schismatic, or even problematic.
Older studies of the background to the Reformation tended to portray the later Middle Ages as a period in which religion was in decline. Modern research, using more reliable criteria, has indicated that this judgment was premature and unreliable. Between 1450 and 1520, Germany saw a considerable increase in popular religious piety. It is important to realize how deeply embedded religious ideas were in the culture of this period. While there were certainly problems in late medieval religion which Protestant reformers were able to exploit subsequently, the existence of these vulnerabilities is not in itself adequate to explain why Protestantism came into being, or took its specific historical and religious forms.
Underlying such criticisms was a growing spiritual and cultural confidence within the laity, accompanied by a solidifying realization of the disparity between the vision of the church set out in the New Testament, and the somewhat different social reality that they encountered in western culture. The increasing volume and stridence of such complaints is often assumed to reflect failings on the part of the church; yet it might equally reflect growing expectations on the part of the laity, and an increased confidence in expressing these concerns. A growing popular interest in religion during the fifteenth century led to lay criticism of the institutional church where it was felt to be falling short of its obligations.
In many respects, salvation became institutionalized within the western church during the Middle Ages. The church was the institution which bestowed salvation through its sacramental system. The two sacramenta mortuorum (“sacraments of the dead”), baptism and penance, represented the gateway to eternal life on the one hand, and a means of restoring grace after a lapse. Cyprian of Carthage’s famous maxim “there is no salvation outside the church” was interpreted to mean that salvation could only be attained through the institution of the church. Christ made salvation possible; only the church could make it available. This basic principle was expressed in tangible form in church architecture. The great west doors of churches were often decorated with slogans, declaring that it was only through entering the church that salvation could be attained. To leave the church was to leave behind any hope of salvation.
Yet such institutionalized visions of Christianity were of little value to many educated laity, who were searching for forms of Christianity that were relevant to their personal experience and private worlds. Not only were lay Christians in the period 1450–1520 more interested in their faith than their counterparts in earlier generations, but levels of lay literacy had soared, partly due to the introduction of printing, enabling the laity to be more critical and informed about what they believed – and what they expected of their clergy. With the advent of printing, books became more widely available, now lying well within the reach of an economically empowered middle class. Devotional books, collections of sermons, traditional “Books of Hours,” and translations of the New Testament regularly appear in these inventories. Lay people were beginning to think for themselves and did not consider themselves to be dependent upon their clergy in matters of Christian education. Studies of inventories of personal libraries of the age show a growing appetite for spiritual reading, allowing people to make connections between their faith and their experience of the world.
This point is especially evident in the publishing history of one of the most important works of the early sixteenth century – Erasmus of Rotterdam’s Handbook of the Christian Soldier, which first appeared in 1503. The work made a powerful appeal to educated lay men and women, whom Erasmus regarded as the most importance resource that the church possessed. The future of the church, Erasmus argued, rested on the emergence of a biblically literate laity. The central role of the clergy is to educate and encourage the laity, not to see lay Christians as their spiritual inferiors. The soaring popularity of this work, especially in the late 1510s, suggests that a radical alteration in lay self-perception was taking place. The work was translated into English in 1520 by William Tyndale, who was clearly sympathetic to its agenda.
One of the most important aspects of Luther’s doctrine of justification by faith alone was that it stressed the importance of the believer’s personal relationship with God. Although Luther considered that the institution of the church remained important, his doctrine of justification suggested that Christianity was fundamentally about a believer’s direct engagement with God. This new emphasis on the importance of the individual – which is really a retrieval of ideas already developed in the writings of Augustine of Hippo in the early fifth century – extended to Luther’s understanding of the church, particularly his notion of the shared or corporate “priesthood of all believers” (pp. 183–5), which declared that lay Christians played an important role in cultivating the faith and spiritual development of their peers. Just as importantly, Luther’s emphasis on the use of the vernacular can be seen as an important aspect of a wider program of the democratization of faith, which we shall consider further in a later section of this chapter.
Alternative Theologies: Folk Religion and Magic
It is often suggested that Christian doctrine represents an “official” theology, which was supplemented during the later Middle Ages by numerous “unofficial” or “popular” theologies, often with a tenuous or contested affinity with the teachings of the church. The phenomenon of “folk religion” often bore a tangential relationship to the more precise yet abstract statements of Christian doctrine that the church preferred – yet which many found unintelligible or unattractive. In part, popular religion represented an attempt to convert the abstract ideas of theologians into something more tangible and intelligible, with a clear connection with the realities of human existence.
In parts of Europe, something close to “fertility cults” emerged, connected and enmeshed with the seasonal patterns and concerns of rural agrarian communities – such as haymaking and harvesting. In the French diocese of Meaux in the early sixteenth century, the saints were regularly invoked in order to ward off animal and infant diseases, the plague and eye trouble, or to ensure that young women found appropriate husbands. The direct connection of religion and everyday life was taken for granted. The spiritual and the material were seen as being interconnected at every level.
Some scholars have suggested that this “folk religion” represents the persistence of paganism in late medieval Europe. Jean Delumeau, for example, suggested that the process of conversion of western Europe had been incomplete, and was largely restricted to social elites. Especially in rural contexts, the external observance of “official” theological orthodoxy was often accompanied by popular religious beliefs and practices which represented continuities with an older pagan tradition. Others, however, have pointed out that, on closer examination, these allegedly “pagan” continuities turn out to be Christianized beliefs or practices, which may have had pagan origins yet were subsequently redirected by Christian theologians.
In his influential works The Stripping of the Altars (1992) and The Voices of Morebath (2001), Eamon Duffy was critical of those who claim that there was some kind of schism or radical sociological division between the “religion of the people,” characterized by superstition and a lingering paganism, and the religion of a literate elite during the later Middle Ages. Instead, he points to what he considers to be a shared or common set of symbols and beliefs which bridged this alleged “gulf” between the elite and the peasants. These symbols and beliefs were, Duffy argues, expressed in the liturgy – a “cycle of fast and festival, of ritual observance and symbolic gesture” which shaped and held together both folk and educated versions of faith by shaping “their perception of the world and their place in it.”
A second alternative theology is found in the world of magic. This term is too easily misunderstood by modern readers. During the Middle Ages, it designated a range of options, with two being of particular importance. The first (referred to in the scholarly literature as “image magic”) arose from an influx into Europe of Latin translations, mainly originating from Spain, of a range of magic texts drawn from the Greek, Arabic, and Jewish traditions. Many of these texts treated magic as a form of natural science, allowing its practitioners
