ABSTRACT
It is now twenty-five years since the first appearance of Jean Delumeau’s Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire, in which he argued that despite their apparent mutual contradictions, “the two Reformations-Luther’s and Rome’s-constituted…two complementary aspects of one and the same process of Christianization”.2 The Christian Middle Ages, according to Delumeau, was a legend, at least “as far as the (essentially rural) masses are concerned”. Christianity, he thought, had penetrated medieval society only superficially, and the whole of Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, therefore, “pays de mission”, just as surely as the newly discovered pagan Indies, East and West.
