Conscience, Confession, and the Consolidation of Early Public Reform in Strasbourg, 1530–1535

Abstract Reformation historians count Strasbourg among the most tolerant Protestant cities of the sixteenth century. Magisterial concern for protecting the freedom of conscience and religion made the city a reputable safe haven for Anabaptists and related dissident groups until the late 1520s. Nevertheless, as the need for consolidating public moral reform grew more urgent, the Reformed preachers’ tolerance for religious dissidents and conscientious objections to governance wore thin. As this chapter illustrates, the early period of reform in Strasbourg witnessed frequent appeals to conscience among the general populace, as religious dissenters, magistrates, and clerics jockeyed for their respective interests—often appealing to conscience as a means to other ends. Indeed, the available documentary traces especially reveal that the Strasbourg reformers struggled—often with great frustration—to clarify the place that civic duty and moral discipline should occupy in an evangelical religion principally committed to Christian freedom of conscience.