Since the 1980s the concepts of "social discipline" (Gerhard Oestreich) and "confessionalization" (Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard) -- despite numerous challenges -- profoundly influenced the scholarship on early modern Germany. Both concepts highlight that the forms of control, correction, and compliance that secular and clerical elites introduced and expanded in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually established broad patterns of social and religious behavior that reinforced the processes of early modern state building. In recent years, however, the debate over these concepts and their statist and teleological tendencies has diminished, as scholars have begun to emphasize, using a rich variety of case studies, the slippages, tensions, contradictions, and convergences between the norms and practices of confessionalization and social discipline. In the expectation that the new focus will develop further, we would like to organize for the next annual meeting of the German Studies Association (29 September - 2 October 2016, San Diego, CA) a series of panels that critically explores the ways in which this juxtaposition of norms and practices can reinvigorate debate about the conceptual significance of social discipline and confessionalization. Variations in the specific set of norms and practices adopted in different places and periods sprang from an array of political, institutional, and confessional factors. They include:
- different local and regional political structures (for example, large and small territorial states, weak and strong forms of lordship, cities and market towns, villages and hamlets);
- different confessional configurations within individual territories (more or less confessionally homogeneous, confessionally mixed and peaceful, confessionally divided or threatened by latent confessional tensions);
- differently situated organs of political and clerical authority that either cooperated or clashed with one another;
- different media (official ordinances, devotional literature, catechisms and moral handbooks, visual and acoustic modes of expression);
- compliance to and internalization of disciplinary norms, latent and open resistance to social, moral, and church discipline.

In consideration of these factors, the series of panels would inquire into the common parameters and overarching features found in the heterogeneous instances of social discipline and confessionalization.
- reach and limits of clerical, political, and administrative initiatives to set and implement disciplinary norms;
- diverging forms of disciplinary action by authorities and the role of local informers;
- possibilities for resistance to, subversion of, and avoidance of social and clerical control;
- perspectives concerning confessional cultures: symbolic communication; devotional and catechetical literature; worship services and devotional forms, customs, and practices; religious orders and semi-monastic communities.

For the series of panels we are especially interested in case studies, comparative research, and critical methodological treatments of the topic. Please send a short proposal (roughly 300 words) no later than December 31, 2015, to one of the following persons:

Wolfgang Breul, Johannes Gutenberg Universität Mainz, breul@uni-mainz.de
Terence McIntosh, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, mcintosh@email.unc.edu
Alexander Schunka, Freie Universität Berlin, alexander.schunka@fu-berlin.de