The Empire's Reformations: Politics and Religion in Germany 1495-1648.

"David Luebke covers the time span from around 1500 to the end of the Peace of Westphalia, including the Thirty Years War. His first books were about the communal level, the peasants, their ways of rebellion or opposition, but also on religious coexistence from a micro-historical, local perspective. In this book he brings his knowledge of this local level to describe the Empire, its confessional structure and its political history, from the bottom up. It is a very concise, brief, comprehensive book on this era, 1500 to 1648, between the two landmarks that shaped what one can call the Imperial Constitution. Again, religious and political history can absolutely not be separated from one another. He describes the Reformations in the plural, Luther’s and Calvin’s movements, but also the Catholic reform. The Reformation did not produce distinct denominations immediately. What historians call ‘confessionalization’ was a complex, nonlinear process. In the end, there were three distinct denominational groups in the Empire—Lutherans, Calvinists and Catholics—but their emergence was a very long and complicated process. History is always contingent. It could have happened completely differently andnd this is what becomes clear in this book. David Luebke shows how religious diversity posed a threat to the political and economic order and to the tranquility of society. Society was rigidly hierarchical, and this hierarchy was challenged in a strong way. The question is, how did princes and local communities manage this unrest, and how did the different religious and political reformations contribute to general transformations like state building at the level of the individual principalities? At the same time, he looks at how these changes influenced the loose connection of the members at the Imperial level. You always have to take into account that there were at least three layers: the local level of the communities, the territorial level of the principalities, and the top level of the Empire as a whole. You always have to describe the interrelations between these different levels. And this is what he does in a very concise way. He also shows how the Empire differed structurally from other European monarchies, like France, because of this multi-layered structure. It restored, in a way, after the Thirty Years War, what had already been achieved in 1555 at the Peace of Augsburg, but on a different level. After this catastrophic war, the peace treaties had a stabilizing effect. The Peace of Westphalia was a fundamental law for the Empire as well as for the international order. However, it also created a problem for the subsequent centuries, because it made the imperial system less flexible and conflicts less manageable. It fixed all of the members’ vested rights and a certain denominational status quo without settling the basic tension between the imperial bonds on the one hand and the princes’ claim to sovereignty on the other. This left little means to react flexibly to changing conditions, which was a huge handicap for the future and contributed to the slow but steady dissolution of the whole imperial system."