This report assesses the conference thematically, providing a brief overview of the proceedings. For a complete list of papers presented, please reference the conference website <http://faculty.ucr.edu/~rhead/fni>. In addition, abstracts of the papers should be appearing on H-German, providing a more detailed review of individual presentations. This conference report was the collaborative project of Laura Stokes (Virginia), Sean Dunwoody (Chicago), Veronika Tuckerova (CUNY), and Katie Brun (Berkeley).
Overview
The papers presented at the FNI conference approached the question of orthodoxy and diversity from a variety of angles. A number of papers which dealt with the question of authority demonstrated the fluid and negotiated nature of political and religious orthodoxy. Similarly, presentations focusing on questions of social history demonstrated that social discipline is not as monolithic as historians once argued, stressing instead the appropriation of social discipline by various groups. Other papers focused on diversity, ethnic and religious minorities, and the European encounter with the rest of the world, providing a nuanced view of Otherness in early modern Germany and emphasizing individual agency. As a truly interdisciplinary event, the conference enjoyed presentations from musicologists, art historians, and Germanists as well as historians of political, social and religious history. Anchored by a workshop on using life narratives as a source, a lively discussion ran throughout the weekend on questions of sources and methodology.
Authority and Orthodoxy
Among other means of reinforcing authority and political identity were acted representations. A triplet of papers on Swiss Renaissance political theater - Eckehard Simon (Harvard) on the medieval genealogy of Swiss political theater, Glenn Ehrstine (Iowa) comparing the Swiss tradition with political performance in Nuremberg, and Hildegard Elisabeth Keller (Zurich) on the uses of theological ideology in the construction of Swiss political identity - demonstrated how the political crisis of the Confederacy in the early sixteenth century was met by the development of political morality plays which reflected the ideals of Swiss political virtue and the myth of the origins of the Confederation.
Confession itself was a negotiated process, rather than a fixed, hegemonic position shared by all. This was demonstrated by Marion Kobelt-Groch (Hamburg) in a discussion of strategies employed by seventeenth-century parents to secure a place in heaven for their stillborn (and hence unbaptized) children. Rebekka von Mallinkrodt (Göttingen) described how confraternities in Cologne failed to fulfill the new demands of Trent and refused to submit to clerical oversight. David Freeman (Reinhardt) investigated the various strategies used by the minority Lutheran community in Wesel, concluding that this minority was most effective when it went over the heads of the city council and appealed directly to regionally influential Lutheran princes. Daniela Hacke (Zurich) used a debate between the abbot of Wettingen and the council of Dietikon in Swiss Baden to demonstrate the manner in which cross-confessional negotiation between cantons prevented the escalation of conflict.
The negotiated nature of orthodoxy was emphasized by Markus Friedrich (Munich/Duke) who argued that the debates between Melanchthon and Flaccius could be considered a struggle between essentialist and performative concepts of orthodoxy. A session on Marian devotion provided an assessment of conflicting religious orthodoxies, with a presentation by Bridget Heal (St. Andrews) on images of the Virgin in Marian devotions as well as two papers detailing attacks on and defenses of Marian devotion; Carol Heming (Central Missouri State) discussed Luther and Zwingli on the Virgin Mary while Beth Kreitzer (St. Vincent) showed how Catholic controversialists defended the Mother of God.
Social History
In dealing with questions of social control, many presenters highlighted the interplay between authorities and subjects in the establishment of order, which resulted in unexpected alliances and some unintended consequences of reform through the negotiation and manipulation of common terms and values. Jason Coy (Charleston) showed that the city council of Ulm was not just concerned with controlling marginal or foreign elements, but fully integrated burghers and guild members as well. Jay Goodale (Bucknell) described a carnivalesque atmosphere surrounding two ducal parish visitations in Saxony, in which parishioners took advantage of the state's fear of peasant discontent and of communal disruption in order to press their own everyday communal agendas. Norman Wilson (Messiah) highlighted the semantic nuances of Bürgerrecht and Bürgerschaft in protracted exchanges between Wolf Imhof and the city council of Regensburg, drawing out the ways in which Imhof sought to evade civic responsibilities that the city considered incumbent upon Imhof as a citizen.
Several papers revised the concept of social disciplining as a monolithic process, demonstrating that the imposition of order was often a two- or three-way process resulting from the interactions of various groups. This was demonstrated by Mitchell Lewis Hammond (Victoria) in a discussion of charity and civic life surrounding the Augsburg Pilgrim house, Allyson Creasman (U. of the South) who demonstrated that rumors among artisans played a dynamic role in the development of the Reformation in Augsburg, Donald McColl (Washington) on the role of water in popular acts of iconoclasm, and by David Luebke (Oregon) whose discussion of rituals of humiliation in eighteenth-century East Frisia decoded popular symbols of rebellious republicanism.
Attempts to enforce order were often supported from below, in surprising ways. Terence McIntosh (North Carolina) showed how parishioners in Wolkenburg eventually came to support pietism, but only after disastrous storms and not because of the pastor's insistence. Michael Sauter (Centro de Investigación y Docencia Económicas, Mexico) argued in a paper on eighteenth-century Berlin that it was the public rather than authorities who pushed for time-discipline, prior to industrialization.
Diversity
The treatment of ethnic and religious minority groups depended in part on the cultural nearness of those groups to host populations, but also on the potential contributions of minorities. Susanne Lachenicht (Galway) showed that in three Protestant states in the sixteenth century, Huguenot immigrants were privileged over Jewish immigrants due to religious affinity, but that Jews were invited to settle in hopes of economic gain. Douglas Catteral (Cameron) showed that in Holland, immigrant Scotch Presbyterians and Sephardic Jews were handled as ethnic groups, rather than strictly in religious terms, despite the religious affinity of the Scots and the host community. Manuela Böhm (Potsdam) discussed the influence of Huguenots and Jews on Berlin vernacular, showing how French influenced high Berlinisch and Yiddish low Berlinisch. Alexander Schunka (Stuttgart) examined how the self-representation of Bohemian Protestants in Saxony was a function of their need for justification to the host prince, for instance by rhetorically emphasizing their suffering under intolerance at home. Duane Corpis (Georgia State) stressed the agency of individuals in choosing conversion and migration as a strategy to escape non-religious forms of social persecution.
The most intimate marker of religious and ethnic identity, circumcision, received treatments in two presentations. Carina Johnson (Pitzer) discussed the increasing sense of Otherness associated with circumcision, as the practice was more firmly associated both with the suffering of Christ and with distant cultures, such as those in Ethiopia or the Yucatan. Yaacov Deutsch (Hebrew) argued that circumcision was experienced by converts to Islam or Judaism as an essential part of the conversion process.
In addition to internal diversity, a number of papers discussed Europe's encounter with the non-Christian, non-European Other. Larry Silver (Pennsylvania) described how visual representations of the Turk were influenced by military concerns about the "Turkish threat" in the face of sixteenth-century Austrian defeats, while Susan Boettcher (Texas) discussed the development of sixteenth-century Lutheran preaching on Jews, Turks and heretics. Several papers addressed the Enlightenment's struggle with heterogeneity. Annette Meyer (Cologne) showed how three approaches to diversity - anthropology, universal history, and philosophical history of mankind - remained fixed in the period-specific liminal space of history and philosophy. Brad Herling (Boston) described the passive Orientalism of the German engagement with the Asian Other as typified by Herder's representation of India. Peter K. J. Park (UCLA) showed that classic philosophy of history's hauteur was engendered by the German academic Christoph Meiners, whose racist ethnology provided a springboard for the reaction against attempts at intellectual integration of Asian influence in Europe.
Interdisciplinary Perspectives
A variety of interdisciplinary approaches also highlighted many of the conference's themes and offered new perspectives. In an analysis of Hans Burkmair's painting of the Battle at Cannae, Ashley West (Pennsylvania) argued that Burkmair's unconventional depiction of the battle allowed space for artistic invention rather than representing a crisis of exemplarity. Susan Maxwell (Virginia) showed how the Rittersaal justice paintings of Trausnitz Castle reflected the counter-Reformation, monarchical aims of the Bavarian dukes while drawing upon the artistic genre of the town hall justice paintings of the free imperial cities.
After a performance by Zephyrus (Virginia) had whetted the musical interests of conference attendees, a triad of papers demonstrated how music history can be used to illuminate broader social and historical developments. Tanya Kevorkian (Millersville) uses the case of J. S. Bach to describe how musicians became producers of confessional culture. Susan Lewis Hammond (Victoria) explained how the Lutheran theology of music affected German adaptations of Italian madrigals and canzonettas. Andrew Talle (Peabody School of Music) described how the commercial production of music took advantage of the bourgeois adoption of the idea of the Galant in the early eighteenth century.
Sources and Methodology
Questions of both sources and methodology were discussed in a workshop on Life Narratives led by Claudia Ulbrich (Freie Universität Berlin) and Gabriele Janke (Freie Universität Berlin). A lively, interdisciplinary discussion followed the introductory remarks. To what extent are literary methods useful in discussing early modern texts? Where should we draw the line between reality and fiction? One major theme of the discussion was how to rethink the traditional category of autobiography, which is closely connected to a particularly modern, Western notion of individuality. The theme of autobiography and life narratives resurfaced in a triad of papers on representation and genre in autobiographical texts. Eva Kormann (Karlsruhe) critiqued the tendency to take a male subject as the starting point in discussions of autobiography, and showed that both men and women described their experiences in the context of the Other, community, God, and the world. Bea Lundt (Flensburg) discussed a transformation of masculinity in myths about Charlemagne, and Silke Törpsch (Freie Universität Berlin) offered a social-historical analysis of a diary from the era of the Thirty Years' War.
Historians must also grapple with pre-selected nature of sources - questions of why certain events were reported and particular sources kept. Ann Tlusty (Bucknell) discussed the apparent increase of women's violence in the late seventeenth century in Augsburg. If one were to take the legal record at face value, this increase would be substantial, but Tlusty argues that it represents instead an increasing interest of the authorities in instances of women's violence.
Summary Thoughts
While all the papers presented at the FNI this year were of high quality, perhaps the greatest strength of the conference lay in its congeniality. Large enough to host a wide range of scholarly papers, the conference was small enough to permit on-going discussions to thread from one session to another. Substantial efforts were made to host foreign scholars and graduate students, for whom travel might otherwise have been prohibitive. The result was a uniquely international forum, rich with discussion and insight.