The Construction of Confessional Identities in Eighteenth-Century Germany*

Abstract

Christophe Duhamelle’s La frontière au village. Une identité catholique allemande au temps des Lumières is part of the rich field of studies devoted to confessionalization in the Holy Roman Empire. The book is, however, innovative on at least three levels. First, it moves away from macrohistorical perspectives favoring an overarching point of view, instead analyzing confessional identity as an interaction and constant tension between attempts at standardization imposed from above and appropriations by communities themselves. Its guiding thread is not the confessional norm, but an exploration of the different ways that individuals establish a sense of membership within a community. Discontinuities and areas of uncertainty persist along the frontiers between Catholics and Lutherans, and confessional identity is characterized by its specular nature, feeding off of what it borrows from its opponents. Second, Duhamelle’s study focuses on the second half of the eighteenth century, in contrast to other studies predominantly dealing with the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Lastly, Eischsfeld, an exclave of the Archbishopric-Electorate of Mainz, was a rural territory, while most studies have essentially been devoted to towns.