‘Everyone Should Be Like the People’: Elite and Popular Religion and the Counter Reformation

2006 ◽  
Vol 42 ◽  
pp. 206-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor Johnson
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Popular Religion ◽  
Collective Unconscious ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Top Down ◽  
The People ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ways Of Thinking ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
As If

It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the GermanVolkskundetradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.

STRUCTURING AND INTERPRETING THE EXPERIENCE OF EARLY MODERN EUROPEANS

2000 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 295-302 ◽  
Author(s):  
RAYMOND A. MENTZER
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Geographic Concentration ◽  
Late Middle Ages ◽  
Imperial Court ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
The Relationship

Archives of the scientific revolution: the formation and exchange of ideas in seventeenth-century Europe. Edited by Michael Hunter. Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 216. ISBN 0–8511–553–7. £45.00.The peasantries of Europe from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Edited by Tom Scott. London: Longman, 1998. Pp. xi + 416. ISBN 0–582–10131-X. £19.99.Civil society and fanaticism: conjoined histories. By Dominique Colas. Translated by Amy Jacobs. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xxx + 480. ISBN 0–8047–2736–8. £14.95.The quest for compromise: peacemakers in Counter-Reformation Vienna. By Howard Louthan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xvi + 185. ISBN 0–531–58082-X. £35.00.Each of the four volumes at hand examines a different yet vital aspect of European society between the late middle ages and the beginnings of industrialization. The field is far too diverse and the approaches too complex to expect a commonality among these works, excepting a shared temporal and geographic concentration. Still, the themes and subjects reveal some of the issues that have captured recent attention and show how scholars propose to go about exploring them. They suggest the interests of historians of early modern Europe, their distinctive perspectives, and varying methodologies. The collective reach extends from deciphering the papers and manuscripts left by participants in the scientific revolution to an exploration of the immense yet largely reticent peasant world, an attempt to establish the origins and trace the development of today's ongoing discussion over civil society and fanaticism, and finally a study of four peacemakers who urged religious moderation at the imperial court of Counter-Reformation Vienna. Put slightly differently, these studies raise fundamental questions about the sources upon which scholars depend, the nature and utility of historical models, and the relationship between contemporary concerns and our collective past, whether they be issues of civil society or irenic accommodation.

Die globale Dichtung des Orlando Furioso

2012 ◽  
Vol 47 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-33
Author(s):  
Federico Italiano
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Hybrid Vehicle ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
The West ◽  
Ludovico Ariosto ◽  
Orlando Furioso ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Epic Poem ◽  
Peter Sloterdijk ◽  
As If

AbstractThe epic poem of Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso (1516–1532), one of the most influential texts of Renaissance writing, shows not only a precise cognition of early modern cartographic knowledge, as Alexandre Doroszlaï has illustrated it in Ptolemée et l’hippogriffe (1998), but also performs a complex transmedial translation of cartographic depictions. The journeys around the globe of the Christian paladins Ruggiero and Astolfo narrated by Ariosto are, in fact, performative negotiations between literary and cartographic processes. Riding the Hippograph, the hybrid vehicle par excellence, Ruggiero and Astolfo fly over the Earth as if they were flying over a map. Their journeys do not merely transmedially translate the course to the West pursued by Early Modern Europe. Rather, by translating the map Ariosto performs a new geopoetics that turns away from the symbolic dominance of the East (or “Ent-Ostung”, as Peter Sloterdijk has usefully called it) and offers us one of the first poetic versions of modern globalization.

Traditional Religion, Popular Piety, or Base Superstition? The Cause for the Beatification of Teresa Higginson

1998 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-144 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Davies
Keyword(s):  
Popular Religion ◽  
Religious Practice ◽  
Traditional Religion ◽  
Great Flexibility ◽  
Popular Piety ◽  
Beliefs And Practices ◽  
Shared Beliefs ◽  
Religious System ◽  
The People ◽  
The Relationship

Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars has reinvigorated the debate over the nature of late mediaeval religious practice and belief, examining the ‘richness and complexity of the religious system by which men and women structured their experiences of the world, and their hopes and aspirations within and beyond it.’ Duffy questions the assumption that there was in that period a wide gulf between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion. In so doing he has not only illuminated the religious practices and beliefs of late mediaeval England but he has stimulated discussion about the relationship between ‘popular’ and ‘élite’ religion in other periods. Duffy eschews the use of the term ‘popular religion’, which he argues carries questionable assumptions about the nature of ‘non-popular’ religion and about the gap between the two. He prefers ‘traditional religion’, on the grounds that it does greater justice to ‘the shared and inherited character of the religious beliefs and practices of the people…’ ‘Traditional religion’ while being rooted in inherited and shared beliefs was, nevertheless, capable of great flexibility and variety.

Song, Confession, and Criminality: Trial Records as Sources for Popular Musical Culture in Early Modern Europe

2001 ◽  
Vol 18 (4) ◽  
pp. 616-657 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander J. Fisher
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
City Government ◽  
Production Performance ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Musical Culture ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
The Public ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, the city government of Augsburg, Germany, struggled to maintain religious peace as the confessional boundaries between its Catholic and Protestant communities hardened. As tensions gradually rose, city officials feared and scrutinized the disruptive potential of the psalms and chorales sung by Augsburg's Protestant majority. Those suspected of owning, singing, or distributing inflammatory songs were subject to imprisonment, interrogation, torture, and exile. When an Imperial decree established a fully Catholic city government in March 1629, the authorities tightened this scrutiny, banning Protestant singing entirely in public and private and using a network of informants to catch violators. A remarkably well-preserved collection of criminal interrogation records in Augsburg dramatizes city officials' concern about religious song and their attempts to restrict its cultivation through coercive measures. These records, which preserve the testimony of suspects and witnesses as well as original evidence (such as manuscript or printed songs), show the ways in which local authorities tried to control singing that they felt threatened the public peace. At the same time, these sources give us unparalleled insight into the production, performance, and circulation of religious songs. Although the interrogations reveal much about how and where songs——often contrafacta of well-known psalms or chorales——were written and performed, the authorities were especially intent on finding out how they originated, who bought, sold, and sang them, and why. These exchanges between interrogators and suspects provide a starting point for an analysis of the relationship between singing, religion, and criminality in an early modern urban environment.

scholarly journals To Sing Upon the Book: Oral and Written Counterpoint in Early Modern Europe

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-105
Author(s):  
Ronald Broude
Keyword(s):  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
New Music ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Music Printing ◽  
Musical Tradition ◽  
Alternative Means ◽  
Textual Form ◽  
The Relationship

During the fifteenth century, many musici thought of counterpoint as an improvisational practice in which certain procedures were employed to produce a musical texture in which interest lay in the interplay of two or more melodic lines. The improvisational practice was called singing upon the book (cantare super librum): it required one singer to realize a pre-existing melody (called a cantus firmus) inscribed in a text while one or more other singers (called concentors), reading from that same text, devised, ex tempore, a countermelody or melodies that obeyed the rules of counterpoint with respect to the cantus firmus. Similar procedures, applied in writing, produced res facta, contrapuntal texture in textual form. Counterpoint and res facta were alternative means of providing music for occasions both sacred and secular. During the sixteenth century, several factors combined to alter the relationship between improvised and written counterpoint, and by the end of the century the importance of the former was greatly diminished. The growth of music printing provided an abundance of music for a growing community of amateurs who could read music but were not interested singing upon the book. The composers responsible for this new music embraced emerging ideas that stressed the advantages of written music, which enjoyed permanence that improvised counterpoint lacked, which was usually more observant of the rules than improvised counterpoint could be, and which enhanced the reputations of the composers who created it. As a result of these developments, emphasis shifted from improvised to written counterpoint, from the procedures that produced a contrapuntal texture to the texture itself, and singing upon the book came to be seen by many not as an end in itself but as a way to sharpen composers’ skills. Marginalized by print, improvised counterpoint survived in a much reduced community, largely in Catholic France and Iberia, and eventually, for want of a musical community large enough to sustain it, ceased to be a living musical tradition.

scholarly journals Tears in Heaven: Tracing the Contours of a Pan-European Transconfessional Genre

Humanities ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 4
Author(s):  
Anne Boemler ◽  
Bryan Brazeau
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Literary Genre ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Specific Kind ◽  
Religious Poetry ◽  
Literary Traditions ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
New Form ◽  
Multiple Languages ◽  
Biblical Figures

This article explores the genesis, proliferation, and readership of an understudied genre of religious poetry in early modern Europe. The weeping poem—a devotional literary genre combining elements of epic narrative and Petrarchan lyric that focused specifically on the religious grief of biblical figures—swept across Europe in the forty years around the turn of the seventeenth century. Although this genre was instigated by the Italian Luigi Tansillo’s 1560 Le Lagrime di San Pietro and has often been read as exhibiting a distinctively Counter-Reformation spirituality, our survey of weeping poems uncovers the surprising reach of this genre across multiple languages and even into Protestant England. The range and popularity of this specific kind of weeping poetry across early modern national, linguistic, and confessional lines shows how this constellation of texts transmitted a new form of devotional affect founded on imaginative identification with weeping biblical narrators. In other words, these poems demonstrate how interiority, rather than factional political or theological difference, could be the basis for new emotional communities of worship. Moreover, the relative obscurity of this genre to scholars prompts new questions around the viability of continuing to explore early modern European literary traditions from the perspective of nationalist/linguistic/confessional frameworks.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document