Chapter Fifteen
The People’s Religion

MEDIEVAL TIMES HAVE FREQUENTLY BEEN described as the “Age of Faith”¹ or the “Age of Belief ”² because in this era “everyone believed what religious authority told them to believe.”³ In his bestseller A World Lit Only by Fire, the distinguished William Manchester (1922–2004) proclaimed that “there was no room in the medieval mind for doubt; the possibility of skepticism simply did not exist.”⁴

It would be hard to discover a more glaring instance of historical bias and ignorance. As will be seen, the masses of medieval Europeans not only were remarkably skeptical, but very lacking in all aspects of Christian commitment—often militantly so! To attempt to explain why medieval Christianity had made so little headway among the peasants and lower classes, this chapter examines the local clergy, finding them almost universally ignorant, often lazy, and frequently dissolute. The discussion then turns to how the church long neglected the rural population in an era when nearly everyone was a peasant, and how both the Catholic and Protestant hierarchies, in contrast with the early church, failed to offer the general public an appealing model of Christian life. Finally, the chapter examines the actual religion pursued by most people in the Middle Ages and how it was misinterpreted by Christian theologians—with tragic results.

Popular Christian Commitment

THERE ARE VERY FEW statistics on religious life in medieval times, but there are a surprising number of trustworthy reports from many times and places, and they are in amazing agreement that the great majority of ordinary people seldom if ever went to church. As Michael Walzer put it, “Medieval society was largely composed of nonparticipants [in the churches].”⁵

Alexander Murray’s assessment of medieval Italian religious life is confirmed again and again: “Substantial sections of thirteenth-century society hardly attended church at all.”⁶ The Dominican prior Humbert of Romans (1200–1277) admitted that people in Italy “rarely go to church.”⁷ When the Blessed Giordano of Rivalto (1260–1311) arrived in Florence to preach, he suggested to a local woman that she take her daughter to church at least on feast days, only to be informed: “It is not the custom.”⁸ In about 1430, St. Antonio noted that Tuscan peasants seldom attended mass, and that “very many of them do not confess once a year, and far fewer are those who take communion.”⁹ St. Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) also reported that even the few parishioners who came to mass, usually were late and hastened out at the elevation of the Host, “as though they had seen not Christ, but the Devil.”¹⁰

Meanwhile, in England the anonymous authors of Dives and Pauper (ca. 1410) complained that “the people these days... are loath to hear God’s Service. [And when they are forced to attend] they come late and leave early.”¹¹ According to G. G. Coulton (1858–1947), medieval church attendance was “still more irregular in Wales, Scotland, and Ireland than in England.”¹²

Extraordinary reports on the lack of popular religious participation are available for Lutheran Germany based on the regular visitations by higher church officials to local communities, beginning in 1525. These have been extracted by the distinguished American historian Gerald Strauss who noted, “I have selected only such instances as could be multiplied a hundredfold.”¹³ It is true that these German reports postdate the medieval era, but there is nothing whatever to suggest that they reveal a decline from earlier times—the factors responsible for low levels of popular support and participation had remained constant.

Strauss offered several of these reports of low attendance. In Saxony (1574): “You’ll find more of them out fishing than at service.... Those who do come walk out as soon as the pastor begins his sermon.”¹⁴ In Seegrehna (1577): “A pastor testified that he often quits his church without preaching... because not a soul has turned up to hear him.”¹⁵ In Barum (1572): “It is the greatest and most widespread complaint of all pastors hereabouts that people do not go to church on Sundays.... Nothing helps; they will not come... so that pastors face near-empty churches.”¹⁶ In Braunschweig-Grubenhagen (1580s): “many churches are empty on Sundays.”¹⁷ In Weilburg (1604): “Absenteeism from church on Sundays was so widespread that the synod debated whether the city gates should be barred on Sunday mornings to lock everyone inside. Evidence from elsewhere suggests that this expedient would not have helped.”¹⁸

Nevertheless, it is not clear that having a large turnout at Sunday services would have been desirable. That’s because when people did come to church so many of them misbehaved! The eminent historian Keith Thomas combed the reports of English church courts and clerical diaries finding not only constant complaints that so few came to church, but that “the conduct of many church-goers left so much to be desired as to turn the service into a travesty of what was intended.... Members of the congregation jostled for pews, nudged their neighbors, hawked and spat, knitted, made course remarks, told jokes, fell asleep, and even left off guns.... A Cambridgeshire man was charged with indecent behaviour in church in 1598 after his ‘most loathsome farting, striking, and scoffing speeches’ had occasioned ‘the great offence of the good and the great rejoicing of the bad.’ ”¹⁹

Visitation reports from Lutheran Germany abound in similar accounts of misbehavior. In Nassau (1594): “Those who come to service are usually drunk... and sleep through the whole sermon, except sometimes they fall off the benches, making a great clatter, or women drop their babies on the floor.”²⁰ In Wiesbaden (1619): “[during church] there is such snoring that I could not believe my ears when I heard it. The moment these people sit down, they put their heads on their arms and straight away they go to sleep.”²¹ In addition, many bring their dogs inside the church, “barking and snarling so loudly that no one can hear the preacher.”²² In Hamburg (1581): people make “indecent gestures at members of the congregation who wish to join in singing the hymns, even bringing dogs to church so that due to the loud barking the service is disturbed.”²³ In Leipzig (1579–1580): “they play cards while the pastor preaches, and often mock or mimic him cruelly to his face;... cursing and blaspheming, hooliganism, and fighting are common.... [T]hey enter church when the service is half over, go at once to sleep, and run out again before the blessing is given.... [N]obody joins in singing the hymn; it made my heart ache to hear the pastor and the sexton singing all by themselves.”²⁴

In addition, the locals often misused the church itself. In 1367, John Thoresby, the archbishop of York, fulminated against holding markets in churches, especially on Sunday. Indeed, between “1229 and 1367 there are eleven such episcopal injunctions recorded.... Bishop after bishop thundered in vain... against those who ‘turned the house of prayer into a den of thieves.’ ”²⁵ The same thing occurred again and again across the continent, as higher church officials complained against using churches, even cathedrals, for storing crops, sheltering livestock, and for indoor market days.²⁶

Given their attitudes and their lack of church attendance, it is hardly surprising that most medieval Europeans were completely ignorant of the most basic Christian teachings.²⁷ Interviews in Spain during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries with persons so pious that they reported having had a religious vision (usually of Mary) revealed that most were ignorant of the Ten Commandments and the Seven Deadly Sins. It was not merely that they could not recite them, but that they were entirely ignorant of their contents—some even failing to identify murder as a sin.²⁸

In Saxony (1577 and 1589): “In some villages one could not find a single person who knew the Ten Commandments.”²⁹ In Brandenburg (1583) “A random group of men was... asked how they understood each of the Ten Commandments, but we found many who could give no answer at all.... [N]one of them thought it a sin to get dead drunk and curse using the name of God.”³⁰ In Notenstein (1570): parishioners “including church elders, could remember none of the Ten Commandments.”³¹ In Salzliebenhalle (1590): no one knows “who their redeemer and savior is.”³² In Nuremberg (1626): many could not name Good Friday as the day of the year when Jesus died.³³ And from Catholic Salzburg (1607): according to the bishop, “the common man cannot even say the Lord’s Prayer or the Ave Maria with the right words and does not know the Apostles’ Creed, to say nothing of the Ten Commandments.”³⁴ And the pastor at Graim (1535) summed up: “Since they never go to church, most of them cannot even say their prayers.”³⁵

As for the English, the fourteenth-century preacher John Bromyard asked a shepherd if he knew who were the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. He replied, “The father and son I know well for I tend their sheep, but I know not that third fellow; there is none of that name in our village.”³⁶ In 1606 Nicholas Bownd remarked that the stories in the Bible are “as strange to them [the public] as any news that you can tell them.”³⁷ Indeed, one English bishop lamented that not only did the people know nothing from the scriptures, but “they know not that there are any Scriptures.”³⁸

Perhaps not surprisingly, the lifestyles of ordinary people in this era seem exceedingly dissolute even by modern standards. The sources abound in charges of general misconduct, agreeing with the Margrave of Brandenburg, who in 1591 noted widespread “blaspheming, sorcery, adultery and whoring, excessive drinking and other vices, all practiced openly [by] the common man.”³⁹ This is entirely consistent with Pieter Breughel’s (1525–1569) paintings of Dutch peasant life, especially The Wedding Dance (1566), which shows that all the men dancing in the foreground have full erections pushing out their tights (albeit these protrusions are removed in the reproductions shown in most college textbooks). Breughel’s depiction of peasants was not unusual. In Dutch painting at this time “peasants are invariably associated... with base impulses,”⁴⁰ and are depicted as drunken, lustful, and obscene. Given that several generations of a family often lived crowded together in one small room with absolutely no privacy, it is little wonder that their lifestyle was crude and their sensibilities rather gross.

Defective Clergy

NOT ONLY WAS THE medieval public lacking in Christian commitment; the same was true of the rank-and-file clergy. In fact, given how ignorant the clergy were, it is no surprise that their parishioners knew so little.

In 730 the Venerable Bede advised the future bishop Egbert that because so few English priests and monks knew any Latin, “I have frequently offered translations of both the [Apostles’] Creed and the Lord’s Prayer into English.”⁴¹ In 1222 the Council of Oxford described the parish clergy as “dumb dogs,”⁴² and Archbishop Pecham wrote in 1287: “The ignorance of the priests casteth the people into a ditch.”⁴³ Subsequently, William Tyndale reported in 1530 that hardly any of the priests and curates in England knew the Lord’s Prayer. When the bishop of Gloucester systematically tested his diocesan clergy in 1551, of 311 pastors, 171 could not repeat the Ten Commandments, and 27 did not know the author of the Lord’s Prayer.⁴⁴ The next year, Bishop Hooper found “scores of parish clergy who could not tell who was the author of the Lord’s Prayer, or where it was to be found.”⁴⁵ At this same time, it was reported that in Wales “there were thousands of people who knew nothing of Christ—‘yea almost that never heard of him.’ ”⁴⁶

Matters were no better in Italy. In 1417, Bishop Niccolò Albergati of Bologna visited his diocese and discovered many priests who were “unable to identify the seven deadly sins.”⁴⁷ St. Bernardino of Siena (1380–1444) observed a priest who “knew only the Hail Mary, and used it even at the elevation during mass.”⁴⁸ In France, St. Vincent de Paul discovered in 1617 that his local priest knew no Latin, not even the words of absolution, and simply mumbled nonsense syllables.⁴⁹ So too the Lutheran clergy. In Bockenem (1568): “not one of the fourteen pastors examined could name the [books] of the New Testament.”⁵⁰ In Kalenberg (1584): a pastor was asked, “Which person of the Trinity assumed human form?” and answered, “The Father.”⁵¹ Keep in mind that there were “virtually no seminaries,” and that most priests picked up what little they knew as an apprentice to “a priest who had himself little or no training.”⁵²

Not only did the clergy resemble the laity in terms of ignorance; they also often led similarly dissolute lives as was noted in the preceding chapter. As Eamon Duffy reported: “Concubinage was widespread: impecunious clergy with a houseful of children, presiding over a half- coherent liturgy on Sundays... were common all over Europe.”⁵³ Nor was dissolute living concentrated in the lower clergy. As is documented in chapter 17, there were many notorious popes, including Alexander VI (served 1492–1503), a member of the Borgia family, who flaunted his many mistresses, fathered nine illegitimate children by three women, and is widely believed to have poisoned a number of cardinals in order to seize their property.⁵⁴ As for Rome itself, in 1490 more than 15 percent of its resident adult females were registered prostitutes, and the Venetian ambassador described it as the “sewer of the world.”⁵⁵

However, “it is a mistake to suppose that the corruption of the clergy was worse in Rome than elsewhere,” according to Roman Catholic historian Ludwig Pastor (1854–1928). Pastor continued: “there is documentary evidence of the immorality of the priests in almost every town in the Italian peninsula.”⁵⁶ Duffy reported an abbot in southern Italy who had a concubine and five children, who told his bishop he could not end the affair because “he was fond of the children, and his physician had prescribed sexual intercourse for his gallstones!”⁵⁷ Humbert of Romans reported that many clergy “spent so much of their time in gaming, pleasure and ‘worse things,’ [that they] scarcely come to church.”⁵⁸ As for Spain, consider that an examination of priests in the archdiocese of Braga found that an astounding seventeen hundred were the sons of priests!⁵⁹ Early in the sixteenth century, Erasmus charged that “many convents of men and women differ little from public brothels.”⁶⁰ In fact, after visiting the monasteries and convents in Tuscany, the pope’s representative Ambrogio Traversari (1386–1436) reported that one convent was openly a brothel.⁶¹ Meanwhile, in England, visitations from as early as the fourteenth century regularly reported local priests keeping mistresses (some of them more than one)⁶² while clerical drunkenness and absenteeism were widespread.⁶³

Rural Neglect

IF MOST MEDIEVAL EUROPEANS did not attend church, a primary reason was that for many centuries only the nobility and those living in towns and cities had a local church to attend! Most churches in rural areas were not located in peasant villages, but were private chapels, each maintained by a local nobleman for his family and retainers, being only about the size of “a moderately large living room in a modern house.”⁶⁴ Until the thirteenth century and later, most peasants could have contact with the church only by travelling a considerable distance for baptism or marriage, and by occasional visits by an itinerant friar. This was consistent with the antirural outlook of the early Christian movement which, in turn, reflected the urban snobbery of Rome—the term pagan comes from the Latin word for rustic or rural-dweller ( paganus ). As Richard Fletcher explained: “The peasantry of the countryside were beyond the pale”; hence urban Christians made little or no effort to evangelize them. Rather, for early Christians “the countryside did not exist as a zone for missionary enterprise. After all, there was nothing in the New Testament about spreading the Word to the beasts of the field.”⁶⁵

Even when rural parishes did begin to appear, they suffered from neglect and most of them probably lacked a pastor, even an ignorant one, most of the time. Eamon Duffy has estimated that during the sixteenth century, for example, as many as 80 percent of the churches in the diocese of Geneva had no clergy. To make matters worse, even when there was an assigned pastor, “absenteeism was rife.”⁶⁶ Thus the bishop’s visitation of 1520 found that of 192 parishes in Oxfordshire, 58 pastors were not in residence.⁶⁷ The same was often reported in Italy—absent clergy, many villages with “no services at all.”⁶⁸

How then could the peasants be expected to possess any Christian culture? Where should they have learned the Lord’s Prayer or who preached it, especially since even if they had a local priest, he probably didn’t know either? What seems most remarkable is that the rural populace even knew who Jesus was, at least to the extent that he was one of the divine beings who could be called upon for blessings.

Eventually, of course, subsequent to the Reformation, Protestants in northern Europe and Counter-Reformation Catholics in the south (and Anglicans in Britain) initiated vigorous campaigns to educate and activate the peasant masses and the rapidly expanding urban under-classes. Thus, Martin Luther had optimistically launched massive programs to inform and energize the Lutheran parishes in Germany. But before he died, he recognized that these efforts had failed, as demonstrated by the reports from Lutheran visitations mentioned earlier in this chapter.

Inappropriate Expectations

THE PRIMARY REASONS THAT even vigorous efforts failed to reach the peasantry and urban lower classes was the failure by both Protestant and Catholic clerics to propose a Christian lifestyle that was appropriate and attractive to ordinary people,⁶⁹ and their failure to present Christian doctrines in simple, direct language rather than as complex theology.

Even though many clergy were dissolute, the medieval church presented only one model of the proper Christian life, and that was the ascetic lifestyle followed by devout monks and nuns. There was no acknowledgement by the church that this was not an appropriate model for the laity; instead they were merely “exhorted to imitate clerical piety.”⁷⁰ Hence, although the church fathers certainly knew that celibacy was not to be expected of the laity, they continued to present it as the ideal and to teach that sexual intercourse was always sinful even within marriage,⁷¹ never mentioning Paul’s admonition to couples that they should “not refuse one another” (1 Cor. 7:5). In similar fashion, monastic commitments to fasting, to extensive prayer sessions, and even to poverty were prominent in the model of Christian life proposed by the church. But asceticism only appeals to those for whom it is a choice. Fasting has little appeal to those for whom hunger is an actual threat; hours of prayer presuppose having considerable leisure; and poor people never chose to increase their poverty. Hence, most medieval Europeans disdained the moral expectations of the church, thereby remaining alienated from sincere Christian commitment.

In contrast, early Christianity was attractive to the laity because it offered a model of Christian virtue that improved their quality of life by urging attractive family norms, a tangible love of neighbors, and feasible levels of sacrifice, along with a clear message of salvation. When these aspects of the early Christian faith were preached in medieval times, as they often were by various reform and dissident movements, they continued to appeal—at least to some people. Thus we encounter the most significant aspect of medieval Christianity, both heretical and conventional; its appeal was primarily to people of at least some privilege, to the burghers of the towns and cities as well as to the nobility. As Keith Thomas noted: “Preaching was popular with the educated classes, but aroused the irritation of the others.”⁷² Even so, most peasants seldom had contact with any form of Christianity, and what little contact they did have was with a Christianity that urged an unsuitably otherworldly lifestyle and the prompt payment of tithes.

As for the ignorance of the laity, it must be recognized that until the Reformation, church services (with the exception, sometimes, of brief homilies) were in Latin, a language that almost no one in the pews and many in the pulpit could understand. Not surprisingly, mass attendance was neither edifying nor educational. Thus, it was widely anticipated that Protestant preaching in the local vernaculars would end these centuries of ignorance. Not so! Why? Because when a well-trained clergy did emerge at this time, they so “often pitched their discourse far above the capacity of most of their listeners.”⁷³

The English philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) noted that a preacher “may as well talk Arabic to a poor day-labourer as the notions”⁷⁴ that the Anglican clergy preferred as the basis for their sermons. By the same token, Martin Luther’s efforts to provide religious education for the German peasants and urban lower classes failed so completely because the lessons were conceived by a university professor primarily far more concerned with intricate theological nuances than with basic themes. The heart of Lutheran religious education was Luther’s Catechism, which provides a very lengthy explication of basic Christian doctrines such as the Ten Commandments and the Lord’s Prayer. Thus, it devotes many pages of convoluted text to interpreting each of the commandments. The local Lutheran clergy were supposed to preach from the Catechism every Sunday afternoon and hold classes for young people during the week. In most villages these sessions were never or rarely held because no one came.

Luther’s error was not unique. All across Europe, the established churches failed to convert and arouse the “masses,” by failing to recognize that it was a job for preachers, not professors. But the clergy seemed unable to grasp the point that sophisticated sermons on the mysteries of the Trinity neither informed nor converted. Thus the Oxford theologian William Pemble (1591–1623) reported on a man of sixty who had faithfully attended church twice on every Sunday and often on other days of the week, thus hearing as many as three thousand sermons in his lifetime, who when questioned on his deathbed as to “what he thought of God, he answers that he was a good old man; and what of Christ, that he was a towardly young youth; and of his soul, that it was a great bone in his body; and what should become of his soul after he was dead, that if he had done well he should be put into a pleasant green meadow.”⁷⁵

As James Obelkevich explained, “what parishioners understood as Christianity was never preached from a pulpit or taught in Sunday school, and what they took from the clergy they took on their own terms.... Since the clergy were incapable of shaping a more popular version of the faith, villagers were left to do so themselves.”⁷⁶

The People’s Religion

DESPITE THEIR IGNORANCE OF Christianity and their alienation from the local clergy, Europe’s peasants and lower classes had a fulsome supply of religion of which they made constant use. As Gerald Strauss put it, they “practiced their own brand of religion, which was a rich compound of ancient rituals, time-bound customs, a sort of unreconstructable folk Catholicism, and a large portion of magic to help them in their daily struggle for survival.”⁷⁷ Notice that Strauss did not include a list of popular divinities, neither pagan nor Christian. Although the people’s religion did often call upon God, Jesus, Mary, and various saints, as well as upon some pagan gods and goddesses (and even more frequently invoked minor spirits such as fairies, elves, and demons), it did so only to invoke their aid, having little interest in matters such as the meaning of life or the basis for salvation. Instead, the emphasis was on pressing, tangible, and mundane matters such as health, fertility, weather, sex, and good crops. Consequently, the centerpiece of the people’s religion was, as it had always been, magic.

Magic and Misfortune

The word magic initially identified the arts and powers of the magi,⁷⁸ the Zoroastrian priests of Persia who were discussed in chapter 1. The magi were especially admired in the classical world for their command of astrology, but also for their repertoire of spells and occult ceremonies that claimed to enlist or compel supernatural forces to provide some desired outcome, that becoming the general definition of magic. The purpose of magic is the same as that of technology and science: to allow humans to control nature and events in a reality permeated with misfortune.

Like everyone else, medieval peasants felt most threatened by ill health, and hence medical magic was paramount. Indeed, the Roman scholar Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE ), claimed that magic “first arose from medicine.”⁷⁹ In medieval times, medical magic coexisted with nonmagical remedies and treatments, and practitioners seldom distinguished between the two. Thus, the application of an herb thought to have medicinal properties was almost always accompanied by attempts to cast various spells and often by charms or amulets. The same was true of other “healing” efforts such as inserting a charm when binding up wounds, and “amulets of various kinds were used to aid in childbirth”⁸⁰ by experienced midwives. Thus the success of a treatment confirmed both the magical and the nonmagical efforts. A particularly vital aspect of early medical magic was the widely held belief that evil supernatural forces such as demons were the cause of most medical problems and that a cure was to be obtained by driving them away, which generated an extensive catalogue of appeals and threats used to expel demons, many of them of pre-Christian origin. As will be seen, eventually this led to the witch hunts since in every hamlet and village there were “Wise Ones” whose treatments for illness and injury included the invocation of supernatural agencies.

Second most important was weather magic used to quiet storms and bring rain for the crops. As would be expected, there were many specialists offering weather magic, but few details have survived compared with those who specialized in bringing bad weather, especially hail and drought to destroy a neighbor’s crops.

Love and sex magic probably was the third most common form of magic, with revenge magic close behind. Love magic took many forms. Often it was used to cause a particular person to fall in love with the individual who purchased or performed the magic in order to gain a spouse. Often too, it was used for purposes of seduction. Sex magic was mainly the erectile dysfunction treatment of the times, purchased by men suffering from impotence, or by their wives. Not surprisingly there also was an extensive store of magic meant to cause impotence or to suppress sexual desires. Indeed, St. Hildegard of Bingen wrote extensive instructions about how to use mandrake root to suppress sexuality—oddly enough mandrake was far more often used to cause sexual desire and fertility, as in Genesis 30:14–16.

Revenge magic was widely known as maleficia or “evil doings” and consisted of attempts to harm others directly by causing death or injury, or indirectly by damaging crops or livestock. Archeology has turned up many magical curses scratched on lead tablets, one of which reads: “I curse Tretia Maria and her life and mind and memory and liver and lungs mixed up together, and her words, thoughts, and memory.” Seven nails had been pounded through the sheet of lead on which this curse was written.⁸¹ Lawsuits brought against malefactors often presented evidence that “magical amulets” had been discovered under the plaintiffs’ thresholds or even under their beds, placed there by the accused in order to do them harm.⁸² There also are many recorded cases, especially in medieval Switzerland, of lawsuits filed against persons accused of causing storms to destroy their neighbor’s crops.

Sometimes magic was used in pursuit of wealth, including a variety of efforts to turn base metals into gold. And, of course, there were various magical efforts to read the future, not only via astrology, but also through study of various arcane texts such as the kabbalah. However none of these kinds of magical activities involved the general population. Finally, there were all manner of minor magical techniques used by everyone to bring them good luck.

Church Magic

The Christian hierarchy objected to popular magic not because it was superstitious nonsense (in fact they believed it worked), but because it was rooted in paganism and competed with the church for support. Hence massive efforts were made not merely to suppress it, but to replace it.⁸³ As would be expected, the greatest emphasis was placed on providing church forms of medical magic.

As already noted in chapter 11, from early days the church transformed the thousands of healing springs, wells, and shrines into Christian sites, often associated with a saint or martyr. The church also sanctioned and promulgated many magical procedures for the treatment of specific health problems. However, unlike the treatments offered by the village Wise Ones, medical church magic very seldom was combined with herbs or physical procedures, but usually consisted entirely of Christianized spells and incantations. For example, a recommended treatment for someone with a speck in her or his eye was for the priest to pray:

Thus I adjure you, O speck, by the living God and the holy God, to disappear from the eye of the servant of God (name of victim), whether you are black, red, or white. May Christ make you go away. Amen. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.⁸⁴

When a woman suffered from menstrual problems, the cure was to write these words on a slip of paper, “By Him, and with Him, and in Him,” and then to place the slip of paper on the woman’s forehead.⁸⁵

The church also provided a great deal of weather magic. Weather crosses, blessed by a local priest, were erected in fields as far back as the sixth century, to protect against hail and high winds,⁸⁶ and church bells often were rung to drive away thunderstorms.⁸⁷ And, of course, it was common to have a local priest pray for rain, as needed.

Although the church made vigorous efforts to provide medical and weather magic, it entirely rejected both love and revenge magic. The former was resoundingly condemned as bordering on rape when used to charm women and as violating the individual free will of both men and women. Of course, condemnation did not eliminate it. In fact, given the intensity of market demand, Christian variants of love magic arose—albeit they were forbidden—and even Christian clergy sometimes were involved in their use. For example, a priest in Modena confessed in 1585 that he had acceded to the request of a local noblewoman to baptize a piece of magnet thus giving it the power to attract her husband away from promiscuous women.⁸⁸ Revenge magic also was condemned as unchristian as well as antisocial, giving an uncontested market to those laypersons willing to deal in maleficia. An additional advantage enjoyed by lay magical practitioners was proximity—at a time when many places lacked a priest, there were Wise Ones in every village and hamlet, since they were local people, very often midwives, on whom their neighbors depended for medical as well as magical services.

Not surprisingly, popular magic soon was infused with elements of church magic. Many spells and formulations made use of holy water taken from church fonts. “People said the Lord’s Prayer while casting lead to tell fortunes. They... invoked the names of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost to protect chickens from hawks and humans from the evil eye.... Village healers cured cattle of worms by spitting three times in appeal to the Trinity.... They concocted infusions of baptismal water against bed-wetting.”⁸⁹ The mixture of church and nonchurch magic was so extensive that people even bound amulets into the swaddling clothes of infants, to ward off enchantments when they took them to be baptized.⁹⁰

Theology and Tragedy

All magic works some of the time. Many magical medical treatments and other uses of church magic often seemed successful—the desired outcome was gained. But because the nonchurch magic also succeeded (probably more often than church magic because it was usually associated with herbal and other physical treatments, some of which were effective), it could not be dislodged by church magic. That raised a dangerous question.

Christianity is a theological religion. It isn’t satisfied with mystery and meditation, but relentlessly seeks to ground its entire system of beliefs in logic and reason. This has many admirable features, including the way the Christian commitment to rationalism provided a model for the development of Western science. But when confronted with magic, this aspect of Christianity turned out to have tragic consequences. In other cultural settings magic is usually taken for granted. Thus, the ancient Romans and Greeks devoted little or no effort to explaining why magic works—as it appears to do, at least some of the time. But Christian thinkers demanded to know why magic works. A clear answer could easily be provided for why church magic worked. God, Jesus, the Holy Ghost, sometimes Mary, and various saints and angels were the active agents; when church magic failed it was because these supernatural beings had decided it should not work in a given instance. Clearly, however, these hallowed figures did not cause nonchurch magic to work. Who then? The answer seemed equally obvious: evil supernatural beings, especially Satan. From there it was a short, obvious step to deducing that thousands of Wise Ones all across Europe were involved in satanic dealings. The witch hunts were born.⁹¹

The European conception of witchcraft was entirely the product of theological reflection; there was no basis for it in the popular magical culture. As the celebrated Norman Cohn (1915–2007) reported: “Nowhere, in the surviving [medieval] books on magic, is there a hint of Satanism. Nowhere is it suggested that the magician should ally himself with the demonic hosts, or do evil to win the favour of the Prince of Evil.”⁹² As the equally celebrated Richard Kieckhefer put it: “The introduction of diabolism... [resulted] from a desire of the literate elite to make sense of [magic].”⁹³ Thus it was university professors who played the leading roles in generating and sustaining the terrible witch hunts that stormed across Europe.⁹⁴ And it was the continuing magical activities of the peasants and urban lower classes in particular that gave substance to the witch hunts.⁹⁵ Ironically, despite the nearly universal belief to the contrary, the earliest, most vigorous, and most effective opposition to the witch hunts came from the Spanish Inquisition (see chapter 19). It was the inquisitors who never lost sight of the fact that the Wise Ones were performing magic in good conscience and were not knowingly involved in pacts with the devil.

Conclusion

MEDIEVAL TIMES WERE NOT the “Age of Faith.” For the vast majority of medieval Europeans, their “religious” beliefs were a hodgepodge of pagan, Christian, and superstitious fragments; they seldom went to church; and they placed greater faith in the magic of the Wise Ones than in the services of the clergy. The frequent claims that empty churches and low levels of religious activity in Europe today reflect a steep decline in piety are wrong—it was always thus. As Martin Luther summed up in 1529, after recognizing the failure of his campaign to educate and arouse the general public: “Dear God help us.... The common man, especially in the villages, knows absolutely nothing about Christian doctrine; and indeed many pastors are in effect unfit and incompetent to teach. Yet they all are called Christians, are baptized, and enjoy the holy sacraments—even though they cannot recite either the Lord’s Prayer, the Creed or the Commandments. They live just like animals.”⁹⁶