Passionate Peace: Emotions and Religious Coexistence in Later Sixteenth-Century Augsburg

In an age characterized by religious conflict, Protestant and Catholic Augsburgers remained largely at peace. How did they do this? This book argues that the answer is in the “emotional practices” Augsburgers learned and enacted—in the home, in marketplaces and other sites of civic interaction, in the council house, and in church. Augsburg’s continued peace depended on how Augsburgers felt—as neighbors, as citizens, and believers—and how they negotiated the countervailing demands of these commitments. Drawing on police records, municipal correspondence, private memoranda, internal administrative documents and other records revealing everyday behavior, experience, and thought, Sean Dunwoody shows how Augsburgers negotiated the often-conflicting feelings of being a good believer and being a good citizen and neighbor.