Together Apart: The Churches of Peace and the Practice of Religious Coexistence in Premodern Europe

Abstract: While premodern Europe is often characterized by religious persecution and confessional conflict, this lecture examines the mechanisms through which different religious communities found ways to coexist. We will begin by exploring key historiographical debates on religious pluralism, from discussions of confessionalization and state-building to more recent scholarship on pragmatic toleration and the dynamics of everyday coexistence. To illustrate these dynamics, the lecture will focus on the Churches of Peace — three magnificent wooden structures built for Lutherans in seventeenth-century Silesia, where the public practice of Protestantism was otherwise prohibited. The Churches of Peace were the largest wooden buildings constructed in the region and amongst the largest in Europe. But they are more than simply exceptional constructions: because of the unique combination of religious, political, and material factors that underpinned their existence, the Churches of Peace offer a microcosm for analyzing the dynamics of religious coexistence. Their construction was the result of foreign intervention and the resilience of local communities, revealing how religious minorities navigated power structures to secure their survival in an era of political instability and religious strife. As physical structures, these churches also reflect the cultural exchanges that accompanied religious coexistence: built with Catholic permission, financed through Protestant networks, and designed by architects who worked across confessional divides, they serve as material testaments to the intersections of faith, politics, and culture in premodern Europe. By analyzing the Churches of Peace within the broader context of religious governance, this lecture will explore both the modes and limits of confessional coexistence as well as the ways in which religious diversity shaped individual and communal identities in premodern Europe.

About the Speaker: Anastazja Grudnicka is the Evelyn Dunbar and Ruth Dunbar Davee Fellow at the Newberry Library (Chicago), and a Postdoctoral Scholar of History at European University Institute