Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe

Confessionalism and Pietism: Religious Reform in Early Modern Europe. Edited by Fred van Lieburg. [Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz, Abteilung für Abendländische Religionsgeschichte, Beiheft 67.] (Mainz:Verlag Philipp von Zabern. 2006. Pp. vi, 324. euro39,90.)

This first volume of three collections of essays presents the results of the editor's project "Cultural History of Pietism and Revivalism, c. 1650-c. 1850: An American, Dutch, and Nordic Connection." Readers unfamiliar with recent scholarship on the Pietist renewal movement in early modern Protestantism can sample both the important emphasis on the international dimensions of Pietism as well as its complicated relationship to the political and social transformations both within and beyond Europe. This first volume that specifically attempts to analyze Pietism's connection to the major Protestant confessional churches (Evangelical-Lutheran and Reformed) and the free church movements will be followed by subsequent collections that investigate Pietist revivalism and notions of "modernity" and finally the movement's impact on creating patterns and notions of religious dissent and social community in...