PIETY & PRACTICE
RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE IN ENGLAND,
C.1470-1558
INEVITABILITY: A PROBLEM
• Traditional accounts of the
Reformation
• A.G. Dickens
• Caricature of late-medieval
Church :
• Corrupt, only concerned with
enrichment
• Poor levels of piety, inept
priesthood.
• England’s anti-Catholic
heritage.
• Whig History legacy – England
meant two things:
• ‘Protestantism’ & ‘Parliamentary
sovereignity’
• Reformation beginning of both,
HAD to happen!
• Teleology
• Beginning with the end and projecting
backwards
• Examining late-medieval Catholicism
solely for evidence of ‘what came
next’ skewers its reality
• Edward Muir: historians’ obligation to
‘respect the dead, to honour how
different they were from us rather
than to celebrate their ability to
anticipate us or our ability to surpass
them’.
• History for whom, and to what end?
REVISIONIST HISTORIOGRAPHY
• Late medieval Church
characterised by a religious culture
which was:
• Vibrant
• vital
• Evidence for this:
• No evidence of a swelling tide of
discontent
• Laity investing in the Church – time,
money, energy – more than ever
before at the Reformation.
• See the work of:
• Christopher Haigh, Jack Scarisbrick,
R.B. Manning, Ralph Houlbrooke,
Robert Whiting,
• Eamon Duffy
• Essentially 2 thesis:
• 1) How attached people were to
the liturgy
• 2) That liturgy was flexible
enough to allow them to adapt
the Church’s practices to a
variety of activities, needs and
spiritual requirements.
• That Church was not ‘top down’,
‘institutionalised’ and ‘rigid’
•
actually a marriage between
clergy and laity – moulded to
local/individual needs.
REVISIONISTS: A CAVEAT
• Focus on liturgy, practice and piety
• What the laity do, how they do it, and to what extent.
• What is missing?
• Clergy?
• Where are they in Duffy?
• Surely pivotal to assess the role of them in this society?
• And people’s views towards them?
• Structure of the Church
• An institution.
• Did it conflict with other areas of this society?
• Crown
• Nobles
• Social organisations?
RELIGION: NOW & THEN
THEN
NOW
• Voluntary
• Mandatory
• Private
• Public
• Individual
• Shared
• Peter Marshall: ‘where faith met
community’
• Corporate souls, members of the body of
Christ which had visible expression in local
structures.
THE ‘WORK’ OF TRADITIONAL RELIGION
• Biggest landowner in Europe
• Major provider of charity incl. schools, hospitals
• Monopolisers of orthodox access to the sacred – via the
(seven) sacraments – in partic. Baptism, Eucharist and
Extreme Unction (but also penance, the Orders, matrimony &
confirmation)
• Providers of afterlife ‘fire insurance’ (also for your kin)
• Promoter of social cohesion/peace via ‘mechanisms’ of
confession & communion
• Providers of entertainment (e.g. Church Ales & election of Boy
Bishops; May Queens)
HOW DO WE KNOW ABOUT THE PREMODERN WORLD?
CHURCH RECORDS
• ‘Official’ records
• Courts
• Domestic disputes
• Crimes against the Church/society
• Wills
• Tax records
• Bede rolls
• Churchwarden’s accounts
• Registers of:
• Birth
• Marriage
• Death
• Visual & material culture
•
•
•
•
•
Art
Sculpture
Prints & book illustrations
Investment/wealth
The Church building itself
• Buildings
• Bodies
• Household goods
WHAT DO CHURCHWARDEN’S
ACCOUNTS TELL US?
• Scale of investment in the Church
• 2/3 of Church buildings in England refurbished C15th/ early C16th
• Pride
• Lavish church with the material culture
of religion
•
•
•
•
•
•
Cloths
Vestments
Chalices
Candles
Imagery
Carvings
• How is this paid for?
• Tithe
• And from additional sources of
revenue.
• May include:
• Sheep – sell wool pay for candles
to saints
• Church ales
• Plays
• Hock-tide
• Key:
• a communal religion, not separate
from the world (like monastery) but
shaped by it.
TIME: THE RITUAL YEAR
• Cyclical time:
• Liturgical calendar’s reenactment of life of Christ:
• Advent
• Christmas
• Epiphany
• Easter
• Ascension
• Pentecost.
• Agricultural rhythms of the year:
• Carnival preceding Lent:
•
licensed sin and disorder.
• Holy Week/Easter:
•
imaginative engagement with sufferings of
Christ.
• performative
• Easter communion: individual and
collective rite.
• Community as ‘the body of Christ’.
• Year end – Easter (not Christmas)
MARKING THE SEASONS
• February/March – Carnival vs Lent
• March/April – Easter – time of annual confession followed by
communion/eucharist
• May: Ascension/Pentecost/Whitsun – rogation processions
(Feast of Corpus Christi)
• June: Feast of St John the Baptist – midsummer’s eve 24/6
• November – All Hallows/All Saints’ day 1/11
• November – Martinmas/St Martin’s day – 11/11
• November – Advent (30/11) – beginning of liturgical year
(feast of St Andrew)
SAINTS
• Different conception of sanctity:
• Not just exemplar of holy living
• Portal to the supernatural
• Major part of the practice of religion
•
Veneration of images/ prayers/ candles
• Localism:
• Each parish a patron saint
• Acted as a guardian
• Saint’s Day & communal celebration/
definition
• Beyond the parish:
• Shrines & aspects of the landscape
• Travel to see/touch relics
• Pilgrimages
•
Receive and indulgence
• Specialities
• ‘Problem solving’?
• Plague/ disease
• Infant mortality
• Death in childbirth
• Capricious and precarious existence
• Weather
• Harvest
• Mary – a special case?
• Most intense cult
• Why?
• Vengeful God – role of caring,
sympathetic protector open.
• Example of meek submission to divine
will
• In the works of some theologians –
notably Gabriel Biel – she is almost the
co-redeemer of mankind.
PICKERING, YORKSHIRE
St. Peter & Paul
St. Sebastian
LAY INVOLVEMENT
• Fraternities
• Voluntary associations of laymen
• Usually a devotion to the host, the
Trinity or the Virgin Mary.
• 30,000 in LC15th.
• Very high – almost improbable
• Own patron saint and therefore
own rounds of religious practices
• Maintain own
light/candles/chapel for patron
• Own altars in church – richest
support own priest to tend to their
needs
• Burial of members
• Other forms of support –
religious and non-religious.
• Tensions
• Complement or supplement
‘official’ religion
• In competition with the Church?
• Did it withdraw from the
body?
• Within and without the parish:
• Needs and demands which may not
have been for the village or parish
as a whole
• Members may come from other
parishes.
• Yearning?
• Counter Reformation respond to
Protestantism in Europe by extending
confraternities.
SACRAMENTAL RELIGION
• Mediation
• Clergy’s pivotal role in society: to assist
people en route to salvation.
• Not necessarily about belief in the modern
sense
• Remember verb vs noun: Sacramental
religion:
• God’s grace channelled through
particular ritual actions, material objects
and sacred places.
• Salvation: a problem.
• Adam & Eve and Original Sin
• God, in his mercy, offered the
opportunity to be saved – salvation.
• Saving work of Jesus Christ on the Cross
– crucified for the sins of humanity –
was mediated through the sacrificial and
sacramental ministry by the priests of
the Catholic Church.
• The rituals and sacraments of Catholic
Church was the route through which that
opportunity could be realised.
• No salvation outside of it.
• Overly material?
• Scholasticism
• Role of God and humanity in the
process
• Catholics – rites of the Church
afforded some leverage
• Protestants – God alone decided
• Sacraments a visible role in life of the
average Christian
• Punctuated their journey from cradle
to grave:
• Baptism
• Confirmation
• Confession
• Marriage
• The Mass
• Extreme Unction
THE MASS
• Temporal centre of the world:
• Collapse time
• Sacrifice
• Ritual re-enactment of the Last
Supper
• Transubstantiation:
• Piety & pity
• Efficacious:
• See God
• Not a singular practice:
• Powerful – variety of uses:
•
•
•
•
•
•
Masses for the dead
Corpus Christi procession
Mysticism
Unofficial – curses
Bossy – ‘social institution’
Marshall – ‘where faith met
community’.
ST GREGORY’S MASS
MATTHIAS GRUNEWALD
CORPUS CHRISTI PROCESSION
DOES ‘COMMUNAL’ = ‘UNIFORM’
• Uniformity:
• No space for individual to approach
God?
• Christian?
• Keith Thomas, Religion & the Decline
of Magic
• Division of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’
religion.
• Most ‘Christianity’ before the
Reformation not ‘Christian’ in any
meaningful sense.
• Overstatement to see as semimagical or solely ritual based
• Religious books:
• Handbooks for priests
• Catechisms
• Work through the basics before
confession:
•
•
•
•
10 Commandments
Seven deadly sins
Works of mercy
Five bodily senses
• Asked parishioner how their
behaviour accorded with
• A move to education/
instrospection/ piety?
• Eamon Duffy
• ‘Popular’ & ‘Elite’? Or
‘traditional’?
BOOKS OF HOURS
• Primer of religious instruction/
text-book of essentials o faith
• Poor Caitiff – didactic and
devotional works
• Dives and Pauper – systematic
exposition of the Commandments
• Prayers to meditate on – especially
the Passion.
• Thousands printed in the laterfifteenth century
• Extensive readership by the
standards of the time (if not
our own).
• Division of ‘popular’ and
‘elite’?
• Peter Burke
• 1500-1800: move to a divide
between solemn ‘high’ and a
vibrant ‘low’ culture
• Social stratification determines
cultural stratification
• Access to culture
• Ability to read
• Duffy – ‘traditional’
• Shared/common culture
• Oral and written not as
demarcated as we would see it.
BOOKS OF HOURS
BOOKS OF HOURS
DIVISIONS?
• Were the gentry
withdrawing?
• Develop own chapels
• Moves to build own pews in
Church
• Reading = withdrawl?
• Group reading, not private.
• Criticisms of the ‘material’
aspect of late medieval
Christianity:
• shrines/ pilgrimages criticised
• Yearning, or debate?
• Individual examples, rather than
the system?
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
• Vibrant and vital
• Fulfil needs in many different facets of life
• Clearly not waiting for Reformation
• But were there fissures in the bedrock of this Church?
• Was that vibrancy actually a weakness as much of a
strength?
• Ability to be pulled in lots of different ways – as communal as historians
suggest?
• Later lecture – see that early Protestantism had much to do with
Reform movement within the Church
• Perhaps ‘Ref’ not a juncture, but a continuation of what was already
present.