Conversions and Lutheranism in Early Modern Central Europe

In 1880 the final volume of the Strasbourg bishop Andreas Räss’ monumental The Converts since the Reformation according to Their Lives and Own Writings (“Die Convertiten seit der Reformation nach ihrem Leben und aus ihren Schriften dargestellt”) was published in Freiburg.1 it was the thirteenth volume of this massive undertaking. The books described converts to Catholicism, starting with the Humanist Wilibald Pirkheimer and continuing all the way into the nineteenth century. While not overtly polemical in nature, the books were celebratory and argued that those profiled in ca. 7200 pages had returned to the true and only Catholic Church. Ordered chronologically as a sequence of individual convert biographies, the volumes built – by means of repetition – a compelling narrative of false belief overcome through conversion to a perennially forgiving and receptive Catholic Church. Räss’ undertaking was the most substantial of several works produced by scholars from the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, which discussed the converts to Catholicism in a celebratory mode.2 Undoubtedly, Räss’ work was not meant for popular consumption since purchasing the set of thirteen volumes would have been beyond the means of most contemporaries. Nonetheless, the continuation and completion of this ambitious publication project over fourteen years suggests that amongst suitably resourced readers, at the very least, Räss’ account of Catholic triumph by way of conversion was well received. Räss followed a narrative that was already popular amongst the missionaries of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, namely that through instruction and catechesis, many Protestants (as well as heathens) saw the error of their ways and embraced Catholicism.