Sensing Multiconfessionality in Early Modern Germany

Abstract

This article brings together sensory history and research on multiconfessionalism in early modern Germany. It argues that research has not yet paid sufficient attention to the fact that many of the towns in the Holy Roman Empire were not monoconfessional but instead highly diverse, home to a range of religious groups, which influenced the respective town’s sensescape. For a fuller understanding of multiconfessional settings, we can adopt the senses as an analytical category. Focusing on shared churches (Simultankirchen) in the Holy Roman Empire, the article shows that what parishioners heard, saw and smelled in these settings was influenced by the presence of multiple confessions. And confessional coexistence influenced sensory stimuli not only inside the ecclesial space, but also across the town as a whole. The senses are, the article argues, key to our understanding of the experience of multiconfessionalism.