Religious Identity in an Early Reformation Community: Augsburg, 1517 to 1555. By Michele Zelinsky Hanson. Studies in Central European Histories 45. Leiden: Brill, 2009. xiv + 242 pp. $158.00 cloth

摘要

Michele Hanson’s monograph examines the nature of religious identity in anreligiously mixed community, namely the German city of Augsburg during thenfour decades following the start of the Reformation movement. In this setting,nHanson argues that we should see religious identity as fluid, multivalent, andncomplex rather than stable, simple and clear-cut. Hanson takes an unusual andncreative approach to this question. Rather than examining sources that arenexplicitly religious in nature, she bases her claims on a close reading of fortynyears worth of interrogation records produced by functionaries of Augsburg’sncity councilors. In the course of carrying out its regular law-enforcementnresponsibilities, city officials routinely questioned suspects and witnesses inndetail, and every interrogation session was transcribed by a city clerk.nHanson’s research strategy, apparently, was to comb through mountains ofnthese transcripts—she doesn’t tell us exactly how much material there is—andnto document and analyze every reference to religion or religious themes, evennif tangential to the case at hand. Religious Identity in an Early ReformationnCommunity represents a compact distillation of what must have been anmassive undertaking indeed. In stories drawn from her archivalia, populatednwith a lively (and often funny) cast of characters, Hanson solidly demonstratesnher central contention—that people in Augsburg in the first half of thensixteenth century did not think in terms of fixed religious identities (Lutheran,nReformed, Catholic, Anabaptist). Rather, they engaged in an ongoing processnof constructing complex and nuanced identities for themselves, their families,nand their neighbors. When they spoke about their own or others’ religiousnlives, they tended to embed religious beliefs and practices in a landscape ofnother, often decidedly non-spiritual choices and affiliations.