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Marc R. Forster, David M. Luebke et al., editors. Conversion and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Germany., The American Historical Review, Volume 118, Issue 2, April 2013, Pages 603–604, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/118.2.603
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This volume is based on a series of panels presented at the 2008 German Studies Association Conference, and the book is unusually coherent for a collection of essays. The contributors all engage the question of religious conversion in German-speaking lands from the Reformation to the eighteenth century. The central theme of the book, which co-editor David M. Luebke outlines in the introduction, is the evolution of the idea of conversion and how that evolution related to political structures. The traditional notion of conversion held that it was a “complex and gradual process of spiritual revitalization and intensification” (p. 2). In the sixteenth century, as confessional boundaries solidified and new churches developed institutional structures and gained political support, an “interreligious” idea of conversion as a crossing of confessional boundaries emerged. Luebke emphasizes that these two ideas of conversion coexisted across the early modern period, although the newer concept came to dominate the discourse.
