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.

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.

List of Illustrations

Introduction: Reformations Lost and Found
Carina L. Johnson

PART I: SILENCING PLURALITY

Chapter 1. Misremembering Hybridity: The Myth of Goldenstedt
David M. Luebke

Chapter 2. A Luther for Everyone: Irenicism and Orthodoxy at the German Reformation Anniversaries of 1817
Stan Landry

Chapter 3. Challenging Plurality: Wilhelm Horning and the Histories of Alsatian Lutheranism
Anthony J. Steinhoff

Chapter 4. Confessional Histories of Women and the Reformation from the Eightteenth to the Twenty-First Century
Merry Wiesner-Hanks

Chapter 5. Catholics as Foreign Bodies: The County of Mark as a Protestant Territory in Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Prussian Historiography
Ralf-Peter Fuchs

PART II: RECOVERING PLURALITY

Chapter 6. A Catholic Genealogy of Protestant Reason
Richard Schaefer

Chapter 7. Fighting or Fostering Plurality? Ernst Salomon Cyprian as a Historian of Lutheranism in the Early Eighteenth Century
Alexander Schunka

Chapter 8. Heresy and the Protestant Enlightenment: Johann Lorenz von Mosheim’s History of Michael Servetus
Michael Printy

Chapter 9. The Great Fire of 1711: Reconceptualizing the Jewish Ghetto and Jewish-Christian Relations in Early Modern Frankfurt am Main
Dean Phillip Bell

PART III: EXCAVATING HISTORIES OF RELIGION

Chapter 10. The Early Roots of Confessional Memory. Martin Luther Burns the Papal Bull on 10 December 1520
Natalie Krentz

Chapter 11. Early Modern German Historians Confront the Reformation’s First Executions
Robert Christman

Chapter 12. Prison Tales: The Miraculous Escape of Stephen Agricola and the Creation of Lutheran Heroes during the Sixteenth Century
Marjorie E. Plummer

Chapter 13. Invented Memories: The ‘Convent of Wesel’ and the Origins of German and Dutch Calvinism
Jesse Spohnholz

PART IV: REMEMBERING AND FORGETTING

Chapter 14. ‘Our Misfortune’: National Unity versus Religious Plurality in the Making of Modern Germany
Thomas A. Brady, Jr.

Index