ABSTRACT
One of the most difficult tasks facing historians of early-modern religion is to get behind the official belief system of the Church to reconstruct the religious sensibilities and values of ordinary men and women. Historians have access to a wide range of source material, including personal testimonies, printed devotional material, ecclesiastical architecture and furnishings, and the Church’s own administrative records. But all these types of source are incomplete and difficult to interpret. There is no way of knowing whether the religious feelings expressed in surviving letters, diaries and autobiographies are idiosyncratic and extreme, or typical and representative of society as a whole. Historians cannot be confident that the recommended rites and exercises contained in religious manuals and devotional books were actually being followed; and even if they assume they were, how can they recapture and evaluate the emotion and spirituality that accompanied their performance? Furthermore, how can anything very meaningful be written about, for example, the level of religious commitment in society, when there are no statistical records relating to matters such as church attendance, pilgrimages, and reactions to sermons and lectures?
