ABSTRACT
According to the ‘confessionalisation thesis’, strategies for imposing religious and social discipline are one of the most important changes in the making of Early-Modern European states, and one which cuts across confessional boundaries.1 In Catholic countries, the Council of Trent was a watershed in this process and the Counter-Reformation can be defined as an ideological re-conquest involving the imposition of religious conformity as well as the reassertion of a social hierarchy. By focusing on the policy of coercion and control implemented by the state and by a state-controlled church, the confessionalisation thesis has emphasised the existence of a gap between the elite and popular culture and promoted a two-tier model of Early Modern society. Recently, the process of confessionalisation has been questioned, at least with regard to specific areas of the Catholic countries, and the need for a more flexible model has become clear.2 Investigations have highlighted strategies of accommodation and compromise adopted by the Church towards popular devotion. The investment of unorthodox behaviour with accepted meanings was a much more common Church strategy than had previously been recognised. Moreover, in the lower strata of the clergy, the priests themselves often shared with their parishioners a relationship with the sacred which the higher hierarchy considered with suspicion. What was most often at stake in the clash of these different views was control over access to the sacred and over the boundaries between the natural, the supernatural and the diabolic. One of the areas where this issue had the strongest implications was healing. Recent research has made it clear that medicine in the Early Modern period was a pluralistic system, where various techniques and practitioners were available to different
patients, not necessarily according to their social position.3 Official medicine had a flexible strategy towards unofficial forms of healing; often, as long as a proper patent was issued and the boundaries of what was permitted were respected, midwives, barbers and even charlatans could carry out their activities.
