Diversity and Dissent: Negotiating Religious Difference in Central Europe, 1500-1800

Early modern Central Europe was the continent’s most decentralized region politically and its most diverse ethnically and culturally. With the onset of the Reformation, it also became Europe’s most religiously divided territory and potentially its most explosive in terms of confessional conflict and war. Focusing on the Holy Roman Empire and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, this volume examines the tremendous challenge of managing confessional diversity in Central Europe between 1500 and 1800. Addressing issues of tolerance, intolerance, and ecumenism, each chapter explores a facet of the complex dynamic between the state and the region’s Catholic, Protestant, Orthodox, Utraquist, and Jewish communities. The development of religious toleration―one of the most debated questions of the early modern period―is examined here afresh, with careful consideration of the factors and conditions that led to both confessional concord and religious violence.

Howard Louthan is Professor of History at the University of Florida. He specializes in the intellectual and cultural history of early modern Central Europe. Among his books are The Quest for Compromise: Peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna (Cambridge, 1997) and Converting Bohemia: Force and Persuasion in the Catholic Reformation (Cambridge, 2009).

Gary B. Cohen is Professor and Chair of History and former director of the Center for Austrian Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. He teaches modern Central European social and political history and has published numerous articles and essays as well as two books in these areas.

Franz A. J. Szabo is director of the Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies and Professor of Austrian and Habsburg History at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada. He has published widely in Europe and North America, including a prizewinning book on Habsburg enlightened absolutism and a recent study of the Seven Years War.