ABSTRACT
Piety and community are not new topics of historical reflection. Both have been looked at extensively over the last decades with historians investigating the impact of the Reformation movements in different locales. Community, in particular, has been shown to be an extremely broad and flexible term that needs further definition if it is to have any useful meaning and application. 1 From the range of possible categories, such as political community, economic community or familial community, it is the religious community that we are primarily concerned with here – hardly a clearer or more easily definable idea! – which encapsulates a variety of common subcategories, for example Christian community, sacred community or pious community. It is therefore advisable for any scholar working on ‘community’ to acknowledge the complex and multifarious nature of the concept right from the start. Communities also existed on more abstract levels and historians have examined imagined communities, communities of space and supra-regional networks of people sharing ideas, customs, language or a common purpose. 2 One factor that all communities in the early modern period shared, though, was their reliance on people and for this reason it is perhaps best to begin by trying to find out more about those who constituted a specific community. Who participated in it, how and why? Who was excluded from it and on what basis? These questions need to be answered if we want to be able to understand the purpose, characteristics and meanings of community in the period.
