Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque: Religious Identity in Southwest Germany, 1550-1750.

Louthan, Howard Paul

By Marc R. Forster. New Studies in European History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. xiv + 268 pp. $59.95 cloth.

The Reformation affected southwest Germany in a gradual fashion. In the middle of the sixteenth century it was not always easy to distinguish Catholic from Protestant, but by 1700 the lines of religious identity constituted what one historian has termed an "invisible frontier" between these two confessional groups. Catholic Revival in the Age of the Baroque is a fascinating exploration of this period of confessional formation. Carefully sifting through archival evidence, Marc Forster, in what is essentially an extended critique of the confessionalization thesis, outlines the complex processes by which Catholicism became a critical marker of identity for the people of this region that lacked the structures of a strong state. Forster begins his study by examining an aggressive Tridentine program that lay and clerical leaders attempted to impose in the early years of Catholic reform. By 1650, however, churchmen had come to realize that such changes could not be imposed unilaterally. Ordinary men and women insisted on their right to fashion a religious identity that spoke to local sensibilities. As the residents of one community stated when responding to the reforms of an overzealous cleric, "It is not up to him [the parish priest] to bring new practices into the church, the church is ours, not his" (60). Through his examination of pilgrimage patterns, the practices of everyday piety, and the communal administration of the region's many parishes, Forster charts the development of a Catholic identity that at its basis was more popular than elite.

Howard Paul Louthan

University of Florida