Serving Three Masters? Hessian Military Chaplains Between Church, State, and Regiment (C. 1650–1800)

Abstract

Recent scholarship on the early-modern Swedish and Prussian military chaplaincies holds thatchaplains were functionally the same as civilian pastors. By contrast, scholarship in the field of New Military History, while in general neglecting military chaplains as topics of research, has argued for stark distinctions between military and local communities—distinctions which would have differentiated the role of military chaplains significantly from that of civilian pastors. To move beyond this impasse, the current study combines analysis of military chaplains’ life writings and church registers with analysis of institutional sources (chaplains’ application letters, Consistorial and Territorial Council proceedings) on chaplains throughout their careers in the German territory of Hesse Kassel (c. 1650–1800). The results of this analysis show that early-modern military chaplains, while similar to civilian pastors in their clerical acculturation, their positive relationships with local communities, and the types of pastoral care they provided on campaign, were nevertheless shaped and differentiated by their service in the regiments. In the camps, chaplains had to adapt their parish-based experience and church regulations to life on the move. Like their parishioners, chaplains became bellicose, devoted to honor, skilled in verbal sparring, and reliant on military authority when negotiating for sacred church space or intervening in local confessional conflicts. After retirement, chaplains had to adapt again, struggling to fit their war-hardened personas into the narrow bounds of civil society. In doing so, former chaplains brought army culture into conversation with parish communities in ways that rippled beyond the battlefield and into the general consciousness of early-modern Europe. These conclusions help bridge the gap between scholarship on chaplains and on military history. By focusing on Hesse Kassel, they also contextualize developments emphasized in Prussian historiography. Finally, due to chaplains’ involvement in parish communities on campaign, this dissertation bears significance for scholarship on clerical itinerancy, early-modern soldier-civilian interactions, and interconfessionality.