PARISH · Parish Politics in Early Modern East Central Europe, 1650–1800: The Role of Popular Politics in Late Catholic Confessionalization and Early Modern State-Building

Why is our picture of the early modern East Central European popular politics often contradictory, fragmented, and difficult to generalise? The project addresses this question by exploring parish politics as a form of popular politics through which local communities participated in parish matters by creating a local public arena around Catholic parishes. The project examines how local communities influenced late Catholic confessionalization and early modern state building through parish politics in the multi-confessional and multi-ethnic Habsburg Monarchy and Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth between 1650 and 1800. To understand these interactions, the project shifts the focus from church and state policymaking to the communal actions shape these politics. The project explores the changing norms, values, and social practices of communal control over the parishes. Despite the strong landlord power these communities were able to participate in parish matters by forming local spaces of political sociability around Catholic parishes that had previously been associated with Protestant parishes. The communities thus became active agents of late Catholic confessionalization, and secular powerholders (landlords and state administration) involved them in local control of the Catholic Church, through which parish politics contributed to early modern state building. The project develops novel methodological tools by combining textual analysis of parish documents with moral theorizing and historical research, using methodologies from church, social, and cultural history. It focuses on the local public arenas that provides comparable new findings on late Catholic confessionalization and state building in early modern East Central Europe from a bottom-up perspective. The project is groundbreaking in its approach, as parishes have never been studied as a common factor in popular politics, confessionalization, and early modern state building.