Jesse Spohnholz . The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars . Newark: University of Delaware Press, with Rowman and Littlefield Publishing Group, Lanham, Md. 2011. Pp. 334. $80.00.

This book is a very welcome addition to the growing literature on the existence of religious pluralism or of practical toleration in an age generally noted for violence and religious extremism. By focusing on the largely Dutch Calvinist refugee community in the northwestern German town of Wesel in the Duchy of Cleves, Jesse Spohnholz outlines significant qualifications not only to our understanding of religious pluralism in the post‐Reformation era, but also of the nature of confessionalism itself. The author has purposely chosen a difficult case to make his argument: if a foreign Calvinist refugee community could live more or less peacefully in a Lutheran town subject to a Roman Catholic duke, clearly our standard view of religious intolerance in the age of religious wars requires some serious rethinking. Indeed, it was not only the large Calvinist contingent (at one point they made up half of the town's population) that found toleration, but also smaller communities of Mennonites and Roman Catholics. The toleration that emerged in Wesel was the lesser of evils and was made up not of grand pronouncements of high ideals, but rather of the cumulative impact of thousands of individual decisions on an everyday basis over a period of years. In all of this the attitude and policies of the civic government were crucial. After an earlier attempt to enforce Lutheran confessional unity on the refugees had produced substantial tension, the city council adopted a more flexible stance. Indeed, this may be the most unusual feature of Wesel's experience: in most places, once religious tension and conflict had set in, it tended to intensify rather than abate. The city fathers were no doubt nudged toward this flexibility by the irregular nature of their own reformation. As a territorial city subject to the Roman Catholic Duke of Cleves, they were explicitly denied the religious freedom granted to imperial cities in the Peace of Augsburg. Nevertheless, this was in reality a Lutheran town, and preserving their reformation made them extraordinarily sensitive to any commotion that might attract outside attention.

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