ABSTRACT
As the introduction to this volume shows, the phrase ‘negotiating religion’ can have many meanings. Some of them are indeed applicable to the history of Europe before the modern era. It has sometimes been suggested that the very concept of religion is a modern invention and that the religious sphere once overlapped so pervasively and profoundly with the political, social, economic and cultural spheres that there was no meaningful distinction between them. This is an oversimplifica - tion. Conceptual and legal distinctions between religion and the state existed already in the Middle Ages and medieval Europe was not caesaropapist: despite the pretensions of some popes, supreme political and religious authority was never vested in the same person, as it was in the Byzantine Empire. Relations between ecclesiastic and ‘temporal’ authorities were always subject to negotiation and the tensions between the two sometimes took dramatic forms, as in the Investiture Controversy of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Likewise, there was always a distinction between the canon law of the Roman Catholic Church, on the one hand, and different forms of civil law on the other. Neither is it the case that, before modern times, ordinary lay people had no freedom or agency in religious matters. Not only the intensity but also the forms and terms of people’s religious engagement were variable, so there was always a relationship to be negotiated between individuals and the religious institutions to which they belonged. This was especially the case when people were confronted openly with a variety of religious options from which they could choose – most obviously when they could choose between rival faiths, but also when a single faith, like late medieval Catholicism, encom - passed a wide range of schools, movements, devotions and models of piety. The experience of spirituality has always had an intimate, personal aspect as well as communal and public ones, and even within rigid orthodoxies there has always
The purpose of this chapter is to consider the forms of negotiation between people of different faiths in early modern Europe.1 The early modern period witnessed the formation of a distinctive form of religious plurality, for it was this period that saw Europe divide for the first time into rival Christian churches – Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran, Mennonite, Anglican and so on – whose relations with one another, and whose places in the socio-political order, had to be negotiated. A product of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, the sundering of western Christendom was entirely unintentional, as all the reformers of the sixteenth century conceived of the Christian religion as a single faith, church and body of believers. From the outset, they sought to effect not some division of this entity, but its reform and revitalisation. Even as divisions rapidly emerged – not only between Protestants and Catholics, but between different sorts of Protestants as well – reformers maintained that their own version of ‘true Christianity’ was the only genuine one, that it alone enjoyed divine favour and that it could not but prevail. When this did not happen in their own lifetimes, they projected this victory into the future. As the victory of God over the devil, Christ over Antichrist, good over evil, it remained in their minds an eschatological certainty.
