Structure and Dynamics of Religious Insurgency

Abstract

The Protestant Reformation swept across Central Europe in the early-sixteenth century, leaving cities divided into Evangelical and Catholic camps as some instituted reforms and others remained loyal to the Roman Church. In offering a new explanation of the Reformation, we develop a theory that identifies ideologically mobilized students as bridge actors-that is, agents of religious contention who helped concatenate incidents of local insurgency into a loosely organized Evangelical movement by bridging structural holes. Building on existing literature, we offer a novel way to measure the influence of contending religious movements through university enrollments; we propose that the institution of reform can be partially explained by the varying degree of exposure that cities had to Evangelical activist and Catholic loyalist university students. Based on statistical analysis of a novel dataset comprising cities in the Holy Roman Empire with a population of 2,000 or more from 1523 to 1545, we find support for the role of university students as bridge actors linking critical communities at universities to arenas of urban contention. The greater a city's exposure to heterodox ideology through city-to-university ties, the greater its odds of instituting the Reformation.

Geographical Research in the Digital Humanities

“…To my knowledge, no structured data set currently exists that captures the main historical characteristics of territories described above. The best approximation are collections of cities and their affiliated princes which had been assembled for individual studies (Becker et al 2020, Cantoni 2012, Kim/Pfaff 2012, Rubin 2014, Wurpts et al 2018, mainly based on the 'Deutsches Stätdebuch' (Keyser/Stoob (1939-1974. However, data on relations between places, princes, and each other are missing.…”

“…To address these issues, other studies have used non-capital cities (Kim/Pfaff 2012, Rubin 2014, Wurpts et al 2018) and real-world trade routes (Becker et al 2020) to operationalise territories and local relations, respectively. Compared to these approaches, the added value of the simplified operationalisation is that smaller localities, for which additional information cannot be retrieved, can be analysed, too.…”

Contexts of State Violence: Jewish Expulsions in the Holy Roman Empire

“…6 Similar to Kim and Pfaff (2012), I first calculated the number of religious communities recorded in a city as a representation of the potential visibility and importance of religious ideology in civic life. Unfortunately, this information was absent or else impenetrably recorded as "various" for some of the most notable cities.…”

Contexts of State Violence: Jewish Expulsions in the Holy Roman Empire

“…I captured this through the sovereignty coding for bishop and archbishop mentioned above. 6 Similar to Kim and Pfaff (2012), I first calculated the number of religious communities recorded in a city as a representation of the potential visibility and importance of religious ideology in civic life. Unfortunately, this information was absent or else impenetrably recorded as "various" for some of the most notable cities.…”

“…Jewish Settlement and Expulsion in German Lands, 1000-1520 CE same time or through a transfer of sovereignty. This method differs from the typical measurement(Anderson, Johnson, and Koyama 2017;Cantoni and Yuchtman 2014;Finley and Koyama 2018;Kim and Pfaff 2012;Pfaff 2013;Voigtländer and Voth 2012) that does not allow for overlapping categorizations, even though shared authority was not an anomaly. The possible ruler types were numerous: archbishop, bishop, religious house, religious foundation, imperial, free, king, prince, lord, minor nobility, city, and others (usually individual financiers who held mortgages over the city).…”