Daniela Hacke completed this Habilitationsschrift at the University of Zurich. In it she analyzes confessional conflicts and their resolutions in the Swiss county of Baden from the second Landfrieden signed at Kappel in 1531 to the fourth Landfrieden signed at Aarau in 1712. The Reformation had made inroads into Baden before 1531. The Peace of Kappel allowed the Reformed communities to stay but greatly constrained their actions. In 1655–56 a census enumerated around three thousand Reformed villagers resident in seven different parishes. Baden was a condominium, ruled since 1415 by the eight old cantons. Throughout Hacke's study, Catholics comprised the vast majority of Badeners, and among the ruling cantons, only Bern and Zurich had embraced the Reformation, while Glarus was confessionally mixed. A Landvogt administered the condominium, and the post rotated annually among the eight cantons. Thus, Catholics dominated at the village level, within the county, and at the Tagsatzung. That system ended in 1712 with the Catholic defeat during the Second Villmergen War. The Peace of Aarau instituted parity in Baden's confessionally mixed villages and excluded the Catholic cantons from their traditional role in the county's governance.

Hacke identifies four goals for her research. First, she seeks to bind together several historiographic threads in Swiss history and in the history of early modern confession building from the new perspective provided by her study of confessional conflicts in Baden. Second, she wants to explore how resolving the confessional conflicts helped establish components of the Landfrieden of 1531 as confederal norms for religious peacekeeping. Third, she intends to present the negotiation of confessional coexistence in Baden as a microcosm for the history of confessional coexistence in Switzerland as a whole. Finally, she proposes to show that the political process of conflict resolution for the condominium helped ingrain confessional pluralism as an accepted component of Swiss collective identity. To achieve her ends, Hacke applies Niklas Luhmann's communication theory to the extensive correspondence generated by confessional conflicts within the condominium after 1531. She argues that the discourse of conflict and resolution generated confessional identity for both Catholic and Reformed Swiss at the village level and among the cantonal elites governing the condominium. The discursive process also helped the parties understand the confessional identity of their opponents. The pathways of communication ran vertically downward from the ruling cantons to the villages and upward from the villagers to their lords. Moreover, at each level—village, county, and canton—horizontal communication, both intra- and interconfessional, also played a critical role. Finally, Hacke utilizes Martina Loew's theories on the sociology of space to frame the scope of the various communication networks and to show how the parties gradually carved out their confessional space at every level.

Chapter 2 focuses on the communication networks themselves. Because the Landvogt rotated, resolving confessional disputes required negotiations among the eight ruling cantons. The cantons’ decision to meet in confessional caucuses during the Tagsatzungen replicated on the confederal level the growing self-consciousness of the confessions at the local level. Despite the sharpening divisions, the confessional parties had to communicate with one another to resolve conflicts at all levels. Meanwhile, communication between lords and subjects followed confessionally exclusive pathways often bypassing the Landvogt of the other confession. Chapter 3 chronicles how discourse about the Landfrieden of 1531 changed over time, from a period when the Catholic cantons asserted Catholic interpretations (1532–60), to a stage where Zurich pushed for a “hetero-confessional exegesis” (208) of the document (1561–1655), and, finally, to a phase following the third Landfrieden, when Reformed correspondence inserted the concepts of confessional parity and equality as desired norms for confessional peace (1656–1712). In the three remaining chapters, Hacke examines specific discourses within the communication networks that were generated by polemical sermons from ministers and priests, by rare acts of conversion, and by disputes over the shared usage (simultaneum) of village churches. The chronologies of her examples show the growing confessional self-awareness among the villagers; the growing understanding of the religious values of confessional opponents, often demonstrated by the choice of issues to contest; and the growing understanding among the cantonal elites of how to challenge any changes as unsanctioned confessional novelties and, more importantly, how to find resolutions within the rubrics of the Landfrieden.

Hacke's focus on confessional building through communication works for the condominium of Baden. It is, however, a narrow base for plotting changing values among Swiss political elites for whom the condominium was one of many confessional issues. Her research also offers another thoughtful critique of the Schilling-Reinhard confessionalization thesis. Her analysis, however, would have benefited from some consideration of David Luebke's newly proposed model of regimes of confessional coexistence.