Anthony D. Wright - The Counter-Reformation: Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World

Catholic Europe and the Non-Christian World

A.D. WRIGHT

First published 2005 by Ashgate Publishing

Published 2017 by Routledge
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Wright, A.D. (Anthony David), 1947

The Counter-Reformation : Catholic Europe and the non-Christian world.2nd

ed. (Catholic Christendom, 1300-1700)

1.Catholic ChurchMissionsHistory 2.Counter-Reformation

I.Title

270.6

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Wright, A.D. (Anthony David)

The counter-Reformation : Catholic Europe and the non-Christian world /

Anthony D. Wright2nd ed.

p. cm.(Catholic Christendom, 13001700)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-7546-5027-8 (alk. Paper)

1. Counter-Reformation. 2. Catholic ChurchMissionsHistory I. Title II.

Series.

BR430.W7 2005
270.6dc22

ISBN 13: 978-0-7546-5027-0 (hbk) 2004053823

The still-usual emphasis on medieval (or Catholic) and reformation (or Protestant) religious history has meant neglect of the middle ground, both chronological and ideological. As a result, continuities between the middle ages and early modern Europe have been overlooked in favor of emphasis on radical discontinuities. Further, especially in the later period, the identification of reformation with various kinds of Protestantism means that the vitality and creativity of the established church, whether in its Roman or local manifestations, has been left out of account. In the last few years, an upsurge of interest in the history of traditional (or catholic) religion makes these inadequacies in received scholarship even more glaring and in need of systematic correction. The series will attempt this by covering all varieties of religious behavior, broadly interpreted, not just (or even especially) traditional institutional and doctrinal church history. It will to the maximum degree possible be interdisciplinary, comparative and global, as well as non-confessional. The goal is to understand religion, primarily of the Catholic variety, as a broadly human phenomenon, rather than as a privileged mode of access to superhuman realms, even implicitly.

The period covered, 13001700, embraces the moment which saw an almost complete transformation of the place of religion in the life of Europeans, whether considered as a system of beliefs, as an institution, or as a set of social and cultural practices. In 1300, vast numbers of Europeans, from the pope down, fully expected Jesuss return and the beginning of His reign on earth. By 1700, very few Europeans, of whatever level of education, would have subscribed to such chiliastic beliefs. Pierre Bayles notorious sarcasms about signs and portents are not idiosyncratic. Likewise, in 1300 the vast majority of Europeans probably regarded the pope as their spiritual head; the institution he headed was probably the most tightly integrated and effective bureaucracy in Europe. Most Europeans were at least nominally Christian, and the pope had at least nominal knowledge of that fact. The papacy, as an institution, played a central role in high politics, and the clergy in general formed an integral part of most governments, whether central or local. By 1700, Europe was divided into a myriad of different religious allegiances, and even those areas officially subordinate to the pope were both more nominally Catholic in belief (despite colossal efforts at imposing uniformity) and also in allegiance than they had been four hundred years earlier. The pope had become only one political factor, and not one of the first rank. The clergy, for its part, had virtually disappeared from secular governments as well as losing much of its local authority. The stage was set for the Enlightenment.

Thomas F. Mayer,
Augustana College

When the first edition of this book was published, in 1982, discussion of the Counter-Reformation, even among historians writing in the English language, reflected questions raised by the French historian Jean Delumeau. In a pair of volumes, originally published in French, Naissance et affirmation de la Rforme (2nd edn, Paris, 1968) and Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1971), he had argued that the two Reformations, the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Reformation, shared a fundamental purpose, however little acknowledged by contemporary antagonists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. That purpose he identified as the attempt by ecclesiastical elites to impose on the laity, especially the less educated or illiterate of both town and country, an articulated formula of Christian doctrine, a denominationally prescribed set of beliefs, in place of traditional rituals taken to define Christian society but barely comprehended at fully conscious level. When the second of these works was published in English translation, Catholicism between Luther and Voltaire (London, 1977), the historian John Bossy, in his introduction, expressed some measure of Anglo-Saxon reserve about the argument. Nevertheless many regarded Bossys own stimulating articles, above all perhaps The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe, Past and Present, XLVII (1970), 5170, as sharing in one respect at least Delumeaus understanding, in that the Catholic leadership in Western Europe in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries seemed to be depicted as trying to reshape popular religion in just such a way, even at the cost of alienating the generality of the laity. Such an idea, at any rate, moved beyond any specifically French concern with the causes of a long-term dechristianization of French society, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, which preoccupied French scholars other than Delumeau alone. However a subsequent slim but seminal book by Bossy himself, Christianity in the West 14001700 (Oxford, 1985), appeared to realign his argument in a way which happened to approach that of Delumeau. The starting date, in the title, and the review of developments in the whole of an eventually divided Western Christendom suggested that both Catholic and Protestant elites, for all their violent confrontation, had pursued similar goals in their treatment of the laity of Western Europe during the period. On that basis, the author could be understood to regard disruption of existing social affinities as the cost of Catholic as well as Protestant campaigns of reform in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Within historical writing in the English language a similar question was among those addressed in the rich, monumental volume of Keith Thomas,