ABSTRACT
Many traditional accounts of post-Reformation Europe portray religious conflicts, massacres and wars as the inevitable, not to say 'natural', outcome of religious pluralization. Confessional coexistence and indifference, lived toleration and the non-violent negotiation of conflict in confessionally heterogeneous communities, however, have attracted scholarly attention only relatively. The chapter examines how military society dealt with confessional heterogeneity. It discusses the ways in which structural idiosyncrasies of the military as a socio-legal realm facilitated the negotiation of religious difference. The chapter aims to reassess the role confession played in military life and considers how soldiers overcame religious differences in encounters with adherents of other confessions. Confessional coexistence in the armies was aided by the absence of certain factors that could cause strife in multi-confessional civilian communities. The chapter provides some of the very rare recorded instances that allow witnessing the peaceful negotiation of confessional differences.
