Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irland

http://history.arizona.edu/user/152

Die doppelte Konfessionalisierung in Irlandby Ute Lotz-Heumann

In Ireland, a peripheral kingdom in the ‘multiple kingdom’ of the English monarchy, a process of ‘confessionalization from above’ initiated by the Protestant state church and the English state confronted a process of ‘double confessionalization from below’ initiated by the country’s traditional elites and supported by the Catholic underground church. In this process of ‘double confessionalization’ neither the Protestant nor the Catholic confessionalization was successful: the state-sponsored Protestant one failed because it could not achieve an integration of politics and religion in Ireland; the oppositional Catholic one failed because it could not break the legal status and rhetorical confessional monopoly of the church of Ireland. As a consequence, the history of Ireland in the first half of the early modern period was characterized by both ‘conflict’ and ‘coexistence’. Ute Lotz-Heumann analyzes the process of ‘double confessionalization’.

My scholarship has been devoted to early modern Irish, British and German history. My book on the process of dual confessionalization in Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (2000) is concerned with confessional conflict and coexistence in a politically diverse and multi-ethnic environment. It poses the question of why England’s attempt to introduce the Protestant Reformation in Ireland ended in warfare, colonization projects, and fierce confessional resistance.

I am currently working on two projects in German history. One is concerned with holy wells as popular worship sites in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Lutheranism and Catholicism. The other is a study of eighteenth-century German spas as meeting places of the nobility and the bourgeoisie.

My research interests encompass the success or failure of the Reformation in different European countries, church discipline in early modern Europe, conversion as an indicator of confessional conflict and coexistence, prophecies and other aspects of popular religion, the formation of religious and confessional identities, urban history, and space and discourse as historiographical methods and concepts.