Introduction

By combining the study of early modern everyday religion and the study of material culture, new light is shed on daily religious beliefs, practices, and identities. This chapter examines what the material record discloses about everyday religion in the light of new theoretical developments in material culture studies and studies of material religion in anthropology and sociology. It sets out how detailed, qualitative analysis of inventories and objects provides access to the inner devotional lives of Prague burghers. The analysis is embedded in a broader discourse of religion and material culture across the early modern world. It situates the study in a wider context by comparing and contrasting seventeenth-century Prague to milieus elsewhere in Europe.

Domesticating the Baroque

ít‘Domesticating’ as a process shows how a larger cultural shift—in this case, that of the Counter-Reformation—became something quotidian, everyday, accessible, and realized on the ground. It was a process by which new cultural developments became part of a broader mentalité. The focus of this chapter is to examine the concrete ways in which Catholic culture was domesticated in burgher homes over the seventeenth century. It examines how Counter-Reformation styles and themes permeated domestic objects, how Counter-Reformation images were newly integrated into domestic scenes, and how new materials contributed to the diversification of Catholic material culture at the end of the seventeenth century in a constant negotiation between ‘official’ and lay demands. From the material evidence—rose motifs, a cold-enamel painted glass beaker, and agnus dei made from a range of materials—emerges a fascinating coalescence of old and new forms of devotion that exemplifies the interplay between local and universal. It represents diversification and elaboration in the formation of a new Baroque Catholic culture in the home that was driven as much by the laity as by the Church in the second half of the seventeenth century.

Prague—An Urban Cosmos

Early modern Prague is best known through snapshot glimpses as the setting for the escapades of the English alchemist John Dee, Rudolf II’s exotic Kunstkammer, or the famous defenestration of Catholic councillors that sparked the Thirty Years’ War that ravaged Europe between 1618 and 1648. No continuous treatment of its social and cultural history across the seventeenth century exists. Moreover, Prague is often viewed through refracted categories: as a court city, a city of four administratively independent towns, a city of reform and protest prior to 1620, or a city of Baroque Catholic ascendancy after 1620. While delineating the social, cultural, and religious topography of Prague over a century, this profile presents a different perspective of a city that enabled a web of encounters between people of different social strata, faiths, and occupations, and fostered its own urban cosmos.

The Clockmaker’s Cosmos

On one level confessional distinction began to define material culture in the first decades of the seventeenth century, but a microhistorical approach reveals the persistence of plural devotional practices and beliefs. A close reading of the 1635 inventory of a court clockmaker, Kúndrat Šteffenaúr, reveals the complex intersections of confessions in Central Europe. It indicates an environment in which a wide range of devotional options were available. Analysis of Kúndrat’s possessions as individual items, and how they were kept together, shows the need to think across and beyond confessional boundaries of Protestant versus Catholic in order to understand lay religious beliefs and practices at this historical moment of confessional rupture. This chapter examines the inventory from two perspectives: first, it surveys the confessional spectrum of objects—Protestant books, Catholic devotional jewellery, clocks, and charms—contextualizing them and exploring why they may have come into Kúndrat’s possession; second, it offers an interpretation of the objects as items that formed Kúndrat’s individual cosmos, as ‘fragmented religion’.

Natural Matter

Studies of lived religion have shown that from the perspective of the early modern laity, stark divisions between religion, magic, and superstition were largely absent from daily life. This chapter establishes how the division of ‘religious’ objects from secular or ‘magical’ objects in the early modern period is problematic. In particular, it shows how amulets made from natural matter, such as gemstones and animal teeth, can be reintegrated among religious objects. The evidence of amulets and rings reveals the connections of the cosmos, showing how men and women used these items to negotiate the divine and to control the ‘exigencies of daily life’. There was logic to how the divine could work through these tiny shards of stone or animal matter. From a lay perspective, the use of amulets and precious stones was not ‘enchantment’, but part of a developed belief structure that located the divine in the natural environment and that was tied to natural philosophy.

The Matter of Kinship

Alongside natural matter, the ‘matter of kinship’ was a channel through which to negotiate divine power in the cosmos. Objects were integral to constituting kinship and forming devotional communities before God. Gifts exchanged between kith and kin on the occasion of baptism, marriage, and death reveal the dynamic nexus of objects and kinship within the cosmos, to which love was central. Gifts, bequests, trades, transfers, and exchanges of all kinds acted to create and sustain kinship bonds as an important part of devotion. Such objects were not only important during the moment of their initial production and use, but also as they were embedded in the daily life of the family and became constant reminders of the Christian lifecycle. Over time such items were woven more deeply into the fabric of daily family life by being given, used, or inherited down the generations.

Fracturing Universal Christianity

It has widely been assumed that religious objects were quickly associated with different confessions during the Reformation period. However, the unique environment of Prague enables the conditions, speed, and clarity of this process to be tested. This chapter pushes beyond previous historiography that has focused on mono-confessional contexts to examine the confessional specificity of devotional material cultures. The multiconfessional environment of Prague in the first decades of the seventeenth century enables an examination of the role of material culture in the creation of distinct confessional identities. Prague thus provides a fascinating context in which to study the process of fracturing medieval Christianity along confessional lines. It sustained an environment of what might be called ‘multiple options’ well into the seventeenth century. Three factors that shaped this confessional context are examined: survivalism of pre-Reformation devotional modes, the impact of Utraquism, and the persistence of confessional flexibility. A detailed examination of prayer beads in the inventories and as extant objects provides a microcosm through which to understand confessional identities at ground level. Close up, qualitatively, the records reveal them to be part of a spiritual world of endless possibilities and devotional options, but quantitatively, from a distance, they reveal a striking pattern of plural confessions and religious change.

Conclusion

The history of religion in the early modern period has been overwhelmingly shaped by tracing confessional divisions. These divisions undoubtedly had a significant impact on religious experience in this period, as shown by the fracturing of faith in Part II, but by foregrounding a spiritual world in Part I, this book seeks to shift our perspective and understand confessions as only one layer of devotional experience on top of a complex, shared spiritual world attached to materialities, local environments, and family histories. This concluding chapter underlines the contribution of this book to the history of religion, showing how a sustained and interlinked treatment of material culture and religion can significantly reshape our understanding of early modern lived beliefs, practices, and identities. Men and women in seventeenth-century Prague conceptualized the universe as a cosmos full of harmonies and correspondences through which the divine could work. This worldview framed their approach to the objects and material surroundings they encountered in their daily lives. Examining objects allows us to reconsider the categorization of early modern items as confessional, sacred, and profane in favour of a broader connected cosmos. This material approach reveals everyday beliefs, practices, and identities from a new perspective and traces the workings of larger cultural forces at ground level.

A Cosmos in the Making

Objects can be examined to decipher beliefs in the cosmos, but the material environment of the home was also an agent in making and sustaining religious beliefs, practices, and identities. Objects were tools with which to teach members of the household across generations, and they were prompts to pious living. Items such as glass beakers, knives, and clocks, studied here, perpetuated and reinforced beliefs in the cosmos, but they also reveal a cosmos in the making. They show how the material environment of the home shaped a mentalité by forming a didactic environment and conditioning responses to objects. Building on the work of Bourdieu, this chapter makes the case that these material environments played an instrumental role in the formation of a material devotional habitus that was ‘historically conditioned’ and open to change.