ABSTRACT
On the face of it, ritual change in the transition from Roman Catholicism to Protestantism in Germany was about returning to the “pristine” practice of the early church. The elite men who directed the Reformation thought carefully about the alterations that they introduced, and they were convinced that they were restoring biblically condoned observance to the sixteenth century. They saw themselves as purging from the agenda “papist” invention, much of which, in Lutheran and Calvinist teaching, was not harmless embroidery but rather a falsifying, injurious departure from the will of God. For God did not, in these divines’ opinion, give mortals, including priests, license to arrogate to themselves power over supernatural domains. When they condemned “superstition,” as they repeatedly did, they included ritual practices within the church as well as ritualized folk measures that purported to render less noxious the teeming unseen elements that beset people’s equilibrium and made them vulnerable to a bleak hereafter. Probably few late medieval clergy perceived the complementarity between official cere-monial assumptions and those adhered to by many ordinary people who, imitating the language, artifacts, and gestures of the church, confronted life’s problems well fortified. Popular healers and the throngs who gave their custom to them tapped the magical powers of the church and applied them, as they thought, between Eucharistic Masses (strictly the ordained priests’ domain) to a larger sphere. The incantations of cunning people and midwives were filled with the language of saintly invocation and Trinitarian blessing. Whenever possible, they employed sacramentals such as blessed candles, baptismal water, and bits of the Host that someone had managed to bring out of the church unswallowed. They meant to serve God aright, and the simple versions of righteousness that their unlettered priests shared with them and conveyed to them very likely reinforced their practice. The priests gave them blessed bread, pronounced their own protective formulae over their candles, fields, crops, beehives, and hovels, and lived similarly among them. If such men of the cloth objected to folkish measures, it was on the grounds that they alone within their respective parishes ought to wield the sword against Satan; they may
have been jealous of their oftresorted-to rivals. Nonetheless, their view of the universe was much the same as those of their charges.
