ABSTRACT
What sort of religion was produced by the ‘reforming’ of the territory? Catholic practice may primarily be seen in terms of liturgy and sacrament, together the inescapable framework of Christian living, mediated by the clergy. Like its medieval precursor, however, the Counter-Reformation Church increasingly surrounded the sacraments, above all the Eucharist, with devotional apparatus which invited greater or lesser degrees of voluntary participation. Moreover, beyond the Mass and the sacraments there existed a world of sacramentals, or blessings, the use of which was almost entirely voluntary and challenged clerical pretensions to control, even as it required priestly participation. A further world of largely voluntary religion, expressed both individually and collectively, developed in the form of devotions to the saints and their local shrines. Often this devotion was expressed through attachment to images; for the culture of baroque Catholicism, seeing was believing. Sacramental ritual, the use of blessed objects and the veneration of images shared tangibility and the effect of quickening the sensorium. To complement it, the Church placed greater stress on intelligibility, accelerating pre-Reformation trends to explain the meaning of its rites and insisting that parish clergy possess the correct missals, breviaries, agendas and handbooks. This intricate culture gradually developed in the Upper Palatinate after 1621, drawing on new
also in part through the prism of, the Protestant culture which had been promoted in the sixteenth century.
