ABSTRACT
Catholicism, reform the parish clergy and place local religious confraternities under firm control (Muchembled 1985). Peter Burke, surveying the whole of Europe in a pioneering and influential work, offered a rather different picture. Burke posited a medieval culture that had embraced the whole of society, except a tiny handful of learned schoolmen or theologians. During the early modern period, by contrast, the elites gradually withdrew from much of this traditional world, a process encouraged in different ways by Renaissance humanism, the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, and the Enlightenment. The Renaissance and Enlightenment promoted the values of reason and civility, or politeness, and all waged war on ‘superstition’, disorder and excess (‘The Renaissance’ and ‘Enlightenment’ in Part IV). Religious reformers sought to improve clerical standards and separate the sacred world from the profane; Catholics wanted to ban rowdy festivities from the church and churchyard, while Calvinists tried to suppress them altogether. Burke presented these developments as a war between ‘Carnival’ and lent, Carnival standing for the rough, earthy and boisterous celebration of life and the senses, Lent for the new values of civility, restraint and discipline – a war that ended with the triumph of Lent (Burke 1978). In recent years many scholars have questioned such a stark binary division, stressing instead cultural continuities, interaction and diversity. Instead of viewing cultural change simply in terms of acceptance or resistance, Roger Chartier has emphasized the need to see how each element was used, understood and ‘appropriated’ by different communities (Chartier 1987). The cult of saints continued to flourish in Catholic lands, if now more closely supervised. In Lutheran Germany, where saints disappeared, the figure of Luther himself took on some of their attributes, with stories telling how his picture had remained unharmed by fire, sweated blood or tears, and even worked miracles. Moreover, such reports were fostered by educated clerics, realizing perhaps that they needed to work within the grain of traditional beliefs rather than trying to destroy them (Scribner 1987, 323-53). In England, where the intervention of saints in people’s daily lives was also swept away, a belief in God’s pRoviDential direction of human affairs took its place, reflected in the widespread conviction that God rewarded virtue and punished the wicked in this life as well as the next. Such developments have led historians to speak increasingly of ‘postReformation’ rather than ‘Protestant’ beliefs (‘The Long Reformation’ in Part III). For their part, Puritan ministers complained bitterly about what they dismissed as the ‘country divinity’ of most villagers, who after endless sermons still failed or refused to absorb the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, and remained convinced that heaven was a reward for all who lived a decent life. Lutheran ministers made similar complaints, and Catholic missionaries in the more remote parts of France, Spain and Italy found the peasantry equally resistant to new Catholic Reformation teaching. We should not conclude, however, that ordinary folk were always passive or traditionalist in their thinking. The Italian miller Menocchio drew on his limited reading and fertile imagination to devise a new cosmology, which eventually brought him to the stake (Ginzburg 1992; Box 1). Many other men and women fashioned personal beliefs from
the mélange of religious ideas in circulation, especially in Reformation Germany and revolutionary England.
