Maximilian Miguel Scholz
Contact Information
About
Maximilian Miguel Scholz specializes in the social and religious history of early modern Europe. His current book project, The Road to Prussia: How Travel Defined the Earliest Reformation, 1517-1600, investigates the relationship between human mobility and church reform. It argues that migration was not merely a byproduct of the Reformation but rather an essential element of reform. For Christianity to be renewed, people had to get moving. This research is supported by grants from the Gerda Henkel Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, and the DAAD.
Dr. Scholz’s first book Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608 (University of Virginia Press, 2022) explores the fate and impact of Reformation refugees by looking at one center of European refugee life, the city of Frankfurt am Main. Strange Brethren contends that refugees determined the nature of the religious changes taking place in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe, especially via their construction of discrete religious communities with clear boundaries.
Dr. Scholz received his B.A., M.A., M.Phil., and Ph.D. from Yale University. He won a Fulbright Grant for his research in Germany and held a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Religious and Ethnic Diversity in Göttingen before coming to FSU. His research appears in Central European History, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History, Migration and Society, Sixteenth Century Journal, and Journal of Urban History, and he has written book reviews for the Sixteenth Century Journal, German Studies Review, Central European History, and Lutheran Quarterly.
Dr. Scholz welcomes inquiries from students interested in early modern Europe, German history, and the history of Christianity who are considering graduate school in history.
Book
Strange Brethren: Refugees, Religious Bonds, and Reformation in Frankfurt, 1554-1608 (University of Virginia Press, 2022)
Articles
“Sex in Prussia: How Forbidden Marriage and Forced Migration Birthed the First Protestant Church, 1500–25.” Central European History, vol. 58: 1 (2025), 1-20.
"The Expanding Definition of Refugee in Early Modern Hesse-Kassel and Württemberg" Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte - Archive for Reformation History, vol. 112, no. 1, 2021, pp. 296-307.
"Sacred Welcomes: How Religious Reasons, Structures, and Interactions Shape Refugee Advocacy and Settlement," coauthored with Benjamin Boudou and Hans Leaman. Migration and Society 4:1 (Summer 2021): 99-109.
"Religious Refugees and the Search for Public Worship in Frankfurt am Main, 1554-1608.” Sixteenth Century Journal 50:3 (Fall 2019):765-782.
“Over Our Dead Bodies: The Fight Over Cemetery Construction in Nineteenth-Century London.” Journal of Urban History 43:3 (May 2017): 445-457.
Dr. Scholz regularly teaches EUH4144 “Reformation," WOH3232 “History of Catholicism,” and WOH3440 “History of Refugees.”
