A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World

In the sixteenth century, the Christian church and Christian worship fragmented into a multiplicity of confessions that has grown to the present day. The essays in this volume demonstrate that multiconfessionalism, understood as the legally recognized and politically supported coexistence of two or more confessions in a single polity, was the rule rather than the exception for most of early modern Europe. The contributors examine its causes and effects. They demonstrate that local religious groups across the continent could cooperate with confessional opponents and oppose political authorities to make decisions about their religious lives, depending on local conditions and contingencies. In so doing, this volume offers a new vision of religion, state, and society in early modern Europe.

Contributors include: Bernard Capp, John R. D. Coffey, Jérémie Foa, David Frick, Raymond Gillespie, Benjamin Kaplan, Howard Louthan, David Luebke, Keith Luria, Guido Marnef, Graeme Murdock, Richard Ninness, Penny Roberts, Jesse Spohnholz, Peter Wallace, Lee Palmer Wandel.

Thomas Max Safley is Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He has published extensively on the social and economic history of early modern Europe, in which multiconfessionalism played a substantial role.

“[This volume’s] value lies in its geographical range, the diverse approaches taken, and the generally high quality of the contributions […]. The most ambitious essays – and potentially the most useful for comparative purposes – tackle big questions of how coexistence operated at the level of both community and state.”
Barbara Diefendorf, Boston University. In: The Journal of Ecclesiastical History, Vol. 64, No. 3 (July 2013), pp. 638-639.

‘’Le volume est vraiment un «companion» valable qui décrit avec Bonheur l’état de la recherché historique et peut constituer ainsi l’arrière-plan d’études ultérieures. Le volume contient en outre une abondante bibliographie polyglotte [..] présentée comme «works cited», celle-ci illustre l’extension du contenu du recueil qui est une excellente introduction à la problématique de la multiconfessionalité en Europe, à l’époque de la naissance de la Réforme protestante.’’
Jos E. Vercruysse, Pontificia Gregorian University. In: Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, p. 448.