| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.5 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Europe: Early Modern and Modern

David Mayes. Communal Christianity: The Life and Loss of a Peasant Vision in Early Modern Germany. (Studies in Central European History, number 35.) Boston: Brill. 2004. Pp. ix, 369. $150.00.
David Mayes's book traces the religious and political history of rural communities (Gemeinden) in upper Hesse in the early modern period (ca. 1550–1730), integrating and modifying the communalism thesis of Peter Blickle and the confessionalization model advanced by Heinz Schilling and others. Based on his examination of the interactions of Hessian Gemeinden with higher authorities, Mayes depicts communities that assiduously cultivated a Christian identity and the structures to support it, from church buildings and cemeteries to diligent, learned, and pious pastors and teachers. These were rural communities that sought on their own initiative to extend moral discipline and were more likely to complain that a pastor was remiss in teaching the catechism than to be criticized by ecclesiastical visitors for their failure to learn it.	1
The religious interests of these communities were not, however, identical with those of the confessional state, although they might be coincident and were rarely (at least before 1648) in open conflict. Unlike the Hessian landgraves (or the urban community in Marburg), upper Hessian rural communities did not construe their religion in confessional terms. Rather than thinking of themselves as Lutherans or Calvinists, they regarded themselves simply as "Christian." Mayes regards the religion of the Gemeinden, dubbed "communal Christianity," as a distinct and viable alternative to confessional religion throughout much of the early modern period.	. . .

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