Fighting or Fostering Confessional Plurality?: Ernst Salomon Cyprian as a Historian of Lutheranism in the Early Eighteenth Century

Confessional polemics are closely connected to the confessional ruptures of Europe following the Reformation. Written polemics were numerous and ranged among the most popular ways of coping with competing religious truths. While polemical writings seemed to aim at changing the minds of opponents, they often contributed to solidifying the views of the authors’ supporters. Points of contention were not only continuously present between the large confessional denominations but, in the course of the early modern era, increasingly within Protestantism itself. Quarrels between orthodox Lutherans, Reformed irenicists, and Lutheran Pietists featured prominently in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This