Abstract

Modern religious identities are rooted in collective memories that are constantly made and remade across generations. How do these mutations of memory distort our picture of historical change and the ways that historical actors perceive it? Can one give voice to those whom history has forgotten? The essays collected here examine the formation of religious identities during the Reformation in Germany through case studies of remembering and forgetting—instances in which patterns and practices of religious plurality were excised from historical memory. By tracing their ramifications through the centuries, Archeologies of Confession carefully reconstructs the often surprising histories of plurality that have otherwise been lost or obscured.

Jesse Spohnholz is Associate Professor of History at Washington State University. His research focuses on confessional coexistence, religious exile, gender, and memory of the Reformation  in the early modern Netherlands and northwest Germany. His books include The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (2011) and The Convent of Wesel: The Event That Never Was and the Invention of Tradition (2017).

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

Carina L. Johnson is Professor of History at Pitzer College and serves as extended faculty at Claremont Graduate University. She specializes in the cultural history of the sixteenth-century Habsburg Empire, particularly in relation to the extra-European world. Her publications include Cultural Hierarchy in Sixteenth-Century Europe: The Ottomans and Mexicans (2011).

“As a group, the essays take up a variety of our predecessors and are carefully researched and argued.  There is not a weak link among them.” • German History

“This is a wide-ranging collection which raises some challenging questions for historians about the reliability of earlier scholarship. Two key issues emerge: the danger of assuming a confessional clarity and separation in the early years of the Reformation (or even later) which did not actually come into being until later, and the need to check even accepted narratives of identity formation against archival material. The points are well made and the examples adduced are convincing evidence for this double need.” • The English Historical Review

“This impressive collection of essays deals effectively with the question of confessional histories, offering a convincing evaluation of how the events of the Reformation were regarded and interpreted by contemporaries as well as later generations.” • Andrew Spicer, Oxford Brookes University

“Archeologies of Confession comprises a fascinating series of original and stimulating essays. It will be invaluable for scholars of the Reformation and of German religious history more broadly.” • Joachim Whaley, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge

Marjorie E. Plummer is Professor of History at Western Kentucky University. She researches the history of the impact of the early reform movement on family and gender roles and on the changing legal definitions of social norms and religious identity in Early Modern Germany. She is the author of From Priest’s Whore to Pastor’s Wife: Clerical Marriage and the Process of Reform in the Early German Reformation (2012).