Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 This page intentionally left blank Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 kaspar von greyerz translated by thomas dunlap 1 2008 1 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright # 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Greyerz, Kaspar von. [Religion und Kultur. English] Religion and culture in early modern Europe, 1500–1800 / Kaspar von Greyerz ; Translated by Thomas Dunlap. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN: 978-0-19-532765-6 (cloth); 978-0-19-532766-3 (pbk.) 1. Religion and culture—Europe—History. 2. Europe—Religious life and customs. I. Title. BL65.C8G7413 2007 274'.06—dc22 2007001259 987654321 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper To Maya Widmer This page intentionally left blank Preface When I wrote the foreword to the original German edition of this book in March 2000, I took the secularized social and cultural cli- mate in which Europeans live today as a reason for reminding the reader of the special effort he or she had to make in order to grasp the central role of religion in the cultures and societies of early modern Europe. There is no need to repeat this caveat in a preface to the American edition of Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe.To this day, North American society has not undergone the same thor- ough process of secularization. What will appear naturally more re- moved to American readers, however, is the specifically European context of what follows. The attempt to familiarize a largely secularized public with the dynamics of religion in early modern Europe was not, in fact, the main reason for writing this book. Above all, the purpose—and challenge— was to cover more than three hundred years of European history and religion while doing justice to the aspects of durability and change, as well as to theoretical questions posed by the history of premodern religion. I have tried to come to terms with this challenge by attrib- uting prominence to religion as a social and cultural force. This re- sulted in a conscious neglect of institutional aspects and their corollaries, which are usually covered by surveys concentrating on salient aspects of the history of early modern Europe. In this book, I do not look at early modern poor relief or at Baroque ecclesiastical ar- chitecture, to name only two examples. Likewise, I have not tried to viii preface cover all of Europe. What follows concentrates strongly on central and western Europe and excludes eastern Europe. In other words, this is not a survey. It is primarily an essay in interpretation. The conscious omissions noted above have afforded room, in turn, to connect my narrative and analysis with issues of methodological approach and of scholarly debate. In this respect, it is also a work that will familiarize the American reader with the most important Eu- ropean scholarly discussions of the last decades regarding the role and mean- ing of early modern religion as a cultural phenomenon. Although seven years have passed since the original publication of this book, I continue to stand by the interpretations it offers. Given the vastness of the subject, it was (and is) not possible to include an exhaustive bibliography. For the same reason, I will not attempt here to cover all the important publi- cations on aspects of early modern religion that have appeared since 2000. I will name only a handful, and no surveys or textbooks. Among approaches that lend more room to the institutional aspects of early modern religion than I have decided to, I want to mention Thomas Kaufmann’s concentration on Lutheran Konfessionskultur, now highlighted in his Konfession und Kultur: Lu- therischer Protestantismus in der zweiten Ha¨lfte des Reformationsjahrhunderts (Tu¨bingen, 2006), as well as Philip Benedict’s Christ’s Churches Purely Re- formed: A Social History of Calvinism (New Haven and London, 2002). Diar- maid MacCulloch’s Reformation: Europe’s House Divided, 1490–1700 (London, 2003) offers a new and lengthy interpretation of the Reformation and its aftermath on a broad European scale. Aspects of religion and violence are treated by Peter Burschel in Sterben und Unsterblichkeit: Zur Kultur des Mar- tyriums in der Fru¨hen Neuzeit (Munich, 2004) and in a collection of essays I recently edited jointly with Kim Siebenhu¨ner, Religion und Gewalt: Konflikte, Rituale, Deutungen (1500–1800) (Go¨ttingen, 2006), with German, American, and French contributions. Peter Hersche, whose work I frequently refer to in the following pages, has published a large interpretative synthesis of his re- search on European Baroque Catholicism in the two-volume study Musse und Verschwendung: Europa¨ische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter (Freiburg im Breisgau, 2006). Finally, H. C. Erik Midelfort has addressed central aspects of the ambivalence of the era of the Enlightenment in Exorcism and Enlight- enment: Johann Joseph Gassner and the Demons of Eighteenth-Century Germany (New Haven, 2005). I owe particular thanks to Kathy Brady, Tom Brady, Peter Hersche, Hei- drun Homburg, Josef Mooser, and Patrice Veit, who have helped me in one way or another to come to terms with the original German manuscript. I am very grateful to Tom Brady, Mark A. Forster, Frank Roberts, Thomas Robisheaux, and to an anonymous reader, who all encouraged me to pursue, and Oxford preface ix University Press to publish, a translation of Religion und Kultur. Thomas Dunlap has not only provided an excellent translation, but has also made contact with me whenever questions arose. I would like to thank him for both. The translation was made possible by a grant from the Freiwillige Akademische Gesellschaft, Basel. I also want to thank Cynthia Read, Daniel Gonzalez, and Sara Needles of Oxford University Press, as well as Mary Bellino, for their assistance and proficiency. This book is based on many years of research and teaching. It owes more than they are probably aware of to my assistants and students in Kiel (1988– 91), Zu¨rich (1993–97), and Basel (from 1997 onward). They have my special gratitude. It finally owes a great deal to Maya Widmer, who helps me to keep my head above water in an academic environment ever more inundated by administrative demands. Basel and Bern April 2007 This page intentionally left blank Contents Introduction, 3 PART I. Upheaval and Renewal 1. The Ripple Effects of the Reformation, 27 2. Renewal Versus Ossification, 79 PART II. The Integrated, Outcasts, and the Elect 3. Community, 113 4. Outcasts, 133 5. Separatism, 157 PART III. Fragmentation of Religiosity 6. The Privatization of Piety, 187 7. The Self-Questioning of Early Modern Religiosity?, 213 Conclusion and Outlook, 225 Notes, 227 Literature and Sources, 263 Index, 289 This page intentionally left blank Religion and Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1500–1800 This page intentionally left blank Introduction Religion and Culture: Popular Culture and Religiosity Few historians question that the late Middle Ages was an era profoundly marked by religiousness and piety. But the scholarly consensus is not so clear when it comes to the religious life of the early modern period (ca. 1500–1800). What is one to make of French Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, who subjected religion and the church to trenchant criticism, or LaMettrie and Diderot, who fully embraced atheism? What about the Italian humanists of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whom historians—beginning with Jacob Burckhardt and extending into the late twentieth century—saw as unbelievers who made a radical break with the medieval past also in their religious beliefs? Scholarship has now corrected the image of humanism in this particular respect: there is broad agreement among historians that humanism all across Europe was a phenomenon rooted in Christianity, its embrace of pre-Christian classical authorities notwithstand- ing. But can the same be said of the eighteenth-century Enlighten- ment, which was, at times, unsparingly critical of ecclesiastico- religious traditions? Any answer must begin by acknowledging that the movement was not everywhere as critical of religion and the church as it was in France. In England, Scotland, Germany, Switzer- land, Austria, and Italy, we are dealing with an essentially Christian Enlightenment. Still, the Enlightenment does represent a break in that its rationalism powerfully reinforced the trend toward the sep- aration of religion and daily life that had begun among the educated 4introduction classes in the late-seventeenth century. This is indirectly confirmed by the reaction to this trend in the form of the Protestant movement of awakening and Catholic ultramontanism at the turn of the eighteenth century. Inciden- tally, in part this reaction is also an indication that the Enlightenment ac- centuated existing disparities between different sociocultural worlds: when it comes to the different mentalities of the educated and lower social strata, the Enlightenment accelerated the potential for change in the former, while con- tributing little to a corresponding change in the latter, whose exposure to the Enlightenment was slight.