Confessional Identity, Pan-Protestantism, and Secularization: International and Cross-Confessional Marriage Projects in the House of Hohenzollern in the 18th Century

This paper addresses the frequent marriages of Calvinist members of the house of Hohenzollern to foreign Protestants, especially surrounding the reign of King Frederick William I (1713-1740).

As sources I'm using primarily the files of the Hohenzollern dynasty (the "Haus Archiv"), which include the correspondences regarding marriage projects and the marriage contracts of the projects that came to fruition (including preliminary drafts, with revisions).

I'm going to present some material, some tentative hypotheses, and some ideas for further study. From what I can see, so far, these mixed marriages were problematic and are of interest for their "transgressive" nature, but they're especially interesting because marrying foreigners, across confessional lines, became less and less of an issue over time. This change seems to have happened during the reign of King Frederick William I, in the 1710s, '20s, and '30s, which I see as a bit of a watershed.

As a bit of background: marrying across confessional lines was a tradition among the Hohenzollerns. Though scholars have paid great attention to the Hohenzollerns’ religious policies, the mixed-confessional nature of these marriages is rarely mentioned in the secondary literature, much less seen as problematic. To digress, I think that this historiographical void is due to the relative success of the Protestant union in the nineteenth century. By the time the foundations of Prussian history were established in the late nineteenth century, perhaps it simply didn't occur to anyone that various Protestants would not marry each other.