The Disordered Police State: German Cameralism as Science and Practice. By Andre Wakefield. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 2009. Pp. x+226. Cloth $45.00. ISBN 0-226-87020-0.

Abstract

level it mobilized systems of support that allowed evangelical communities to survive external attacks on the Reformation" (p. 261).Close has identified an important aspect of the political and religious culture of sixteenth-century Germany by emphasizing the negotiated character of the Reformation. While the idea of negotiation is not new, his discussion of the intercity negotiations that influenced the Reformation at the regional level is useful and any analysis of the urban Reformation must take this perspective into account. The concept of communication, also frequently cited in this book, is less clearly developed. Close's diplomatic sources tend to limit his discussion of communication to letters written between city councils. He recognizes that traveling preachers provided another form of communication, as did merchants and other travelers. What is downplayed is a wider concept of communication, which occurred not only through pamphlets, woodcuts, devotional literature, and other religious writings, but also through personal connections in the context of immigration from the countryside and the movement of journeymen artisans and rural servants between and into cities. Historians of the early urban Reformation, following the lead of scholars such as Robert Scribner, have long been aware of these kinds of communication. The danger of a focus on the diplomatic and political interactions between cities is that historians might lose sight of the lived experience of religion at the local level and of the kind of communication that rarely made it into the correspondence of the city council of Augsburg. As historians reexamine the development of the urban Reformation, the political context presented here should not be ignored; at the same time this perspective should not replace the careful analyses of the appeal of Reformation ideas in concrete social contexts that have done so much to advance this field in the last twenty-five years.