Gerd Schwerhoff and Alex Kästner, eds., Göttlicher Zorn und menschliches Maß: Religiöse Abweichung in frühneuzeitlichen Stadtgemeinschaften (Constance: UVK, 2013)

This book presents six essays by researchers associated with the Technological University of Dresden’s collaborative research centre, Transzendenz und Gemeinsinn, on the interesting theme of religious deviance in early modern cities. As Gerd Schwerhoff and Alexander Kästner make clear in the introduction, early modern religious deviance is a broad concept, and one difficult to delimit, particularly because most early modern secular crimes—theft, adultery, witchcraft and magic, blasphemy—were also sins. Should such offences fall under the rubric of secular or religious deviance? Historians have traditionally approached these offences as secular (and indeed, they were commonly prosecuted in ‘secular’ courts), but one cannot help but see their religious roots. Moreover, religious deviance also encompassed divergence over confessional practices and doctrinal beliefs among Catholics, Protestants, Anabaptists, Calvinists, and so on. To try and demarcate this broad field, Schwerhoff and Kästner advocate using the ‘labelling approach’, drawn from sociology and previously used in Schwerhoff’s work: that is, behaviour only becomes deviant when contemporaries classified (or labelled) it as such (p. 27).

The sediment record of the past 200 years in a Swiss high-alpine lake: Hagelseewli (2339 ma.s.l.)

Sediment cores spanning the last two centuries were taken in Hagelseewli, a high-elevation lake in the Swiss Alps. Contiguous 0.5 cm samples were analysed for biological remains, including diatoms, chironomids, cladocera, chrysophyte cysts, and fossil pigments. In addition, sedimentological and geochemical variables such as loss-on-ignition, total carbon, nitrogen, sulphur, grain-size and magnetic mineralogy were determined. The results of these analyses were compared to a long instrumental air temperature record that was adapted to the elevation of Hagelseewli by applying mean monthly lapse rates. During much of the time, the lake is in the shadow of a high cliff to the south, so that the lake is ice-covered during much of the year and thus decoupled from climatic forcing. Lake biology is therefore influenced more by the duration of ice-cover than by direct temperature effects during the short open-water season. Long periods of ice-cover result in anoxic water conditions and dissolution of authigenic calcites, leading to carbonate-free sediments. The diversity of chironomid and cladoceran assemblages is extremely low, whereas that of diatom and chrysophyte cyst assemblages is much higher. Weak correlations were observed between the diatom and chrysophyte cyst assemblages on the one hand and summer or autumn air temperatures on the other, but the proportion of variance explained is low, so that air temperature alone cannot account for the degree of variation observed in the paleolimnological record. Analyses of mineral magnetic parameters, spheroidal carbonaceous particles and lead suggest that atmospheric pollution has had a significant effect on the sediments of Hagelseewli, but little effect on the water quality as reflected in the lake biota.