Confession and Nation in Early Modern Central Europe

Abstract

Amongst historians of early modern Europe, the relation between confession and nation has been largely neglected, especially in the Anglo-Saxon world. The dominant discourse on nationhood, in contrast, was established by historians of modern history such as Elie Kedourie, Ernest Gellner, Eric Hobsbawm, Benedict Anderson, and Miroslav Hroch. This article evaluates the contributions of two historiographical debates to the study of early modern Central Europe, which were conducted in parallel, from the 1980s, but have not been assessed in context. It argues for the necessity to combine the perspectives of ‘confessionalization’, developed by early modernists, with the focus of nationalism, championed by students of the nineteenth and twentieth century, in order to achieve a full understanding of the region.