ABSTRACT
From the preceding sketch of the secular and ecclesiastical instruments by which a Catholic identity was promoted in the Upper Palatinate from the 1620s, we may now turn to the question of their impact and their effectiveness in shaping a Catholic society, moving from conversion to consolidation, or from the ‘Informing’ of the territory to its ‘Reforming’, as the 1693 drama characterised it. How was the Catholicity of a society to be assured and how might it be measured? For biconfessional environments, such as those to be found in some of the South German imperial cities, or in areas of religious Siimultaneum after 1648, the ‘invisible boundaries’ between the confessions have been explored through shifting demographic patterns, or through the microcosm of individual conversion experience.1 For the recatholicised Upper Palatinate, the tension was a diachronic one with a Calvinist or Lutheran past. But identity was also about public individual and communal performance and the third part of this study concentrates on visible markers, on participation in the sacraments and the
liturgy, and on conformity to the norms of Catholic deportment and a new moral economy, or, conversely, non-compliance in the same, as exposed through court cases. It will be found too in voluntary devotion, for which the Catholic restoration offered an extraordinary range of opportunities. The present chapter concentrates on the smallest locus of communal identity, the parochial or village Gemeinde.2 The first section explores the locale of the schoolroom and the reading space of the household and examines confessional indoctrination in the form of catechising and the diffusion of formational literature. In the second section, the locale shifts to the chapel, the street and, more furtively, to the Spinnstube and the bedroom, to investigate forms of youth and adult communal association or disassociation, particularly in the voluntary membership of confraternities, the organisation of processions and the blanket imposition of religious and sexual discipline. Finally, we move to the graveyard to examine how relations between the living and the dead changed with the coming of the Counter Reformation.
