PART 3
14
Kathryn A. Edwards
In the last twenty years, studies in popular religion have exploded, a situation that is somewhat ironic given debates about the term that defines the field.1 Scholars have challenged the term popular as suggesting ignorant or inferior beliefs and practices, reinforcing belief in a false dichotomy between it and the equally ill-defined term elite and implying a common European piety at a time characterized by confessionalism.2 While less contentious, the term religion has also drawn fire. Is the religious a belief, a practice, or a meld of the two? Does religion require an institution, or can it be expressed privately and independently?
In order to avoid such debates and clarify the parameters of their research, some authors have proposed terms like common or traditional to replace the much-maligned popular, substitutions that have their value but fail to address the fundamental ambiguity of the field.3 Increasingly, scholars analyzing popular religion note the term’s varied definitions and the disciplinary debates, provide a working definition that falls within the field’s commonly accepted boundaries, and move on to analyzing and, to some degree, reveling in the very flexibility of the subject itself. That method will be followed in this chapter. Here, popular religion will have several defining characteristics: the spiritual beliefs and pious practices that a large section of a region’s population support; a cosmology shared between individuals of diverse classes, genders, professions, and educational levels; and dissenting religious movements that draw on these commonalities but reformulate them in a way to appeal to the social, economic, or cultural groups comprising their movement. As this rather complex definition suggests, in some cases, popular religion may be best characterized by what it is not: religious practice and doctrine as institutional theologians primarily define them.
Although studies on popular religion include many diverse religious experiences, scholars working in this field make implicit assumptions that help to unify the discipline. Fundamental is early modern Europeans’ acceptance of immanence.4 While some theologians in later medieval Europe stressed the unknowability of God, common practices, such as blessing a farmer’s field, were based on the conviction that God was directly active in this world and accessible to those using the right tools and having the right mental and spiritual state. If he could not be known, he could at least be manipulated. The holistic view of the universe implicit in these activities underlies much of later medieval popular piety and spirituality and would continue until well into the seventeenth century. Challenges to, and revisions of, this relationship were implicit in both Catholic and Protestant reform movements and are the subject of much modern scholarship on popular religion.
The place of popular religion in analyses of confessional distinctions and disputes between reformers and the general population have influenced the way in which scholars tend to present studies of popular religion. The subject of popular religion grew out of studies in the late 1970s and early 1980s on popular culture and ritual more generally; as such, it was the subject of only a chapter or two in a monograph.5 These treatments made it clear that detailed regional studies were necessary, and much work to this day continues in this vein, concentrating on particular manifestations of popular piety (processions, pilgrimages, plays), the religious experience of distinct groups (women, villagers, dissenters), or the early modern reinterpretation of certain fundamental aspects of later medieval religion (purgatory, images, sermons) in regions throughout early modern Europe. As such, while there are many books devoted to topics in popular religion, much excellent research remains as journal articles or book chapters.6 These studies continue to emphasize the local nature of much popular religious expression and the need for thorough contextualization in its analyses—a situation that has made scholars wary of proposing big syntheses.7
The lack of a synthesis is not the only challenge faced by those who work in this field. Popular religion is by definition an interdisciplinary topic combining skills and involving scholars from anthropology, folklore, history, literary studies, religious studies, psychology, and sociology.8 The diverse approaches of these disciplines enrich the field while simultaneously contributing to its fragmentation. Problems in terminology also plague research in this area. While most scholars of this subject have made their peace with the concept of popular religion, finding an appropriate vocabulary to express its intellectual and social exchanges continues to vex them. By stressing their hermeneutics, the binaries that once guided an understanding of popular religious experience (such as popular/elite and center/periphery) have been undermined, but the negotiated and polyvalent relationships that have replaced them—although more accurate—are even more difficult to synthesize. Disciplinary paradigms, such as confessionalization and social discipline, have driven much research in early modern popular religion (whether they should is another topic), and in many cases they have determined the questions asked about it.9
Despite these difficulties in classification, the rest of this chapter is organized according to five key approaches to early modern social and cultural history that have guided the treatment of popular religious history during the last twenty years: ritual practice; religion and community; death, the dead, and demons; reforming popular religion; and violence and toleration. As these categories make clear, many topics in popular religion incorporate related themes and rely on similar sources.
Ritual Practice
Some of the first work done in the later 1970s and 1980s on early modern popular religion focused on ritual practices, complementing a series of books and articles about popular ritual and culture more generally.10 Innovative research along these lines continues.11 Underscoring the importance of understanding the social context of popular religious ritual, these scholars emphasize social and environmental distinctions, such as the effects of an urban or a rural setting, the influence of local or regional politics, and the interactions between artisans and burghers, in their treatment of discrete events. Discussions of appropriation and social classification frequently dominate such work. The wide possibilities for the interpretation of festivals and drama have made them particular favorites for this type of analysis. Religious processions, such as Corpus Christi celebrations or annual devotions in honor of a town’s patron saint, have multiple interpretive levels that in some cases enhance orthodoxy and in others subvert it.12 Work on religious festivals has also complemented the “history of daily life” (Alltagsgeschichte) through its stress on the distinctive social dynamics of individual celebrations, even if they are annual or “common” occurrences. Disputations over and changes to later medieval religious festivals point to the effects of religious reform during the sixteenth and seventeenth century on community identities and ideologies. For scholars, the ways in which communities ignore or revise religious festivals and processions illustrate the various personal and local interests affecting larger reform programs.
Fundamental to understanding changes in popular religious ritual has been research on revisions to the ritual year in Protestant Europe. Such work has stressed an obvious, but all too frequently ignored, point: time in pre-Reformation Europe was organized according to agricultural and ecclesiastical calendars. With religious reform should have come calendrical reform and thus a basic revising of the appropriate structure of time and of the relationship between those who exist in time (everything in this world, especially humans) and that which exists beyond time (God). Like the scholarship on religious festivals and processions to which it is so closely linked, research on calendrical change has stressed its gradual nature in the centuries after the Reformation.13 Even areas that readily adopted the Gregorian calendar made few alterations to a day’s significance; certain saints were still venerated on certain days, and processions and sermons continued to mark key points in the year. An examination of England, in particular, has emphasized that the annual religious calendar was the product of centuries of negotiation and was being revised right up to the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Like the Reformation itself, calendrical change ebbed and flowed during the sixteenth century, and the calendar would never lose aspects of its pre-Reformation form, despite challenges by ecclesiastical hierarchies.14
The ecclesiastical calendar also affected the ritual aspects of the mass itself. Rather than focus on the Reformation’s theological debates, scholars of popular religion have examined to what degree populations accepted changes in religious services and what effect these changes had on popular religiosity.15 Moving beyond general statements about how the Reformation fragmented a “unitary” Christendom, these studies concentrate on the local appreciation of a ritual with an ostensibly universal message. For example, when an altar is changed to a simple table and the elaborate cloths, chalices, and other objects of a medieval mass are removed, many questions are left for the community so affected: Who decided that the change would occur? Who approved of the change? What happens to the objects that were once used as part of the mass? Is this new mass spiritually valid?16 The answers to these questions and many others that could be posed stress the role of negotiation and perception in the reformation of religious ritual. Some research has carried these ideas further and examined religious ritual as a sensory experience. Arguing that later medieval religious ritual relied on the full application of all five senses, this work examines the sensory and, by implication, psychological effects of renovating churches and other sites of religious ritual during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.17
The most basic yet most complex changes to religious ritual occurred in the sacraments and sacramentals. By moving from seven to two sacraments, Protestant churches fundamentally altered the salvific system of later medieval Europe and threw into doubt the means by which individuals could be saved.18 As might be expected, the response to such alterations was mixed. Scholars have repeatedly shown where communities resisted new impositions, with or without the help of the local clergy, and sometimes in the process created their own variants of common religious rituals. Such challenges were not confined to newly Protestant territories. Catholic reform movements condemned some aspects of popular sacramental piety while elevating others, such as the necessary place of the clergy as intercessors.19 Particularly questioned was the role of sacramentals. Central to both later medieval and early modern popular religion, sacramentals were paraliturgical rites—means by which the laity as well as the clergy could access the sacred and the powerful. Sacramentals involved rituals such as blessing the crops and exorcism and were often used for power and security at rites of passage, such as birth and marriage.20 Challenges to traditional sacramentals were challenges to valuable tools. As much recent scholarship has shown, communities frequently ignored ecclesiastical or secular directives about them and revised the old rite to accommodate a new sensibility, as happened when Bibles replaced the Eucharist as part of the annual blessing of the fields.
Religion and Community
John Bossy’s Christianity in the West proposed another, but related, paradigm that has been fundamental to the analysis of popular religion.21 Arguing that the Protestant Reformation redefined the medieval concepts of community, Bossy’s work has led scholars to examine more closely the ways that popular religion depends on its communal setting and the interaction between religious rites and concepts of community. As such, these scholars are indebted to the concepts of appropriation and polyvalence described in the preceding section but use them to consider more sociological questions.
Beginning with studies of particular communal settings—villages, towns, larger cities—researchers since Bossy have explored the relationship between concepts of community and forms of popular religion. Continuity and change are the two poles by which both piety and community are often measured, and they tend to vary between urban and rural areas.22 Perhaps not surprisingly, scholars of Catholic towns in southern Europe have tended to stress continuity, while those of Protestant towns in northern Europe have leaned towards change, but even this broad, denominational pattern has been challenged.23 Work on confraternities has proven an especially useful way of combining studies of common religious beliefs and practices with analyses of community construction and perception.24 With diverse social and spiritual functions, confraternities were an influential expression of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century popular, urban piety, and the Protestant rejection of the traditional cult of the saints undermined one of their reasons for existence. Redirection of traditional confraternal activities, such as charitable giving, in Protestant towns suggests reconstruction of community bonds and ideologies, while changing attitudes and activities among confraternities in Catholic territories calls into question the extent to which religious ideology drove aspects of early modern society and popular religious expression.25
Scholars working on rural communities have tended to stress continuity in popular religious beliefs and practices, while resisting a traditional dichotomy that links peasants with conservativism. Noting that it took generations for some regions to see enduring effects from Protestant reform, they also highlight “revolutionary” outbursts such as the German Peasants’ Revolt, which clearly linked Reformed doctrines to concepts such as the “common man” and a sense of communal responsibility.26 Aside from such dramatic events, most scholarship on rural communities has concentrated on durable aspects of traditional religion, although they are sometimes given an ostensibly Protestant twist. In Catholic regions, this research has assessed the extent and success of reforming missions in rural communities and the enduring manifestations of popular piety, such as local cults.27
In the history of later medieval Europe, pilgrimage has been seen as one means to bridge communities and create a broader sense of a Christian community. Relying as it did on the belief in an intercessory system and the efficacy of good works, two ideas anathema to Protestant reform, the study of its endurance, revision, or elimination during the sixteenth and seventeenth century has been used as a means of gauging the success of various reforming ideals.28 While odysseys to Canterbury, Compostela, or Rome became the most dramatic later medieval pilgrimages, local shrines were the most frequent pilgrimage sites—an observation that has challenged the extent to which pilgrimage ever built a broad sense of Christian community. Sixteenth-century pilgrims shared the medieval emphasis on local saints, and some Protestant communities were quite reluctant to relinquish their shrines. One area that cannot be disputed, however, is that pilgrimage visibly linked key components in popular religious belief: the veneration of saints and the quest for supernatural, magical power.29
Veneration of saints was a fundamental part of the later medieval economy of salvation and would continue as such in Catholic regions during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.30 Recent research has stressed how sanctity and the intercessory system of which saints were a part simultaneously challenged and reinforced social hierarchies and gender perceptions. Saints had such a powerful hold on the popular religious imagination that Reformers were forced to accept, and sometimes themselves embraced, constructions of Protestant martyrdom that placed Protestant martyrs in roles quite similar to those of later medieval saints.31 Aspects of sanctity and, in some cases, Protestant martyrdom that continued to have an enormous appeal were the miracles associated with saints and martyrs. Scholarship has repeatedly shown that although Catholics and Protestants disagreed even among themselves on the sources and significance of these miracles, none could doubt their popularity. As heroes surrounded by the miraculous, or even as miracle workers, saints and martyrs both affirmed the validity of their faith and motivated others to stiffen their spiritual resolve.
In the later Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary was the ultimate saint, and in the fifteenth century veneration of the Holy Family reached new heights in popular religious expression.32 With the reform movements of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the ontological status of the Virgin and the Holy Family changed, but each remained important examples of the religious roles and status of mothers and families.33 The Virgin continued to have a central position in reformed Catholicism, with certain devotions (such as that of the rosary) apparently increasing, and veneration of the Virgin endured in Protestant territories longer than many Reformers would have preferred.34 Eliminating, or even redefining, the Virgin in towns and villages whose primary church was named after Our Lady and may have been shared by Protestants and Catholics alike required a fundamental revision of the senses of hierarchy, spirituality, and gender.
Studies of the Virgin closely complement extremely productive research done on women, the feminine, and popular religion.35 Scholars have analyzed manifestations of piety to which women were especially devoted, as well as ways in which women supported reform programs morally and financially in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.36 Work on both Protestant and Catholic territories has been inspired by earlier research, which suggested that Protestantism led to a regression in women’s spiritual and social status by minimizing the opportunities available to devout women. This interpretation has been strongly challenged, and a new generation of scholars has focused on ways that Catholic and Protestant reform provided opportunities for female religious expression. Among Catholics, for example, communities of religious women, such as the Daughters of Charity and the Ursulines, both accepted and challenged Counter-Reformation perceptions of female spirituality and roles.37
Striking among the studies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Catholicism have been the links between female mysticism, official Catholicism, and popular ideas of appropriate religion. The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries saw a flowering of female mysticism, and a “feminization of religious language,” to use Carolyn Walker Bynum’s famous phrase, was a defining characteristic of later medieval spirituality. Recent scholars have stressed the continued power of female mystics in Catholic territories during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries but have simultaneously emphasized the very careful path these mystics had to follow.38 While mysticism and the feminine could lead to union with the divine, both Protestants and Catholics alike feared that mystical experiences could actually be demonic manifestations.39 Although both men and women could be and were mystics, the mystics’ femaleness heightened the tension between the demonic and the divine for both herself and her community.
Death, The Dead, and Demons
The community of the later Middle Ages that Bossy described and other scholars have found so persuasive transcended worldly bonds. His depiction of a community of the living and the dead transformed by the Reformation has inspired a generation of scholarship to focus on the social and spiritual construction of death. Influenced by the work of Philippe Aries and Jacques Le Goff, scholars have integrated cosmological revisions and the practices of death and mourning. The result is research that assesses the common experience of death and the dead, while stressing the wide variety of ideologies that supported these practices.40
The later medieval intercessory system depended on a postmortem triad: heaven, hell, and purgatory. While some theologians argued that these were states of the soul, popular belief—and many theological works—portrayed them as real, substantial places. In this physical, corporeal hell and purgatory, humans would be subject to unimaginable, albeit frequently and graphically described, suffering.41 Although sixteenth-century Protestant Reformers rejected purgatory, recent scholarship has stressed that it took generations for this rejection to be reflected in popular beliefs and practices.42 With death ubiquitous, the rituals of death and the practice of the good death (ars moriendi) retained their significance for both Protestant and Catholic alike.43 Although Protestant Reformers challenged the significance of tomb placement (a later medieval preoccupation), scholars have shown that location continued to matter.44 Irregular death, such as suicide, remained suspect, although the theological reasons for this suspicion varied between confessions.45
Only recently has scholarship begun analyzing one of the more widespread and contentious ideas about the dead in late medieval and early modern Europe—namely, that they could and did return.46 Whether these dead manifested as zombies, apparitions, poltergeists, or supernatural animals, belief in these entities transcended confessional boundaries. In later medieval Christianity, such beings had a clear role confirming the existence of purgatory, the need for intercession, and the bonds between the living and the dead. They also complemented ideas about portents and prophecy, as the dead assisted prophets or manifested prophetic characteristics.47 They found buried treasure and revealed murderers. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, belief in the returning dead was remarkably durable, even when the doctrinal justification for such beliefs no longer existed.48
Research into the returning dead is closely tied to the extensive work that has been done about the role of demons and the devil in late medieval and early modern Europe, because one of the most common beliefs about apparitions is that they were demonic manifestations. While much of this scholarship belongs to the debates about demonology and witchcraft—and, accordingly, will be treated in that chapter—belief in demonic activity was not purely a concomitant to witchcraft trials. Heiko Oberman has convincingly stressed the place of the devil in Luther’s theology and daily life, and in this Luther was very much a person of his time.49 Late medieval and early modern Europeans commonly supported a dualistic worldview where the devil assumed the characteristics of a second divinity and the demons were his corrupted angels.50 Although such an interpretation was at least theologically dubious and at most heretical, its existence has been repeatedly demonstrated. For this reason, possession was a real fear as well as a tool in confessional battles, and exorcism was a valuable rite contended over between laity and clergy.51
Reforming Popular Religion
As the previous sections have suggested, key topics in early studies of popular religion were the tools by which official ideology was indoctrinated and the extent to which indoctrination succeeded. While the work of Gerald Strauss has been particularly influential and contentious in this area, such research also stems from the debates over social discipline.52 Over the last thirty years, scholars have assessed the degree to which official doctrine was designed to reconstruct and discipline society according to a confessional ideology. While such social discipline presumes a distinction between official and unofficial, popular and elite, that most modern scholars of popular religion insist must be nuanced, the questions of communication and interpretation that led scholars to propose the theory of social discipline still drive modern research in this field.
Visitation records were among the first documents examined by scholars interested in studying the reception of the Catholic and Protestant Reformations. When comparing these records to official statements of religious belief (confessions) and catechisms, some scholars felt compelled to echo the despair of early Lutheran and Calvinist Reformers themselves about the “failure” of Protestant reform in village populations. More recent work has challenged this assessment by disputing its premise that Reformed religion was innately what its theologians determined it to be.53 Key to this analysis is the example of later medieval and early modern Catholicism, where popular beliefs and practices could revise, nuance, or even negate official doctrine. As in the Catholic Church, two of the great challenges facing later sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism were the enforcement of doctrine and the degree to which popular belief and piety would mediate official doctrine and practice.
Fascinating work has been done in the last several decades on the communication of religious messages in early modern Europe, particularly within Protestant confessions but also in Catholic communities. Robert W. Scribner’s For the Sake of Simple Folk pioneered this work among historians, describing how text(s), image, symbols, and setting worked together to communicate a wide variety of orthodox Lutheran ideas to a diverse audience.54 Given the literacy levels of early modern Europeans, such research has developed sophisticated analyses of communication systems and borrowed heavily from literary and communication theory. By using cheap literature, broadsheets, and music as the basis for their analyses, researchers in this field argue that their work is innately about popular, widespread culture and, in many cases, its potential to subvert and redefine the official.55 The iconographic and oral elements embedded in this print culture have been traced, and recent research on manuscripts and music attempts to examine their pedagogical elements, although such influence can be much more tenuous.56 This work has also benefited enormously from modern technologies. Services such as Early English Books Online make examples of these materials available in pdf format. Many libraries and archives are developing extensive online depositories that include early pamphlets and larger polemics. Institutions such as the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel have microfilmed many of their early German broadsheets, and the St. Andrews Reformation Studies Center’s Short Title Catalog for early French printed books (completed in late 2007) will make identifying and finding French sources far easier.
Sermon collections have also benefited from these technologies and methodologies and were a key means for communicating doctrine among and between literate and illiterate members of Protestant and Catholic communities. Recent research on sermons has ranged from descriptions of sermon practice and the training of preachers to linguistic analyses of sermon content.57 Sermons may seem at first to be odd examples of popular religion, but as scholars have shown, a preacher’s need to influence his audience increasingly determined the forms and presentations of early modern sermons. Effective preaching demanded accommodation to popular attitudes. Sermons themselves are consummately polyvalent documents; their audience could be quite diverse, and they could be experienced as given orally, as read silently or aloud, or as repeated at second- or thirdhand. Each time, they were also subject to reinterpretation and appropriation.
One of the most common means by which such religious messages were reinterpreted and made popular was through family discussion, and current scholarship continues to emphasize the role families played in the dissemination and incorporation of religious belief. In both Protestant and Catholic communities, families were a site of religious education, although official approval for this role tended to separate along confessional lines and between the clergy and laity.58 The significance of familial religious instruction remains far more contentious. For example, while some scholars have stressed how the father’s role in Lutheran religious instruction reinforced patriarchal ideals, others have questioned the extent of paternal religious instruction in the broader Lutheran community.59
Violence and Toleration
While the confessionalization paradigm has led to the analyses of social discipline and education as described above, it has also driven current discussions of religious violence. Such research tends to focus on the experience of persecution rather than the integration of violence and piety, which was also an aspect of early modern religious experience. Using anthropological and psychoanalytical theories, during the last several decades, scholars have proposed intriguing perspectives about the links between violence and popular religion that rely on a dialog between the prosecutor and the prosecuted.60
Not surprisingly for a Europe often defined by confessional difference, the prosecution of religious dissent has received considerable attention from historians. Historians of Catholicism, however, have particularly stressed the links between institutions and rituals of enforcement and popular dissent. Although excommunication was one tool for removing threats to the religious body, the subjects that have received the most thorough recent treatments and revisions are the Venetian and Spanish Inquisitions. With the opening of both the Roman and Spanish Inquisitorial archives, a new generation of scholarship on both the institutions and popular religion has emerged.61 Rather than presenting the Inquisition as an authoritarian monolith, these works emphasize the diversity of early modern inquisitions and their need to respond to local circumstances and, at times, bow before local piety. In addition, some works stress the agency of the accused and their defenders: the ways the accused manipulated the inquisitorial environment and the unusual spirituality and piety individuals could construct from their daily exchange with official theology, lived experience, and personal interpretation.62
Such work on doctrinal enforcement and unofficial reconstructions complements recent studies done on religious minorities in late medieval and early modern Europe. The older concept of Radical Reform ties such groups innately to Protestant Reformed movements, but as recent scholarship has shown, such connections are misleading.63 While some dissenting groups in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have clear ties to Reforming movements, others derived the bulk of their ideas and practices from later medieval communities. Europe’s non-Christian minorities have also received increased treatment but in scholarship that frequently sees them through Christian eyes—asking, for example, what Christians thought of Jews—or that treats them as separate entities.64 Recent scholarship on late medieval and early modern Spain has, in particular, been forced to grapple with the problems of popular religion about and within minority Muslim and Jewish communities and has offered intriguing insights about the effects of diversity on popular religious expression and ideologies.65
Research on popular religion and religious minorities, Christian or non-Christian, must often grapple with the motivations for and consequences of religious violence. Violence against heretics—that is, religious opponents—burst forth frequently in early modern Europe and could assume terrifying proportions. Not only were political and social revolts tied to popular religious beliefs, such as in the Pilgrimage of Grace and the German Peasants’ War,66 but more confined examples of religious violence and pillage could achieve recognition throughout Europe—as occurred with the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the Sack of Rome.67 Scholars of popular religion have approached these topics in diverse ways. Some have concentrated on the degree to which ideas found elsewhere reappeared in widely circulated religious manifestos and the ways in which exchange between opposing camps refined and eventually revised official doctrines and practices. Others have examined the social composition of rioters to ascertain any common cultural experiences. Still others have analyzed the symbolic meaning of ritual violence. The most influential example of the latter remains Natalie Zemon Davis’s distinction between popular Protestant and Catholic religious violence.68
As the work of Davis and those responding to her suggests, iconoclasm was a powerful manifestation of popular religious violence in early modern Europe.69 Later medieval Catholicism viewed objects as appropriate means to guide pious reflection; early modern Protestants regarded them as misdirecting the reverence due to God alone. Recent work has stressed both the symbolic elements in iconoclasm and the practical problems communities faced when removing images. Given that families donated objects and that family sites, such as burial chapels, were covered with images in spaces that bridge any distinction modern scholars might make between the public and the private, complicated questions of ownership and patronage arose when images disappeared or were destroyed. By stressing the ritual nature of image “desecration,” scholars have also pointed out the enduring nature of the symbolic systems that supported the use of images in devotions.
A more recent counterpoint to the research on religious violence has been work done on religious toleration and accommodation.70 Responding to the vast scholarship on confessionalization, this work suggests that the oppositions within confessionalization theories are overstated.71 Entirely practical reasons could govern moves towards religious toleration: a village might only have one church, professional or familial ties might be more significant than religious ones, or lords might be willing to deal with dissenters who could be made to pay disproportionate taxes. More spiritual emphases could also lead to accommodation, such as a sense that a peaceful example might be a more effective proselytizing tool than extermination.72 This work rarely suggests that popular spirituality disdained organized religion or fell into a more politique or “enlightened” idea of religion; rather, it argues that diverse communities had diverse priorities. The work on toleration and accommodation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries even complements recent studies by scholars of the eighteenth century that challenge the extent of Enlightenment secularization.
Current research in popular religion is remarkably rich and diverse, and, as such, the answer to the question of where do we go from here might seem like an exercise in academic cheerleading: keep doing what you’re doing! Certainly many of the topics discussed above have not been fully explored. There are, however, both thematic and methodological issues in the study of popular religion that especially need to be resolved. Thematically, academic studies in popular religion are only now coming to terms with subjects traditionally classified as folkloric: legends, magical practices, and supernatural beings such as werewolves, vampires, and dwarves. Individual experience of religion through senses and symbols, as advocated by the late R. W. Scribner, and the further examination of popular practices and beliefs among non-Christian and marginalized groups would also add to a greater appreciation of the diversity of early modern religious experience. Methodologically, microhistorical and local studies are still extremely valuable, but leading scholars in the field need to grapple with syntheses, if only to point out gaps in our current research. Much analysis also remains tied to, and constrained by, modern organizational boundaries—what does a particular archive tell us?—and national historiographies, which little reflect the realities of early modern experience. And, in what is perhaps the most contentious statement in this entire essay, scholars must move beyond the debates over the reality and contextualization of early modern religious experience. Of course, early modern people believed in the reality of their experience, and of course scholars need to contextualize their beliefs and experiences. The techniques applied in contextualization can, however, vary and still be legitimate. An acceptance of methodological diversity is perhaps one of the greatest contributions recent historiographical debates have given the study of popular religion in early modern Europe. The continuation of this diversity will only enhance our understanding of and appreciation for this topic.
Bibliography
ELECTRONIC RESOURCES
While there are many websites devoted to leading authors and national histories, few concentrate specifically on popular culture. The sites listed below are quite broad, but they also contain rich sources for the study of popular religion in Reformation Europe.
Bodleian Library Broadside Ballads: http://www.bodley.ox.ac.uk/ballads/.
Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliothek, Universitäts- und Staatbibliothek: http://www.ub.uni-koeln.de/digital/elzss/index_ger.html.
Historische Flugschriften (most are seventeenth century): http://digbib.bibliothek.uni-augsburg.de/dda/flugschriften_0001.html.
Libros antiguos hasta 1830, Biblioteca Nacional Madrid: http://www.bne.es/esp/digi/FORESBIMA.HTML.
Records of an English Village (1375–1854), Earls Colne: http://linux02.lib.cam.ac.uk/earlscolne/contents.htm.
Reformationsgeschichtliche Handschriften: http://luther.hki.uni-koeln.de/luther/pages/sucheHandschriften.html.
Réseau des Bibliothèques des Universités de Toulouse: http://www.biu-toulouse.fr/num150/accueil.htm.
Sagen (collection of European folkstories, especially Austrian): http://www.sagen.at/.
Virtuelles Archiv mitteleuropäischers Klöster und Bistumer: http://www.monasterium.net/at/.
Wolfenbütteler Digitale Bibliothek: http://www.hab.de/bibliothek/wdb/index.htm.
PRINTED SOURCES (primarily works in English or translated into English)
Ariès, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Translated by Helen Weaver. New York: Knopf, 1981.
Barber, Paul. Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988.
Baroja, Julio Caro. Las formas complejas de la vida religiosa: Religión, sociedad y carácter en la España de los siglos XVI y XVII. Madrid: Akal, 1978.
Bell, Dean. Jewish Identity in Early Modern Germany: Memory, Power, and Community. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007.
Benedict, Philip, and Virginia Reinberg. “Religion and the Sacred.” In Renaissance and Reformation France, 1500–1648, edited by Mack P. Holt. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
Black, Christopher. Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
——, and Pamela Gravestock, eds. Early Modern Confraternities in Europe and the Americas: International and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005.
Bornstein, Daniel, and Roberto Rusconi. Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Bossy, John. Christianity in the West. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.
Burke, Peter. Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987.
Bynum, Caroline. Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007.
Caciola, Nancy. Discerning Spirits: Divine and Demonic Possession in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003.
Cameron, Euan. The Reformation of the Heretics: The Waldenses of the Alps, 1480–1580. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
Camporesi, Piero. The Fear of Hell: Images of Damnation and Salvation in Early Modern Europe. Translated by Lucinda Byatt. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991.
Charlton, Kenneth. Women, Religion, and Education in Early Modern England. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Châtellier, Louis. The Religion of the Poor: Rural Missions in Europe and the Formation of Modern Catholicism, c. 1500-c.1800. Translated by Brian Pearce. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Christian, William A. Apparitions in Late Medieval and Renaissance Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
——. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Comerford, Kathleen M., and Hilmar M Pabel, eds. Early Modern Catholicism: Essays in Honour of John W. O’Malley, S.J. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
Conelli, Maria Ann. “A Typical Patron of Extraordinary Means: Isabella Feltria della Rovere and the Society of Jesus.” Renaissance Studies 18, no. 3 (2004): 412–36.
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