Keeping the Peace in the Village: Conflict and Peacemaking in Germany, 1650–1750 . By Marc R. Forster

Marc R. Forster’s Keeping the Peace in the Village: Conflict and Peacemaking in Germany, 1650–1750 is a lively account of conflict resolution and state formation in southern Germany in the hundred years after the Thirty Years War. The depth of Forster’s archival research is tremendous, and his passion for the stories of common people leaps out from every page. Forster demonstrates the embeddedness of state institutions in rural communities and their continued responsiveness to local demand for conflict resolution well into the Age of Absolutism. Forster’s material comes from the lower court records of four ecclesiastical territories near Lake Constance that were directly subject to the emperor: the commandery of the Teutonic Knights at Mainau, the Premonstratensian abbey of Rot an der Rot, the prince-bishopric (Hochstift) of Constance, and the Cistercian abbey of Salem. In many ways, Forster carries forward the work of Katherine Brun, whose study of abbatial–peasant relations in Salem from the late Middle Ages to the Thirty Years War serves as a major inspiration (The Abbot and his Peasants, 2013). Similarly to Brun, Forster argues for a gradual process of ‘state formation from below’ in these territories. This is distinct from ‘statebuilding’ (whether from above or below) with its suggestion of planned development. In each of the four territories he surveys, Forster finds a similarly ‘dynamic and organic process’ of interaction between authorities and communities which produced institutionalization but not domination (p. 10).