From moral reform to civic Lutheranism: Protestant identity in seventeenth-century Lubeck

The following study suggests that social change in seventeenth-century German cities cannot be understood apart from community religious identity. By reconstructing the overlapping crises of the seventeenth century as they occurred in Lubeck, the capital city of the Hanseatic League, I argue that structural crisis alone did not cause permanent changes in the ordering of urban politics and religious life inherited from the late middle ages and Reformation. In fact, the "Little Ice Age" (c. 1570-1630) and Thirty Years' War (1618-1648) elicited very different responses from the city's Lutheran pastors and oligarchic magistrates. In contrast to better-studied cities like Augsburg and Frankfurt, dramatic change came to Lubeck only when guildsmen mounted a series of overlapping attacks on elite property and religious non-conformists in the 1660s. These attacks drove the city council to make unprecedented political concessions to the guilds in 1669, and to impose new legal restrictions on other, "unorthodox" religious practices during the ensuing decades. These were more than pragmatic expedients: urban elites also cooperated closely with the clergy in everyday religious life, and became enthusiastic patrons of Lutheran music and art after mid-century. By 1700, new consensus regarding their shared "civic Lutheran" identity enabled magistrates, pastors, and guildsmen to collectively depict their city as stable and prosperous, despite a long-term decline in Lubeck's international influence.