• 1 Jérôme Delatour, “Noël le 15 décembre. La réception du calendrier grégorien en France (1582),” in M (...)
• 2 Robert Rebitsch, “Die Kalenderreform in Tirol im Jahre 1583,” Innsbrucker Historische Studien, 20/2 (...)
• 3 Christophe Duhamelle, “Une frontière abolie ? Le rapprochement des calendriers catholique et protes (...)
• 4 Jennifer Powell McNutt, “Hesitant Steps: Acceptance of the Gregorian Calendar in Eighteenth-Century (...)
• 5 Hellmut Gutzwiller, “Die Einführung des gregorianischen Kalenders in der Eidgenossenschaft in konfe (...)
• 6 Robert Poole, “’Give us our eleven days!’: Calendar reform in eighteenth-century England,” Past and (...)

1Europe followed two calendars in the seventeenth century. The Julian calendar, inherited from Julius Caesar, was still used on part of the continent. The rest used the Gregorian calendar, named after Pope Gregory XIII, who introduced it in 1582. The differences between the two are minor: calculation of the date of Easter (based on both solar and lunar years) is slightly different, and the Gregorian calendar occasionally skips a leap year in order to make up for the delay of ten minutes a year accumulated by the Julian calendar relative to the actual time the planet needs to rotate around its star. This occurs once a century, except those that are multiples of 400; since 1582, it only happened in 1700, 1800, and 1900, but not in 1600 or 2000. However, Gregory XIII’s reform also included an initial ten-day leap forward to make up for the lag that had built up since the Council of Nicaea (in 325), which had decided how the date of Easter would be calculated. Consequently, in Rome in the year 1582, Thursday 4 October was followed by Friday 15 October. It was also a Friday in the Julian calendar, but the 5 October. In practice, not all Catholic countries adopted the reform at exactly the same time. In France, for example, 9 December 1583 was followed by 20 December.1 In the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, the leap forward into the new calendar was also scattered: Austria and the Tyrol went from October 4 to 15, but in 1583, well after Bavaria but one day before the Prince-Bishopric of Brixen.2 Above all, most Protestant and Orthodox countries rejected the Gregorian calendar, mainly because it came from the pope. This rejection would last a long time: until 1700 in the Empire3 and most of Switzerland (but in 1701 in Geneva,4 1783 in the Upper Engadine, and in 1812 for the towns of Schiers and Grüsch5), and 1752 in England.6 Although all of Europe would still call the same day “Sunday” or Wednesday,” there were henceforth two dates for identifying this Sunday or Wednesday, ten days apart (eleven after 1700), the so-called “New Style” Gregorian calendar being ahead of the “Old Style” Julian. This was hardly practical, and at first glance does not seem to be a promising topic for research in the social history of categorization.

• 7 For a longer discussion and numerous bibliographic references, see: Christophe Duhamelle, “Confessi (...)
• 8 See, for example, Damien Tricoire, Mit Gott rechnen. Katholische Reform und politisches Kalkül in F (...)
• 9 And even more: after 1700, calculation of the date of Easter continued to distinguish between the P (...)

5The second deconstruction is of the favor that historiographers (for the most part in Germany) accord to the State scale and its mechanisms to study confessional affiliations and their construction, either by establishing a strong conjunction between “confessionalization” and “the modern State,”7 or, more recently, by reducing politics to theology,8 in both cases by compounding the lofty perspective ordering confessional affiliations according to their doctrinal and ecclesiastical cores with another lofty perspective ordering it according to its State core. Rather than proposing a bottom-up view in response to these two top-down perspectives, I set out to resituate confessional categorization in a differentiated social process wherein State and ecclesiastical authorities both play significant, albeit neither unique nor univocal, roles. The difference in calendars is also interesting from another perspective: it concerns society as a whole and allows us to comprehend its diversity; the ways in which it is used are intensified by interaction; and lastly, this same problematic interaction between the political dimension of the calendar and its religious implications is the very same central and as-yet unresolved issue upon which some Protestant authorities initially based their rejection of the Gregorian calendar. Over the long century when both calendars existed in the Empire,9 the respective positions of political decisions, social uses, and the religious dimension would remain subjected to variable and controversial arrangements that invite historical analysis.

• 10 Christophe Duhamelle, La Frontière au village. Une identité catholique allemande au temps des Lumiè (...)

6Finally, the third deconstruction is of the notion of border. Emphasis on the aforementioned congruence of State-building and confessional discipline, and the favor accorded to core doctrine over the complexities of the aforementioned social factors, both lead to making the boundary between confessions out to be a simple meeting point of differences that developed elsewhere, and to supposing that the coincidence between political and confessional boundaries, as well as the increasing linearity of each, was the norm. On the first point, it is helpful to also see the boundary between confessions as a place for the social appropriation of affiliation and the social production of confessional categories in the range of actors and their interests.10 The second point is often summed up by the Latin phrase “cujus regio ejus religio” (he who possesses a territory decides its religion), sometimes taken as a certainty despite the fact that it does not correspond with the more nuanced provisions of the two religious truces established in the Holy Roman Empire (the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 and the Peace of Westphalia in 1648) and is even less a reflection of the infinite variety of concrete situations where multiple confessional affiliations and various combinations of political obedience, public worship, and private religion all mingled under a single territorial authority. In this domain, too, the calendar is a fertile topic for study, because it made the border both visible and problematic. Indeed, it certainly engendered a spatial threshold that was socially shared by all and brutally binary, but the boundary it marked is even more prominent for its complexity: calendar choice was an issue so successful in dissociating political belonging (if one considered the calendar as only concerning secular authority) and religious belonging (if one favored its function in organizing religious holidays) that most of the calendar-related conflicts teeming in the Empire wielded this diffraction of the notion of boundary according to the angles and scales that diverse actors had chosen for thinking about it.

• 11 Falk Bretschneider, Christophe Duhamelle, “Fraktalität. Raumgeschichte und soziales Handeln im Alte (...)

7These three shifts in approach are the organizing principles of my research agenda: producing a social history of confessions embedded in a social history of the Holy Roman Empire as a political system. This agenda rejects the dichotomy between the Imperial and Estate level that structures historiography, and instead highlights the roles of actors among various scales, according to what Falk Bretschneider and I have called the “fractality” of the Imperial social space.11 In so doing, it also ventures to get past historiographic classifications that are especially powerful in Germany because they are firmly rooted not only in the institutional organization of historical research and intellectual traditions, but also in how archives are distributed and their chaotic redistribution since the early nineteenth century.

• 12 There is only one, very recent, summary, focused mainly on general and scientific debates: Edith Ko (...)
• 13 The main lines of the “calendar quarrel,” especially in Augsburg, have been known since the late ni (...)
• 14 See, among others, Hans Gaab, “Der Kontakt von Abdias Trew mit Herzog August von Branschweig Lünebu (...)

8Calendrical differences are a research topic permitting me to pursue this agenda, but one that also comes with challenges. Little study has been devoted to it,12 and what does exist is scattered over several rather exclusive historiographical fields: the history of sciences, especially astronomy; the history of the book, especially calendars; and local history, which often encounters conflicts over calendars but generally does not make it into a theme in its own right. Additionally, archival documentation is fragmentary and access is difficult: the diversity of calendars crosses several conflictual areas but is rarely constituted as a thematic file – even less so as it did not last to the end of the Empire, in contrast to other themes. This all leads to a scattered treatment of the issue, with many gaps: apart from the initial quarrel over the Gregorian calendar, particularly at Augsburg,13 and to a lesser extent the astronomical debates over the calendar up to 1700,14 the issue is rarely raised aside from references in local conflicts. It is more than personal vanity that made me cite so many examples of my own work in the footnotes of this text; to my knowledge there is no prior work on the Easter crisis of 1724 or the case that I will discuss next. Consequently, my work on the calendar difference is fated to remain incomplete, since I am pursuing it from several perspectives that I am trying to interconnect: discussions between astronomers, debates at the Imperial scale, local conflicts, and differentiated uses of the dual calendar system.

• 15 Werner Freitag, Pfarrer, Kirche und ländliche Gemeinschaft : das Dekanat Vechta 1400-1803, Bielefel (...)
• 16 Volker Wappmann, Durchbruch zur Toleranz. Die Religionspolitik des Pfalzgrafen Christian August von (...)
• 17 Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Westfalen (archive in Münster): Fürstabtei Corvey, Akte (...)

10The date is interesting, for a start. Although, as we have seen, there has been some study of the beginning of the difference in calendars in 1582-1583 and its apparent end in 1700, changes between these dates have been largely ignored. They were constant, however: for example, in 1624 the Gregorian calendar was introduced in the Prince-Bishopric of Osnabrück,15 it went into effect in the Principality of Palatinate-Sulzbach in 1655,16 and it became the sole calendar of the town of Höxter in 1675.17 The history of the difference in calendars in the Empire is not set according to one criteria of attribution, Julian for Protestantism and Gregorian for Catholicism. To the contrary, it played out according a great number of variables, revealing ever-problematic and reworked connections between the political, the confessional, and the social.

• 18 Hans Nordsiek, “Vom Fürstbistum zum Fürstentum Minden. Verfassungsrechtliche, politische und konfes (...)
• 19 On the Minden chapter, the best presentation is still: Hermann Nottarp, “Ein Mindener Dompropst des (...)

11Another characteristic of the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in the Principality of Minden in 1668 supports this initial information: it was established by a Protestant prince. The Electors of Brandenburg (Calvinists reigning over Lutherans) had rejected the calendar of Pope Gregory XIII out of hand, and were committed to that choice. Furthermore, the Principality of Minden was also mainly populated by Protestants, ever since the 1535 signing of an agreement between the town and the cathedral chapter.18 Until the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, the territory had been a prince-bishopric. The fact that it was populated with a heavy majority of Protestants is only one of many circumstances forcing us to reconsider the relationship between territory and religious confession. This particular situation (a primarily Lutheran territory headed by a Catholic prelate elected by canons, some of whom were Protestant) helps us to understand why the prince-bishopric had not adopted the Gregorian calendar in 1583. In addition, the cathedral chapter, which for a long time elected the bishop, remained a social and political power in 1668, dominating the local assembly (Landtag). The peace of 1648 had set its composition: Protestant and Catholic canons coexisted in the chapter, all nobles of old families, jointly exercising the supervision of the clergy of the principality, which was entirely Lutheran save for the cathedral and the town’s two collegiate churches.19

• 20 On this point, with other examples of maps made according to the same principle: Christophe Duhamel (...)

13The notion of boundary is also relativized in this approach. The map accompanying this article reflects a conscious choice of representation: it is a silhouette map that gives the detailed outline of a territorial unit, but nothing else. This map is somewhat misleading because it reflects the dynastic ensemble of the House of Brandenburg on the eve of the French Revolution; Frisia and the principalities of the Frankish Margraves were added after 1668. But the important thing is that it shows that the lands of one of the most powerful princes of the Empire, like those of all his more modest peers, formed a sort of archipelago of enclaves that were themselves dotted with enclaves, with a low degree of territorial continuity.20 In this ensemble, the Principality of Minden was a recent and still fragile addition: created as a secular principality and attributed to the Elector of Brandenburg by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Swedish troops did not evacuate until September 1650 – and the last elected Prince-Bishop, Franz Wilhelm von Wartenberg, continued to claim his rights until his death in 1661. The prerogatives of the local government and the Assembly of Estates, which was dominated by the cathedral chapter, were confirmed in 1650 by the Elector of Brandenburg. This was Friedrich Wilhelm, the “Grand Elector” that one historiographic current long imbued with Prussian teleology presented as the one who laid the foundations of the “modern State”: rationalized, Protestant, military, efficient.

• 22 Stefan Ehrenpreis, “Wir sind mit blutigen Köpfen davongelaufen...” Lokale Konfessionskonflikte im H (...)

16In this text the Elector chose the intermediate scale of “our Westphalian territories” as the relevant scale, rather than all of his lands or solely the Principality of Minden. Minden was a newcomer to these territories. The Electors of Brandenburg obtained the bulk of their acquisitions in Westphalia in the early seventeenth century, during the division of the duchy of Jülich, Cleves, and Berg between the Brandenburg and the Palatinate-Neuburg. But the Dukes of Jülich-Cleves-Berg had long had a cautious policy of compromise regarding the Empire’s confessional diversity, one manifestation of which being the rapid and little-contested adoption of the pontifical reform of the calendar.22 So even if these lands were henceforth Lutheran in majority and placed under the authority of a Calvinist prince, they followed the Gregorian calendar from the beginning. Like all acquired rights, this was scrupulously preserved regardless of confessional affiliation.

• 25 The circles were regional cooperation groups that were granted certain collective functions by the (...)

21An important aspect of this text is thus that it was positioned, word for word, on the same grounds as the arguments of authorities in Berlin. The Elector said he wanted economic unity in his Westphalian lands, hoping to foster common interests between recently united territories. Minden town council retorted that trade was already vigorous, but in historic Westphalia, institutionally embodied by the grouping of the Lower Rhenish-Westphalian Circle (Kreis) that included the Hoya, the Lippe, the Schaumburg, and the Hessian exclaves cited in the text.25 These neighbors kept to the Julian calendar to such an extent that the new calendar ran a chance of harming trade rather than helping it. By adopting the same semantics as the Elector – that of pragmatic territorial and commercial interests – the Minden town council illustrated the malleability of arguments and scales according to the context.

• 26 For example, see Michaela Fenske, Marktkultur in der frühen Neuzeit. Wirtschaft, Macht und Unterhal (...)

22What the text leaves out is also worthy of note. By citing only non-Brandenburg neighbors, it not only offers its own interpretation of the regional economic scale, regardless of the dynastic scale, but also asserts that the trade problems were created by the calendar change, not fixed by it. In other words, it was the brutal change, not the difference in dates, that harmed commercial relations. This joins other evidence showing that the diversity of calendars was soon accompanied by complementarity in markets, fairs,26 and working days, at a scale of action that defied the innumerable internal borders of the Empire, which many actors were able to exploit to their benefit. Quietly, and despite the conventional discourse at the Imperial level, this dual system for counting the days allowed the emergence of a system of activities often working around each confession’s religious obligations and days of rest, even between confessional “adversaries.”

• 28 This question has received little attention. See, for example, Alfred Schirge, “Grenz- und Zuflucht (...)
• 29 This complexity emerges fully when a territory’s confessional situation is analyzed parish by paris (...)

25This pastor’s rural parishioners introduce a new scale. In opposition to the postulated linearity of the principality’s border and its “territoriality,” they asserted the specific delimitation of the parish. Parishes in the Empire, in Protestant and Catholic lands alike, often consisted of several villages. Parishes on the edge of political territories frequently overlapped more than one principality; such overlapping edges were found everywhere, so this was not a rare phenomenon. There was no part of the Principality of Minden that was more than 15 km from the border, and it was hardly exceptional in this regard. Consequently, practically everywhere, parish boundaries imposed a scale that did not coincide with the scale of territorial borders.28 Likewise, the old patchwork of rights of patronage and collation, the micro-geography particular to parishes, often muddied the connections between political obedience and ecclesiastical affiliation.29 Compounding this complexity was the fact that the normative year regulation had formalized this complex system of prerogatives by tying it intimately to the notion of the de facto confession of public practice, more powerful in law than the will of the princes and bearing the power of possessio (“immemorial rights”). The spirit of cujus regio ejus religio was thus not only compromised by the complexities of dynastic inheritance and hindered by the Imperial compromises that determined confessional power relations, it was also undermined by the patchwork of parishes at the local scale.

• 31 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, I. HA Rep. 32 Nr. 83 10535, “Fürstentum Mind (...)

28More precisely, the documentation cited thus far sometimes gives the impression that the economic or legal arguments mask the aversion these Protestants feel toward the adoption of Pope Gregory’s calendar. For instance, the Lutheran leadership of the town of Minden ended its long geographical and economic essay of 7 February 1668 by saying “…without even recalling the powerful reasons for which […] the Lutheran and Calvinist States of the Holy Roman Empire refused to adopt the new calendar and introduce it in their territories.”31

• 33 Hans Nordsiek, “Vom Fürstbistum zum Fürstentum Minden. Verfassungsrechtliche, politische und konfes (...)

30History, too, made the adoption “difficult and painful,” since the principality of Minden had already undergone an introduction of the Gregorian calendar under dramatic circumstances: in 1632 the Prince-Bishop Franz Wilhelm von Wartenberg, recently elected and supported by the Imperial troops that had occupied the fortress of Minden since 1625, had imposed the New Style as part of a broader re-Catholicization effort. As soon as the Duke of Brunswick, in the service of Sweden, took the fortress in turn, Minden went back to the Julian calendar – in 1634, November 25 was curiously followed by November 16.33 A generation later, this memory gave a strong confessional charge to the calendar change, veiled in exchanges between Minden and Berlin but flowing freely from the pastor’s pen.

• 34 Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz Berlin, I. HA Rep. 32 Nr. 83 10535, “Fürstentum Mind (...)

32One final example will convince readers once and for all. On 16 December 1677, two councilors of the government of Minden wrote to the Elector to inform him that one of the canons of the cathedral had died on December 1. Now, during certain months of the year, it fell to the prince to name clergymen to the cathedral (Catholic and Protestant alike), in return for payment, cooptation being the rule the rest of the year. The councilors explained that the agreement with the cathedral chapter on the topic dated to April 1665, but that the 1668 ordinance on the introduction of the Gregorian calendar had not mentioned this point, “and it might also seem, since nothing in the matter was changed, that things had to be left according to prior usage, according to the old calendar.” This would put the date of death on 21 November, and allow the Elector to give the canonship to his court chaplain. Of course the Elector rapidly (on 21 December) rejected this ruse that only promised confusion. But the councilors’ attempt to make the 1668 introduction of the Gregorian calendar serve the prince’s interests adds yet another illustration of the flexible uses of the calendar issue.34