Extract

Since Schilling and Reinhard introduced it in the early 1980s, the confessionalization paradigm has hypothesized a new interpretative framework for investigating how institutional religion intersects with political, socioeconomic, and cultural trends in early modern societies. Although originally focused on Germany, it has since been applied to other case studies within and beyond Europe, including the Ottoman Empire. While innovative and valuable, the paradigm has its limitations, especially as regards the risks of generalization and misinterpretation. In his book Confessionalization on the Frontier: The Balkan Catholics between Roman Reform and Ottoman Reality, Antal Molnár successfully sidesteps these pitfalls of broad and uncritical applications of the concept of confessionalization and demonstrates its heuristic relevance for examining Catholic minorities in the Ottoman Balkans. In so doing, Molnár takes us through an impressive array of non-Ottoman primary sources and provides a detailed historical analysis of key reforms in the Catholic Church as they instantiate in the Balkans. The principal temporal framework of the book is the seventeenth century, when the Balkan missions were implemented, and the spatial is the Ottoman Empire. However, both time and place are presented as porous categories with regular interventions from the past and the outside, allowing for a more nuanced understanding of how political and religious factors gain meaning through specific and practical circumstances.

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