ABSTRACT
At the heart of confessionalization was something historians term ‘social discipline’ – a drive by both political and ecclesiastical authorities to regulate more closely the moral and cultural behaviour of ordinary subjects, and get them to conform to official and territorial norms. In the process, local and customary expressions of religious identity – such as the riotous festivity in the carnival season preceding lent – often came under attack. In this area, recent historians have tended to emphasize not so much the differences between the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, as the
similarities of aims and approach: a common drive to require the laity to attend church services, educate them in right belief, particularly through the use of catechisms, and eradicate popular ‘superstition’. Both Catholic and Protestant territories witnessed a new emphasis on the education of the clergy as a means of delivering these ends. It has even been claimed that it was only in the era of Reformation and Counter-Reformation that European society, or at least rural society, became meaningfully Christian for the first time, as ancient half-pagan ways of seeing the world were swept aside in a process of parallel ‘Christianization’ (Delumeau 1977). This may be to take things too far: to deny the label ‘Christian’ to the popular religion of the late middle ages is to adopt an anachronistic standard of definition (‘Church and People’ in Part III). The success of reformers in changing popular belief-systems was slow and distinctly patchy. In 1662, a full century after the close of the Council of Trent, a diocesan statute from the Archbishopric of Cologne complained about lay people’s trust in astrological predictions, interpretation of dreams, and magical use of amulets, saints’ names and relics ‘for purposes they could not possess inherently or in accordance with the will of God’ (Greyerz 2008, 42-3). In areas affected by the Protestant Reformation, which Max Weber regarded as an agent of modern rationality leading to a ‘disenchantment’ of the world (Weber 2001, 61), scholars now find a religious culture saturated by the supernatural, alive with signs and portents, and the presence of angels and demons. Officially, mainstream Protestantism held that miracles had ceased in the world after the time of the apostles. But, at both elite and popular levels, the intense Protestant interest in divine pRoviDence could serve a very similar function. There is also much evidence of continued reliance on quasi-magical rituals to ward off evil or cure disease, of belief in ghosts and poltergeists, or in the sacred significance of particular times, days or seasons (Thomas 1971; cf. ‘Witchcraft and Magic’ in Part IV). It would be wrong, however, to see the relationship between official Protestantism and popular religious culture as a purely antagonistic one. Protestantism proved capable of generating its own recognizably confessional but genuinely popular forms of religious expression. In seventeenth-century England, for example, strongly anti-Catholic and nationalist sentiments came together in annual popular commemorations of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot. Seventeenth-and eighteenth-century Germany saw much interest in stories about how images of Martin Luther had apparently been miraculously preserved from destruction by fire – an indication of genuine popular regard for the memory of the great reformer, but also of a mindset showing ‘unmistakable traces of the Catholic cult of the saints’ (Scribner 1987, 328).
