In October 1987, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told readers of a women’s magazine that ‘you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and there are families.’ Thatcher was the daughter of a Methodist lay preacher, and thus a spiritual great-granddaughter of the Reformation. Although the stark and self-reliant individualism encapsulated in her philosophy is often supposed to be a cultural off-shoot of Protestantism, her blunt aphorism would have made little sense to any 16th- or 17th-century reformer, Protestant or Catholic. From their perspective, human beings were fundamentally defined by their relationships to others, and by their place in social structures of various kinds. The Reformation was a collective enterprise geared, not just to the saving of individual souls, but to the transformation of the entire societas christianorum, the fraternity of Christians. It is a truism to observe that the titles of books and articles addressing themselves to ‘Religion and Society’ in the medieval or Reformation periods actually set up an unreal dichotomy: what we would today class as ‘religion’ was so woven into the fabric of social organization and day-to-day living that attempts to extract it risk falsifying the lived experience of our ancestors. It follows that the Reformation, in seeking to alter the language, symbols, and rituals of communal Christianity, changed relationships with neighbours and the very textures of everyday life. At the same time, those textures and relationships shaped the Reformation, which was not just something imposed on society, but itself a deeply social phenomenon.
Investment in ‘community’ was not a lifestyle choice for pre-modern people, but a necessity of existence. Agriculture (the occupation of the great majority of the population) was a fundamentally collective exercise, in which all planted and ploughed according to agreed conventions, and brought in the harvest together. If the sustaining of life was a collective business, so were the principal threats to it: harvest failure, epidemic disease, extreme weather, war. These were often seen, in a phrase still embedded in the small print of insurance policies, as ‘acts of God’. The Lord might reward or punish individuals, but his judgements might also be felt by communities as a whole. This made everybody’s behaviour everybody’s business: all would suffer if the immorality, or heresy, of a few brought down God’s wrath upon the society tolerating them. Towns, cradles of modern individualism and anomie, were in the 16th century just as communally and collectively minded as the countryside, seeing themselves as sacred communities with a responsibility for the moral wellbeing of all their inhabitants, something which may explain why the theologies of Zwingli and Martin Bucer, imbued with the spirit of civic humanism, appealed more to townspeople than those of the solitary monk, Martin Luther. Early modern people depended heavily on each other, as husbands, wives, children, masters, apprentices, neighbours, guild members, and fellow-parishioners. It would not be surprising if they hoped they might get to heaven together too.
Here again, we see the strokes of the Reformation running along, rather than cutting against, the grain of late medieval religious culture. The principal block of both religious and social organization was the parish, a local administrative unit to which all who lived within its boundaries by definition belonged. The parish church was typically ‘community centre’ as well as place of worship, the only substantial collectively owned building and the site of communal festivity. Parishioners supported their local priest through the payment of tithes, a tax of 10% on all income and agricultural produce. In return, the priest was expected to supply pastoral care, and the sacraments, from baptism to extreme unction, which were essential keys to the doorway of salvation. Ensuring a reliable quantity and quality of such services was an understandable preoccupation of village life. Already before the Reformation a number of Swiss and German communities were securing property and endowments to hire and control their own priests. In the early years of reform, leading up to and culminating in the Peasants’ War, many local communities sifted from the reformers’ messages a pledge of improved and simplified pastoral care, of greater clerical accountability, and of more secure collective salvation.
Even if expectations were to be disappointed, there were continuities to appreciate. Where Protestantism became the established faith, it retained the existing parish system, and made community cohesion, oversight, and control central features of its pastoral mission. Only in this context can we understand the passions raised by the matter of excommunication, whether issued by Catholic church courts or Genevan consistories. Excommunication was not merely a source of social disgrace (at least for more respectable members of the community), it was also an exclusion from crucial participation in community life, principally the sacrament of communion that symbolized one’s status and good standing among neighbours. Nor could excommunicates, barred from acting as godparents, play any part in the sacrament of baptism. Godparenthood, unlike its pale shadow today, was a vital social institution, providing a child with a lifelong patron, and creating bonds of spiritual kinship between families. Calvinist reformers were suspicious of the institution, suspecting a potential for superstition, but Calvin was not able to eliminate it from the Genevan baptismal ceremony any more than Puritans were able to abolish it in 17th-century England.
Perhaps the test of any community is how it treats marginal and disadvantaged members. Christ had warned that ‘the poor are with you always’, but the Reformation was a pivotal moment for redefining their relationship to the rest of the community and formulating practical solutions for their relief. Poverty as a concept, and the poor as participants in a drama of salvation, played important roles in medieval Catholic culture. Poverty was holy, the estate of the apostles, and though the poor suffered in this life, they were especially beloved of Christ and rewarded in the next. The Church had its own institutionalized poverty, in the persons of the begging or mendicant friars, whose sermons castigated the rich for lack of charity. ‘Charity’ meant, not as today, mere altruism towards the unfortunate, but a state of right social relations, which restored all the partners to God’s favour. Giving alms to the poor was a charitable deed, a good work contributing to the donor’s eventual salvation. The poor for their part had the charitable obligation to pray for their benefactors’ welfare, in this life and the next.
For Protestant reformers, giving to the poor was not a ‘good work’, there was no spiritual exchange of benefits, and no sense in which the poor particularly resembled Christ. Nonetheless, Protestant propaganda tended to castigate Catholics not for doing too much for the poor, but too little. The money spent on adorning shrines and images of saints, on lighting candles or paying priests to pray for the dead; all this could more profitably go towards the relief of the poor. The 16th century was an era of great social and economic dislocation, of population pressure on resources and rising inflation. Conventional wisdom credits the Protestant Reformation with getting serious about poverty, ceasing to romanticize it, and setting up properly prioritized schemes for the support of the ‘deserving poor’. In fact, older forms of indiscriminate and sporadic charity were starting to change in some places before the Reformation. The Catholic Spanish humanist Juan Luis Vives (1492–1540) advocated that town magistrates, rather than the Church, should assume responsibility for poor relief, consolidating private and parochial funds to sustain those unable to work, while ‘sturdy’ beggars should be banished or made to labour. Ideas of this sort, placing restrictions on begging, were put into practice in London in 1514–18, and more comprehensively in Ypres in 1531. Starting with Luther’s Wittenberg, many Protestant towns put similar schemes into effect, prohibiting begging, mandating regular collections for the establishment of a ‘common chest’ to support the poor, and sometimes establishing civic workhouses. Private donations to the poor did not cease, and the Protestant churches (particularly Calvinist ones) often retained parallel systems of charity, just as municipal systems of poor relief multiplied across the towns of Catholic Europe. But Protestantism more emphatically moved primary responsibility for the problem of poverty from the Church to the state, and understood it as part of the enforcement of public order. This did not necessarily ‘secularize’ the issue in our sense of the term. Protestant poor relief was underpinned by ‘correct’ doctrine, and was part of building a genuinely Christian community. It was also accompanied by attempts to regulate, control, and reform the moral behaviour of the poor, requiring them to demonstrate a pious demeanour as a condition of support. In areas where two confessions existed side by side, it could also become an instrument of religious discipline and confessional cohesion. Church communities gave to ‘their’ poor, and charity became exclusive, a mark of belonging.
Success in building a godly community depended on one social group above all others: the clergy. The Catholic clergy were at the sharp end of the Reformation’s attack on traditional religious practice. Reformers rejected the idea of a separate clerical caste or estate, marked off by legal privileges, ritual celibacy, and such outward status markers as a shaved or ‘tonsured’ head. Priests were no longer the special channels of God’s grace through their unique ability to perform the miracle of the mass; Luther taught that ‘we are all equally priests’ through baptism, with clergy duties being no more than a function delegated to some members of the community. In its first phases, the Reformation was intensely, virulently, anticlerical, its propaganda prints depicting friars and monks as, literally, the defecations of the devil. A man seeing a priest in a Cambridgeshire village in the 1520s, ‘took up a cow turd with his spade, and clapped it upon his crown’, saying ‘all the sort of you will ere it be long be glad to hide your shaven pates’. Some asked whether a distinct clerical profession was necessary at all, if salvation came through faith, and the vernacular Word of God in scripture. Most anticlerical of all were the anabaptists, who believed simple folk were quite capable of assimilating the messages of the bible on their own, without the intervention of bookish pastors.
It is characteristic of revolutions to have to rebuild what they have earlier torn down. Both secular and church authorities across the Lutheran and Reformed worlds soon realized that well-heeled and respected clergymen were vital instruments of religious instruction for the laity, and key agents of social discipline. The Protestant minister may not have possessed the mystique of the mass, or the charisma of the confessional, but he was expected to wield moral and religious authority in the community he served, principally in his role as preacher of the Word (Reformed pastors tended to sport full beards, like Old Testament prophets). By the early 17th century, Protestant clergy in most places were likely to be university-educated, and were acquiring the status and characteristics of a ‘profession’. There were, in fact, more similarities than they would have cared to recognize with the parish priests of the Catholic Reformation, who, as the seminary system started to bed down, were similarly more learned than their predecessors. In both cases, education may have been a mixed blessing: clergy were better able to articulate the doctrines of their respective churches, but they were apt to be ‘outsiders’ in the communities they served, more culturally distant from the day-to-day concerns of parishioners than the humble local boys who typically served as medieval parish priests. Protestant and Catholic pastors could be equally touchy about their rights and status, and anticlericalism continued to be a low-key but persistent feature of different church settings, with the potential to burn bright in times of tumult or crisis.
A key difference between Protestant and Catholic clergy, however, was their permitted relationship to sex. Trent maintained the discipline of celibacy for the priesthood, and in practice the bishops of the Catholic Reformation considerably tightened it up, though scandals were never eliminated. For Protestants, by contrast, the most palpable pointer to the priesthood of all believers was that ministers were allowed, even encouraged, to get married. Luther himself led the way here in 1525, taking as his bride – to the revulsion of Catholic Europe – an ex-nun, Katharina von Bora. It was a symbol of Protestantism’s impulse to redeem and reform, and also to control, the most basic components of human society.
Catholicism’s retention of clerical celibacy endorsed the longstanding view that, although marriage was a sacrament, and a holy ordinance of God, complete abstinence from sex was the more spiritually perfect state. Virginity had some heavy-weight role-models: St John, St Paul, Mary Mother of God, Christ himself. Medieval monks and nuns (in theory) resembled the angels in their chastity. Protestantism’s pessimistic view of mankind encouraged the perception that professed chastity, other than for an exceptional few, was bound to be hypocrisy. Sexuality – a consequence of Adam and Eve’s Fall – needed a legitimate outlet, and the only such outlet was marriage. A feature of the Lutheran Reformation in German cities was an attack on the public brothels, maintained by civic authorities as an acceptable channel for the sexual energies of unruly youth, and even tacitly accepted by pre-Reformation clerics as a necessary evil, a sewer maintaining the moral hygiene of wider society. But for reformers, the only acceptable sexual acts were procreative ones between husband and wife. ‘Sodomy’ remained a heinous moral offence, as well as a capital crime, in both Protestant and Catholic societies throughout the Reformation period.
Although removing its sacramental status, reformers raised the status of marriage by eliminating the competition: monastic life no longer existed as a spiritually superior alternative. Married life and Christian life were now effectively the same thing for adults. As the most fundamental religious and social institution of society, marriage required close regulation. Medieval canon law and sacramental theology held that a marriage was a contract (requiring free consent) between two partners, who were themselves the ministers of the sacrament. The public declaration of marriage banns, a blessing in church, the participation of a priest, and the consent of parents were all desirable, but not essential to a marriage’s validity. Among wealthy families, the phenomenon of youthful elopement – ‘clandestine marriage’ – was a persistent source of grievance. The Reformation moved to police marriage more closely as a component of an ordered society. In both Lutheran and Reformed territories, parents were given the right of veto over children’s marriages, and the blessing of a minister became mandatory. Similar social concerns motivated the Fathers of Trent, who in 1563 declared a church ceremony and the presence of witnesses (though not necessarily the consent of parents) to be necessary components of a valid marriage. For Catholics, the sacramental status of marriage made (and still makes) it an indissoluble lifelong bond. But for Protestants, the dissolution of marriages became imaginable. Luther thought it permissible in cases of adultery, impotence, or refusal of conjugal rights; Zwingli added abandonment to the list. With the demise of the old episcopal courts, new marriage courts regulated divorce, which in practice was extremely rare in Protestant Europe. Reformed England kept its medieval church courts, but by a quirk of history never introduced divorce legislation, and up until the mid-19th century, private acts of parliament were the only means to secure a full divorce.
The family was the Protestant social institution par excellence, the building-block of the Christian community, and at the same time a portrait in miniature of how that society was to be structured. In Calvin’s view, the household resembled a private church, in which father played the role of minister, disciplining and instructing the domestic congregation of wife, children, and servants.
The Reformation was an era when fathers ruled. Its basic presumptions about family and domestic life are aptly described as patriarchal. The implications of this for the experience of childhood were probably mixed. Children were regarded, like the rest of humanity, as intrinsically bad, rather than naturally innocent. They were to be ruled by the rod, restrained and restricted, and indoctrinated (in a morally neutral sense of that term) with the messages of the catechism. But just as the Old Testament commanded the honouring of parents, the New instructed fathers to ‘provoke not your children to anger’. Children were gifts of God, and reformers taught that they should be nurtured and cared for. One theory holds that the punitive mortality rates of early modern Europe (half of all children died before their tenth birthday) discouraged parents from making any real emotional investment in their offspring. Yet a wealth of surviving evidence suggests otherwise: Luther himself was distraught upon the death of his daughter Magdalene in 1542.
11. Anthonius Claessins’s painting (c. 1585) of a family saying grace before a meal presents an idealized picture of godly domestic order
If the Reformation reinforced patriarchy, did it therefore diminish the status of women? There are arguments both for and against this view, though the notion that women, in this period or any other, constitute a unitary block with common interests and aspirations is a questionable one. It is often suggested that in elevating the standing of marriage, reformers raised the dignity of women, though a positive view of marriage and a positive view of women are not necessarily identical. The Reformation did little to change existing stereotypes that women were unruly and sexually voracious. Unmarried (and therefore masterless) women might be regarded as dangerous, and laws in various places prohibited them from taking up residence in cities, or living on their own. Within marriage, contemporary attitudes could be bruising to modern sentiments. ‘Reasonable’ physical chastisement of wives by husbands was a social norm, and in a notorious passage Luther remarked that ‘if women grow weary or even die while bearing children, that does no harm. Let them bear children to death, that’s what they’re there for.’ Yet Luther’s own union, like many Protestant marriages, was an affectionate and companionable one.
In terms of Christian vocation or calling, the Protestant Reformation offered women only the dual package of marriage and motherhood. It removed the distinctive religious path open to women in the Middle Ages, as sisters under vows in convents. Not all nuns, of course, had sincere religious vocations. Many had entered religious life as young girls, and some (such as Katharina von Bora) were happy to leave when opportunity presented. But the idea that the Reformation ‘liberated’ women from the corrupt and stultifying confines of the cloister now seems a rather Victorian one. Along with all-female confraternities (also abolished by the reformers), convents represented a rare opportunity for women to express themselves spiritually and creatively in their own social space, and for this reason have started to attract the admiring attention of modern feminist scholars. In German towns, some of the most effective resistance to the onset of the Reformation came from nuns. The humanist abbess of the Franciscan Poor Clares in Nuremberg, Caritas Pirckheimer, simply refused to leave, withstanding with her sisters a barrage of Protestant sermons, and skirmishing vigorously with the city council until her death in 1532. In a number of places in Germany, in fact, the authorities decided it was simpler to let convents gradually die out, leaving them alone, but refusing to let them take new novices. The approach was more brutal in Henry VIII’s England, where all nunneries were closed in the later 1530s by royal command. Here, the usual Reformation prescription for the welfare of ex-nuns, supplying them with dowries towards their marriage, was ruled out, Henry perversely insisting that monastic vows of celibacy were binding even after monasticism ceased to exist.
The demise of female monasticism in the Protestant world was paralleled by a spectacular renaissance in the Catholic one. Over the course of the 17th century, women came to form an absolute majority of persons in religious life. Some Catholic centres were awash with nuns, most notably Venice, where about half of all women from the wealthy governing class entered convents around the turn of the 17th century. They led cultured and not very ascetic lives there, preserving family estates from the erosion of multiple dowries. But the expansion of women religious was undoubtedly part of the explosion of religious energy in the Catholic Reformation more generally, as well as an assertion by women of their distinctive spirituality. New women’s orders were founded, often with an innovative ‘activist’ bent. The Ursulines established in the 1530s by the Italian Angela Merici, and the French Visitandines, founded two generations later by Jeanne-Françoise de Chantal and Francis de Sales, had a remit of caring for the poor and sick. But the idea of women performing a public religious ministry increasingly caused unease to the Roman authorities. Separate attempts by the Spaniard Isabel Roser and the Englishwoman Mary Ward to establish female branches of the Jesuit Order were blocked by the papacy, which also in the 17th century insisted upon stricter ‘enclosure’ of Visitandines and Ursulines. Nonetheless, by insisting on a status as lay ‘congregations’, without habits or vows, some communities of women were able to continue charitable work in wider society, such as the Daughters of Charity founded by Vincent de Paul and Louise de Marillac in 1633. And even from behind convent walls, women could make remarkable contributions to the religious culture of the age: the writings of the Spanish Carmelite Teresa of Avila (1515–82) stand alongside the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola as some of the greatest Catholic devotional works.
Too often, scholarship focuses upon the Reformation’s impact upon women, rather than women’s impact on the Reformation. Women were not supposed to participate actively in the religious changes of the era, but many did, displaying fervent, even fanatical, partisan commitments. A remarkably high percentage (51 out of 280-odd) of the Protestants burned by Mary Tudor’s regime were female. Under the Protestant government of Elizabeth I, women played a crucial role in the preservation of English Catholicism, exploiting the fact that wives had no separate legal identity from their husbands, and could not be fined for ‘recusancy’ so long as their husbands attended church. Female activism seems particularly pronounced in the developing world of ‘voluntary’ religion: in the late 17th-century Lutheran renewal movement known as pietism, in anabaptist groups like the Dutch Mennonites, and in the sects of interregnum England, the Baptists and Quakers, where membership lists show women outnumbering men two-to-one.
12. This engraving, after Egbert van Heemskerk, shows a woman preaching at an English Quaker meeting – a shocking occurrence to respectable 17th-century opinion
New religious movements may have offered more scope for expression, and to achieve positions of influence. But women were often the most committed and devout members of established churches as well. A pronounced feature of modern Western culture – the feminization of religion – was firmly underway in a patriarchal age.
A chapter on the reformation of society invites the question of whether society wanted to be reformed. In many ways, it didn’t. Clerical reformers, Protestant and Catholic, wanted better-educated, more devout, and less ‘superstitious’ congregations. Where local customs and rituals were an obstacle to these objectives, they sought to abolish them. Both Protestant and Catholic authorities in Germany, for example, tried hard to suppress suggestive fertility customs, such as young men harnessing local girls to ploughs on Ash Wednesday. They also discouraged the lighting of bonfires on the midsummer festival dedicated, since the coming of Christianity, to St John the Baptist. But villagers were attached to such traditions, and suspicious of innovation. Perhaps there was a fundamental non-meeting of minds. University-educated pastors understood religion as a force for moral renewal, a training course for heaven; illiterate rural folk, it is sometimes suggested, regarded it as a practical reservoir of magic to draw on for help with the day-to-day problems of disease, crop failure, and sick livestock. Among the laity, approved Protestant piety may have appealed disproportionately to local elites; respectable, literate people who could appreciate learned sermons and vernacular bibles, and who had a vested interest in curbing the disorderly conduct of their poorer neighbours.
Anyone anxious to suggest that at a popular level the Protestant and Catholic Reformations ‘failed’ has little difficulty amassing evidence in support of the case. Clerical complaints about the ignorance, immorality, and superstition of country folk abound, from Lutheran Germany as well Catholic France. They were just as common in Reformed territories, from Scotland to Switzerland, where consistory supervision should have meant social discipline was intense and effective. In the Pays de Vaud, for example, there were recurrent complaints in the mid-17th century of local people venerating a sacred tree trunk, which they believed had the power of healing gout. In 1662, a full century after the Council of Trent, the Catholic archbishop of Cologne was complaining about people’s faith in astrological predictions, interpretation of dreams, and magical use of amulets and relics. Jesuits in Italy and Spain called the rural hinterlands to which they went on mission their ‘Indies’, because of the ignorance and uncouthness of the populace.
13. Hans Sebald Beham’s depiction (1520) of a raucous and ribald popular festival, The Dance of the Noses, exemplifies the kinds of activities reformers were keen to suppress
But to view the processes of Reformation as a head-on collision between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture is too simplistic. For a start, although it is currently fashionable to stress the parallels and similarities of Catholic and Protestant reform, there were some crucial differences. Catholic reformers wanted a purified, more disciplined and clerically controlled Catholicism, but, unlike their Protestant counterparts, they had no desire to repudiate the existing religious culture of the people or many of its underlying presumptions. Concern for souls in purgatory, belief in miracles, the cult of the saints – these were common ground on which Catholic reformers could build. Festivals and processions to honour patron saints were fine, if supervised by the clergy, and unaccompanied by dissipation. Confraternities were a potential problem, if dominated by lay people, and threatening to become a rival source of loyalty to the parish. But reformers actively encouraged the formation of new ‘rosary confraternities’, which promoted through recital of the rosary devotion a disciplined, interiorized piety in tune with clerical priorities. Traditional and local saints’ cults were supplemented in the 17th century by encouragement of devotion to new, universally venerated saints, some of whom were recent heroes of the Counter-Reformation: Ignatius Loyola, Francis Xavier, Carlo Borromeo. Catholic missioners, particularly Jesuits, understood what people wanted from the saints and were sometimes prepared to meet them more than half way, for example distributing ‘Xavier water’ which had been blessed by contact with a relic or medal of St Francis Xavier. Peasants in the Eifel in the early 18th century sprinkled it on their fields to eliminate a plague of caterpillars. But it was probably never true that such ‘magical’ use of divine power was the sum and substance of popular religious mentalities. In their own way, people grasped the Church’s teachings about right living and salvation, and were open to some of what Catholic reformers had to say. If jargon words are required, ‘negotiation’ and ‘accommodation’ seem the appropriate ones here.
It was harder for Protestant reformers to bridge the gap between message and audience, but they were sometimes surprisingly prepared to have a go. Lutheran ministers in Denmark were willing to continue the ritual blessing of fields around Easter time, and in the Gaelic-speaking highlands of Scotland, Calvinist ministers had a liturgy for the blessing of fishermen’s boats. Ethnic hostilities prevented similar accommodations to the culture of the people in Ireland, which must be a reason why the Reformation failed to take root there. Elsewhere, Protestantism generated recognizably confessional but genuinely popular forms of religious culture. In 17th-century England, annual commemorations of the 1605 Gunpowder Plot helped fuse anti-Catholic and nationalist sentiments. Numerous stories circulated in 17th- and 18th-century Germany about how images of Martin Luther had been miraculously preserved from destruction by fire. These were an indication of genuine popular regard for the memory of the great reformer, but also of a mind-set still showing traces of the Catholic cult of the saints. Here, questions about success or failure elude easy definition.