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Recent scholarship has criticized the assumption that European modernity was inherently secular. Yet, we remain poorly informed about religion's fate in the nineteenth-century big city, the very crucible of the modern condition. Drawing on extensive archival research and investigations into Protestant ecclesiastical organization, church-state relations, liturgy, pastoral care, associational life, and interconfessional relations, this study of Strasbourg following Germany's annexation of Alsace-Lorraine in 1871 shows how urbanization not only challenged the churches, but spurred them to develop new, forward-looking, indeed, urban understandings of religious community and piety. The work provides new insights into what it meant for Imperial Germany to identify itself as "Protestant" and it provocatively identifies the European big city as an agent for sacralization, and not just secularization.
Price: $242.00
Pages: 518
Publisher: Brill
Imprint: Brill
Series: Studies in Central European Histories
Publication Date:
28 February 2008
ISBN: 9789004164055
Format: Hardcover
"Steinhoff has offered a lengthy analysis that reveals in its richness the complexities inherent in modernity...This study should help illuminate the contemporary view of the relation of religion to the secular sphere in western societies that are still ambivalent when it comes to the role of religion in the political life of states."
Donald J. Dietrich, Church History, 80: 3, 2008, 700-702
"äusserst materialreich....ein wirklich gewichtiges Buch."
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Neue Politische Literatur, 53, 2008, 493-494
"Ce n’est pas seulement une grande thèse d’histoire de l’Alsace, c’est une belle thèse d’histoire culturelle européenne, fondée, à la mode américaine, sur une étude de cas : l’étude de l’évolution du protestantisme strasbourgeois à la fin du XIXe et au début du XXe siècle. Elle se situe dans le sillage des études qui marquent le renouveau contemporain de l’histoire du fait religieux."
François Igersheim, Revue d'Alsace, 2010
"Steinhoff’s highly successful book remains a most thoughtful, clearly conceived, and well-organized study, one that deftly engages with and appropriately modifies the growing historiography on religion in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.
Mark Edward Ruff, Journal of Modern History, Sept. 2010, vol. 82, no. 3, 748-750
Donald J. Dietrich, Church History, 80: 3, 2008, 700-702
"äusserst materialreich....ein wirklich gewichtiges Buch."
Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, Neue Politische Literatur, 53, 2008, 493-494
"Ce n’est pas seulement une grande thèse d’histoire de l’Alsace, c’est une belle thèse d’histoire culturelle européenne, fondée, à la mode américaine, sur une étude de cas : l’étude de l’évolution du protestantisme strasbourgeois à la fin du XIXe et au début du XXe siècle. Elle se situe dans le sillage des études qui marquent le renouveau contemporain de l’histoire du fait religieux."
François Igersheim, Revue d'Alsace, 2010
"Steinhoff’s highly successful book remains a most thoughtful, clearly conceived, and well-organized study, one that deftly engages with and appropriately modifies the growing historiography on religion in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe.
Mark Edward Ruff, Journal of Modern History, Sept. 2010, vol. 82, no. 3, 748-750
Anthony J. Steinhoff, Ph.D. in History, University of Chicago (1996), is Associate Professor of Modern European History at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. He has published widely on European religious history, including articles in Geschichte und Gesellschaft and the Journal of Urban History.