the Lutheran community in Kempfenbrunn in 1756 wanted wood from the communal forest for a Lutheran schoolhouse construction, HStAM, 83 no. 5540; the Reformed community in Rosenthal in 1791 sought firewood from the communal forest to warm their school, HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 2866; the Lutheran community in Hochstadt in 1763 wanted communal funds to pay for Eucharistic wine, HStAM, 83 no. 2579; for dialogue among Hanauian ecclesiastical figures in 1765–1766 over the use of communal funds toward Reformed and Lutheran expenses, HStAM, 83 no. 107.

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chest, to which both Lutheran and Reformed members of the commune contributed. According to a 1754 decision the funds were to be allocated in proportion to the number of Lutherans. Funds from the chest, the Lutherans argued, had been given to the Reformed church from time immemorial, yet none to the Lutheran church. But the Bruchköbel Reformed minister and elders objected. The “whole Gemeinde was of the Reformed religion” prior to the 1670 Resolution, they wrote, with the implied assumption that it had been so prior to 1648 as well.74 Then, “a few Lutherans were taken on by the Gemeinde.” They were allowed to bury their dead in the cemetery, receive a funeral sermon from the Reformed minister in the Reformed church, and have their children baptized in it. Funds in the communal chest were directed to the maintenance of the Reformed church “without objection [from] the Lutherans,” just as they had been before. The Bruchköbel Lutherans in 1763 no more realized the fundamental flaws in this historical argument than did the Reformed who were making it. They both had the same anachronistic view of history. Because of it the Lutherans claimed the mayor’s accounts “from the years 1643, 1654, and several others from the same century” provided no evidence for the Reformed, for “they cannot claim that Lutherans were already here.” The Lutheran village head and church elders protested principally on grounds that they had equal right to the chest funds as did the Reformed. Denominational differentiation and historical anachronism generated a similar pattern of grievance between local sacred communities over a spectrum of parish expenses, salaries, and labor duties.75 Prior to 1648 members of the commune fulfilled their obligations. In the wake of 1648, as the original parish became denominated Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, the members were still obligated, regardless of whether they all bore the same denominational name as the parish and community, or whether certain members bore a different name because, for example, they had immigrated from elsewhere. But whenever enough members broke off from the original community and incorporated a newly forming community, they could well object to the parish duties. Not only did they have their own parish expenses to meet, but they also

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The account and quotations from this 1763 episode in Bruchköbel are in HStAM, 83 no. 3175. A sampling: a 1761–1774 dispute between Reformed and Lutheran in Windecken over a poor box, HStAM, 83 no. 4676; for 1752 and 1766–1773 Lutheran-Reformed disputes in Hintersteinau over wood deliveries, HStAM, 83 no. 1277:1a–b, 2; for a 1783 case involving Lutheran refusal to provide labor services for the Hainchen Reformed church, HStAM, 83 no. 5002; a 1786–1788 Lutheran-Reformed dispute in Wolferode over parish salaries, HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 2793.

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did not have an established source of ecclesiastical income to help fund them. Members of the original community would protest that those of the secondary community had to continue fulfilling the obligations. The Lutherans, wrote the Niedereschbach Reformed community in 1709, had been building and bettering “our Reformed parish house and schoolhouse” along with them from “time immemorial.”76 If the Lutherans stopped, then these would be brought to ruin. Like other original communities in the same situation the Niedereschbach Reformed characterized the new community’s unwillingness as dispossessing them of right and custom. A new community, meanwhile, might be willing to contribute so long as it was understood to be voluntary or they were permitted to use the parish properties too. Relations were not helped when the original community would not contribute anything toward the new community’s expenses. When the Reformed minister of Seckbach asked his parishioners in 1711 whether they would give from a “willing, Christian heart” toward the bells for the new Lutheran church, “not one single [member] of the Reformed community gave even the most meager coin.”77 The dynamic could become especially contentious when a territorial sovereign intervened on behalf of coreligionists. Finally, sacred communities quarreled over proportionality within bodies of secular governance. In 1736 the Kilianstädten commune had nine Lutheran and eighty-eight Reformed members. The Lutherans demanded to have one of theirs on the district board in order to make representation proportional. They also claimed the village head oppressed them. The village head, however, rebutted the charge by citing occasions when he had helped the Lutherans, including by making deliveries to the Bruchköbel Lutheran church and offering his horse for Lutheran minister G. K. Blum to use.78 In the case of rural Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda, then, the notion that “village space” in the century after 1648 “conserved [the] confessional antagonism,” which had characterized the century prior to 1648, and “extended the confessional age” in “phase-delayed” fashion would be misleading.79 The villages could not have conserved what they did not have, and they did not have confessional adherence or antagonism prior to 1648. Rather, the antagonism

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HStAM, 83 no. 6153. HStAM, 83 no. 6153. HStAM, 83 no. 2865. Tobias Dietrich, “Der Zwang zum Frieden? Dörflicher Interkonfessionalismus in Deutschland, Frankreich und der Schweiz zwischen Aufklärung und Hungersnot (1780–1830),” in Ländliche Frömmigkeit: Konfessionskulturen und Lebenswelten 1500–1850, ed. Norbert Haag, Sabine Holtz and Wolfgang Zimmermann (Stuttgart: Jan Thorbecke, 2002), 312.

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emerged in many villages as a consequence of the Peace of Westphalia and of denominational differentiation, and this time the antagonism took the form of local denominational communities rivaling each other over space, objects, and properties, instead of confessional adversaries fighting over true and false religion. Such action-spaces and contentious objects had materialized already prior to 1648 in places, such as the Swiss county of Baden, where two distinct corpora operated locally.80 After 1648 they did so for the first time at a local level in rural Hesse, Hanau, and Fulda wherever a second community emerged and rivaled the original one. They did so not for doctrinal reasons but for reasons of communal property and access. 80

Hacke, Konfession und Kommunikation.

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Ministerial Conflict, 1648–1817 Ministers were prominent adherents of the three denominations that were to acknowledge each other’s coequality after the 1648 Peace. One might expect that they coexisted amicably in an ostensibly more progressive and tolerant age.1 However, their circumstances had fundamentally changed. Prior to 1648 they were typically on opposite sides of territorial borders because princes enforced the cuius-regio principle. Following 1648 they began to cross over those borders, to take up residence in rival ministers’ areas, and to vie with them for ministerial rights and jurisdiction. The opposing ministers’ rivalry facilitated the division of the sacred community and thereby expedited a local Gemeinde’s loss of its civil-sacred unity. A quintessential example from 1747 illustrates the nature and tenor of their conflict. In that year Lutheran minister Blum of the rural town Steinau an der Straße lodged yet another grievance against his rival, Steinau’s Reformed minister F. Grimm. Grimm, he reported, had buried two children of a Lutheran man from nearby Seidenroth and received the standard fees for it. Blum acknowledged that the children had attended the Reformed school but objected that they had not been confirmed in the Reformed religion. Grimm conceded these points but said the Lutheran man’s wife was Reformed and from the beginning both parents talked freely about having their children educated in the Reformed religion. Indeed, over time they sent the children to the Reformed church and school. The Reformed consistory even provided his children with necessary clothing and books because the man was poor. The children were thus cared for in life by the Reformed, and according to local custom, continued Grimm—who was utilizing that custom to benefit his denominational cause—the means for their burial should be provided by those to whom such care had fallen. Blum remained unconvinced. In his appeal he fired a parting shot: “[Grimm] should leave to his fellow man what is his and abstain from these totally un-Christian and, for a Christian, very dishonest violations.”2 Grimm fired back: “Good God! What incriminations! 1 See, for example, Michael Maurer, Kirche, Staat und Gesellschaft im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1999), 15–17; and Joachim Whaley, The Peace of Westphalia to the Dissolution of the Reich 1648–1806, vol. II of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 322–29. Mauer discusses the Peace of Westphalia and the notion of it as a model for the coexistence of various confessions. Whaley, in contrast, describes a more complicated picture of coexistence after 1648. 2 HStAM, 83 no. 5749. © David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_012

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I know what is mine to do and I, too, understand the [1670 Resolution]. I call on any man to show convincingly that I have ever acted in violation of [it] in my eighteen years of service here.”3 Such ministerial clashes triggered a seemingly endless paper war of written complaints, appeals, and adjudications in the centuries after 1648. The quarrels can seem trivial, not to mention preferable to the violent hostilities of the pre-1648 period in which religion is typically implicated.4 But those assessments would overlook what is most noteworthy about the conflicts— the sheer novelty of their existence, and of the existence of the Seidenroth couple’s mixed marriage, which was both the quid pro quo and the occasion for the clash between Blum and Grimm. For the rural Gemeinden, the significance of the Peace of Westphalia was not that it “guaranteed freedom of conscience” and thereby caused “conflicts over mixed marriages [to] acquir[e] a potent diplomatic and juridical dimension,”5 but that it created the possibility of mixed marriages in the first place. The 1648 Peace did so by paving the way for the Christians to become denominated as Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed and therefore caused some couples who got engaged—i.e., couples in which the betrothed were of differing denominations—to enter marriage with mixed ecclesiastical labels. It was this phenomenon that also explains why mixed marriages described by theologians before 1648 differ from those after 1648. To wit, Georg Dedeken, in a context of Christian monism in 1616, wrote about whether a “Christian may marry an un-Christian and unbeliever,” whereas Christian Thomasius, in a context of Christian pluralism in 1689, wrote about whether “one who was joined to the Lutheran [religion]” could marry “the other who was joined to the Reformed religion.”6 Scholarship based on the Catholic-Protestant narratives would obscure the contrast and write about both as, say, mixed marriages featuring a Lutheran spouse and Reformed spouse. But removing the anachronism from an analysis of the pre-1648 period reveals that Dedeken was speaking about something fundamentally different, about mixed marriages of a Christian spouse and non-Christian spouse. 3 HStAM, 83 no. 5749; and HStAM, 83 no. 425 (1670). The 1670 Resolution granted Lutherans in the county of Hanau-Münzenberg the same “free” and “unrestricted” exercise of their religion that the Reformed had (Coexercitium Religionis) as well as the accompanying rights and liberties. 4 Luebke, “A Multiconfessional Empire,” 150. 5 Dagmar Freist, “Between Conscience and Coercion: Mixed Marriages, Church, Secular Authority, and Family,” in Luebke and Lindemann, Mixed Matches, 102. 6 The word “joined” used by Thomasius was “zugetan.” Dedeken, Thesauri consiliorum et decisionum, 3:172–74; Christian Thomasius, Rechtmäßige Erörterung der Ehe- und Gewissens Frage Ob zwei fürstliche Personen im Römischen Reich deren eine der Lutherischen die andere der Reformierten Religion zugetan ist einander mit gutem Gewissen heirathen können (Halle, 1689), Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek.

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Finally, the onset of denominations in the wake of Westphalia also principally explains why there was such an “escalation of conflicts” and “volume of grievances” that “call … into doubt” the “picture of religious irenicism after 1648.”7 This picture, drawn from classic Catholic-Protestant narratives, would have been foreign to rural Christians and an inversion of their historical experience. Conflicts among them were a symptom of denominational differentiation taking root locally. Ministerial conflicts were yet another unanticipated and unintended consequence of the 1648 Peace. They testified to the fact that well-intentioned measures of toleration could and did rouse division and conflict.8 Moreover, ministers clashed regardless of which denominational affiliations were involved. Their battles concerned rights, jurisdiction, and precedent instead of the doctrinal and liturgical ones of the pre-Westphalian period. In short, they were not Lutheran-versus-Catholic or Reformed-versus-Catholic affairs. They occurred as often and as intensely between Reformed and Lutheran clerics in Hanau-Münzenberg and Hesse-Kassel as they did between Lutheran and Catholic ones in the Fuldian region. Tellingly, such conflicts had not materialized in these Imperial territories prior to the Westphalian proceedings. Enforcing the cuius-regio principle meant sovereigns compelled any unwilling ministers to leave the territory. The ministerial staff of a territorial church therefore comprised coreligionists who were educated and trained in the theology to which they adhered.9 Once appointed to a post, a minister stood unopposed within the geographical bounds of his parish. He could focus on instructing parishioners in true religion.10 He also had a monopoly on performing ministerial acts such as baptism, marriage, and burial for residents in his parish. Noncoreligious ministers

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9

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Freist, “Between Conscience and Coercion,” 112. For more: David Mayes, “Divided By Toleration: Paradoxical Effects of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia and Multiconfessionalism,” Archive for Reformation History 106 (2015): 290–313. Schorn-Schütte, Evangelische Geistlichkeit in der Frühneuzeit, 152–226; Thomas Kaufmann, “The Clergy and the Theological Culture of the Age: The Education of Lutheran Pastors in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” in The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe, ed. C. Scott Dixon and Luise Schorn-Schütte (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 120–36; Amy Nelson Burnett, Teaching the Reformation: Ministers and Their Message in Basel, 1529–1629 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 67–194. Ian Green, “Teaching the Reformation: The Clergy as Preachers, Catechists, Authors and Teachers,” in Dixon and Schorn-Schütte, The Protestant Clergy of Early Modern Europe, 156–75; Hans-Christoph Rublack, “Success and Failure of the Reformation: Popular Apologies from the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” in Germania Illustrata: Essays on Early Modern Germany Presented to Gerald Strauss, ed. Andrew C. Fix and Susan C. Karant-Nunn (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 141–65.

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were those of a false religion who lived out of sight beyond the territorial borders. The circumstances were benign in that they prevented rival ministers from engaging with one another. Across various parts of Europe local laypeople who differed over religion lived in close proximity and struggled to tolerate or suffer each other’s immediate presence. By contrast, ministers of these Imperial territories typically did not interact with noncoreligious counterparts. The 1648 Peace made it possible for them to collide head on. No longer did they remain on opposite sides of a territorial border. Some of them crossed over and took up residence on the other side until many territories were populated by ministers of multiple denominations. Ministers of one denomination typically outnumbered those of the other(s), but the salient point is territories eventually had not one parish network with its set of ministers but rather multiple, competing ones.11 By the second quarter of the eighteenth century a minister’s parish jurisdiction commonly overlapped that of one or more noncoreligious counterparts. For a parish minister the prospect of an opposing denominational minister’s encroachment and competing jurisdiction was wholly novel, unwelcome, and menacing. The two became immediate rivals. Whatever their thoughts regarding the new era of Christian pluralism in the Empire, rivaling ministers lived in circumstances that impelled them to cry foul against each other time and again. Their newfound proximity fostered a narrative not of toleration or peaceful coexistence but rather of discord, which frequently spilled over into prolonged acrimony and occasional hostility.

1

Alleged Encroachments

One cause of conflict concerned alleged encroachments, that is, occasions when one minister accused the other of an intrusion or violation that deprived him of his ministerial rights. The minister appealed to the authorities partly because he did not want his interloping rival to secure a precedent and use it as leverage in future cases. To be silent was to concede. Yet whether his rival had acted legally or illegally was seldom clear. Both plaintiff and defendant had reason to argue the right was his. For example, tempers flared in 1721 over who was to bury Lutherans in Erbstadt.12 The Windecken Reformed minister claimed the right because Erbstadt was incorporated in his parish and Lutherans did not exercise their religion in the locale per se. The Windecken

11 12

For one case study: Mayes, Communal Christianity, 205–337. HStAM, 83 no. 5541.

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Lutheran minister claimed it because the Lutherans were of his denomination and attended services he conducted in his parish, particularly in nearby Eichen. The authorities ruled in favor of the Lutheran minister, an unusual outcome for the county of Hanau-Münzenberg. The incident testifies to the complicated circumstances that Imperial territories concocted for themselves by composing the 1648 Peace. Prior to it such disputes did not materialize because only one parish network operated in each territory; one minister was appointed to each parish, and he handled all ministrations for all parishioners within it. In many parishes after 1648, a rival denomination’s minister claimed some of them. Territorial authorities had to delineate one minister’s jurisdiction from another’s and adjudicate cases whenever a grievance was filed. Disputes between ministers arose from acts of omission as well. In HanauMünzenberg if one spouse was Reformed and the other Lutheran, then the minister of each was to announce the coming marriage a few times in his church. The minister of the groom’s denomination was then to officiate the wedding. Occasionally, weddings occurred before the bride’s minister had opportunity to announce it. He interpreted such incidents as a slight, an encroachment by omission, and something done maliciously. At times the defendant pleaded his innocence. In 1715 the Marköbel Reformed minister wrote, “[M]y God knows that in no way was it my intention to deprive [the Rüdigheim Lutheran minister] in the slightest, although it is the case that he did not first request written notification.” But more often the defendant denied the accusation. Grimm did so in 1733 because, he said, a wedding announcement was not made by both sides in City Hanau and therefore neither should it be in Steinau an der Straße.13 Besides, he noted, weddings in Steinau were common knowledge. An announcement was not necessary. His words revealed the discrepancy that could exist between formal decree and actual perception and practice. As usual the matter fell into partisan dispute. The Reformed consistory backed Grimm while the Lutheran consistory charged him with acting irresponsibly and against better judgment. Post-Westphalian church authorities fostered this ministerial discord by nurturing a climate of coercion, distrust, and vengefulness.14 In 1736 the Burghaun Lutheran minister reported how Catholic authorities, as high as

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HStAM, 83 no. 5765. For more: David Mayes, “Beyond Discipline: The Consistory in the Central Reformed Territories of the Holy Roman Empire,” in Politics, Gender, and Belief: The Long-Term Impact of the Reformation. Essays in Memory of Robert Kingdon, ed. Amy Nelson Burnett, Kathleen M. Comerford, and Karin Maag (Geneva: Droz, 2014), 155–77.

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Figure 33

Ludwig Knaus, Visit with the Village Minister, date unknown

the prince-abbot himself, had been strong-arming prospective Lutheran and Reformed spouses for decades.15 Although the law stated that children were to follow their father in religion, Fulda had granted dispensation to certain Lutheran or Reformed men to marry Catholic women on condition that they baptize and educate their offspring in the Catholic religion. One immigrant pledged to be married to a Burghaun woman would not consent to these terms, and so with “tears and sighs” the two were married in nearby Rothenkirchen. Parishioners facilitated ministerial conflict as well. Rosenthal resident Johann Wagner and his wife, both Lutheran, became Reformed in 1668 and, soon after, asked the Frankenberg Reformed minister to baptize their newborn.16 Their maneuver infuriated the Rosenthal Lutheran minister and inaugurated lasting tensions between the ministers who held the respective posts. Crucially, too, the Wagners’ conversion added to the number of local Reformed, who soon called themselves a community. Altenhaßlau Reformed minister E. A. Hassenpflug relayed in 1749 how a Lutheran soldier had twice

15 16

HStAM, 92 no. 80I, 80II, 83. HStAM, 22a no. 9:9.

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impregnated a Reformed woman.17 Privately the man had promised her marriage, but publicly nothing had been done to make it legally binding because, purportedly, one in active military service was not readily allowed to marry. The woman’s father asked Hassenpflug to baptize the first child, which he did. But Hassenpflug was not duly notified after the second child’s birth. Instead the woman’s sister arranged for the local Lutheran minister, J. P. Schreier, to administer the baptism. Officially, she did so because the child’s father was Lutheran. Unofficially, her apparent motive was to impel the man to abide by his promise of marriage. Hassenpflug protested and cited 1717 and 1733 decrees in his defense. Schreier should have administered the baptism only if the child’s father had personally requested it. If not, Hassenpflug continued, then the law required a bastard child to be baptized by the district’s ordained minister, which meant, in this case, the Reformed minister. Customarily, too, the Reformed midwife was to notify him of the birth, but he claimed she had been prevented from doing so. Schreier submitted his own defense but the county authorities ruled against him. They issued a decree concerning the baptizing of bastard children and required each Reformed or Lutheran minister to read, sign, and forward it to the next minister.

2

Financial Interests

Financial interests sowed discordant ministerial relations too. Parish ministers in the post-Westphalian Empire busied themselves with the maintenance of ecclesiastical lands, wealth, and power at a time when rising secularization and state power placed pressure on churches.18 Cases of encroachments added to it as many ministers had to protect their material conditions from a local competitor. In exceptional cases a rival’s presence could threaten as much as a minister’s entire income from a parish. After a majority in the parish Bottendorf affiliate of Willersdorf switched their Lutheran denominational status and became Reformed in 1682, Landgrave Karl considered transferring Willersdorf Lutheran minister A. Bock to a vacant post and channeling parish Bottendorf’s income to Reformed minister T. Krug of nearby Frankenberg. When Bock and a local official protested, Karl reprimanded the former, fined the latter, and ultimately redirected the dividends of a Willersdorf parish field from Bock to Krug.19 The landgrave did similarly elsewhere in Upper Hesse. 17 18

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HStAM, 83 no. 5301. Mary Fulbrook, A Concise History of Germany, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 60–84; and Tim Blanning, The Pursuit of Glory: The Five Revolutions that Made Europe 1648–1815 (New York: Viking, 2007), 364–85. Mayes, Communal Christianity, 296. David Mayes - 978-90-04-52649-5 Downloaded from Brill.com 03/02/2024 05:06:48PM via University of Wisconsin-Madison

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After barring Roda Lutherans from their own church in 1688, he granted them access to it again seven years later on condition that they work local parish fields for the benefit of the Münchhausen Reformed minister.20 More often ministers’ financial interests were linked to parishioners. While parishioners were, first, souls to be shepherded, they also paid fees for ministrations. Payment came at times in the form of cash and at other times in kind, such as a determined amount of bread, beer, eggs, or rolls. Ministers might forgo the fee if the person was especially poor, but typically they were keen to collect, especially those clergy with a meager income or those located in tenuous secondary parishes. They depended on fees to make ends meet. In 1740 Hochstadt Lutheran minister J. H. Schwalb protested how Bischofsheim Reformed minister B. Frey had gone against ordinance and observance by censuring a Lutheran woman shortly before her marriage to a Reformed man and then receiving the customary fee for the wedding.21 Schwalb wanted the authorities to correct Frey and order him to restore the fee he had “taken away.”22 Ministers thus had additional reason to demand justice in cases of an encroachment: they might lose out on a fee, and worse, lose it to their rival. Ministers also fought for fees to be restored to the local schoolmaster or warden, who received them for certain duties. In 1764 the Hochstadt Lutheran minister griped to his consistory after the funeral of a child of a Bischofsheim Lutheran subject.23 It was the Hochstadt Lutheran schoolmaster’s duty, he wrote, to toll the bells, lead the singing at the cemetery, and read a prayer. Yet on this occasion the Reformed schoolmaster of Bischofsheim handled these duties without permission, thereby depriving the Lutheran schoolmaster of the customary fee. The Lutheran consistory immediately petitioned the Reformed consistory for the amount to be given to him. Because a fee was token in amount, a minister could belittle his rival for petty greed if the latter appealed for it. Around 1762, after Frankenberg Lutheran minister P. L. Stausebach had baptized the child of a Brunswick officer, Reformed minister H. Hast of Frankenberg protested that the right was his. Stausebach countered that the officer was Lutheran, the husband of a local Lutheran woman, and not part of the local military group to which Hast was appointed. Stausebach had no reason not to baptize their child. Besides, he did not receive a fee for it. If Hast wanted the money, Stausebach sneered, then he could “go get it from the mother.”24 20 21 22 23 24

HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 767 (1688); and HStAM, 315f no. 1874. HStAM, 83 no. 2679. The Lutheran authorities dropped the case after Schwalb declared he had done neither. HStAM, 83 no. 2679. HStAM, 83 no. 2673. HStAM, 315c no. M68.

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Personal Honor and Dignity

The tone of Hast’s letter points to a third cause of ministerial conflict: personal honor and dignity. Rivaling ministers expressed contradictory impulses toward each other. On the one hand they were supposed to treat each other as fellow Christians. This was unchartered territory. In the pre-Westphalian world of Christian monism a minister behaved in a Christian manner toward an adversary by revealing his error and instructing him in the truth. If persuaded, then the other minister would turn to the truth and relocate to a region or parish where true religion was being practiced.25 The 1648 Peace and the Christian pluralism it ushered in fundamentally redefined the ministers’ public relationship. Christian behavior now meant they were to recognize each other as Christian and coexist peacefully in the same region or parish. On the other hand their emerging squabble over rights and fees gave the ministers grounds for new kinds of conflict. This, too, was unchartered territory. Various factors exacerbated the tensions. One was how ministers tried to exploit advantages and negate disadvantages. Ministers who staffed parishes of the original territorial church felt themselves superior. In the first generations after 1648 they could treat a rival condescendingly because they enjoyed a well-established parish income, infrastructure, and larger sacred community. Ministers of the new secondary parishes could feel acutely inferior. They usually ministered to smaller communities which could teeter on the brink of extinction. In the 1690s the Münchhausen Reformed minister lamented to Landgrave Karl that one should give up altogether trying to establish a Reformed presence in the area.26 Ministers of the secondary parishes struggled acutely to build up a stable income. They also frequently had sprawling parish domains that placed greater physical demands on them. In Lutheran Upper Hesse, Reformed ministers sometimes accused a Lutheran minister of intentionally running his worship service late, thereby forcing the Reformed service to start late and disrupting their inflexible and exhausting schedule. On one occasion in 1707, the Schwabendorf Reformed minister exacted a little revenge by barging into a Lutheran catechism lesson in Schiffelbach and conducting a service for the minority Reformed community. His belligerent gambit drove the stunned, grief-stricken Lutherans out onto the churchyard.27

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Alexander Schunka, “Transgressionen: Revokationspredigten von Konvertiten im mitteldeutschen Raum im 17. Jahrhundert,” in Lotz-Heumann, Mißfelder, and Pohlig, Konversion und Konfession in der Frühen Neuzeit, 491–516. Landeskirchliches Archiv Kassel, A: Münchhausen, ref. (Marburg-Land). HStAM, 315f no. 796.

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Yet ministers of the secondary parishes were the ones who normally suffered the ignominy of slights. A trump card, and perhaps the only one, held by a minister in an inferior position was when the territorial sovereign and top local officials were coreligionists. He knew he would receive their partisan support. In Upper Hesse, as Reformed state officials and Landgrave Karl together knit a network of Reformed mother churches and affiliates, the Reformed ministers of those parishes faced local Lutheran resentment. However, the Reformed typically enjoyed favor in courts of appeal, which were staffed by coreligionists. A similar scenario played out in the Burghaun district. Evangelicals outnumbered Catholics in it, but in a 1736 grievance the evangelical community wailed that their minister, like their community, suffered one loss after another, each time to the Catholic priest’s gain.28 Some of the minister’s salary was taken away and consigned to his rival. The priest arrogated to himself the burial and baptism of Catholics, rights which the Lutheran minister had held. The priest even did the same for some evangelicals. Once, a Burghaun father was forbidden from letting the evangelical minister bury his infant. While the father was away in City Fulda to plead, the Catholic minister buried the child according to the Catholic rite in a Catholic cemetery. The evangelical community crackled with outrage in a complaint to the Fulda authorities, who responded by asking whether they wanted the child’s corpse back. The community did not, but the members and minister did plea for such an incident never to happen again. The Catholic official rejoined, cynically, that such was the way affairs were to be run. In sum, the Lutheran minister no longer had the prerogative. The Catholic minister, backed by Fulda, now held it. The point was hammered home again just days later when the Catholic minister buried a Rudolphshan youth who had recently received his first evangelical Eucharist.29 Unsurprisingly, ministerial discord could reek of bitterness. In 1757 Reformed minister J. H. Wackerberg of Gemünden an der Wohra charged Löhlbach Lutheran minister J. W. Wanzell with having taught and confirmed the daughter of Reformed parents from Dodenhausen. Wanzell denied the charge, claiming the “peace-hating and truth-hating” Wackerberg had lodged an unfounded complaint against him.30 The wording is revealing. In the pre-Westphalian world of Christian monism, Wanzell would have linked the hatred of truth to erroneous beliefs held by his adversary. In the postWestphalian world of Christian pluralism, he linked it not to false doctrine but 28 29 30

HStAM, 92 no. 80II. HStAM, 92 no. 80I. HStAM, 315c no. M68.

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rather to a wrong understanding of the laws governing catechization and confirmation, to actions committed by Wackerberg, and to what had transpired.

4

State Authority and Order

Ministerial discord was also linked to the authority of the princely state and its notion of order. Prior to the 1648 Peace a prince’s formula for order was to require subjects to conform to his chosen religion. The 1648 Peace then sowed the seeds for a different formula. It required the estates to respect a subject’s freedom of conscience and to allow him to adhere to the religion of his choice. Sovereigns, like their predecessors, still wanted order, only now they would have to achieve it in territories populated increasingly by ministers of multiple denominational churches, by parish networks additional to the original one, and by subjects who had been baptized and confirmed in the Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed religion. Maintaining order became more complicated with each decade as these complexities took root, rival parish networks expanded their reach, animosity between opposing local sacred communities smoldered, people relocated from one locale or territory to another, men and women crossed denominational boundaries in marriage and childrearing, and the opportunities for disputes over ministerial acts metastasized. Thorny dilemmas were endemic in many parishes. Could a subject venture beyond the territory to receive ministrations according to his or her denomination, assuming he or she could not access them otherwise? The Marköbel Reformed minister posed this question in 1731 after the Catholic wife of a Reformed man took her daughter out of the territory for Roman Catholic baptism and education. “[One wants to know] how far the freedom of conscience extends,” he wrote, “so that one knows what one should do in future cases.”31 He wondered whether her conduct could be regarded as subversive and promoting disorder and especially whether her husband’s behavior could be too, since he allowed her to do it. The Reformed consistory in Hanau in fact addressed his behavior, not hers. It suggested the minister might reprove the man and keep an eye on his “contrarian conduct.”32 If persons of differing denominations died on the same day in the same locale, then in what order should their funerals be held? This question arose a few times in Windecken alone in the 1730s. On one occasion in 1736 two children, one Lutheran and the

31 32

HStAM, 83 no. 4739. HStAM, 83 no. 4739.

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other Reformed, died on a Friday.33 Their funerals were scheduled for Sunday, but a dispute ensued over which funeral should be held first. The Reformed minister argued that he had been notified of the Reformed child’s death around 3:00 p.m., whereas the Lutheran minister reported on the Lutheran child’s death sometime after 6:00 p.m. Besides, he noted, albeit anachronistically, the local Reformed church and community were much older than those of the Lutherans. The Lutheran child, rebutted the Lutheran minister, had died in the morning and the Reformed child in the afternoon. Moreover, the Lutheran child was born to a married couple and the Reformed one to a couple out of wedlock. His rival, however, countered that the Reformed child’s mother had married after becoming pregnant. As per usual, the reports were partisan. Ultimately, the ruling came down that whichever minister had been notified first would conduct the funeral first. Due to the princely state’s intention to regulate ecclesiastical affairs, any minister or subject who ran counter to its ordinances promoted “disorder” or “disorders,” or “ruinous, sinful disorder,” as one minister put it.34 Although he himself had announced certain weddings in his church, warned the Eschersheim Reformed minister, his Lutheran counterpart stealthily conducted the wedding ceremonies “in quiet” and “behind closed doors” in the local house where the Lutherans gathered for services. If such practices continued, then they would give rise to “great disorder.”35 Employing such rhetoric could mobilize the authorities against a rival. Accusations of encroachment, then, not only affected the accused but also struck the nerve of the princely state’s authority. The historical paradigm known as the “Confessionalization thesis” has argued that the fusion of state and church strengthened in the century up to the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, even to an unprecedented degree.36 Religion thus served as a key cog in the modernization of states because territorial sovereigns proactively utilized the church and other institutions to fashion

33 34 35 36

HStAM, 83 no. 4674. HStAM, 83 no. 5542. HStAM, 83 no. 5542. Heinz Schilling, ed., Die reformierte Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland: das Problem der “Zweiten Reformation”: Wissenschaftliches Symposion des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1985 (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1986); Hans-Christoph Rublack, ed., Die lutherische Konfessionalisierung in Deutschland. Wissenschaftliches Symposium des Vereins für Reformationsgescichte 1988 (Gütersloh: G. Mohn, 1992); Wolfgang Reinhard and Heinz Schilling, ed., Die katholische Konfessionalisierung. Wissenschaftliches Symposion der Gesellschaft zur Herausgabe des Corpus Catholicorum und des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1993 (Münster: Aschendorff, 1995).

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confessionally uniform subjects and morally disciplined communities. The process encouraged order and control within a territory and abetted the civilizing process. The local, post-Westphalian ministerial conflicts reveal that 1648 was not an endpoint, as the Confessionalization thesis would have it. The year 1648 was, rather, a watershed. The Peace of Westphalia restructured the links between state and church, governance and confession, and sovereign and subject. It made these links as dynamic—and arguably even more dynamic— in the later seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, albeit in a different way. A territory’s transition to multiconfessionalism in the post-Westphalian period and the novelties engendered by it bred tremendous potential for confusion, dispute, and disorder. Reacting to this situation, sovereigns intended to control and regulate the sources of disorder before they shredded the territorial fabric. Yet the situation also offered opportunity to augment his power. While sovereigns might try to compel subjects to their chosen confession or denomination—Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel and prince-abbots of Fulda were among those who did—their focus was rather less on policing belief. They wanted to bring order to diverse conflicts, including those the sovereigns themselves incited while trying to coordinate their denomination’s advantage.

5

Persons of the Tertiary Denomination

Finally, ministerial discord arose over subjects of a region’s tertiary denomination. By the early eighteenth century, subjects of all three denominations could be found in the Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian territories. Generally speaking, in Upper Hesse the leading two denominations were Lutheran and Reformed, with Catholic in the tertiary place; in the county of HanauMünzenberg the leading two were Reformed and Lutheran, with Catholic as tertiary; in the region north of City Fulda the leading two were Lutheran and Catholic, with Reformed as tertiary. Heading into the post-1648 period the principal denomination, with certain exceptions, retained the posts and infrastructure of the territorial church’s parishes. The posts and infrastructure of the secondary denomination gradually took shape. Meanwhile, members of the tertiary denomination were typically few and scattered. Usually they did not possess a parish network or the free exercise of religion. Those who adhered firmly to the denomination might brave the distance and hazards and risk potential punishment to receive ministrations in a neighboring territory. Otherwise, they likely received them from a local noncoreligious minister. But for those who lived where a principal and secondary parish network overlapped, which minister should it be? The princely state composed ordi-

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Figure 34

Carl Bantzer, Sacrament in a Hessian Village Church, 1892

nances to clarify and regulate this complex matter. A 1699 decree pertaining to Upper Hesse granted rights over Catholic parishioners to the local Reformed minister and not the Lutheran one.37 Disputes still surfaced, however. In 1722 Haina Lutheran minister J. Faust was outraged after the Reformed minister of Gemünden an der Wohra accompanied a condemned Catholic man to his execution.38 The man had confessed his sin to Faust amid eight days of counseling and purportedly said he wanted Faust to accompany him. Like other ministerial acts that Faust unsuccessfully contested during the same years, he believed the duty was his, just as it had been his predecessors. Regulation proved difficult in Hanau-Münzenberg as well. By the early eighteenth century the minister whose denomination possessed the properties of the local original church was to exercise ministerial rights over Catholics. But troubling reports spurred county authorities in 1725 to solicit Reformed ministers for word on who in fact was exercising them. Their responses brought irregularities and discrepancies to light.39 At Marjoß the Catholic wife of a Reformed man was buried in 1713 by the Lutheran minister, even though he had been warned against it twice in correspondence. At Dorheim the

37 38 39

HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 461 (1710). The decree was reaffirmed in 1710. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10162. The cases in this paragraph can be found in HStAM, 83 no. 34.

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Reformed ministers had always carried out ministerial acts for Catholics, yet the Schwalheim Lutheran minister was elbowing his way in. Recently, he quietly officiated the wedding of a Catholic man in a local official’s house. The Reformed minister solicited direction on how to handle such cases, for he believed the 1670 Resolution was unclear. Consequently, matters were being run according to custom. The Niederrodenbach Reformed minister had also been handling duties for Catholics, except in one recent case. After a Catholic woman fell ill, the minister, upon her request, diligently visited her several times. Before dying she asked him to conduct her funeral and stipulated which text and song to include. However, the Lutheran minister ultimately handled it after the woman’s Lutheran husband claimed she had subsequently changed her mind. Certain works on post-1648 confessional history have it that tensions between Protestants and Catholics surfaced after Westphalia. Catholics apprehended Protestant renewal and revivalism, and Protestants suffered consternation due to Catholic ambitions and gains.40 Particularly troubling to Protestants was a growing Catholic presence within Protestant royal families and the conversion of certain Protestant sovereigns to Catholicism.41 Hesse-Kassel, Hanau-Münzenberg, and Fulda offer contrasting storylines. First, Catholic subjects in Lutheran and Reformed territories did not so much pose potential subversive threats as offer welcome opportunities for Lutheran and Reformed sovereigns to aggrandize their power by exerting regulatory control over ministrations performed on Catholics. The same was true for Lutheran and Reformed subjects of Catholic sovereigns in Catholic territories. Second, the conventional juxtaposition of Protestants and Catholics as the main rivals in the post-Westphalian period is an arbitrary one stemming from the CatholicProtestant narratives. Lutheran-Reformed relations could be as strained and full of intrigue because, locally speaking, one of them had possession of the original parishes and the other emerged as a threat and rival. The same tensions materialized in cases where Catholics were the sacred community that possessed the original parish or emerged as the threat. The 1648 Peace intended to quell religious conflict and enable confessional adversaries to coexist peacefully. Later, Lutheran and Reformed leaders 40

41

Fuchs, “The Right to be Catholic—The Right to be Protestant?”; Ronald Asch, “Religious Toleration, the Peace of Westphalia and the German Territorial Estates,” Parliaments, Estates and Representation 20, no. 1 (2000): 75–89. Hartmut Lehmann, “Continental Protestant Europe,” in Enlightenment, Reawakening, and Revolution 1660–1815, Brown and Tackett, 45–48; Nigel Aston, “Continental Catholic Europe,” in Enlightenment, Reawakening, and Revolution 1660–1815, Brown and Tackett, 16; Ward, Christianity Under the Ancien Régime, 1648–1789, 4–7.

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worked to ameliorate relations by gathering at colloquies, most notably in Kassel (1661) and Berlin (1663), both of which followed in the tradition of those in Maulbronn (1564), Mömpelgard (1586), and Leipzig (1631).42 In 1717 they explored the possibility of unification. In light of these, competing ministers in the post-1648 Imperial territories were not the exemplars they ought to have been. However, they should not be faulted too quickly. Scarcely anyone anticipated how additional parish networks would form within territories and how the jurisdictions of rival ministers would overlap so extensively. It was difficult for them to tolerate and coexist when one believed the other had picked his pocket or deprived him of ministerial rights. 42

C. Scott Dixon, Protestants: A History from Wittenberg to Pennsylvania 1517–1740 (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 137.

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Chapter 8

Toleration Transformed, 1648–1817 The effects of the 1648 Peace also fundamentally changed the function of forms of toleration. Among these were emigration and exile, Auslauf, house churches, Simultaneum, and freedom of conscience. Recent scholarly works, building on the consensus understanding that Europeans were divided by faith in the sixteenth century, have explored how Europeans developed these forms in order to relieve pressure from religious differences, cope with the division, facilitate coexistence, and carry on as an orderly, functioning society.1 In this context of Christian monism they worked—with possible exceptions, such as cases of Simultaneum—to preserve the unitary concept of the corpus christianum. However, forms of toleration were also unstable. Their effect depended greatly on the Imperial and territorial constitutions in place and the context in which they were applied. Consequently, constitutional changes such as those made in Westphalia and in the post-1648 territories threw them into flux. In the new context of Christian pluralism they worked to the opposite end of what they had done before. They helped tear the communal fabric and divide a local Christian community into rivaling denominational communities. Like the ministerial conflicts, they militated against the unitary concept of the corpus christianum. The arc of toleration’s history thus produced a few historical ironies. First, if the populations of the central Imperial territories examined here are indicative, then the ultimate measure of toleration—the Empire’s recognition in 1648 of the exact equality of the estates that adhered to the three confessions—did far more to divide than any of the pre-1648 religious differences had ever done. That is, those rural Gemeinden that became divided, the ones discussed here in Part 2, were divided not by faith but by toleration. The measures of toleration instituted by governing authorities starting in 1648 eventually caused them to lose their civil-sacred unity. Second, the Empire’s decision in 1648 to go multiconfessional fundamentally transformed the very

1 Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided By Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007); Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration; C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Freist, and Mark Greengrass, ed., Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Luebke, Hometown Religion.

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_013

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same forms and mechanisms of toleration into vehicles that facilitated the division of local sacred communities. The division occurred publicly and officially. Third, the 1648 Peace made the forms much more prevalent and prominent in territorial life, to the point where they became common. Authorities increasingly regulated them through the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Yet, as seen at the close of this chapter, local denominational communities did, on occasion, mend the tear to a degree by agreeing in common on a particular matter. Although they did not reunite into a single sacred community, and could not because of bureaucratic strictures, their collaboration was reminiscent of the local civil-sacred unity that had existed prior to their post-Westphalian division.

1

Emigration and Exile

Emigration and exile had been safety valves in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They could appeal to sovereigns because they channeled dissidents out of their territory, to local Gemeinden because they helped preserve the appearance of local unity, and to dissenters because they enabled them to avoid potential danger and join coreligionists elsewhere. The Diet of Augsburg in 1555 had even taken the unprecedented step of making legal provision for it, known as ius emigrandi, or the right to emigrate to another territory.2 The 1648 Peace of Westphalia confirmed the right,3 yet the treaty’s effects also reduced if not eliminated the need for emigration or exile. Those who enjoyed the right to private worship had little need to emigrate. Although the clause regarding domestic devotion stipulated that its practitioners were to go outside the territory for schooling and to attend worship churches, it also permitted them to say prayers and educate their children in the home. This, in turn, gave them an unprecedented foothold, one they could leverage as time brought change in the post-Westphalian period. Moreover, as the exercise of multiple religions became prevalent, emigration or exile became obsolete for those adherents whose religion was now being exercised within the territory’s borders instead of beyond them. Finally, the 1648 Peace paved the way for one to be no longer an illegitimate dissenter in a Christian territory but a legitimate Lutheran in a Reformed one, or Catholic in a Lutheran one, or Reformed 2 It did so in article 24. For more: Gotthard, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden. 3 Article 5 § 30 of the Peace of Osnabrück, in Müller, Instrumenta pacis Westphalicae.

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in a Catholic one. Latent therein was a degree of empowerment to petition if not pressure authorities in a manner not seen prior to Westphalia. It appeared clearly when a newly forming denominational corpus at a locale began invoking the term “community” (Gemeinde), a natural yet resolute gesture that implied it was entitled to a standing equal to the original local sacred community. Whether they were treated as equals locally and territorially depended on various factors. Rulers certainly backed them whenever they were coreligionists. In any case, tensions that had been diffused prior to Westphalia by being channeled extraterritorially were now being channeled intraterritorially and were directly experienced by many local Gemeinden, which felt threatened in a wholly novel way. The case of Lutherans in the small Hanauian town of Windecken illustrates the point. In the early 1670s approximately two dozen Lutheran men each had a Reformed wife and, in total, forty-six children. The men had their children baptized by the local Reformed minister and educated at the local Reformed school, but due to the absence of any local Lutheran services the men had been attending ones in Büdesheim in the nearby county of Friedberg. The Windecken Reformed minister castigated them for it, accusing them of going “to their foreign, Büdesheimer God.”4 It also earned them scorn from fellow members of the commune, “as though we were Jews, or heathen.”5 The Windecken schoolmaster forbade the men’s children to have any Lutheran catechism or books, forcing them to Reformed ones or else leaving them uneducated. Consequently, some Lutheran fathers stopped sending their children altogether. Other Lutheran fathers imposed a form of exile on their children by sending them to nearby Lutheran regions. Once there, some ended up marrying “adults,” suggesting, it would seem, that circumstances compelled them to marry prior to the customary age. Meanwhile, in March 1673 the Büdesheim minister feared Lutherans in and around Windecken would die out in ten years because some men were willing to let their children be confirmed Reformed, including a dozen scheduled to be so at Easter. His fears and the men’s concerns were soon assuaged. On the strength of the 1670 Resolution the Büdesheim minister and Lutheran men sent their 1673 letters to the Hanauian authorities with the request that Lutheran services be set up in Windecken. The petitions also listed the names of fifteen men from Eichen and six from Ostheim. Times had changed. Before the Westphalian proceedings such subjects had either done Auslauf or emigrated. They did

4 HStAM, 83 no. 5061. 5 HStAM, 83 no. 5061.

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not send such pleas. After Westphalia they did send them. The Lutherans in Windecken secured regular services in 1673 and also a schoolmaster for their children’s education. Up to 1648, under Imperial and territorial constitutions that preserved the integrity of local Gemeinden, emigration and immigration were two sides of the same, pressure-relieving coin. An emigrant or exile of one region was at once an immigrant in another whose Gemeinden exercised his chosen religion. His arrival did not pose a threat. After 1648, under new constitutional arrangements, if an immigrant adhered to a religion different from the one being practiced by his neighbors, then the Gemeinde would perceive him as an insidious, divisive threat because he could set up his own domestic devotion or, potentially, as time brought change, the full public exercise of his religion. He embodied the potential for the formation of a new community. What had been a mechanism for managing conflict had been transformed into one that could well ignite it in places where none before had existed.

2

Auslauf

Multiconfessionalism within a territory also had direct implications on Auslauf, the practice of “walking out” of one’s parish to attend the services of one’s religion elsewhere. In Hesse-Kassel, Hanau-Münzenberg, and Fulda abbey Auslauf in the pre-Westphalian period was, as a rule, extraterritorial and also something the authorities tried to stop. Sovereigns enforcing rights granted by the 1555 Peace channeled dissenters not only outside the bounds of the local Gemeinde but also the boundaries of the territory, to a neighboring one where they could find the exercise of their chosen religion. Meanwhile, the local Gemeinde retained religious uniformity. Delegations in Westphalia incorporated Auslauf into the 1648 Peace, but as territories became multiconfessional, new kinds of Auslauf emerged and shifted, in turn, the pressures of the practice. In the initial years after 1648, Auslauf participants might have gone outside the territory or region for ministerial services. The aforementioned Windecken Lutherans were one such example; another were the Upper Hessian Reformed officials of Hospital Haina who, until 1677, traveled three hours to the nearest Reformed parish in Lower Hesse.6 But due to the changing circumstances, the exercise of the participants’ own religion—be it the religion they had chosen for confessional

6 HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 10160; HStAM, 22a no. 3d:2; HStAM, 22a no. 8:12; HStAM, 22a no. 9:6.

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reasons or in which, after 1648, they became denominated—steadily emerged within their territory or region. Such was the case with the Lutheran religion in Hanau-Münzenberg and the Reformed religion in Upper Hesse. Naturally, participants in Auslauf became frustrated with traveling a considerable distance or across difficult terrain to an extraterritorial location when the potential existed for them to practice their religion within their territory. Reflexively they pined for what town dwellers and villagers had always wanted: to bring access to regular religious exercise closer—ideally, to localize it. Whether and how quickly the participants could reach the goal depended on various factors. It tended to be accomplished sooner by those living in leading towns or who had greater means and resources, or by ranking individuals such as state officials who could leverage power and influence. It tended to be accomplished later, if ever, by those who lived in modest or distant villages, or had few means, or little power to leverage. Whatever the case, Auslauf had changed. Under the terms of the 1555 Peace Auslauf was extraterritorial and interminable (meaning one had to do it on a permanent basis) so long as the sovereign successfully enforced the cuiusregio principle in his territory. Auslauf in the post-Westphalian era, by contrast, became increasingly intraterritorial and was potentially terminable. For example, Reformed in Gemünden an der Wohra stopped doing Auslauf into the neighboring region of Lower Hesse after they became a Reformed affiliate of Marburg in 1689 and of Rauschenberg in 1700. Any Auslauf they did after 1689 was to Reformed services within their own region. They then terminated Auslauf for themselves in 1714 after they established Gemünden as the mother church of a new Reformed parish.7 A similar storyline applied to the Upper Hessian Reformed who attended services at five other mother church locations (Marburg, Frankenberg, Münchhausen, Kirchhain, and Rauschenberg) and the approximately sixteen affiliate locations linked to them.8 By 1730 the Reformed scattered across Upper Hesse had reasonable access to a Reformed service and minister. During the same decades the Lutherans in HanauMünzenberg steadily built a parish network as well. Across the county they established mother churches at locales such as City Hanau, Windecken, Altenhaßlau, and Steinau an der Straße, as well as a complement of affiliates. For sovereigns, post-Westphalian Auslauf engendered new realities. Some of these were appealing. Subjects’ motivation to go outside the territorial borders for reasons of confessional religion decreased while their motivation to 7 HStAM, 315f no. 796; HStAM, 16 no. 5024. 8 These numbers do not include the half-dozen Huguenot settlements in Upper Hesse, some of which also became linked to the Reformed parish network of Upper Hesse.

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set up or seek out their religion’s exercise within the territory surged. Doing so kept them within the bounds of the sovereign’s jurisdiction and under his control. Additionally, the clandestine nature of Auslauf and the authorities’ need to crack down on it diminished if not disappeared. Post-Westphalian Auslauf was usually done publicly, matter-of-factly, and routinely, be it quarterly, or monthly, or weekly. Unsurprisingly, territorial authorities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries issued decrees to bring order to it. They aimed to regulate the ministrations and schooling of a subject population now composed of Catholics, Lutherans, and Reformed.9 Authorities also had less reason to fear any collusion between such subjects and external enemies. From the perspective of the local sacred community, post-Westphalian Auslauf carried new and threatening implications that pre-Westphalian Auslauf did not—especially for space and borders. Pre-Westphalian Auslauf “remov[ed] dissenting worship from communal space” and placed it outside the territory. In this way it was an “effective solution to the problem of religious dissent [because it] respected borders even as it violated them.”10 In contrast, post-Westphalian Auslauf incentivized its participants to bring the worship of their denominational religion to locations ever nearer until they established it locally. Moreover, whereas the demands of pre-Westphalian, extraterritorial Auslauf might have dissuaded participants or would-be participants to the point where they resigned and aligned themselves with the religion practiced locally, post-Westphalian intraterritorial Auslauf was comparatively less onerous and would have encouraged participants to abide by their religious affiliation or convictions. Fueling the impulse were the implications Westphalia had on another of the pressure-relieving practices of the pre-Westphalian era, dissimulation. A post-Westphalian world, in which the denominations were equal and their religious exercise was more accessible, obviated the need for dissimulation, at least of confessional religion. The pressures of post-Westphalian Auslauf thus tended to fracture the sacred dimension of a territory and of a Gemeinde. They did so by moving the boundary between a local Gemeinde’s religious exercise and an alternative exercise from the territorial border to within the territory, and potentially, within the local Gemeinde itself. If the sacred community had not yet split into multiple sacred communities, then initiating the local exercise of a religion different from the parish one certainly effected it. For example, in 1613, a village head in Rollshausen still had not communicated according to the landgrave’s chosen religion (the so-called Calvinist rite). The Marburg consistory 9 10

For examples: HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 461, 1002; HStAM, 83 no. 5301. Kaplan, Divided By Faith, 162 and 170, respectively.

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admonished him “finally to make peace” with it and join the “full community of the church.”11 By contrast, in 1669 a Reformed official of Rosenthal grew resentful of his opponents’ discriminations and saw no need to do Auslauf for all services. He referred to the local body of Reformed as a “community” (Gemeinde) for the first time and, on its behalf, received authorization for Reformed services to be held locally on a regular basis.12 In Rosenthal, and many locales like it, no longer would there be one sacred community standing as the local body of authority for the one and only set of local parish affairs. Instead, there were multiple sets of local parish affairs and multiple sacred communities, each tending to its respective parish matters. Their competition over space, properties, and rights imperiled customs that the local Gemeinde had built and maintained prior to 1648.

3

House Churches

Auslauf participants who ended it by successfully establishing the local exercise of their religion had three main options for where to assemble for worship. One was a house church or an atypical venue. Clandestine and illegal in origin, house churches, where they had already appeared in pre-1648 Europe, accommodated local religious dissent, “preserved the monopoly of a community’s official church in the public sphere,” and permitted “people to go on living as if civic and sacral community were still one and the same.”13 The 1648 Peace had several noteworthy implications for the house church. First, because it made allowances for private exercise and domestic devotion, house churches appeared for the first time in certain Hessian, Hanauian, and Fuldian areas. Second, the changed post-Westphalian conditions occasioned a potential redefinition of their status and the perception of them. In a preWestphalian territory where the cuius-regio principle was enforced, attendees of a house church would have intended it to be secretive and invisible. By contrast, article six of the 1670 Resolution, to cite one example, directed Lutheran religious exercise to be done in private or atypical houses or in a church constructed for the purpose.14 It thus conflated a house church and a church building as equivalent instead of contraposed to one another. Attendees arranged for services in houses not for clandestine purposes but for practical reasons: 11 12 13 14

HStAM, PMK vol. 4 (3 Febuary 1613). HStAM, 22a no. 8:23. Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 176 and 195. HStAM, 83 no. 425.

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they were the best if not only viable venue for their religion’s exercise. The building might once have been identified as a residence and still retained all the external appearances of it, yet public discourse now identified it also as a house of worship whether it contained few or all of the furnishings of a proper church sanctuary. Third, attendees were now less dissenters, as they had been in pre-Westphalian times, and more adherents of an Imperially sanctioned faith. If their territory took it a step further and formally recognized their faith, as Hanau-Münzenberg did to the Lutheran religion in 1670, or de facto endorsed it, as Hesse-Kassel did to the Reformed religion in Upper Hesse and Fulda did to the Catholic religion in the Burghaun district, then the notion of dissension essentially disappeared. Paradoxically, however, attendees at once became the distinctive and public “other” to the original community. Fourth, a house church in the pre-Westphalian period would have been clandestine, and it therefore would have worked toward the distinction and separation of public and private. A house church after 1648 tended to promote the opposite. The new community, distinct from the original community, pursued its founding publicly through legal channels with correspondence to territorial authorities. Officials documented the house church’s financing and maintenance. Such post-Westphalian house churches eviscerated the monopoly in the public sphere held by the original community’s official church. People could not go on living as if civil society and sacred society were still one and the same. House churches appeared in Hanau-Münzenberg but not, as a rule, in the region of Upper Hesse. The divergence is revealing. Tensions surfaced in City Hanau when Count Friedrich Casimir of Hanau-Lichtenberg inherited the county of Hanau-Münzenberg in 1642 (a guardianship helped him govern until November 25, 1647). The count adhered to the religion articulated in the 1580 Book of Concord, yet for a half century Hanau-Münzenberg had been exercising the religion that adhered to Calvin’s teaching. And owing to a 1610 agreement (Erbvereinigung) signed by the two counties, Friedrich Casimir was obligated, per consensus thought, not to alter Hanau-Münzenberg’s exercise of religion.15 As a result the count had a severe conflict of interest with, especially, the leadership and citizens who dominated City Hanau—he wanted to introduce the exercise of his religion; they wanted to prevent it. The two sides resolved the issue initially with an agreement (Reversales) in 1642.16 It allowed for the court minister to deliver sermons and administer the Eucharist in the castle church

15 16

HStAM, 83 no. 105. HStAM, 83 no. 391, 415, 416.

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but otherwise forbade the introduction of the exercise of another religion. The count’s frustration waxed over the subsequent few years. His subjects could exercise their religion fully but he, their sovereign, could not do so with his, and that no less in his own ancestral town, which he had rightfully inherited. By all appearances the Westphalian proceedings of earlier 1647 triggered a change to the arrangement. The count and his guardian, Georg Albrecht I von Erbach, were informed of them. In mid-July 1647 an emboldened Friedrich Casimir proposed to the City Hanau town council that the full exercise of his religion be introduced.17 The Reformed citizens immediately contested the count’s new intentions by citing Hanauian pacts from the previous half century, including ones the count himself had signed. Friedrich Casimir defied their objections with Imperial constitutions, invoking, for the first time, the 1552 Treaty of Passau and 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg as well as the “current peace” agreements at Münster and Osnabrück. All of them, he asserted, approved and permitted the religion to which he adhered.18 In rebuttal the Reformed party in City Hanau said the Imperial statutes did not bear on the Hanauian pacts. The Reformed delegation in Westphalia added that the 1642 agreement had severed the count from any right to reform he might have held. Yet Friedrich Casimir and his guardian dismissed the former by noting that the full exercise of the Reformed religion would be left entirely to the Reformed and the latter by claiming he held the right to introduce “my own religion” the same as before. Such maneuvers highlighted the Westphalian proceedings’ complicated results. No longer did the count grudgingly have to accept a partial exercise of his religion in his castle church. Now he could demand, as he put it, the “public exercise of the Lutheran religion” in Old-City Hanau.19 As the disapproving City Hanau town council wrote in the summer of 1647, the count aimed to inaugurate an “equality of both religions” so that “hopefully a better confidence among the citizenry may and can be fostered.”20 If the assumption in the Empire remained that religious dissent encouraged social and political rebellion,21 then for a prince to lobby for the exercise of a religion other than the territory’s official one meant he was rebelling against his own territory’s

17 18 19 20 21

HStAM, 83 no. 25. HStAM, 83 no. 25. HStAM, 83 no. 25. HStAM, 83 no. 25. Ernst Wangermann, “Confessional Uniformity, Toleration, Freedom of Religion: An Issue for Enlightened Absolutism in the Eighteenth Century,” in Diversity and Dissent, Louthan, Cohen, and Szabo, 210.

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order. Friedrich Casimir, however, did not perceive his actions as such because change was afoot in the Empire in the later 1640s.22 In mid-1647 Friedrich Casimir proposed a Simultaneum to the citizens of City Hanau in which “Reformed” and “Lutheran” services would alternate in Old-City Hanau’s main church. Although fair and equitable in principle the count’s gesture fanned the flames of antagonism which already burned strong. Such a “parity of religious exercise,” wrote the town council of Old-City Hanau, “would only instigate bitterness,” “a blood bath,” “hatred,” “antipathy,” “dangerous conflicts,” and the “greatest enmity” between the two sides, both at large and among in-laws, married couples, and small children.23 The citizens who adhered to the so-called Reformed religion, expressly not wanting to disadvantage themselves or their coreligionists elsewhere in the Empire at a time when their Imperial standing was still undecided, demanded that everything remain status quo. The count relented. No precedent for a Simultaneum was set in the county. Nevertheless, Lutheran demand for services led to the aforementioned article six in the 1670 Resolution. Many Lutheran communities subsequently set up religious exercise in people’s homes: in Schlüchtern, Niederrodenbach, Preungesheim, Niedereschbach, Hochstadt, Dorheim, and Eichen in the late seventeenth century, and in Bischofsheim, Marköbel, Marjoß, Ostheim, and Heddernheim by the mid-eighteenth century.24 Certain others held Lutheran services in other venues: first the town hall and then a winery in Seckbach, a barn in Eschersheim, a brewery in Rodheim, and the clerical room of a salt operations in Bad Nauheim. Sometimes they did so for years before securing a more suitable venue. Holding or requesting to hold worship or schooling in an atypical venue that was a public building could easily become a contentious affair. In HanauMünzenberg during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, Lutherans in some locales, led by their ministers and schoolmasters, tried to gain access to a town hall or a communal building, be it for Sunday services or funerals or schooling.25 Especially as time wore on, they failed against stiff Reformed resistance backed by the 1670 Resolution, which had effectively pro-

22

23 24 25

The point made here echoes David Luebke’s observation that “after 1648 … German princes frequently deployed their power in a manner that encouraged the pluralization of faiths.” “Introduction: The Politics of Conversion in Early Modern Germany,” in Luebke, Poley, Ryan, and Sabean, Conversion and the Politics of Religion, 8. HStAM, 83 no. 25. HStAM, 83 no. 401, 90, 99; HStAM, 315g no. 1435. HStAM, 83 no. 401.

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Figure 35

Schlüchtern and its cloister, which was founded by Benedictines allegedly in the eighth century, refounded in the eleventh century according to Cluniac reforms, and gradually influenced by the Reformation in the sixteenth century until the cloister’s constitution was ended in 1609

hibited religious exercise in public buildings such as a town hall or communal hall. Occasionally in the county the Reformed were the ones who faced opposition. In Bleichenbach, where the minority Reformed held parish rights, the majority Lutherans initially though reluctantly allowed their children to be taught with Reformed children by the Reformed schoolmaster in the town hall. Then, in the early 1680s the Lutherans acquired their own schoolmaster and, according to the Reformed, “little by little separated themselves from us,” until finally two decades later they “achieved a full separation” after having relocated Lutheran services from the town hall’s upper floor to a newly built church.26 Nevertheless, the Lutherans resented that the Reformed schoolmaster still lived and taught in the town hall’s lower floor. They wanted him moved to what they called a “customary schoolhouse” on the parish yard, but which was, in effect, an animal stall. Reformed presbyteries and officials from around the county exhorted the Bleichenbach Reformed not to yield. “If you give one a finger,” wrote those from Brandenstein, “then one will want the whole hand.”

26

The content for the Bleichenbach affair and the quotations in this paragraph regarding it are found in HStAM, 83 no. 401.

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Leadership in Oberkalbach also interpreted the affair as a threat to Reformed jurisdiction: “We should not be constrained in the slightest in our religion.” If one ever allowed the same in Rodheim, warned the minister there, then it would give rise to problems. He claimed in Ginnheim, where the town hall and Reformed church stood close to one another, Lutheran services in the hall had sparked friction quite often. In Upper Hesse, by contrast, Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel intervened to prevent a pattern of house churches from taking root. The Lutheran form of religion was exercised in the region’s parishes thanks to the 1648 Accord between Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Darmstadt. Yet Upper Hesse lay within the officially Reformed territory of Hesse-Kassel and was ruled by successive Reformed landgraves. State-appointed officials in Upper Hesse were, therefore, Reformed. Increasingly, they severed themselves from the parish cleric’s Lutheran ministrations and secured them instead from a Reformed minister. Officials in the leading towns of Marburg and Frankenberg quickly accomplished this. By the early 1650s they had arranged for regular Reformed services in a local church building other than the parish church. In Rosenthal, starting in 1669, Reformed services were held for fifteen years in the local district office (Amthaus). The forceful and aggressive Landgrave Karl, however, broke from such precedents. To display his authority, and in an unofficial and largely unsuccessful campaign to coerce Upper Hessian subjects to become Reformed, he authorized his officials and other Reformed in the region to use the main church in any town or village where they requested it.

4

New Church Buildings

A second venue where attendees could assemble to worship was a church building of their own. Prior to the Peace of Westphalia the church building had, in a sense, helped relieve pressures from religious differences wherever they existed. The church building at the end of an extraterritorial Auslauf and the local church building served this purpose. While dissidents participating in Auslauf traveled to an extraterritorial church building to exercise their religion in it, their neighbors walked down the street to attend services in the local church. The church tower projecting above the rooftops signified to residents and visitors that local religious uniformity, at least outwardly, remained. The church building’s role in either preserving or shattering the local civilsacred unity comes into sharper relief as the focus shifts to the post-1648 period. One novelty that now appeared was the construction locally of a new church building—one in addition to the preexisting local church—in order to

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meet the new community’s demand for a church in which it could exercise its own religion. The measure could infuriate the original community. Events in the evangelical parish Burghaun vividly illustrate the point.27 In 1647 noble families jettisoned a Fulda-appointed cleric in Burghaun, ignored Fulda’s protests regarding it, and replaced him with their own cleric, an adherent of the Augsburg Confession.28 But starting around 1684 Fulda abbey took steps to acquire the Burghaun district from the noble Schenk family, which had lived in Burghaun but since relocated to Buchenau. The deal included the old Ilten castle. It had been serving as a government building and sat in the most sensitive location of Burghaun: next door to the evangelical church, gate house, and to the town’s main square. Across 1687–1688, Prince-Abbot Placidus (r. 1678–1700) ordered a new construction within the castle. Evangelicals, as princely subjects, were forced to contribute labor toward it on grounds that the site was princely agrarian terrain and the new building was to be a granary. This was a pretext, however, for the construction resulted in a chapel, and Catholic services began there by 1688. The evangelicals scoffed at any claim that the services were protected by the 1648 Peace or by its provisions for a sovereign to practice his chosen religion. The ground where the chapel was built, the evangelicals argued, was part of their churchyard, and construction of the chapel had unlawfully divided and confiscated half of it. But their efforts to resist failed. At first, monks and then a priest from Michelsrombach came to lead the Catholic services, which alternated between Burghaun and Hünhan. Attending them were the few local Catholic officials appointed by Fulda, including a district official who had been attending the local evangelical services. The evangelical minister continued exercising ministerial rights—weddings, baptisms, burials, catechetical instruction—over Catholics for nearly four more decades. Yet the Catholics had established a good foothold in Burghaun. They did the same in the neighboring Langenschwarz district during the same years. There, like in the Burghaun district, the Catholic lords not only aimed to deprive the evangelical clerics of jurisdiction and to install Simultaneum but also to settle Catholics in its locales.29 Placidus finalized the acquisition of Burghaun in 1692. Around 1700 he intended to raze the town’s decrepit evangelical church and build a new one for both evangelicals and Catholics, effectively a Simultankirche. But the evangelical community emphatically opposed the idea, and Placidus relented.

27 28 29

HStAM, 92 no. 80I–80III, 81IV–V, 82–85, and 112. HStAM, 94 no. 239. AGV, EFU/A/4/09-01.

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Later, around the 1707–1714 period, Prince-Abbot Adalbert I (r. 1700–1714) authorized a grand construction project: a new church on the site of the castle chapel, old keep, and surrounding wall. The unused portion of the site was turned into a garden for the Catholic minister and a new wall built around it. A service was first held in the Catholic church in 1717. Upon the building’s ultimate completion in 1720, it was consecrated to the honor of the Mother of God. A Catholic parish based in Burghaun became established by 1728 and marked the culmination of the Catholics’ separation. The Catholic minister was provided with a new parish residence within the castle. Local evangelicals were compelled again to contribute to both the new Catholic church and parish house on the pretext that these were princely buildings resting on princely property. The requirement embittered them all the more. The Catholic parish also included a newly founded Catholic school. Catholics started sending their children to it instead of the local evangelical school. Additionally, the evangelical minister eventually ceased to exercise rights over local Catholics. The matter had become a source of contention by 1700. When a Catholic man of Burghaun died that year, a gravesite on the evangelical churchyard was prepared for him. But a Catholic cleric insisted that he perform the burial. Four evangelical representatives feared the maneuver’s potential to become a perilous precedent and protested it. Ultimately, and just as controversially, the man was taken to Hünhan and buried there by a Catholic cleric. The evangelical representatives, meanwhile, were incarcerated and fined. By 1728, after the Catholic parish of Burghaun became official, the ministerial rights over Catholics had come under the Catholic minister’s jurisdiction. Not to be outdone, the evangelical community of Burghaun tore down their church; after two years, also by 1728, they had constructed a new one. The heart of Burghaun exemplified the 1648 Peace’s complicated ramifications. On the one hand it reflected the exact equality ascribed to the confessions. The evangelicals and the Catholics each exercised their own religion, their respective churches stood next to one another, and the steeples above them were equal in height. On the other hand it expressed the unequal power relations between them. When standing and looking eastward on the main town square, the most prominent location in Burghaun, one gazed directly on the west front of the Catholic church but had a mostly obscured view of the evangelical church. Equally significant, the Catholic church was perched on a higher plot of ground. Both the church and its steeple towered above the evangelical church and steeple. A stone wall divided the respective church grounds. The scene personified the highly tense atmosphere of Burghaun and its wider district, which developed in the late seventeenth century and ran through

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Looking eastward in Burghaun onto the Catholic church (right), gate house (smaller, timber-framed structure), and evangelical church (left)

the eighteenth century. To hear the evangelicals describe it, the Catholics, and especially their cleric, schoolmaster, and officials, became even more aggressive after the Catholic church was constructed. They applied pressure on sensitive nerves and leveraged any advantage. For decades the evangelical community bitterly opposed them. The evangelicals’ repeated but vain efforts

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aimed at no less than the termination of Catholic practice in Burghaun and the surrounding area. Catholic maneuvers in Langenschwarz felt, similarly, like encroachments to the evangelical community there. A 1745 letter alludes to how the district Catholics traveled outside it to Michelsrombach for their baptisms and weddings and how they “[have to] consign their children to the Protestant school if only to learn [their] A.B.C.”30 They kept pressing to localize such Catholic services. The Lutheran subjects in 1749 responded by lodging a dozen religious grievances against steps taken by Catholics.31 Yet in 1769 a Franciscan, who carried out various ministerial acts as chaplain at the Langenschwarz castle, began educating Langenschwarz’s Catholic children and received an annual supply of wood and hay for it. The friar then obtained ministerial rights over the Catholics at Langenschwarz in 1781.32 In Hanau-Münzenberg many of the new sacred communities—in most locales, Lutheran; in some, Reformed—eventually possessed their own new church building. For the Lutherans, who were usually the local minority and lacked sufficient resources, the Lutheran Count Johann Reinhard III (d. 1736) played a vital role across the 1710s to 1730s. He directed resources at his disposal toward church construction in locales such as Kesselstadt, Steinau an der Straße, and Windecken. Local Lutherans helped make up the difference in costs. The steps taken by the count and Lutherans sewed tensions in the territory but were not as inflammatory as those by the Fulda prince-abbots and Burghaun Catholics. Mechanisms, then, that had commonly served as safety valves in the preWestphalian period could now be useful tools in the hands of sovereigns in the post-Westphalian period. Just how a sovereign exercised his power through them was critical. If, as in Hanau-Münzenberg, he did so mildly and noncombatively, whether by choice or because of an inability to wield his temporal authority more forcefully, then those subjects might experience it as an irritation. If, as in Hesse-Kassel and Fulda abbey, he did so forcefully and combatively, in a flagrant demonstration of superior power and authority, then his subjects of the opposing denomination experienced it as oppressive, manipulative, and perhaps a violation of a legal statute. The difference was not so much in kind as in degree. Nevertheless, either instance demonstrated how forms of toleration were being “repurposed,” often by opportunistic sovereigns.

30 31 32

AGV, EFU/A/4/09-01. AGV, EFU/A/4/09-01. AGV, EFU/A/4/09-01.

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Simultaneum

A third option for attendees of an alternative worship service was Simultaneum. Here the spotlight turns to Upper Hesse. A clause in the 1648 Accord stated that Reformed in Upper Hessian towns that had two churches could set up their services in one of them, while Lutherans and Reformed in locales with one church were to alternate use of it.33 At the time the clause seemed relevant only in Marburg and perhaps Frankenberg, both of which had multiple churches and a small number of high-ranking Reformed residents. Even three decades later, despite the growth and assertiveness of Reformed in the region, its relevance still scarcely extended outside of those two leading towns. Only in the aforementioned Rosenthal did Reformed services begin prior to 1677 and only then in the district office. Landgrave Karl then blazed a new path by meticulously coordinating the expansion of a Reformed parish network in Upper Hesse until all Reformed in the region had relative proximity to a Reformed worship service. In almost every one of these approximately two dozen mother churches and affiliates he authorized Simultaneum in the main church.34 This included Rosenthal, where in 1684 Reformed services were moved from the district office to the local church. In violation of the 1648 clause it also included many locales that had multiple worship venues or church buildings. Karl and his coreligionists justified the usage of the main church. They claimed the venue currently used by the Reformed was insufficient for the growing body of attendees, and that local Lutheran worship would not be obstructed by Simultaneum. Establishing a precedent proved useful too. All subsequent Reformed petitions for Simultaneum could be justified on this basis, as indeed they sometimes were. Karl demonstrated his power by forcing Simultaneum on the region. Doing so also spared him and his coreligionists there the great expense of building their own churches. Lutheran communities in Upper Hesse typically greeted Simultaneum with anger and objection. In Frankenberg, with its post-1648 population of approximately two thousand residents, Simultaneum ignited arguably the most explosive event in Hessian parish history. The Town Church was a late thirteenthcentury Gothic construction and, historically, Frankenberg’s parish church. Following 1648 the church as well as the local sacred community became 33 34

HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 254. Karl did not push for Simultaneum in Marburg, presumably because the degree of antipathy and resistance it would have sparked was too discouraging. Instead, Lutheran and Reformed services continued to be held in separate churches.

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View of Frankenberg, looking southward, 1581. The Town Church with its tall tower stands most prominently atop the skyline. To the left of it is the roof of the Hospital Church and, a little further left, the six pointed towers of the town hall. Below the town on the right is Georgenberg, an administrative office and former monastery

denominated as Lutheran. The community’s notion of custom (Herkommen) and the term Lutheran now fused, which meant that to defend the one and defend the other had become one and the same. For the next half century the Lutherans exclusively used the church. During the same period, a small corpus of Reformed in Frankenberg, most of whom were state officials and their family members, leveraged the support of Reformed sovereigns and steadily appropriated certain local church properties.35 Beginning in 1648 the Reformed held services—irregularly, it appears, at first, then regularly—in the sanctuary of Georgenberg, a former monastery located just beyond the town walls.36 Then, in 1662, they formally established a Reformed community and started holding services in the Hospital Church located inside those walls and near the Lutheran church. Such maneuvers increased tensions between the two parties.

35

36

Due to the 1648 Accord between Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Darmstadt, Upper Hesse passed into the post-1648 period with an ecclesiastical system classified as Lutheran even though the region rested within the larger Reformed landgraviate of Hesse-Kassel. HStAM, 17e Frankenberg no. 38.

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Change in the local order in Frankenberg occurred in January 1705 after the imperious Landgrave Karl authorized, on behalf of his Reformed coreligionists, the introduction of Simultaneum in the Lutheran church. Karl’s directive, first issued in October 1704, sharply escalated the acrimony within Frankenberg until the Lutherans’ anxiety reached a fever pitch on 4 January 1705.37 On that day, as the Reformed parishioners headed to the Lutheran church and started ringing its bells for their service, hundreds of Lutheran men, women, and children ran into the bell tower and onto the churchyard to defend the Lutherans’ prerogative and customary use of them. Lutheran schoolboys beat and kicked Reformed schoolboys in the tower. Lutheran women dismantled a chaplain’s wooden fence and hurriedly handed its posts to Lutheran men on the churchyard. The Lutheran men assaulted Reformed men by yanking their hair, breaking their noses and ribs with punches and the wooden posts, and holding aloft swords they had snatched from several Reformed men, an act that was viewed as a challenge to princely authority. When the top state official in town, who was also Reformed, rode up to the wall surrounding the churchyard and tried to defuse the situation, the Lutherans in the churchyard defied his efforts with deafening screams. The lines of what was “confessionalized” had shifted from the pre-1648 period. In 1605, for example, a band of Christian citizens of Marburg stormed inside the town’s parish church and severely attacked the new minister when he began preaching on so-called Calvinist Eucharistic theology. In 1705, by contrast, the Lutheran community of Frankenberg stormed onto the churchyard outside of the Lutheran church to defend against any Reformed usage of the church building and property. The 1605 tumult concerned doctrine and liturgy; the 1705 tumult concerned communal property, objects, and space that had been “confessionalized” in the sense of denominated. Due to the enormous attention given to the Reformation era, the former tumult has been well known and the latter one virtually unknown to scholars of Hessian history. Yet the latter one ranked, arguably, as the most physically violent and explosive event in Hessian parish history. Although the town’s Lutherans prevented the Reformed community from using their church that day, a seven-week investigation, conducted by partisan Reformed officials, brought punishments down on certain Lutherans. The landgrave, meanwhile, permanently secured Simultaneum in the church.38 The tumult left, it seems, a silent legacy. Virtually no written mention of it

37 38

HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362; HStAM, 315f no. 585; HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 1103. HStAM, 5 vol. 3 no. 3362.

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can be found in any document after 1705, yet the humiliation and resentment from the affair must have simmered within the Lutheran community during the long era of Simultaneum in Frankenberg’s town church (1705–1817). Across that century Lutherans and Reformed staggered their use of the church for their respective worship services, and Lutherans lived with the knowledge that the Reformed rang their church’s bells for Reformed services and sat in pews that the Lutherans had purchased. Simultaneum triggered rising tensions elsewhere as well. In Haina, Münchhausen, and Wetter the Lutherans had locks put on church doors to prevent Reformed access,39 and in Haina they came to physical blows with Reformed in a prayer room after a Reformed official broke off a lock in order to have a second set of keys made for it. Wolferode Lutherans protested that Simultaneum would turn the local church into a “whore’s church” because the Reformed had permitted two sexually immoral women to come and do penance locally.40 Such efforts failed in the face of the landgrave’s authority. In three villages, Schreufa (1685), Münchhausen (1688), and Roda (1688), Karl’s forcefulness pressed Simultaneum as well as exile and Auslauf into peculiar forms. In each case he pushed beyond Simultaneum and prohibited the local Lutheran community from holding Lutheran services in their own church, leaving its use solely to the Reformed.41 The Lutherans in Schreufa held services, for a short time, in a local barn. It marked the rare instance in Upper Hesse when worship occurred in a house church or atypical venue. The Lutherans, ironically, begged Karl to authorize Simultaneum so that they might regain access to their own church.42 For them Simultaneum had suddenly crossed the line from being a facilitator of division and oppression to a plea for mercy. The extraordinary developments in the villages also fashioned exile into a form found only in the post-Westphalian period: not one taken up by dissidents because of unwillingness to conform to or dissimulate the sovereign’s territorial religion, as in the pre-Westphalian period, but rather an exile compelled by a sovereign of one Imperially recognized denomination on subjects of another Imperially recognized denomination, forcing them into an exile not from the territory but from their local church. For although Karl wanted the Lutherans to attend Reformed services and convert, they attended Lutheran ones in nearby locales. Hence they engaged in a peculiar

39 40 41 42

HStAM, 315f no. 1874. HStAM, 17e Wolferode no. 2. HStAM, 22a no. 9:10 and 8:28; HStAM, 17e Schreufa no. 6; HStAM, 17e Münchhausen no. 9; HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 767 (1688); HStAM, 315f no. 1874. HStAM, 315f no. 585.

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form of Auslauf: intraterritorial like other post-Westphalian cases, yet, like preWestphalian ones, interminable or permanent so long as the sovereign set the conditions for it to be so. Only when Karl granted the Lutherans’ request for Simultaneum would their Auslauf cease. Those in Münchhausen were granted it six months later; in Roda, almost seven years later; and in Schreufa, eighty years later due to legal obstacles set in place by Karl.43 Comparing these cases of Simultaneum with those elsewhere in the Empire helps to clarify them. In the 1540s, when the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V imposed Simultaneum on Imperial cities, neither of the two sides disputing true Christian religion had yet prevailed over the other. His maneuver buttressed the Roman Church adherents’ effort to contest their adversaries on these important urban stages, and possibly vanquish them. By the late sixteenth century each faith had adopted a confessionalized form that excluded the others and sought to triumph over them in the claim of having true Christian religion, until, that is, the 1648 Peace declared the exact equality of the estates that adhered to them and effectively set the stage for the confessions to become denominations. Karl’s coercions, in contrast to the occasions of Simultaneum in the 1540s, were tantamount to one denominational party dishonoring and disrespecting a coequal. In another comparison, in the late seventeenth century Simultaneum was foisted on Alsatian communities and some Palatine ones after a foreign sovereign, French King Louis XIV, conquered the region.44 Simultaneum expanded in the Palatine region after the Catholic Elector Johann Wilhelm (r. 1690–1716), without abrogating earlier treaties, declared in 1698 that churches hitherto in the hands of Reformed would be shared by all three denominations.45 In Upper Hesse it was the territorial sovereign, Landgrave Karl, who imposed Simultaneum and in the process, to all intents and purposes, expunged the terms of the 1648 Accord, terms he was supposed to uphold. At times in Europe in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries Simultaneum provided an arrangement when other options were “impossible or unacceptable,” and thereby “manag[ed] and limit[ed] the conflict” between rivals.46 But its mention aggravated tensions between Reformed and Lutherans

43 44 45

46

HStAM, 315f no. 555 and no. 580. Stephen A. Lazer, State Formation in Early Modern Alsace, 1648–1789 (Rochester: Boydell & Brewster, 2019). Kaplan, Divided By Faith, 212–13; also Helmut Neumaier, “Simultaneum und Religionsfrieden im Alten Reich. Zu Phänomenologie und Typologie eines Umkämpften Rechtsinstituts,” in Historisches Jahrbuch 128 (2008): 160. Kaplan, Divided By Faith, 217.

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in City Hanau and between Lutherans and Catholics in Burghaun. Its implementation in Upper Hesse exacerbated the conflict between Lutherans and Reformed. In Frankenberg in particular the offense became an inherited grievance which, one can assume, was silently passed down for generations and would rear its head in a spirit of revenge in the 1830s.

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Freedom of Conscience

Finally, the 1648 Peace complicated instead of resolved the matter of burdened consciences. Confessional adherents in the pre-Westphalian Empire had spoken of their conscience being burdened when a sovereign demanded conformity to another confession. The 1648 Peace addressed the issue in article seven, which declared that estates and subjects were each to have “freedom of conscience” (Gewissens Freyheit).47 However, things set in motion by other articles in the 1648 Peace could contradict it head-on and burden consciences in new ways. Those affected included the great majority, the non- or aconfessional rural Christians, whose consciences had not had burdened before. Although persons became denominated as Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed, they might, according to their own conscience, seek ministration from one of the other denominations. Valentin Merz, a Catholic of Schlotzau with an evangelical wife, wanted in 1721 to educate his daughter in the evangelical religion.48 However, by then governments had set down regulations on such things. On the basis of them Fulda forbade Merz—and the evangelical minister of Langenschwarz for good measure—from doing so at penalty of punishment. The evangelicals of Langenschwarz and Burghaun cited the incident as coercive to the conscience, religiously oppressive, and counter to the 1648 Peace. Consciences became easily burdened when the public exercise of a second denominational religion was introduced locally. The Lutheran community in Burghaun appealed to Fulda authorities on this account throughout the eighteenth century. The construction of a Catholic church in Burghaun did not mark the end of Catholic assertions on the town stage. Starting in 1716, they instituted an annual procession on Ascension Day, which went along the Hünhan border and through the fields and town of Burghaun. The evangelical community objected that it ran counter to custom and claimed the Catholic

47 48

Article 7 § 1 of the Peace of Osnabrück, in Müller, Instrumenta pacis Westphalicae. HStAM, 92 no. 85.

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minister had threatened to physically assault them if they did not let the Catholics complete the processional. The confrontation earned the evangelical community a summons before Fulda authorities. There, they maintained their unity, and for it the authorities rewarded them with a stiff fine. In 1736 the evangelical community noted how Catholic territorial subjects had been going on pilgrimages and processionals in the wider area. Not once did these spare “our fields and properties.”49 The members described them as disruptive of their town’s ancient constitution and wanted them to cease. But Fulda responded by bringing more fines down on their heads. In interrogations Catholic officials implicated the evangelicals of the previous and current generations of false witness. During one processional the evangelicals allegedly knocked the Catholic minister from his horse with “murderous” intent. The officials said it occurred while he was passing along a public road, and not, as evangelicals alleged, because he rode through their fields. The distinction was telling. The evangelicals might have had legal standing if a procession touched their fields, but they had none if it traversed public or princely ground. The officials believed the evangelicals of their day were trying, too, to link Catholic processionals with encroachment on property. The coexercise of Catholic religion in Burghaun affected the town’s public life and people’s consciences in other ways. Evangelicals objected to the Catholic crucifixes and stock images erected on streets. The Catholic minister and officials replied in testimony that the only one they knew of stood on princely property, twenty steps in front of the Catholic church. Evangelicals also bristled at seeing the Catholic cleric sprinkle consecrated water on objects in public view, such as church property or gravesites. Furthermore, the Catholic minister compelled evangelicals to serve as musicians at baptisms, betrothals, and weddings. Relations soured especially over Catholic holidays and apostles’ days. Starting in 1703 the Prince-Abbot Adalbert I ordered Lutherans to ring their church’s bells on such occasions and to celebrate the occasions by having men and women refrain from their customary work, be it labor in the fields, baking bread in the communal bakery, carrying something across the street, or knitting and spinning at home. As an evangelical letter put it, Catholics believed these violated the Catholic religion’s principles, showed contempt for “our Lord God, and profaned the Christian religion.”50 For years Catholic authorities kept watch for violations. Among numerous instances was the case of Hermann Altstadt, who on a Monday afternoon retrieved flax by

49 50

HStAM, 92 no. 80I. HStAM, 94 no. 285.

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a tributary so that it would not spoil. Because it was the Feast of the Birth of Mary, the Catholic priest dispatched his schoolmaster to question and summon Altstadt. “I don’t have anything to do with [the priest],” Altstadt rejoined, “he’s not my confessor.” The local authorities called him to appear before them and the priest, and they issued Altstadt a fine. He initially refused to pay it but eventually was forced to. A particularly sensational incident in Burghaun occurred in 1736. On May 13 Catholics were conducting a processional while Lutherans were worshipping in their church. According to the evangelical community, as the processional passed by “very malicious Catholic Christians” threw stones through the church windows while the Catholic missionary priest looked on.51 Later reports indicated that approximately five boys had hurled them. The boys came from villages near Burghaun, and as nonlocals, they might have felt a certain liberty to commit the acts. The evangelicals described how the stones endangered the life of their minister, who was standing in the pulpit. Apparently, Lutheran men were sent outside to tell the unruly youths, including one poised to throw another stone, to stop. But a boy hollered, “We should beat up these dogs and cleric!”52 Perhaps rallied by the cry, Catholic youths and worshipers stormed into the Lutheran church, pushing, shoving, and inciting a tumult along the way. They verbally harassed the minister, forcing him to halt his sermon and grieve aloud to God. Evangelicals expelled the Catholics from the church and closed its doors, but the Catholics then kicked hard against the doors as if intending to break them down. The evangelicals heard the Catholics outside scream threats about the survival of the Lutheran church and faith: “What’s it going to be like when there’s only a Lutheran [church building] and nothing more?! What will the Lutheran faith be like then?!”53 Following the incident four soldiers kept watch by the Lutheran church to arrest anyone who might incite another uproar. The evangelical community described the affair as the greatest sorrow and a piercing jab to the heart. The ruckus scandalized God’s holy word, they cried, and disrupted their minister’s office of handling worship. They carefully linked the Catholics’ actions to their own exercise of religion. They claimed the Catholic coexercise of religion had interfered with their own and amounted to religious oppression, which meant it violated terms of Imperial constitutional law. The Catholics’ violent measures, as well as subtle manipulations and

51 52 53

HStAM, 92 no. 80I and 80II. HStAM, 92 no. 80I and 80II. HStAM, 92 no. 80I and 80II.

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sleights of hand, intended to eliminate their religion. They experienced the Catholic presence as ever encroaching and expressed how their consciences were being ever constricted as a result. The “entire disruption of our freedom of church, religion, and conscience” was more than imminent, they wrote in 1736.54 Additionally, they catalogued and alleged many cases of prejudice against them when trying to acquire property or make a purchase. Either they were denied for no apparent reason, or a Catholic received preferential treatment, or it was intimated that they could finalize the deal on condition they first submit to Catholicism. They especially noted how evangelical immigrants to the Burghaun area received this treatment, too, likely because they would have felt more vulnerable to such pressure and more dependent on territorial favor for their material subsistence. Fulda described the acts and words of the May 1736 incident as “insolent” and “excesses” and as a provocative and punishable threat to civil order. They commissioned two Burghaun officials to investigate. Trouble had brewed two days prior to the tumult, reported the officials, as Catholic youths tore down equipment used at local wells, leaving locals unable to draw water. The Lutheran gatekeeper affirmed that three stones broke through the windows during the May 13 commotion and that one of them flew in the minister’s direction. The Lutheran minister, though no enthusiast of Catholic maneuvers in Burghaun, tended to downplay the events. The Catholic minister, though not condoning the youths’ actions, brushed them off as grossly exaggerated. After summoning and questioning all members of the commune, Catholic and evangelical, the officials concluded that the incident had emboldened the evangelicals, who had become more impudent and had tried to exploit the situation by butting into Catholic affairs. One official acknowledged the sharp discord between the two sides, especially the caustic, defaming words they exchanged. He decreed a universal censorship: any man, woman, or child heard saying punishable words in a public or private setting would be fined twenty reichsthaler, and anyone who heard but did not report them would likewise be fined twenty reichsthaler. Any guilty party resisting these penal measures would be arrested and taken before the government in Fulda. In sum, the 1648 Peace authorized freedom of conscience and the accompanying right to exercise a religion. Though these seemed tolerant measures, they inadvertently paved the way to burdened consciences and oppressive censorship.

54

HStAM, 92 no. 80I and 80II.

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7

Rural Collaborations and Unifications

The story of Part 2 thus far has been that many of the rural Gemeinden lost their civil-sacred unity after 1648 and that this loss fomented local strife and tension for generations. It was their principal narrative. But complementary storylines also began to unfold. On matters such as cemeteries, schools, and church buildings those of differing denominations sometimes collaborated and sometimes blurred the lines of division, even to the point where they were approaching unity. Doing so helped heal, to a degree, the rending of the sacred community suffered in the post-1648 era. One way was by sharing use of a cemetery. Großenmoor established a local one in 1767.55 Records from a half century later indicate that the majority Lutheran and minority Catholic members of the commune shared communal use of the cemetery as well as use of the communal bell (to signal a funeral) and certain ecclesiastical instruments.56 In Rüdigheim the Lutherans in 1811 possessed their own church and churchyard but had long been burying their dead in the Reformed cemetery.57 A contractor and local official estimated the practice had been going on since 1689. They described a long-standing unity of the local Lutherans and Reformed, how almost all marriages were mixed, and how “man and wife want to rest [together] in a churchyard.” The two communities used the same funeral instruments. Catholics were also buried in the same cemetery. “One never heard anything about another Christian cemetery” in Rüdigheim wrote local officials and church elders. The Reformed schoolmaster tolled the bells regardless of the denomination of the deceased. The Reformed wanted it understood that the cemetery belonged to them and was not officially communal, but beyond that no locals wanted to institute separate graveyards because of the disunity it would instill. In Hanauian locales the denominational minister of the original parish—classified after 1648 as Reformed in most cases—led funeral services. Though the modest number of Lutherans in Uttrichshausen in 1809 expressed a wish that theirs could be led by a Lutheran instead of a Reformed minister, they were unreservedly pleased with the Reformed burial rite.58 Reports from the late 1850s concerning Catholics in Hanauian locales indicated that they had the same or a very similar arrangement. By denominational jurisdiction they were linked to a Catholic parish based in another Hanauian locale, yet they had been burying 55 56 57 58

HStAM, 92 no. 415. AGV, EBK/A/4/09-02. HStAM, 83 no. 3356. HStAM, 315g no. 1890.

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their dead in the local cemetery in ceremonies led, commonly, by Reformed parish ministers.59 Whereas Landgrave Karl forced Simultaneum on many communities in Upper Hesse, local Reformed and Lutheran communities in certain Hanauian locales came to it under more anodyne circumstances. Those at Assenheim and Ortenberg did so around the mid-eighteenth century.60 Simultaneum was considered in Fechenheim in 1792 and installed there in 1805–1814.61 In Uttrichshausen, after Lutherans requested access to the Reformed church for their services and Eucharist, the two shared use of it starting around the turn of the nineteenth century.62 Lutherans and Reformed in the Hanauian village of Schwalheim took the sentiment a step further. In the late eighteenth century they together built a new church in their locale and intentionally designated it a communal church.63 So, too, did Lutherans and Reformed in the Upper Hessian village of Roda around the same time. In the Schwalheim and Roda cases the civil-sacred unity was being partially restored despite the members being denominationally mixed. Just as it was fairly common for a spouse in a mixed marriage to attend the denominational services of the other spouse, so it was fairly common for children of one denomination to attend the school of another. The parents plainly preferred to send the children to a local school, regardless its denomination, instead of fretting about them walking a long way to and from a school of their denominational affiliation. At times children were instructed for years at the local school but then confirmed in their own denomination. Other times, especially in the absence of ordinances or a dispensation from existing ordinances, children were both schooled and confirmed in the other denomination. Church authorities were busied with a steady stream of bureaucratic paperwork on these matters, including complaints from a minister or schoolmaster and requests from parents and grandparents for a child to be allowed to attend the school of the other denomination. In 1694 the Windecken Lutheran minister excommunicated a Lutheran man in Eichen for sending his son to the Reformed school. His action pointed up the potential for severe opposition to the practice, especially, it seems, in the half century after 1648, when it first unfolded.64 But in Willersdorf, after a majority of the Lutheran members 59 60 61 62 63 64

HStAM, 83 no. 1319. HStAM, 83 no. 95, 99; HStAM, 83 no. 1804; HStAD, E5C (alt). Simultaneum was also considered for Steinau an der Straße, Eschersheim, and Schwalheim in 1784–1785. HStAM, 81 no. 6421; HStAM, 315g no. 611. HStAM, 315g no. 1890. HStAM, 83 no. 99. HStAM, 83 no. 398.

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Figure 38

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The church in Roda, built 1789

became Reformed in 1682 and hired a Reformed schoolmaster, the Lutheran parents sent their children to him and kept doing so for generations. The normalization of this kind of mixed schooling became widespread. In the early 1720s all Lutheran parents in Mittelbuchen sent their children to the Reformed school because the Lutheran one was reportedly in Bruchköbel. During the same period all Lutheran fathers in Ostheim and Kilianstädten had their children confirmed Reformed.65 Lutheran children in Hintersteinau in 1747 were attending the Reformed school too.66 A solid majority of Catholic parents in Hanauian locales sent their children to local Reformed or Lutheran schools, as 1747 records from district Altenhaßlau demonstrate.67 As happened in certain locales in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Lutheran and Reformed communities in Ostheim united their schools around 1813.68 In the 65 66 67 68

HStAM, 83 no. 4603, 4738. HStAM, 83 no. 1276. HStAM, 83 no. 5339, 5371. HStAM, 315g no. 1973.

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nineteenth century some Catholic and evangelical children were attending the other denomination’s school. Catholic fathers in Wehrda in the mid-1830s sent their children to the Catholic minister in Langenschwarz or Burghaun for the season of confirmation instruction. But the rest of the year the fathers sent them to the local evangelical school instead of on a hazardous, one hour trek to the Catholic school in Langenschwarz. They entreated the Fulda authorities for any necessary dispensation.69 Even in strife-weary Schreufa the forces of Christianization and localization eventually prodded opposing parties to offset grievances with collaboration. Lutherans regained use of the church in early 1686 after ecclesiastical authorities granted it. But the Schreufa Reformed barred them anew in 1692 after having pooled together funds to construct a new church. Lutherans wanted Simultaneum in it, not least because they had contributed some manual labor toward the construction, but the Reformed refused. Landgrave Karl backed them. He reasoned in a 1695 ruling that Lutheran members of Schreufa’s commune, though a small minority, were seeking equal use of the church. Therefore they should finance half of its costs. It was one of his many characteristic attempts to coerce Lutheran subjects to convert. Subsequently, Lutherans in Schreufa grew in numbers and made repeated efforts to reacquire full access to the local church. Seizing on a 1732 decree they managed to secure all of their baptism, wedding, and funeral services in it, instead of only certain ones, as had been the case. But they failed to secure Simultaneum in 1748–1750 and 1766. They tried once again in 1772 and negotiations dragged into 1773. “The [Schreufa Lutherans] have now lain an entire year before the pool of Bethsaida and waited for the angelic stirring of the healing waters!” exclaimed the Frankenberg Lutheran minister. “The [Lutheran] minister at Viermünden holds prayers, funerals and weddings in the church at Schreufa, so why should the Sunday services not be allowed?” The Frankenberg Reformed minister rebutted. “I and the Reformed residents,” he wrote, “are quite willing and ready, like our ancestors and parents, to allow Lutheran services in the church there.” But the Lutherans first had to agree to continue fulfilling contractual obligations to him and the Reformed schoolmaster, and to shoulder half of the church construction and maintenance costs.70 The Lutheran minister chafed at these demands. The Reformed had use of Lutheran churches in Upper Hesse without officially having to contribute anything toward their costs, he said. Nearby Röddenau, Haubern, and

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HStAM, 180 Hünfeld no. 873. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 333, 341.

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Wangershausen had recently built churches. There, too, the Reformed were authorized to use them if they wanted.71 He asked for reciprocity so that the Schreufa Lutherans would be permitted the same. Once the Schreufa church’s total costs were recalculated from an exorbitant nine hundred reichsthaler to a reasonable three hundred, the Lutherans agreed to pay half. Finally, after almost nine decades of bickering and impasse, Simultaneum began again in Schreufa in 1775. Lutheran services were held every two weeks on Sunday afternoons and on certain holidays, and the Eucharist was administered four times annually. The Reformed and Lutheran ministers alternated giving the prayer day sermon. A 1789 visitation revealed that the Reformed schoolmaster was leading Lutherans in their prayer hour services. In 1775 at least some Lutheran fathers had their children confirmed in the Reformed religion, which the Reformed community supported, the Viermünden Lutheran minister dreaded, and the Marburg consistory turned a blind eye to. Conflicts flared between the two sacred communities into the 1790s over salary payments, rights over the church building, and the administration of church pews, including the seating of Reformed and Lutheran children.72 Yet Simultaneum as well as mutual attendance at local services was occurring in Schreufa. And on Sundays when no local Lutheran service was held, the Schreufa Lutherans opted for local Reformed services over Lutheran ones elsewhere in the parish. Collaboration of this kind recalled the Gemeinden of old, before their civilsacred unity had been lost. Yet their restoration would never happen so long as local sacred communities remained split. Then came the 1817 evangelical Union. It aimed to unite local Lutheran and Reformed communities into evangelical communities, yet thanks to the complexities that had developed since 1648, doing so would be a far more complicated and difficult enterprise than Union proponents anticipated. 71 72

HStAM, 315f no. 555. HStAM, 22a no. 4b:9; HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 927.

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Chapter 9

Rural Fulda amid the Evangelical Union, 1817–1850s Starting in 1817, the church and state authorities of Hesse as well as Prussia and other German states officially launched the evangelical Union. In their view, which was molded into an anachronistic one by Catholic-Protestant narratives, evangelicals in the sixteenth century had split into Lutheran and Reformed. The authorities seized on the tricentennial celebration of the Reformation to declare the distinctions between the Lutheran and Reformed faiths to be ultimately not a matter of orthodoxy, to phase out the names Lutheran and Reformed, to unite all Lutherans and Reformed, and henceforth to call them “evangelicals” and their church “evangelical Christian.” Local sacred communities, however, had had a fundamentally different historical experience. In the pre-1648 period rural Gemeinden treated the socalled Lutheran, Reformed, and Catholic confessions as Christianity, and they affirmed themselves as Christians through whichever confessional form was installed in their parish. At some point after 1648 the sacred community in many locales split into multiple sacred communities. It did so not because of theological differences but because denominations formed and governing authorities codified them. In rural Hanau relations between local communities were often tense, yet the milder hand of a relatively weaker central authority tended not to make them worse. In rural Fulda and Upper Hesse the actions of an imperious church and state intruding on behalf of coreligionists frequently antagonized volatile relations between communities. This historical dissonance between, on the one hand, the elites and, on the other, the local sacred communities caused them to interact with the Union in profoundly different ways. The repercussions carried on through the nineteenth century, and even into the twentieth. In sum, in northern locales of rural Fulda the Union fractured the local sacred dimension along new lines and thus exacerbated the disunity between the civil and sacred dimensions. Across rural Hanau the Union facilitated the unification of the local sacred communities, the restoration of local civil-sacred unity, and the devolution of parishes according to the original pre-1648 pattern. In rural Upper Hesse the Union’s ultimate failure in Marburg and Frankenberg caused authorities to abandon it altogether and pursue a return to the Lutheran-Reformed status quo. That decision, in turn, compelled them to thwart ongoing collaborations between local Lutherans and Reformed, a development that, in several curious cases, forced authorities to break up local civil-sacred unity.

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_014

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The Evangelical Union

Certain historical trends informed the governing authorities’ intentions regarding the Union. One trend was consensus understanding about the Protestant Reformation and confessionalism in the sixteenth century. It held that God had initiated a great evangelical movement in the German lands to reform the Christian Church but that the movement then suffered an unfortunate division within its own ranks. The Reformers never wanted separation, the Schlüchtern convent of ministers stated in 1817. Many unfortunate consequences had resulted from it. The Union would finally heal the animosity between Lutheran and Reformed ministers and their denominational members. They could not shrink from the occasion, just as the Reformers did not from theirs. The Schlüchtern convent anticipated some inconveniences in the immediate future but expected the “subsequent generation … to acclimate itself to the new rite.”1 By September King Friedrich Wilhelm III in Potsdam declared his intention to have Lutherans and Reformed unite “[u]nder the influence of a better spirit, which dispels the inessential, and hold fast to the main tenets of Christianity, wherein the two denominations are one, to the glory of God and the salvation of the Christian Church.”2 Kassel formally announced the celebration and the intention to inaugurate a corresponding annual day of prayer and thanksgiving. A second trend was the Enlightenment. The authorities deployed the current of Enlightenment thought that regarded the Union as manifestly sensible for a more tolerant age.3 They derided the hairsplitting confessionalized religion of the sixteenth century as antiquated, ridiculous, and detrimental to the evangelical movement. The reasonable thing to do was to put the divisive Lutheran and Reformed past behind them and unite Lutheran and Reformed as evangelical. As the four Frankenberg ministers wrote, union had long been their wish for they believed it befitting “the humane spirit of our times.”4 The Reformed and Lutheran consistories in Hanau claimed “sensible” members of the evangelical church in numerous German states had long wanted the union of the two parties into one church.5 “[The Union] honors human understand-

1 HStAM, 83 no. 240. 2 HStAM, 16 no. 4285. 3 David Sorkin, The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews, and Catholics from London to Vienna (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008), 1–21, esp. pp. 11ff. 4 HStAM, 16 no. 4287. 5 HStAM, 16 no. 4285; HStAM, 83 no. 240.

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ing and hearts,” echoed a Frankenberg convent of ministers, “and will spread much blessing in the evangelical Christian Church for the future.”6 A third trend driving the evangelical Union was the rise of nationalism. Governing authorities and popular media supported the Union in part because of their enthusiasm for the welling nationalist sentiment in German lands.7 “The people of Germany,” a Hessian government statement announced, “are enlivened with pure and sincere love of the fatherland in this festive … hour.”8 Fresh nationalist ambitions flowed from the Wartburg Festival in neighboring Thuringia. There, at the castle site above Eisenach, several hundred students from more than a dozen German universities had gathered on October 18, 1817 to herald Martin Luther as a national symbol and champion German unity. The Festival bolstered calls for Lutherans and Reformed to leave behind confessional partisanship in favor of a unity as German Protestants joined in a single German national church that would promote national unity.9 On October 30 the Hanauer Neue Zeitung hailed the attendees’ desire for “a common fatherland” and, “through unity, conformity in political opinions, firmness of character, [and] exercise of civil virtues, to become one nation having one God, one faith, one sword.” Then they could stand on their own and resist all foreign enemies.10 Hanauian authorities shared the aspiration: “We stand on the eve of the great church festival that we will celebrate tomorrow with the whole of Germany.”11 Hanauian ministers at the Schlüchtern convent believed

6 7 8 9

10 11

Evangelisches Kirchenkreisarchiv Frankenberg (hereafter: EKF), Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. Gerhard Besier, Kirche, Politik und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 1–7. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918, 214–27; Wolfgang Altgeld, “Religion, Denomination and Nationalism in Nineteenth-century Germany,” in Protestants, Catholics and Jews in Germany, 1800–1914, ed. Helmut Walser Smith (Oxford: Berg, 2001), 49–65; Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “‘Our Misfortune’: National Unity versus Religious Plurality in the Making of Modern Germany,” in Archaeologies of Confession: Writing the German Reformation, 1517–2017, ed. Carina L. Johnson, David M. Luebke, Marjorie E. Plummer, and Jesse Spohnholz (New York: Berghahn, 2017), 307–34; Thomas Nipperdey, Nachdenken über die deutsche Geschichte (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1986), 207; Anthony Steinhoff, “Christianity and the Creation of Germany,” in World Christianities, c.1815–c.1914, vol. 8 of The Cambridge History of Christianity, ed. Sheridan Gilley and Brian Stanley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 282–300. For the relationship between German nationalism and interdenominational and intra-Protestant efforts to bridge the denominational divide, see Stan M. Landry, “A Luther for Everyone: Irenicism and Memory at the German Reformation Anniversaries of 1817,” in Johnson, Luebke, Plummer, Spohnholz, Archaeologies of Confession, 45–66; Stan M. Landry, Ecumenism, Memory, and German Nationalism, 1817–1917 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2014). HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 83 no. 240.

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the Union, backed by nationalism, would provide political benefits as well. In contrast to the Catholic Church, they wrote, Protestant lands across Germany, especially the small ones, were susceptible to isolation. They were also vulnerable to inimical Catholic intentions. If, however, Lutheran and Reformed united across all of Germany, then a more powerful body would grow out of it and probably necessitate a reorganization of the German Protestant church. This could, in turn, enable evangelical representatives before a federal court to secure a legal protection of rights and a defense against attacks. The time was “favorable to a union,” the ministers concluded, “and we urgently wish that the present moment not go unused…. A religious enthusiasm like one has never seen before is prevailing in Germany.”12 The Hessian Elector Wilhelm I (r. 1785–1806, 1813–1821) charged the Kassel consistory in June 1817 with ascertaining how best to celebrate the tricentennial in Protestant areas in four months’ time. By August the consistory decided it should occur on October 31 itself, even though the date fell on a Friday. “A communal celebration of both Protestant communities,” they wrote, “will joyously … declare the better spirit of the age.”13 Kassel printed detailed, liturgical directives for the Reformation jubilee celebration services.14 In the weeks leading up to it schoolchildren were taught from A Brief History of Hessian Church Betterment, written by the Marburg professor Dietrich Christoph von Rommel.15 On September 14 Berlin professor Philipp Konrad Marheineke spoke in City Hanau about how the evangelical church had no part or fault in past confusions and abuses. Going forward the faithful in all lands needed only to unite.16 Reports about local October 31 festivities, written in a climate of euphoria and optimism, suggested broad support for the evangelical Union. In Kassel a procession led from the town hall to St. Martin’s church, where a service united the two denominations. Both the ministers and communities officials wholly endorsed it, and purportedly a great majority beyond them did too. Two church elders relayed that, as far as they were concerned, the Union was needful, appropriate, and in line with “the spirit of our times.”17 In City Hanau the procession also began at the town hall.18 In Marburg, after Lutheran and 12 13 14 15 16

17 18

HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 319 Marb. no. A 216. A copy of his speech is in Carl Henß, Die Hanauer Union: Festschrift zur Hundertjahrfeier der ev.-unierten Kirchengemeinschaft im Konsistorialbezirk Cassel am 28. Mai 1918 (Hanau: Gelnhäuser Pfarrkonferenz, 1918), 28–30. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 83 no. 240.

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Reformed ministers led a similar service, academics gathered in the university’s auditorium to honor the occasion. Anecdotes came in from many rural Hanauian locales. In Bergen and Enkheim wreaths of flowers and foliage prepared by young women were hung in the churches. In Steinau an der Straße horns from the towers of both churches played Bach’s “Now Thank We All Our God.” In Gronau attendees carried a picture of Luther and placed it over the altar. In Windecken, where Catholics and Jews joined in attendance, pictures of Wycliffe, Hus, Luther, Zwingli, Melanchthon, and Calvin reminded the attendees of the history lessons they had been given during the previous weeks. In Wachenbuchen the minister delivered a message very similar to Marheineke’s. In Preungesheim youths were instructed on the beneficial effects of the Reformation, especially for their own times. In Bad Nauheim the two local ministers decided to hold the morning service in the Reformed church and later offered the Eucharist in the Lutheran church.19 Bells were rung at the same time in both churches. A procession of ranking officials led a large gathering of three hundred residents, including the schoolmasters and presbyteries of both denominations. The Eucharist was administered as had been done in the duchy of Nassau, in the form of a larger host that was then broken. In the afternoon one minister helped lead a common service in Schwalheim, while the other led a service in the Lutheran church for a large number from both communities. On the subsequent day of prayer the communities held separate services and, the ministers indicated, would continue to do so until directed on when to hold further common services. Remarkably, in Frankenberg the local Lutheran and Reformed communities were united into an evangelical community. The initiative within the Upper Hessian rural town came principally from the local Lutheran and Reformed ministers.20 They had reservations about it, not least because a majority of both communities had signaled their opposition to unification. Yet the ministers had seen local Lutheran and Reformed members come together on church occasions, even, reportedly, attending each other’s worship services. The ministers also, allegedly, gained approval from elders of both communities as well as from the town council. Organizers of the unification of Lutherans and Reformed in Frankenberg carefully planned the October 31 occasion. On the same date three hundred years earlier Luther posted his Ninety-Five Theses and initiated what became known as the Protestant Reformation. Lutherans

19 20

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and Reformed in Frankenberg in 1817, like those who celebrated the occasion in other Hessian locales, symbolically affirmed their common heritage dating to the early sixteenth century instead of the division that set in between them in the latter half of the sixteenth century. On the evening of October 30, bells were rung and those gathered at the church’s tower sang religious songs, accompanied by horns. By 9:00 a.m. on October 31, townspeople had assembled before the town hall to form a procession led by the elders, clothed in black attire, from both communities. Following the elders were: the Lutheran and Reformed schoolboys blended in brotherly fashion and led by their schoolmasters, the town’s four ministers, the ranking officials, the mayor and councilors, and the citizenry according to the order of guilds. The proceedings were to showcase unity, especially in the town or Lutheran church, which, officially at least, was now to be called the Big Church. None were to take precedence in its sanctuary; rather, Reformed and Lutherans were to receive the Eucharist communally, according to the new rite, from the same altar and from the ministers irrespective of denomination. “Whoever is enlivened by the mind of Christ, by pure brotherly love,” the many attendees heard, “will heartily rejoice in this and genuinely partake of it with a pious willingness.”21 Several days later, on November 4, the ministers happily reported that the two communities had “celebrated … the meal of Christian brotherly love” according to “the arranged rite, and at the Lord’s Table one no longer saw a distinction between Reformed and Lutherans.” It was a day “in the history of our town that will remain forever memorable.”22 The Marburg consistory seized on the occasion. In December 1817 it recommended to authorities in Kassel that the measures taken in Frankenberg be applied to the wider region of Upper Hesse. Within Hesse, the Hanauian church authorities led the way in planning for a successful union. In late 1817 the Hanau synod issued a foundational set of nine articles for how best to proceed.23 The articles, which became a guide for church authorities elsewhere in Hesse, expressed the synod’s theological orientation and approach. Article one said the Lutheran and Reformed in the principality of Hanau, the portion of the principality of Isenburg under Electoral Hessian control, and the great duchy of Fulda were to unite themselves in one single church under the name “evangelical-Christian.” Article two declared that the names Lutheran and Reformed were to cease altogether. All buildings and establishments bearing such names were to be renamed. Article three

21 22 23

HStAM, 16 no. 4287. HStAM, 16 no. 4287. HStAM, 16 no. 4285; HStAM, 83 no. 240.

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stated that parishes and schools were to remain in their current standing, to be altered and outfitted as necessary to align with the Union, and to meet the needs of the ministers and populace. The fourth article said that wherever multiple evangelical churches existed in a locale, the members were to remain, as before, members of their respective church. Article five indicated that, at the Eucharistic celebration, the evangelical church was to use the customary wheat bread, without leaven and in rectangular form, and to break it. Upon dissemination of the bread the words to be spoken were “Jesus said, ‘Take and eat; this is my body to be given for you, do this in remembrance of me.’” And at the administration of the chalice the minister would speak the words “Jesus said, ‘This is the cup of the new testament in my blood, that is poured out for you for the forgiveness of sins; do this in remembrance of me.’”24 Article six stated that the words of Matthew 6:9–13 as found in Luther’s translation of the Bible were to be used for the Lord’s Prayer, and that bells were to be rung at the close of it. The seventh articled stated that until further notice the form of worship service in every church was to continue as it had been. The evangelical consistory in Hanau, to be formed from the Reformed and Lutheran consistories, was to craft and introduce a uniform agenda, common catechism, and common hymnal. They also were to revise the standing church constitution, which the ministers were to implement. Article eight indicated that those evangelical Christians who wished to receive the Eucharist according to the older, customary manner were, subsequent to ministerial instruction and according to the freedom of conscience, to be offered it either in the church on specified Sundays or in the quiet of their residences. Nevertheless, noted Hanau church officials in late 1817 in a letter to Kassel, all young Christians taken up into the evangelical community after the Union were to receive the Eucharist according to article five. Finally, article nine stipulated that all ministerial funds, church inventories, and ecclesiastical endowments were to stand, without exception, under the supervision of the Hanau consistory and be administered by those authorities in whose charge they stood. In late May 1818, at a synod in Hanau, church officials from Hanau, Isenburg, and Fulda voted in favor of articles two, three, and six from the set of nine.25 Ecclesiastics across Upper Hesse raved about them. “Who doesn’t read joyfully about the Hanau synod?” wrote the Löhlbach minister.26 The Schwabendorf minister estimated in early 1819 that the region of Hanau had nearly completed

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HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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its union. “[L]et it also be done so here in our land,” he wrote. Any necessary changes and modifications were insignificant. They should not impede unification.27 The region’s press joined the chorus. The front page of a Marburg newspaper reported on December 12, 1818 that the Union had been successful in the principalities of Hanau and Isenburg and in the great duchy of Fulda. A full printing of the Hanauian synodal articles followed the optimistic news.28 The Marburg consistory signaled its approval of the movement. “As in numerous German neighbor states,” it announced in April 1818, “so is the wish uttered by many parties in our fatherland that the lengthy and unfortunate separation of those of the Augsburg Confession cease, and that one work vigorously toward the happy constitution of a Christian fraternization.”29 In April 1819 the consistory repeated the exhortation in a letter to Upper Hessian ministers.30 It regarded the Hanauian synodal articles as a template for how to navigate through the tricky points of contention and accomplish a union in their own region. The one modification it made was to relabel article nine as article ten and to insert a new article nine, which said the ecclesiastical constitution in Upper Hesse would remain essentially unchanged and the rights of its spiritual authorities unaffected. The Upper Hessian ministers rushed to affirm half of the ten articles.31 They voiced consensus for a new church agenda, and many supported a new catechism. Likely they wanted one resembling the catechism proposed by Frankenberg Lutheran minister P. C. Pfeiffer, which was a systematic, concise summary of evangelical Christian teaching.32 Certain ministers or convents did raise issue with particular articles. The Frankenberg Lutheran convent balked at article four on grounds that having members continue attending their respective churches would only nurture a wall of separation between the two denominations. They emphasized the need for a common worship service in those churches that had sufficient room. Except for Marburg, they reasoned, all locales in Upper Hesse had a church sufficiently big enough for a common service. Lone members of a denomination in a locale would be compelled to attend their local church instead of traveling long distances to meet with their former minister.33 Virtually all Upper Hessian ministers rejected

27 28 29 30 31 32 33

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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the issuance of a new hymnal. Its expense would instantly become a “great stone of offense for the common man” and the greatest source of opposition to the Union, especially among parishioners already suffering from escalating poverty.34 Ministers of both denominations believed the hymnal need not be an issue. If the Lutheran one were kept in Upper Hesse and the Reformed one in Lower Hesse, and if a newly printed cover page were affixed to them, then no one would complain. One could simply select songs common to both hymnals. By championing the evangelical Union, however, the governing authorities unknowingly engineered a number of historical twists and ironies. The first concerned names and naming practices. In the 1517–1648 period clashes over doctrine caused certain terms, including Lutheran and Reformed, to be disputed and charged. After the 1648 Peace caused the terms to become naturalized and categorized, Imperial and territorial authorities denominated persons, churches, schools, and the like as Catholic, Lutheran, or Reformed. With the evangelical Union, authorities tacked yet another course. The word “Luther” remained positive. As an 1841 text in Schmalkalden declared, “The light of the gospel, like sun through clouds after a long, dark night, shone from Luther’s soul and ignited the spirits and hearts of many in western Christendom.” But the words Lutheran and Reformed became charged once again. This time they posed an existential threat to the Union, and authorities wanted the names removed from circulation. In a letter to the Lutheran consistory in Hanau, evangelical church councilor S. F. E. Petri in City Fulda quoted from Luther’s own plea that one “[not call oneself] ‘Lutheran. How did I, a poor, stinking sack of maggots, come to the point where one refers to Christians after my wretched name,’ and not ‘dear brother!’ Let us lay aside the partisan names,” Petri declaimed, “and call each other ‘Christian.’ … They will now do so in Hanau.”35 The Schlüchtern convent agreed. “From now on,” its ministers declared, “the names—Reformed and Lutheran—will forever be outmoded and no longer used in any official dispatch.” In the condescending, disdainful attitude exhibited by church authorities toward the laity amid the Union’s founding, they added that “[t]he great mass hangs more on names than on the object.” All of them “should take on the same name, be it evangelical or Protestant Christian.”36 Although others elsewhere raised issue with the name Protestant, the convent had no qualm with it. Ironically, the ministers did not know that powers that be in German lands had created that hydra in the first 34 35 36

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 83 no. 240.

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place back in 1648. They also did not realize that slashing at the creature with the sword of the 1817 Union would, in many regions, not slay it but rather spawn more problems. The anticonfessional thrust of the attempted Union constituted a second irony, and it was one that put its advocates in a double bind. They saw themselves as heirs of the great evangelical movement of the sixteenth century, one that had, in their view, unfortunately and unnecessarily split. They viewed the tricentennial of the Reformation as the time to set things right. But whereas sixteenth-century confessional adherents carefully defined what a Christian believed, churchmen supporting the Union were largely mute on what an evangelical or Protestant was to believe. As the Schlüchtern convent put it, they wanted neither “an inner union” on all points of doctrine nor a “new Formula of Concord (neue formula concordiae)” to which people and their instructors were to be bound, for these would only lay insurmountable obstacles in the path toward union. Talk should rather be of “constraining oneself to an outward church community” (äussere Kirchengemeinschaft).37 Whereas sixteenth-century creedal authors had cared most about delineating the truth, the Union churchmen seemed keen to hush up the matter. The acumen of scholars would work out the theological concerns over time. “The truth will set itself on its own tracks,” the convent assured.38 Everyone had the right to his beliefs, and differences in viewpoint could not be avoided, yet all “who intend to lay claim to the name of Protestant” had to “overcome them.”39 The creedal authors had designed old-fashioned liturgy and catechisms, which identified true believers and also nonadherents. By contrast, the Schlüchtern convent, while affirming a uniform liturgy as essential and a common catechism as absolutely necessary, called for a catechism to be written with such wisdom and care that the Lutherans, too, could accept it without offense. The “narrowminded among the Reformed will detect Luther’s positions and those among the Lutherans will detect Calvin’s.” Both will complain of a “falling away from the paternal theology.”40 But, the convent ministers resolved, one simply could not be scared off by it. A prudent course of action would be not to demarcate the disputed points too exactly or determine them too crisply. They took the same approach to the Bible. While they affirmed “the Holy Scriptures [to be] the sole norm of religion,”41 they acknowledged that the words of Scripture

37 38 39 40 41

HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 83 no. 240.

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had been explicated differently. Best would be to remove the barrier between Lutherans and Reformed, decide in favor of those things that least offended, and make the Union as uncontentious as possible. However, authorities instituted a double bind by espousing an anticonfessionalism while also intending for all Lutherans and Reformed to follow a prescribed path. Parishioners could, as Union authorities themselves worded it, “err” from the path, much like authorities in the sixteenth century said one could err from the true religion laid out in a confession. Authorities’ desire for adherence to the Union involved a third irony, and it tied them in a similar double bind. On the one hand the authorities fervently intended all to conform because, as they put it, doing so was sensible and rational and good for the fatherland, and because it would preclude any dissension from church and state authority. It would clear the way toward the goal of national unity. On the other hand, if a person held confessionally to either the Lutheran or Reformed denomination, then requiring conformity would violate the person’s freedom of conscience. To coerce would be intolerant. The authorities did not expressly articulate this, but it hung unwantedly over their deliberations and sewed tensions in their efforts. Their forbears in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries would have understood it to be their God-given right to require conformity. Doing so now conflicted with ensconced Enlightenment ideals. One wished all would freely take up the Union, wrote the Schlüchtern convent, yet inquiring with each community would not lead to the desired result.42 The convent nevertheless affirmed the body of ecclesiastical instructors as representative of the laity, and that body had come to a decision. Any dissenting clerics had to defer to the majority. All children were to attend the united school and every member of the community was to submit to baptism, marriage, and burial as administered by the local minister, regardless if he had previously been of the other denomination. Yet the Schlüchtern convent also made token provision for those who wanted the old rite. In order to spare consciences as much as possible, the convent wrote, Christians who were adults at the time of the Union would be permitted either to communicate with the community according to the evangelical rite or to receive the Eucharist privately from a minister of their former denomination according to that denomination’s rite.43 In sum, the authorities could not reconcile their own contradictions. They could only leave a loophole for the older generations and direct all confirmands, henceforth, to conform to the new-rite. 42 43

HStAM, 83 no. 240. HStAM, 16 no. 240.

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The authorities’ shifting notion, once again, of order and sedition gave rise to a fourth irony. Authorities following the 1648 Peace had fashioned territorial order according to the Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed categories, which they steadily codified. Ideally, Union authorities wanted to codify the new order according to the categories of evangelical and Catholic. This inclined them to view nonconformists as a problem, if not a threat. Yet the authorities championed toleration. They left provision in article eight for denominational devotees to receive old-rite sacraments. Effectively, this spun a web in which state subjects could become easily entangled. They could invoke article eight but still become suspected of sedition. When judged by the measure proffered by nineteenth-century authorities, the authorities of the sixteenth century may well have been more tolerant. The latter tolerated whatever inner thoughts and beliefs a dissimulating person might have had so long as she conformed outwardly to official religious practice. By contrast, Union authorities explicitly called for an outward union but could abandon their outspoken support of toleration if they grew distrustful of a person’s inner thoughts. In such cases they ran roughshod over one’s inner peace much like authorities during the 1648–1817 period sometimes fettered one’s freedom of conscience. In a final twist the function of exile, Auslauf, house churches, Simultaneum, and the like underwent yet another transformation. In the 1517–1648 period they served, where present, as forms of toleration that enabled disputing parties to coexist and the local Gemeinde to maintain the appearance of being whole. The 1648 Peace kick-started their transformation into the complete opposite, into facilitators of the division of a local sacred community, the breaking up of the local civil-sacred unity, and the proliferation of Lutheran and Catholic and Reformed communities at the local level. The evangelical Union, where implemented, transformed the forms once again. They now worked toward one of two ends: either they promoted the restoration of a local Gemeinde by extensively or entirely reuniting the civil and sacred dimensions, or they tended to perpetuate Lutheran and Reformed communities and thereby threatened to scuttle the Union. The Union revitalized exile and extraregional or extraterritorial Auslauf, which had largely disappeared by the late half of the eighteenth century. Anyone who rejected the evangelical rites for confessional reasons might go beyond the border to seek out their desired Lutheran or Reformed rites. Exiles thereby promoted the Union in their region of origin and the wholeness of the local evangelical community from which they emigrated by channeling their dissent permanently outside of both. If they moved to a region where the Union was being considered or attempted, then the exiles’ arrival promoted the Union’s failure there. Those who did extraregional Auslauf could,

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if only symbolically, diminish the Union and the evangelical community in their locale of origin by maintaining their residence yet refusing the Union rite, which their neighbors received. Any intraregional Auslauf done to receive old denominational rites posed a very serious if not vital threat to the Union because it meant that Lutheran or Reformed religious practice still existed within the region. The Union also theoretically reinvigorated dissimulation. During the 1648–1817 period dissimulation had been minimized or negated among confessional adherents in as much as the 1648 Peace had made provisions for the three confessions. But following the Union, one can assume, dissimulation would have reemerged among those who abided by the Lutheran or Reformed faith. The Union’s success would effectively remove the need for house churches, except, in a sense, for persons who received an old-rite Eucharist privately in their residences. Conversely, in cases where the Union was installed but ultimately failed, either the Lutherans or Reformed would have to set up their own services, possibly in a house church or atypical venue. But the Union also infused a powerful charge into existing house churches and into secondary church buildings that had been established after 1648. If authorities believed a local evangelical community could worship in more than one local venue without risk to the Union, then house or secondary churches might survive as places of worship. But if they believed the venues encouraged the continuation of Lutheran and Reformed distinctions and jeopardized the Union, then they could feel compelled to terminate the buildings’ status as worship venues and even erase their very existence. For this reason the house and secondary church buildings could quickly test the authorities’ stated intention to be tolerant. Finally, the Union transformed Simultaneum again into something new. For the authorities, it served not as a pragmatic solution, as it did so often before 1648, nor as an instrument they could wield to enforce their agenda and benefit their denominational coreligionists, as some did in the 1648–1817 period. Instead, the mere prospect of Simultaneum, not to mention the actual manifestation of it, posed an existential threat to the Union. Any local sacred communities opposed to the Union would have intuitively known this, as the case of Frankenberg would demonstrate.

2

Sacred Communities Divided Anew in Rural Fulda

The leading storyline regarding the Union in rural Fulda, specifically in locales in northern districts, was how it divided the local sacred communities anew. Compared to Lutherans in the Hanauian and Upper Hessian regions, who regarded the Reformed as their principal local rivals, the Lutherans in northern

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Fuldian locales would seem to have had the least objection to the Union. They had been dealing with encroaching Catholics, who were backed by Catholic temporal authorities until Fulda abbey’s secularization in 1802. The Reformed in northern Fulda, meanwhile, constituted a small, scattered, and innocuous presence, not least because they typically attended the Lutherans’ services. In fact, the practice of calling them both by the name evangelical was already familiar because in the northern districts during the 1648–1817 period the name often denoted Lutheran but also, at times, Lutheran and Reformed. Lutherans in the northern Fuldian districts also would seem to have had motivations to embrace the Union. For Lutherans to unite officially with the Reformed would have strengthened the standing of both, as evangelicals, in Catholic lands. They would have been aided by rising nationalism. Furthermore, in contrast to the Hanauian and Upper Hessian regions no separate Lutheran and Reformed ministerial staffs, presbyteries, schools, and salaries existed in the district. No convoluted union of the two needed to be worked out. Nor, in contrast to Hanauian lands, would one encounter the conundrum of figuring out what to do with local Lutheran and Reformed church buildings. The evangelical consistory in Hanau supervised the Union’s implementation in Fuldian lands, and its unfolding, starting in June 1818, took a distinctive course for several reasons. First, the Union aroused objections from both Lutheran and Reformed because the authorities moved on it unilaterally. In an 1819 letter the Lutherans argued that they should have the same protection under Hessian royal government as they did previously. They claimed the king had spoken such words to his Fuldian subjects on the day they came under his authority. His words penetrated “our hearts.”44 But instead, the Union was adopted and installed without their consent. In an 1820 appeal Lutheran communities capitalized on official theology by citing how, according to Protestant fundamentals, the ministers alone did not constitute the church, rather the “whole people” did.45 The Union thus could not be binding on or apply to them because they had not participated in the synod that approved it, nor had they been consulted or solicited for their input. Their exclusion stripped the decision-making process of integrity and validity. In the past, they added, Catholic rulers of Fulda had protected their free practice of religion according to customary form. With the age-old communal preference for custom and aversion to novelty, they kept

44 45

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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protesting into the 1830s. The authorities dismissed such appeals as impertinent. “When all is said and done,” they jeered, “the peasants will be popes!”46 The authorities reasoned that ministers and people may constitute the church yet a synod has natural representation, by which, it seems, the authorities meant that the synod’s membership was drawn logically and legitimately and that to object to its decisions would be out of order. The Lutherans and authorities also argued over whether the Union violated standards of toleration and freedom of conscience. The Union should not be effected through state coercion or cajoling, wrote the Langenschwarz and Rothenkirchen Lutherans in mid-1819, but should be left “to the conscience of every single Christian.”47 They declared that their “inner conviction” was committed to the conventions of their fathers, the love of their children, and the desire to fortify them in the ancestral tradition. The spirit of the age did not incline them to union; rather, it was “dangerous,” and religion had to remain doggedly steadfast against it lest “novelties” casually lead to “unbelief or a diminution of holy reverence.”48 All these, they wrote, troubled their conscience. They were scared about the future and the freedom of religion, just as Catholics, Greeks, Jews, Quakers, and Anabaptists were in other states. They beseeched the king to safeguard their freedom of religion and conscience, and they extended their appeal of protection to those who wished to return to the old Lutheran faith. Such persons should be left to the instruction, religious dogma, and honoring of God according to old custom.49 Others echoed their words. In June 1820 the representatives of a dozen communities, including those of Rothenkirchen, Schlotzau, Großenmoor, and Kleinmoor, requested permission to continue practicing religion according to the old (i.e. Lutheran) rite. To receive the Eucharist and confirm their children according to the new rite would harm their sanctioned freedom of religion and conscience, which “can certainly not be the intention of Your Royal Majesty.”50 The communities of the Buchenau and Neukirchen church districts conveyed much the same in an 1830 letter. Since 1819 they had petitioned on this matter at great cost and time.51 They appealed to royal “toleration.” They did not want their freedom of conscience to be hung up in a long, bureaucratic process but rather to be recognized outright.

46 47 48 49 50 51

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. Also: HStAM, 100 no. 4777. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 100 no. 13017.

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View of Buchenau, 1833

Authorities acknowledged what article eight guaranteed, yet they were furious. They were mystified at the Reformed who would have nothing to do with the Union.52 They faulted the Lutherans for not being “content” with the Union order of things. They attributed such behavior to “the spirit of sedition.” The Hanau consistory read a mid-1820 letter about how “introducing the church Union in the local, unmixed community remains unceasingly more difficult [in Fuldian lands] than in the Hanauian and Isenburgian [ones],” yet it would not be impossible if “[we] only had the means in hand, and could straightaway silence certain disruptive people who have a thoroughly evil will.”53 That people would arbitrarily find exceptions to decrees issued by a legitimate authority blindsided and bewildered the authorities: “The closing words of article eight are so definite and categorical, one would have never dreamed that an attempt would be made to destabilize them.”54 How could subjects, the authorities wondered aloud, be so unashamed as to oppose the stated intention of their ruler? “It is truly a preposterous conceit of a handful of peasants, and a hubris that certainly does not deserve compliance.”55 In 1819 the authorities charged the Lutherans with having changed the minds of those 52 53 54 55

HStAM, 315g no. 415. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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who had committed to the united church, with countering synodal rulings by forbidding their children to recite the Lord’s Prayer in school according to the instituted standard, and with obstructing catechumens from receiving the Eucharist according to the form set down by the synod. The authorities here revealed their new notion of order. Following 1648 they divided families by naturalizing and codifying the names Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed and by decreeing in which religion, the father’s or the mother’s, sons and daughters were to be confirmed. Under the Union, they made division possible in a new way in that parents who desired the old rite were to receive the Eucharist according to it while their children would be taught and confirmed in the new rite. “Article eight permits us to continue receiving the Eucharist according to our old custom in private or on certain Sundays,” communities wrote in 1820, but this license “was just as oppressive and grievous to us.” Because the accommodations that the article permitted had to be carried out secretly, they added, “the article spreads a shadow over us.”56 “And what disaffection and animosity between parents and children would this necessarily have if one receives the Eucharist according to the old rite while the other to the new rite! This will surely drive the children away from the parents and cause them to err completely in their notions of faith and religion.”57 Yet because of their new notion of order, authorities found the Lutherans’ conduct amid the 1819 case reprehensible. The consequence of “these punishable acts and the false religious zeal incited by them” was events like “the disorders” that took place in Langenschwarz and Scholtzau on Maundy Thursday in 1819. Prior to that occasion the Hanau consistory had decreed a cessation of the holiday celebration across Fulda just as it had for the Hanauian region. But the measure incurred a blowback. Those already opposed to the synodal rulings, along with others who joined them against the new rite, engaged in what the authorities called a “truly riotous scene” in Langenschwarz and Scholtzau. Ignoring their minister’s warning, they gathered in both villages on Wednesday and resolved to have bells rung in the evening and on the following morning to announce the holiday. They intended to conduct the worship service themselves. Adding to the offense, the man leading them had, eighteen months earlier, been shackled in chains and made to sweep the streets of City Fulda as a form of punishment. He also had a reputation for whipping up the enthusiasm of the Schlotzau village head in his favor. Authorities regarded all this activity as “disorders,” which should not go unpunished. Those who had

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HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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let themselves “err” for a while, wrote the authorities, could right themselves, return to the evangelical rite, and thereby promote “good order.”58 The two sides also disputed the breadth of opposition. Authorities framed the old-rite adherents as an unrepresentative minority positioning itself above the “better-minded majority.”59 Not one of them had raised objection before the Union was formally announced, stated the authorities, and after it only certain individuals did so. “They invoke a definitive right while the entire land willingly accedes to the rulings of their head of church.” One report portrayed those in Langenschwarz, Schlotzau, and other evangelical communities as forming a “separate party.” Another referenced “fanatics” in the Wehrda district who led an oppositional group and actively tried adding members to it. The opinion wrongly set in among them, the authorities continued, that the Union was unlawful and merely a clerical enterprise. Langenschwarz minister C. W. Kraus added doubt about the dissidents’ claim to have substantial numbers. By contrast, the Lutheran objectors invoked a broad, communal consensus. Over one hundred members, including one widow, from Langenschwarz and Rothenkirchen signed the mid-1819 letter declaring that they wanted the old-rite Eucharist.60 In the early 1820s a local minister counted 231 new-rite evangelicals and 221 old-rite adherents in the two villages,61 yet even these numbers did not tell the whole story. Others pointed to the Union’s tenuousness. The tide was shifting. The authorities were discouraged that 134 of the 221 old-rite devotees had, for a while, taken the new rite until they reverted back to the old. They were encouraged, however, that 48 among the 231 newrite proponents had been confirmed after the Union and that a family of four had twice left the old rite. Yet they were discouraged that among the 48 confirmands there were 27 families that abided by the old rite or had reverted to it. In the affiliate Schlotzau the Union’s prospects appeared grim: only the five former Reformed, the schoolmaster, and an elderly couple joined the new rite. The confirmands of 1818 had “spurned the altar,” a cleric wrote, since their first Eucharist at the Union festival. In addition, three confirmands of 1819 still had not communicated, and seven catechumens of 1820 still had not been confirmed, nor would they agree to it.62 Reports indicated similar trends among confirmands in Langenschwarz.63 58 59 60 61 62 63

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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Troubling numbers for the Union emerged elsewhere too. In Wehrda, Schletzenrod, and Wetzlos lived five hundred communicants, but in two years the number of old-rite adherents among them had risen from 38 to 152.64 In Rothenkirchen only 37 communicated with Union bread at its first administration, 16 at its second, and at its third, nearly 200 wanted the host and none the Union bread.65 In Burghaun, where an average of 300 normally communicated, 290 received the Union rite at its first administration, while 67, mostly from neighboring locales, had the Lutheran host.66 But according to an 1821 visitation in Burghaun the Union bread was being administered four times annually to young and old communicants and the Lutheran host six times annually to the elderly.67 By 1835 administration of the bread and host still alternated, although not many, an estimated 40–60 persons, still communicated with Union bread.68 Moreover, behind even the hopeful numbers lay other stories. A set of evangelical communities described how, in Neukirchen, children were to take their first Eucharist according to the new rite while parents did so according to the old. Yet when the time came, the parents slid those children behind them in line so that they received the old-rite Eucharist. “The minister, who has slowwitted eyes, did not notice it.”69 The authorities also believed the failure of neighboring regions of “old Hesse” to opt for the Union militated against it elsewhere. By the late 1820s the Union in the northern Fuldian locales was clearly faltering. The Hanau consistory, citing an 1828 report, said the Neukirchen minister administered the Eucharist according to the old Lutheran rite to most of the new confirmands because the parents had compelled him. Ministerial reports described how an atmosphere of this kind dominated as well among the communities around Neukirchen and Rothenkirchen. Across 1829–1830 the communities of the Buchenau and Neukirchen church districts repeatedly pressured Hanau and Kassel authorities to be allowed to receive the old-rite Eucharist, retain the apostle holidays, and raise their children in the religion of their fathers and ancestors. They cited two young men who, like so many others, had only known what the two communities called a dreaded crisis, and worse, while the crisis raged a prevailing immorality gained the upper

64 65 66 67 68 69

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 315g no. 415. HStAM, 315g no. 415. HStAM, 315g no. 437. HStAM, 315g no. 437. HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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hand. For such young persons the whole Union affair had sewn “ill in [their] roots.”70 The Hanau consistory commented that the repeated appeals offered no new reasons, only punishable threats that violated the synodal articles— articles which, the consistory added, were being followed with positive effect in the province of Hanau. Only the adults had been permitted to receive the Eucharist according to Lutheran form. Moreover, one had to give consideration to the new-rite confirmands themselves. For them to celebrate the Eucharist with their parents would ignore their freedom of Christian faith and conscience. One could see just how “stiff-necked and insolent” the petitioners were, continued the consistory, for they were asking again to celebrate the apostle holidays even though Kassel had prohibited it in a December 1826 ordinance.71 The Hanau consistory advised Kassel to reject once and for all the communities’ plea and to authorize the consistory to demand adherence to the synodal articles from all evangelical ministers in the Fuldian region. Kassel, however, flinched in its decision. As an 1842 summary report by the Hanau consistory put it, the Interior Ministry in Kassel in 1830 upheld the synodal articles yet also relented enough by permitting a local minister to administer the Lutheran-rite Eucharist to any person who wanted it so long as it was done wholly according to the Lutheran denominational standard. Additionally, confirmation was to be done apart from the Eucharist.72 After one generation the unsuccessful Union in the northern Fuldian locales had divided local sacred communities along new lines. Although it intended to unite the two groups, Lutherans and Reformed, it encouraged fragmentation into three groups: the new-rite subscribers or evangelicals, and the two groups of old-rite adherents, Lutherans and Reformed. It also tended to divide older generations who wished to receive the old-rite Eucharist from the younger generations, who would be confirmed and receive it according to the Union rite. The disunity of civil and sacred had been made worse by these divisive outcomes. Discrepancies in the handling of the Union by governing bodies and by ministerial rank and file contributed to the debacle. Reflecting in 1841, Langenschwarz minister C. Peters, a staunch proponent of the Union, believed he would have achieved his objectives had certain things not interfered. Out of deference to the consistory and the advice it gave to Burghaun minister

70 71 72

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4286, 4285.

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N. Jacobi—that making an issue out of something could do more damage than good—Peters had kept quiet about the Eucharist and focused on carrying out his duties. He did take the opportunity to reason with certain parents from Schlotzau and Großenmoor who had asked for their children to be catechized and confirmed according to the Lutheran rite. He doubted their statement that the consistory would grant their request, but when the parents talked to Fulda evangelical minister C. G. Weiss, he directed Peters to do as they wished. Peters refused, however, because he believed that their request ran counter to the synodal articles, that it would cause a rupture whose end could not be foreseen, and that it had no basis in theology or matters of conscience. They could, he remarked, celebrate the Eucharist as worthily with the Union rite as with the Lutheran rite. Peters described himself as sensible and the men from Großenmoor and especially Schlotzau as highly immoral, lacking any sense of religion, and prideful in their opposition to secular authority. Upon taking office in Fulda in 1839, Weiss inherited the Eucharistic practice of offering both bread and host on a plate. Later he added another form: bread which he broke and offered over the plate to the communicant. The method, which he had seen in Westphalia, allowed each communicant to take according to his “pious habit.” Weiss borrowed the plate from the Catholic minister but made sure that the bread was big enough to conceal the Catholic symbol from sight. As he expected, the practice met with success. Weiss commended himself for his practical solution, especially because certain Hessian circles were earnestly debating the correct form, preparation, and administration of the Eucharistic host. In candor he believed the Union was ill-fated and had not reached its goal after more than two decades. Officials and ministers leaned either toward Lutheranism or Calvinism, he concluded. Union initiatives could, at most, sway indifferent communities toward the one or the other. The minister in Rothenkirchen, said the church elders in 1844, favored the Reformed rite even though tenets held the evangelical Church to be a united faith. The Hanau consistory in the early 1840s was appalled to learn of Weiss’s methods and those of his predecessor. These merely pushed denominational difference to the fore instead of celebrating unity. It judged Weiss’s intentions regarding the meaning of article five to be “errant.” Permitting those confirmed after the Union to communicate according to the Lutheran or Reformed rite would negate unity, empower choice, and encourage people to do more Auslauf to places such as the nearby Hünfeld district. The result, noted the consistory, would transform evangelical communities back into Lutheran and Reformed communities.

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The consistory seemed unaware or unwilling to admit that article eight, which it helped formulate, empowered the kind of choice that could undermine the Union. It called for the rescission of the June 1830 decision by the Interior Ministry and for Weiss to conform fundamentally to the constitution of the united church, not least by enforcing articles five and eight. Yet by the middle of the century church authorities themselves stopped pressing for the Union in Fuldian lands. In the 1870s and 1880s, as church visitations revealed, ministers carried out duties according to the Lutheran agenda, form, and catechism.73 In closing, it is important to note that, across the same nineteenth century, local communities generated voluminous records concerning their own initiatives and concerns. A disproportionate focus on the evangelical Union would overlook or obscure these. Some predated the Union and persisted long after its energy had been spent. Across 1815–1832, for example, the communities of the Burghaun evangelical church district lodged twenty grievances against their minister, J. D. Römheld.74 Most concerned his failure to perform various duties: lead worship services at the appointed times and locations, hold prayer hour services, announce weddings, inculcate moral discipline, instruct confirmands in the months leading to Easter, supervise the youth’s education, and administer the Eucharist to the sick. A couple grievances pertained to Römheld’s mismanagement of church properties. Only one grievance concerned a Union matter: in a November 1818 sermon Römheld announced that those who wanted the Eucharist in the customary host form would face divine and eternal punishment. The communities’ grievance lay not with Union Eucharistic theology per se but rather “the manner of the announcement,” how Römheld turned “the Holy Supper into an object of mockery, sacrilege, and threat,” and how his announcement opposed “our freedom of religion.”75 The communities blamed Römheld’s negligence for chasing Großenmoor out of their parish. By the early 1830s they wanted him to be transferred. Römheld called the whole affair “a work of darkness” perpetrated by a few, but the authorities confirmed the grievances had widespread consensus. They faulted and fined Römheld, and transferred him to another post. 73 74 75

HStAM, 315g no. 437. HStAM, 83 no. 1994–1999. HStAM, 83 no. 1994, 1999.

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Rural Hanau amid the Evangelical Union, 1817–1860s The leading storyline regarding the Union across the rural Hanauian lands was that the local Reformed and Lutheran communities raised no objection to it and, as a result, reunited into one corpus. In locales that had only Reformed and Lutheran communities, this enabled the civil and sacred dimensions to overlap once again and thereby restored the local Gemeinde as it had existed prior to its division during the post-Westphalian era, only now its sacred community bore the classified name evangelical. In locales with a corpus of Catholics or those who remained devoted to the old Reformed or Lutheran rites, the restoration of the Christian corpus was extensive but not entire. These developments occurred in spite of the church authorities’ poor handling of important logistical concerns, including how to regulate worship services and, above all, what to do with the secondary worship venues erected locally since 1648.

1

Sacred Communities United and the Gemeinde Restored

Reformed and Lutheran communities calmly unified in some Hanauian locales in the late 1810s. In Mittelbuchen and Niederrodenbach the few benign reports testify to it.1 In Marjoß the ministers, presbyteries, and communities of the majority Reformed and thirty-seven Lutherans agreed to the Union. The two ministers’ language betrayed their thoughts about what was happening: the small Lutheran community was being joined to the larger Reformed community, to its public worship service and school, and to the new evangelical Christian presbytery. The ministers recommended enlarging the church, which had already been too small to seat members of the Reformed community. Otherwise they were euphoric: “May God let his continuous blessing rest on this community, united in love!”2 The Union proceeded speedily in and around Schwarzenfels. The Reformed community in Weichersbach constituted seven hundred members, while sixty 1 HStAM, 315g no. 1552; HStAM, 315g no. 1770. 2 HStAM, 315g no. 1438.

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_015

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View of Ramholz and the Steckelberg ruins, 1850

Lutherans (half the number recorded in 1706) lived scattered across the wider district of approximately ten locales. Weichersbach was viewed as a Lutheran vicariate of Ramholz, for a Ramholz minister had been traveling one hour to Weichersbach to hold monthly services in the Lutherans’ so-called prayer house, administer the Eucharist biannually, and lead an annual day of prayer. On the other Sundays of the year the local Lutheran schoolmaster, who resided and led school in the other half of the prayer house, had read a sermon and catechized the children. On the Reformation jubilee most Lutherans voluntarily communicated with the Reformed in Mottgers. The following year the respective ministers did not anticipate much trouble during the Union’s promulgation.3 Importantly, the Hanau consistory intended for the Lutheran prayer house to be sold so that it could be converted into two rental apartments. The decision to close one of the two houses of worship in Weichersbach turned out to be a bellwether for the Hanauian region. Lutheran members saw it as an encroachment and vehemently protested. With rhetoric used by

3 HStAM, 315g no. 1629.

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other communities in subsequent years, the members claimed the building, its inventory, and accompanying school properties as their own “sacred possession.”4 The Lutheran community had purchased the site from Landgrave Friedrich II (r. 1760–1785) in the 1770s and funded its renovation into a prayer house and its subsequent maintenance. They interpreted the consistory’s ambition as a violation of their rights and cited documents to prove their case. Local Reformed and Lutheran presbyteries and schools united across Hanau, largely without incident. The process stalled momentarily around Windecken and Ostheim in late 1818 due to strife over how members of the presbytery would rank, but once resolved a new presbytery formed and a man of the formerly minority Lutheran community assumed its head position for the year.5 When it was noted in mid-1819 that the former Lutheran elders needed to be paid equally, the Hanau consistory authorized an honorarium to ensure it. As for schools, if a local commune had been financing costs for the Reformed school, then it did so now for the former Lutheran school too. The Union also alleviated great disparities in student populations. In Weichersbach the Reformed schoolmaster had been teaching a staggering 145 Reformed boys and girls and the Lutheran schoolmaster a mere 15.6 After the Union one instructor taught the boys and the other the girls. Oberdorfelden minister J. P. Horst made a couple recommendations. The children in Niederdorfelden could be divided into two classes, whether boys and girls or older and younger, just not former Lutheran and Reformed. The schoolmasters could be paid by their respective set of schoolchildren, and they could adopt what Horst called a biblical approach to teaching for the time being, which, as he explained, meant that the schoolmasters would borrow from both instructional books until a common catechism arrived.7 In Schlüchtern the mayor and a dozen, former Reformed and Lutheran councilors wrote in 1820 how the two denominational bodies had united voluntarily in 1818.8 They pleaded, however, for improvements in local schooling. The school for Reformed boys had a huge enrollment, insufficient space, and an overmatched schoolmaster. The one for Reformed girls lacked a proper building. The schoolmaster had been teaching them in his living room and some girls even had to find seating in his bedroom. By contrast, the Lutheran boys and girls had an adequate schoolroom and a good teacher who instructed a modest number. They

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HStAM, 315g no. 1629. HStAM, 315g no. 2673, 1973. HStAM, 315g no. 1629. HStAM, 315g no. 1802. HStAM, 315g no. 2197.

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proposed dividing the children up according to age and sex and renovating the former Lutheran schoolhouse so as to provide sufficient space. Without improved schooling, “the Union will lose almost all its significance,” they wrote, likely with rhetorical embellishment.9 As they put it, they would sooner want an annulment of the Union, if necessary, lest “our schools be worsened” by way of the conditions.10 Authorities adjusted the salaries of ministers and schoolmasters to align with the new arrangements and to rectify any disparities. If one minister stood to lose fees or services because of the Union, then the Hanau consistory worked out a compensation. In 1820 the Lutheran bell ringer of Schlüchtern requested compensation for fees and salary he had lost.11 In Hochstadt, the former Lutheran minister and presbyters petitioned for the former Lutheran schoolmaster to continue receiving an annual allotment from the poor relief fund.12 In Niederdorfelden the former Reformed schoolmaster was to be compensated for his loss of firewood and new year monies, and the former Lutheran schoolmaster was to be paid each year from the local church chest for his loss of handling the host and crucifix on holidays.13 Authorities also directed the two to divide fees among themselves proportional to former Reformed and Lutheran members. Typically compensations continued on an annual basis until one minister or schoolmaster died or was transferred. The authorities then used the window of time to reorganize finances. Not all compensations went smoothly. In late November 1818, Ostheim Reformed minister F. B. Rollmann insinuated that Windecken Lutheran minister J. C. O. Grauel had briskly effected the Union in Windecken in September but delayed its introduction in Ostheim, causing the notion of a “Reformed community and a Lutheran community to persist among the common man.” Grauel allegedly defended his inaction on grounds that one “should not hasten the Union too quickly,”14 but Rollmann noted that Grauel received income from united evangelicals in Windecken and Lutherans in Ostheim and thus implied that his motivation concerned money. The delay apparently incited some Reformed and Lutherans to abstain from the Union-rite Eucharist in December 1818, even though most had already voiced enthusiasm for the Union. The delay did not last long. By early 1819 the Union had been effectively completed in Ostheim.

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HStAM, 315g no. 2197. HStAM, 315g no. 2197. HStAM, 315g no. 2197. HStAM, 315g no. 995. HStAM, 315g no. 1802. HStAM, 315g no. 1973.

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The uniting of Reformed and Lutheran communities remedied the distortions that had been created by overlapping sets of denominational parishes. Parishes across Hanau, like in other regions, had devolved for many centuries up to 1648. Then, after 1648, that pattern was disrupted as an additional network of parishes formed in the region, just like it did in many other regions. In Hanauian lands there were Reformed and Lutheran parishes and, in the late eighteenth century, a few Catholic ones as well, such as in City Hanau.15 Except for locales with a corpus of Catholics the Union restored the singularity and natural dimensions of local parishes. This, in turn, restored them to the path of natural devolution that had been unfolding for a millennium up to 1648. The Schlüchtern convent in December 1817 anticipated these effects. They enthused that the Union would set aright the egregious parish incongruities and disparities, which had worsened over time. Many ministers and parishioners, they noted, had been traveling inordinate distances because denominational affiliation obligated them. Likewise, many local denominational schools had wildly disproportionate student bodies. These interests appear to have been at work early in the Union era when the evangelical community of Seckbach requested that the vicariate in Berkersheim be disconnected from the parish.16 The need to rectify parish boundaries was also behind a case involving Oberdorfelden Reformed minister Horst and Gronau Lutheran minister V. F. Laupus, who had been traversing the same terrain as they ministered, respectively, to Reformed and Lutherans strewn across Oberdorfelden, Niederdorfelden, Gronau, and two farmsteads, Kleingronau and Dottenfeld. The Union made this arrangement obsolete, compelling authorities to reconfigure parish jurisdictions. They combined parishioners of the former two locales into one church community and assigned them to Horst, and those of the latter three locales into another church community and entrusted them to Laupus. The two ministers performed this rearrangement before the congregations. On January 31, 1819, Laupus gave a parting sermon to his former community members in Niederdorfelden and then strolled with Horst to the front of the altar, delivered a warm speech, and formally gave the members over to Horst. A week later the two repeated the act in Gronau, where Horst delivered his former Reformed members over to Laupus. According to Horst, attendance at both events was full, the atmosphere worshipful, and no one opposed the Union. In fact parishioners had already been communicating according to the Union

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HStAM, 83 no. 236, 238, 6584. HStAM, 315g no. 2239.

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The parish house and church in Gronau in 1814

rite. Horst described himself and Laupus as “joined in peace. Neither gave the other an occasion for religious conflict.”17 In the following decades the rhythm and course of devolution, which had been interrupted starting in the later seventeenth century, resumed once again. Kempfenbrunn became a vicariate in 1834 and autonomous in 1835. Oberzell and Züntersbach split from parish Mottgers and formed a new parish in 1836.18 Parish Berkersheim was founded in 1838.19 Hohenzell broke from Schlüchtern in 1843 and became the seat of a new parish that included Ahlersbach, Bellings, and Lindenberg.20 A second parish in Bockenheim formed in 1853.21 Niederissigheim, after having joined parish Bruchköbel in 1786, became an independent parish again in 1856.22

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HStAM, 315g no. 1802. HStAM, 16 no. 5215; HStAM, 180 Schlüchtern no. 258. HStAM, 83 no. 6559. HStAM, 315g no. 1009. HStAM, 16 no. 5164. HStAM, 83 no. 3863.

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Across Hanau only a few dozen persons reportedly refused the Union-rite Eucharist. All were Lutheran; none were Reformed. In Rüdigheim all parishioners received the new-rite Eucharist in 1818 except for two dozen individuals from seven Lutheran families, who abstained.23 At Easter 1819 they did extraregional Auslauf to receive the old-rite Eucharist. Some Lutherans in nearby Niederrodenbach refused it. So, too, did a few persons in Marköbel, though perhaps only momentarily. Before 1818 was over, the Lutheran host ceased to be administered there. At Pentecost in 1819 the Rüdigheim minister relayed how the parents of nine confirmands consented to their children receiving the Union-rite Eucharist, but they themselves wanted the old-rite form and would get it elsewhere if needed. In 1821 the number in Rüdigheim who still desired the Lutheran-rite Eucharist remained the same.24 Like past litmus tests, then, the evangelical Union revealed the number of confessionally committed among the common laity. Across Hanau it was negligible.

2

Authorities’ Anxiety about the Use of Multiple Churches

In contrast to the paucity of confessional objections to the Union, the most crucial concern in Hanauian lands, generating by far the most paperwork, pertained to the Union’s implications for local church buildings and how the united communities related to them. As article two had proposed, local churches were renamed. In certain locales, including Kesselstadt, Bad Nauheim, Altenhaßlau, Rodheim, Steinau an der Straße, and Windecken, the Lutheran building was renamed Reinhard’s Church because in the eighteenth century Count Johann Reinhard had been instrumental in helping Lutherans acquire it. The former Reformed church in Steinau an der Straße was renamed Catharine’s Church after Catharine of Belgium, a town patron; in Windecken, it was renamed Stift’s Church, reflecting its old, original purpose; and in Marjoß, it was renamed St. Maria’s Church because it had once been a chapel dedicated to St. Maria, after whom the village itself was named.25 The united presbytery of elders in Bruchköbel decided to rename the Lutheran church St. Johann’s Church and the Reformed church St. Jacob’s Church.26 In Rüdigheim the Reformed church became the Older Church and the Lutheran the Newer Church.27 In Seckbach the Reformed church, constructed by the

23 24 25 26 27

HStAM, 315g no. 2157. HStAM, 315g no. 2160. HStAM, 315g no. 2346, 1438. HStAM, 315g no. 375. HStAM, 315g no. 2160.

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View of Windecken, circa 1800. From left to right: a weather flag perched atop the Heldenberger Gate of the town wall, Stifts (formerly Reformed) Church, a tower of the town wall, Reinhard’s (formerly Lutheran) Church with a weather vane atop its tower, the Kilianstädter Gate, and the house of a bell foundry

Reformed community in 1764 partly with stones from a razed, twelfth-century church, was renamed Peter’s Church; and the Lutheran church, built by the Lutheran community in 1710, became Marian’s Church.28 In Schlüchtern the Reformed church was now called the Big Church and the Lutheran church the Little Church. The organ of the latter was sold to the nearby Kirchbracht parish after the one in Weichersbach proved to be a poor fit.29 During the Union’s first years evangelical services in many locales alternated in the two churches on a given Sunday. A service was held in one church at an earlier hour and in the other church at a later hour. Authorities favored the arrangement. On the basis of it the Hanau synod had proposed article four and adopted article two. Authorities conceptualized the local evangelical community as whole even though its members worshipped in multiple venues. Local evangelicals were typically amenable to alternating services. Collaborating in the effort reflected their openness to the Union and, arguably more, their desire to continue using their respective church buildings. At its first meetings the united presbytery in Bruchköbel decided to alternate services

28 29

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and the Eucharist between the two local churches. The two ministers would share confirmation duties.30 In Windecken the two presbyteries and ministers agreed in 1818 on alternating the services while taking steps to unite the two communities, schools, treasuries, church protocol, sets of church properties, and administrative processes.31 The two communities in Steinau an der Straße reportedly accepted the synodal articles without qualification. One minister described the communities’ unification as “among the happiest occurrences of my life.”32 When asked, the presbyters replied that the good rapport between the communities would continue if worship services were held in one church, yet they recommended the move be made after the Union had consolidated. Until then a morning service was held in one church, an afternoon service in the other, and then vice versa the following week. The ministers delivered sermons in alternating fashion as well. In Altenhaßlau a similar pattern for services and the Eucharist was adopted for Reinhard’s Church and Wilhelm’s Church, and the administration of baptism occurred in whichever church the service was held.33 There could be compelling reasons to decide against alternating the use of churches. The united community in Hochstadt concluded in 1819 that maintaining two churches would stretch local resources too thin. It opted to utilize materials from the former Lutheran church interior in order to expand the balcony and supplement seating in the larger former Reformed church.34 Services took place in the former Lutheran church until completion of the work. However, alternating services between local churches across Hanau created formidable problems. Sufficient seating became the most immediate. Former Reformed and Lutherans were to worship side by side as evangelicals and thereby dissolve distinctions between them. Initially, authorities did not try to organize any attendance, perhaps because of their euphoria over the Union, or their confidence that they could resolve problems should any arise, or their failure to anticipate the predicament of seating. Yet for evangelicals to attend services in the local evangelical churches meant either church building needed to be capable of accommodating more, likely many more, persons because more attendees might well show up for a service. This reality instantly transformed nagging concerns about lack of seating and space in some churches into a severe problem in most of them.

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HStAM, 315g no. 375. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2346. HStAM, 315g no. 45. HStAM, 315g no. 995; HStAM, 83 no. 2591.

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Certain ones, such as the former Reformed church in Hochstadt, might have had sufficient space within their walls to add enough new seating. In Ostheim the former Lutheran community numbered fewer than one-fifth the members of the former Reformed community, but the Lutheran members, not to be marginalized amid the good will of the Union, asserted “the same rights and claims” on church seating.35 The minister of the larger former Reformed church suggested extending a certain bench on both ends, setting this pew in the balcony next to the organ, shoving that pew to one side, sliding another into a particular dead space, and positioning one from the former Lutheran church in a spot below the pulpit. The eight church elders, who would sit there, could then see the whole community. The Ostheim Reformed minister, at least, could imagine a remedy. In most cases no one could. The numbers told the story. In Altenhaßlau, Wilhelm’s Church seated four hundred adults while another two hundred and fifty could stand or otherwise find place, but even these numbers totaled only one-half of the parish’s adults.36 Matters were worse in Seckbach. At a united service in Marian’s Church to commemorate the Union, scarcely one-quarter of those wanting to attend could fit inside.37 Afterwards the two Seckbach ministers intended to alternate services between the two churches, but when they proposed it in February 1819, Marian’s Church presbyters worried it might lead members to attend their respective church. That would perpetuate old distinctions and disturb the peace. For although the “residents have nothing against the Union,” explained the presbyters, in what was the most apposite statement made amid the Union across Hanau, “they do have a particular affection for their church properties.”38 A morning and an afternoon service ought to be held only in Marian’s Church, they advised, and the two ministers should alternate leading it. Predictably, the greatest logistical challenges came during Easter season. In 1819 the Ostheim minister fretted about administering the Eucharist in a timely fashion to so many more communicants. Rushing it, he worried, would sour the worship or the words spoken to each person. Prior to the Union circumstances had already made it difficult, even with his modest Lutheran community, to keep a worshipful tone and not lose “the blessed working of the worthy meal.”39 Labor demands always distracted participants. Moreover,

35 36 37 38 39

HStAM, 315g no. 1973. HStAM, 315g no. 45. HStAM, 315g no. 2239. HStAM, 315g no. 2239. HStAM, 315g no. 1973.

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“among the communicants are elderly and young Christians who perhaps out of pious delusion do not have any food or drink on days when the Eucharist is administered, and after a long time they shake from hunger and thirst or from chill.”40 He supported either administering the Eucharist six times annually instead of four and spreading out the communicants accordingly, or administering it to two people at a time instead of one. He seemed to favor the latter, which had been practiced in parishes Mottgers and Neuengronau and had been introduced in Marköbel. It would save time, not slow down worship, and not burden the church chest financially. In June, at least, he could happily relay that the united evangelicals were all receiving the Union-rite Eucharist. During the previous two holiday services “one did not see any difference any longer in the local Christian community,”41 as though no distinction had ever existed. Yet seating and space proved an intractable problem in numerous parishes. When the St. Jacob’s minister in Bruchköbel made preparations in St. Johann’s Church for Easter in 1822, over two hundred communicants came to register. So many gathering in a confined space, he complained, made a commotion that disturbed the reverent occasion.42 In Windecken, men of Stift’s church kept finding no available seats when attending services in Reinhard’s Church or found them only in women’s pews, the staircases, or on the floor.43 In such moments, they wrote, they longed for the ample space in their Stift’s Church. By early 1820 the former Lutheran presbyters in Steinau an der Straße griped that none of the former Reformed attended services in Reinhard’s Church, including those who lived right across from it.44 They had expected such matters to work themselves out, but instead all former Reformed continued attending Catharine’s Church. This perpetuated the line of division, they wrote, and threatened to sharpen it further. They wanted the Eucharist held monthly and alternately in the two churches instead of seven times per year. But, they lamented, only those of the former Reformed community were regarded as citizens, while the opinions of the sixty housefathers of the former Lutheran community were completely disregarded. It mattered critically how the authorities interpreted such reported developments. Local communities exhibited a willingness to accept the Union and to be called evangelicals but sought feasible solutions to the logistical problems. By contrast, Hanauian authorities more and more believed the devel-

40 41 42 43 44

HStAM, 315g no. 1973. HStAM, 315g no. 1973. HStAM, 315g no. 375. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2346.

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opments jeopardized the Union altogether. The Union’s troubled run in the region north of City Fulda, which they also administered, likely deepened their worry. Alternating services also engendered financial concerns and grievances. Stift’s Church members in Windecken commented that their treasury was annually losing twenty to thirty gulden, funds they wanted for poor relief.45 The church communities in Rüdigheim butted heads over maintenance costs of Newer Church’s bells and the tolling of them to signal services in Older Church.46 Similarly, while holding services only in Marian’s church in Seckbach was done to promote unity, within a couple years attendees complained of a “great inequality” among the members of the united “Christian community.”47 They shouldered the salary of the former Lutheran post and the maintenance costs of Marian’s church. They requested that the income and properties of both former parishes be combined and that the community members, “oppressed hard enough already by other tributes and ruined by war,” be freed of the parish salary.48 Local evangelicals knew enlarging one church, until it could accommodate the entire united community, might resolve some problems. But as seen in Steinau an der Straße and Altenhaßlau, the sword cut both ways. In late 1819 there was thought of designating Reinhard’s Church in Steinau an der Straße the “main church,” but when the Catharine’s Church community caught wind of it, they protested on behalf of their “temple, which we esteem higher than our own lives and where we honor God the Almighty.”49 Moreover, communities gasped at the enormous expense of enlarging a church. Estimates for Wilhelm’s Church in Altenhaßlau swelled to a galling 3,386 florins in 1824.50 By 1834 the number jumped to 7,500 florins.51 As local leaders noted the following year, the one hundred and twenty measures of wood required would whittle down the supply of the district’s forests drastically. Furthermore, expanding the interior space would complicate things outside of the church. Through 1828, burials were done in the churchyard cemeteries of Reinhard’s Church and Wilhelm’s Church. From 1829 on, the deceased from Altenhaßlau, Geislitz, Großenhausen, und Lützelhausen were buried in the Wilhelm’s Church cemetery after it was designated, in the Gelnhausen district official’s words, “the

45 46 47 48 49 50 51

HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2160. HStAM, 315g no. 2239. HStAM, 315g no. 2239. HStAM, 315g no. 2346. HStAM, 315g no. 45. HStAM, 315g no. 45.

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communal cemetery.”52 Enlarging Wilhelm’s Church or tearing it down to make way for an entirely new one would disturb some gravesites and raise health issues. Evangelical ministers in certain locales added ferment by squabbling over Union procedures. Steinau an der Straße suffered from acrimony between the two evangelical ministers over the assigning of fees. According to a district official such conduct from the senior minister had inclined his parishioners to consider a “return to the old order,” meaning the order of things prior to the Union.53 The ministerial dynamic in Windecken was even more toxic. Grauel, the elder minister, portrayed C. W. Zimmermann as an upstart who had wronged him and “embittered” the little time Grauel had left on earth.54 Grauel led his church’s presbyters in blaming Zimmermann and his church community for unilaterally backing out of agreements. Such reneging, they alleged, would negatively affect mixed marriages. It would also give area Catholics opportunity to mock, “Look! You can’t live in union with each other at all!”55 Meanwhile, Zimmermann led his presbyters in faulting Grauel for obstructing several things, including the unification of church treasuries, the introduction of a common protocol, an alternating or collective confirmation procedure as utilized in other locales, and the reorganization of schooling according to age or sex. Moreover, they accused Grauel of wanting the Eucharist to be held in his church on grounds that “he was the elder minister” and that the church was a more suitable venue.56

3

A Switch in Strategy

Evangelical communities across Hanau were doing what the authorities desired. They were conforming to Union standards and showing outward unity, regardless of whether services were held in one or multiple churches. If the setting had been the sixteenth century, then governing authorities at that time would have been content with how things were going. And by the Enlightenment’s own standards, the communities were being sensible and reasonable. But the nineteenth-century authorities could not shake their unease

52 53 54 55 56

HStAM, 315g no. 45. Gelnhausen had been a free Imperial city until 1803, when it was joined to Hesse-Kassel. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673.

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about what the communities’ inner thoughts might be. They fretted over where these feelings might steer the Union. Preemptively, the Hanau consistory started to close down the secondary churches. Local clerics were instrumental in this process. In 1822, Bruchköbel minister J. I. März, after his local colleague had transferred, lobbied against the mere presence of one of the local churches. “A great obstacle [to the Union] is the presence of two churches in a locale,” he wrote to the Hanau consistory.57 If a locale had one sufficiently large church for the united community, then the second church stood in contradiction to the Union. März cited this, incorrectly, as the reason why ministers and communities in Hochstadt, Bockenheim, and Seckbach had already closed their lesser second church. (In fact, the communities in Hochstadt closed it for financial concerns, and the Hanau consistory closed the one in Seckbach against the will of its church community). He believed the fate of the former Lutheran church in Bruchköbel had long been sealed. To mobilize the authorities, März claimed that, so long as the second church stood, one “believes a Lutheran community exists as well.”58 He seemed unaware of how his assumption contradicted other things he reported, including that former Lutherans had been receiving the Eucharist from him in the former Reformed church and that the former Lutheran elders called for a common catechism, hymnal, and agenda. And although that community had been united under him as the one minister, März continued, he believed internally they viewed him as separate and the united presbytery viewed itself as a republican constitution. The cumulative effect of such reports enticed the Hanau consistory and other ecclesiastical authorities to change their minds. In the early 1820s they became anxious that local communities’ attachment to their respective church building would invigorate pre-Union distinctions, rekindle their inner devotion to their former denomination, and scuttle the Union. Instead of supporting local services in two churches, the authorities now favored having them in only one. They regarded this as necessary for the Union’s long-term success. Implications for an unused local church were, as in the Weichersbach case, instantly clear: it would become expendable and its status threatened. St. Johann’s Church in Bruchköbel soon learned this. By the end of 1822 the Hanau consistory, along with the Interior Ministry, had followed the Bruchköbel minister’s advice. It ordered the church’s doors to be shut and services to be held henceforth in St. Jacob’s Church.59 57 58 59

HStAM, 315g no. 375. HStAM, 315g no. 375. HStAM, 315g no. 375.

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The switch in the authorities’ strategy had ramifications in several other, leading locales. One was Steinau an der Straße. Back in 1820 the former Lutheran presbyters outspokenly rejected a return to their “Lutheran” status and name. If, however, matters regarding the church buildings and seating could not be resolved, then they wanted permission for those associated with their church to assemble on their own and constitute their “own evangelical Christian community” so as to quell all strife.60 They described this as a “return to Schlüchtern,” a reference to the nearby town in which the two communities were united as evangelicals and attended services in their respective churches.61 The church board of the former Reformed community largely echoed the petition. They expressly wanted to promote the fullest attendance and remove any trace of separation. Lack of space in Reinhard’s Church constituted the problem, they wrote, especially during the Eucharist’s administration. They rejected a monthly Eucharist as too costly. They believed instead it should be held either during the morning services in both churches or, in a nod to their belief that “the minority [should] do the brotherly thing and yield to the majority body that was three times larger,” exclusively in their larger Catharine’s Church.62 For them, a “return to Schlüchtern” would be a “return to the better in moral and financial respects, in which two evangelical Christian communities live among each other in peace” as a “united community” instead of in “disharmony.”63 In its decision the Hanau consistory ruled that the Eucharist was to be held seven times per year. On each occasion, both ministers were to administer it to both communities, one time in one of the churches and the next time in both churches. It also directed additional pews to be set in Reinhard’s church, presumably to accommodate the greater number of parishioners on such occasions. But by 1825 the consistory’s strategic thinking had changed. When one of the Steinau an der Straße ministers died that year, it ordered one church to close and the other to host services exclusively.64 Candid official reports relayed how Reinhard’s Church was well built and its interior agreeable and bright, whereas the interior of Catharine’s Church was somber. It had pews in dark corners where one could fall asleep without the minister knowing it. Nevertheless, authorities closed Reinhard’s Church for regular services, which were now held only in Catharine’s Church. Over the next century Reinhard’s

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HStAM, 315g no. 2346. HStAM, 315g no. 2346. HStAM, 315g no. 2346. HStAM, 315g no. 2346. HStAM, 315g no. 2346.

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Church was seldom used for services. It was finally repurposed for storage in the 1930s. Seckbach also failed to prevent the authorities from closing one of its two churches. After one of its two ministers transferred in early 1821, requests came from Seckbach for the post to be reappointed. But the Hanau consistory did nothing. By March the former Reformed, according to the members of Marian’s Church, returned to Peter’s Church, “united with the abstainers there, formed themselves into a community, and intended to be freed of obligations to Marian’s Church.”65 The former Reformed longed to possess again their “beautiful church along with the parish house, schoolhouse, and walled cemetery.”66 The former Lutheran church could scarcely accommodate its own members, they wrote. Enlarging it would not only be expensive but also incline opinion toward a dismantling of the Reformed church, which would devalue the latter, along with its properties, by 75 percent. The former Reformed added that they, unlike the Lutheran community, “had possessed a free church, a free minister and a free school.”67 Displaying the anachronistic historical consciousness formed by institutionalized Catholic-Protestant narratives, they declared that the first residents of Seckbach were of the Reformed religion and only in later times did the Lutheran believers gradually settle locally.68 Their effort, however, came to nothing. The authorities closed Peter’s Church. Into the 1830s the former Reformed community pleaded for their church not to be offered for sale, but it was sold by the mid-1830s to Seckbach itself.69 The town had chronically lacked sufficient space for schooling, and as a result the church was converted into a schoolhouse. In Windecken the Stift’s Church members’ frustration also reached a breaking point in early 1821. In April, after invoking article four, they increased the Sunday services in Stift’s Church from one to two so that they could attend services in their church and Reinhard’s Church members could do so in theirs.70 According to them peace and order immediately returned. Anticipating the authorities’ rebuttal, they argued, adroitly, that mixed marriages could not be negatively affected because the Union had already removed denominational distinctions. They also capitalized on Enlightenment language to argue for use of their church: “And besides, the sensible members of both communities

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HStAM, 315g no. 2239. HStAM, 315g no. 2239. HStAM, 315g no. 2239. HStAM, 315g no. 2239. HStAM, 315g no. 2243. HStAM, 315g no. 2673.

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interact with one another, serve each other, and both churches are attended by members of both communities for self-evident reasons.”71 They called out a contradiction intrinsic to the Union proceedings by saying it was a great error to force a common worship service on a people instead of letting it be attended out of free will. In his own letter Zimmermann struck a note of optimism in order to persuade authorities to have services run concurrently in both churches. “By a wide margin most former Lutherans as well as at least half of the presbytery are liberal minded,” he wrote in March 1823. “[M]oreover the schools are united, the confirmation of children from both communities goes on in Stift’s Church, [and] many former Lutherans … are asking for seats in Stift’s Church. I don’t see any obstacle that could stand in the way of reason!”72 The Hanau consistory, however, negated their efforts. It ordered repairs and renovations to Stift’s Church to ensure sufficient seating in it for both church communities. Once the work was completed by early 1823, the consistory directed services in Reinhard’s Church to cease after Palm Sunday, for all of them to be held henceforth only in Stift’s Church, for pew seats in it to be consigned to those who did not yet have any, and for the presbyteries and church properties of the two communities to be united once and for all.73 The ruling plunged members of the Reinhard’s Church community into turmoil over the imminent closure of their church. They stood unanimously— fifty-six to zero—against it according to a poll taken by Grauel, formerly their Lutheran minister.74 The consistory tersely reprimanded him for the poll. It called his behavior “very unbrotherly and against the teaching of the evangelical church” because he had acted unilaterally, without the collaboration of Zimmermann.75 Two leading members of the Reinhard’s Church community pleaded with the consistory. They interlaced candor and eloquence, despair and bewilderment, powerlessness and exasperation. “The greatest sanctum of men,” they began, “is their religion. Experience from all ages teaches this. These offer innumerable examples of how the slightest constraint or change to it, when not wholly and voluntarily accepted by [a person], produces the greatest disorders.”76 They admitted that it would be partisan for them not to

71 72 73 74 75 76

HStAM, 315g no. 2673. Emphasis theirs. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. By chance Zimmermann died of illness a few months later. HStAM, 16 no. 5227. HStAM, 315g no. 2673.

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forget the former teachings in which they were educated, not to prefer the former, customary ceremonies ahead of the current ones, and not to favor hearing sermons in the church of their youth where their ancestors had carried out worship services. “Nevertheless, it is so,” they declared, “and because of it we feel threatened.”77 Their descendants might be happy with the teachings of the “united religions, but not us, for this Union did not arise from us [and] was not called forth due to our own persuasion, rather [it] is being given to us.”78 They confessed to feeling better in their own church as compared to another, but ultimately they could not adjudicate the matter “without endangering our inner peace, partly because we feel too weak” when faced with it, “partly because we have no cause” or conviction to provide guidance amid such a decision, and “partly also because we would be daring to assault our greatest sanctum.”79 Tellingly, the Union itself had not incited the Reinhard’s Church community. At no time did they object to it or call for a return to Lutheranism. Instead, they were provoked to action when their church building was threatened. Their devotion to the Union underlay the content of their 1823 statements, including this one: “For every inquiry we pose ourselves the question: which teaching is the most correct?”80 They allowed their children to be educated in the new teachings and they were carrying out the directives, “but as for us, we cannot dissociate ourselves from our previous faith, we cannot acclimate ourselves to the thought [that] we must carry out our worship services in another church.”81 This is the closest a church community in Hanau came to voicing unease on account of the Union, and yet they did not juxtapose the former and current teachings as mutually exclusive, as if they could associate with only one of them. Rather, the authorities, by generating multiple teachings, gave the church community occasion to wonder aloud which was the “most correct.” Voicing this may also have been the members’ backhanded way of casting judgment on the authorities’ ability to determine affairs rightly. Similarly, the Reinhard’s Church community had been attending evangelical services and receiving Union-rite ministrations, but they also wanted to continue associating with the former ones. Their actions were reminiscent of pre-1648 Gemeinden, which expressly affirmed the former and the current religion amid confessional changes. A key difference was that the Reinhard’s

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HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673.

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Church community was one of two local sacred communities and had built its own church building. Their course of action hinged on that building. They expressly disavowed obstinacy. The two church communities in Windecken, they assured the consistory, were not being separated by partisan hatred. Yet “[t]he matter itself is too sacred to adjudicate and we are too little educated to be able to set ourselves at a distance from biases of this kind.”82 Should their appeal go unheeded, then it would occasion hatred against the former Reformed. The Reinhard’s Church community would have reason to refrain from attending services in Stift’s Church or to attend them elsewhere. The authorities knew either of those scenarios would inhibit if not jeopardize the Union. Despite the community’s earnest plea the Hanau consistory closed Reinhard’s Church and services were held henceforth only in Stift’s Church.83 Reinhard’s Church sat locked and empty until it was sold in 1832. In 1833 it was razed to the ground.84 Other churches had comparable fates. After Newer Church in Rüdigheim was dismantled, the materials went toward the construction of a schoolhouse and town hall. The church furnishings were sold off, including a large new organ to Steinheim.85 In Hochstadt the former Lutheran church was sold to the mayor by 1833. Although thought was then given to razing it, the building appears to have been repurposed as a barn.86 By 1838, Reinhard’s Church in Kesselstadt was converted into a council room, a school room, and a teacher’s residence.87 Similarly, Reinhard’s Church in Eichen was turned into a town hall and the prayer house in Niederrodenbach into a schoolhouse.88 In Bruchköbel, the organ of St. Johann’s Church was sold in 1829 along with the building itself, which was converted into a residence in 1845.89 In Bad Nauheim services in Reinhard’s Church ceased in 1825. Intentions by 1828 were to raze and reconstruct it in nearby Schwalheim.90 Instead, it stood empty until 1866, when Catholics rented and used it until a Russian orthodox congregation bought the building in 1905. They then renovated it for services, which began in 1908. Meanwhile, vacant parish houses and schoolhouses were also sold or repurposed. 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90

HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 315g no. 2673. HStAM, 180 Hanau no. 1196. HStAM, 180 Hanau no. 1292. HStAM, 83 no. 2591; HStAM, 82 no. e 403. HStAM, 180 Hanau no. 2187. HStAM, 180 Hanau no. 4326. HStAM, 315g no. 374, 373. HStAD, E5C no. 998.

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The one outlier to this sweeping trend across Hanau was Reinhard’s Church in Altenhaßlau. Periodically across the 1820s to 1840s the governing authorities wanted to enlarge Wilhelm’s Church. They had in mind to pay for it partly by closing and selling Reinhard’s Church.91 Starting in 1831, the doors of Reinhard’s Church were shut after the local minister, who had been appointed in 1829, refused to hold further services in it. But the Reinhard’s Church community mounted great efforts to preserve their church. In 1825 they wrote, “We acceded with joy to the union of the evangelical communities.” They had wished to avoid the great cost of enlarging either local church, not least because “evangelical services have been going on in alternate fashion, and can continue. For a poor, heavily indebted district this would be welcome and would preclude … the potential for hatred and favoritism.”92 In 1829 they declared Reinhard’s Church to be “private property,” for their ancestors had received it as a gift from Count Johann Reinhard. They also renovated it at their own expense. The building and everything in it, the Reinhard’s Church community repeated in the mid-1830s, was the “true property” of past members, thereby making them the “inheritors and rightful successors” of it.93 The building had been used for the worship of God “from time immemorial” on Sundays and holidays. “It baffles foreigners traveling through the area and no less the people of our surrounding region,” the community continued, “that such a beautiful church is … to be sold at a price, and [that] we are to be unmoved by it and earn the reproach of our descendants should we not have worked against it.”94 In 1836 the district mayors confirmed these words. “It is apparent that among the residents of the Altenhaßlau district much religious sensibility still prevails,” the mayors wrote, “for they are pressing ceaselessly for the restoration of Reinhard’s Church.”95 By 1839 the consistory knew tearing down churches elsewhere “had clearly stirred a lot of ill and objection among the present generation,” as well as local, internal discord.96 As one of its members put it, the option of razing Reinhard’s Church was “impossible.” Finally, after years of members’ striving and pouring collected funds into renovations of Reinhard’s Church, it opened again for services in 1843. They got to satisfy a longing that the Windecken Reinhard’s Church community did not. The community members arranged for two Gelnhausen ministers to lead

91 92 93 94 95 96

HStAM, 315g no. 45, 46. HStAM, 315g no. 46. HStAM, 315g no. 45. HStAM, 315g no. 45. HStAM, 315g no. 45. HStAM, 315g no. 46.

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Reinhard’s Church in Altenhaßlau

them, but into the 1850s their goal remained to have their own appointed minister. The Hanau superintendent feared what he believed was “Lutheran sentiment” behind the community’s requests. Granting them, warned the Hanau

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consistory, especially the administration of the Eucharist in Reinhard’s Church by a minister of their own, would divide the “former Lutherans” and “former Reformed,” each of whom would cling to their church and look with jealousy on the other.97 But as they had been doing with communities since the early 1820s, the authorities misinterpreted the community’s intention. No church communities in Hanauian lands, not even the Reinhard’s Church community in the town of Windecken, ever called for a return to the Lutheran rite or to the Reformed rite. Members of the Altenhaßlau Reinhard’s Church community were attached to their building and the resources their ancestors had poured into it, and not to the Lutheran denomination. As they expressed again in December 1850, their church had fallen into a woeful state such that the “words of our Savior ‘My house shall be called a house of prayer, but you have made it into a den of thieves’” wholly applied to it. “For years we had to bear the ignominy of seeing a house of God, bequeathed by our ancestors, neglected and disfigured.”98 Holding services in it again, they wrote, “has not gone without visible blessing.”99 A half century after the Reformation tricentennial, a ranking churchman in City Hanau reflected on how successful the Union had been across Hanau. “From the introduction of the Reformation onward, an earnest conflict ruled between Reformed and Lutheran principles in doctrine and ecclesiastical constitution in this whole region,” he wrote, albeit with anachronistic naming practices and historical perspective. “But this Union, however inadequate in form and spirit it seems, was still a necessary event that, from its innermost vital instincts, had to be brought forth in ecclesiastical developments and achievements,” lest the endeavor “should emerge as a stillborn child.”100 The record from rural Hanauian areas tells a different history. It points to the Peace of Westphalia, not the Reformation, for the spawning of Lutheran and Reformed and for the conflict between them, and though the sources do not present the Union as doctrinally or ecclesiastically “necessary,” they do credit it with restoring local civil-sacred unity. 97 98 99 100

HStAM, 315g no. 46. HStAM, 315g no. 46. HStAM, 315g no. 46. HStAM, 16 no. 4286.

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Rural Upper Hesse amid the Evangelical Union, 1817–1900s In Upper Hesse the era of the Union generated yet another storyline, one that was comparatively more complex. It unfolded on two fronts and in two phases. One front was the regional lynchpins of Marburg and Frankenberg, and the other front was locales elsewhere in the region. The first phase ran from 1817 to the mid-1830s and the second phase in the subsequent decades. In the process two trends were thwarted. One was the authorities’ effort, albeit anemic and superficial, to instill the Union in the region. Marburg gravely wounded the Union when citizens immediately and unanimously rejected it. Frankenberg dealt the Union a death blow almost two decades later. Meanwhile, authorities scarcely tried to effect the Union in the villages. In fact, by the 1840s they had completely reversed their own course regarding the Union, working not for but rather against it. This, in turn, compelled them to thwart a second trend, namely, the collaborations and unifications between local Lutherans and Reformed, which had been ongoing in the villages since the days before the Union. In several cases the authorities forced the sacred community to split and thereby disunited the local civil and sacred dimensions. As in the Hanauian region, Catholics in Upper Hesse did not feature much in the evangelical picture. They had a very modest presence outside of the Catholic parishes of Anzefahr, Roßdorf, and Amöneburg and the Catholic parishes based in Marburg and Schönstadt. The Frankenberg district had a mere handful of Catholics. According to an 1856–1857 report, thirty-three of its locales had none, eight had only a few, and Frankenberg had six.1 An anomaly to the pattern was the hospital in Haina, where twenty-five Catholics worked.

1

The Union’s Inauspicious Start in the Region

As they strategized about the Union, Upper Hessian ministers held a lively debate on several matters, although these would later have no bearing on the Union’s success or failure in the region. One was how the Eucharist should be

1 HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 115.

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_016

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administered.2 The Rengershausen minister took the literal, textual approach: “Breaking the bread is entirely in accordance with the spirit of Jesus, who took it, gave thanks, broke it, and gave it to his disciples. Who would distance himself from this? Not me!” The Bottendorf minister combined the literal with the practical. “The host,” he argued, “should be retained because it is disseminated easily; however, the host as well as the wine should be given to the hand of the communicant instead of placed in his mouth, for the Lord Jesus said take it and eat, take it and drink. One should also retain the words ‘This is my body’ and ‘This is my blood’ at the Eucharist because the Lord Christ expressly said them.” A Frankenberg Lutheran minister combined them, too, only he came to a different conclusion: “[Let] the larger host be broken before the communicants, [and let] two communicants at a time come before the minister [and] each of them receive one half of the host broken before them.” Such had been introduced at the local tricentennial celebration. Lutherans and Reformed were content with it. A convent of district ministers in Frankenberg could not accept article five of the evangelical Union as proposed. By May 1818 they had resolved in favor of the long host and for it to be broken. The Seelheim minister opposed breaking the bread, preferring instead that the whole community decide whether to have the Eucharist administered according to the old rite. The Schweinsberg minister proposed a common dissemination of it by ministers of both denominations. The Eucharist, acknowledged the Löhlbach minister, was a concern due to the fundamental disagreements between the Lutheran and Reformed churches. Yet he welcomed the Union for how it might ameliorate attitudes. He expected them to change over time. Ministers also deliberated the opening words of the Lord’s Prayer.3 One minister took the straightforward approach: Jesus prayed “Our Father” (Unser Vater) and so, he implied, that should be the formula. Another accepted uncritically what the consistory, agreeing that “Our Father can be kept according to the proposal of the consistory.” There was the linguistic argument: “[One should] choose Our Father instead of Father Our” (Vater Unser), a minister wrote, “because Our Father is better German.” There was the linguistic combined with the literal: “Because Our Father is more correct in the German language than Father Our, and [because] Jesus also taught Our Father to [his] disciples [in] Matt. 6:9 and Luke 11:2, so I say amen to [the consistory’s proposal].” The Oberweimar convent of ministers approved article six as proposed. The Wetter convent favored leaving it to a minister’s discretion

2 The content and quotations in this paragraph are in HStAM, 16 no. 4285. 3 Except where noted, the content and quotations in this paragraph are in HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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Otto Piltz, Women Praying the “Our Father,” 1882

whether to open with “Father Our” or “Our Father,” for many ministers had already acclimated their communities to both. The Frankenberg convent held fast to what it had chosen in 1818—“Father, Our Father of all” (Vater, unser aller Vater). A Frankenberg Lutheran minister did suggest “Our Father of all” (Vater Unser Aller) or even “Father of all” (Vater Aller). The former, he acknowledged, contained words not in the biblical passage. Neither, in fact, did the latter, but he betrayed his fondness for it. To overlook it, he opined, would leave aside “a very attractive, fruitful alternative idea.”4 The Marburg consistory believed the wording of the Lord’s Prayer to be, for the “common man,” an essential point of distinction between Lutheran and Reformed. One ought to eschew anything that appeared to lean one way or the other, they advised.5 On the question whether their local communities were inclined or disinclined toward the Union, ministers in Upper Hesse ranged from reflexively optimistic to cautiously hopeful.6 Yet their reasoning merely projected their own aspirations. Ministers also theorized about how to pitch the Union to

4 EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. 5 HStAM, 16 no. 4285. 6 Except where noted, the content and quotations in this paragraph are in HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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Lutherans and Reformed. “It cannot be said often enough,” wrote a Lutheran minister in early 1819 in Frankenberg, where the Union already faced trouble, “that the hitherto party of Lutherans is not crossing over to the party of the Reformed, nor the [Reformed] to that of the Lutherans; rather, both are to form themselves into one united evangelical Christian Church as founded on the teaching of Jesus.”7 It was to be, as he put it, wholly new. Another minister couched the Union’s installation as largely a name game and advanced a naive proposal. He believed the Union easier to achieve in locales with one church. If authorities pronounced the names Reformed and Lutheran completely equal and said one could freely belong to the church of one’s choosing, then the scattered Reformed in Upper Hesse would certainly decide to attend the local church instead of traveling far for ministrations. The Lutherans in Lower Hesse would do the same. As for Upper Hessian locales where services occurred in two churches, if one dropped the name “Lutheran” from the lexicon, then any reluctant Reformed would, likely, eventually give up and start attending. Applying the same principle to Lower Hessian towns—dropping the name “Reformed”—would make reluctant Lutherans relent. “In this way, perhaps, could the lovely thought of a pure evangelical Christian Church be most easily realized,” and that peacefully, without any commotion.8 Upper Hessian ministers believed such measures necessary because of congregants who were “weak” in faith.9 The Oberweimar convent judged article eight—administering an old-rite Eucharist privately to those who wished it—to be unadvisable because it conceded too much ground to the “weak.” A Kirchhain minister agreed. He regarded the Eucharistic rite to be a minor matter anyway. Jesus used unleavened bread because it was the only kind around, he reasoned, implying that it was not because unleavened bread was the only divinely sanctioned kind. In any case, he continued, one must not order things to accommodate the weak or out of worry about coercing their conscience. The Haina minister likewise believed the Union should be done singularly, not with various accommodations and forms. The Viermünden minister argued the opposite. On the Lord’s Prayer, he wrote, “instead of Father Our, and Our Father [it should be] ‘Our Father of All,’” for, as Paul wrote in Romans 14:1, one had to be considerate of those weak in faith. But the Schwabendorf minister said simply carrying out the Union was the main thing. The rest would fall into place, and “the riffraff who clings to his customary

7 EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. Emphasis his. 8 HStAM, 16 no. 4285. 9 The content and quotations in this paragraph are in HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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practices … can mull the matters over, and when he sees how they progress, he will let himself come into line with them.” Ministerial convents in the region called for the Union to take place next door in Lower Hesse, where it had not yet been implemented. Attempting Union in one area but not another would very likely stymie their own efforts. In Marburg the consistory feared broad opposition would embolden other communities elsewhere to oppose it as well, putting the ministers and any willing members in a very difficult position. The consequence would be “indifference and unbelief, or upheaval, divisions and unpleasantness of every kind.”10 They had good ground for being pessimistic about Marburg. In May 1819 eighteen church elders from the town’s two Lutheran church communities cited four reasons behind their unanimous repudiation of the Union articles. For one, the union was unnecessary. Lutherans and Reformed were divided in name but otherwise lived together as Christians should. Names did not matter, rather the disposition and attitude did, and in these the two parties were united already as children of God in love, faith, and hope. For another, the proposed Union was in fact no union, for it concerned only the conversion of superficial, external forms. It did not address the differences in theology and ethos, and the proposed changes had nothing to do with the essential things. The Lutheran elders therefore found no reason to move away from venerable, customary practices, not least regarding the Eucharist. Third, the planned new hymnals and catechisms were reason enough to oppose the Union. The Lutherans were happy with the ones they had. The hymnal contained songs that edified and reassured them. Thousands of copies of the Herder catechism, which they deemed “one of the most all-around useful books to the spiritual man,” had been distributed across Upper Hesse only sixteen years earlier.11 Acquiring new ones would be impossible for most house fathers in such financially lean times. Finally, they valued their church constitution so highly that any alteration to it would be painful. The proposed articles would only disrupt, not unite. They had spoken with the communities’ members, the elders added, and all stood in agreement. Correspondence in June 1819 from the Lutheran community of Marburg fully backed their claim. Nearly four hundred members signed their names on the left half of the page, which was titled “those evangelical Lutheran members of the commune that want to remain by the Lutheran denomination.” None signed under the heading on the right half, which read “those that want to join the new evangelical Christian Church.”12 10 11 12

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 16 no. 4285.

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It did not help that members of the Marburg consistory stood divided in their own opinions. In their August 1819 report a majority of them believed it prudent, for the time being, to abstain completely from attempting union.13 But the remaining members favored the work. Opposition from certain individual communities should not inhibit the Union, they argued. Many communities inside and outside Hesse offered precedent to proceed. They described, dubiously, a favorable atmosphere dominating Frankenberg two years after the town took the step. A new ecclesiastical agenda was appropriate, and a new catechism could be formulated over time. Despite the consistory’s optimism the evangelical Union went nowhere in Marburg itself. Nothing changed. Lutheran and Reformed distinctions continued on as before. When the first (in rank) Reformed minister died in 1820 after fifty-three years of service, the Reformed community members beckoned for their favored candidate, who was ultimately appointed as the second (in rank) Reformed minister.14 The new first Reformed minister pledged in writing that he would refrain from all demeaning rhetoric against the Lutheran religion. Lutherans and Reformed in Marburg would not be united as evangelicals until after World War II.

2

The Union Attempted in Frankenberg

Frankenberg was one of the few locales in Upper Hesse where the Union was even attempted.15 This was ironic because Frankenberg had been the site of the most combustible Lutheran-Reformed relations in the region. But it also stood to reason, for Frankenberg, though a small town, had just enough liberalminded inhabitants to generate some sympathy for the Union. Moreover, for the Union to have a chance of success in the region, it needed to succeed in Frankenberg. The ministers during the Union’s initial phase in Frankenberg— Reformed ministers J. J. Becker and J. C. Doering (whose posts were later held, respectively, by G. H. Murhard and K. A. B. Bingel) and Lutheran ministers F. C. Hassencamp and F. A. Koch (whose post was later held by V. Lodderhose)—were willing to accept the Union, albeit with little enthusiasm. They could not, however, overcome the stinging grievance still anchored deep in the Lutheran community. Whereas Marburg’s stiff rejection of the Union is

13 14 15

HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 315f no. 1570. HStAM, 16 no. 4287.

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best understood in light of a confessional adherence forged by the turn of the seventeenth century, the tale in Frankenberg is best told in light of post1648 developments and, above all, the Simultaneum forced on the Lutheran community by Landgrave Karl and his Frankenberg Reformed coreligionists in 1704–1705. As time would tell, the local Lutheran community had in mind not only to maneuver for the reinstallation of Simultaneum but also to exploit it as a means toward their ultimate goal: a restoration of the pre-1705 order in which Lutherans had exclusive use of the Town Church while the Reformed held services in the Hospital Church, or elsewhere. Early on the ministers clung to the few glimmers of hope. In 1818 over eighty boys and girls were confirmed in a common service during which Hassencamp led the boys and Becker the girls. The occasion stirred Hassencamp to entreat God to “further grant His blessing, that one faith and one love reigns among us Protestants!”16 The ministers also enthused at seeing over two hundred communicants at the 1819 Easter service. In 1820 authorities in Kassel extended this cheerful optimism by writing that “the best spirit continues as ever to be felt from the united community” in Frankenberg.17 But ominous signs loomed larger. Already in May 1818, 179 Lutherans petitioned for the cessation of the Union, and in May 1820, after Becker’s transfer to Kassel, Reformed minister Doering wrote that the Reformed members wanted him to administer the Eucharist to them according to the “accustomed method,” which the consistory knew to mean the “earlier customary form,” or Reformed rite.18 To manage the increased number of confirmands, the ministers, on the Sunday prior to the 1819 service, naively proposed from the pulpit that there be two morning confirmation services instead of one and that confirmands of the Reformed community be confirmed in the earlier service and those of the Lutheran community in the later one. Certain locals, unnamed but likely from the small number who supported the Union, objected that doing so would resegregate the community that had been united since 1817. The ministers were persuaded by this argument and proceeded with a single confirmation service. But they continued worrying about the Union’s tenuous standing in Frankenberg. Hassencamp wrote in May 1819 that he wanted “with [my] whole heart” for the Union to be fully established, but for it to be so, “both sides would have to surrender to a degree and draw near to one another such that they meet approximately in the middle. Such is a foundation from which one

16 17 18

EKF, Lutheran Kirchenbuch 1781–1830; EKF, Reformed Kirchenbuch 1790–1830. HStAM, 16 no. 4285. HStAM, 315f no. 579.

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cannot shrink,” Hassencamp advised, with a discernible air of apprehension, “[o]therwise, it will not be a union, rather a concession in which the one party that surrenders everything [is made to feel as if it] hitherto had had no right, and that is something simply neither party can be accused of.”19 He emphasized that the Union must go through in all provinces of Hesse. In response, the Marburg consistory tepidly encouraged the four ministers to hold fast to the Union yet not place any pressure on a person’s freedom of conscience.20 The Union’s troubled start in Frankenberg linked to a second concern, namely, the very superficiality of its installation. While ministers now held a common service and confirmation in the Big Church and one spoke of the “Union” in the town, most things stayed oddly the same. Scant effort was made to purge the names Lutheran and Reformed from the local lexicon or even to insert the word “former” in front of them. Even authorities made regular mention of things “Lutheran” and “Reformed,” of the Lutheran community and the Reformed community, and of their respective elders. The two presbyteries continued to function separately too. The four ministers and some elders occasionally discussed uniting the presbyteries and starting a common protocol for the unification process, but they differed over its membership and leadership and whether a united presbytery would make any difference. Ultimately, nothing came of it. The authorities’ token attempt at union in the district around Frankenberg would, presumably, have accentuated its superficiality.21 For Frankenberg’s ministers, in plain sight of their parishioners, to continue going to parish village affiliates as Lutheran and Reformed ministers in name, where they led Lutheran and Reformed services and administered Lutheran and Reformed rites, contradicted the Union head-on and enabled the continuation of the pre-Union status quo. Even the annual confirmation service in Frankenberg was deeply compromised. The ministers did not so much confirm children as evangelicals as confirm children of the Lutheran and Reformed communities at the same time.22 The respective ministers wrote the names of the respective groups of confirmands in their respective parish registers, which they still maintained separately and which still bore the respective titles Lutheran and Reformed. Pews and seating in the Town Church quickly emerged as a third and critical concern. Prior to the Union, money from the Lutheran purchase of pews went 19 20 21 22

EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. Emphases in the original. HStAM, 315f no. 579. EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. EKF, Lutheran Kirchenbuch 1781–1830; EKF, Reformed Kirchenbuch 1790–1830.

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toward maintenance of the church. The Reformed sat in the same pews during their own services yet paid nothing for them, although they did claim that they financially contributed to the church’s general maintenance. As the Union got underway, assigned seats remained unchanged. The unspoken assumption was that the rest of the parishioners were to sit in vacant pews. But the ministers then contradicted such notions by asserting that both sides had to meet in the middle for the Union to succeed. Moreover, word spread that the Lutherans would not surrender their purchased seats and that the Reformed were disinclined to sit in vacant ones—estimated in August 1822 at 200 seats for men and 120 for women—because one could not see or hear well from them. The dilemma regarding the pews had severe and long-lasting consequences. The Reformed felt an awkward uncertainty about where to sit, causing Hassencamp to direct them to certain pews. Those opposed to the Union capitalized on the circumstance. One local clothmaker purportedly said that, if it were up to him, the Reformed would never get any pews.23 In April 1822, N. E. Arend, a chief regional architect, drew up a blueprint for a rearrangement of existing pews and the insertion of new ones. His aim, as he put it, was to gain more place for pews. Yet Hassencamp mocked his proposal as unrealistic and logistically impossible.24 Murhard and Doering despaired about the pews. They sounded the alarm on this and other issues that they had not anticipated and that seemed trivial to them but which threatened to scuttle unification. Their Reformed community, they wrote in September 1822, had made “sacrifices upon sacrifices and patiently suffered unpleasantries” to uphold the Union.25 The ministers acknowledged that selling the many cheap seats in 1817 would have greatly reduced the problem, but they also contradicted this statement with others. First, the Reformed expressed a disinclination to pay for pews in which, previously, they had sat without cost. Second, they opined that selling pews to the highest bidder would only incite enmity. Third, the two ministers described the Reformed community, though only a small minority of Frankenberg’s population, as having the most important members and deserving to have their interests met. Among these would be having pews in the Town Church commensurate with their rank and status. In a belated effort, the ministers announced a sale of vacant pews in October 1822. Of the many Reformed who could have purchased one, only nineteen expressed an interest, causing the

23 24 25

HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582.

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Frankenberg’s Town Church, 1850

ministers to abandon the idea. Years later, Murhard and Doering grieved at how many residents, including council members and church elders, had gone without sermons and the Eucharist for several years due to the impasse regarding the pews. Whatever the two communities’ thoughts about the Union in 1817, and whether or not they genuinely sought for a peaceable arrangement in its initial years, they brought into the Union their respective customary notions about order, hierarchy, toleration, and regulation, including how these pertained to objects in the church interior. Such notions clashed with newer ones that were implicit in the Union and linked to Enlightenment standards and nationalist interests. The customary notions also perpetuated the distinction between the two communities in Frankenberg and stymied the token progress toward a union there. Church authorities had failed to anticipate these issues in advance, and once they cropped up, the authorities misread their significance. As discussed in this section, the pressures they applied and proposals they offered only made matters worse. The pew fiasco tied directly to the fourth and final concern, namely, the town’s secondary church building. Although, following the Union, locals were instructed to call it the Little Church, they also still called it the Reformed

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Church or Hospital Church.26 It fell dormant after late 1817, yet there was passing mention of holding services for the evangelical community in both the larger Town Church and the smaller Hospital Church, presumably on grounds that doing so might reduce tensions and help facilitate the Union.27 The ministers immediately objected.28 For union to occur, the Lutherans and Reformed parishioners needed to worship God together, in one church, and be instructed by ministers from both sides. The ministers recommended that a common Eucharistic rite be installed throughout Hesse and that a new cover and title— “evangelical Hymnal”—be affixed to the Lutheran hymnal. The two Reformed ministers favored converting the Hospital Church into a schoolhouse, but Hassencamp thought the project cost prohibitive. He supported using it for prayer and weekday services and for services in winter, when harsh weather discouraged attendance in the cavernous Town Church. By late 1822, as the anemic Union in Frankenberg teetered on the verge of disintegration, Murhard and Doering, in a letter to the Marburg consistory, suggested reopening the Little Church for prayer day and weekday services. To district official Giebler, time was of the essence. “Though it seemed to promise many good results at the beginning,” he wrote, “the whole union of religion up to now has, it seems to me, not brought about the slightest advantage…. It has done more to distance those of the denominations from each other than it has to bring them closer.”29 He believed that reopening the Little Church offered perhaps the only hope of salvaging the Union. The Marburg consistory seemed to agree, for after strong winds had broken windows of the church in early 1822 and rain threatened to do damage, the consistory swiftly authorized repairs.30 Then, after the aforementioned pew sale flopped and the ministers judged that other proposed solutions would produce disorder and confusion, the consistory conferred about prayer day and weekday services in the Little Church.31 Especially controversial, however, was the Marburg consistory’s proposal in early 1823 to start Sunday services in the Little Church. Giebler feared that holding Sunday services simultaneously in both churches and having ministers alternate leading them would disrupt the Union.32 Koch could easily

26 27 28 29 30 31 32

HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582.

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imagine that attendance at Sunday services would devolve into the Reformed and the Lutherans going to separate churches, thereby producing many contradictions to the “so-called Union.”33 Before long, he continued, parishioners would ask for the Eucharist according to the old rite, and the ministers would not refuse them. Discussion about Sunday services in the Little Church sparked disagreement among the Reformed parishioners. Four Reformed church elders favored such services and approved having the Lutheran and Reformed ministers alternately deliver sermons. They reported that the Lutherans supported the proposal too. But Doering and the other Reformed elders objected that reopening the Little Church for prayer day and weekday services would unravel the Union. Holding Sunday services in separate churches would merely accelerate that. “It would not be long before one would demand to have the former [i.e. pre-Union] situation fully reconstituted,” they wrote. “In this way these few church elders would successfully make a mockery of us regionally and beyond and thwart the hope of a full Union in Upper Hesse.”34 They continued, rhetorically: “Why should the two communities here separate themselves again after they have been bound so closely after five years?”35 No longer should one go only half way with the Union; rather, it should be pushed further. Murhard claimed that the four Reformed elders favored services in the Little Church because of personal pride and adherence to custom.36 They asked him to hold these services and administer the Eucharist according to the old form. He estimated the Union’s goals were at best half reached. Many locals, he wrote, believed the Union was in retreat, including many who wanted it so. The Marburg consistory nevertheless tried to save the Union in Frankenberg. In May 1823 it decided, in desperation, that Sunday services should commence in both churches at 9:00 a.m., that the first minister of each denomination would alternate in leading them, and that the Eucharist would be administered communally in both churches at a set time.37 The consistory did not realize, however, the spectacular ripple effect this would unleash on the four ministers’ highly demanding schedules. Twice, the four ministers and Giebler discussed whether the decision could even be installed feasibly. Remarkably, they devised an arrangement, but adopting it would require a

33 34 35 36 37

HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582. Emphasis theirs. HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582. HStAM, 315f no. 582.

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dizzying reorganization of ministerial assignments. The consistory promptly canceled its own decision. The next decade did nothing to ameliorate the beleaguered state of the Union in Frankenberg. In 1823 the two communities disputed costs toward the Reformed chaplain’s residence.38 The Lutherans were reluctant to contribute, but the Reformed countered that the 1817 Union meant that Reformed parish buildings per se, like the Reformed community, no longer existed. Thus, the church and town treasuries should shoulder the costs. In 1824, reports indicated that the Frankenberg ministers catechized confirmands no longer in common but separately, according to their denominational group.39 Uniting the local Lutheran and Reformed schools in 1826 also complicated matters.40 It alleviated financial burdens and disproportionate enrollments but apparently was done without broad initiative, a development that later redounded negatively.

3

Collaborations and Unifications Continue in Rural Upper Hesse

In the early 1820s Frankenberg ministers explained to the Marburg consistory that to eliminate the Lutheran and Reformed classifications would require “a completion of the church union in the entire district of Frankenberg.”41 Yet any initiatives Frankenberg authorities might have made toward uniting the denominations were stalled after the Union died in Marburg and lumbered in Frankenberg. Instead, Lutheran and Reformed communities in many rural locales continued collaborating just as they had prior to 1817. Frankenberg ministers themselves took notice of it. Doering remarked in 1823 how Lutherans and Reformed in nearby Schreufa, Willersdorf, and Haina worked together, often without any ministerial involvement.42 He hoped their example would encourage the two communities in Frankenberg to sidestep an ugly outcome as it pertained to the Union. Murhard once surveyed opinions in most of the villages around Frankenberg and, according to him, found that people were agreeable to the Union.

38 39 40 41 42

HStAM, 16 no. 4964. HStAM, 16 no. 4964. HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 96; HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 2025. HStAM, 16 no. 4964. Emphasis theirs. HStAM, 315f no. 582.

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The rural communities themselves produced scant direct evidence that would support those reported opinions, but documents amply testify to the collaborative steps noted by Doering. In Willersdorf, Reformed and Lutheran services had been alternating for generations. In 1823 this meant the Frankenberg first Reformed minister came to lead a Reformed service on one Sunday, and the Bottendorf Lutheran minister, P. Scriba, a Lutheran service on the next. Members of both denominations, as Murhard noted, attended both services very well.43 The ecclesiastical rank and file had entered an era of “Union,” and therefore they made reference to the “united community” of Willersdorf just as they did to the “united community” of Schreufa, of Wangershausen, of Ellershausen, and of others.44 But “united” meant something different here. Across Hanau it meant Lutherans and Reformed became evangelicals, attended evangelical services, and received evangelical rites. In Frankenberg it meant members of the Lutheran and Reformed communities attended the same one service in common. For locales around Frankenberg, the ecclesiastics’ use of the term “united” meant members of separate Lutheran and Reformed communities mutually attended each other’s services. This links to an important point about the rural response to the Union. Local Lutheran and Reformed communities could have their own reasons for either effacing or retaining the Lutheran-Reformed distinction. Embracing the Union meant uniting the two sacred communities and, possibly, restoring the local civil-sacred unity, as happened across Hanau. Retaining the distinction meant they could have more local Christian services than if the two communities united, for both a Lutheran and a Reformed minister would, by visiting separately, make more combined visits to the village than would a single minister coming to serve a united community on his own. Either reason tapped into animating desires that were many centuries old. In villages around Frankenberg the customary practice of Lutherans and Reformed mutually attending services stirred them to joint opposition against a change of schedule proposed by ministers in 1823. Hassencamp asked Scriba whether he could hold services in Willersdorf on the second day of the Easter and Pentecost holidays instead of the first. Scriba had no objections, but the Willersdorf Lutheran and Reformed communities both hotly protested. Customarily the Bottendorf Lutheran minister and Frankenberg Reformed minister alternated duties in Willersdorf on the first day of the Easter and Pentecost seasons. Under the proposed changes, these would fall exclusively to the 43 44

HStAM, 315f no. 574. HStAM, 16 no. 4287; HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 1278; HStAM, 16 no. 4964; HStAM, 315f no. 578.

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Reformed minister. The Lutheran members particularly objected, not because the Reformed minister would be handling them but because their children would have to be confirmed in Bottendorf instead of locally in the Willersdorf church. The elders appealed to the consistory that the Lutheran community be left with their old customs and legal claims. Scriba thought the proposed changes negligible yet acknowledged that they could negatively affect the holiday services. Willersdorf’s two sacred communities also chafed at disruptions to local custom concering hymns. They established a practice whereby hymns that both songbooks shared in common were chosen. The respective schoolmasters wrote the numbers, as found in the Reformed and the Lutheran songbooks, on the two stone tablets at the front of the church. But in 1823 the Reformed chest officer accused Bottendorf Lutheran schoolmaster Zinn of writing down only the Lutheran songbook’s numbers. Zinn protested his innocence but also revealed some underlying grievances. He wanted the chest of the Willersdorf commune or the village’s Reformed church to purchase a Reformed hymnal for him. He also thought each Reformed man who attended Lutheran services ought to give him one loaf of bread. He believed it a modest request considering the Willersdorf Reformed schoolmaster received his entire salary from local Reformed and Lutherans alike. Irked by Zinn’s behavior, some Reformed snatched the Reformed hymnal from the pastoral pew. The spat moved Scriba to vent his own frustrations. Initially, he delighted that the Reformed, “who have their own minister, also attended the worship services I held” in Willersdorf and that songs common to both denominations were sung. “But now I think otherwise.”45 He was suspicious of the Reformed who attended because they stopped bringing the Lutheran songbooks they had at home and brought their Reformed ones instead. It was an odd, emotional statement in light of the one he had just made. His next grievance revealed why he made it: he had to let a number of hymns dear to him go unsung because the Reformed songbook did not have them, and on a Sunday when he had three verses sung from a Lutheran hymn that tied directly to his message, some Reformed allegedly grumbled about it to the Frankenberg metropolitan. “I am the Lutheran minister in Willersdorf,” Scriba declared to the Marburg consistory, “and as such bound to lead worship services there according to the wishes of my community members, but [I am] not bound to do so for free for the Reformed [or to do so according to] what their zeal will not allow.” He signaled his readiness to be severed altogether from Willersdorf.

45

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The Marburg consistory, already compromised for pursuing the Union in Frankenberg but not in Willersdorf next door, could only try to muffle the problem. It directed the Willersdorf Reformed to conduct themselves in a “Christian, peaceful” manner and Scriba to continue selecting songs common to both songbooks. Scriba relented, but in 1831, the Willersdorf Reformed complained that he integrated a few Lutheran hymn verses and verbal expressions in the Eucharistic and confirmation services. “In Willersdorf,” rebutted Scriba, “there is no [evangelical] Union and no right can be invoked” that would prohibit the inclusion of Lutheran-only liturgy.46 Again, however, the Marburg consistory prohibited Scriba from selecting hymns found only in the Lutheran songbook. Rural Lutheran and Reformed communities also collaborated in the unification of their local schools. Some had already done so prior to the Union. The Willersdorf Reformed schoolmaster taught Reformed and Lutheran schoolchildren utilizing instructional material from both denominations. Others united their schools in the nineteenth century. When Rosenthal did so in 1827, it helped to balance the numbers.47 Instead of two Lutheran instructors with classrooms of 60 and 130 Lutheran students each, and a classroom of 15 Reformed students who were being taught by a local Lutheran tailor, the schoolchildren could be spread more evenly among the three instructors. The school union in Rosenthal removed bothersome bureaucratic hurdles, such as a Lutheran schoolmaster’s recent refusal to enroll a Reformed postman’s son until he had legal authorization. The Ellershausen commune acquired the property of the Reformed schoolhouse from the state when its two schools were united in the mid-1830s. The 1839 unification of Gemünden an der Wohra’s schools resolved great disparities in numbers. A schoolboard was set up and comprised the district administrator, the local mayor, and three local ministers from the two denominations.48 Parties agreed that instructors would use material common to both denominations, such as songs found in both hymnals. On the first day, Gemünden, mimicking a method used in nearby Rauschenberg, had the schoolchildren line up in a 3:1 ratio, meaning three Lutherans for every one Reformed. The children seemed not to mind but Kassel authorities did. The district administrator had not been consulted, they barked, and equalization had not been done gradually. Authorities officially organized Reformed children from Haina, Schiffelbach, Rosenthal, and other

46 47 48

HStAM, 315f no. 574. HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 96. HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 3138.

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locales into the Gemünden school. Yet by the late 1860s parents of Reformed children in the more distant locales typically sent their children to the local Lutheran school anyway. A local habit of collaborative practices enabled church authorities to approach the Reformed in Löhlbach in 1823 with a peculiar query. The second Reformed minister of Frankenberg was holding services there every sixth Sunday for the Reformed and Lutheran communities. On those occasions he performed all ministerial acts for Lutherans just as the Lutheran minister did for Reformed at all other times. The arrangement satisfied both communities, he reported. Point four of the 1823 fourteen-point plan, however, stipulated that he would assume duties in Willersdorf, which would have forced him to cease ministrations in Löhlbach. Church authorities asked the six Reformed members of Löhlbach whether they would take on the local Lutheran parish’s minister as their own. Five affirmed they would, though they preferred that he administer the Eucharist to them according to the Reformed rite. In a bizarre and contradictory statement the authorities momentarily considered uniting the Lutheran and Reformed communities in Löhlbach but then dropped the idea because “one would be asking the Reformed to give up their religious practice,” which would be “coercion and not something to be authorized.”49 It was a candid if unconscious acknowledgement that church authorities had not instituted an evangelical rite and that, in Upper Hesse, the Union was often perceived as the Reformed, who were the minority, joining the Lutherans, the majority, instead of the two sides meeting equally in the middle. The one Reformed member who refused the proposal cited this as his reason. He said he would sooner communicate elsewhere. Though the fourteen-point plan was ultimately voided, the Marburg consistory in 1824 still authorized the other five to take on the Lutheran minister.50 During the same years the Marburg consistory also acted ham-handedly in dealing with the smattering of Reformed in three administrative districts of southern Upper Hesse. In the late seventeenth century Reformed officials, backed by Landgrave Karl, secured regular Reformed services in Allna. They did so in Ebsdorf, too, though these were relocated to Cappel a generation later. Most if not all attendees were state officials and their families. A Reformed minister from Marburg handled the duties for them and for the Schönstadt Reformed into the nineteenth century. However, few Reformed remained in the districts by 1818, when their minister died. The Schönstadt Reformed community was transferred to the pastoral care of a Lutheran minister. The Cappel 49 50

HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 1328. HStAM, 315f no. 795.

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Reformed community, headed by five men, lobbied for two years for Reformed services to continue locally.51 Listening to sermons of the Cappel Lutheran minister, they wrote, left them feeling little instructed in the truths of Christianity. Starting in 1820 the second Reformed minister of Marburg assumed the duties, but bouts of sickness steadily inhibited him from traveling and administering the Eucharist quarterly. By 1822 he had effectively resigned. The Marburg consistory eventually refilled the post but its handling of the three districts became increasingly contradictory. It respected one’s freedom of conscience and therefore ruled in 1823 that the districts’ Reformed could request and receive the Reformed Eucharist in Cappel or Marburg. But it expressly wanted those Reformed to unite with the local Lutheran communities and therefore commissioned local ministers to inquire whether the Reformed would be willing. The handful of Reformed families at Frauenberg, originally a Huguenot settlement, were unwilling but the dozen other Reformed scattered in various villages were willing. Two of the latter were the wife of the Oberweimar Lutheran minister and her widowed mother. Over half said they had already joined the local Lutheran community, whether recently or long ago. One man expressly wanted to because the Reformed minister was so far away. With such unanimity the Marburg consistory removed the token Reformed toehold in the three districts and transferred its worship instruments to Cappel. It seems these reports across Upper Hesse, along with the Union’s dwindling vitality by the mid-1820s, spurred state authorities to issue a curious ordinance in February 1826. It permitted a person to cross from one evangelical denomination to the other.52 Authorities hoped this would play down Lutheran-Reformed differences in people’s minds and thereby help facilitate the Union. Authorities had also effectively forced their own hand. By proclaiming the Union, they officially negated any meaningful distinction between Lutheran and Reformed. Yet as the Union foundered in much of Hesse and the Lutheran and Reformed classifications continued, authorities were compelled to let anyone switch who wanted to. To qualify one had to be at least eighteen years old and make the switch voluntarily. After all, commented one Marburg consistory member, crossing over because of denominational pressures was foreign to the spirit of Protestantism. The ordinance, the authorities understood, made possible a new anathema. What if, a consistory member wondered, a Lower Hessian Reformed man

51 52

HStAM, 315f no. 1574. HStAM, 315c no. M166.

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moved to Upper Hesse, married a Lutheran woman, and became Lutheran himself but then, after his wife died, moved back to his Lower Hessian hometown, married a Reformed woman, and wanted to switch back to being Reformed? Should he not be permitted to do so, and to attend the church in which he was born and reared? The consistory member did not want a statute to forbid it, for such would effectively sanction denominational coercion. The consistory acknowledged the hassle that switches would mean for parish record keeping and church discipline. It feared how flip-flopping denominations could produce disputes, misunderstandings, and disorder. As a file kept in Marburg until November 1835 reveals, all switches except a few involved Reformed becoming Lutherans.53 The greatest percentage of persons did so in the first years after the state issued the ordinance. They communicated their intentions to local church authorities at times as individual men or women, and at times as a married couple, as a whole family, or as a group. Forty-two Reformed in Josbach switched on an April day in 1826. In Dodenhausen nine of the eleven local Reformed switched on a day in March that same year. In an indication that immigrants to the region frequently crossed denominations shortly after arriving, eleven more in Dodenhausen switched on a December 1826 day and then three men followed suit with their families in December 1829. In parish Grüsen six switched on an August 1826 day and then ten more on a day in January 1827. In Wohra, Halsdorf, and Langendorf a few dozen switched in January and February 1827, another fifteen crossed over on a day in June, and seven more in February 1828. In 1833 Ludwig Kaiser in Dodenhausen became Lutheran shortly after he turned eighteen. Most people signed their names. Those who could not drew three crosses. Early on the consistory noted that no known cases in Upper Hesse existed in which someone switched denominations “for reasons of dogma.”54 Persons switched rather because of “external circumstances” and regarded the difference between the denominations as “inessential.” The pattern persisted. People cited common reasons: the desire to be of the same denomination as their spouse or children or family members and to worship and communicate with them; the fact that they had married into the local community, which was predominantly Lutheran, and therefore wanted to be part of the local Lutheran community; the strong preference to send their children to school and confirmation lessons locally; the hardships and risks involved in reaching their minister; and, finally, the belief there was no difference between the

53 54

HStAM, 315c no. M166. HStAM, 315c no. M166.

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two denominations. A number of Reformed men and women added that they had already been communicating with the Lutherans for years or decades. Charlotte Pausch was confirmed Reformed in Hersfeld but soon after moved to Halsdorf with her parents in 1811 and received the Lutheran Eucharist until her formal switch in October 1827. The Treisbach forester and his wife were members of the Münchhausen Reformed community yet had been communicating with the local Lutheran community since 1804. The highest concentration of those switching denominations was in eastern Upper Hesse. Many of them, as passing notes indicate, originated from the Reformed parishes of neighboring Lower Hesse. For one betrothed woman, switching meant she and her groom would be of the same denomination. They would then have to pay only one minister the proclamation fee for announcing the marriage. In one of the few cases involving a switch from Lutheran to Reformed, an Ellershausen farmer had localizing motivations for his decision. He asked the Frankenau Reformed presbytery in 1834 to take him and his children into the Reformed community. When asked why, he said the Reformed held regular services in his village, something the Geismar Lutheran minister was not bound to do. In addition, Ellershausen had a local, subsidized, Reformed school. Localizing interests also factored into the one Catholic case in the file. An illiterate man, confirmed Catholic in Paderborn and since married to a Reformed woman in Langendorf, switched to become Reformed because his wife wished it and because the distance to a Catholic priest was too great. A particularly instructive case concerned Johann Heinemann of Ederbringhausen. Heinemann, whose father was from the Reformed parish of Densberg in Lower Hesse, was Reformed. But in 1820 he took his ill newborn son to Oberorke and begged Viermünden Lutheran minister K. F. Herwig to baptize him lest the child die unbaptized.55 His wife at home, Heinemann added, was so sick that he feared she might be dead upon his return. Ederbringhausen Lutherans who had come to the service in Oberorke confirmed his report. Herwig initially demurred because Frankenberg Reformed minister Murhard had ministerial jurisdiction over the baptism of the child. But Herwig relented after Heinemann agreed to pay fees and inform the appropriate Reformed ministers. One of them, Murhard, asked the consistory to protect him from such ministerial predations, which, among other thing, prevented him from keeping the parish registers orderly. In 1833 Heinemann explained that locally he was the only Reformed. While all others attended church in the nearby

55

HStAM, 315c no. M68.

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affiliate Oberorke in parish Viermünden, he had to travel two hours and cross two rivers to communicate in Frankenberg or Ellershausen. At times the rivers swelled so high that they became impassable and forced him to stay home. “What worries me even more,” he continued, “is when, in the future, I am to send my children to Frankenberg for confirmation lessons. It would be so burdensome for me, a poor man, to have to send them away for entire days, especially in winter.”56 Frankenberg Reformed minister Bingel countered each of Heinemann’s arguments. Heinemann was not poor, wrote Bingel, for he had a pair of oxen, a horse, and his own farmstead. Nor was Heinemann the only local Reformed. A thirteen year-old girl had recently been coming from Ederbringhausen for confirmation lessons. If she could manage it even in the worst weather, Bingel asked rhetorically, then how much easier it should be for a strong farmer to come twice annually in seasons of pleasant weather. Moreover, Heinemann had only one son, whom he was sending—without authorization—with other local children to Viermünden for Lutheran confirmation lessons. Bingel accused Heinemann of laziness and of being motivated by comfort. “In my thirty years of holding office as a Reformed minister,” he wrote, “I have not had a single case when any of my Reformed community members became Lutheran.” Bingel, who was supposed to be advocating the evangelical Union, contrasted Heinemann with Bingel’s own ancestors, French refugees in the seventeenth century who had renounced their aristocratic ancestral heritage, properties, and France itself, and had moved to Kassel “in order only to save the faith.”57 It would grieve Bingel if Heinemann were allowed to satisfy his personal ambitions. But Viermünden Lutheran minister E. Menche rebutted Bingel’s specious arguments. He remarked—in words that were also true for every previous century of Christian history along the Eder river—that to reach Frankenberg for ministrations was extremely dangerous and even life threatening. It was especially hazardous at river crossings that had no bridge, only wooden boards tied together and put up in summer before being taken down in autumn. Heinemann should instead attend weekly services in the local “house of God.” As Heinemann testified later, his spiritual needs would be maintained just as well by a Lutheran as a Reformed minister, for “to be a disciple of Jesus depends much more on one’s deeds and life than on our confession (Bekenntniss).”58 56 57 58

HStAM, 315c no. M166. HStAM, 315c no. M166. HStAM, 315c no. M166.

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If the 1826 ordinance was intended to help facilitate the Union, then it may have helped in the one successful case of unification in Upper Hesse, that of Rosenthal. Curiously, G. M. Vollmar, stationed at nearby Wetter, staffed the official post of Münchhausen Lutheran ministerial assistant and also the quasiofficial post of Münchhausen Reformed ministerial assistant. Vollmar at the time was holding monthly Reformed services in Rosenthal. But then a united community formed there in 1827–1828.59 Initially, the unification process went smoothly. The minister, at Eucharist, planned to use the wording from article five of the Hanau synod. The Lord’s Prayer would follow the prescribed formula, and the Reformed altar vessels and linens would remain property of the community instead of being given to nearby Roda for Reformed services there. But later, dispute arose over the willingness of the Reformed to accept the Union. A letter, allegedly written by Reformed elders in the name of the Reformed community, complained that only Jacob Doer, a Reformed town councilman, had known about and supported the proposed union while the rest had not. A “mutual consent between Reformed and Lutherans had always stood” in Rosenthal, they wrote, yet “from time immemorial our evangelical Reformed denomination and its precepts have stood in Rosenthal.”60 The Reformed community wanted Vollmar to continue leading Reformed services. However, a subsequent investigation revealed that Doer was, in fact, not alone. Eight other Reformed members favored the Union while seven, almost all of whom came from the Knöppel family, did not. In any case, the Marburg consistory authorized the Union in Rosenthal on January 4, 1828, although later on August 29 it also permitted “dissidents” to have Reformed services and the Eucharist in private.61 By the early 1830s the matter seemed moot. All dissidents, except one man who later died heirless, had registered with the evangelical community. Included was the Knöppel family. As Daniel Knöppel put it in July 1830, he switched from the Reformed to the Protestant community for familial reasons. His wife belonged to it, and he wanted his children later to be confirmed in it.62 The civil-sacred unity in Rosenthal had been restored after it had been lost more than a century and a half earlier. Down the road in Roda the same climate nurtured by the 1826 ordinance made possible a nakedly contradictory ecclesiastical arrangement. In the 1820s Roda’s commune was over ninety percent Lutheran and had a few Reformed

59 60 61 62

HStAM, 315f no. 801. HStAM, 315f no. 801. HStAM, 315f no. 801. HStAM, 315c no. M166.

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members. In 1820 the Gemeinde had contracted Rosenthal Lutheran rector Henkel to lead a weekly “edification” or prayer hour service, the stated purpose for which was to “build” or “edify the Gemeinde through a Christian reflection.”63 Rural Gemeinden above in Part 1 would have recognized the expression. Then in 1828 Lutheran minister Vollmar suddenly had less income and more available time after Rosenthal adopted the Union and terminated the Reformed services he had been leading. He turned to Roda and offered to hold monthly Reformed services in their church. Henkel described Vollmar’s maneuver as surreptitious and financially motivated. He believed the Gemeinde agreed to it only after Vollmar threatened them. A Marburg consistory investigation revealed, instead, an enthusiastic Roda seeking to add local Christian services. The commissioner put four questions to the village head and to each commune member. The one Reformed member responded diplomatically while the forty-three Lutheran members expressly wanted Vollmar because he had been formally trained and because, unlike Henkel, who was authorized only to stand by the altar and lead prayer, Vollmar could mount the pulpit to deliver sermons. Contracting him at once increased the number and enhanced the status of local Christian ministrations. Meanwhile, Roda also continued paying Henkel to lead weekly prayer hour services. Authorities prior to 1817 would never have dreamed of allowing a Gemeinde to contract both Lutheran and Reformed ministrations. Nor would they have allowed a minister of one denomination to conduct the service of another denomination. Doing either would have violated the very notion of ecclesiastical order. But at a time when they were grasping for anything that resembled progress toward union, church authorities had little reason to object. Roda’s Christian modus operandi appeared again in 1832. A dispute arose over the start times of services on the one Sunday each month when Vollmar and Henkel each held a local service. Even though the Reformed of Roda numbered only two residents, Münchhausen Reformed minister K. V. Renner classified them as a “community” (Gemeinde), and he claimed that they held the legal prerogative to have services scheduled first. He urged them to assert it. The Roda village head, Wasmuth, contested Renner’s claim. Locals had permitted the Reformed service to go first not because it had any prerogative but because they, out of generosity, wanted to do Vollmar the courtesy of being able to fulfill duties elsewhere after the service in Roda. Moreover, Wasmuth continued, the Roda church was not “Reformed” from time immemorial, as Renner claimed. Rather, Lutherans and Reformed had built their church communally in the late eighteenth century, and they still owed a debt of 200 63

HStAM, 315f no. 1871.

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reichsthaler on it. Were Wasmuth to tell the general public that “our church is Reformed or Lutheran,” it could incite a nasty legal battle, for “our church is a Christian, communal [church] and not a Reformed or Lutheran church.”64 In short, although Roda had denominationally mixed members, they operated with a civil-sacred unity reminiscent of the Gemeinden in Part 1, and they maximized opportunities provided by the denominational ministeriums to better their Christian life.

4

The Union Thwarted in Frankenberg

In contrast to Lutheran-Reformed collaboration in the villages the simmering antipathy in Frankenberg between Lutherans and Reformed finally came to a boiling point. The evangelical Union in Frankenberg hobbled into the 1830s but then, following the Easter season in 1833, entered its end phase. As the Union disintegrated, the Lutheran community changed Simultaneum’s function not once but twice in the mid-1830s. They weaponized Simultaneum, first, by facilitating its reintroduction in the Town Church in order to terminate the Union and, then, by leveraging it to restore the pre-1705 local order in which Lutherans exclusively used the Town Church and the Reformed used some other venue, such as the local Hospital Church. The Lutherans’ actions across the late 1810s to the late 1830s explain why the church authorities’ installation of the evangelical Union, and later their reintroduction of Simultaneum, failed in Frankenberg. The authorities did not discern or detect what the Lutherans were aiming for because there had long been a chronic dissonance between the learned elites’ confessionalized understanding of history—one informed by creedal theology and, following 1648, framed by denominational categories—and the communally framed course of history forged by local corporate bodies. “Enough is enough!” exclaimed the Reformed community in a letter from April 26, 1833, demanding an annulment of the Union. They claimed that every effort was made to effect a unity outwardly and inwardly, yet each measure only drove the two sides farther apart. In sum, “such a unity never took place in the actual sense of the word.”65 The Reformed cited numerous reasons for the Union’s failure. The first several reasons concerned the pews. Any Lutherans who sold them in 1822 did so to other Lutherans. Almost no Reformed

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HStAM, 315f no. 1871. HStAM, 16 no. 4287. Emphasis theirs. Also: HStAM, 315f no. 578 and no. 579.

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had a rightful claim to a pew in the Town Church. Whenever the Reformed attended services they were harshly treated, especially when they sat next to— or, worse—between Lutherans. Loud altercations broke out in the women’s pews. The Town Church had insufficient space for holiday services. Beyond these, the Reformed church chest was increasingly insolvent, schooling had deteriorated since the Lutheran and Reformed schools were united, and the Lutheran ministers had imperiously assumed all Eucharistic duties after the first Reformed ministerial post was vacated. Unabashedly, they preached and administered the Lutheran rite. The Reformed members alleged other slights. The lack of common church and school books meant that Lutheran ones were being used. At the 1832 Pentecost service, the Reformed parents and confirmands knew none of the hymns and were unable to sing along. Such schemes caused “disharmony” in church and school. Others, more egregious, did greater harm. During the Easter season in 1833, numerous Lutheran members walked out of the church while the second Reformed minister was preaching. Later, they hurled insults at him. This was “proof of intolerance” and of the Lutheran community’s wish to annul the Union.66 The Reformed members were resolved: “We must therefore return once again to our house of worship.”67 The Reformed estimated renovation of their previous home, the Little Church, at 400 reichsthaler and signaled a readiness to combine their resources with a general donation to fund it. Ministers in Frankenberg, both Reformed and Lutheran, were indeed doing more to undermine the Union than support it. Gone were the early days of the Union, when they made the occasional exaggerated mention of Lutherans and Reformed being united without distinction as a community. Instead, the ministers were now openly siding with their respective communities. Murhard backed the motion of the Reformed community, signed by 112 members, to disband the Union. In 1817, he wrote, the intention was “that only two ministers should work [in Frankenberg] in the future and not four.”68 For this reason, “one closed the Reformed church and promised Reformed members pews in the Town Church.”69 Had two of those four ministers been reappointed to school duties, Murhard continued hypothetically, and had the Reformed been offered pews in suitable locations instead of highly undesirable ones, then

66 67 68 69

HStAM, 315f no. 579. HStAM, 315f no. 579. HStAM, 315f no. 579. HStAM, 315f no. 579.

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they would have attended services and matters would have quieted. His words amounted to a concession that the cause of unification had been lost. Hassencamp refuted Murhard’s assertions. The Reformed had in fact been offered pews. David Renner signed for one in 1825 for four reichsthaler, although he never paid it, and a Reformed parishioner had purchased one of two women’s pews recently consigned in the best location in the church. “And that was intolerant!?” barked Hassencamp.70 Lutherans, he claimed, often found a Reformed parishioner sitting in their pew and had to seek out another one instead. Yet in “fifteen years I’ve never heard a noisy complaint, nor has there ever been a quarrel in the church, especially among men…. On this one might well ask: which other community would show itself so tolerant?”71 As for the 1832 Pentecost service, he noted that the Lutherans did not lead services and select hymns that day; rather, the Reformed ministers did. Hassencamp added that many Reformed and Lutherans had been abstaining from worship services and the Eucharist since 1817 because they objected to the church union. He described Lutherans and Reformed as having become much more distrustful of each other instead of being drawn closer in love. Mistrust had festered especially between Reformed community members and Lutheran ministers and between Lutheran community members and Reformed ministers. Both communities did their part to terminate the Union. The Lutheran community made particularly good use of Reformed minister Bingel. They alleged that, on Maundy Thursday in 1833, he preached in unedifying fashion on Christ’s warning about false messiahs and prophets (Matt. 24:23), declared Lutheran Eucharistic theology to be false and erroneous, and accused Luther of obstinacy at the 1529 Marburg Colloquy. Over one-hundred men signed a statement affirming these accusations as true. Some Lutheran citizens, whenever they saw Bingel was going to preach, simply left the church. Scandalous reports also had it that Bingel had fathered two children with his servant girl, Sophia. “How can such a minister have the respect of the community?” cried the Lutherans before requesting his transfer.72 Bingel denied all charges and accused two Lutheran elders of mounting a conspiracy against him. The Marburg consistory did, however, find him culpable for his pulpit behavior. Especially cynical was the April 1835 petition, sent enthusiastically by the Lutheran community and elders, for Bingel to be appointed to the vacant

70 71 72

HStAM, 315f no. 579. HStAM, 315f no. 579. Emphasis his. HStAM, 315f no. 579. In 1853 Sophia affirmed the reports as true.

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first Reformed post in Frankenberg.73 Their ulterior motive, it seems, was to elevate Bingel so that his duplicity about the Union and intentional provocations would accelerate its dismantling. The Marburg consistory likely saw through the Lutheran community’s words and discerned their intent, but the tide in Frankenberg against the Union was welling too strong for the consistory to rebuke them for it, and besides, so long as the Union was still going, the Lutheran community had grounds to make the petition. They were playing the game and playing it well. The Reformed community also lobbied the consistory. Multiple times in 1834 and 1835 signatories reissued their petition for an annulment of the Union and the restoration of the pre-1817 order.74 Few Reformed members, they wrote, were solicited for their opinion prior to the 1817 church union and 1826 school union; rather, they were led about like uncomplaining sheep, void of any volition as union was effected without their consent. They argued that the Union in Frankenberg was really a minister union instead of a church union since all it did was free the ministers from certain duties on Sundays. A true union, they continued, would require no longer using the names Lutheran and Reformed but rather using the name evangelical. Yet the ministers and communities in Frankenberg continued to bear the names Lutheran and Reformed. In fact, they added, various articles in constitutional records stated that no subject, much less an entire community, could be compromised or hindered in his freedom and public practice of religion. So long as no formal union had occurred in the main and provincial towns of Hesse, neither would they consent to it. By autumn 1835 the Marburg consistory recognized that the situation in Frankenberg was unsustainable. A report from state officials in Frankenberg concluded that of the two options available—a complete union or a return to pre-Union conditions—only the latter was plausible. The consistory, to console itself, rationalized that the Union had been installed with the approval of both communities and, according to the ministers at that time, without dispute. Yet they cited evidence from 1818–1822, including aforementioned letters and petitions and the pew fiasco, that the installation had been done too hastily.75 The consistory thus declared a separation of the Reformed and Lutheran communities and a reintroduction of their respective denominational ser-

73 74 75

HStAM, 315f no. 578. HStAM, 315f no. 578; HStAM, 16 no. 4287. HStAM, 315f no. 579.

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vices. These were to be held in the Town Church, meaning that Simultaneum was to start there again. The Union in Frankenberg was dead. Conventional approaches, framed and conditioned for centuries by a confessionalized understanding of history, would reflexively interpret this Frankenberg case as, for example, indicative of a second confessional age or a reconfessionalization of Christianity after the first one in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.76 If true, then the Frankenberg Lutherans in October 1835 should have been satisfied with where things stood. They could once again receive their denomination’s rites and services; the Reformed could receive theirs now, too. But the Lutheran community did not stop there because the members’ principal motivation was communal, in the sense of reclaiming sacred space and property that they understood to be exclusively theirs, and not confessional in the sense of creedal or doctrinal. They aimed not for a pre-1817 order in which Lutherans and Reformed shared the Town Church and the Reformed also utilized the Hospital Church. Nor did they pursue, say, a late sixteenth-century order in which their primary stated objective was to have doctrinally and liturgically pure services and to participate in them. Rather they targeted the pre1705 order in Frankenberg, one in which the Lutheran community exclusively used the Town Church while the Reformed community held their services in the Hospital Church. They sought to roll back the Reformed encroachments of the 1662–1817 period, which, like those of 1648–1662, occurred in a world made possible by the unanticipated consequences of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia.77 Above all, their actions exacted revenge for the Simultaneum that Landgrave Karl and his Frankenberg coreligionists had forced on the Lutheran community in 1705. Ironically, the Lutheran community in the 1830s flipped the script on Simultaneum by using its reinstallation in 1835 as a catalyst to that end. They weaponized it, just as Karl had over a century earlier, though to the opposite effect. Critically, the Lutherans had to make Simultaneum so disagreeable that the parties involved would want to end it and have the communities use separate 76

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Olaf Blaschke, “Das 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Zweites Konfessionelles Zeitalter?,” Geschichte und Gesellschaft 26, no. 1 (2000): 38–75; Olaf Blaschke, ed., Konfessionen im Konflikt. Deutschland zwischen 1800 and 1970: Ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002). This case of Frankenberg illustrates well the way that “the centuries connect in German history” and the need to “think about historical change over long periods of time” in order to elucidate nineteenth-century German history. Helmut Walser Smith, The Continuities of Germany History: Nation, Religion, and Race across the Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3–4.

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church buildings exclusively. The Lutherans went to work right away on October 18, 1835, the first scheduled Sunday of Simultaneum. When the Reformed arrived at the church, they found the doors locked and the bells’ ropes wound up and inaccessible. In their appeal to Marburg the next day, the Reformed relayed how the Lutheran minister had mischievously played a “game of religion” by telling his Lutheran community a few days prior that the Reformed would not hold services until further notice.78 The consistory replied by authorizing the Reformed access to the Town Church. At 8:00 a.m. on October 25 they started their Sunday service, which was led by Reformed minister J. Fürer, who had just transferred from Kirchhain to Frankenberg. But at 8:45 a.m., while Fürer was preaching, the Lutherans made such a commotion before the church doors that the minister had to send someone out to quiet it. Instead, the Lutherans doubled their level of noise and started ringing the bells, and many community members even pushed their way into the sanctuary, forcing Fürer to stop his sermon. Fürer, a well-intended supporter of the Union, eloquently described conditions in Frankenberg in multiple letters.79 Only eight days into his tenure he reckoned it the most soul-rattling experience of his ten-year ministerial career. Having glimpsed the rancor in Frankenberg, he regarded the separation of the two communities as an entirely just ruling. Yet it hit him “like a bonafide thunderclap” that in 1835, at a time when the Union was completed in so many lands, those of two closely related denominations would separate again and that he, a “mortal enemy of discord,” was in the middle of it. He passionately expressed his commitment to lead “his fellow citizens and friends in Jesus and to do everything that a shepherd would do for the salvation of their souls,” but he pleaded that he not somehow become a “pillar for superstition and a source for new discord and incalculable wicked consequences.” Fürer pinned the debacle principally on the strife over the pews. Why, he exclaimed, could everyone not be more sensible and conduct themselves in a Christian manner? During his first weekend in Frankenberg his community had, “with a thousand tears,” peppered him with pleas, including that he lead them in their own worship service. The Reformed leadership described how Fürer had declared “under no circumstances” would he preach to the Reformed alone, and also that he categorically protested the authorities’ ruling. He “should be our comfort and standard,” they cried, and yet he “is refusing us our worship

78 79

HStAM, 315f no. 578. Fürer’s letters and the quotations in this and the subsequent paragraph are found in HStAM, 315f no. 578.

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service.” Fürer’s affections, however, were elsewhere: “Oh! How my heart longs to return to my faithful, dear community in Kirchhain. [In Frankenberg] there is oppressiveness and curse, night and gloom and the desolate work of darkness, for sadly the distressing spirit of mean-spiritedness reigns here.” Fürer also called out the disorder and contradictions he inherited at his new post. He did not know how to handle even the most elemental ministrations. Was he to administer the Eucharist to the Reformed according to the old rite? If so, then with what? For, he noted, Murhard had sold all the Eucharistic instruments after the 1817 Union. And were the fifteen confirmands to be given a special, that is, retroactive religious instruction? Annulling the Union also increased Fürer’s workload, for now he had to lead a service in Frankenberg every Sunday instead of every other one. He quickly discovered that fulfilling duties in two nearby villages was physically impossible for him. Becker fulfilled them two decades earlier because he was an accomplished rider. Fürer was not, and several hours of walking every Sunday jeopardized his fragile constitution. At one point, Fürer’s exasperation spilled into sarcasm. He relayed how Bingel considered himself minister of the united community, and Lodderhose and Hassencamp associated themselves with the Lutheran community, while Fürer himself officially held a Reformed post—“so then, 3 different denominational ministers!!”80 Unamused, the authorities in Marburg and Kassel reprimanded Fürer for his conduct and insubordination, which they found especially galling in a locale where it was crucial “for a minister to awaken and strengthen a sense of Christian obedience.”81 However, the authorities struggled with the same reality. As a member of the Marburg consistory commented in December 1835, if Simultaneum generated unavoidable conflicts that jeopardized the establishment of peace, then one should set up the Little Church for services “as soon as possible.”82 In early 1836 the Lutheran community continued aggressively leveraging the reintroduction of Simultaneum by driving wedges between the Reformed and their claims on the Town Church. In a February letter to the Marburg consistory, one they resent in June after it went unanswered, the Lutheran community targeted what they called Reformed incursions in the Lutherans’ legally protected space and property.83 The Reformed had been enjoying use of all Lutheran properties but had not contributed anything from their 80 81 82 83

HStAM, 315f no. 578. HStAM, 315f no. 578. HStAM, 315f no. 578. HStAM, 315f no. 578.

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Figure 46

Otto Piltz, Boys’ Choir, 1880

church treasury to help maintain them. Consequently, Lutheran funds had been depleted. Moreover, they claimed that incursions by the Reformed had caused disruptions, for the Reformed not only rang the Lutheran church’s bells for Reformed services but also, allegedly, had caused a crack in the largest bell, damaged the belfry, and endangered the tower itself. The Lutherans stated that the Reformed community could hold services in the Town Church only until their own church was ready. Until then, the Reformed were not at liberty to start and end their 7:00 a.m. service late such that it disrupted the Lutheran service at 9:00 a.m. Lutherans claimed the Reformed had done so with a service on the first day of the 1835 Christmas holiday—a service they believed unnecessary to begin with. “For eighteen years the Reformed had a worship service in common with our community,” the Lutherans wrote, “and by way of it lost nothing on their salvation.”84 During that holiday service, the Lutherans alleged, vindictively, the Reformed schoolboys sat next to their beloved organ and damaged it enough to threaten its ruin. 84

HStAM, 315f no. 578.

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The Lutheran community capitalized on the reinstallation of Simultaneum in other ways too. They complained that Reformed kept attending the afternoon service in the Town Church so that, the Lutheran members contended, the Reformed could maintain a claim on it. The Lutheran community thus demanded that the annulment be completely enforced and a “pure Lutheran service” take place every Sunday afternoon, by which they meant that the Reformed would no longer attend it. Otherwise, it would exacerbate vexing tensions between the two parties. They also wanted Bingel barred from the pulpit altogether, for, in their words, he had called the Eucharist “Reformed” in full earshot of church attendees on Maundy Thursday in 1833. Moreover, since he taught in the united school and was responsible for a total lack of student discipline, they asked that the school be separated in two, or at least that Bingel no longer serve as a teacher. Hassencamp read the community’s letter and generally agreed with it.85 Hassencamp and the Lutherans then utilized additional leverage after the Reformed church reopened in October 1836 and the consistory reinstituted year-round Sunday morning Reformed services. The town’s approximately 250 Reformed, 67 of whom were heads of families, began attending. Hassencamp immediately pushed for the cessation of Simultaneum in the Town Church. Adding to the problems facing the Reformed was a sharp dispute between their community and Bingel over afternoon services on every third Sunday and second holiday. They insisted that these had been held prior to the Union. Across 1837 and 1838, they described how Bingel’s refusal to hold these services caused the Reformed to be “more and more the laughingstock to the Lutherans, something that has left a negative imprint on our community members.”86 Lutherans also took advantage of opportunities during the 1837 Easter season. Everything went fine on the first day, Hassenkamp wrote, but then the Reformed disrupted order on the second day when they sought for the Town Church to be opened and demanded the organ key from the Lutheran organist. Both transpired without Hassencamp’s knowledge and “behind my back.”87 Bells were rung uncustomarily late and the Reformed gathered in the Lutheran church, purportedly according to Fürer’s directive. Neither Hassencamp nor his community were informed of this. Moreover, the clock was set back one half-hour that morning. When the bells were rung, one did not know if they were for the Lutheran service because of the discrepancy on the clock and because prior to the Union the Reformed had never rung “the so-called ‘lower’

85 86 87

HStAM, 315f no. 578. HStAM, 315f no. 578. This quotation and the others in this paragraph are found in HStAM, 315f no. 578.

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bell.” The bell was Lutheran property, Hassencamp argued, and they used it only when the Lord’s Prayer was prayed from the pulpit and on the principal holidays to signal the Lutheran service. “All of this made the Lutherans so confused that they were totally uncertain whether the Lutheran service was starting or not.” Worse, Fürer and his community were still in the church at 9:00 a.m., the hour “when the Lutherans year after year punctually go to their church.” Hassencamp assumed the two communities would henceforth attend services only in their respective churches, an arrangement he believed “appropriate.” People “in our enlightened times have taken up more tolerant dispositions,” he stated, turning on its head the kind of Enlightenment reasoning that had been used to justify the Union a mere two decades earlier. Back then, “enlightened” meant recognizing the reasonableness of uniting Lutherans and Reformed as evangelicals. In the 1830s it meant, for Hassencamp, permitting the distinct communities to worship in separate churches according to their own services. Like Simultaneum and other forms of toleration, enlightened thought did not always produce the same effect. Its effects could vary, and the shift against the Union in Frankenberg threw them into flux. Bitterness mounted as each party disputed the legality of the other’s claims regarding the Town Church. In April 1837, Fürer, who was becoming increasingly partisan, objected to Hassencamp’s letter of complaint and how it characterized events on the second day of the Easter holiday. He wrote, emphatically, that for over a century the Reformed held a “right” to conduct services in the Town Church in the nine months between early February and November.88 Moreover, it was their “right” to start holding such services at any time during any of those months. He, for one, had no intention of giving up these rights; after all, the church and the bells were “property of the town.” To call them property of the town would have been perfectly normative and unobjectionable in the pre-1648 time of civil-sacred unity, and Fürer might have had some grounds for asserting his claim in 1837. Yet the longstanding classification and usage of the church as a “Lutheran” church— realized in the wake of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, the formal division of Frankenberg’s sacred community into Lutheran and Reformed communities by 1662, and Karl’s imperious introduction of Simultaneum in the church in 1705—powered the Lutheran community’s insistence in the later 1830s that the church belonged exclusively to them. Against it the Reformed elders asserted customary arguments: “the falsely so-called Lutheran church, which is more rightly the common Town Church;” “our old right that was in place up

88

HStAM, 315f no. 578.

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to the Union;” “[use of the Lord’s Prayer bell] stands to us by custom;” “it is the case for Reformed in all locales in Upper Hesse and is so explicitly here, where the church as well as the Lord’s Prayer bell is our common property;” and, “we let [our demand to use the bell] cease out of love for peace.”89 These failed to persuade the consistory, which increasingly sought for the resolution that would produce the least amount of unrest. Hassencamp fired back at Fürer. Why does a community of 200 souls with a suitable church, he asked, want to compromise a 2,700-soul community’s use of its church merely to gain a marginal advantage?90 He accused the Reformed of harping on trivialities over alleged rights and obstinately pursuing them through false and absurd means. In the past, the Reformed had proven their intolerance and hostility by constantly letting their services in the Town Church run late. The Lutherans, by contrast, had proven their tolerance and brotherly love by patiently holding their tongue. Simultaneum existed in Upper Hesse, he conceded, but only in locales with one church building. In those with more than one, each used their own church. Lutheran pressure steadily prevailed on the Marburg consistory, which had, since late 1835, expressly worried about Simultaneum’s sustainability in Frankenberg and whether it would become “an abundant wellspring of tensions, the results of which would be a bloody and brawling mass of bodies.”91 The consistory cast doubt on the legal grounds of the Reformed’s demand, stated that strife over the “supposed right had already been ratcheted up to a high degree,” and argued that a “peaceful resolution is difficult to hope for so long as the seeds of discord are spread.”92 After the Easter 1837 incidents, the intimidated consistory did not authorize the Reformed to continue using the Town Church. Instead, it issued a feeble statement that Fürer be punctual whenever holding Reformed services in the Town Church, that he notify his counterpart ahead of time, and that he not use the “Lord’s Prayer bell.” It also suggested to Fürer that the Reformed hold services in the Reformed church throughout the year. Later, the consistory directed Fürer to notify them and receive its permission before ever

89 90 91

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HStAM, 315f no. 578. Emphases theirs. HStAM, 315f no. 578. HStAM, 315f no. 578. One consistory member believed, wrongly, that Simultaneum had not generated bitterness in the past because people were accustomed to it. He believed “the opposite” was true in his day. However, he, like other contemporaries, was unaware of the tumult that had erupted in Frankenberg itself due to Simultaneum’s installation there in 1705. HStAM, 315f no. 578.

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attempting to use the Town Church. Fürer put in that request multiple times in February and March 1838, and he fancifully suggested that Simultaneum would do the most to facilitate a future union. But by then the authorities’ opinion had shifted openly against it. Simultaneum was not a matter of rights, wrote one consistory member, and pursuing it could damage church harmony. The consistory did not grant permission to Fürer. The Lutheran community of Frankenberg achieved its ultimate goal. Simultaneum in the Town Church was dead. The pre-1705 order had been restored. Reformed elders made a couple last appeals in 1842–1843 for access to the Town Church annually each year between February and October. While reiterating prior claims, they added that the Town Church, unlike their own, had a beautiful organ, which encouraged one in worship. But C. F. A. Busch, a new Lutheran minister, countered each point. Shrewdly, he cited Fürer’s own 1837–1838 correspondence for having revealed how shared use of the Town Church stirred troubles between the two communities. Busch questioned whether Landgrave Karl’s edicts in 1704 and 1706, copies of which the Reformed included, had granted the Reformed a “right” to morning services in the Town Church. He also doubted the elders’ claim that the Reformed church was too small. Indeed, it had been newly renovated such that a “thousand communities” would be delighted to have it. If the Reformed were not, then they could hold their worship services in the town hall’s heated room or the church by the cemetery.93 Finally, Busch noted how the Reformed pleaded desperately in 1833–1835 for “a pure Reformed worship service” in their church but now also wanted use of the Town Church. However, Busch continued, a “pure Reformed worship service cannot ever be held at the altar of the Lutheran church.”94 The Marburg consistory agreed with Busch. As one member put it, reinstituting Simultaneum would be “highly inexpedient and foment the biggest disruptions and strife.”95 Kassel authorities concurred in their September 1842 ruling and rejected the Reformed petition. Nothing further was heard about the matter. In records across the 1830s and 1840s one can discern a distinction between the ministers’ and communities’ notion of a pure service. The ministers linked their idea to confessional interests concerning such things as the altar and instruments. The communities linked their notion to communal interests such as each community having a service of its own, and, as the Lutherans in particular fought for, having it in a church exclusively their own. That the Lutherans 93 94 95

EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 20, no. 3. HStAM, 16 no. 4287. Emphasis theirs. HStAM, 16 no. 4287; HStAM, 315f no. 578.

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around late 1835 and early 1836 demanded that no Reformed attend the Sunday afternoon service, which they did to deny them any foothold in the church, highlights this point. Ironically, the two communities ended up more segregated by the 1840s than they had been prior to 1817, when some mutual attendance at services had been going on. The Union’s failure by the late 1830s in Frankenberg, Marburg, Schmalkalden, Bad Arolsen, Bad Wildungen, and other Hessian locales left church and state authorities to wonder why.96 They all blamed the laity. Those in Kassel also faulted the Marburg consistory, for three of its members espoused the Union, while two did not.97 The authorities offered trite and naive proposals on how to salvage it. Kassel supported calling a synod which could formulate a new catechism and hymnal for the united church. It also proposed communities be asked, individually, their intention regarding the Union. If most were in favor, then the Union could proceed. The objecting communities would undoubtedly reconsider and follow the majority. The Marburg consistory stated that “evangelical” ought to replace the names Lutheran and Reformed, even though the consistory itself had scarcely tried it for two decades. It also believed a ministerial appointment to a post offered an opportune time to introduce a common service in locales with mixed populations, even though the consistory itself had just done the opposite in Frankenberg with Fürer’s 1835 appointment. To convince themselves again of the rightness of their cause, authorities in Kassel, Schmalkalden, and Marburg each penned abridged histories that portrayed the evangelical Union as a logical continuation of Hessian church history. Their revisionism muted voices of the past, whitewashed discrepancies, and reconciled irregularities for the sake of their desired narrative. Hessian church history, they proclaimed, was defined above all by a peaceful neutrality instituted from above. Landgrave Philipp began it by hosting the 1529 colloquy in Marburg and issuing his 1562 testament, in which he charged his four sons to hold to the Augsburg Confession. Religious tolerance held fast in subsequent periods because the confessional distinctions in theology were not essential to Christianity. With the anachronistic filter of nationalism they blamed non-German influences from the past. The cleavage in the evangelical movement in the sixteenth century, asserted an 1841 Schmalkalden text, emerged on foreign soil. Luther was a German whereas Zwingli was a Swiss and Calvin a Frenchman. Zwingli did wrong by throwing out images, the organ, adornments, and 96 97

HStAM, 16 no. 4286. HStAM, 16 no. 4286.

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many church songs. Princely powers channeled the external division into the German spirit via the Palatinate and Prussia and via Hesse under Landgrave Moritz. Division, therefore, did not emerge from among the German people, and it existed in the German evangelical church only in outward formalities. Synergistic, adiaphoristic, syncretic, crypto-Calvinist, and other disputes interrupted the peace of the evangelical church in Hesse. They distracted Landgrave Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel, which explained why he disapproved of the Formula of Concord of 1577. Yet evangelical Christianity stood true for not only the Lutherans but also the Reformed, who were included in the Peace of Westphalia because they confessed to this Christianity. The Hessian church did not have a “dogmatic-symbolic foundation,” wrote a Marburg consistory member.98 It had held at arm’s length every extreme party and tendency. It never desired a particular confession by which it would become a secondary branch on the great, evangelical tree of life. The Hessian church was nothing other than the Apostolic, Nicene, Athanasian, and Chalcedonian confession of faith, a fact that “situates us with the general Christian church and the Augsburg Confession of faith.”99 The inner union had always been prevalent in Hesse, he continued. The church Union would be so much more easily accomplished if church leaders could make the people conscious of this through instruction. One Marburg church administrator differed candidly on Hesse’s past. He declared that one could not speak of “neutral” and even less of a “neutrality.”100 Hessian ministers had a long track record of joining and waging polemical battles. Wilhelm IV clearly had inclinations toward the Reformed confession, the administrator wrote, anachronistically labeling the landgrave’s religious sympathies. Moritz and Hedwig Sophia (regent 1663–1677) suppressed the Lutheran denomination in Marburg, Schmalkalden, and elsewhere. Contrariwise, authorities in 1736 forbade Lutherans in Kassel from having a tower or bells in their newly built church. “In time thoughtful Christians fostered a better climate,” he wrote, in a nod to the Enlightenment narrative. He disparaged the numerous Prussian provinces that had introduced the Union by force and military assistance and which, since then, were abolishing it locally. “Why does one want to roil the people, who had finally enjoyed peace and quiet, with unwelcome forms? It is readily apparent that the greater portion of the Hessian people are scarcely ripe and ready” for the Union.101 The 98 99 100 101

HStAM, 16 no. 4286. HStAM, 16 no. 4286. HStAM, 16 no. 4286. HStAM, 16 no. 4286.

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Union’s annulment in Frankenberg, Rauschenberg, and others locales proved the point, he stated.

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Collaborations and Unifications Thwarted in Rural Upper Hesse

By the mid-1840s Hessian church authorities reversed course completely on the evangelical Union. Instead of encouraging it in regions such as Upper Hesse, they worked directly against it. They had to. The Union had an all-ornothing quality to it. Things in a region needed to be united and evangelical or else Lutheran and Reformed. To have both in coexistence would be contradictory and undermine ecclesiastical authority. Disorder would ensue. As the Union’s failure in Upper Hesse was undeniable, church authorities in Marburg abandoned it and hastened back to the status quo ante. Officially recognizing the ecclesiastical separation of the Lutheran and Reformed denominations had various impacts at the local level. In one case concerning Ellershausen, Allendorf, Dainrode, and, above all, Haubern, the authorities terminated the Simultaneum that a local Gemeinde had arranged and compelled the Gemeinde’s civil and sacred dimensions to disunite. Christian history at each of the four villages had been a familiar one of ambition and resourcefulness. A 1613 report reveals that Haubern had, at some point, contracted the minister at the parish mother church of Geismar to hold local services biweekly.102 Haubern reformulated the contract with him in 1614 amid the 1605–1624 period of reforms based on Calvin’s theology, and reaffirmed it with another minister in 1626 after the reinstallation, in 1624, of religious exercise according to the Book of Concord. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a ministerial assistant based in Geismar often led the service in Haubern, and according to a 1789 record a schoolmaster within the parish could lead a prayer service if the minister was detained.103 Following Haubern’s lead, neighboring villages contracted regular, local services with the Geismar minister. Allendorf and Dainrode did so in 1694 and Ellershausen in 1698. Each contract was private and to be renewed annually. Either the minister or Gemeinde could terminate it at the end of a given year, and any new minister was not required to sign on. Yet over time the Gemeinden conflated the contract with custom tantamount to a legal right. So it was with Haubern. Across 1791–1795 Haubern

102 103

HStAM, 22a no. 1:9. HStAM, 318 Marburg no. 852.

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resisted the intentions of the new Geismar minister, J. Fenner, to reassert the rights of the mother church. With a minister in Haubern every other week to lead services, and with parents reluctant to take a newborn to Geismar in any adverse weather, the praxis had become for baptisms to be done in Haubern, sans dispensation from the consistory. For this reason Haubern hotly objected to Fenner’s intention to conduct baptisms in Geismar and to require parents to place a baptismal fee in its church chest.104 They could not remember ever doing either. The Geismar ministers, even elderly ones, had always come to them, and if Fenner would not, then he should direct an assistant to do it for him. The Haubern church had always hosted weddings, too, and no Geismar minister ever objected. In 1793 the consistory issued a Solomonic resolution: between October and April the minister would do baptisms in Haubern and during the other months parents would bring newborns to Geismar. Fenner also challenged Haubern over the holding of biweekly services in their church. He said they had become emboldened in their “mistaken delusion” over the years to the point that they believed holding such services was his duty. He was right that Haubern was unabashed. The members implored the consistory to defend them and to punish Fenner severely if he did not comply.105 They even appealed directly to the sovereign for the customary services “from time immemorial” to be reinstated.106 They did so in vain; ultimately, Haubern and Fenner hashed out a new contract in 1796.107 Haubern grew even stronger in the nineteenth century. In 1824 church authorities permitted the Eucharist’s administration in Geismar’s affiliate churches four times annually while the mother church was being repaired. The affiliates clearly enjoyed the arrangement and, even after repairs were completed in 1829, it continued despite complaints from the church elders of Geismar and Dörnholzhausen, both of which shouldered a greater financial burden for the Eucharistic bread and wine. But Geismar affiliates ran into conflict with their new minister, L. Koch, in the 1840s. In 1844, Koch, citing an excessive work load, terminated the contract with Allendorf, whose members fiercely protested.108 Then in 1848 he suspended the one he had agreed to with Haubern in 1837 and encouraged the four affiliates to find another minister or ordained candidate to lead services in the meantime. The affiliates decried what they feared: the “deprivation of the

104 105 106 107 108

HStAM, 315f no. 671. HStAM, 22a no. 4b:4. HStAM, 22a no. 4b:4. HStAM, 315f no. 565. HStAM, 315f no. 668.

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Figure 47 The church in Haubern, possibly circa 1930. The church had been built in 1772–1773

worship services” would “weaken religious sense and lead to aberrations,” for “the maintenance of religion,” which they esteemed as “the highest good,” was in danger. They implored the consistory to have Koch continue the services, which had been held from “time immemorial,” or hire a “diligent assistant” if he could not.109 The contracts, Koch retorted, were private and not part of his official duties. Why should he pay an assistant to do them? At age sixty-six he had shown that he could fulfill duties in his affiliates. Why could they not come to the mother church for services? Viermünden Lutheran minister Menche investigated the matter and sided with the affiliates. “They used to be accustomed to walking an hour to Geismar in order to be in a church,” he wrote, “[but] that was a different era, [and] perhaps [at that time they] still did not have churches, … but now they have all built churches for themselves.” He judged it unreasonable to expect them to leave the churches empty and travel to and from Geismar. It would “totally disrupt” church attendance, he insisted. “The affiliate Gemeinden must keep

109

HStAM, 315f no. 668.

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their local services. But how can this be made possible?”110 Church authorities decided it could be with a ministerial assistant and greater payments from the affiliates. But when Menche told the affiliates in a June 1848 meeting, they issued bold terms and conditions: baptisms, confirmations, the Eucharist, and weddings in their local churches, with no customary fees paid to Geismar, and no obligations toward parish buildings and properties in Geismar either. The demands stunned Menche. He rightly characterized them as fully detaching the affiliates from the mother church. Koch feared the precedent it could set for other parishes. The nearly fifty members of Haubern,111 most of them Lutheran and a handful Reformed, then capitalized on an opportunity in 1849. Having gone almost a year without local worship services, and apprehending the Gemeinde’s spiritual destitution, they contracted Frankenberg Reformed minister Bücking to hold biweekly services in Haubern. The members might have gotten the idea from the Reformed in nearby Ellershausen. In 1819 the latter had arranged for Reformed services in Frankenau to be relocated to their village and held every third week, and in 1849 they improved the arrangement by contracting Bücking to lead them biweekly.112 Koch consented to the Reformed services in Haubern, but after seeing the locals’ great enthusiasm for them, he became jealous. He quickly hired an assistant to conduct Lutheran services there temporarily. Before the year was out, the opportunistic Haubern members had tried to maximize the localization of Christian ministrations, both Lutheran and Reformed, by contracting Koch and Bücking to lead their respective services in biweekly, staggered fashion.113 Doing so would anchor Simultaneum in Haubern. Local services would occur every week for the approximately four hundred Haubern residents, over ninety percent of whom were Lutheran and the others Reformed. Haubern’s maneuvers triggered fateful consequences. Usually, since 1648, when a commune’s membership became denominationally mixed it would precipitate the split of the local sacred community into two communities and the breakup of the local civil-sacred unity. If services with a minister were contracted, then members of a denomination would do so with a minister of the same denomination. Haubern Christians became classified as Lutheran in the wake of 1648, and Reformed had been residing in Haubern since the 1660s. Rather unusually, however, the Reformed did not call themselves a distinct 110 111 112 113

HStAM, 315f no. 668. HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 249. HStAM, 315f no. 565. HStAM, 315f no. 565.

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Reformed community. Instead, they and others deployed phrases such as “the Reformed inhabitants of Gemeinde Haubern” and “the Reformed members of the Gemeinde.”114 The makings for the disunification of the civil and sacred were present but Haubern had not been compelled to it. The 1849 course of events in Haubern severely alarmed church authorities because Lutheran and Reformed members, in unison, were contracting services with a Lutheran minister and with a Reformed minister. Doing so harmonized with the age-old, communal penchant to localize; yet from the vantage point of the church institution, it violated the very heart of ecclesiastical order and what ministers were ordained to do. Governing authorities described in Part 1 generally supported the efforts of rural Gemeinden to localize Christian ministrations, but those handling the Haubern case judged that doing so would be highly dangerous. Marburg superintendent T. Merle visited Haubern in April 1850. He described the occasion to the consistory as “painful.” He appreciated the “spirit of discipline and order” he witnessed there and the Gemeinde’s earnest effort to satisfy their “religious needs.” Yet, he wrote, the same threatened to “unravel all ecclesiastical relations…. What if every community were permitted to take on a minister to go along with the one already ordained to care for them? Such would rattle the foundations of the apostolic order of the church set down by God, cripple the pastoral function and incite disorder, division, and disruption in the community.” Merle acknowledged the “good, Christian element” that stirred in Haubern. Bücking’s services had clearly met a deep need. But “today or tomorrow entirely different, anti-Christian elements with similar pursuits could tread against us, and to satisfy their lusts [those who take up the pursuits] ‘will heap to themselves teachers who will tickle their ears.’”115 Should the authorities compromise the ecclesiastical order, then others in similar cases could justifiably invoke the precedent of Haubern. Authorities would have no grounds to refuse. Moreover, the logical conclusion of Haubern’s intentions jeopardized the strength and viability of the Geismar mother church. Thus compelled, the superintendent admonished Haubern to reconcile with their ordained minister in Geismar and set everything anew. To facilitate the process, the consistory ordered Bücking to stop leading services in Haubern, effectively prohibiting Simultaneum there. The Haubern case offered perfect irony. For one, in locales across Upper Hesse Lutherans and Reformed had been mutually attending each other’s services for many generations. For another, from 1817 to the early 1840s church 114 115

HStAM, 315f no. 565. HStAM, 315f no. 565.

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authorities amid the Union had essentially advocated what Haubern was doing in 1849, namely, coming together as Lutherans and Reformed and working as one. Differences between the two religions, authorities had said, were inessential. Those who held fast to them were narrow-minded. Moreover, the authorities had freely permitted the Roda Gemeinde in 1828 to contract for Lutheran and Reformed ministrations. But the Union’s ultimate failure forced the authorities by the mid-1840s to revert to the pre-1817 notion of order, which meant governing ecclesiastical affairs along Lutheran and Reformed denominational lines. Haubern’s actions in 1849 threatened it. According to superintendent Merle they were manifesting “the spirit of lawless arbitrariness.”116 Initially, the Gemeinde resisted the authorities’ directives and asked Bücking to continue holding services, “perhaps with the thought,” Bücking wrote, “that they did not want to reenter the contract with Koch.”117 But eventually the Lutheran and Reformed members accepted the inevitable. The Reformed members were pressed into operating as a distinct corpus. In 1862, for example, they self-identified for the first time ever as “the Reformed community of Haubern.”118 As a consequence, even though Haubern had had a denominationally mixed population since the 1660s, the sacred community only divided into two communities following 1849, and the Gemeinde lost its civil-sacred unity for the first time ever. The Haubern Reformed went on to fare poorly. In 1859 they finally contracted biweekly services with the Frankenberg Reformed ministerium. The reintroduction of Simultaneum in Haubern also thrilled local Lutherans. They contributed their own resources to it, and Haubern enjoyed what the Gemeinde in 1849 had sought: biweekly Lutheran and Reformed services that, because they were staggered, provided a localized service every week. But church authorities’ reorganization of Frankenberg’s two Reformed parishes in 1862 ended the private contract. A desperate appeal against its termination sent by nine Haubern Reformed men and the Reformed schoolmaster availed nothing. Worse, by 1864 Haubern’s nearly forty Reformed were redistricted from Frankenau-Ellershausen to the more distant Willersdorf. Their religious life languished. The hour-long, hilly trek to Willersdorf, wrote an elder in 1864 and again in 1872, was utterly impossible for children, the old, and the weak. Frankenberg lay even farther away than Willersdorf. The Reformed had become “like sheep without a shepherd.”119 Their repeated attempts to get a 116 117 118 119

HStAM, 315f no. 565. HStAM, 315f no. 565. HStAM, 315f no. 565. The word used here for community was “Gemeinde.” HStAM, 315f no. 565.

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state subsidy in order to renew the private contract failed. The first Reformed minister of Frankenberg took pity at one point and came twice annually to Haubern to lead services and administer the Eucharist without charging a fee, but his successor was unwilling to continue it. The Haubern Lutherans fared comparatively better. The members reconciled with Koch, but through the 1850s their persistent demand for the Eucharist, baptisms, and locally administered weddings sparked sharp discord with Geismar and nearby Dörnholzhausen. Geismar, which did not want to lose affiliate money, insisted on the rights of a mother church and insulted the affiliate churches as “mere funeral churches.” But Menche firmly backed Haubern and the other affiliates. Five hundred adults were now communicating on holidays, he wrote, forcing ministers to consider administering the Eucharist across two days. He did not believe ministers had the prerogative to tell someone, “You may not go to Eucharist. You must wait until it comes to you.” Such would set the Eucharist on its head, transforming a sacred ministration into a mere custom. “[Parish] relations have changed,” Menche continued. The affiliates had brought the Eucharist to themselves and over the previous twenty-six years, grown accustomed to receiving it, “the parents with their children,” in their local church. Doing so remedied the previous nuisance. “Shall everything be reset to the way it once was, where the holy Eucharist is to be partaken of only in the mother church?” Menche feared it would leave the children with “no church life” and “totally estranged from the Lord’s table.”120 The four affiliates procured modest gains in an 1861 contract with the new Geismar minister. It lasted for a half century, but the elderly and ill were still traveling to Geismar for certain ministrations, as they had for a millennium. The affiliates finally broke through during World War I. The Geismar minister agreed to hold services in the affiliate locales as well as the mother church on church district Sundays in exchange for certain labor services for the parish. In a second case from the 1860s, concerning Rosenthal, the authorities had to deny that the Union and the formation of a united community had occurred there in 1828, reinstituting instead separate Lutheran and Reformed communities. Circumstances made the volte-face necessary. Outside Rosenthal the evangelical Union had long since failed in Upper Hesse. The classifications Lutheran and Reformed remained. Surrounding Rosenthal were Reformed mother churches in Marburg, Rauschenberg, Münchhausen, Frankenberg, and Gemünden an der Wohra, along with their affiliates in villages nearby. These external realities worked their way internally. Over time Reformed individuals moved into Rosenthal, and while some likely attended services with the 120

HStAM, 315f no. 565.

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local united community, others received ministrations from the Gemünden or Münchhausen Reformed minister. Additionally, Sanner, the conciliatory Lutheran minister who had facilitated the Union in Rosenthal, was succeeded by Bang, a Lutheran partisan who associated with the confessional Lutheranism resurging in Hesse, Prussia, and elsewhere. The shifting tide provoked Rosenthal resident Georg Löber and several Reformed families, including three members of the Knöppel family, to lobby in the early 1860s for regular Reformed worship services. An evangelical Reformed community existed in Rosenthal the same as it did in other Upper Hessian towns, declared Lüber. Bang delivered “hyper-Lutheran” sermons and chastised Reformed theology until his zeal had ruptured the “denominational peace of the evangelicals” and inclined “fairly numerous members” of the Reformed community to “feel repulsed” from worship services.121 Löber, who claimed two dozen Reformed resided locally and listed fifteen by name, invoked the consistory’s 1830 decision. Münchhausen Reformed minister Hildebrand, who conducted services and a Eucharist for over twenty Reformed in late 1861, backed their statements. No real united church existed in Rosenthal, he reasoned. Some Reformed joined the united community in 1828 while others did so only tacitly. Their sympathies lay no more with the “united” community than did Bang’s.122 Bang refuted all these claims. He called some of them outright lies. By order of the consistory in the late 1820s there was only a united community, he insisted. Bang also chastised Löber’s son-in-law and another Reformed man as “notoriously unchurched” and carefully noted that both had Lutheran wives. He accused a third Reformed man of communicating with the Reformed, Lutherans, or Catholics on any given day, and with a willingness to do so even if “pork were administered instead of the union host and bitter schnaps instead of wine.”123 He chided four families for having “notoriously become apostates not for confessional reasons,” by which, it seems, Bang meant that they had fallen away from the sacred community for reasons not having to do with doctrine or belief. To a midwife in 1861 he allegedly said he would not baptize a newborn because the father was not Lutheran. Gemünden Reformed minister J. Iffland requested permission to do it but was denied. In the following weeks the father turned to other ministers in the area but they all abstained. The desperate father then went further afield to the nearest Catholic priest, in Anzefahr, but the priest, too, declined to baptize the infant. 121 122 123

HStAM, 315f no. 801. HStAM, 315f no. 801. HStAM, 315f no. 801.

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In a July 1862 ruling the Marburg consistory expediently revised the historical record of the 1820s in order to meet its interests of the 1860s. The consistory, it argued, authorized the Union for Rosenthal on January 4, 1828 on the supposition that both denominations had fully consented to it. But this was annuled or “essentially modified” on August 29, 1828, causing a Reformed community of several members to continue to exist. Thereafter, reasoned the consistory, “no Union existed in reality in Rosenthal. [Instead] numerous Reformed members had crossed over to the Lutheran Church, or rather, [to] the evangelical Protestant community amid a modification of the Eucharistic form.”124 The consistory marshalled other evidence to argue its point. It quoted Bang himself, who mentioned “a Reformed and Lutheran community in Rosenthal” in an 1855 report.125 The community was officially registered as a “Lutheran community” in the state books. Bang, as a “Lutheran minister” of a “Lutheran community,” had participated in the 1858 election of the Lutheran superintendent, a function from which Reformed ministers of Upper Hesse were entirely excluded.126 Bang, who was once a Lutheran ministerial candidate and who had been ordained by the Lutheran superintendent, could not credibly classify himself “united,” especially after having been born of Lutheran parents and confirmed in the Lutheran church. From the Union’s beginning in Rosenthal, concluded the consistory, the body of Reformed might have participated in local Lutheran church life. But they did so only because of the strenuous two hour journey to their parish base in Münchhausen for ministrations and catechetical instruction for their children. The parochial relations of Rosenthal’s Reformed to the Reformed Münchhausen-Wetter parish had never been dissolved, and the Reformed in Rosenthal had repeatedly tried to secure their own Reformed service, Eucharist, and parish relations. The Rosenthal presbytery replied that the consistory’s August 29, 1828 decision in fact strengthened its earlier, January 4 authorization of the Union, for the decision’s own words said “the Union was to remain as is,” while the seven dissenting Reformed members would be permitted to have a Reformed service.127 Moreover, almost all of the seven shortly thereafter came over to the evangelical community until virtually all local evangelicals were in the

124 125

126 127

HStAM, 315f no. 801. HStAM, 16 no. 4286. Moreover, as seen in a superintendent’s 1855 record, Marburg authorities, consciously or not, eventually started calling the community in Rosenthal “Lutheran” instead of “united.” HStAM, 315f no. 801. HStAM, 16 no. 4286. Emphasis theirs. HStAM, 16 no. 4286.

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Union community. The presbytery also baldly charged the consistory with being incompetent to rule on an interdenominational union, for the same body of authority could not declare a union in 1828 but then countermand its ruling sometime later. The Union in Rosenthal, wrote the presbytery, became fully and legitimately established, and it did so above all “because it is an outflow of the will of [royal] authority.”128 An ecclesiastical administration such as the consistory need not confirm whether “every single little community had achieved Union because the authorization had already been issued from the head of the church.” All members of the one united community in Rosenthal had lived in undisturbed peace. “From [1827] right up to this hour,” they wrote in 1863, “the local community has considered itself as a united [one] and has also stayed true to the Union in the years when it was ruined in the neighboring towns of Gemünden and Frankenberg. [The community] wants to preserve the glorious inheritance of their fathers for their children and grandchildren.”129 The presbytery faulted Löber. “Shall the peaceful work of a whole community be subject to the peace of an unchurched single [man] and [his] church-avoiding intentions?”130 In their view Löber had latched onto revolutionary political messages from a territorial assembly in Kassel and, upon his return, poisoned Rosenthal with malice and intrigue. Bang failed to get him to forswear the revolutionaries’ godless ways and stay true to his authorities. In retaliation, the presbytery believed, Löber petitioned for Reformed services. The Rosenthal case also exposed the irony of the church authorities’ volteface regarding the Union. A generation earlier, “united” ground was all they wanted, but now, in the 1860s, they insisted it did not exist. In fact, united ground was wholly anathema: “[I]n any case we must regard it as troublesome to have a united community in plain sight of Lutheran and several Reformed communities surrounding it,” wrote the Marburg consistory. “To which denominational [or] diocesan association would it belong, Lutheran or Reformed? Or should it stand totally autonomous or be consigned to the Hanau Union?”131 Shuddering to think of the pandora’s box such hypotheticals could open, the consistory ruled the Rosenthal complaint to be unfounded and forwarded the matter to the Interior Ministry in Kassel, which affirmed the Marburg consistory’s decision.132 By December 1862 the consistory authorized Iffland to hold

128 129 130 131 132

HStAM, 16 no. 4286. Emphasis theirs. HStAM, 16 no. 4286. HStAM, 16 no. 4286. HStAM, 16 no. 4286. Emphasis theirs. HStAM, 315f no. 795.

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regular Reformed services in Rosenthal. In 1863 it joined the Reformed community in Rosenthal to the Reformed parish in Gemünden. In yet a further twist, locals in Rosenthal who had wanted a whole or united community did eventually get it, albeit under the Lutheran moniker. Across the 1860s and 1870s the Reformed’s lack of finances, not to mention the two hour distance between Gemünden and Rosenthal, took its toll.133 By 1881 Reformed numbers in Rosenthal had shrunk to four families. They acceded to Gemünden Reformed minister Martin’s offer to hold services twice annually instead of monthly. According to Rosenthal Lutheran minister D. Ernst, the Lutheran community denied that the Reformed ever had any right to the church. They proposed the Reformed attend the second Lutheran service and consider Ernst their chaplain. The Lutheran members thus emulated those in Frankenberg by trying to terminate Simultaneum, but instead of driving Reformed services into another building, they aimed to absorb the Reformed into their own ranks. Ernst, however, was apprehensive about adding a chapter to the region’s complicated history: “It would pain me to have to take up again here the old defensive war of the Lutherans in Upper Hesse against the encroachments of the Reformed ministers. For both churches in Hesse are not merely siblings, rather twins.”134 Ernst could soon forget about it. By 1883 the Reformed Eucharist ceased to be administered in Rosenthal, and by 1885 only eight Reformed remained. The others had started receiving the Lutheran Eucharist and confirming their children Lutheran. Martin questioned whether a Reformed community still existed there. The consistory suspended Reformed services in Rosenthal indefinitely, directed Reformed properties to be placed in the Lutheran parish house, and had the lone Reformed elder participate in the Lutheran presbyterial meetings. In a third case concerning Schreufa, authorities quickly nixed a locallymade arrangement that had shades of a local civil-sacred unity. Lutherans and Reformed in Schreufa had made remarkable strides despite their highly charged history. The two local presbyteries united in 1832,135 and an 1838 document refers to the “united community of Schreufa,” which, in this case, meant Lutherans and Reformed were mutually attending each other’s worship services.136 But when the Marburg consistory reorganized Frankenberg’s

133 134 135 136

HStAM, 315f no. 798. HStAM, 315f no. 798. HStAM, 16 no. 4287; HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 1278. HStAM, 16 no. 4964.

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Reformed parishes in the 1860s and switched Schreufa from the first to the second Reformed parish in 1865, the Reformed became outraged.137 Members cited “an old right” of having belonged to the first parish since 1685. The Reformed and Lutherans in Schreufa had become almost brotherly with one another, they wrote in a letter with all their signatures, but now “conflicts had been sparked, every Christian had reason to be angry, and flames were sure to be fanned.”138 They flatly rejected the consistory’s assurances that the new arrangement benefited them and that state funds would cover costs associated with the second parish house. They refused to attend Reformed services on Sunday and allegedly schemed on the streets to keep other regular attendees, including Lutherans, from entering the church. Frankenberg first Reformed minister C. W. H. Hochmuth accused the ringleaders of huddling in a local tavern deep into multiple nights and of accosting a Frankenberg schoolmasterin-training who had dropped by Schreufa for a meal. The Schreufa Reformed’s new minister, Frankenberg second Reformed minister G. Fennel, called the Reformed “renitents” and their behavior “stiff-necked opposition.” He wished to be free again of such a community. Meanwhile, the Schreufa Reformed reportedly collaborated with Viermünden Lutheran minister Menche. Apparently, that included arranging for a Lutheran Easter service in Schreufa because, soon after, the Lutheran minister formally announced the service. The Reformed attended it instead of the Reformed one. The Reformed thus created a Simultaneum at Easter by securing a Lutheran service. If only for a brief window of time, there was something approaching or resembling a civil-sacred unity in Schreufa. After the Easter service Menche chatted with them on the streets and in their homes. Fennel was appalled by his counterpart’s “irresponsible” conduct and called him “the ‘evil spirit’ of the opposition party.” “Thus with courageous regard for the Lord I must take hold of the weapon,” Fennel wrote, as he pleaded for the consistory’s backing. For him the fight only intensified as Menche reportedly went to Schreufa almost daily to talk with the renitents and, in Fennel’s words, to “strengthen them in their spirit of opposition.” In May the Reformed superintendent in Marburg visited Schreufa and described Menche’s conduct as collegial. But he confirmed the strident opposition in Schreufa. His efforts to reason with Reformed leadership and members availed nothing.139 In 1866 the Interior Ministry turned away the Reformed’s complaint, but time apparently

137 138 139

HStAM, 315f no. 564, 572. HStAM, 315f no. 572. HStAM, 315f no. 575.

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brought healing. An 1871 record indicates Reformed and Lutheran services occurred as per usual in Schreufa and were always well attended.140 Finally, by reverting officially to separate Lutheran and Reformed operations, authorities left themselves in a compromised position later in the 1880s when they entertained, once again, the unification of Lutheran and Reformed in a case in Gemünden an der Wohra. During the nineteenth century Reformed numbers dwindled in pockets of eastern Upper Hesse, mostly because so many of them opted to become Lutheran.141 Eventually, however, enough immigrants from Lower Hesse retained their Reformed classification and helped build a sustained Reformed presence in the area. When the Reformed post in Gemünden an der Wohra became vacant in 1886, members of the Lutheran and Reformed communities agreed to found a single evangelical community. Financial considerations partly motivated them. The town had recently created a fourth school post, but doing so kindled thought of forming an evangelical community because then the town could combine two of the posts into one and thereby reduce costs. Certain, confessionally committed Reformed members abstained from the meeting, reported the mayor, because they believed the Reformed were to be transferred to the Lutheran minister. “This is not the intention,” he wrote, “rather one merely wants to found an evangelical community. Such a union was the wish of the assembled church elders, teachers, town officials, and various members of both communities.”142 Nevertheless, twenty-five Reformed men signed a protest declaring that “we have neither expressed the wish nor, much less, petitioned the royal councilor in Frankenberg that we be joined to the Lutheran community.”143 They wanted the Reformed post refilled. The Reformed in tiny, nearby Hertingshausen echoed the sentiment: “[w]ithout exception,” they intended to remain “true to their faith and to the custom of their fathers.” Reformed heads of household in Dodenhausen and Haddenberg added that if a Reformed minister ceased to exist in Gemünden, then they would sooner be joined to the nearby, Reformed church district of Densberg in Lower Hesse. Authorities in Kassel were open to the idea of an evangelical community in Gemünden. Apparently, since the 1860s, as the political tide of the Kulturkampf fostered a united German Protestantism, they had changed their

140

141 142 143

A long history of parish squabbles between Viermünden and Schreufa ended in 1887 when the Lutheran community of Schreufa was transferred from parish Viermünden to the second Lutheran parish of Frankenberg. HStAM, 180 Frankenberg no. 1278 and 1365. HStAM, 315f no. 795, 797, 2465, 2466, 2468, and 2470. HStAM, 315f no. 795. HStAM, 315f no. 795.

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mind about nullifying Lutheran-Reformed unification and once again welcomed the prospect. However, in an oblique decision that masked their eroded credibility on the issue, the consistory in Marburg cited the “difficulties” that had arisen and decided not to pursue it further. In closing, much of Hesse did not join other German lands that achieved evangelical union. Authorities in Kassel pointed the finger at laypeople. The Union had not succeeded, they wrote in the late 1830s, because of the “ignoramus” who “clings to distinctions between Lutheran and Calvinist Eucharistic theology, even though the general populace in fact knows little to nothing about it.”144 The elites, a full generation after the Union, still did not grasp why it had failed in numerous regions. In reality, Eucharistic theology had very little to do with the Union’s failure, and the general populace was not clinging to the distinctions. The percentage who did in the nineteenth century was generally the same as in previous centuries—very small, and they usually resided in urban areas. From the sixteenth century, the time when churchmen first formulated the distinction, rural communities commonly affirmed the Eucharist as Christian, regardless the form of its administration. The elites’ same misreading of the local past and present surfaced again in Frankenberg on September 21, 1862, when the Reformed celebrated the twohundredth anniversary of their community.145 The committee had extended invitations to local Lutheran ministers and presbyters, town authorities, and Marburg dignitaries. The day itself was festive. Bells were rung at 6:00 a.m. and a choir gathered at 7:30 a.m. on a plateau above the town to lead the assembled in hymns such as “How Glorious Shines the Morning Star.” Participants then convened at the town hall by 8:30 a.m. before proceeding to the Reformed church for a 9:00 a.m. service. A tablet inscribed with “In Memory of 21 September 1662” had already been placed in the choir area. Only forty-five years earlier the Reformed in Frankenberg affirmed their common Protestant heritage with Lutherans. Now they were celebrating their distinct Reformed founding in Frankenberg. From the pulpit, first Reformed minister Hochmuth delivered two contrasting messages.146 He commemorated Reformed history in Frankenberg by 144

145 146

HStAM, 16 no. 4287. This attitude reflected contemporary German intellectuals’ contemptuous view of the masses, which is described in James Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 203–4. It had been around for a long time: “Village folk who understand very little of the Word of God, are stiff-necked and hard to pry from their accustomed abuses,” wrote a theologian of Brandenburg-Ansbach in 1527. Hamm, “The Urban Reformation in the Holy Roman Empire,” 200. HStAM, 16 no. 4430. The message, and passages quoted from it here, are found in HStAM, 315f no. 571.

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telling a tale—unknowingly, an anachronistic one—of how the religion survived initial resistance in the 1605–1624 period and the devastating Thirty Years War until a Reformed parish was finally founded in the town. The occasion was, therefore, a “day of honor” for the whole Reformed church in Hesse, for in Frankenberg it had set a deep anchor. At the same time, Hochmuth said, the evangelical Union had long been completed in many German lands by 1862, and he lamented the ongoing division in the evangelical church in Hesse. Quarrel and discord had split the “wall of Zion.” “The damage,” Hochmuth intoned, “is as great as an ocean. Who can heal it?” He assured his audience that God would bring that unity and appealed to them to participate in it. “How would it be, beloved, if we, in this festive hour, renewed in our town the bond that has since enveloped our evangelical communities, the bond of the evangelical faith, evangelical love and evangelical peace … ?” From the “single root of the glorious Reformation,” he said, God had let two boughs emerge in order to “merge them into a tree of the evangelical denomination.” The townspeople could be certain of such joy and hope, which were growing among them with each passing day, “always more pure and rich, free and happy.” In a flawed understanding of history that had reigned since the late seventeenth century (and which still holds sway today), Hochmuth stated that “[w]ith the Westphalian Peace, a new period of ecclesiastical and civil tolerance” had been instituted. He thus encouraged the townspeople to reach beyond the “narrow denominational cubicles” and take hold of the evangelical hand of unity. Later that day, the second Lutheran minister preached similarly to his congregation about how “Heaven and Earth will pass away,” insinuating that denominational division among evangelicals should do the same. The two ministers got their wish, though not during their lifetime. Commemorative services for the quadricentennial of the Reformation in 1917 were held in what was still the “Lutheran church,” and ministers in Frankenberg as well as in the wider district made no reported mention of any Lutheran-Reformed spirit of unity.147 Lutherans and Reformed in Frankenberg united as evangelicals in 1959. Yet the region’s ecclesiastical rank and file themselves were contradicting the 1862 exhortations of the Frankenberg ministers. Lutheran clerics across Upper Hesse made sure to point it out. In June 1863 the Lutheran superintendent and metropolitans and forty Lutheran ministers signed a petition for jurisdiction over Lutheran affairs to be given to Lutherans.148 By 1704 in Upper

147 148

EKF, Gr. 2, A, Kart. 22. HStAM, 16 no. 4286.

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Hesse, they wrote, Reformed affairs had been consigned to the Kassel consistory, while Lutheran ones continued to be governed by the Marburg consistory. But in 1822, a time when the distinction between the two denominations “was nearly forgotten,” a newly formed provincial consistory containing a majority Reformed membership was given jurisdiction over both the Reformed and Lutherans within Upper Hesse.149 This, the Lutheran clerics continued, not only conflicted with a 1760 decree that affirmed the Lutheran superintendent would have no right over Reformed affairs and vice-versa, but it also meant a Reformed majority opinion could hold sway over the predominantly Lutheran region of Upper Hesse. The clerics described the Reformed in Upper Hesse as having a “strong and sharpened consciousness,” for the Reformed had just successfully lobbied for a high-ranking Reformed post (Metropolitan) and for their parishes to receive a special classification.150 The clerics wanted the Lutheran church of Hesse, especially the Lutheran diocese of Upper Hesse, also to have a body of ecclesiastical authority for their denomination and guaranteed rights. The Marburg consistory rejected their plea. Its own membership was not intended to whet denominational antagonisms, the consistory reasoned, and it never conducted business in a way that interfered with the interests of the Lutheran church. To split the consistory along denominational lines would be as unfeasible as to split the Interior Ministry along the same. With these words the consistory justified the singularity of its own institutional corpus even though it governed a region’s separate Lutheran and Reformed institutions. It did so around the same years when it forced the united community in several rural locales to separate into Lutheran and Reformed communities. 149 150

HStAM, 16 no. 4286. HStAM, 16 no. 4286.

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Conclusion to Part 2 As for the question of religion and the rise of the modern secular and liberal state, Luther and the Reformers’ principle of sola scriptura may have unintentionally bred a chaotic mess of parties quarreling over the correct interpretation of the Bible, and this may have compelled the state to become secular in order to control the churches and maintain societal order.1 The rural Gemeinden seen in Part 1 did not contribute to the process. The Christian culture they nurtured and the order they valued worked against those trends. After 1648 many rural Gemeinden, as seen in Part 2, were drawn to a degree into the modernizing process by the repercussions of the Peace of Westphalia. The story in some circles in Western Europe may be that they were as divided after the mid-seventeenth century as before and that confessional or denominational adherences only grew stronger in the decades leading to 1700.2 The story for the rural Gemeinden in these German lands offers sharp contrasts. Many of them never divided during the sixteenth through twentieth centuries. The others became divided, for the first time, starting around the end of the seventeenth century. The division had its origins in the 1648 Peace of Westphalia, and it prompted authorities to want to regulate its effects. In a historical irony, princely states augmented their own power by unknowingly setting in motion processes that could turn locally established order into disorder and then issuing sanctions in order to establish order as the states newly defined it. Rural Gemeinden had differing experiences in relation to government regulation. Those in Part 1, which faced less government involvement, improved their circumstances according to communal interests and did so at times they judged opportune. By contrast, as seen in Part 2, government initiatives and the intelligentsia’s agendas, which cosponsored each other, tended to complicate or upend the Gemeinden’s efforts. While rural Gemeinden through the early seventeenth century neutralized the threat to their civil-sacred unity posed by confessional versions of Christianity, all of them suffered from the ensuing Thirty Years War. Many of them also succumbed to the divisive fallout of the 1648 Peace, and many were disrupted by the attempts at an evangelical Union in the early part of the nineteenth century. Even the intellectually minded within the church, state, and university bureaucracies, who usually 1 Brad Gregory, “The Reformation and Modernity: Explaining the Causal Nexus,” in Howard, Noll, Protestantism after 500 Years, 141–64. 2 Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Belknap, 2012), 162–63.

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went unaffected by the ideological programs they set in motion, had to reckon with the consequences. While they were trying to extinguish administrative brushfires at the local level, which their predecessors had sparked, they inadvertently touched off new ones in a recurring pattern of ironies across the centuries. The elites often conveyed an awareness that such deleterious effects had causes, but the Catholic-Protestant lens through which they looked at the past distorted their view and led them to a fundamentally flawed understanding of how to remedy the problems. On this note, the record from these territories commends toleration as a burden to be suffered and cautions against toleration as a virtue to be championed.3 Delegations at the Congress of Westphalia may have intended to remedy conflict due to religious difference. But, paradoxically, they dramatically promoted conflict in Imperial territories as well as in rural Gemeinden, where it had not previously existed. They did so by effectively terminating the cuiusregio principle and eliminating the basis for a wider pluralization that had existed after neighboring territories had adopted differing confessional religions. Doing so enabled religious variety to exist within Gemeinden of those territories instead of between Gemeinden that stood on opposite sides of the territorial border, and it threw the door wide open to the dismantling of the civil-sacred unity of local Gemeinden, rural and urban. Inserting the supreme measure of toleration—the principle of exact equality—into an Empire in which practical forms of toleration such as exile, Auslauf, and Simultaneum were already present did not in evolutionary fashion make for greater toleration or a more tolerant society. It nourished a divided and disputatious one. The 1817 evangelical Union did much the same by reshuffling names, definitions, and lines. As for the course of Europe’s history, the 1648 Peace of Westphalia was not a momentous occasion in a historical arc bending toward peace, civility, and unification on the continent, as the member states of the European Union have asserted. In 1998 they repurposed the continent’s contentious Catholic-Protestant history. They commemorated the 350th anniversary of the 1648 Peace of Westphalia by considering how polities with Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed allegiances in the mid-seventeenth century set precedents that beckoned the European Union’s own members to move beyond their warring past and to unify.4 When viewed from the vantage point of the Holy Roman

3 Some conclusions here resonate with ones found in Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England 1500–1700 (New York: Manchester University Press, 2006), 300–322. 4 Klaus Bussmann, Heinz Schilling, ed., 1648 – War and Peace in Europe, 3 vols. ([Münster], 1998).

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Empire’s estates or from the present day, the 1648 Peace appears to have cleared a path for German as well as European lands to enter a more modern phase of civilization, a path leading to secularized politics and the Enlightenment,5 a path whose promised destination Europeans of today can claim to be reaching. But the outcomes of the 1648 Peace were more problematic than such rosy appraisals would have it. From the standpoint of rural Gemeinden it is partial and misleading to claim that the Empire’s population was caught up in the menace and threat of religious pluralization up to 1648 and that the Peace then provided the solution of tolerance;6 or that the 1555 Religious Peace of Augsburg was a milestone on the road to modernity and that the 1648 Peace of Westphalia was an important signpost of toleration.7 If 1648 was a “turning-point of universal historical significance,”8 then it was so for many local Gemeinden because of the disruptions, divisions, and griefs it produced within them. Framers of the 1648 Peace, their good intentions notwithstanding, set in motion a host of unintended consequences. Some of these continue in the twenty-first century.9 Today, when entering a Hessian village that has both local Catholic and evangelical services, one commonly passes a sign indicating their regular start times. A Catholic-Protestant reading of history would have it that the Reformations of the sixteenth century were responsible for the sign’s presence. They were not. Responsibility lay with the 1648 Peace of Westphalia. Just as the arc of history for the rural Gemeinden did not bend toward the Reformations or the Thirty Years War or the Enlightenment, so also did it not curve toward nineteenth-century nationalism or Germany’s twentieth-century disasters. The idea that “the beginning reconfessionalization of religion at the start of the nineteenth century also meant … the confessionalization of German national thought” may have traction among those figures who discoursed about religion and the nation, but it would have been foreign to the 5 Heinz Duchhardt, Europa am Vorabend der Moderne 1650–1800 (Stuttgart, 2003), 132–75; Volker Gerhardt, “On the Historical Significance of the Peace of Westphalia: Twelve Theses,” in Bussmann, Schilling, 1648 – War and Peace in Europe, 1:485–89. 6 Winfried Schulze, “Pluralisierung als Bedrohung: Toleranz als Lösung: Überlegungen zur Entstehung der Toleranz in der Frühen Neuzeit,” in Der Westfälische Friede. Diplomatie. Politische Zäsur. Kulturelles Umfeld. Rezeptionsgeschichte, ed. Heinz Duchhardt (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1998), 115–40. 7 Gotthard, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden, 501–86. 8 Heinz Schilling, “War and Peace at the Emergence of Modernity – Europe between state belligerence, religious wars, and the desire for peace,” in Bussmann, Schilling, 1648 – War and Peace in Europe, 1:20. 9 Part 2 of this book adds to the unintended consequences of the Reformation, as discussed in Gregory, The Unintended Reformation. The consequences presented here, however, did not lead to a secularization of rural society.

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rural Gemeinden.10 Nor does the evidence suggest that residents in villages and rural towns bothered much about the Kulturkampf in the 1870s. Studies of the Kulturkampf’s history have concentrated on urban areas because that, it seems, was where it largely played out.11 Evidence examined for this book argues that rural Gemeinden in Hesse thought very little in terms of Germany or the German nation or a national identity or what role religion should play in regards to them.12 Such concerns, along with calls for the nation to be culturally pure, swirled about elsewhere in bourgeois, intellectual, and governing circles.13 Rural Gemeinden in evangelical parishes may have been part of the Protestant fold from an ecclesiastical vantage, but they fostered a culture that was not principally Protestant. They kept dialoguing instead about matters of communal concern. They identified with their locality and the surrounding region as intensely as before, if not more so. Hitler and Nazi Germany may have intersected with the rural Gemeinden, but among the Gemeinden it is difficult to discern a meaningful attachment to the nation-state or any apparent road to Hitler and Nazi Germany. The war memorials in many villages of central Germany today witness to this dissonance between rural Gemeinde and the nation-state. They list the names of locals who died in war during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, most commonly in the two World Wars. Against macro-level narratives

10

11

12 13

Wolfgang Altgeld, Katholizismus, Protestantismus, Judentum: Über religiös begründete Gegensätze und nationalreligiöse Ideen in der Geschichte des deutschen Nationalismus (Mainz: Grünewald, 1992), 162. Foreign, too, would have been the notion of the Germans as a “chosen” people and a yearning for an ideal Christian nation. Hartmut Lehmann, “‘God our Old Ally’: The Chosen People Theme in Late Nineteenth- and Early TwentiethCentury German Nationalism,” in Many are Chosen: Divine Election and Western Nationalism, ed. William R. Hutchison and Hartmut Lehmann (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1994), 85–107. Rebecca Ayako Bennette, Fighting for the Soul of Germany: The Catholic Struggle for Inclusion after Unification (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012); Helmut Walser Smith, German Nationalism and Religious Conflict: Culture, Ideology, Politics, 1870–1914 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995). Because rural parishioners were generally not preoccupied with the question of nationalism and confession (in the sense of denomination), neither did they participate in the ecumenization of the national idea, as described in Landry, Ecumenism, Memory, and German Nationalism, 1817–1917. Helmut Walser Smith, Germany: a nation in its time: before, during, and after nationalism, 1500–2000 (New York: Liveright, 2020). Edward C. Mathieu, “Public Protestantism and Mission in Germany’s Thuringian States, 1871–1914,” Church History 79, no. 1 (2010): 115–43; Brian Vick, “The Origins of the German Volk: Cultural Purity and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Germany,” German Studies Review 26, no. 2 (2003): 241–56.

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Figure 48

Dedication of a new cemetery and a soldiers’ memorial in Allendorf, 1928

such as Latin Christendom’s demise and Europe’s rise, or how notions of a German nation eventually enabled ideological nationalism and national socialism, the memorials’ presence seems plausible and explicable. Against the story of rural Gemeinden, such memorials seem like an aberration. While the commemoration of the fallen of a village paralleled a millennium of localizing trends, a disconnect exists between the course pursued by rural Gemeinden and the era of the World Wars.

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Epilogue The culture of rural Hesse continued to be chiefly Christian and communal into the twentieth century. In contrast to secularizing trends such as the radical Enlightenment and higher criticism, the prevailing forces in villages and rural towns did not steadily put God in the dock.1 Yet the formerly robust attendance in rural Hessian churches has plummeted in recent generations. The local culture has, per consensus opinion, become pervasively secular or post-Christian. One wonders why. Asking this of locals around rural Hesse over the past couple decades has elicited a range of responses: “because of the miracle economy after the war people became materially satisfied and forgot about God” or “philosophical and intellectual trends eroded the faith” or “the counter-culture of the 1960s rejected the stature and authority of clerics” or, most often, “it has to do with the war [i.e., World War II].” One would think that the World Wars, especially the Second, did have a lot to do with it. Yet the fourteenth-century plague and the Thirty Years War ravaged rural Gemeinden at least as much, and still the Christian culture resurged in them each time before reaching an all-time high. Perhaps the rural Christian culture would have rebounded by the later twentieth century if the animating forces that buoyed it for over a millennium had remained vibrant. Instead, they weakened, rapidly. In the twentieth century the industrialization of agriculture swept the countryside and fundamentally transformed the relationship of residents to the surrounding land. A few generations ago most households possessed and derived income from agricultural fields surrounding the village, and most had livestock, including a cow or two. Today, many rural Hessian locales, like ones elsewhere in Europe, have only a couple farmers in residence. Some have none at all—farmers from nearby areas come to work their fields. Federal administration has supplanted the local Gemeinde in terms of managing and financing the salaries and infrastructure of parishes belonging to the state churches. To pay the maintenance on many church buildings, Germany’s state churches have been selling certain properties and renting or leasing others. Mobility has changed dramatically. From time immemorial locals traveled daily as far as their feet or maybe a horse and wagon could take them. Then the steam engine and motorized transport speedily reconfigured the parameters of their social network and

1 Part VII, “God in the Dock (1492–present),” in Diarmaid MacCulloch, Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (New York: Viking, 2010), 769–1016.

© David Mayes, 2023 | DOI:10.1163/9789004526495_018

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professional lives. Cars and trains also joined mass immigration of evacuees from the east after 1945 to speed the decline of traditional dress, and they converted locales far from urban centers into so-called bedroom communities as residents commuted to jobs in Frankfurt am Main and elsewhere. Moreover, larger urban areas sprawled, absorbing neighboring rural locales. The abandonment of settlements, a common development for many centuries and one that had bolstered neighboring locales’ capacity to improve their own parish relations, ceased to occur by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. House and barn inscriptions evidence the shift. Of those from the 1914–1945 period, which are comparatively very few, a 1922 stone engraving in Stausebach articulated a refrain of ages past: Built with God’s help by Anton Höck and his wife Monika. A 1932 barn in Ebsdorf similarly read Built with God’s help and blessing, while adding, from Psalm 50:14, Offer to God thanksgiving and fulfill your vows to the Most High. A 1946 beam in Heskem also hints at continuity: The house that casts itself on God stands fast. But inscriptions by the later twentieth century signaled a change.2 An innocuous (and secular) one on a 1993 house in Heskem states: One looks at me and reads me, I was an old house, now one has thought of me again and made me white again. A minimalist one on an Ebsdorf barn simply indicates the year it was renovated, Anno 2002, and bears the sketched image of a pig. Others also suggest a dissipation of Christian culture, instead commending a sentimentalism for aesthetics and worldly happiness. A Mardorf house renovated in 1981 is tinged with a utilitarian view of the divine: The most beautiful thing in life, that God can give, is a contented home, and to be happy in it. Inscriptions still invoke flowers, though not as a metaphor for humans’ fleeting time on earth or with thought of a heavenly garden. Stenciled onto a Roth house are two paintings of delicate flowers flanking the phrase The flower is so small and yet warms the world. A Lohra house renovated in 1992 bears a poem, found on homes elsewhere in German-speaking Europe, that also values the flower for the temporal pleasure it offers: Simply be human, simply live. Gaze into the air, see the sun, behold flowers and at night the stars. Watch children, laugh, play, do whatever

2 The timing of Christianity’s decline in rural Hesse coincided with the decline observed elsewhere, though the reasons given for it here are different. Callum G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain (London: Routledge, 2001), 1–15; Mark Edward Ruff notes that centuries-old Catholic values took on a defensive approach amid the post-1945 culture of rising consumption and withered in the face of it. The Wayward Flock: Catholic Youth in Postwar West Germany, 1945–1965 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).

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fosters happiness, dream, let fantasy frolic, be content. Life is a celebration. Finally, parish devolution has gone in reverse and undone what Gemeinden worked many centuries to achieve. Parishes have been combined into one principally due to declining church attendance and growing budget shortfalls. A rise in persons opting out of the church tax by registering federally as nonreligious instead of with the evangelical or Catholic denomination has contributed to the trend.3 Fueling it, too, has been an aging population and the demographic stagnation or decline of the traditionally Christian European population,4 a phenomenon unfolding in other countries of Europe as well. The devitalization of all these forces has weakened communal bonds and local residents’ participation in them. The Christian religion is still exercised by those who attend parish services and who have established churches independent of the state. Yet if rural Gemeinden of past centuries were asked, they might well say that the Christian and communal culture that defined local life for more than a millennium has faded to a faint afterglow. 3 Neha Sahgal, et al., “In Western European Countries With Church Taxes, Support for the Tradition Remains Strong,” Pew Research Center, 30 April 2019, https://www.pewforum.org /2019/04/30/in-western-european-countries-with-church-taxes-support-for-the-tradition -remains-strong/. 4 “Germany’s Protestant and Catholic churches predicted to lose millions of members,” Deutsche Welle, 2 May 2019, https://p.dw.com/p/3HpMh.

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Bibliography Unpublished Primary Sources Archiv des Bischöflichen Generalvikariats Fulda (AGV) EBK/A/4/09-02 - Burghaun, Kollisionen zwischen Katholiken und Protestanten, 1818– 1826 EBS/A/4/03-01 - Dipperz, Gottesdienst in der Filialkirche Dipperz 1764–1959 EBS/A/4/09-01 - Dipperz, Errichtung einer eigenen Pfarrei 1834–1898 EFU/A/4/09-01 - Langenschwarz, Acta betr: Darstellung der früheren Religionsverhältnisse 1733–1780 EGI/A/4/03-01 - Margretenhaun, Acta in Sachen der Gemeinden Steinhaus, Steinau und Bernards 1686–1722 EGI/A/4/03-02 - Margretenhaun, Gottesdienst, Seelsorge EGI/A/4/03-03 - Margretenhaun, Processionen, Gottesdient, Bruderschaften EGI/A/4/09-03 - Margretenhaun, Die Trennung der zur neu errichteten Pfarrei Dipperz geschlagenen Orte von der Pfarrei Margretenhaun, –1841 EGI/A/4/10-01 - Margretenhaun, Besetzung der Pfarrei 1631–1749 EGI/B/4/11-01 - Margretenhaun, Die Gründung einer Kaplanei 1825–1924 EGN/A/4/03-01 - Mittelkalbach, Gottesdienst zu Mittelkalbach 1755–1904 EGN/A/4/09-01 - Mittelkalbach, Die Gründung Localkaplanei in Mittelkalbach bzw. einer Pfarrei daslbst 1837–1910 EGN/A/4/09-02 - Mittelkalbach, Pfarrbeschreibung EGU/A/4/03-01 - Neuhof, Gottesdienst, Seelsorge 1787–1937 EGU/A/4/09-03 - Neuhof, Visitation der Pfarrei 1848–1874 EGU/B/4/11-01 - Neuhof, die Kaplanei 1754–1912 EHA/A/4/09-01 - Niederkalbach, Gründung einer Lokalkaplanei, Kuratie und Pfarrei EHA/A/4/09-02 - Niederkalbach, Gründung einer Lokalkaplanei, Kuratie und Pfarrei EIL/A/4/09-01 - Steinbach, Pfarrbeschreibung EIM/A/4/09-06 - Steinhaus. Stiftung des Exbenedictiners P. Damian Arnd zur Gründung einer Pfarrei in Steinhaus EIM/A/4/09-02 - Steinhaus, Acta betr die Errichtung einer Pfarrei zu Steinhaus

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Index of Place Names Aachen 55 Africa 22 Ahlersbach 335 Allendorf (near Haubern) 389, 390 Allendorf (near Kirchhain) 197 Allendorf (west of Caldern) 409 Allna 29, 39, 112, 152, 170, 173, 183–84, 187–88, 190, 368 Alsace 298 Altengrüsen 39 Altenhaßlau 80n182, 267, 282, 305, 336, 338–39, 341, 349–51 Altenschirf 39n81 Altenvers 184–85 Alzey 17 Amönau 42, 195 Amöneburg 22–23, 101, 163–64, 165n99, 167, 177n143, 196–97, 352 Andernach 17 Antioch 66 Anzefahr 166, 177n143, 183, 196, 352, 396 Archfeld 108, 125, 177, 181, 184 Argenstein 113–17, 119, 142, 156, 159, 199, 208, 210, 212, 214–17, 229 Armenhof 219 Armsfeld 32 Aschaffenburg 20 Assenheim 304 Aßlar 39n81 Augsburg 59 Ausbach 168 Austria 64 Bad Arolsen 387 Bad Brückenau 84 Bad Nauheim 287, 312, 336, 348 Bad Wildungen 387 Baden (Swiss county) 42, 94n248 Balkans 5 Baltic 5 Battenfeld (parish) 81 Battenhausen 32 Bauerbach 166, 183, 191, 196 Bellings 335 Beltershausen 28

Bergen 312 Bergheim 186 Berkersheim 334 Berlin 163n91, 222, 277, 311 Berneburg 43 Bernhards 112, 128–31, 135, 137–38, 155, 158 Bethsaida 306 Biberach 59 Biedenkopf 41 Bischofsheim 269, 287 Bischofszell 104 Blasbach 143, 143n9 Bleichenbach 288, 288n26 Bochum 225n106 Bockenheim 335, 343 Böckels 219 Böddiger 115–16, 128, 130, 136, 139, 148, 156, 182, 196, 215, 218 Boppard 17 Bortshausen 112, 128, 129–30, 136, 138, 194, 207, 213 Bottendorf 79, 268, 353, 365–66 Bracht 122 Breitenbach 87 Breitzbach 108–9, 183, 187, 200, 202–3, 207 Bringhausen 194 British Isles 24 Brotterode 45n112 Bruchköbel 256, 258, 258n73, 259, 259n74, 260, 305, 335–37, 340, 343, 348 Brunswick 269 Buchenau 290, 322, 323, 326 Büdingen 86 Bürgeln 191 Burghaun 76, 89, 158, 177–78, 191, 249, 251, 254, 256, 266–67, 271, 285, 290–93, 299–302, 306, 326–27, 329 Caldern 152–53, 172, 172n125, 195 Cappel 114, 143–46, 173, 199, 200, 202–7, 215, 217, 229, 368–69 Cologne 17 Constantinople 52 Cyriaxweimar 112, 170, 173, 228

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446 Dainrode 389 Dermbach 167n104 Dietkirchen 20 Dinkelsbühl 59 Dippach 84 Dipperz 112, 120–21, 127, 131, 136–37, 141, 144, 158, 171–72, 192, 209, 216–17, 219–22, 224, 226–27 Dodenau 80n183 Dodenhausen 271, 370, 401 Donauwörth 59 Dorfborn 109, 227 Dorheim 275, 287 Dörnholzhausen 390, 395 Dreihausen 23, 112, 119, 121–23, 125, 128–35, 138–39, 142, 144, 160, 171, 173, 183–84, 188–92, 200–201, 203, 207–8, 213–16, 218–19, 225 Dresden 65 Ebsdorf 23, 28, 32, 34, 46, 79, 80, 112, 116, 119, 121, 123, 125, 128–34, 136–39, 144–46, 148, 150, 153–55, 159, 163, 167, 174–77, 179, 184, 186–88, 192, 197, 200–201, 207–8, 211, 213–15, 218–19, 225, 368, 411 Eckelshausen 41, 80n183 Ederbringhausen 371–72 Eichen 266, 280, 287, 304, 348 Eichenried 109, 118, 125–27, 131, 209, 211, 223, 266, 280, 287 Eichsfeld 74–75, 255 Eilsdorf 28 Eisenach 108, 310 Eiterfeld 82 Ellers 106 Ellershausen 365, 367, 371–72, 389, 392, 394 Emsdorf 166, 183 Erbstadt 265 Erfurtshausen 166 Eschersheim 256 Eschwege 22, 42, 43, 70, 78, 92, 93, 95–96, 103, 108 Fechenheim 304 Felsberg 215, 217 Finkenhain 209, 216 Fleckenstein 71 Flieden 65, 76, 83, 106, 107, 109

Index of Place Names Frankenau 243, 371, 392, 394 Frankenbach 81 Frankenberg 13–14, 22–23, 30, 36, 41, 79, 102, 237, 248–49, 253–54, 254n53, 256–57, 267–69, 282, 289, 294, 295–96, 297, 299, 306, 308–10, 312–13, 315, 320, 352–55, 357–64, 365–68, 371–72, 375–87, 389, 392, 394–95, 398–99, 400–403 Frankershausen 42 Frankfurt am Main 13, 88, 88n217, 89, 98n266, 224, 411 Frankfurt an der Oder 65 Frauenberg (Fulda) 164, 226 Frauenberg (Upper Hesse) 369 Frauenborn 108–9, 169, 173, 176 Friedberg (county of) 280 Fritzlar 22, 27, 29 Fronhausen 86, 114–17, 119, 127, 135, 142, 156, 191, 193, 199, 209, 212, 214–15, 217 Fulda (City) 64, 104, 105, 112, 164, 210, 271, 274, 316, 324, 341 Fürsteneck 82 Gadarenes 75 Gaul 25 Geiersberg 173 Geislitz 341 Geismar 30, 31, 371, 389–92, 395 Gelnhausen 341, 342n52, 349 Gemünden (Taunus) 186 Gemünden an der Wohra 39–40, 150, 153, 186, 253, 271, 275, 282, 367–68, 395, 396, 398–99, 401 Georgenberg 295 Germershausen 112, 157 Gießen 13, 20, 22 Ginnheim 289 Ginseldorf 166 Gisselberg 112, 170, 204, 228, 229 Graubünden 103, 103n295, 104n297 Gronau 312, 334–35 Großenhausen 341 Großenmoor 177, 303, 322, 328–29 Großseelheim 161 Grüsen 80, 370 Hachborn 34, 45–46, 112, 114, 133–34, 138–39, 144, 154–55, 173–75, 185, 187, 213

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447

Index of Place Names Haddamshausen 112, 170, 173, 183, 227–28 Haddenberg 401 Haimbach 69, 82 Haina 275, 281, 297, 352, 355, 364, 367 Hainchen 259n75 Halberstadt (diocese) 28 Halsdorf 370, 371 Hammelburg 64, 84, 89, 99, 100, 105 Hanau (City) 69, 71, 242, 246, 266, 282, 285–87, 299, 311, 334, 351 Hanau-Lichtenberg 3n2, 71, 285 Hanau-Münzenberg 3, 3n2, 56, 65, 71, 75, 86, 196, 241–42, 258, 263n3, 264, 266, 274–76, 281–282, 285, 287, 293 Harle 81n184 Haselstein 82 Hassenhausen 114, 138, 145, 148, 203, 207, 215 Haubern 306 Heddernheim 287 Heidelberg 65, 68, 85 Heigenrad 43 Herborn 70 Herbstein 78 Herleshausen 189 Hermannstein 76, 78 Hermershausen 112, 157, 170, 173–74, 186–87, 190, 227 Herpf 167n104 Hersfeld 34, 66, 68, 87, 92–93, 95–96, 179, 182, 371 Hertingshausen 401 Heskem mit Mölln 112, 138, 139, 173, 186, 190, 194, 208, 213–15, 218–19, 225, 411 Hesse 3, 3n2, 4, 13–14, 16, 17, 21–22, 24, 26–29, 31, 33–34, 39, 39n81, 41, 51, 56, 61, 89n219, 104–5, 150n50, 178, 181, 196, 222, 260–61, 308, 313, 326, 357, 359, 362, 369, 378, 388, 396, 399, 402–4, 408, 410, 411n2 Hesse-Darmstadt 3n2, 69, 71–72, 81, 86, 99, 237, 289, 295n35 Hesse-Kassel 3n2, 41, 65, 68, 78, 86, 105–6, 136, 167, 197, 237, 241–42, 264, 274, 276, 281, 285, 289, 293, 295n35, 342n52, 388 Hesse-Marburg 3n2, 69, 72n134, 79 Hesse-Rheinfels 3n2 Heyerode 43 Hilmes 184

Himmelsberg 39–40, 78n168, 178, 181 Hintersteinau 259n75, 305 Hochstadt 256, 258n73, 269, 287, 333, 338–39, 343, 348 Hodal 28 Hofbieber 29 Hofgeismar 27, 29 Hohenzell 335 Holzburg 191 Holzhausen (near Fronhausen) 191, 193 Hüddingen 41 Hünfeld 82, 84, 95, 102, 136, 328 Iberia 5 Ilschhausen 112, 169, 173–76, 213 Isenburg 69, 257, 313–15, 323 Italy 21, 25, 54 Josbach

28, 153, 370

Kalbach 24, 33 Karlsruhe 167 Kassel 72, 85, 108, 115–16, 131, 136, 149, 197, 206, 212, 214, 217–18, 257, 309, 311, 313–14, 326–27, 358, 372, 381, 386–88, 398, 401–2, 404 Kastel 17 Kaufbeuren 59 Kehna 112, 170, 173–74, 176, 183, 186, 188, 195 Kesselstadt 293, 336, 348 Kiliansberg 109, 126, 209 Kilianstädten 260, 305 Kirchbracht 337 Kirchhain 196, 254–55, 282, 355, 380–81 Kirchvers 167, 183, 190 Koblenz 17 Königsberg 81 Kreuznach 17 Krumbach 81 Lahnberge 164 Landau 160, 187 Langendorf 370–71 Langenschwarz 290, 293, 299, 306, 322, 324–25, 327 Leipzig 71, 99, 100, 277 Lengefeld 187 Leutkirch 59

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448 Lindenberg 335 Löhlbach 271, 314, 353, 368 Lohra 137, 167, 182–84, 188, 190, 192, 194, 211, 256, 411 Lohrhaupten 43 Lower Hesse 76, 78, 80, 162, 196, 281–82, 316, 355–56, 371, 401 Lübeck 66 Lützelhausen 341 Mainz

17, 20–21, 27–28, 34, 63, 66, 74, 78n168, 105, 107, 165–67 Mansbach 84, 169 Marburg 13, 23, 29–30, 36, 72, 74–76, 80, 85–86, 89, 99–102, 112, 114–17, 119, 121, 125, 129–30, 134–35, 137–39, 144–46, 148–52, 154, 163–64, 174, 176, 181–82, 200n14, 204–8, 215–18, 225, 246, 251, 255, 282–83, 289, 294, 294n34, 296, 307–8, 311, 313, 315, 352, 354, 356–57, 359, 362–64, 366–70, 373–74, 377–78, 380–81, 385–89, 393, 396–97, 397n125, 398–400, 402, 404 Mardorf 162, 164, 166, 183–84, 411 Margretenhaun 108, 112, 112n5, 116, 120, 127–31, 135–37, 140, 155, 164, 171, 173, 196, 208–211, 213–14, 216–17, 219–22, 225–27 Markershausen 108, 156 Marköbel 254, 266, 272, 287, 336, 340 Maulbronn 277 Mellnau 194 Mengeringhausen 195 Merlau 39 Michelbach 28 Michelsberg 183 Michelsrombach 290 Mittelbuchen 305, 330 Mittelkalbach 109, 118, 120, 125, 127–28, 146, 159, 172, 186, 209, 211, 215–16, 219, 222–24 Mohnhausen 80, 192 Möhra 167n104 Mömpelgard 277 Mottgers 87, 331, 335, 340 Münchhausen 269–70, 282, 297–98, 371, 373–74, 395–97 Münden 184 Münster 225n106, 286

Index of Place Names Nanz-Willershausen 112, 173 Nassau 312 Naumburg 99 Nausis 161 Nentershausen 168 Nesselröden 78, 109, 156, 203, 207 Neuengronau 340 Neuhof 64, 74, 82, 100, 104–9, 112, 112n5, 116, 118–20, 125, 127, 131, 146, 172, 184, 186, 196, 208–9, 211, 215–16, 219, 222–24, 226–27 Neukirchen 322, 326 Neustadt 106 Niederdorfelden 332–34 Niedereschbach 256, 260, 287 Niederissigheim 335 Niederkalbach 109, 125, 223, 226 Niederklein 166, 197 Niederrodenbach 276, 287, 330, 336, 348 Niederschreufa 32 Niedervorschütz 115, 128, 130–31, 136–37, 139, 142, 148, 156, 183, 208, 210, 212, 215, 217–18 Niederwald 122 Niederwalgern 114–16, 181, 183, 189 Niederweimar 35–36, 112, 159, 170, 173, 183, 186, 192, 228 Nordic lands 5 Nürnberg 72 Oberdorfelden 332, 334 Obereschenbach 84 Oberhörlen 81n187, 149 Oberkalbach 24, 289 Oberorke 371–72 Oberrosphe 194 Oberweimar 29, 35, 43, 78, 112, 114–16, 142–44, 146, 148, 150–51, 153, 157, 167, 170–74, 176–77, 199–200, 202, 204–6, 208, 227–28, 353, 355, 369 Oberzell 87, 335 Odensachsen 169 Opperz 106–7, 211, 226 Ortenberg 304 Ostheim 280, 287, 305, 332–33, 339 Paderborn 371 Palatinate 42, 61, 65, 69–70, 247n13, 298, 388

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449

Index of Place Names Persia 24 Petersberg 29, 132, 164 Potsdam 309 Preungesheim 287, 312 Prussia 3n2, 222, 308, 388, 396 Ramholz 331 Rasdorf 82 (Rauisch)holzhausen 68, 76, 78, 200, 204, 207–8 Rauschenberg 78n168, 196, 282, 367, 389, 395 Ravensburg 59 Rengershausen 79, 149, 353 Rex 219 Rhena 192 Rhoden 188 Roda 269, 297–98, 304–5, 373, 374–75, 394 Röddenau 79, 81n184, 256–57, 306 Rodheim 287, 289, 336 Rollshausen 81n184, 190, 194, 284 Rome 16, 21, 21n13, 52, 53, 55, 59, 63, 63n74, 66, 88, 167 Rommershausen 183 Rommerz 74, 100–101, 109, 118, 226 Ronhausen 112, 114–15, 143, 146, 173, 199–200, 200n14, 202, 204–7 Ronshausen 168–69 Rosenthal 249n21, 254, 258n73, 267, 284, 289, 294, 367, 373–74, 395–97, 397n125, 398–99 Rossberg 112, 119, 121–25, 128–29, 137, 142, 144, 172, 184, 192, 200–201, 204, 207–8, 213–15, 218–19, 225 Roßdorf 166, 352 Roth (south of Marburg) 26, 115–19, 127, 129, 135, 138, 142, 149, 156, 159, 172–73, 208–10, 212, 214–17, 229, 411 Roth (west of Marburg) 81n187 Rothemann 173 Rothenkirchen 78, 149, 267, 322, 325–26, 328 Rückers 107, 172 Rüdigheim 166, 258, 266, 303, 336, 341, 348 Rudolphshan 271 Ruhlkirchen 166 Sachsenberg 185 Schaffhausen 42

Schiffelbach 184, 270, 367 Schletzenrod 326 Schlierbach 43 Schloßberg 23 Schlotzau 299, 322, 324–25, 328 Schlüchtern 145, 287–88, 309–10, 316–18, 332–35, 337, 344 Schmalkalden 76, 80, 316, 387–88 Schmillinghausen 167 Schreufa 13–16, 21–22, 24, 30–34, 185, 237–38, 243, 249, 251, 256–57, 297–98, 306–7, 364–65, 399–401, 401n140 Schröck 166, 197 Schwalheim 276, 304, 304n60, 312, 348 Schwalm (region) 160, 163–64, 179, 191–92 Schwarzenfels 330 Schweina 167n104 Schweinsberg 76–78, 105, 157, 192, 353 Seckbach 260, 287, 334, 336, 339, 341, 343, 345 Seibelsdorf 166 Seidenroth 262–63 Simmersbach 81 Spain 21, 25, 54, 87 Sparhof 209 Speyer 17, 61, 98–99 Stausebach 166, 177, 177n143, 178–80, 183, 186, 196, 206, 269, 411 Steinau 112, 128–30, 131, 135, 137–38, 140, 155, 158, 219, 225–26 Steinau an der Straße 86, 262, 266, 282, 293, 304n60, 312, 336, 338, 340–42, 344 Steinbach (Hanau) 256 Steinbach (Thuringia) 167n104 Steinhaus 112, 128–31, 135–38, 140, 142, 155–56, 165, 219, 225–26 Sterzhausen 191 Straßburg 85 Switzerland 42, 94n248, 103–4, 261, 387 Thurgau 42 Thuringia 20–21, 167, 167n104, 310 Tiefengruben 109, 118 Torgau 98 Traisbach 131, 136–37, 219 Tribur 28 Trier 20 Tyrol 42

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450 Udenhausen 32 Ulm 59, 150 Untereschenbach 84 Upper Hesse 29 Upper Lusatia 63 Usseln 187 Uttrichshausen 257, 303–4 Vacha 105 Vasbeck 188 Veitsteinbach 109, 112, 118, 125–26, 209, 211, 223, 226 Viermünden 13–15, 22, 30, 33, 81n184, 237–38, 306–7, 355, 371–72, 391, 400, 401n140 Vogelsberg 20 Völkershausen 43, 74, 79, 99 Vollnkirchen 39n81 Wachenbuchen 312 Wahlen 39n81 Waldeck 41, 167 Wallau 81n188, 100–101 Wartmannsroth 84 Wehrda (Fulda) 306, 325–26 Wehrda (Upper Hesse) 122 Weichersbach 86–87, 330–32, 337, 343 Weiershausen 112, 169–70, 173, 204, 227 Wenkbach 115–17, 119, 142, 156, 159, 205, 205n40, 208–10, 212, 214–17, 229 Werra (district) 76, 78 Werthesberg 165 Wesel 88–89

Index of Place Names Westphalia 95, 231, 328 Wetter 39, 297, 353, 373, 397 Wetterau 17 Wetzlar 20, 22 Wetzlos 326 Weyhers 76 Wichmannshausen 78, 169 Wiera 184 Wiesbaden 17 Willersdorf 243, 268, 304, 364–68, 394 Willershausen 78, 108–9, 116, 125, 142, 156, 172, 183, 196, 201, 203, 207 Windecken 69, 242, 257–58, 259n75, 265, 272, 280–82, 293, 304, 312, 332–33, 336–38, 340–42, 345, 348–49, 351 Wissels 219 Wisselsrod 121, 209, 216 Wittelsberg 41n93, 122, 145–46, 152, 200 Wittenberg 90, 98, 102, 231 Wohra 370 Wolferode 253, 259n75, 297 Wolferts 112, 121, 209, 216, 227 Wolfshausen 114–15, 118–19, 142–43, 146, 155, 172, 178, 180, 184, 191, 199, 200, 202–3, 207, 215, 217, 229 Worms 17, 34 Würzburg 105 Zeitlofs 86 Zizers 104 Zurich 63 Zurzach 94n248

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Index of Subjects Accord (between Hesse-Kassel and Hesse-Darmstadt, 1648) 237, 289, 294, 295n35, 298 ackerbürgerlich 24n31 Adalbert I (Prince-Abbot) 291, 300 Address to the German Nobility (1520) 61 adiaphorism 388 Adriatic Sea 52 Advent 138–39, 225 Aesop fable 66 affiliation 198–99, 218, 264, 283, 304, 334 affliction 179, 187, 189, 194 agrarian 141, 290 cycle 210 Agricola, Franciscus 72, 96n257 agriculture/-ral 4, 24, 26, 108, 190, 194, 198, 227–28, 410. See also economy, agricultural environment 10, 84, 143, 165, 175, 179, 186, 190 existence 1–2, 13, 166, 196 terrain 24, 31, 164, 166, 214, 256 agriculturalist 190–93, 195 age of 9 Alemanni 22 altar 149, 169, 312–13, 325, 334, 374, 386 instruments 129, 373, 386 Anabaptism 3 Anabaptist 9, 47n1, 68, 73, 75, 79, 86, 90, 240, 243, 322 anachronism 59, 258–59, 263 Andreä, Jacob 67–68, 91 Anglican 9, 47n1 animal 2, 9, 23–25, 75, 169, 191, 288 husbandry 9, 191 animating force 4, 9, 10, 16, 22, 24, 33, 36, 43, 44, 46, 77, 107, 116, 119, 199, 227, 232, 411 devitalization of 412 Antichrist 71, 73 Antitrinitarians 47n1 apostate 54, 72, 396 apostle 67, 76, 168, 326–27 apostles’ days 138, 300 Apostles’ Creed 168

apostolic 6, 9, 63, 65, 70, 73, 75, 213, 219, 388, 393 Appellation (1529) 98 archdeaconry 27, 29 Fritzlar 27, 29 Hofgeismar 27, 29 St. Stephan 27, 29 Arianism 25 aristocracy 13, 24, 30, 32, 34, 62, 71, 75–76, 102, 109, 136, 156, 372. See also noble Arndt, Ernst Moritz 189 Arndt, Johann 122 artistic 59, 167, 193 Ascension Day 299 Athanasian creed 388 Augsburg Confession (1530) 47, 59, 70, 70n123, 73, 76, 85, 98, 100, 102, 143n9, 239, 250, 315, 387–88 adherent of 62–63, 66, 68, 70, 73, 74, 82, 84, 96n257, 99, 102, 106, 112n5, 241, 251, 290 Apology of (1531) 67 elements of 76 religion of 59, 68, 82, 88, 105 Auslauf (“walking out”) 78, 86, 88, 278, 280–84, 289, 297–98, 319–20, 328, 336, 406 autonomy 15, 21, 27–28, 30, 32, 36–37, 88, 114–15, 125, 138, 159, 208, 223, 335, 399 awakening 233 Bach, Johann Sebastian 184, 312 bakery 218, 221, 300 balcony 123, 152, 157, 168–69, 186–87, 338–39 Balthasar von Dernbach (Prince-Abbot) 64, 82, 105, 105n301, 106–7 baptism 4n5, 41, 54, 58, 73, 81, 81n185, 89–90, 94–95, 107, 112, 138, 155, 214, 223, 254, 280, 293, 338 conflict related to 69, 69n118, 71, 121, 205–6, 267–69, 300, 371, 390, 396 fees related to 35, 269, 290 occasion of 1, 206 petition concerning 9, 43, 127–34, 136, 140, 143, 199–200, 392, 395

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452 baptism (cont.) right or ruling concerning 26, 27–30, 226, 248, 259, 264, 267–68, 271–72, 290, 306, 318 baptismal font 94n248, 107, 131, 155, 209, 215–16, 257 Baptists 213, 219 barn 9, 175 church converted into a 348 converted into a church 228 and inscription 159–60, 182–84, 190–94, 214, 411 and its construction 166 parish 214, 218, 237 and worship services 238, 287, 297 baroque 167–69 peasant (Bauernbarock) 167–68 beasts 74, 75, 249 belief 6, 27, 49n7, 50, 54–55, 57, 59, 79, 96, 232–33, 317, 319, 344, 370, 396 differing 59 erroneous 96, 143, 271 policing 274 un- 322, 356 bell 13, 140, 160, 194, 260 and denominational collaboration 303, 313 and denominational conflict 296–97, 301, 324, 380, 382–85, 388 and funeral 170, 174, 176 making or repair of 43, 80, 109, 229, 337 -ringer 40, 256, 269, 333 and worship service 134, 152, 239, 312, 314, 341, 402 benefice 35, 107 Bergius, Conrad 65 von Berlepsch 106 Bible 57, 64, 91, 94, 100, 158, 176, 314, 317, 405. See also “God’s Word” biblical 59, 69, 143, 159, 168, 176, 179, 187, 332, 354 Biedermeier 179 Black Death (1347–1353) 2, 4, 28, 32, 106 blasphemy 54, 96n257, 148, 255 Book of Concord (1580) 2, 4, 28, 32, 106 border 86, 160, 166–67, 198, 210, 223, 247, 262, 265, 279, 282–83, 299, 319, 406

Index of Subjects boundary 32, 48, 50–51, 89n219, 160, 187n150, 248, 248n15, 255, 272, 281, 283, 334 boy 49, 152, 162, 296, 301, 313, 322, 358, 382 Boyneburg 70, 89, 102 bread 182, 186, 191, 194–95, 269, 300, 366 Breitinger, Johann Jakob 63 bride 96n257, 162, 226, 266 bridge 114, 221, 229, 310n9, 372 bureaucracy 7, 44, 116, 131, 141–42, 243, 249, 279, 304, 322, 367, 406 burgher 49, 54, 59, 85n206 burial 95, 172, 176, 303, 318, 341 authorization or rights concerning 28–30, 264, 271, 290 Christian 1, 74, 91 dispute concerning 13, 128–29, 200n14, 222–23, 262, 291 service 170–71, 173, 209, 213 site or ground 131, 169–73, 209 Calvin, John 60–61, 63, 70, 168, 254n53, 312, 387 theology of 22, 68, 88, 88n217, 143, 159, 285, 317, 389 Calvinism 3, 232, 328 Calvinist 6, 7, 47n1, 74, 79, 100–101, 169, 252, 254, 257, 283, 296, 402 crypto- 388 “error” or “heresy” 64–65, 68–70, 70n123, 71, 90, 101–2, 254 Carolingian 21, 24, 52 carpenter 74, 182, 196–97 Castilian 54 catechism 280 association with 91, 95–96, 102 and the evangelical Union 314–15, 317, 324, 325, 328–29, 331–32, 343, 356–57, 364, 387, 397 and heresy 68 instruction 9, 118, 120, 123, 136, 146, 149, 209, 215, 270, 272, 290 cemetery 27, 39, 166, 229, 242, 386, 409 claim regarding 112, 258–59, 345 collaboration related to 303–4, 341–42 (re)construction related to 13, 125, 128, 222–23 dispute related to 257, 269, 271

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Index of Subjects cemetery (cont.) and gravestones 176–77 localization of 169–72, 172n125, 173–76, 216, 226, 227 maintenance of 35, 156 censorship 302 Center Party 224 ceremony 46, 69, 103, 106, 139, 160, 273, 304, 347 Chalcedonian creed 388 Charlemagne 3, 35, 55 Charles V (Emperor) 59, 60, 67, 298 Chatti 22 chicken 42, 118, 214 chiliastic 195 choir 152, 174, 176, 382, 402 Christendom 5, 21, 58, 232 Imperial 57, 234 Latin 4, 5, 47n1, 51–54, 56, 58, 60, 65, 97, 234, 316, 409 “last” 234, 241 “lost” 241 micro- 21 rural 234 Christian monism 6, 51, 54, 62, 72, 74, 89, 92, 95, 98–100, 102–3, 238, 242, 248, 255, 263, 270–71, 278 pluralism 6–7, 8, 57, 62, 74, 89, 94n248, 98, 237, 241, 252, 255, 263, 265, 270–71, 278 post- 234, 410 Christianity and the Gemeinde 2, 5, 10, 45–46, 77, 94–96, 116–17, 112, 142, 174, 208–9, 211, 216, 220, 232 as an animating force 16–22 communal 46, 81 Christianization 1–3, 16, 27, 44, 77, 106, 119, 141, 155–56, 166, 225, 306 de- 198 re- 198 Christmas 129, 225, 382 Christoph of Württemberg (Duke) 68 church festival (Kirchweih) 131 civil-sacred unity of Latin Christendom 51–54, 58 of German-speaking cities 54–55, 59

453 of the Holy Roman Empire 55–57, 59–60 of Imperial territories 57, 60, 99 and the rural Gemeinde 1, 4–5, 7–10, 41–42, 45, 51, 76, 79, 99, 115, 141, 211, 230–32, 237–38, 240, 242–43, 246–47, 257–58, 262, 278–79, 285, 289, 303–4, 307–8, 319, 327, 330, 351–52, 365, 373, 375, 384, 389, 392–94, 399–400, 405–6 civilization 26, 233, 234, 407 civilizing process 274 cloister 33–34, 45, 64, 105, 114, 155, 165, 165n98, 226, 288. See also monastery coexercise of religion 242, 263n3, 300–301 coexistence 6, 6n6, 60, 98, 104n295, 240–41, 247n13, 262, 262n1, 265, 270, 276–78, 319, 389 collaboration 279, 303, 306–8, 346, 352, 364, 375, 389 “common man” 38, 87, 316, 333, 354 communalization 2–3, 16, 37, 40, 44, 77, 106, 119, 141, 156, 160 conciliarism 53 confessionalization 47, 50, 81, 86, 89n219, 210, 230, 232, 247n13, 407 re- 379, 407 Confessionalization thesis 273–74 confirmation 134, 272 arranging for 145, 203, 305 and cases of mixed denominations 262, 271–72, 280, 304–5, 307 concerning the localization of 125, 139 and the evangelical Union 318, 322, 324–29, 336, 338, 342, 346, 358–59, 364, 366–67, 370–73, 376, 381, 392, 397, 399 instruction 9, 201, 223, 227 language surrounding 102–3, 254 service 1, 136–37, 160–61, 163 conscience 61, 87, 90, 93–95, 103, 132, 299–300, 302, 318, 322, 327–28, 355 freedom of 240, 263, 272, 278, 299, 302, 314, 318–19, 322, 359, 369 consecrating 1, 27–28, 94, 107, 135, 187n150, 256, 291, 300 constitution 278, 281, 286, 288, 300–301, 314–15, 329, 343, 351, 356, 378, 381

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454 conversion 50n10, 54, 91–92, 94n248, 101–3, 143, 240n7, 247, 252–53, 267, 276, 297, 306, 356 coreligionist 78, 88, 95, 105–6, 242, 264, 271, 279, 287 ecclesiastic support of 64, 67–68, 69n118, 70, 72, 74 princely support of 69, 105–6, 260, 271, 280, 294, 296, 308, 320, 358, 379 corpus christianum 5, 41–42, 51, 54, 57, 234, 278 cow 190, 410 creed 6, 47, 59, 63, 102, 168, 232, 317, 375, 379 crescendo 8, 176, 199, 211 crop 9, 191, 194, 195 crucifix 165, 165n99, 166–67, 300, 333 cuius regio eius religio 61, 88–89, 98, 247, 262, 264, 282, 284, 406 custom 2, 43, 116, 129–30, 136–37, 145, 151, 162–63, 170, 176, 203, 210, 226, 232, 243, 262, 276, 280, 295–96, 314, 329, 355–56, 358, 361, 363, 384, 395 customary payments and obligations 35, 269, 392 and fusion with denomination label 116, 243 maintenance of 44, 127, 137–38, 140, 153–54, 171, 179, 366, 385, 389–90, 401 threatened by novelty 70, 81, 120, 127–28, 130, 132–34, 142, 144, 152, 200, 260, 284, 299, 321–22, 324, 347, 365–66, 383 von Dalwig 128, 156 death 3n2, 16, 35, 75, 80, 82n192, 106, 145, 154, 176–78, 180–81, 194–96, 201, 213, 273 debt 221–23, 349, 374 deficit 221 demographics 2–3, 22, 24, 32, 37, 108, 116, 118, 200, 210–11, 214–15, 225, 412. See also population von Dersch 13, 15, 32, 33 Devil 75, 97, 219 devotion 169, 176, 179, 240, 247, 279, 281, 284, 343, 347 Diet of Augsburg (1530) 68 of Augsburg (1555) 60, 63, 279 of Augsburg (1566) 68

Index of Subjects of Speyer (1526) 61 of Speyer (1529) 61, 98, 99 Dieterich, Konrad 150 differentiation 88, 103–4, 232, 258–59, 261, 264 Diocletian 248 discipline 45, 55, 61, 86, 149n42, 158, 232, 274 disorder 44, 120, 164, 272–74, 324, 346, 362, 370, 381, 389, 393, 405 dissent 61, 88, 98, 279, 281, 283–86, 318–19, 397 dissimulation 283, 319–20 doctrine 30, 50, 90, 159, 261, 264, 296, 316–17, 351, 396 and the Church 53, 58 creedal system of 6, 232, 379 Martin Luther and 45, 57 rural Gemeinden and 9, 159 true and false 64–68, 92, 271, 379 and urban culture 75, 85 dress (Tracht) 161, 163, 163n90, 164, 411 drunkenness 148, 164, 215, 217, 222 early modern 9, 50 Easter 82, 84, 123, 145, 201, 329 communicant at 82, 336, 339–40, 358 confirmation at 280 season of 339, 375–76 services related to 139, 365, 383–85, 400 economy 3, 22, 24, 33, 36–37, 53, 55, 88, 116, 190, 198, 210, 220–21, 225, 410 agricultural 4, 24n31, 26, 29, 36, 37, 43, 108, 160 capitalist 232 local 34 manorial 44 ecumenical 6, 241 ecumenization 408n11 education 25, 242, 262, 267, 272, 279–81, 293, 299 and ministers 264 and rural Gemeinden 45, 211, 329, 347–48 and urban circles 141, 163, 201 elder (church) 181, 390, 401 and denominational issues 259, 303

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Index of Subjects elder (church) (cont.) and the evangelical Union 311–13, 328, 336, 339, 343, 356, 359, 361, 363, 366, 373, 377, 384, 386 and gravestone inscription 177 and minister 139, 144, 146, 148–50 and parish jurisdiction 200, 218, 225, 394, 399 and pews 154 elector. See Imperial emigration 61, 82–84, 86, 88, 198, 278–81, 319 Empire (artistic style) 179 endowment 33, 106, 120, 314 Enlightenment 5, 195, 210, 309, 318, 345, 361, 384, 388, 407 episcopal 20–21, 26, 33, 105 epitaph 177–78, 181 Erbvereinigung (1610) 285 Erfurt bishop 107 error 1, 64, 68–69, 71, 103, 143, 270–71, 318, 324, 377 estates. See Imperial Eucharist bread 9, 43, 70, 87, 91, 94, 103, 314, 326, 328, 353, 355, 390 chalice 132, 314 plate 132, 328 wine 43, 105, 132, 258n73, 353, 390, 396 European Union 406 evangelical union (1717–1722) 250 exile 105, 278–81, 297, 319, 406 family 197 and agriculture 25, 36, 186 aristocratic 13–15, 32–33, 68, 75–76, 78, 84, 109, 114–15, 128, 135, 148, 155–57, 203, 206–7, 214, 217, 290 bourgeois 190 division 252, 324 minister’s 149, 149n42, 150 and officials 295, 368 and religion 49, 50, 84, 151, 154, 171–72, 210–11, 226–28, 325, 336, 369, 370, 373, 383, 396, 399 royal 1, 20, 276 rural 38, 164, 177–80, 219, 223 farm 195, 214 farmer 25–26, 192, 224, 227, 371–72, 410

455 farming 159, 186, 190, 221 farmstead 109, 118, 121, 126, 211, 220, 334, 372 fatherland 189, 218, 310, 315, 318 feast 35 Feast of the Birth of Mary 301 Fernando III (King) 54 feudal society 44 finance 146, 177, 212, 214, 356, 410 and local governance 38 and local records 256 and lords 36, 157 and ministerial conflict 268–69, 374 and parish affairs 27, 42–43, 44n109, 156, 172, 206, 216, 218–21, 242, 285, 332–33, 340–41, 343–44, 360, 364, 399, 401 and parish dispute 115, 306, 390 fine (monetary) 43, 84, 129, 214, 220, 237, 268, 291, 300–302, 329, 383 fire 9–10, 75, 159, 181, 184, 186, 192 flooding 9, 155, 172–73, 192, 200, 203–4, 209 flower 169, 178–79, 194–95, 312, 411 font. See baptismal font forest 23, 123, 128, 166, 214, 256, 258n73, 341, 371 Formula of Concord (1577) 68, 79, 142, 388 Fourth Lateran Council 35 Franciscan 118, 137, 293 Franke, August Hermann 143 Franks 16, 20–23, 52 Frederick I (Emperor) 55 French Revolution 216n78 Friedrich II (Landgrave) 332 Friedrich Casimir of Hanau-Lichtenberg and Hanau-Münzenberg (Count) 71, 241–42, 285–87 Friedrich Wilhelm III of Prussia (King) 309 “from time immemorial” 44, 411 and baptism 155 and cemetery 112, 174 and church attendance 118 and communal identification 141, 238, 373–74 and parish finances 256, 259–60 and worship services 139, 349, 390–91 funeral 35, 81, 81n185, 127–28, 136, 160, 163, 170, 174, 209–10, 269, 272–73, 276, 287, 303, 306, 395 procession 29, 162, 176

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456 funeral (cont.) sermon 112, 136, 138, 169, 176, 204, 259 geese 214 Georg I of Hesse-Darmstadt (Landgrave) 69 Georg II of Hesse-Darmstadt (Landgrave) 71, 99 Georg Albrecht I von Erbach 286 German lands 3–4, 7–9, 23, 89, 105, 108, 163n91, 182, 190, 198, 230n2, 231, 309–10, 316, 402–3, 405 nation 56, 60, 182, 231, 408–9 -speaking 4, 21–22, 51, 54, 411 Peasants War 40, 45 Germanic 17, 54 Germany 3n2, 62n70, 171, 189, 198, 225, 230, 240, 310–11, 407–8, 410 rural 7, 9, 10, 16, 36, 46, 89, 116, 187, 199, 212, 231–33 girl 49, 161–62, 175, 332, 358, 372, 377 global 5, 233 glory 71, 123, 129, 142, 144, 160, 167, 179, 184, 186, 216, 309 “God’s Word” 45n113, 64, 66–68, 73, 79–80, 93, 119, 123, 132, 142, 150, 158, 301, 402n144. See also Bible goldsmith 85 Gothic 30, 53, 294 neo- 215, 224 grace 54, 96n257, 159–60 grain 26, 42, 95, 118, 191, 194, 204, 214 grave 17, 171–72, 179, 192, 233, 291, 300, 342 -stone 17, 176–81 -yard 170, 303. See also cemetery Greek 17, 63, 322 fathers 51 Gregory of Valencia 74 grievance 120, 148, 201, 301, 306, 324, 341, 361, 366 against a denominational community 8, 259, 264, 293 against a denominational minister 262, 266, 271, 329 concerning an opposing religion 63, 71 inherited 299, 357 within a parish 35, 209 guild 59, 87, 251, 313

Index of Subjects Habsburg 64 hail 192 Hanauer Neue Zeitung 310 harvest 4, 26, 109, 115, 123, 132, 163, 190–91 Haun 78 hay 214, 293 health 163n91, 174, 180, 184, 200 heathen 71, 280 heaven 85, 168, 178–79, 181–82, 184, 188–89, 194–96, 216, 218, 403, 411 Hedwig Sophia of Hesse-Kassel (regent) 388 Heidelberg catechism (1563) 68 Henry IV (Emperor) 55 Henry VIII (King) 88 Heshusius, Tilemann 65 heterodoxy 97 Heydwolff 157 hill 23, 29, 109, 112, 114, 130, 164, 166, 173, 201, 214, 223, 394 historical consciousness 141, 243, 255, 345 Hitler, Adolf 408 von Hoënegg, Matthias Hoë 66 holiday 35, 117–18, 129, 160, 324, 333 apostle 138, 300, 326–27 services 118, 125–26, 128, 131, 138, 207, 209, 216, 340, 365–66, 376, 383–84 Sunday and holiday services 118–21, 155, 214–15, 225–27, 307, 349, 383, 395 Holy Roman Empire 35, 89n219, 106, 268, 286–87, 298, 406–7 and its birthing of triplets 7, 246–55 and its civil-sacred unity 51, 56–57, 59–61, 234, 246 and the confessions 47–48, 50, 299 and the Imperial church 3 the Imperial territories in 3, 57, 61, 65, 246 and multiconfessionalism 6, 240, 278 naming practices in 62, 97, 241 Napoleon and 163, 210 religious reform in 56, 68, 150, 239 titles and status 55 universalism of 56 homily 45 honor 179, 181, 204, 291, 403 and burial 74 dis- 298

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Index of Subjects honor (cont.) and the evangelical Union 309, 312, 322, 341 and the Gemeinde 79–80, 119, 129, 134, 146, 157 and inscription 178–79, 181, 183–84, 186, 190–91 and minister 270 and religious reform 69 honorarium 123, 128, 137, 174, 322 Honorius III (Pope) 54 horse 2, 160, 190, 227, 260, 296, 300, 372, 381, 410 hospital 34, 281, 352 house church 86, 278, 284–85, 289, 297, 319–20 household 4, 38, 42, 122, 126, 164, 190, 199, 217, 401, 411 Hunnius, Aegidius 65, 66n92, 70n123 Hunnius, Nicolaus 66 husband 49, 178, 269 in a mixed marriage 272, 276 and inscription 178 Hus, Jan 312 Hussite 53 hymn 55, 187–90, 194, 194n160, 366–67, 376–77, 402 hymnal 186, 314, 316, 343, 356, 362, 366–67, 387 icon 52 iconography 169, 176, 178 identity 21, 50n9, 82n192, 88, 90, 118, 165–66, 218, 224, 408 ideology 56, 195–96, 406, 409 idolatry 72–73, 94 illness 43, 79, 121, 170, 176, 189, 190, 201, 213, 276, 346n75, 349, 371, 395 Imperial 34, 55–56, 59–60, 70n123, 106, 241, 285, 287, 297, 316 administration 105–6 church 3, 227 city 13, 55n41, 59, 88, 298, 342n52 constitution 278, 281, 286, 301 elector 3n2, 65, 65n89, 68–69, 71, 98, 251, 298, 311, 313

457 estates 6, 57, 61, 63, 68, 71, 72, 74, 98–100, 105, 239, 242, 248, 250–51, 272, 278, 299, 407 territory 3n2, 6, 57, 60–61, 65, 77n164, 94n248, 97, 241, 246, 264–66, 277, 279, 406 indifference 92, 328 indoctrination 50 industrialization 210, 225, 410 infant 73, 134, 178, 181, 199, 205–6, 214, 271, 396 infrastructure (parish) 2, 7, 27, 35, 84, 270, 274, 410 inscription on gravestone 179–81 on house 159, 181–97, 411–12 on shrine 167 instruments (used in worship) 43, 84, 129, 132, 303, 369, 381, 386 insult 54, 131, 254, 376, 395 intellectuals 16, 50n9, 98, 224, 402n144, 405, 408, 410 Interior Ministry (Kassel) 327, 329, 343, 398, 400, 404 intolerance 248n15, 318, 376–77, 385 irreligion 224 ius emigrandi 279 ius episcopali 77 ius patronatus 77 ius presentandi 77 ius reformandi 77 Jahn, Friedrich Ludwig 163n91 Jesuit 66, 105 Jew 54, 58, 75, 82, 87, 97, 102, 167, 255, 280, 312, 322 Johann Bernhard (Prince-Abbot) 79 Johann Friedrich (Prince-Abbot) 84 Johann Reinhard III (Count) 293, 335, 349 Johann Wilhelm (Elector) 298 Julius Echter (Prince-Abbot) 105 Karl of Hesse-Kassel (Landgrave) 197, 294n34 coercive measures of 237, 268, 274, 294, 296–98, 304, 358, 379, 384, 386 and coreligionist subjects 270–71, 289, 294, 306, 368

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458 Karl of Hesse-Kassel (Landgrave) (cont.) and pejorative naming 254 Kindbett 200 Kratzputz 193 Kulturkampf 224, 401, 408 labor services (parish) 13, 29, 34–36, 44n109, 80, 154, 259, 259n75, 306, 339, 395 laity 33–35, 48–49, 51, 56, 61, 79, 90, 95–97, 102–3, 104n295, 105, 253–55, 316, 318, 336, 387 Latin Christian world 4–5, 47, 230n2, 234. See also Latin Christendom Christians 58 church 51, 53 language 38, 52, 63, 99, 181, 184 law 54, 126, 132, 218n83, 231n5, 239, 241, 246, 253, 394 church 53, 267–68, 272 godly 59 Imperial 60 natural 108 Ledderhose, Konrad Wilhelm 136 Leipzig Convent (1631) 71, 99 liberal 224, 346, 357, 405 linden tree 39–40 liturgy 21, 57, 264, 296, 311, 317, 367, 379 Lollard 53 Lord’s Prayer 314, 324, 353–55, 373, 384–85 lordship (Herrschaft) 77–79, 100 lost villages (Wüstungen) 31–32, 39, 42–43, 109, 411 Louis XIV (King) 298 Ludwig IV of Hesse-Marburg (Landgrave) 69, 78n168, 79–80 Luther, Martin 3, 45n113, 58–59, 61, 67, 90, 231, 405 and the evangelical Union 310, 312, 387 Ninety-Five Theses of 57, 312 theology of 44, 142 Magyars 3 Mainz 28, 34, 66, 165–67 (arch)bishop(ric) of 17, 20–21, 27, 63, 74, 78n168, 107 manor 32–33, 36–37, 44, 156 manure 174–75

Index of Subjects Marburg Colloquy (1529) 377 Marheineke, Philipp Konrad 311–12 Marian grotto 165n99 market 2, 37, 108, 182 marriage 95, 154, 251, 267–68, 273, 318, 370 of Christian couple 95–96, 100 clerical 2, 105, 149n42 depicted on gravestone 177–78 minister’s handling of 264, 266, 269, 371 mixed 263, 269, 272, 287, 303–4, 342, 345, 370–71 Mary, the Virgin 27, 176, 196, 291 Masonic symbol 182 Mass 105, 107, 120, 256 Maundy Thursday 138–39, 324, 377, 383 Maximilian (Emperor) 57 mayor and communal proceeding 126, 146, 170–71, 174, 205, 215–17, 220, 226 and the evangelical Union 313, 332, 348–49, 367, 401 and parish dispute 129, 259 and religion 70 meadow 166, 204, 214 media 48, 310 medieval 4, 9, 36, 54, 87n206, 230. See also Middle Ages Melanchthon, Philipp 67, 312 memory 132, 178 mercenary 108 Merovingian 16, 20 metaphysics 231n5 Michaelmas 123 Middle Ages 230–31, 231n5 midwife 134, 268, 396 military 23, 211, 268–69, 388 mill 31, 113–14, 121, 143, 199, 204, 211, 220 mission 17, 20, 56, 67, 233, 301 mockery 70, 126, 238, 255, 329, 342, 360, 363 modern 189, 407 state 5, 210, 273, 405 and naming conventions 63n74 and nationalism 218 and periodization 9, 50 and Protestantism 47n1, 231n5, 232, 405 and religion 225, 231, 233, 273, 405 monastery/-ticism 16, 21, 25, 30, 33–34, 52, 155, 187n150, 295. See also cloister

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Index of Subjects Moor 54 motorized transport 1 Muhammad 54 multiconfessionalism 6, 240, 242, 274, 278, 281 Muslim 3, 58, 97, 102 Napoleon 163, 210 narrative 16, 143, 230, 265, 303, 387–88, 408 Catholic-Protestant 9–10, 48, 172, 176, 263–64, 276, 308, 345 and the Enlightenment 195–96, 388 Nas, Johannes 72 national 53, 163n91, 182, 224, 230, 231, 310, 318, 407–8, 408n11 -ism 5, 210, 310, 310n9, 311, 321, 387, 407, 408n11, 409 -ist 56, 163, 189, 230, 310 Nazism (German national socialism) 230, 409 network (parish) 26–27, 34, 242, 247, 265–66, 271–72, 274, 277, 282, 282n8, 294, 334 New Apostolic 213, 219 Nicene creed 388 nobles 1, 28, 33, 61, 89, 191, 290. See also aristocracy and the church 20, 32, 33, 155, 177 and Gemeinde 30, 80, 95, 157, 159, 203, 211 and minister 13, 25, 217, 290 and patronage 33, 34, 43, 77, 109, 115, 156, 157, 217 and religious reform 68, 70, 74–78, 82, 84, 85n206, 105–6 subordinates of 4, 38, 48, 82 Normaljahr (“normal year”) 240, 240n7 novelty 44, 129–30, 134, 243, 263, 274, 290, 321, 322 nun/-nery 34, 187n150 obedience 53, 221, 381 observance 130, 139, 269 officer 39, 42, 42n95, 45n112, 144–46, 148, 150, 177, 183, 212, 218, 237, 269, 366 ordinance church 41, 44, 61, 69, 71, 100, 132, 148, 237, 252, 269

459 communal 221 concerning graves 171 concerning schooling 304 of 1826 (switching denominations) 369, 370, 373 Hessian (1533) 44n109 Pew (1656) 151–55 territorial or state 44, 57, 273, 327 organ 216, 229, 337, 339, 348, 382–83, 386–87 organist 182, 207, 383 orphan 149, 150 Orthodox 9, 348 orthodoxy 57–58, 74, 97, 232, 250, 308 Otto I (Emperor) 55 oxen 190, 372 Palatine elector 65, 65n88 pamphlet 97 Papist 63, 66–68, 71, 74, 90, 254, 256 Pareus, David 65, 71 passion of Christ 166 passion week 138–39 path 7, 10, 29–30, 60, 64, 130, 162, 166, 230, 238, 293–94, 317–18, 334, 407. See also road condition of 112, 120, 170, 174, 201, 204, 209, 223 patron/-nage 336 aristocratic 13, 30, 33–34, 43, 77–78, 80, 109, 114–15, 128, 148, 156–57, 159, 203, 206–7, 211, 214, 217 ecclesiastical 34 festival 131 saint 27 Paulus III (Pope) 99n272 peace (as communal value) 44, 79, 128, 177, 190, 232, 344–45 peasant 49, 51, 177 and agriculture 24, 34, 36, 108, 109, 186, 191 and creativity 163–64 and the Gemeinde 36–43 and relationship to nobles 4, 24, 36, 37 and religion 45, 50n10, 85, 85n206, 88, 99, 129, 159–60, 165, 167–69, 179, 187n150, 194, 256, 322, 323 and settlement pattern 24, 33, 36

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460 peasant (cont.) and towns 37 and war 1, 2, 7, 40, 45, 61 Pentecost 95, 225, 336, 365–77 pestilence 2, 13, 24, 79, 115, 170, 222 pew 169, 366. See also ordinance, Pew and denominational community 297, 307, 359–62, 375–78, 380 and the Gemeinde 2, 45n112, 132, 150–55 and noble patrons 157 and the Reformation 45 reorganization of 339, 344, 346 women’s 217, 340 Philipp of Hesse (Landgrave) 3n2, 61, 68, 105, 387 Philipp Ludwig of Hanau-Münzenberg (Count) 258 Philipp Ludwig of Palatinate-Neuburg (Duke) 65n88 Philipp von Schweinsberg (Prince-Abbot) 105 Pietism/-tist 143, 189 piety 165–66, 217, 233 pilgrimage 52, 114, 164–66, 300 Pius IV (Pope) 59 Placidus (Prince-Abbot) 290 plague 2–3, 24, 37, 109, 210, 410 plow 23, 25, 108, 191 pluralism 6–8, 57, 62, 74, 89, 94n248, 237, 241, 252–53, 255, 263, 265, 270–71, 278 pluralization 6, 47–48, 57, 75, 287n22, 406–7 “points of improvement” (Verbesserungspunkte) 68n109 polarization 6, 89, 101, 104, 243, 246 polity 6, 62 poor relief 35, 43, 333, 341 pope 16, 21, 52, 54, 59–60, 66, 70, 72, 322 popery 69, 72 postil 2, 122, 158 poverty 52, 198, 226, 316 prayer 123, 133, 165, 172, 187, 192, 269, 279, 306, 309, 331, 351. See also Lord’s Prayer house or room 13, 297, 331–32, 348 service 122–23, 125, 128, 130, 132, 134, 139, 226, 307, 312, 329, 362–63, 374, 389 pregnancy 209, 268, 273 Premonstratensian 34, 45, 114, 155 presbytery 45, 139, 225, 288

Index of Subjects and the evangelical Union in Hanau 312, 330, 332–33, 336–40, 342–44, 346 and the evangelical Union in Fulda 321 and the evangelical Union in Upper Hesse 359, 371, 397–99, 402 print 59, 98, 101, 311, 315–16 press or shop 58, 75 procession 86, 104, 160, 163, 166–67, 299–301 border 160, 162 confirmation 160, 161 festival 160 funeral 29, 162, 175–76 pilgrimage 164–65 Reformation tricentennial (1817) 311–13 wedding 161–62 procurator 85 progressivism 196 proprietor 32–33 protocol 85, 338, 342, 359 pulpit 132, 150, 150n50, 158, 301, 339, 358, 374, 377, 383, 384, 402 punishment 78n168, 274, 296, 299, 324, 329 Quaker

322

Rau of Holzhausen 68, 76, 78 reformation 64, 72, 76, 94, 95 Reformation/-ns 5, 44–45, 50, 50n9, 59, 64n84, 73, 105, 151, 204, 230–31, 238, 257, 288, 296, 312, 351, 403, 407, 407n9 Protestant 3, 47, 231n5, 232, 309, 312, 331, 351 Catholic Counter- 3, 47 centennial (1617) 90n225 quadricentennial (1917) 403 tricentennial (1817) 308, 311, 317 refugee 372 Religious Peace of Augsburg (1555) 59–61, 63, 105, 141, 239–41, 247, 279, 281–82, 286, 407 Renaissance humanism 54, 59 renewal 77n164, 198, 233, 276 renitent 400 Resolution (1670) 242, 259, 263, 263n3, 276, 280, 284, 287 resurrection 70, 179 revival 198, 276

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Index of Subjects river Danube 23 Eder 13, 30, 372 Lahn 20, 112, 114–15, 135, 172–73, 179, 199–200, 203–5, 209, 229 Main 17, 20 Rhine 4, 16–17, 22–23 road 1, 16, 130, 166, 193, 300, 373, 407–8. See also path condition of 9, 119, 169, 174, 216 rococo 163, 167 Romanesque 53 neo- 227 Romanists 63 Romantic 167 von Rommel, Dietrich Christoph 311 Rudolph II (Emperor) 63 du Ry, Charles 197 sacralization 1, 59, 61, 141, 160, 169, 198 de- 232 sacrament 275, 319 and doctrinal theology 57, 105, 159 and the Gemeinde 9, 30, 43, 130, 134, 137, 156, 203, 214, 232 and Latin Christendom 54 ministerial right concerning 26 and the mother church 27 sacrilege 329 salvation 6, 57, 66, 76, 142–43, 189, 195, 204, 216, 227, 231n5, 309, 380, 382 Satan 97 Schäfer, Carl 197 Schenk family 76, 78, 114–15, 148, 157, 206–7, 214, 217, 290 schism 51, 58, 60 Great Schism 53, 58 of 1054 52 Schmalkaldic Articles 102 school 9, 95, 103, 125–27, 148, 151, 156, 203, 211, 237, 248, 262, 304–6, 318, 324, 331–32, 348, 367–68, 376, 378, 383, 401 -house 125–27, 137, 183, 214, 222, 258n73, 260, 288, 333, 345, 348, 362, 367 -master 14, 71, 80–81, 122–23, 125–26, 133–34, 137, 143, 156, 174, 191, 200, 203, 206, 211–12, 215, 226–27, 237, 269, 280–81, 287–88, 292, 301, 303–6, 312–13,

461 325, 331–33, 366–67, 389, 394, 400. See also teacher schooling 71, 98n266, 125–26, 211, 223, 279, 283, 287, 305, 332–33, 342, 345, 376 Schutz und Schirm 79 Schwenckfeld, Caspar 73 Schwenckfelder 68 science 231n5, 233 scripture 64, 66, 76, 187, 194n160, 195, 317, 405 sect 64, 67–68, 72–74, 213 sectarian 96n257, 250 secular 3n2, 44, 55–56, 97, 104n295, 196, 255, 260, 328, 405, 410 secularization 3n2, 5, 45, 105, 155, 195, 198, 210–11, 232–33, 268, 321, 407, 407n9, 410 sedition 319, 323 seigneurial 37, 158 sensory 84 sermon 71, 89, 159, 285, 301, 307, 329, 334, 338, 361, 363, 369, 380, 396 funeral 112, 136, 138, 176, 204, 259 Gemeinde’s interest regarding 79, 80, 117–18, 121–23, 136, 138–39, 146, 158, 347, 374 obligation regarding 128, 132, 138–39, 201, 331 read versus preached 122–23, 158 related to the Reformation 45, 45n113 settlement 3–4, 16, 22–24, 26–29, 31–33, 36–37, 58, 106, 109, 114–15, 160, 282n8, 369, 411 Seven Years’ War 152 sheep 121, 179, 192, 221, 378, 394 shepherd 48, 79, 93–94, 146, 179, 192, 207, 269, 380, 394 shoemaker 85, 102, 137 shrine 165–67 Sidonius (Bishop) 17 Sigismund (King) 56 Simultaneum in the evangelical Union era 319–20, 358, 375, 379–81, 383–85, 385n91, 386, 389, 392–94, 399–400, 406 in the pre-Westphalian era 86 in the post-Westphalian era 278, 287, 290, 294, 294n34, 296–98, 304, 304n60, 306–7

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462 skepticism 201, 233 slander 69, 72, 254, 256 Slavic 54 snow 9, 120, 121, 203, 214, 223, 238 societas christianitas. See corpus christianum sola scriptura 405 song 133, 187, 187n150, 189, 276, 313, 316, 356, 366–67, 388 songbook 187n150, 188–89, 194n160, 366–67. See also hymnal songwriter 194n160. See also hymnist Specht 106 St. Boniface 3n2, 16, 20–21, 118, 167 St. Clare convent 72 St. Paul 90, 355 St. Stephan’s Stift 34 St. Sturm 3n2 steam engine 410 stillborn 178, 180, 351 stock images 300 strife 8, 97, 151, 154, 215, 249, 303, 306, 332, 344, 380, 385–86 suffering 135, 178, 189, 219, 224, 316 summer 115, 119, 134, 171, 190, 204, 225, 286, 372 symbol 20, 44, 55, 102, 168, 177–79, 182, 224, 310, 313, 320, 328, 388 syncretism 96, 388 synergism 4, 232, 388 synod 45, 70, 313–15, 321, 322, 324, 327–28, 337–38, 373, 387 tablet 366, 402 tailor 85, 102, 137, 367 Tanner, Adam 64n84, 66 Tartar 75 tavern 100 tax 38, 44, 170, 174, 218 parish 35, 148, 412 wartime 2 teacher 162, 251, 332, 348, 383, 393, 401. See also schoolmaster Ten Commandments 100 tenant 36 tenure (land) 36 territorialization 56 theologian 47, 66, 68, 70, 72, 84, 91, 96–98, 169, 250, 263, 402n144

Index of Subjects theology 70, 94, 122, 231–32, 313, 317, 321, 328–29, 375, 377, 387, 402 Calvin’s 22, 68, 88n217, 159, 389 and the Congress of Westphalia 6 differing 51, 57, 74, 142, 308, 356 Luther’s 22, 159 Protestant 143, 171 Reformed 168, 296, 396 Roman Church’s 22 and the rural Gemeinden 46 training in 53, 264 Thirty Years War (1618–1648) 2, 32, 60, 79, 107, 116, 405, 407 Three Leagues 104n295 tithe 27, 35, 43, 148 tolerance 262, 302, 309, 319, 320, 377, 384–85, 387, 403, 406–7 topography 32, 39, 163, 208, 217, 222 trade 98, 137, 177, 221, 226 tradition 20, 27, 80n181, 86, 138–39, 158, 163, 168, 201, 277, 322, 411–12 Trent, Council of 63. See also Tridentine treten 102, 253 Tridentine Creed 59 reforms 105 Tossanus, Daniel 70 Totenkronen (“crowns of death”) 181, 181n147 treasure 187, 195 Treaty of Passau (1552) 286 Treusch von Buttlar 109, 156, 203, 207 Tribur, Council of (895) 28 tumult 76, 253, 296, 301–2, 385n91 Turk 70, 75 unbelief 322, 356 unbeliever 71, 74, 96, 249, 263 undifferentiation 103–4, 250 Ungewitter, Georg 197 university 53, 75, 114, 182, 310, 312, 405 urban 24, 36, 163, 191, 246, 406, 411 culture 30, 50n9, 59, 84, 85n206, 181–82, 189, 224, 408 populace 1, 6, 8, 16, 75, 88, 102, 141, 182, 201, 218 setting 8, 88, 150, 298 society 37, 55, 59, 62, 85

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463

Index of Subjects utilitarianism utopia 196

411

values

2, 43–44, 85, 177, 232, 356, 405, 411, 411n2 Vikings 3 village book 37 festival (Kirmes) 160 “villagization” 36 violence 40, 255, 263, 296, 301 visitation 45, 71, 85, 85n206, 86, 153, 307, 326, 329 de Voltaire, François-Marie Arouet 240 wagon 175, 227, 410 war memorial 408–9 warden 39–40, 133–34, 170, 215 Wartburg Festival (1817) 310 water 9, 14, 66, 75, 114, 127, 131, 170–71, 199–200, 203–5, 214, 300, 302, 306 wealth 5, 25, 34, 157, 189, 192, 221, 268 weather (inclement) 1, 112, 119, 123, 127, 133, 143, 169, 174, 176, 201, 223, 337, 362, 372, 390 weaving 95, 222 wedding 29, 35, 112, 160–63, 226, 266, 269, 273, 276, 293, 300, 306, 329, 390, 395 Werra district 76, 78 Westphalia, Congress of (1643–1648) 6, 239, 406 Westphalia, Peace of (1648) 7, 10, 60, 62, 237–39, 239n1, 240, 240n7, 241, 246–50, 252–53, 262–64, 265–66, 270, 272–73, 276, 279–81, 284, 290–91, 298–99, 302, 316, 319–20, 379, 384, 405–7

pre-Westphalia 97, 248, 264, 270–71, 281, 283, 285, 297, 299 post-Westphalia 242, 266, 268, 274, 276, 279, 282–85, 293, 297–98, 330 widow 38, 91, 93–94, 126, 149–50, 154, 170, 205, 253, 325, 369 wife 49, 100, 251, 267, 370–71, 373 and inscription 159, 177–79, 183–84, 196, 411 of minister 122, 150 in a mixed marriage 237–38, 254, 262, 272, 275, 280, 299, 303, 370–71, 396 Wilhelm I of Hesse (Elector) 311 Wilhelm I of Prussia (King) 222 Wilhelm IV of Hesse-Kassel (Landgrave) 65, 105, 388 winter 112, 115, 119, 120, 124, 127, 133–34, 142–43, 176, 200–201, 203–4, 209–10, 214, 362, 372 Wittenberg Concord 102 Witzel, Georg 74 Wolfgang of Isenburg (Count) 69 wood 214, 258n73, 333 worden 101–2, 252–53 World War I 395, 408, 410 World War II 2, 357, 408, 410 World War period 2, 8, 409 Wycliffe, John 312 yield (agricultural)

214

Zepper, Wilhelm 70 zugetan 100, 251, 252, 263n6 Zwingli, Ulrich 55, 312, 387 Zwinglian 63n74, 69, 70n123, 72

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