ABSTRACT

Among the most flourishing and stimulating strands of recent research on early modern Germany figures most prominently the recovery of a culture of communication among early modern Germans either directed against the territorial state, the confessional church and its doctrine, or at least beyond their reach. The parish of Caldern belonged to the Lutheran church in that part of the Upper Hessian principality that had remained with the mainly reformed Landgraviate Hesse-Cassel after 1648. At the top of the church hierarchy was the Marburg Consistory. It remained responsible in all cases that could not be resolved by the local presbytery at Caldern or where the sinner had proved unwilling to undergo the process of penance provided by that local presbytery. The blueprint for Lutheran discipline thus went back to the Ziegenhainer Zuchtordnung of 1539 that had envisaged the church as consisting of all those who had been baptized.