Confession, confusion, and rule in a box? Archival accumulation in northwestern Germany in the age of confessionalization
This essay compares archival accumulation in clerical and secular principalities in seventeenth-century northwestern Germany. As this is known to be the age of confessionalization, the focus is on confessional convergences and divergences in the development of confession, rule, states, and archives. The sources show the emergence of administration, the accumulation of legitimation and evidence via archives, and confessional competition, as well as coincidences of centralization and separation. Catholic and clerical archives were oriented toward persisting written records and historical traditions, while in Protestant and secular contexts, we find novel developments: a new age, new confessions, the need for a new history together with the creation of a new (historical) identity, and thus, new archives. Later success stories that characterized the Protestant secular state as orderly, administration- and rule-related, and possessing well-indexed archives, however, neglect most Catholic and nongovernmental archives and their qualities.
northwestern germany confessionalization clerical principalities seventeenth century