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In the century after the Reformation, Basel’s clergy gradually met the criteria of professionalization. Central to this transformation was the church’s control over the education and appointment of its clergy. Basel may not have been typical, but it clearly illustrates trends that occurred in other, larger territories over a somewhat longer time period. The case of Basel also reveals the important connection between the development of rhetoric and dialectic instruction at the university and the evolution of both theology and preaching, and it indicates some possible differences between Lutheran and Reformed preaching. It questions the older interpretation of Basel’s confessional history, indicating instead the persistence of a non-confessional form of Protestantism into the 1570s. Together with the Senate’s relative lack of concern with church affairs during this time, this suggests that confessionalization, if defined as a process imposed from above, did not begin until the last two decades of the century, coinciding with the entry of the third generation into the ministry.

This book demonstrates that the Counter-Reformation of the 16th and 17th centuries contributed to the process of state building in Inner Austria in various ways, most important among which were the enhancement of the power of the Habsburg Monarchy and the creation of an ideological formula for the consensus between the dynasty and the provincial nobilities who represented the political nation. On the other hand, there was the case of Hungary and the unsolved problem of crypto-Protestantism which illustrated the dialectics of a confessional policy that already carried the germ of self-destruction. In the course of the 18th century, it was to succumb to the dissolvent, secularising forces of the Enlightenment, whose ‘cosmopolitan’ expansionism was in turn checked by the countercurrents of nascent nationalism. The age of confessionalisation and aspiring confessional absolutism thus left an ambivalent legacy of repression and revolt, to be rejected or assimilated by the modern national movements of the peoples in the Habsburg Monarchy.

What effect did the structural process of religious confessionalisation have on the production, publication, and dissemination of works of erudition, and on shaping those aspects of European intellectual activity that have come to be known as the ‘humanities’? This introductory overview offers a comparative assessment of that question, focussing separately on each confessional space: Catholic, Reformed, and Lutheran, and the individual regions within each. It stresses the importance of confessional investment in erudite practices for stimulating their growth and development. At the same time, it emphasises the importance of trans-confessional emulation as an agent of intellectual change. It is suggested that early modern erudition and the conditions in which it developed should be conceptualised on their own terms, rather than as a triumphant precursor of the ‘modern’ humanities or a pale remnant of the golden age of a pre-confessional Renaissance humanism.

This book explores the interaction of Cossackdom and religion, specifically the role of the Cossacks in the religious wars that began in Ukraine in the late 16th century and the influence of religion on the ideology, social and political behavior, and cultural identity of the Cossacks. Another aspect of this theme is the effect of Cossack intervention in religious affairs on the Ukraine's Orthodox Church and its relations with other churches and religious groups. The period covered in this book, extending from the late 16th century to the middle of the 17th, was one of the growth and development of Ukrainian Cossackdom as a distinct social estate. It discusses the effect of confessionalisation on religious life in Ukraine and how it influenced the fate and outlook of Ukrainian Cossackdom.

The events of the last quarter of the 16th century in the Kyivan metropolitanate largely determined the course of further ecclesiastical development, playing a decisive role in the history of the Ukrainian lands. The new era made unprecedented demands on the leaders of the Kyivan church, its institutions, and the mass of the faithful, while expanding contacts with the West brought the powerful influences of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation to bear on the Ukrainian lands. The impact of confessionalisation, which intensified both internal and external pressures on the old traditional structures of the Kyivan metropolitanate, proved overwhelming, and the church, failing to withstand them, split in two and sparked a religious crisis between Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism. One branch remained under the authority of the patriarchs of Constantinople, while the other subordinated itself to the pope of Rome. The growth of Counter-Reformation tendencies in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth had a great influence on the development of religious life in Ukraine.

This chapter examines the relationship, if any, between Cossackdom and nationhood, how social and national identities were interconnected in Ruthenian society, and the role of religion in that relationship. It focuses on the changing social, religious, and ethnocultural image of the Cossacks in the Ruthenian and Polish writings of the period. The Union of Lublin (1569) between Poland and the Grand Duchy of Lithuania not only established an administrative boundary between Poland and Lithuania more or less coinciding with the present-day Ukrainian-Belarusian border but also united Galicia and Western Podilia with the remaining Ukrainian territories to the east. The link between ethnicity and religion took on importance for Rus' long before early modern times because of its location on the boundary between Western and Eastern Christianity and its Islamic neighbors. In post-Brest Ukraine and Belarus, confessionalisation promoted the formation of new varieties of religious consciousness that were no longer shaped by allegiance to a once united Kyivan church but by loyalty to one of the supranational denominations: Orthodoxy, Catholicism, or some branch of Protestantism.

By the early 17th century, the blurred religious allegiances of previous decades were rapidly giving way to a clear confessionalization. The Protestant Church of Ireland had become a colonial institution, in which a clergy overwhelmingly recruited from England ministered to an almost exclusively settler population. Meanwhile, the Catholicism of the Gaelic Irish and Old English was being reorganized along Counter-Reformation lines. Conflict between the government and the Old English reached a peak at the parliament of 1613. A later agreement to trade religious toleration for assistance in resolving the crown's financial difficulties (‘the Graces’) only confirmed the estrangement that now existed. The writings of the growing community of Irish exiles in Catholic Europe reflect the development of a militant Catholic ideology. By contrast, the dominant theme within Ireland itself was the continued attempt to seek an accommodation with the new political and social order.

Among the most protracted of the Dutch controversies was the bitter quarrel which erupted around the well-meaning figure of Johannes Bredenburg, a dispute which reached such a pitch of intensity that it eventually generated a formal schism in the Dutch Collegiant movement. A fringe Church in numbers, the Collegiants, from their origins in the second quarter of the 17th century down to the early 18th, were disproportionately prominent in Dutch intellectual debate owing to the special emphasis they placed on the intellectual and spiritual freedom of the individual. As such they were both a new and highly innovative phenomenon in the wider European, as well as Dutch, context, reflecting in a theological mode the wider psychological and spiritual reaction against the pressures of confessionalization gripping western culture in the late 17th century. The Bredenburg disputes were the climax of a long process reaching back to the 1650s when a fringe of Socinian, rationalist Collegiants, including Jelles and Pieter Balling, became immersed in Cartesianism and formed links with the radical philosophical clique around Van den Enden, Meyer, and Spinoza.

This chapter introduces the reader to Augustine of Hippo and his varied reception in the long sixteenth century. It explains the aims, scope, and organization of the book and situates its main arguments in the context of recent research in the fields of Reformation history (including the confessionalization paradigm, the concept of Augustinianism and recent studies of the reception of the Church fathers), Renaissance Humanism, and the history of reading.

After 1555 princes and urban magistrates faced the task of re‐establishing order and equilibrium. German historians have generally described this as a process of confessionalisation that led to state formation. In fact, however, the German territories remained subject to the authority of the emperor and the Reich and the process of confessionalisation was not as rigorous as many have claimed. Significant developments took place in administration, finance and taxation, education and the economic activities of the princes. The court emerged once more as a central institution; in cities, ruling councils tended to aspire turn themselves into closed oligarchies. From the 1570s, however, governments found themselves challenged by the need to respond to apparently increasingly severe social and economic crises. This had implications for the way that they dealt with the poor, with minorities such as the Jews and the gypsies, and with the phenomenon of witchcraft.

The study discussed in this chapter, of Barholomaus Keckermann, not only addresses the issue of the late Reformation or early orthodox approaches to philosophy as a necessary element in the academy or university curriculum, it also examines the issue of the Reformed reappropriation of aspects of the older tradition in the era of the institutionalization of Protestantism, what might be viewed as the intellectual analogue of what various social historians have called “confessionalization”. Keckermann's analysis of the problem of faith, reason, and double truth appears as an exercise both in the positive reappraisal and in the delimitation of the bounds of philosophy.

Alevi documents that were issued by Ottoman authorities recognising related families as Sufi dervishes and/or sayyids form a point of departure of the analysis in this chapter that focuses on relations between the Ottoman state and the Kizilbash communities. While such documents might be interpreted simply as manifestations of Ottoman religious tolerance and administrative pragmatism, this chapter approaches them in the light of the key argument of this book that emphasises the Sufi genealogies of Kizilbash/Alevi saintly lineages. In assessing relations between the Ottoman state and the Kizilbash communities, a special emphasis is placed on the sixteenth-century Kizilbash persecutions and their ruinous impact on the Sufi infrastructure of the Kizilbash milieu. I contend that the persecutory measures employed against the Kizilbash, rather than being viewed within such binaries as tolerance versus intolerance and politics versus religion, ought to be understood in connection to a range of other developments in Ottoman history, including most importantly the process of Sunni confessionalisation that entailed the demarcation of boundaries of acceptable Sufism. Pressures for confessionalisation would also pave the way for Kizilbashism to evolve from a social movement comprising a diverse range of groups and actors into a relatively coherent and self-conscious socio-religious collectivity.

This chapter considers the effect of postrevolutionary Anglican benevolence on the structure and character of British national life in the mid-eighteenth century. It argues that although reactionary forces pressed for a reclamation and reconstruction of sacerdotal authority, a burgeoning Anglican voluntary sector moved toward continuing social engagement and institutional innovation. In so doing, it fashioned works of Anglican confessionalization into monuments of national benevolence. The result was the making of modern civil society in Britain, a spilt religion: moral rather than confessional, associational rather than parochial, benevolent rather than sacramental — a space perhaps where individuals may be improved, but not saved.

Chapter 3 explores the view of vocation and ordination held by Calvin and his colleagues. The ministers’ responsibility to proclaim the Christian gospel was of primary importance to their sense of vocation. The chapter summarizes this public theology, and then explores the process by which ministerial candidates in Geneva were recruited, elected, and ordained to pastoral posts between 1536 and 1609. The final section of this chapter recounts the protracted struggle between the magistrates and city ministers over the prerogative of pastoral election (as seen in the affair of Michel Le Faucheur), and considers it in light of the contemporary model of confessionalization.

This chapter notes the parallels between the well-studied process of confessionalization in Europe and an equivalent process that took place in the Islamic World. This latter process entailed the articulation of doctrine and ritual and the development of a religious establishment. The chapter looks at various stages of confessionalization within Sunnism and Shi’ism. It also addresses how the Ottoman–Safavid conflict accelerated the Ottomans’ development of a Sunni jurisprudential establishment based on Hanafism, even as the Shahs in Iran were building their own Imami Shi’i institution. Both institutions were hierarchical and enjoyed a division of functions between the army, the judiciary, and the fatwa-issuing apparatus. They were also closely involved in disciplining and socializing the population. Therefore, the chapter observes how the religious establishment plays an important role in the formation of a community of religion: it defines the creed, articulates it in a way comprehensible to the masses, links it with practices that invoke its historical narrative, and provides it with a canonical interpretation. It also Provides and analyses examples of confessionalization , sectionalization and sectionalization of confessions via ethnic conflict.