Southwest Germany, like the rest of Catholic Europe, experienced the Counter-Reformation in the form of measures taken by both the Church and Catholic states to combat the spread of Protestantism. Catholic leaders in this part of Germany also worked to implement the reforms of the Church, the clergy, and religious practice advocated by the Council of Trent. Tridentine reforms came to the Southwest in the later sixteenth century as Catholic officials pursued reforms of the clergy and made tentative efforts to reform popular religious practice. Tridentine reform was slowed by the conservative and traditional nature of many powerful ecclesiastical institutions, especially the great monasteries, and by the relatively late arrival of the Jesuits in the region, but it left an indelible mark on the Church.

The period from 1550 to the end of the Thirty Years' War was the era most marked by Tridentine reform and the related processes of Counter-Reformation and confessionalization, although the decrees of the Council of Trent remained a blueprint for church reform into the eighteenth century. Yet even during these decades of reform, an analysis of the successes and failures of reform measures does not do justice to the complex interplay of social groups that created Catholic religiosity and culture.