History Has Many Voices 9780271090931

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History Has Many Voices

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Habent sua fata libelli

Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies Series General Editor Raymond A. Mentzer University of Iowa Editorial Board of Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies Elaine Beilin Framingham State College

Roger Manning Cleveland State University, Emeritus

Miriam U. Chrisman University of Massachusetts, Emerita

Mary B. McKinley University of Virginia

Barbara B. Diefendorf Boston University

Helen Nader University of Arizona

Paula Findlen Stanford University Scott H. Hendrix Princeton Theological Seminary Jane Campbell Hutchison University of Wisconsin–Madison Christiane Joost-Gaugier University of New Mexico, Emerita Ralph Keen University of Iowa Robert M. Kingdon University of Wisconsin, Emeritus

Charles G. Nauert University of Missouri, Emeritus Theodore K. Rabb Princeton University Max Reinhart University of Georgia John D. Roth Goshen College Robert V. Schnucker Truman State University, Emeritus Nicholas Terpstra University of Toronto

Merry Wiesner-Hanks University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee

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Copyright © 2003 by Truman State University Press 100 East Normal Street, Kirksville, Missouri 63501-4221 USA http://tsup.truman.edu All rights reserved

This book has been brought to publication with the generous support of a grant from the Burdick-Vary Fund and the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin–Madison

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data History has many voices / edited by Lee Palmer Wandel. p. cm. – (Sixteenth century essays & studies ; v. 63) Each chapter represents a generation of doctoral candidates who studied under Robert M. Kingdon (1970-1989). Dissertations supervised by Robert Kingdon (p. ). Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-931112-17-7 (casebound : alk. paper) 1. Church history—16th century—Congresses. 2. Church history—Modern period, 1500– —Congresses. I. Wandel, Lee Palmer. II. Kingdon, Robert McCune, 1927– III. Series. BR305.3.H57 2003 270.6—dc21 2002155567 Cover design by Teresa Wheeler Printed by Thomson-Shore, Dexter, Michigan, USA Set in Adobe Minion typeface No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any format by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission, which may be obtained through Copyright Clearance Center, http://copyright.com. The paper in this publication meets or exceeds the minimum requirements of the American National Standard—Permanence of paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48 (1984).

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Contents Acknowledgments

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Introduction: The Past Has Many Voices Lee Palmer Wandel

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Doubts about “Witches” and “Magicians” in Reginald Scot and Gabriel Naudé Maryanne Cline Horowitz

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Alcohol and the Clergy in Traditional Europe A. Lynn Martin

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Popes, Astrologers, and Early Modern Calendar Reform Frederic J. Baumgartner

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Planning Jesuit Education from Loyola to the 1599 Ratio Studiorum John Patrick Donnelly, S.J.

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Laity and Liturgy in the French Reformed Tradition Raymond A. Mentzer

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Reflections on a Quarter Century of Research on Women and the Reformation Merry Wiesner-Hanks

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Rethinking the Social History of the Poor Thomas Max Safley

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Preparing the Pastors: Theological Education and Pastoral Training in Basel Amy Nelson Burnett

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Dissertations Supervised by Robert M. Kingdon

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Contributors

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Index

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Acknowledgments

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n 25–26 February 2000, Robert McCune Kingdon’s Wisconsin and Iowa Ph.D.s gathered in Madison, Wisconsin, for a colloquium, “At the Frontiers of the Reformation: Robert Kingdon’s Legacy of Graduate Education.” That event was made possible through the support of many individuals and the Institute for Research in the Humanities of the University of Wisconsin. Paul Boyer, director of the Institute for Research in the Humanities, offered full administrative and financial support. The colloquium was funded through the Burdick-Vary Trust. The late Judy Cochran, graduate advisor in the Department of History, found addresses for almost all of Kingdon’s Wisconsin Ph.D.s. Loretta Freiling of the Institute contacted each of those students and made all arrangements, from reserving hotel rooms to advertising the colloquium. Bob’s friends and colleagues from the Department of History at the University of Wisconsin participated happily in the colloquium, a number serving as chairperson of the sessions. This volume, which presents revised versions of the papers given there, is generously subsidized by the Institute for Research in the Humanities. I wish to thank particularly Ray Mentzer, general editor of the Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies series, and Paula Presley, director of Truman State University Press, for their many different sorts of help and support in the publication of this volume. Finally, acknowledgment should also be made of the remarkable bonds of loyalty, admiration, and affection that Robert McCune Kingdon and his students share. This volume is foremost a testimony to his legacy of affection among colleagues, within the University of Wisconsin, and among an extraordinary range of early modern scholars.

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Introduction The Past Has Many Voices Lee Palmer Wandel

In a very important sense, however, [Garrett] Mattingly taught his students as much by example as by precept. To appreciate fully his influence as a teacher, therefore, one must consider his accomplishments as a historian. Robert M. Kingdon, “Garrett Mattingly” American Scholar 51 (1982): 397

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n 1949, in considering with whom he might pursue graduate education in history, Robert Kingdon did more research than many undergraduates: he wrote to a number of recent graduates of his college, Oberlin, for their advice. Sifting through that advice, he chose Garrett Mattingly, who had recently arrived at Columbia after a circuitous career.1 At that time, Mattingly was known for his biography of Catherine of Aragon, published in 1941, and a number of influential articles; the works for which he is now remembered, Renaissance Diplomacy and The Spanish Armada, were published in 1955 and 1959, respectively. Three ingredients in Mattingly’s work, I believe, help to explain the special character of his books and their successful appeal to both scholars and the general public: a pronounced moral concern, a superb technical foundation, and a real mastery of English prose.2 1 “I first heard about Garrett Mattingly in 1949, when I was completing an undergraduate major in history at Oberlin College.… [Robert K.] Webb told me of an exciting new teacher named Mattingly, who had just joined the Columbia department as its specialist in early modern European history. For someone with my background, Webb said, Mattingly would be an ideal person to work with. He was right.” Robert M. Kingdon, “Garrett Mattingly,” American Scholar 51 (1982): 396. 2 Kingdon, “Mattingly,” 398.

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What draws a younger scholar to train with an established scholar might be a method, a particular conceptualization of periodization, an orientation, a thesis. In 1949, Garrett Mattingly was known not for his later books, and their important historical theses, but for his exhaustive archival research, his electrifying prose that engaged readers of widely differing interests and educations, his capacity to pose questions meaningful beyond the narrow range of specialists, and a clear moral voice. When Kingdon arrived at Columbia, he discovered Mattingly to be “most widely known as a lecturer.” By then, Kingdon was already at Columbia; what had brought him there was Mattingly’s reputation as an “exciting” teacher: as Kingdon learned in personal conferences and seminars, the capacity to pose unexpected questions, to suggest “extraordinarily interesting problems for historical investigation,” to guide his students “to provocative models of analogous research and to standard works of reference, conveying the real excitement possible in historical research.”3 Historical scholarship is often studied in terms of “schools”: a teacher and his students who share a method, a particular conceptualization of periodization, an orientation, a thesis. What distinguishes the students of Robert McCune Kingdon, however, is neither method, nor period, nor country, nor orientation, nor thesis. He did not require either profound moral concern or superb English prose. No, what distinguishes his students is his insistence on that technical foundation: a direct and deep engagement with one’s sources, which must rest upon both linguistic and paleographical training. It is a modest distinction in some ways: there will be no Kingdon thesis worked out among another generation of scholars; there is no Kingdon method refined and applied to other case studies. Yet that modest distinction sets the students of Bob Kingdon apart from all the others trained by the major figures in the first generation of distinctive American Reformation historiography: Harold Grimm, Lewis Spitz, and Heiko Oberman. There is no single vision of the past, no consensus as to periodization, no method, no theme, no discrete body of questions that define some thirty-seven Wisconsin and Iowa Ph.D.’s. Those who worked with Bob Kingdon have in common only that they were required to go ad fontes, to the sources themselves. Yet if we consider, that distinction is not small. While archival research in the field of Reformation history might be said to have its origins in Leopold von Ranke’s histories of the popes and the Reformation, until the Second World War, archivally based history was largely the purview of European scholars. American scholars of the Reformation worked from printed sources, primarily from the 3

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corpus of Martin Luther’s works. To go to the archives has become a commonplace in early modern European history. It was not when Kingdon began his career. And it opened whole new worlds of perceptions, orientations, communities of discourse. In 1956, Robert McCune Kingdon published his Columbia dissertation with the publisher that would become his lifelong venue, Droz. There in the first paragraph of the preface, he indicated both the place that would be the anchor for forty-five years of publications, Geneva, and his modus operandi: It has often been said that the outbreak of the first religious war in France in 1562 was influenced by the activities of the Protestant pastors sent out from the Calvinist city of Geneva. This study undertakes to examine the role played by the organization known as the Geneva Company of Pastors in directing these missionaries. Its object is to test the hypothesis that the Geneva Company directed the religious agitation preceding the war.4 Kingdon encouraged his students to approach those archives with a question. But as he himself indicates here, that question was not to silence the voices his students would find in the archives. Quite the contrary, the voices were to be given weight, to “test” hypotheses derived from contemporary historiography—that modern scholarship was secondary to the archival voices. It was a quiet revolution: Kingdon’s students went to the archives not to find evidence in support of a thesis, but to test a hypothesis that each had developed from his or her reading in the secondary literature. Each student traveled to her or his archive with paleographic skills that Kingdon himself had not had when first he sat down with the registers in Geneva. Each acquired, in other words, the linguistic and paleographic training to hear voices of those long dead. And they heard voices in many different tongues. Trained in paleography and the language of the country where they would do research, all but a handful of his students traveled to archives in Europe. They did not all travel to Geneva, though Kingdon has always been happy to introduce his students to the wealth of materials he found there. Indeed, the great majority of his students did research in places Kingdon himself did not know—again a distinction that shaped scholarship. Rudolph Heinze wanted to work on Tudor royal proclamations: “but, since Kingdon was not a specialist in the early Tudor period and did not claim to know anything about royal proclamations, I was reluctant even to suggest that topic. 4 Robert M. Kingdon, Geneva and the Coming of the Wars of Religion in France 1555–1563 (Geneva: Droz, 1956), preface.

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Introduction However,…[he] not only readily accepted my topic but encouraged it.”5 Kingdon’s students traveled to Geneva’s antithesis, the Vatican archives and the Jesuit archives in Rome, as well as to the Archivi di Stato of Florence and Rome, the Archives and Bibliothèque Nationale of Paris, the British Library, the Hauptstaatsarchiven and Staatsbibliotheken of Munich and Stuttgart, the Staatsarchiv and Zentralbibliothek of Zurich, university libraries of Oxford, Paris, Gdansk, Ingolstadt, Munich, and Tübingen, and the archives of Basel, Constance, Fiesole, Freiburg im Bresgau, Geneva, Languedoc, Milan, Neuchâtel, Nuremberg, and Poland. Kingdon’s students worked on all sorts of documents: formal treatises, both published and manuscript, of theologians and humanists; trial records from civic and ecclesiastical courts; protocols of university senates or town councils. Some read account books, from noble families, or religious houses and orders, or civic institutions, or charitable institutions, or university corporations. Some read pamphlets: polemical, political, commemorative. They drew upon sermons; visitations of Catholic parish priests and Lutheran pastors; acts of national synods in the Netherlands and France. One read the personal papers and memoirs of Roman noble families; another, the cartulaires, levées, notarial books, and archives of the Hôpital d’Orléans. Many read correspondence, between individuals, religious and lay, or between all sorts of corporate bodies, secular and ecclesiastical—private, public, personal, diplomatic. Kingdon’s students read every kind of source: public and private, secular and religious, manuscript and printed, letter and formal treatise, law and devotional manual. To go to the archives is to encounter a cacophony of voices. In the archives one finds not simply Luther’s self-consciously crafted letters and polemical treatises or Calvin’s meticulously structured Institutes, Bellarmine’s subtle engagement with Calvin or Musculus’s carefully negotiated middle way. In the records of cases tried in civic and ecclesiastical courts, one hears beaten wives, angry husbands, curious and judgmental neighbors—carpenters and fishermen, peasants and maids. In the records of charitable institutions, one might just hear the voices of abandoned children, orphans, or children whose families were simply too poor to keep them. Kingdon’s students brought forward the voices of women, of men at the margins, of orphans, as well as those of famous theologians, prosperous Bürger, circumspect magistrates, proud nobles of ancient lineages, and kings. This is one of the legacies of Kingdon’s intellectual generosity: the sheer wealth of 5 Quoted in Jerome Friedman, “Introduction,” in Regnum, Religio et Ratio: Essays Presented to Robert M. Kingdon, ed. Jerome Friedman, Sixteenth Century Essays & Studies, vol. 8 (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1987), 4.

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different voices, the polemicists and the Jesuits, the courtiers and the widows, the chambermaids and wood-gatherers. We can hear them, voices angry and plaintive, their grievances, their sense of entitlement, of rights, as well as their faith, their hopes for salvation, their sense of what is just and good. So, too, Kingdon was open to many different methods of analysis. One could treat those voices aggregately, according to one of the methods of social science. One could just as well treat them singularly, according to one of the methods of intellectual history. Those methods were tested and honed in Kingdon’s seminar, where all his students in residence, from the greenest newcomer to the most advanced dissertator, gathered. Those students, of diverse intellectual predilections, would listen to one another’s work and then critique it: no matter what the approach to the sources, it would be held to the standards “of thoroughness, precision, and attention to detail.”6 The sheer diversity of sources, whose methods of interpretation had been tested and forged in the seminar, opened worlds. From Kingdon’s graduate seminar came studies of working women; divorce; family; political thought of the Catholic League; Jesuits at court; German universities; female religious orders; commemorative literature; the training of Catholic priests; Roman nobility; poor relief in Orléans and Emden; the institutions and the persecution of Huguenots; printers and publishers in Milan; as well as individual studies of Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Robert Bellarmine, Martin Bucer, Cajetan, Pierre Charon, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Wolfgang Musculus, Michael Servetus, Clemens Timpler, and JeanAlphonse Turrettini. Many of Kingdon’s students broke new ground, some dramatically, making audible the voices of women, of artisans’ and peasants’ conceptions of marriage, of “second generation” theologians of the Lutheran and Reformed traditions, of ordinary Catholics, as well as Reformed men and women. They were not bound by chronological scope either, and among the dissertations of Kingdon’s students number some of the earliest studies of “early modern Europe,” extending into the seventeenth, even the eighteenth centuries. If they are bound together, Kingdon’s students have in common only this: they come to their sources not with a thesis those sources are used to shore up, but a question those sources test. The final court of appeals rests with the sources: the voices of the past are preeminent. The respect that Kingdon demanded one show to one’s sources brought forth hundreds of perspectives, many for the first time in early modern studies. In Kingdon’s seminar, the past comprised so many different, often contradictory voices: Servetus as well as Calvin and Beza; Jesuits 6

Friedman, “Introduction,” 3, quoting Robert V. Schnucker.

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Introduction

as well as Turrettini; Swiss as well as French; Italian as well as German; working women and Catholic poor; university men and religious women. The past was not unified, but comprised diverse humanity. In this, Bob Kingdon’s vision of the past resonated in perfect harmony with his graduate training: many perspectives and approaches are necessary to grasp the past in all its complexity, just as the past is composed not of one solitary speaker, but of hundreds upon hundreds of voices—of grievance, of dignity, of power, of anger, of faith, of joy, of puzzlement, of toleration, and of rigid conscience. Something of Kingdon’s intellectual legacy is evidenced in the essays that follow. The papers were first given at a colloquium to honor Bob Kingdon as a graduate teacher, 25–26 February 2000, at the University of Wisconsin. The presenters were chosen from different generations of Kingdon’s graduate students to reflect something of the scope of research he supervised and encouraged. Each one has published at least one monograph of his or her research. In this volume, they are organized generationally. Maryanne Cline Horowitz (Ph.D. 1970) writes on doubt and witches. A. Lynn Martin (Ph.D. 1971) writes on clerical consumption of alcohol in actuality and in public perception. Frederic Baumgartner (Ph.D. 1972) explores the role of astrologers in advising early modern popes on calendar reform. John Patrick Donnelly (Ph.D. 1972) sets forth the early development of the Jesuit curriculum. Raymond Mentzer (Ph.D. 1973) offers findings from his most recent research in France on Reformed liturgy. Merry Wiesner (Ph.D. 1979) reflects upon the course of early modern women’s history, which she was able to pursue with Kingdon’s enthusiastic support before it was a field. Thomas Max Safley (Ph.D. 1980) suggests some of the ways the orphans of Augsburg challenge conventional understanding of early modern families and economy. Amy Nelson Burnett (Ph.D. 1989) offers initial findings from her current research on the pastors in Basel. These essays capture neither the full temporal scope of Kingdon’s mentoring—he has students who are finishing in 2002—nor the geographic and chronological breadth of the research he oversaw. But they suggest something of the diversity of languages, source materials, methods, and visions that Kingdon’s students were encouraged to pursue, but pursue carefully and precisely. Robert McCune Kingdon’s history has many voices, as did his graduate seminars.

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Doubts about “Witches” and “Magicians” in Reginald Scot and Gabriel Naudé Maryanne Cline Horowitz

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n Europe in the 1560s, there was a sudden upsurge in trials for witchcraft and publication of works on demonology. By the 1580s two thinkers were bold enough to question in writing the very premises of the phenomena of witchcraft: an Englishman Reginald Scot (1541–99) in His Discoverie of Witchcraft of 1584 and a Frenchman Michel de Montaigne (1533–92) in some penetrating remarks and jokes in book 3 of his Essais.1 In their disputing the demonologists, Scot and Montaigne were influenced by Agrippa von Nettescheim (1486–1535) and his student Johann Weyer (1515–88) who had spread critical methods of reading and a scientific spirit of evaluating alleged observations.2 Explicitly applying the skeptical mode of Montaigne, Gabriel Naudé (1600–63) in his Apologie pour tous les grands personages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de Magie of 1625 discredited accusations that great authors committed demonic magic. The 1650s reprinting of Scot and the English translation of Naudé are very important

1

Maryanne Horowitz, “Montaigne’s Doubts on the Miraculous and the Demonic Cases of His Own Day,” Regnum, Religio et Ratio: Essays Presented to Robert M. Kingdon, ed. Jerome Friedman (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1987), 81–92. Montaigne’s Essais were popular with women readers; in fact, a woman intellectual kept Montaigne’s Essais in print from 1595 until her death in 1645; see Maryanne Horowitz, “Marie de Gournay, Editor of the Essais of Michel de Montaigne: A Case-Study in Mentor-Protégé Friendship,” Sixteenth Century Journal 17 (Fall 1986), 271– 84. In Paris, Gournay associated with La Mothe le Vayer, a friend of Gabriel Naudé. 2 See Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, On the Vanity and Uncertaintie of Arts and Sciences (1530), trans. J. Sanford, ed. C. M. Dunn (Northridge: California State University Press, 1974). See also Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner’s, 1971); Barbara J. Shapiro, Probability and Certainty in Seventeenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983); and Robert H. West, Reginald Scot and Renaissance Writings on Witchcraft (Boston: Twayne, 1984).

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“Witches” & “Magicians” in Reginald Scot & Gabriel Naudé indicators of the emergence of rationalist chronological histories of thought3 and of the discrediting of demonological allegations and witchcraft trials. Scot’s and Montaigne’s approaches stand in striking contrast to Jean Bodin’s De la Daemonomanie des sorciers, which appeared in five editions from 1580 to 1582, as well as in Latin as De Magorum Daemonomani. Bodin (1530–96), already famous in the 1580s for his books on history and government, took an extremist stand in suggesting that a magistrate who refuses to try witches should be tried himself, and he closed with an attempted refutation of Doctor Johann Weyer: “Refutation Des Opinions de Jean Wier.”4 In the 1580s,Weyer’s views and the cause he represented—doctoring women rather than trying them for witchcraft—desperately needed defenders! Known as “Weyer” in German, “Wier” in Dutch, “Wierus” in Latin, this physician born in Brabant, who studied under Agrippa von Nettesheim, is an ambiguous hero in the history of women and of witchcraft. While a physician in the duchy of Cleves on the Rhine ruled by Duke William V, Weyer published his first Latin work, De prestigiis daemonum (On the illusions and impostures of devils), in 1563. Weyer’s names appeared on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum of 1570, and the Protestant University of Marburg burned the work. 5 While scholars might not cite him, they read him and his later editions included his additional works: an apology against detractors, a catalogue of demons and their attributes, and a summary De lamiis liber (On Witches).6 Following Duke William’s shift from Erasmian toleration policies, Weyer retired from his post in 1578; in 1581 witch-hunting with trials and torture conspicuously resumed in Cleves. Weyer lived under the protection of Countess Anna of Techlenburg until his death in 1588.7

3 Maryanne Horowitz, “Gabriel Naudé’s Apology for Great Men Suspected of Magic: Variations in Editions from 1625 to 1775,” in History of Heresy in Early Modern Europe, ed. John Christian Laursen (New York: Palgrave, 2002), 61–75. 4 Jean Bodin, “Refutation Des Opinions de Jean Wier,” De la demonomanie des sorciers (Paris, 1581), and idem, On the Demon-Mania of Witches, trans. Randy Scott and Jonathan Pearl (University of Toronto: Center for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 1995). This translation does not contain the “Refutation Des Opinions.” 5 John Weber, “Introduction” to Witches, Devils, and Doctors in Renaissance Literature, trans. of Johan Weyer’s De praestigiis daemonum by John Shea et al. (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1991), xliii–xliv. 6 Johan Weyer, De Praestigiis daemonum, including Liber apologeticus and Pseudomonarchia daemonum (Basel, 1577), sig. A113. 7 E. T. Withington, “Dr. John Weyer and the Witch Mania,” in vol. 40 of Articles on Witchcraft, Magic and Demonology: The Literature of Witchcraft, ed. Brian Levack (New York: Garland, 1992), 221.

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Between 1563 and 1568, Weyer’s De Praestigiis daemonum appeared in four Latin editions and French and German translations. An enlarged Latin edition appeared in 1578, and was translated into French in 1579. Weyer holds jurists and theologians responsible before the Last Judgment for their errors in imprisoning and torturing “poor old women” on the flimsy basis of malicious accusations.8 In the 1580s, when both Protestants and Catholics were conducting witchcraft trials, anyone reading Weyer would have to consider the possibility that some of the behavior alleged to be witchcraft was symptomatic of the disease of dementia. Weyer’s work on demonology has the ambiguous merit of raising issue with the belief that “childish old hags whom one calls witches or sorcerers can do any harm to men and animals” and of suggesting as an alternative explanation that women are particularly prone to melancholy, or in his words “their imagination—inflamed by the demons in ways not understandable to us—and the torture of melancholy makes them only fancy that they have caused all sorts of evil.”9 He also suggests that the various drugs witches spread on their bodies or ingested made them believe that they could fly or have orgies with the devil.10 Recent research suggests that hallucinogenic substances may have been involved.11 The overall thrust of Weyer’s approach is to suggest that the accused who confessed did believe that they had participated in the alleged behaviors. In the 1580s, the Weyer-Bodin controversy is a cause célèbre, which helps provoke Scot’s and Montaigne’s very forward-looking, outspoken doubts about witchcraft and concerns about witch persecutors. Scot utilizes Weyer’s text leniently and praises him directly as the “most learned in our age” and “the most famous and noble physician.”12 Also, in 1583 the National Synod of Reims cited Weyer in recommending that in cases of alleged possession, intelligent men be called in to examine the possessed, who might benefit from doctoring rather than from exorcism.13

8Weyer, De Praestigiis daemonum, trans. Shea, bk. 6, chap. 4, p. 490. 9Weyer, “Dedicatory Epistle to Duke William of Cleves,” in European Witchcraft, ed. E. William Monter (New York: Wiley, 1969), 39. 10J. J. Cobban, Jan Wier, Devils, Witches and Magic (Philadelphia: Dorrance, 1976), 77. 11Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath (New York: Pantheon,1991), 303– 4; M. J. Harner, “The Role of Hallucinogenic Plants in European Witchcraft,” Hallucinogens and Shamanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 123–50. 12Reginald Scot, The Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1594), ed. Brinsley Nicholson (Totowa, N.J.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1973), bk. 5, chap. 9, and bk. 3, chap. 1. 13Cobban, Jan Wier, 149. For a critical analysis of exorcism as a “defined doctrine of divine apostolic faith,” see Henry A. Kelly, The Devil, Demonology, and Witchcraft: The Development of Christian Beliefs in Evil Spirits (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1968), 121.

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“Witches” & “Magicians” in Reginald Scot & Gabriel Naudé

The modern fields of women’s studies, psychology, and psychiatry should reexamine the impact on women of the alternative explanations of Weyer versus those of Jakob Sprenger and Heinrick Kramer, the authors of the 1486 Malleus Malificarum (Witches’ hammer).14 The latter is generally criticized as a clerical source for viewing witchcraft as heresy, while Weyer is praised for presenting a medical explanation of witchlike behavior. This is especially apparent in Weyer’s De Praestigiis Daemonum, book 3, chapter 6, “Concerning the Credulity and Frailty of the Female Sex,” a potpourri of standard misogyny, and book 6, chapter 22, “That Women Should Be Punished Less than Men” quotes Euripides’ Hercules purens:; “Women are somehow more pitiable than men.”15 Both the Sprenger/ Kramer image of the witch and the Weyer image of the witch borrow from the misogynist learned descriptions of womankind,16 but each applies that lore to women in a different manner. The Sprenger/Kramer image of a witch suggests woman’s malevolent power while Weyer’s image of an alleged witch suggests women’s deranged delusions. Weyer views alleged witches as relatively harmless, weak individuals, while Sprenger and Kramer view witches as powerful individuals capable of doing great harm. Weyer considers women as particularly prone to mental illness, especially to delusions of power they do not hold; Sprenger and Kramer consider women as particularly prone to making a pact with the devil to actually work evil together. While the Malleus Malificarum categorizes such women as criminals, deserving execution, De Praestigiis Daemonum categorizes such women as sick, deserving doctoring and cures. Still, the merit of Weyer’s judgment is that these women should not be executed.17 Montaigne comes to the same conclusion on less misogynist grounds in linking witchcraft with other heresy charges: “it is putting a very high price on one’s conjectures to have a man roasted alive because of them.”18 A careful reading of Weyer shows the mixture of demonic and natural causes in his analysis of mental illness, contrasting with the rationalist interpretation of Weyer that has permeated the history of psychiatry. In 1939, G. Zilbourg’s ratio14Jacob Sprenger and Heinrich Kramer, Malleus Maleficarum, trans. Montague Summers (London, 1928). See also Jean R. Brink, Allison P. Coudert, and Maryanne C. Horowitz, eds., Politics of Gender in Early Modern Europe (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1989), pt. 1, “The Witch as a Focus of Cultural Misogyny.” 15Weyer, De Praestigiis daemonum, trans. Shea, bk. 6, chap. 22, p. 540. 16Stuart Clark, Thinking with Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), chap. 8, “Women and Witchcraft,” 106–33. 17Weyer, De Praestigiis daemonum, trans. Shea, bk. 6, chap. 22, p. 540. 18Michel de Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 1962), 3.11.1010; Montaigne, Complete Works of Montaigne, trans. Donald M. Frame (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1965), bk. 3, chap. 11, p. 790.

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nalist interpretation of Weyer held him up as the founder of modern psychiatry who attributed natural causes to the abnormal behaviors alleged as witchcraft; Zilbourg’s interpretation of the witches of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as hysterics or schizophrenics influenced Alexander and Selesnick’s History of Psychiatry. Recent historians have pointed out that sixteenth-century witnesses distinguished the mentally ill from witches19 and that many alleged witches did not show symptoms of mental illness.20 Historians of psychiatry have often confused witches and demoniacs when canon law deems demonic possession as involuntary and a form of insanity, treatable by exorcism.21 Such historians claim women were accused more than men since witches were hysterics and women are more prone to hysteria; Nicholas P. Spanos shows the self-perpetuating gender stereotypes in that circular reasoning.22 Rather than prove insanity, confessions show the power of interrogation and intimidation tactics, threats of torture, or sustained torture. Weyer found the flaws in the victims rather than in the cultural conditioning and social forces which distorted the testimonies of those who were unlucky enough to be accused. Long before recent historians questioned the mental illness stereotype of Weyer, Reginald Scot, aware of Bodin’s use of Hippocrates and Galen to suggest that women are less prone to melancholy than men, provided evidence from Erastus of melancholia among witches23 and explained the witches’ confessions by delving into the social psychology of contemporary neighborhoods. Scot explains how individuals might associate their own behavior, such as cursing, with someone else’s subsequent misfortune. Some who confessed to being witches arrived at that conclusion in the same way their accusers did, as summed up by Nicholas Spanos, “by applying to themselves the same criteria for the recognition of a witch that were used by the rest of the community.” 24 19G. R. Quaif, Godly Zeal and Furious Rage: The Witch in Early Modern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), 205. 20See Franz G. Alexander and Sheldon T. Selesnick, The History of Psychiatry: An Evaluation of Psychiatric Thought and Practice from Prehistoric Times to the Present (New York: Harper & Row, 1966); T. J. Schoenman, “The Role of Mental Illness in the European Witch Hunts of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Journal of the History of Behavioral Sciences 13 (1977): 347; Nicholas Spanos, “Witchcraft in Histories of Psychiatry: A Critical Analysis and an Alternative Conceptualization,” Psychological Bulletin 85 (1978): 425; and Charles Clark, “Witchcraze in 17th-Century Europe,” 23–25. 21Spanos, “Witchcraft in Histories,” 419. 22Spanos, “Witchcraft in Histories,” 425. 23Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk. 3, chaps. 9–11, pp. 41–46. 24Spanos, “Witchcraft in Histories,” 431; Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk.1, chap. 3, p. 6. On conflict of neighbors, see Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).

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In his book l, Scot defends alleged or accused witches by showing the delusions of their pretended power—both self-delusions and the delusions of their persecutors. He accuses the witchmongers of “intollerable tyrannie,” “barbarous crueltie,” and “plaine knaverie” in attributing to the old women the “power of the Creator.”25 Scot presents a naturalistic theory of causation: “if all the women in the world were witches and all the priests conjurors, they could not change the rains or the winds.”26 He describes the practice of resorting to “coosening witches” for cures and miracles on the order of Jesus Christ’s miracles in the Gospels.27 With a sensitivity to social psychological context, he describes those likely to be accused as “women which be commonly old, lame, blear-eied, pale, fowle, and full of wrinkles; poore, sullen, superstious, and papists; or such as knowe no religion; in whose drousie minds the divell hath goten a fine seat; so as, what mischeefe, micheance, calamitie, or slaughter is brought to passe, they are easilie persuaded the same is done by themselves.”28 Scot describes the popular culture in which both the old woman and her accuser imagine she is the cause of evils befalling her associates.29 Fearful of such a woman, many people give in to her begging, but sometimes a neighbor reproves her and hears her curse in response. “Doubtlesse (at length) some of hir neighbors die, or fall sick; or some of their children are visited with diseases that vex them strangelie…. Which by ignorant parents are supposed to be the vengeance of witches. Yea and their opinions and conceit are confirmed and maintained by unskillful physicians….”30 The suffering parents then conclude that the woman’s curses are the cause of the illness. Furthermore, Scot explains how the witch comes to accept the community’s explanation. Called before a system of so-called justice, and knowing full well that she has often been exasperated by neighbors and cursed them, she is interrogated and led to see that this time her wish, curse, or incantation came true. Again viewing as fictional the powers that witchcraft manuals attributed to witches, as, in fact, pagan belief that contradicts Christian faith, Scot proclaims “and so confesseth that she (as a goddes) hath brought such things to pass. Wherein, not onelie she, but the accuser, and also the Justice are fowlie deceived and abused.”31 25

Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk. 1, chap. 9, p. 14. Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk.1, chap. 1, p. 2. 27 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk.1, chap. 2, p. 3. 28 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk. 2, chap. 3, p. 5. 29 Maryanne Horowitz, ed., Race, Gender, and Rank: Early Modern Ideas of Humanity, Library of the History of Ideas, 8 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 1992), ix–xx. 30 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk.1, chap. 4, p. 7. 31 Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk.1, chap. 3, p. 6. 26

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The title page of the 1651 reprinting of Scot summarizes his intent: Discovery of Witchcraft: Proving the common opinions of Witches contracting with Divels, Spirits, or Familiars; and their power to kill, torment, and consume the bodies of men women, and children, or other creatures by diseases or otherwise; their flying in the Air, &c. To be but imaginary Erronious conceptions and novelties; Wherein also, the lewde unchristian practices of Witchmongers, upon aged, melancholy, ignorant, and superstious people in extorting confessions, by inhumane terrors and tortures is notably detected….With many other things opened that have long lain hidden; though very necessary to be known for the undeceiving of Judges, Justices, and Juries, and for the preservation of poor, aged, deformed, ignorant people; frequently taken, arraigned, condemned, and executed for Witches, when according to a right understanding, and a good conscience, Physick, Food, and necessaries should be administered to them.”32 This mid-seventeenth-century title clarifies that Scot was concerned for the danger of the witchmongers rather than of the accused, and that he recommended judicial restraint and natural remedies. In the essay “Des Boyteux” (On cripples) that appears first in his 1588 edition, Michel de Montaigne discusses Weyer’s distinction between sorcery as the crime of poisoning and the popular and learned conceptions of witchcraft. Weyer, aided by Hebrew scholar Andreas Masius, translated the biblical condemnation of Exodus 22:18 “Thou shalt not suffer a chasaph to live” as “Thou shalt not suffer a poisoner to live.” Bodin, translating the Hebrew chasaph (now usually translated as “sorcerer”) into Latin as malephiciam (witch), condemned Weyer’s untraditional translation, and reemphasized the Malleus Malificarum’s definition of the witch’s crime as making a pact with the devil. Bodin views sorcery as a crime against divine law punishable by death even if no physical act against animal or human has been committed. With unusual brevity, Montaigne refers to Weyer’s definition by stating: To kill men, we should have sharp and luminous evidence; and our life is too real and essential to vouch for these supernatural and fantastic accidents. As for druggings and poisonings, I put them out of my reckoning; these are homicides, and of the worst sort. However, even in such matters they say that we must not be satisfied with confessions, for such persons have sometimes been known to accuse 32Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), v.

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themselves of having killed people who are found to be alive and healthy.33 Montaigne spoofs confessions with this example of obviously false confession. Scot also favors Weyer over Bodin in differentiating between the behaviors described in biblical texts and refraining from translating the Hebrew chasaph as witchcraft as it was understood in the sixteenth century.34 Scot declares: “But as for our old women, that are said to hurt children with their eies, or lambs with their lookes, or that pull downe the moone out of heaven, or make so foolish a bargaine, or doo such homage to the divell; you shall not read in the bible of any such witches, or of any such actions imputed to them.”35 Montaigne spoofs popular spottings of witches, which might very well have been aided by recent French publications of books on witches, following the first one: Lambert Daneau’s of 1564: 36 My ears are battered by a thousand stories…. How much more natural and likely it seems to me that two men are lying than that one man should pass with the winds in twelve hours from the east to the west! How much more natural that our understanding should be carried away from its base by the volatility of our untracked mind than that one of us, in flesh and bone, should be wafted up a chimney on a broomstick by a strange spirit! 37 Montaigne then describes his own opportunity to observe and question alleged witches awaiting trial. He views self-delusion and mental illness as the main mark on ten or twelve old women confessing witchcraft and showing “some barely perceptible marks.”38 Among the prisoners was “one old woman, indeed a real witch in ugliness and deformity, long very famous in that profession. I saw both proofs and free confessions, and some barely perceptible mark or other on this wretched old woman, and I talked and asked questions all I wanted…. In the end, and in all conscience, I would have prescribed them rather hellebore than hemlock. Justice has its own corrections proper to these remedies.”39 After examining the witches, Montaigne’s prescription is in the tradition of Weyer: hellebore, a herb associated 33Montaigne, Complete Works, 789. 34Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk. 6, chap. 1, p. 89. 35Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk. 5, chap. 9, p. 88. 36Joseph

Klaits, Servants of Satan: The Age of the Witch Hunt (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 70. 37Montaigne, Oeuvres completes, bk. 3, chap. 12; Complete Works, ed. Frame, 799. 38Montaigne, Oeuvres completes, bk. 2, chap. 11; Complete Works, ed. Frame, 372. 39Montaigne, Oeuvres completes, bk. 3, chap. 11; Complete Works, ed. Frame, 790.

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in medieval herbals with the cure of insanity. In a post-1588 addition, Montaigne saw Weyer as similar to the ancient historian Livy, who said “It seemed to be a matter rather of madness than of crime.”40 After this example, Montaigne questions the wisdom of using opinion and conjecture as the basis for deciding to execute someone.41 However, soon after, he tries to protect himself, declaring himself not a magistrate but an ordinary fellow, just harmlessly musing. “If anyone should put my musing into account to the prejudice of the pettiest law, or opinion, or custom of his village, he would do himself a great wrong, and great a one to me.”42 In the wake of increased witch trials and vernacular demonological tracts, including Bodin’s Daemonomanie with its “Refutation des opinions de Jean Wier,” both the Englishman Scot and the Frenchman Montaigne expressed open skepticism about individual cases of demonological claims. Both use humor their writings; both use some common authoritative sources, such as Augustine’s City of God, which distinguishes New Testament miracles from the claims of pagans in the Roman Empire; Vives’s Renaissance edition, which Montaigne utilized, shared some of Agrippa’s skeptical humor.43 Likewise, Lucianic humor, as in Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, is evident in both Scot and Montaigne. In the 1580s, to deny the existence of fallen angels or demons might bring one to a trial for heresy. Montaigne avoids use of the word “demon,” for which he may not have an existent referent, while describing in detail the old hags or the gullible who pass on stories. Scot writes a long treatise of sixteen books thoroughly examining and questioning all facets of the evidence in witchcraft trials. Scot excels in presenting the social psychology of the witchcraft craze—the social interactions whereby some of the accused created self-identities compatible with the bizarre accusations. Nevertheless, similar to Weyer, who attaches to his book the Pseudomonarchia daemonia, Scot attaches to his book A Discourse upon Divels and Spirits, which airs all the views about demons, recognizing in the second sentence, “For that being confessored or doubted of, the eternitie of the soule is either affirmed or denied.”44 For both Weyer and Scot, one may well wonder whether the intent is 40Montaigne, Complete Works, ed. Frame, 790. 41Montaigne, Oeuvres complètes, bk. 3, chap. 11, p. 1010; Complete Works, ed. Frame, 790. 42Montaigne, Complete Works, ed. Frame, 790. 43Maryanne Horowitz, “Drogue médicinale ou vieux conte: L’histoire et la justice chez Montaigne, Bodin et saint Augustin,” in Montaigne et l’histoire, ed. Claude-Gilbert Dubois (Bordeaux: Université Press, 1991), esp. 176. Scot uses Augustine for the same example of human-animal transformation; see Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), bk. 5, chap. 6, pp. 76–77. See Augustine, City of God: With the Learned Comments of Io Lodovicus Vives, 1st English ed. (London, 1620). 44Scot, Discourse upon Divels and Spirits, chap. 1, p. 411.

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to expose the absurdity of numerous theories of demons or to uphold a tradition of demonology; such judgment would be relative to the eyes of the beholder. Sydney Anglo interprets Scot as a singular pre-Enlightenment rationalist doubting demonology, while Leland Estes views Scot as an Erasmian Protestant accepting the spiritual existence of demons.45 Although Scot is more rationalist than Weyer, both contributed to the early modern science of demonology,46 a science Montaigne ridicules. Scot is not alone in the sixteenth century; Montaigne’s passages on those “carried away” by imagination are very similar in tone to Scot’s. Nevertheless, the early editions of Scot’s book are today rare, for they were confiscated and burned; both he and Weyer were attacked in 1597 in the Daemonologie of King James VI of Scotland. To explain why there are twenty women to each man practicing witchcraft, King James VI reverts to the model of Eve as “frailer than man” and “easier to be intrapped in these gross snares of the Devill,”47 and he makes a point of declaring many witches to not have symptoms of melancholia.48 Similar to Bodin, who condemned anyone who would hesitate to try witches, James condemns Scot and Weyer together: “Scot an Englishman, is not ashamed in publike print to deny, that ther can be such a thing as Witch-craft…the other called Wierus…sets out a publick apologie for al these craftesfolkes, whereby, procuring for their impunitie, he plainly bewrayes himselfe to have bene one of that profession.”49 In 1625, twenty-five-year-old Gabriel Naudé published Apologie pour tous les grands personages qui on esté faussement soupçonnez de Magie.50 Demonic 45Sydney Anglo, “Melancholia

and Witchcraft: The Debate between Wier, Bodin, and Scot,” and Leland L. Estes, “Reginald Scot and his Discovrie of Witchcraft,” and in Folie et Déraison à la Renaissance (Brussels: Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 1976), 1–31, 174–86. 46Stuart Clark, “The Scientific Status of Demonology,” Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984); see also Clark, Thinking with Demons, 198–203, 211–12 (Clark views Scot as stepping beyond demonology by denying corporeality in demons. I think Scot is reacting against Bodin’s corporeal theory, both of demons and of the human sou); and on Bodin, see Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998), pp. 189–90. 47King James I, Daemonologie (1597), ed. G. B. Harbison, Elizabethan and Jacobean Quartos (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1966), 44. 48King James I, Daemonologie, 30. 49King James I, Daemonologie, xi–xii. 50Gabriel Naudé, Apologie pour tous les grands personages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de Magie (Paris, 1625; repr., Westmead, England: Gregg International Publishers, 1972); this reprint retains the error of the last pages of chap. 22, pp. 641–49 being numbered 607–15. Naudé’s Apologie was published in many editions, including an English translation by J. Davies, The History of magick, by way of apology, for all the wise men who have unjustly been reputed magicians, from the creation to the present age (London, 1657); and Naudé, Apologie pour tous les grands personages qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de Magie, Dernière Edition où l’on a ajoûté quelques remarques (Amsterdam: Pierre Humbert, 1712).

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magic was well established as a heresy in the seventeenth century; Naudé argued against so-called historians and demonologists from a wide range of religious viewpoints who were sure that demonic magicians continued to be very active. Naudé applied the popular vogue of using vegetative symbolism to point to truths growing within the forests of misleading texts, likened to all trees devoid of spreading branches of knowledge: “Tedious and fruitlesse discourses are like Forrests of Cypresse trees, fair and flourishing to the eye, but bearing no fruit suitable thereof.”51 Naudé makes several references to English books and events, and his book was translated into English. In the first edition of 1625, Naudé wishes that he had John Dee’s book defending Roger Bacon, whose “magic,” Dee attests, uses natural operations.52 Naudé cites as a precedent John Denys’s “Apology,” a statement of his own defense in a London trial of 1570.53 J. Davies’s 1657 English translation of Naudé’s Apologie seems most appropriate during the English interlude of diverse Protestant sects and following the 1651 republication of Scot’s 1584 skeptical Discoverie of Witchcraft. Scot’s work derides “imaginary Erronious conceptions and novelties,” and is tied together with Scot’s A Discourse upon Divels and Spirits, which juxtaposes one absurd demonology after another.54 Four years after the English publication of Naudé’s Apologie, John Evelyn’s translation of Naudé’s Advis, Advice for Establishing a Library appeared. The popularity in England of Naudé’s genre of telling the tales of great men practicing magic is evident in William Godwin’s 1834 Lives of the Necromancers or An Account of the Most Eminent Persons in Successive Ages, Who Have Claimed for Themselves, or to Whom Has Been Imputed by Others, the Exercise of Magical Power. Reading Naudé’s Apologie or Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, one finds a scoffing and satirical tone dismissing devilish tales, while one opening Godwin finds a recitation of reports of the devil’s deeds. A Capuchin friar, Jacques d’Autun (Jacques Chevannes), published a polemic against Naudé’s Apologie in 1671, “an apology for the belief of scholars who have

51Naudé,

Apologie (Paris, 1625, London, 1657), sig. A5v; (Amsterdam: Pierre Humbert, 1712), 7v: “ces longs & inutiles discours…une forest de Cyprés, dont les arbre sont beaux & verdoyans, & neanmoins ne produisent aucun fruit de valeur….” For evidence of an influential language of vegetative growth in the French Renaissance, see Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge, especially chap. 7 and epilogue. 52Naudé, Apologie (Paris, 1625), chap. 17, p. 488. 53Naudé, Apologie (Paris, 1625), chap. 5, p. 79; (London, 1657), p. 38. 54Scot, Discoverie of Witchcraft (repr., 1584), ed. with introduction by Brinsley Nicholson (London, 1651).

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“Witches” & “Magicians” in Reginald Scot & Gabriel Naudé justly accused great persons of magic.”55 D’Autun speaks with the authority of firsthand experience in Burgundy in 1644 and 1645 during a popular witchcraze epidemic.56 With an allusion to magistrates’ fascination with Naudé’s book and recommendations, D’Autun agrees with an intendant of Colbert’s inquiry into the magistrates of Dijon in 1648 and 1649 that they preferred their books more than their trade; D’Autun quotes a magistrate saying “one must not attribute the vexation of the possessed to a malice of evil spirits.”57 While Montaigne’s “Apologie” uses Pyrrhonian arguments to question Aristotelian confidence in sense knowledge, Gabriel Naudé’s Apologie enhances the status of investigations of natural philosophy (including those popularly called natural magic) by disassociating philosophical practices from alleged demonic magical practices. Naudé discredits accusations of demonic magic as ignorance or malice. Naudé lumps together Socrates’s “daemon” and the genii of Giralamo Cardano or Julius Caesar Scaliger as claims of theurgic magic, aided by an angel, and he dismisses them as either exaggerated humility about their own natural powers or boasting.58 Naudé thus fashions himself as a “sensible” man, borrowing the techniques of his favorite French authors Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron to ridicule books reporting demonic or theurgic magic.59 While spoofing most allegations of demonic magic, Naudé does uphold the Catholic belief in occurrences of demonic magic. His evidence is mainly biblical, demonic action against holy figures: the magicians of Pharaoh according to Moses; Jannes, Jambres, and Elymas according to St. Paul; Simon Magus according to St. Peter, and Cynops according to St. John the Evangelist. Nevertheless, 55Jacques d’Autun, L’Incredulité sçavante, et la crédulité ignorante: Au sujet des magicians et les sorciers. Avecque la Reponse à un livre intitulé Apologie pour tous les Grands Personnnages, qui ont esté faussement soupçonnez de Magie (Lyon, 1671), 935–1108, entitled internally “Apologie, pour la creance des sçavants qui ont justement accusé les grands Personnages de Magie. Pour répondre à l’Apologie de Monsieur Naudé, les a voulu justifier”; see also Lorenzo Bianchi, Rinascimento e libertismo: Studi su Gabriel Naudé (Naples: Bibliopolis, 1996), 36 n. 21. 56Robert Mandrou, Magistrat et sorciers en France au XVIIe siècle: Une Analyse de psychologie historique (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1980), 372–73, 385–86, 549. 57D’Autun, L’Incredulité, 470–80: “repliqua le sénateur…on ne doit pas attribuer la vexation des possédez à la malice des esprits rebelles.” 58Naudé, Apologie (London, 1657), chap. 13, pp. 143–44, 147, 163; (Amsterdam, 1712), 241–46. See also Ian Maclean, “The Interpretation of Natural Signs: Cardano’s De subtilitate Versus Scaliger’s Exrcitationes,” in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 231–52. 59See Horowitz, Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge, chaps. 9 and 10 on Montaigne and Charron respectively. On free-thinkers Naudé, Marie de Gournay, and La Mothe le Vayer, see Horowitz, “French Free-Thinkers in the First Decades of the Edict of Nantes,” Early Modern Skepticism and the Origins of Toleration, ed. Alan Levine (Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 1999), 77–102.

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citing demonic magicians Dr. Faustus and the Jew Zedechias and judgments during the reign of Emperor Charles V, Naudé upholds the condemnation of magicians in the Code, Lege 7, Cod. de malef. & Mathem.60 Naudé omits from his book the conspicuous and controversial topic of women accused of witchcraft or magic. The only exception is his discussion of the malice of the English in accusing Joan of Arc of witchcraft, in contrast to the view of her in Valerandus Varanius whom he quotes and in de Langey & du Haillan.61 Naudé’s book focuses on clearing men’s reputations—famous historic men of influence.62 Nevertheless, assuming his readers’ awareness of the tradition from Weyer to Montaigne of viewing self-delusion as a characteristic of witch confessions,63 Naudé applies similar explanations to the claims for Socrates’ daemon or Cardano’s genie. He cites as a major source for popular imagination on magic, Malleus maleficarum, by Sprenger and Institoris, which initiated the late-fifteenth-century redefinition of witchcraft as a heresy and the grave increase in trials and executions of an assortment of alleged witches, wizards, and magicians. Many of the demonographers Naudé cites, especially Weyer and Bodin, dispute the causes while affirming the Malleus maleficarum’s opinion that women are more prone to cooperating with demons than are men. Naudé points out the gullibility of these demonographers. In his chapter 7, on heresy, he treats inquisitors Sprenger and Institoris as practitioners of the same fictional genre as Lucian and Apuleius: they are all tale-tellers. Evoking the image of storytellers tying stories together, he suggests that Malleus should not be taken any more seriously than Johannes Nider. Nider’s Formicarius, written 1435 and printed 1475, and often literally tied to the end of the Malleus (first printed in 1486), is a dialogue between a theologian and a skeptic.64 Naudé suggests returning to the more limited pre-1486 definition of heresy. “Sorcières et magiciennes” in his 1625 index leads only to alleged ancient enchantresses like Circe in Homer. In his 1649

60

Naudé, Apologie, chap. 2, pp. 56–57. Naudé, Apologie (Paris, 1712), chap. 7, p. 73. To develop the reader’s capacity to judge, Naudé provides his historical evidence: Valerandus Varanius, De Gest. Johann virg., and de Langey & du Haillan, Art militaire. 62 Of each thinker’s statements on “man,” intellectual historians need ask, “To what extent is the discourse also about “woman”? See Maryanne Horowitz, “The Woman Question in Renaissance Texts,” History of European Ideas, Special Issue on Women’s History, ed. Karen Offen, 8, 4/5 (1987): 587–95, and idem, “The Image of God in Man—Is Woman Included?” Harvard Theological Review 72 (May-Dec. 1979): 175–206. 63 Naudé, Apologie (Amsterdam, 1712), chap. 7, p. 73. Naudé borrows techniques from Montaigne’s applied skepticism; see Horowitz, “Montaigne’s Doubts,” 81–92, esp. 88–90. 64 Johannes Nider, Formicarius, ed. Jakob Wimpheling (Argentorati: J. Schott, 1517). 61

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Le Mascurat, Naudé directly questions witch confessions prominent in Loudun and Louviers in 1643, as well as those of 1491 in Arras.65 Naudé follows the style of Montaigne. In his essay “On Cripples,” Montaigne echoes Augustine’s skepticism on pagan boastful claims, especially evident in the Vives edition of the City of God, 18.18, to spoof Bodin’s gullibility about Apuleius’s tale of a man metamorphosed into an ass carrying a burden.66 Naudé cites Nider to cast some doubt on the Malleus and, like Montaigne, he extrapolates to Bodin’s Démonomanie. While Naudé cites the recently deceased English King James I for refuting Bodin’s Démonomanie,67 Naudé concludes that it would be a waste of time to refute imaginary tales. Naudé distrusts lists of books attributed to authors known for great books, stating that booksellers profit in selling such a falsely listed acclaimed work to a person building a library of great authors. Considering all the Aristotle texts that are now deemed pseudo-Aristotle, including the popular eighteenth-century pamphlet Aristotle’s Masterpiece,68 one appreciates Naudé’s concern for false attribution and misinterpretation of author’s viewpoint from merely a title; for example, Necromancie by Roger Bacon.69 Naudé’s Apologie attempts to teach his readers to evaluate evidence critically. In his preface, Naudé discusses characteristics of these poor readers, the accusers: their reading of superstition or making superstitious observations, as well as their malice, emulation, ignorance, gullibility, or lack of good judgment. Naudé claims that both demonographers and historians embellish their stories beyond what they know to be true or put a new name to an old tale. He considers that the printing press multiplies the problem by spreading misleading information. To judge, one needs good authors and logic; in practice he is suggesting a scientific 65Mandrou, Magistrats et Sorciers, 124, 136–37, 281, 298–99, 310–11. 66Horowitz, “Drogue médicinale ou vieux conte,” pp.173–181. 67Naudé, Apologie (Paris, 1625), ch. 7, p.127. King James I/VI, in his 1597

Daemonologie, xi, criticizes the doubters of most witchcraft accusations, Weyer and Scot. Nevertheless, in his 1625Apologie, Naudé seems aware of James’s new skepticism. In the 1620s King James witnessed cases of accusers taught to accuse others of demonic witchcraft and demonic possession and came under the influence of Francis Bacon, Florio, and Dr. William Harvey. See Russell Hope Robbins, The Encyclopedia of Witchcraft and Demonology (New York: Crown, 1959), 278–79, and summary of recent scholarship in Diane Purkiss, The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations (London: Routledge, 1996), 201 and nn. 4–6. King James enjoyed a court performance of George Ruggles, Ignoramus, which ridicules gullibility on the occasion of an exorcism. 68Maryanne Horowitz, “The ‘Science’ of Embryology before the Discovery of the Ovum,” in Connecting Spheres, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 107, and idem, “Aristotle and Woman,” Journal of History of Biology 9, no. 2 (1976), 183–213. 69Naudé, Apologie (Amsterdam, 1712), chap. 6, p. 67 (book spelling of London, 1657, ed.).

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approach to history. The good authors are Seneca, Quintillian, Plutarch, Charron, Montaigne, Vives, and the historians Thucydides, Tacitus, Guicciardini, Comines, and Sleidan.70 In his conclusion, Naudé explains that false opinions are maintained by never judging but just consenting to popular opinion, transcribing word for word what was said before, and specifically accepting ridiculous tales by Marin Antoine Del Rio, Jean Bodin, Pierre de Lancre, and Johann Georg Godelmann. He recommends that one read Vives for dismissing wild tales on Christian miracles spread by Protestants.71 On demonographers, he concludes by applying the requisite Catholic belief in the devil as an explanation for the devilish accusations against the innocent: “it commonly happens that they prove mere calumnies, weakly grounded suspicions, and indeed but vaine, light and inconsiderate words; which the Devil doth insensibly impose on the good names of the innocent, to the end they may one day prove occasions that men shall not be able to discern and punish the guilty.”72 The Interregnum period in British history witnessed an outpouring of diverse publications, including the earliest chronological, rationalist histories of philosophy. Naudé’s rationalist history of philosophy is precedent to two works of 1655: Thomas Stanley, History of Philosophy, and Georg Horn, Historia philosophica. The 1657 English publication of Naudé’s The History of magick, by way of apology, as well as the 1651 reprint of Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, should be included in accounts of the beginnings of rationalist history of philosophy.73 In discussing the ancient philosophers Zoroaster, Pythagoras, Democritus, Empedocles, and medieval philosophers/theologians, Naudé argues that a person of such stature does not defend demonic magic in books or practice it in life. Likewise, he initiates the tendency to view the succession of natural philosophers as distinct from the succession of occult philosophers. Only in our generation have historians of science and historians of philosophy accepted and tried to comprehend the amazing overlap of scientific and 70Naudé, Apologie (Amsterdam, 1712), chap. 1, pp. 1–14. 71Naudé, Apologie (Amsterdam, 1712), chap. 22, p. 460–70. 72Naudé,

Apologie (London, 1651), 305–6 (Amsterdam, 1712), 470 (Paris, 1625), 615: “l’on trouve ordinairement qu ce ne sont rien que pures calónies, que soupçons mal fondez, & paroles vaines, legeres & estourdies, que le Diable faict sensiblement glisser sur la bonne renommee des innocens, afin qu’elles soient causes quelque jour que l’on ne puisse recognoistre ny punit les coulpables.” His statement of belief in reality of demonic magic appears also in the Amsterdam edition, 22–23. 73Brian Copenhaver and Charles B. Schmidt, Renaissance Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Copenhaver and Schmidt cite Stanley and Horn as the turning point, stressing the issue of the work’s title; ibid., 331–32.

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“Witches” & “Magicians” in Reginald Scot & Gabriel Naudé occult mentalities in early modern Europe.74 Now it is possible to recognize Weyer’s contribution to science in diagnosing mental illness among some of those accused of witchcraft, while recognizing that he pointed to demonic activity as well. The emerging scientific mentality of exploring natural causation extended into the search for evidence in historical explanation, as well as for evidence for use in the courtroom. Scot and Naudé contributed distinctive styles of raising doubts concerning the many particular allegations of demonic activity by inquiring into alternative natural explanations. Scot applied social psychology to explaining women’s self-accusations of witchcraft and Naudé provided multiple human motivations for why famous male thinkers had been falsely accused of demonic magic. In an age when both Protestants and Catholics viewed denying the power of demons as heresy, both Scot and Weyer made catalogues of a variety of beliefs in demons and Naudé attested to rare cases of demonic magic. Montaigne was the most radical in not giving name to the phenomenon of “demons.” The cumulative effect was to shift attention to those guilty of making false accusations. Montaigne drew attention to those who tell tales, Scot named false accusers “witchmongers,” and Naudé critically confronted the books that falsely maligned great thinkers.

74The Warburg

School plays a significant role in recognizing the complexity of many of the figures Naudé discusses in the Apologie. See D. P. Walker, Spiritual and Demonic Magic from Ficino to Campanella (London: Warburg Institute, 1958) and Frances Amelia Yates, Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964). The transformation of the field of history of science to include the occult is evident already by the early 1970s as in Wayne Shumaker, The Occult Sciences in the Renaissance: A Study in Intellectual Patterns (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972). The overlapping mentalities stressed in Occult and Scientific Mentalities in the Renaissance, ed. Brian Vickers (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), contrasts with the thesis of Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic.

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Alcohol and the Clergy in Traditional Europe A. Lynn Martin

A

lcoholic beverages had important functions in traditional Europe, and those functions reveal that the role of alcohol then was far more important than it is today. Alcohol was a necessary component of most people’s diet, comprising a significant portion of their daily intake of calories. They drank water, of course, but in the period before safe alternatives such as tea and coffee many people began their day with a draught of ale or wine at breakfast and continued drinking throughout the day. Alcohol was also the ubiquitous social lubricant; every occasion called for a drink. Drinking accompanied the important rites of passage of birth, marriage, and death, the festivals of the agricultural calendar and of the liturgical year, and royal, civic, religious, and fraternal rituals. Contrary to Karl Marx, religion was not the opiate of the people; alcohol was. Alcoholic beverages often provided the only refuge and the only comfort from the harsh realities of daily life and the even harsher catastrophes and disasters that were too often a feature of existence. Finally, alcohol was an important part of the medical pharmacopoeia. Alcohol, especially wine, was used as a solvent for many medicines, and the medical consensus was that alcohol was necessary to maintain good health. Although a few individuals practiced complete abstinence, alcoholic beverages were so fundamental to the fabric of society that advocates of temperance at most only promoted moderation in drinking. Moderation of a sort: An Order of Temperance established at Hesse in 1600 restricted its members to seven glasses of wine with each meal, at only two meals a day, for a total of fourteen glasses a day.1

1Gregory A. Austin, Alcohol in Western Society from Antiquity to 1800: A Chronological History (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, 1985), 203.

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Moderation in drinking did not fit the image of the clergy in late medieval and early modern literature, which depicted priests, monks, and friars as drunkards and haunters of taverns and alehouses. The image of the drunken cleric developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at the same time as the development of popular heretical movements such as the Waldensians, whose criticism of the clergy included tavern haunting.2 A good example of the popular image of the drunken cleric is a thirteenth-century satire of an abbot. The anonymous author noted the pious intent of the abbot’s drinking; he emptied his first cup for “the peace and stability of the church,” the second was “for the prelates, thirdly for their subjects, fourthly for all prisoners, fifthly for the sick, sixthly for fair weather, seventhly for a calm sea,” and so it went until the fifteenth cup “that the Lord God may send His dew upon Mount Gilboa whereby the harvest may whiten and the vines flourish and the pomegranates may sprout.”3 The drunken cleric was a comic figure that provided Geoffrey Chaucer, Giovanni Boccaccio, and other authors with opportunities for satire. For example, the bishop in one of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s poems always went in procession with his favorite cup right behind him: “Haven’t you seen him in procession give / orders to halt, thus causing a standstill,” so that he could drink from his cup?4 More biting than the comical satires was the social criticism of such works as William Langland’s Piers Plowman, in which the meager diet of the peasants was contrasted with the fare of the priest, whose eating and drinking made him a “piss-pot” with a “puffed-out belly.”5 The satires continued into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as Pietro Aretino, Ludovico Ariosto, Clement Marot, Marguerite de Navarre, and of course, François Rabelais utilized the comic possibilities of drinking priests, nuns, monks, friars, and prelates. Rabelais’s memorable Friar Jean rallied the monks to defend the vineyard from attack by reminding them of the monastic principle that “an honest man never hates good wine.”6 The literary image was not just a product of Catholic Europe but also of Protestant England. The parson in John Aubrey’s unfinished comedy entitled 2Donald F. Durnbaugh, The Believers’ Church: The History and Character of Radical Protestantism (London: Macmillan, 1968), 47. 3G. G. Coulton, trans. and ed., Life in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: University Press, 1967), 4:202. 4Lorenzo de’ Medici, Selected Poems and Prose, trans. and ed. Jon Thiem (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1991), 45. 5William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, trans. and ed. Terence Tiller (London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1981), 148–49. See also Mary Morton Wood, The Spirit of Protest in Old French Literature (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 69, 77, 104, 107, 113. 6François Rabelais, The Complete Works of François Rabelais, trans. Donald M. Frame (Berkeley: University of California, 1991), 146–47.

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The Countrey Revell was “a true spunge of the Church of England,” who admitted, “I’m one of the old red-nosed clergy.” In a marginal note Aubrey explained, “All the parsons herabout are alehouse-haunters.”7 As indicated by Aubrey’s note of explanation, the literary image of drinking clergymen had its roots in the perception that they did drink excessively. This perception derived in part from the repeated regulations issued by ecclesiastical authorities forbidding clergy to haunt taverns or to drink to drunkenness and the authorities’ likewise repeated condemnations of clergy for failing to heed the regulations. In England the regulations and the condemnations began in the eighth century and continued into the eighteenth and beyond. A brief example of the regulations was that issued by the bishop of Westminster in 1200: “That clerks go not to taverns or drinking bouts, for thence come quarrels and then laymen beat clergymen.”8 In the seventeenth century Puritan clergymen echoed the earlier condemnations made by Catholic bishops, as they accused their fellow parsons of being “pot companions” and “subject to the vice of fellowship” at taverns and alehouses.9 The visitation records compiled by Catholic bishops also contributed to the view that the clergy drank too much. Not just medieval visitations recorded the drunkenness of priests;10 those undertaken in the seventeenth century are testimony to the failure of Tridentine reforms. In the diocese of Lyon a visitation in 1613 and 1614 discovered priests who were regular customers at taverns.11 At the end of the seventeenth century the archbishop of

7John Aubrey, “Brief Lives,” chiefly of Contemporaries, set down by John Aubrey, between the Years 1669 & 1696, ed. Andrew Clark (Oxford: Clarendon, 1898), 2:339. For France, see Carrington Lancaster, A History of French Dramatic Literature in the Seventeenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1936–42), vol. 4, pt. 2, pp. 594, 849. 8Hubert’s Westminster Canons, 1200, no. 10, quoted in Edward G. Baird, “The Alcohol Problem and the Law: II. The Common-Law Bases of Modern Liquor Controls,” Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol 5 (1944): 128–29, 129n. See also Richard Valpy French, Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England, A History (London: National Temperance, 1884), 83–85; and Hugh Magennis, Anglo-Saxon Appetites: Food and Drink and Their Consumption in Old English and Related Literature (Dublin: Four Courts, 1999), 109–10. 9From a Puritan survey for Warwickshire, Seconde Parte of a Register, ii, 166, quoted in Patrick Collinson, The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), 103–4. 10For examples of medieval visitations see G. G. Coulton, trans. and ed., A Medieval Garner: Human Documents from the Four Centuries preceding the Reformation (London: Archibald Constable, 1910), 290–95, 311–12. 11Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500–1789 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 50.

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Alcohol & the Clergy in Traditional Europe Rheims censured thirty-seven priests from his diocese for their drunkenness.12 Proceedings of ecclesiastical courts also contributed to the perception that the clergy had poor records when it came to sobriety. In the seventeenth century the parishioners at Genac in France accused their priest of spending all day every day in a tavern; “he never left till he had taken more wine than was good for him. Usually we had to help him to his chamber by lifting him under the arms.”13 In 1620 the church court in the English village of Charlton on Oxmoor heard a case against the local minister. He had become so drunk while playing a football match that he could hardly stand; he then wagered that he could beat the local cooper at wrestling but lost the bout and the bet because of his condition.14 The curate at Wilmslow faced charges of drunkenness and alehouse haunting in 1626. Compounding these charges were others that while under the influence of drink he had thrown a pot at the head of a parishioner and swore at him and had made the arresting constable so drunk that he fell into a ditch on the way home.15 So widespread was the reputation of clergy for drunkenness that it attained the status of proverbs. “Bibamus papaliter,” that is, “Let us drink like a pope,” did not mean to drink in moderation.16 Another proverb noted the difference between religious orders: “To drink like a Capuchin is to drink a little.… To drink like a Dominican is to drink mug after mug. But to drink like a Franciscan is to empty the cellar.”17 The superior quality of the clergy’s drink also helped foster the view that they were intemperate. Because of the need for wine in the celebration of mass, abbots and bishops promoted the cultivation of vineyards, so much so that in France the clergy deserved the title “fathers of the vines.”18 Significantly, some of the most highly regarded vineyards developed around episcopal centers, including Trier in the Rhineland, Reims in Champagne, Florence in Tuscany, and the papal court at Rome and Avignon.19 The contributions of monks to the development of fine 12Robin Briggs, Communities of Belief: Cultural and Social Tension in Early Modern France (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), 262. 13Quoted from Yves-Marie Bercé, History of Peasant Revolts: The Social Origins of Rebellion in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Polity, 1990), 36, original source not identified. 14Paul Hair, ed., Before the Bawdy Court: Selections from Church Court and Other Records relating to the Correction of Moral Offences in England, Scotland and New England, 1300–1800 (London: Elek, 1970), 91. 15John Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1989), 29. 16Coulton, A Medieval Garner, 525. 17Quoted from Léo Moulin, La vie quotidienne des religieux au Moyen Age, Xe–XVe siècle (Paris: Hachette, 1978), 115, original source not identified. 18Moulin, La vie quotidienne des religieux au Moyen Age, 111; Roger Dion, Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France des origines aux XIXe siècle (Paris: Flammarion, 1977), 187. 19Terence Scully, The Art of Cookery in the Middle Ages (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), 140.

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wines were even greater than those of the bishops, with different monastic orders associated with their own accomplishments, such as the clos vougeot and chablis of the Cistercians and the champagne of the Benedictines, thanks to the efforts of Dom Pierre Pérignon.20 Across the Channel in England, the clergy and especially monks battled the climate to promote viticulture. According to Richard Harrison, whose Description of England was published in 1587, “in old time the best [wine] was called theologicum, because it was had from the clergy and religious men.”21 Medieval monks also perfected ale-brewing techniques and earned a reputation for the quality of their brew. In England they produced three grades of ale— weak, mild, and strong—and marked their barrels accordingly with one, two, or three Xs.22 Flemish Benedictines were the first to add hops in the brewing process and created a new drink that became known in England as beer.23 To a great extent, strength determined the quality of wine, ale, and beer, the stronger the better. The strength of the wine is impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy, and the estimates or, perhaps more correctly, guesses of historians range from 5 percent to 10 or 11 percent.24 To make stronger ale or beer, monks used less water and more grain, usually malted barley, in the brewing process. Modern brewers reckon that a quarter of barley produces 76 gallons of strong beer or 150 gallons of mild; the monks of Winchester produced only 45 to 50 gallons from a quarter, definitely a strong drink.25 Finally, as indicated by Chartreuse and Benedictine, monks were leaders in the development of spirits, so much so that one

20Moulin, La vie quotidienne des religieux au Moyen Age, 112–13. 21William Harrison, The Description of England [1587], ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell Uni-

versity Press, 1968), 130. 22Frederick W. Hackwood, Inns, Ales, and Drinking Customs of Old England (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), 46. 23Léo Moulin, “La bière: Une invention médiévale,” in Manger et Boire au Moyen Age: Actes du Colloque de Nice (15–17 octobre 1982), vol. 1, Aliments et société (Nice: Les Belles Lettres, 1984), 23–24. 24Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, “Les masses profondes: La paysannerie,” in Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie et Michel Morineau, eds., Paysannerie et croissance (de 1450 à 1660): Histoire économique et sociale de la France, vol. 1, pt. 2 (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1977), 783; Marcel Lachiver, Vins, vignes et vignerons en région parisienne du XVIIe au XIXe siècle (Pontoise: Société Historique et Archéologique de Pontoise, du Val d’Oise et du Vexin, 1982), 108; Thomas Brennan, “Towards the Cultural History of Alcohol in France,” Journal of Social History 23 (1989): 87 n. 18; and Maria Serena Mazzi, “Note per una storia dell’alimentazione nell’Italia medievale,” in Studi di storia medievale e moderna per Ernesto Sestan (Florence: Olschki, 1980), 96 n. 138. 25Barbara Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 1100–1540: The Monastic Experience (Oxford: Clarendon, 1995), 58; and G. G. Coulton, trans. and ed., Social Life in Britain from the Conquest to the Reformation (Cambridge: University Press, 1918), 376.

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historian has claimed, “all of our spirits have known a monastic period, that of their beginnings.”26 The propensity of the clergy to consume drinks of superior quality influenced the image of the drunken clergyman in contemporary literature. In a thirteenth-century poem by Henri d’Andeli entitled “La bataille des vins” an English priest excommunicated all the bad wines.27 Less humorous were the bitter complaints of the troubadour Peire Cardenal (1180–1278), who attacked the Dominicans for drinking only the best wine, for not observing silence during their meals but debating which wines were the best, and for begging all year for the purpose of obtaining good wines.28 Some of the best sources for the tendency of clergymen to consume fine drinks are other clergymen. The archdeacon Giraldus Cambrensis (1147–1222?) criticized the monks at Canterbury for having so much fine wine that they shunned their native ale,29 the Franciscan Salimbene complained of prelates who drank the best wines but refused to share them with their subordinates,30 and Petrarch accused the pope of staying in Avignon because of the fine wines of the region.31 The best illustration of a clergyman’s preference for fine wine is Sebastiano Locatelli, bon vivant and priest, who kept a diary during his journey from Bologna to Paris and back in 1664 and 1665. Locatelli drank his way to Paris and back, never missing an opportunity to sample the local wines and always seeking out the best, frequently becoming drunk, suffering from an almost continual hangover, adopting a strategy to avoid drunkenness by drinking beer, which he loathed (the strategy did not last), and filling his diary with copious comments on the quality of the wine.32 The quantity of their drinking also contributed to the perception of drunken clergy. In the sixth century the founder of western monasticism, St. Benedict, encouraged monks to abstain from wine, but for those who could not he suggested a hemina a day, allowed more in cases of local necessity, extra labor, or excessive heat, and finally, left the ultimate decision to the abbot of each monastery. Scholars have debated the size of a hemina, with one claiming it was as much 26Moulin, La vie quotidienne des religieux au Moyen Age, 126–27. 27Henri d’Andeli, Oeuvres, ed. A. Héron (Paris, 1881; repr., Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1974), 25. 28Peire

Cardenal, Poésies complètes du troubadour Peire Cardenal (1180–1278), ed. René Lavaude (Toulouse, Edouard Privat, 1957), 161, 163, 203. 29Coulton, Social Life in Britain, 117. 30Salimbene, From St. Francis to Dante: Translations from the Chronicle of the Franciscan Salimbene (1221–88), trans. G. G. Coulton (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1972), 92. 31Dion, Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France, 291. 32Wilfrid Blunt, Sebastiano: The Adventures of an Italian Priest, Sebastiano Locatelli, during his Journey from Bologna to Paris and back, 1664–1665 (London: James Barrie, 1956).

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as .75 liter, that is, a bit less than a quart and the equivalent of a modern bottle of wine, others opting for a half pint, and yet others favoring various quantities in between.33 Whatever the precise amount, the tables on the next pages indicate that many monasteries exceeded it, some by gargantuan amounts. As indicated by the differences for Carolingian monasteries in the ninth century, some of these figures are subject to debate, others present problems of interpretation and precision, but on the whole they indicate levels of consumption that St. Benedict would have considered inappropriate. One of the best analyses of the diet of monks is provided by Barbara Harvey in her work on the monks of Winchester. Their daily ration was one gallon of ale, but they received more for extra work, and they received wine on special feast days—as many as a hundred days a year. Harvey calculates that 27 percent of the amount spent on food by the monastery went to ale and wine, and that alcohol provided 25 percent of the monks’ daily intake of calories.34 In addition to the large amounts consumed on a daily basis, drinking on special occasions further reinforced a perception of clerical indulgence. At the ceremony to install William Warham as archbishop of Canterbury in 1504, guests were provided with “six pipes of red wine, four of claret, one of choice wine, one of white for the kitchen, one butt of Malmsey, one pipe of Osey, two tierces of Rhenish wine…four tuns of London ale, six of Kentish ale, and twenty of English beer.”35 Precision is difficult but that was probably close to ten thousand gallons of drink. According to Raymond van Uytven, at a time when the average per capita wine consumption by the higher clergy in Ghent was three to four hundred liters a year, the average per capita consumption by the rest of the population in Ghent was only eight liters a year.36 However, Ghent was an ale-drinking town, and its inhabitants normally drank ale instead of wine, so the comparison is a better illustration of the quality of the higher clergy’s consumption than its quantity.

33 Moulin, La vie quotidienne des religieux au Moyen Age, 116–18; Austin, Alcohol in Western Society from Antiquity to 1800, 57; Louis J. Lekai, Cistercians: Ideals and Reality (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1977), 370; Maguelonne Toussaint-Samat, A History of Food (Cambridge: Blackwell, 1991), 279; Eleanor Searle and Barbara Ross, eds., Accounts of the Cellarers of Battle Abbey, 1275–1513 (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 1967), 7; and Coulton, A Medieval Garner, 61–62n. 34 Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 44, 58, 64–65; and Harvey, “Monastic Diet, XIIIth– XVIth Centuries,” 611–41, esp. 628, 635–36. 35 Quoted from Frank A. King, Beer Has a History (London: Hutchinson’s, 1947), 57, original source not identified. 36 Raymond van Uytven, “Le combat des boissons en Europe du moyen âge au XVIIIe siècle,” in Alimentazione e nutrizione: Secc. XIII–XVIII, 153.

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Table 1: Daily Consumption or Ration in England Religious

Period

Volumea and Drink 1 gallon of wine

Monks of Battle Abbey

12th century

Canons of St. Paul

12th century?

More if the monk was sickb 4 gallons of alec

Monks of Ramsay Abbey

1284

Only on feast daysd .5 gallon of wine 1 gallon of ale

Monks of Beaulieu Abbey

14th century

2 gallons if out riding on the abbey’s businesse

Canons of Bolton Priory

14th century

1 gallon of ale

Canons of Bolton Priory

15th century

2 gallonsf Corrody for retiring prior 1 gallon of ale Monks of Winchester

14th–15th centuries

Extra duties such as singing the office, 1–2 pints more On about 100 feast days a year, ca. 1 quart of wineg 3 gallons of ale

Prior of Blyth

15th century?

Corrody as a result of retirement, plus allowance for wine and spicesh .4 gallon of ale

Priests of Munden’s Chantry

Mid-15th century

Plus cider, perry, and occasional winei

a.

The English gallon is slightly larger than the U.S. gallon; a U.S. gallon equals 3.785 liters while an English gallon equals 4.543 liters. b. Searle and Ross, Accounts of the Cellarers of Battle Abbey, 19; and Desmond Seward, Monks and Wine (London: Mitchell Beazley, 1979), 132. c. Searle and Ross, Accounts of the Cellarers of Battle Abbey, 20. d. W. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England (Phoenix Mill: Alan Sutton, 1995), 72. e. Ian Kershaw, Bolton Priory: The Economy of a Northern Monastery, 1286–1325 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 133. f. Kershaw, Bolton Priory, 133. g. Harvey, Living and Dying in England, 58, 64; and Barbara Harvey, “Monastic Diet, XIIIth-XVIth Centuries: Problems and Pespectives,” in Alimentazione e nutrizione: Secc. XIII–XVIII, ed. Simonetta Caviciocchi (Florence: Le Monnier, 1997), 613. h. Joel T. Rosenthal, Old Age in Late Medieval England (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 108. i. Hammond, Food and Feast in Medieval England, 63–65.

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Table 2: Daily Consumption or Ration of Wine on the Continent Religious

Period

Volume and Drink

Carolingian monasteries

9th century

3.0 litersa

Carolingian monasteries

9th century

1.5 litersb

Friars at hospital in Aix

1338

1.3 litersc

Monks of Austrian monasteries’

14th century

2.0–4.0 litersa

Monks of Saint-Pierre-de-Bèze

Late 14th century

0.5 liter 1.0 liter on feast daysa

14th–15th centuries

ca. 1.0 literd

1410–12

0.75 litere

Monks of St. Germain des Prés

17th century

1.2 litersf

Nuns of S. Maria delle Vergini

17th century

carafeg

Nuns of S. Pietro Nuovo di Bitono

17th century

half carafeh

Higher clergy at Ghent Prioress of Toul and her entourage

a. Moulin, La vie quotidienne des religieux au Moyen Age, 118. b. Massimo Montanari, L’alimentazione contadina nell’alto Medioevo (Naples: Liguori, 1979), 382. c. Louis Stouff, Ravitaillement et alimentation en Provence aux XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris: Mouton, 1970), 230. d. van Uytven, “Le combat des boissons en Europe,” 153. e. Pierre Charbonnier, Une autre France: La seigneurie rurale en Basse Auvergne du XIVe au XVIe siècle (Clermont-Ferrand: Institut d’Etudes du Massif Central, 1980), 131. f. Maarten Ultee, The Abbey of St. Germain des Prés in the Seventeenth Century (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 118. g. Mario Spedicato and Angelo D’Ambrosio, “L’alimentazione delle comunità religiose nel Mezzogiorno moderno (secc. XVII–XIX),” in Alimentazione e nutrizione: Secc. XIII–XVIII, 777–78. h. Spedicato and d’Ambrosio, “L’alimenazione delle comunità religiose,” 777–78.

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In wine-producing areas people tended to consume amounts of wine that were similar to those consumed by the clergy. The annual per capita consumption of wine in late medieval and early modern Italian towns ranged from 200 to 415 liters.37 This contrasts with the annual per capita consumption of 60 liters for present-day Italy. Fairly typical was the case of Florence; in 1455 Lodovico Ghetti estimated that the annual per capita consumption in Florence was 288 liters,38 that is, about .8 liter a day, which seems temperate in comparison with some of the figures in the tables. However, accounting for those who were too poor or too young to drink much and the women who did not drink as much as men—that makes about 75 percent of the population; the remaining 25 percent, adult males who were not poor, probably consumed at least two and perhaps three or four liters of wine a day.39 Similarly, in the last half of the fourteenth and first half of the fifteenth centuries the daily per capita consumption of ale in England was perhaps one gallon.40 In other words, the large amounts indicated in the tables were not all that exceptional; people drank large amounts of alcoholic beverages as a matter of course. Similarly, the picture presented thus far in this paper has been too onedimensional, focusing on the evidence that supports the literary image of drunken clergy. Much evidence presents a picture of clerical poverty and asceticism. Significantly, when the English Protestant Martin Lister visited Paris in 1698, far from finding fault with clerical indulgence, he condemned monastic orders for their asceticism and their consumption of water instead of wine; after all, God had created wine for the benefit of mankind.41 Just as bishops on visitations of their dioceses could find cases of drunken clergy, so also could they find cases of monks and nuns with poor or inadequate drink.42 Although the bishop of Reims censured 37Enrico

Fiumi, “Economia e vita privata dei fiorentini nelle rilevazioni statistiche di Giovanni Villani,” Archivio Storico Italiano 111 (1953): 231; and Antonio Ivan Pini, Vite e vino nel medioevo (Bologna: CLUEB, 1989), 133–35 and n. 316. 38Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1982), 346. 39A. Lynn Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (London: Palgrave, 2001), 28–32. 40Christopher Dyer, “English Diet in the Later Middle Ages,” in Social Relations and Ideas: Essays in Honour of R. H. Hilton, ed. T. H. Aston et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 209– 10; Dyer “Changes in Diet in the Late Middle Ages: The Case of Harvest Workers,” Agricultural History Review 36 (1988): 25–26. 41Martin Lister, A Journey to Paris in the Year 1698, ed. Raymond Phineas Stearns (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1967), 135. 42W. O. Hassall, ed., They Saw It Happen: An Anthology of Eye-witnesses’ Accounts of Events in British History, 55 B.C.–A. D. 1485 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1957), 203; and G. G. Coulton, The Medieval Village (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925), 317.

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A. Lynn Martin thirty-seven clerics for their drunkenness, another 591 were not censured.43 Most monasteries were not centers of hedonistic gastronomic excess and indulgence in drink, and many maintained a temperate lifestyle, such as the one at Subiaco, visited in 1461 by Pope Pius II, that tempered its wine with large amounts of water.44 Even popular literature indicated that some monastic drink could be bad. In Adam de la Halle’s play Le jeu de la feuillée the tavern-keeper’s mediocre wine was better than that in the monasteries,45 and in another story a robber baron asserts that he could not stomach the sour wine and beer of a monastery.46 In short, the evidence indicates cases of clerical indulgence and drunkenness as well as cases of clerical temperance and asceticism. The cases of indulgence and drunkenness by themselves could account for the literary image of the drunken clergy, but four other, special factors contributed to the literary image. These special factors were not a function of the quality or the quantity of clerical drink but were related to the clergy’s functions and status. The first of these concerns the sacramental functions of priests. Just as modern society would be less tolerant of a drunken airline pilot than a drunken history professor, so societies in general have been intolerant of drunken priests.47 The fourteenth-century Franciscan John Bromyard paraphrased Isa. 28:7 when condemning his fellow priests for their drunkenness: “The priest and the prophet have been ignorant through drunkenness; they are swallowed up in wine; they have gone astray in drunkenness.”48 A drunk priest was an incapable priest who could not perform the sacraments or other offices. Probably the best example of this comes from the satirical poem entitled “Doctour Doubble Ale,” written by the Protestant propagandist Luke Shepherd in 1548. “Doctour Doubble Ale” describes a real Catholic priest, identified by Janice C. Devereux as Harry George of the parish of St. Sepulchrewithout-Newgate in London, who spent all his time at alehouses in search of the strongest drink.

43Briggs, Communities of Belief, 262. 44Pius II, Memoirs of a Renaissance Pope: The Commentaries of Pius II, trans. Florence A. Gragg and ed. Leona C. Gabel (New York: Capricorn, 1962), 214. 45Adam de la Halle, Le jeu de la feuillée, in Medieval French Plays, trans. Richard Axton and John Stevens (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1971), 246–47. 46Coulton, A Medieval Garner, 195. 47David G. Mandelbaum, “Alcohol and Culture,” in Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages: A Cross-Cultural Survey, ed. Mac Marshall (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1979), 18. 48Summa Predicantium quoted in G. R. Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England: A Neglected Chapter in the History of English Letters and of the English People (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1961), 433.

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And wher the drinke doth please Ther wyll he take his ease And drink ther of his fyll. He of course neglected his parishioners and his duties. I never herde him preach God wot But it were in the good ale pot. Not only did he have no time to study, but his intellectual capacity had been damaged by years of excessive drink, so much so that instead of the words, “Hoc est corpus meum” (this is my body) to consecrate the host he stated, “Hoc est lifum meum” (this is my life).49 According to an early medieval handbook of penance, a priest had to undergo penance for four days if he drank wine or strong drink before ministering “in the temple of God.”50 The penance must not have been severe enough, because many cases exist of clergy so drunk that they could not minister. When the bishop of Norwich visited Walsingham priory in 1514 he discovered that several monks stayed up eating and drinking all night, “and when they are come to matins they sleep all the while.”51 Similarly, the Franciscan Nicolas Philip claimed that many monks “imbibe so much that they can say neither vespers nor matins.”52 The inability of drunk clerics to perform their offices formed part of the literary image of the drunken clergy; according to the mid-fifteenth-century French play entitled Le mystère de la résurrection, wine made priests sleep when they should be saying their offices.53 Drinking caused other priests, like Doctour Doubble Ale, just to ignore their duties altogether; early in the fifteenth century the inhabitants of Saltash in Cornwall accused their drunken vicar of neglecting his sacramental responsibilities.54 Visitation records from the diocese of Autun in the seventeenth century reveal another problem with drunken clergy; after

49Janice C. Devereux, “Protestant Propaganda in the Reign of Edward VI: A Study of Luke Shepherd’s Doctour Doubble Ale,” in Religion and the English People, 1500–1640: New Voices, New Perspectives, ed. Eric Josef Carlson (Kirksville: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998), 121–46. 50Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A Translation of the Principal libri poenitentiales and Selections from Related Documents, trans. John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer (New York: Octagon, 1965), 172. 51Coulton, Social Life in Britain, 258. 52Quoted in Peter Clark, The English Alehouse: A Social History, 1200–1830 (London: Longman, 1983), 29. 53Le mystère de la résurrection: Angers (1456), ed. Pierre Servet (Geneva: Droz, 1993), 2:716. 54R. N. Swanson, “Angels Incarnate: Clergy and Masculinity from Gregorian Reform to Reformation,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, ed. D. M. Hadley (London: Longman, 1999), 172.

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A. Lynn Martin drinking too much the priests divulged the confessions of their parishioners.55 Although the sacramental functions of Protestant clergymen were not as important as they were for Catholic priests, cases from Protestant church courts in England record prosecutions of drunk ministers who could not read divine service or celebrate Holy Communion and who failed to arrive for services such as baptism, and one minister so drunk that he read the morning service instead of the afternoon service.56 The second special factor that contributed to the literary image of drunken clergy relates to their role as educators and preachers. Medieval theologians considered excessive drinking and the drunkenness that could result from it to be a branch of gluttony, one of the seven deadly sins,57 and priests were required to read the homily against gluttony and drunkenness to their parishioners at least once a year.58 Increasingly, preachers condemned drunkenness for being the gateway to all other sins and in consequence regarded it with particular abhorrence. However, in the fourteenth century the Franciscan Bromyard pointed out that whenever a priest reproved people for drunkenness, they could point to drunken clergymen to excuse their behavior.59 An English poem from the mid-sixteenth century that attacks the behavior of drunkards poses the same problem: “But, alas! many curates, that should us this tell, / Do all their parishioners in drinking excell.”60 In the following century a Protestant minister asked the obvious question: “If the minister bee a drunkard, how shall he reprove this sinne in his parishioners? or if he doe, may they not reply, Medice cura te ipsum—Physitian heal thy selfe!“61 The drunken vicar of one English parish avoided this problem by failing to preach a sermon against drunkenness even though he had been ordered to do

55James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (1550–1730) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 79. 56Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century, 22–23, 31; Mildred Campbell, The English Yeoman in the Tudor and Early Stuart Age (New York: Augustus M. Kelley, 1968), 296–97; and Marjorie Keniston McIntosh, A Community Transformed: The Manor and Liberty of Havering, 1500–1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1991), 184. 57Morton W. Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1952), 147. 58Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century, 29. 59Owst, Literature and Pulpit in Medieval England, 259. 60Thomas Starkey, A Dialogue between Cardinal Pole and Thomas Lupset, Lecturer in Rhetoric at Oxford, ed. J. M. Cowper (London: Early English Text Society, 1878), clxxiii. 61J. Hart, Diet of the Diseased, quoted in André L. Simon, The History of the Wine Trade in England (London: Holland, 1964), 3:391.

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Alcohol & the Clergy in Traditional Europe so.62 As was the case with the drunken clergy who could not perform the sacraments, those who did not set a good example also formed part of the literary image of the drunken clergy. In Langland’s Piers Plowman the priest, whose eating and drinking made him a “piss-pot” with a “puffed-out belly,” had recently preached a sermon at St. Paul’s extolling the abstinence of St. Paul.63 The third special factor that contributed to the literary image of the drunken clergy concerns clerical celibacy and the association between alcohol and sexual activity. This association between drinking and sex had its roots in ancient history, as is evident in the biblical account of Lot and his daughters and in the erotic passages in the Song of Solomon, and survives to the present, as indicated by Ogden Nash’s witticism, “candy is dandy, but liquor is quicker.”64 In 1215 the Fourth Lateran Council recognized that alcohol excited lust and accordingly warned clergy to curb their drinking so they would not commit sexual sins.65 A similar warning came from the Austin canon John Myrc; in his Manuale Sacerdotis, dated about 1400, he advised priests to curb lust by avoiding taverns.66 The warnings were timely, for many clergy faced accusations that they combined the pleasures of the pot with the pleasures of the flesh. In 1397 at York, Thomas de Watton faced accusations that he habitually boasted of his sexual exploits while drinking in local taverns. According to his drunken boasts, his exploits included having sex fifteen times in a single day and deflowering seven virgins in a neighboring village. Other evidence indicates that the boasts included at least a modicum of truth.67 Seventeenth-century France furnished many examples of the association between alcohol and sexual activity among clerics. At Grenoble priests haunted taverns and consorted with prostitutes;68 in Burgundy the priests with reputations for drunkenness likewise had concubines and illegitimate children, and others haunted taverns where they had contacts with lewd women and made inappropriate advances toward others;69 and in

62Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century, 29. 63Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman, 148. See also Wood, The Spirit of Protest in Old French Literature, 69, 77, 104, 107, 113. 64Martin, Alcohol, Sex, and Gender, 38–57. 65James A. Brundage, Law, Sex, and Christian Society in Medieval Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 401. 66H. Cullum, “Clergy, Maculinity and Transgression in Late Medieval England,” in Masculinity in Medieval Europe, 185. 67Cullum, “Clergy, Maculinity and Transgression,” 187. 68Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600–1814 (Berkeley: University of California, 1985), 36, 57. 69Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy, 78–79.

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1673 at Gonesse near Paris a cleric created a great scandal by chasing after girls when he was drunk.70 As in the cases of the two special factors mentioned above, the drinking, fornicating cleric formed part of the literary image. A theme in medieval French fabliaux was the wife who first served the local priest a pot of wine and a meal before offering him dessert.71 Studies of modern drinking behavior reveal that the major consumers of alcohol in most societies are young men in the years following puberty.72 The same pattern existed in traditional Europe, as students and apprentices caused concern among authorities with their propensity to drink. Despite the concern of the authorities, society regarded youthful excess with indulgence and accepted drunkenness among those who were forced to remain celibate. Paradoxically, although there existed an association between alcohol and sexual activity, drink among young men became a substitute for sex. The young men of course became older, married, settled down, and gave up their wild drinking. Students training for clerical careers in the Catholic church, however, never married and never found sexual outlets in marriage. If a clergyman continued to drink, that was bad enough, but if he drank and was not celibate, that was intolerable. The final special factor that helps explain the literary image of the drunken cleric was the view that the tavern/alehouse represented an antichurch and the tavern/alehouse keeper an antipriest. The most forceful expression of this view occurs in a fourteenth-century treatise: “You have heard of both lechery and gluttony. These sins arise most commonly at the tavern, which is a well of sin. It is the school of the devil, where his disciples study, and the chapel of satan, where men and women serve him. God does His miracles in His church; the devil does his, which are the opposite, in the tavern.”73 Other authors characterized taverns and alehouses as nests of satan, schools of drunkenness and violence, nurseries of naughtiness and of all riot, excess, and idleness, secret dens for thieves, cheaters, and such like, receptacles of all manner of baseness and lewdness, wombs that bring forth all manner of wickedness, and rousy rakehells. Regulations prohibiting alehouses and taverns to open on Sundays or during the hours of church services reinforced the view that they constituted an antichurch; when the church was open, taverns and alehouses were closed.

70René Taveneaux, Le catholicisme dans la France classique, 1610–1715 (Paris: Société d’Edition d’Enseignement Supérieur, 1980), 1:139. 71John W. Baldwin, The Language of Sex: Five Voices from Northern France around 1200 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 183–84. 72Mac Marshall, “Conclusion,” in Beliefs, Behaviors, and Alcoholic Beverages, 454–55. 73Anybite of Inwyt quoted in Bloomfield, The Seven Deadly Sins, 183.

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Ecclesiastical authorities repeatedly issued regulations against clerical drunkenness and tavern/alehouse haunting. They also repeatedly issued regulations against clerics’ keeping taverns and alehouses, and in the sixteenth century secular authorities in England issued their own regulations against the practice, but with limited success.74 Records of episcopal visitations reveal cases of clerics’ keeping taverns and alehouses. For example, in the thirteenth century a Norman priest sold wine to his parishioners and made them drunk.75 Salimbene complained, “I have found [priests] keeping taverns…and selling wine, and their whole house full of bastard children, and spending their nights in sin, and celebrating Mass next day.”76 A bad case in England was Henry Hodges of Askrigg, accused in 1633 of keeping a disorderly alehouse.77 Worse was William Coates of St. Bees, accused in 1634 of inviting his parishioners to his alehouse after Sunday services, and they “sitt drinking there till they were drunk, and to fight and quarrel.”78 Worse was Henry Norcrosse of Ribchester, accused in 1614 of opening his alehouse during the hours of Sunday services and providing music and gambling for his customers.79 A final contributing factor to the image of the drunken clergy was the widespread anticlericalism that was a feature of traditional society. In turn, the image of the drunken clergy contributed to that anticlericalism. The literary depiction of priests, monks, and friars as boozing, drunken gluttons promoted feelings of anticlericalism, while anticlericalism fueled the literary imagination of such writers as Langland, Boccaccio, and Rabelais. Ecclesiastical sources—regulations, condemnations, visitations, and court cases—indicate that many clerics did drink excessively, thus the literary image was not simply a function of literary imagination. Similarly, the role of bishops, abbots, and other clerics in the development of viticulture, brewing methods, and distilling techniques, when combined with the statistical information on clerical consumption of alcoholic beverages, reinforces the connection between drinking and the clergy. However, since most people drank what we would consider large amounts of alcoholic beverages, the gargantuan amounts consumed by the clergy would not account for the popular perception 74French,

Nineteen Centuries of Drink in England, 83; and Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1990), 288–89; R. F. Bretherton, “Country Inns and Alehouses,” in Englishmen at Rest and Play: Some Phases of English Leisure,1558–1714, ed. Reginald Lennard (Oxford: Clarendon, 1931), 193. 75Coulton, A Medieval Garner, 294. 76Salimbene, From St. Francis to Dante, 297. 77Bretherton, “Country Inns and Alehouses,” 193. 78Quoted from Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century, 30–31. 79Addy, Sin and Society in the Seventeenth Century, 29.

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that they were drunks. The four special factors relating to the clergy’s functions and status contributed to the literary image and provided it with increased contempt and scorn. Drunken clergy could not celebrate the sacraments and their other offices, they could not preach against drunkenness when offering such a poor example, they were led away from celibacy by excessive drinking, and as tavern and alehouse keepers their identity merged with antipriests. In other words, people condemned a cleric for drinking too much because he was a cleric.

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Popes, Astrologers, and Early Modern Calendar Reform Frederic J. Baumgartner

he date of 29 February 2000 demonstrated the key feature of the Gregorian calendar that makes it more accurate than its predecessor, the Julian calendar—the presence of a leap day. The Gregorian calendar improved on the Julian by dropping three leap years every four hundred years, keeping as a leap year those century years that when divided by 400 leave a quotient of a whole number. This change provides the current calendar with its greater accuracy over the Julian in respect to the tropical year: the time it takes the sun to make a complete revolution through the heavenly sphere from the vernal equinoctial point (the first degree in Aries) and back to it. The true solar year is 365.242 days in length, but the Julian calendar assumes it is 365.25 days, which is 10 minutes, 44 seconds too long, or 17.89 hours in a century, a full day in 128.6 years, and 71.55 hours, in four hundred years. When Julius Caesar imposed an Egyptian calendar on Rome in 46 b.c., he set the winter solstice on 25 December, the feast of the triumphant Sun, later also the date for Christmas. Over the next 370 years, the solstices and equinoxes had slipped back by 66.5 hours. That, along with the erroneous addition of an extra leap year by early Roman calendar makers, put the vernal equinox on 21 March, when the Council of Nicaea in 325 established the date of Easter as the first Sunday after the first full moon after the spring equinox. By the fourteenth century the vernal equinox was falling on 13 March, eight days too early. Returning the spring equinox to 21 March to conform to the dating of Easter set by Nicaea was the key motivation behind calendar reform. Calendars were created largely for religious reasons, to mark the feasts and divine cycles, or in the case of the calendars formulated by the Jacobins and the Bolsheviks, as antireligious devices. Changing the calendar would be a major task in any society, but in the past it was especially difficult because of how it would

T

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affect religion. Very few societies have had a religious authority powerful enough to impose a change in the calendar, but in early modern Europe, the papacy had sufficient clout both in religion and politics to decree a new calendar. Even the papacy might not have been able to push through reform had it not had strong allies among astrologers, who also had reason to want to see a reformed calendar. For no one in early modern Europe, except perhaps the churchmen, was the calendar more important than for the astrologers. Astrologers include anyone who produced horoscopes or books on the subject or was clearly identified by contemporaries as being involved in astrology, including a number of individuals who are better known for their activities in other areas, such as Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly. It also includes virtually everyone prior to1600 who might be called mathematician or astronomer, because all three words were essentially synonymous until the seventeenth century. Astrologers were among the educated elite of Europe for three centuries after 1300, and they had a wider audience than any other group, excepting the clergy. What they thought of calendar reform had a major impact on the creation, adoption, and acceptance of the new calendar, since until after 1600, astronomy was largely regarded as a handmaiden to astrology. Little work was being done in astronomy that was not intended to lead to the improvement of astrology, and much of that work involved calendar reform. Today, astrology is regarded as a pseudoscience and part of the occult, but in the early modern era, it was a scientia and a significant part of university curricula. The recovery of the works of Aristotle and Ptolemy in the previous century, mediated through the Arab world with its strong interest in astrology, provided the authority and the philosophical basis to make the science of the stars part of the quadrivium. Aristotelian cosmology with its concept of the fifth element, the quintessence, in the sphere of the heavenly bodies provided a rational explanation of why the stars would influence events on earth and human behavior. Drawing on Arabic terminology, medieval scholars defined the study of the stars in general as scientia astorum; the study of their motions—astronomy properly speaking— was scientia motus; while the study of their influence—astrology—was scientia judiciorum. While they were regarded as separate disciplines, the two divisions of scientia astorum were usually studied together.1 The influence of the heavenly bodies was thought to be especially powerful in regard to weather and health. Astrology could therefore predict such matters as droughts and floods, which would have enormous impact on the price of bread, among other matters. Since there were no academic disciplines of meteorology 1Richard Lemay, “The Teaching of Astronomy in Medieval Universities, Principally at Paris in the Fourteenth Century,” Manuscripta, 20 (1976), 198.

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and economics in the Middle Ages, astrology’s entrée into the universities came through its association with medicine. Because astrology was used for determining the proper time for bloodletting, it had a major role in medicine. Since medicine was a major discipline in the universities, astrology gained a secure place in their curricula.2 Astrology had been a discipline in the universities of medieval Europe for some time before there was an upsurge in employment of astrologers by the powerful of Europe. Certainly astrologers had long been present at the courts of kings, princes, and popes, but after 1450 their presence was more obvious. Louis XII of France put an astrologer in his household at an annual pension of 200 livres,3 and every French king after him until after 1700 did as well. The political figure most notorious for having faith in astrology was Catherine de Medicis. The design of her hôtel in Paris included a tower for astrological observations, and the artist Antoine Caron painted his famous “Astrologers Observing an Eclipse” for her. She kept Nostradamus on the royal pension roll at the high salary of 500 livres per annum.4 In England Henry VI began the practice of regularly employing a royal astrologer.5 In the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick III was well known for consulting astrologers, but no German leader carried it to as high a level as Rudolf II a century later.6 Among the popes, Leo X and especially Paul III stand out as patrons of astrology. Lucca Gaurico, who had predicted Paul’s election as pope ten years in advance as well as French King Henry II’s fatal jousting accident in 1559, was the best known of several astrologers to whom Paul gave bishoprics. Leo and Paul, however, were hardly the only popes to appoint astrologers as bishops. Even the sober bourgeoisie of the cities, such as Basel, had astrologers on the city payroll in the early 1500s.7 These are just a few of the many examples showing that astrologers were part of the intellectual elite and occupied positions of influence among the European decision makers at the time when serious discussion of calendar reform began in the fifteenth century. Of course, the popes would not have 2Lynn Thorndike, University Records and Life in the Middle Ages (New York: Octagon, 1971), 281–82. 3Archives nationales (Paris), Fonds Français, KK 87. 4Pierre Brind’amour, Nostradamus astrophile (Ottawa: Presses de l’Université d’Ottawa, 1993), 49–54. 5Hilary Carey, Courting Disaster: Astrology at the English Court and University in the Later Middle Ages (London: St. Martin’s Press, 1994). 6Robert Evans, Rudolf II and His World (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973), esp. 196–242. 7Lynn Thorndike, A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 5 (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 177, 256.

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supported reform had not the need for it arisen from a religious issue, the dating of Easter as established by the Council of Nicaea. The search for reform began at least as far back as the mid-thirteenth century when Robert Grosseteste, Johannes Sacrobosco, and Roger Bacon recognized the need for reform because of the problem of dating Easter.8 Bacon calculated that the vernal equinox fell on March 13 in the year 1267. Pope Clement IV asked Bacon to inform him of possible solutions to the problem, to which Bacon responded with a letter and several works on reforming the calendar. He denounced the problems in the existing calendar as “dreadful, foolish, worthy of derision,” but nothing came from his efforts.9 Early in the next century, Pope John XXII was interested in correcting the calendar, and several works were submitted to him with schemes for the project. Astrologers favored reform because a better calendar would produce more accurate prognostications. The Julian calendar had fallen out of synch not only in the dating of Easter, but also in respect to the timing of the new moon, a matter of utmost importance for astrological work. An anonymous English astrologer (probably Richard of Wallingford) submitted to the pope the Exafenon pronosticorum temporis, written around 1296.10 The author calculated the difference between the Julian year and the solar year within a minute of the correct time and the error in the date of the winter solstice since the time of Christ (not Nicaea) at 11 days. The author states (erroneously) that the Gospel says Christ was born on the winter solstice, and presumably he would have corrected the calendar to that date. He also argued that astrologers needed to make the correction in order to predict accurately, providing a table to make the proper adjustment for several years after 1296. He proposed that the extra days be simply subtracted from the calendar and made no proposal for a permanent correction. John’s successor, Clement VI, addressed letters to two French astrologers Firminus of Belleval and John of Murs in 1344, asking them to come to Avignon to discuss the problems in the calendar.11 It is not known whether they actually went to Avignon, but they did write a treatise dedicated to the pope on the subject. 8The major work on calendar reform before 1582 is F. Kaltenbrunner, Die Vorgeschichte de grego-

rianischen Kalenderreform (Vienna, 1876); on Bacon, see 24–26. 9Roger Bacon, Opus Majus, trans. R. Burke, 2 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), 1:290– 307. Bacon drew heavily from Robert Grosseteste in his discussion of calendar reform. See Francis Seymour Stevenson, Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln (1899), 47–48. 10J. D. North, Richard of Wallingford: An Edition of His Works, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 185–87. 11Emile Déprez, “Une tentative de réforme du calendrier sous Clément VI,” Ecole française de Rome: Mélanges d’archéologie et d’histoire 19 (1899): 131–43.

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Their report on calendar reform dated 1345 is of high quality for their era. They accurately calculated at eight the number of days that the calendar had to be corrected by using the Alfonsine star tables for their work. Those tables were produced in Spain during the reign of King Alfonso the Wise (1223–84) and were more accurate than the Ptolemaic tables generally in use. A French astronomer had translated the Alfonsine tables into Latin by 1320, but they only gradually came into use in northern Europe. The pope’s consultants proposed correcting the calendar by eliminating leap years for forty years but made no provision for long-term accuracy. Pope Clement received the report with enthusiasm, but any intention to implement their scheme disappeared with the outbreak of the Black Death and his own death in 1352. Calendar reform continued to be discussed off and on over the next century. Cardinal Pierre d’Ailly, for example, brought it up with the Pisan pope, John XXIII, who drew up a decree in 1412 reforming the calendar along the lines suggested by Bacon, Grosseteste, and others. When John agreed to resign at the Council of Constance, the cause of calendar reform was lost. D’Ailly urged the Council to pursue the matter, but it failed to do so. At the Council of Basel, which opened in 1431, the noted scholar Nicholas of Cusa, who was also a practicing astrologer, pushed calendar reform.12 He chaired a commission to draw up a plan. Among the several proposals for correcting the Julian calendar, the most promising came from a Polish astrologer, Thomas Strzempinski, who later became bishop of Cracow. It called for eliminating the leap year for forty years and then dropping a leap year every 136 years. Such a scheme would have been correct for about two thousand years before a day of error would have crept in. A decree on correcting the calendar using Cusa’s less accurate plan was drawn up, but the collapse of the Council in acrimony over the question of conciliarism prevented it from being accepted. It was probably just as well that the calendar was not reformed at Basel. A new calendar accepted then would have been less accurate than the Gregorian but would have certainly preempted its creation, and it would have foreclosed the fruitful discussion of the calendar and astronomy that continued for another 140 years. Because of the discussion at Basel and the ever-increasing size of the error in the Julian calendar, the late fifteenth century saw a great deal of discussion about calendar reform. In 1476, Pope Sixtus IV brought the noted German astronomer/ astrologer Regiomontanus to Rome to devise a new calendar, since he had written a work contrasting the correct dates for Easter against what they were in the Julian 12Nicholas of Cusa, Correctio calendarrii, ed. V. Stegemann (Heidelberg: Kerle, 1955); Kaltenbrunner, Vorgeschichte, 56–64; the council’s decree is at 126–28.

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Popes, Astrologers, & Calendar Reform calendar.13 However, Regiomontanus died soon after arriving in Rome. Calendar reform was a major issue in the study of astronomy when Nicholas Copernicus studied at Cracow and Padua.14 In the introduction to De Revolutionibus, he stated that calendar reform was the issue that brought him to reconsider the arrangement of the heavens. A Dutch astrologer, Paul of Middelburg, brought the question of the precise length of the tropical year to Copernicus’s attention, apparently in 1514, when Paul was already about sixty-eight years old. Notorious for his vehement denunciation of the culture of his homeland and ardent praise of Italy, Paul had a medical degree from the University of Louvain and had been given a chair in astrology in the medical faculty at Padua in 1479. He was one of the most outspoken in predicting that the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn (which occurred every twenty years) in 1484 would mark the Second Coming of Christ.15 Astrologers believed that the conjoining of the two planets representing power and wisdom would signal the coming golden age, which for most Christians meant Christ’s reign on earth during the Millennium. In 1489 Paul was appointed bishop of the Italian see of Fossombrone and was named a cardinal in 1533, only to die a week after he arrived in Rome to receive his red hat. Paul wrote in 1523 that as a young man he had been active in casting horoscopes, but he had left them behind for better studies, such as calendar reform. He said, however, that because of the forthcoming great conjunction of 1524 in the Zodiac sign Pisces, he was returning to astrology. He concluded that the conjunction occurring in a water sign did not presage a great flood, being one of the few astrologers who were not making that prediction.16 Paul favored putting Easter on a fixed date in late March, but this idea was always regarded as too violent a break with church tradition. By 1514 he had written two works on calendar reform, the better known being his Paulina, sive de recta Paschae celebratione, dedicated to Pope Innocent VIII.17 As a result, Pope Leo X called him to Rome for the Fifth Lateran Council to head a commission on calendar reform. In 1516, Paul published a Secundum Compendium correctionis Calendarii at Rome. 13Joannes

Regiomontanus, Calendarium (Venice, 1476; repr., New York: Landmarks of Science,

1975). 14Richard

Lemay, “The Late Medieval Astrological School at Cracow and the Copernican System,” Studia Copernicana 16 (1978): 337–54, and Pamal Czartoryski, “The Library of Copernicus,” ibid., 355–96. 15Thorndike, History of Magic, 5:217–18. 16On the prediction of a great flood in 1524, see Paola Zambelli, ed., “Astrologi hallucinati”: Stars and the End of the World in Luther’s Time (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1986). 17Paul of Middelburg, Paulina, sive de recta Paschae celebratione et de die passionis domini nostri Jesu Christi (Fossombrone, 1513).

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The Fifth Lateran Council came closest to achieving calendar reform prior to its actual implementation.18 Leo’s commission solicited the advice of numerous mathematicians, astrologers, and astronomers such as Copernicus. In his preface to De Revolutionibus, Copernicus wrote, “From that time on, at the suggestion of that most excellent man, Paul of Fossombrone, who was then in charge of this matter [calendar reform], I have devoted myself to the study of these topics.”19 The pope also several times asked the princes and universities to help him find others who could help in the project. Besides Paul of Middelburg, the astrologer most involved in the work of calendar reform was Luca Gaurico, who demanded exclusive credit for a plan that he seems to have kept a deep secret, since no information on it is available.20 Other astrologers who contributed included the Germans Georg Trannstetter, Johann Stöffler, and Hans Virdung von Hassfurt, who were professors of astrology at Tübingen, Vienna, and Heidelberg respectively; the Italians Roggio of Florence and Cipriano Beneti; the Spaniard Pedro Cireulo at Alcala; and the Frenchman Albert Pigghe.21 This last was a student in theology at Paris, who wrote a sharp attack on the many charlatans who gain patronage from kings and princes yet do not practice a true astrology. In 1520, Pigghe published a treatise on the proper dating of Easter. He argued that a major cause of the error was the inaccuracies in the star tables available, which placed the entry of the Sun into the zodiac sign Aries five degrees too early. Not only did this create errors in the calendar, said Pigghe; it also resulted in incorrect prognostications. For Pigghe as for other astrologers, calendar reform would lead to better astrology. Despite the efforts of pope and astrologers, calendar reform failed to come about at the Lateran Council, largely because scholars such as Pigghe and Copernicus agreed that their knowledge about the length of the year was not accurate enough to design the perfect calendar.22 Copernicus would go on to produce a better set of star tables for De Revolutionibus, published in 1543, largely to support his heliocentric theory but also to help achieve calendar reform. Word about both Copernicus’s new star tables and his theory had spread widely before the book’s publication, and astrologers eagerly awaited his Prutenic (Prussian) tables, as they 18Demetrio Marzi, La questione della riforma del calendario nel quinto concilio lateranense (1512–

1517) (Florence: Carnescchi e Figli, 1896). 19Copernicus, De Revolutionibus orbis terrarum (repr., New York: Johnson Reprint, 1965), preface. 20Paola Zambelli, “Fine del Mundo o Inizio della Propaganda?” in Scienze credenze occulte livelli di cultura (Rome: Olschki, 1982), 291–368. 21Zambelli, “Fine del Mundo,” 291–368. 22Kaltenbrunner, Vorgeschichte, 113–15.

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came to be called, because of their expected contribution to more accurate prognostication. Gemma Frisius, for example, writing in 1541, expressed his hope that the new tables would bring an end to the errors and uncertainties in astrology; like most astrologers, he was little interested in nor concerned by the prospect of a new theory of the universe. Fifteen years later, the French poet, astrologer, and bishop Pontus de Tyard, had one of his characters in his dialogue Mantice comment on the confusion created by the differences among the several star tables in common use. He expressed the hope that the Prutenic tables would lead to the creation of an accurate calendar as well as a true astrology.23 Yet the work of Girolamo Cardano, probably the most respected astrologer of the sixteenth century, demonstrates that a highly precise calculation of the length of the tropical year was possible without the new tables. While Cardano’s Supplementum Almanach was published in 1544 at Nuremberg, there is no hint that he used Copernicus’s star tables for it. He calculated that the true length of the year was 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes, and 41¾ seconds,24 which was off by less than 21 seconds. That would have been accurate enough to produce the Gregorian calendar. In the half-century after Copernicus published De Revolutionibus, astrologers reworked their science, using its Prutenic tables while largely ignoring its heliocentrism. A good example of this was the prominent Italian astrologer Francesco Guintini, who was shortly called upon to advise Pope Gregory on calendar reform. In his Speculum astrologiae of 1573, Guintini used the Copernican star tables for his astrology while stating his conviction that the earth was the center of the universe.25 Correcting the calendar had not disappeared as a concern in the midst of the Protestant Reformation and the first stirrings of the Scientific Revolution. After the failure of the Fifth Lateran Council, the number of works on the subject increased substantially. In 1560 Pietro Pitati of Verona made what seems to have been the first proposal to solve the leap-year problem by dropping the leap day three out of every four century years. He also wanted to set the spring equinox on 25 March, but this proposal was deemed to be verging on heresy.26 Pitati had worked with Paul of Middelburg in trying to determine the exact time of the vernal equinox in 1520 and 1521. He was an astrologer of high repute, publishing 23Pontus de Tyard, Mantice: Discours de la verité de divination par Astrologie, ed. S. Bokdam (Geneva: Droz, 1990), 86–87. 24He carried his calculation of seconds to the equivalent of four places to the right of the decimal point. 25Thorndike, History of Magic, 5: 418. 26Noel Swerdlow, “The Length of the Year in the Original Proposal for the Gregorian Calendar,” Journal for the History of Astronomy 17 (1986): 109–18; Thorndike, History of Magic, 5:264–65.

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an Almanach novum in 1544 that addressed in particular the six different kinds of great conjunctions. The book was dedicated to Pope Paul III, whom Pitati praised for restoring astrology to its proper luster after many centuries of darkness and barbarism. The problem of calendar reform gained greater urgency when the Council of Trent in its last session in 1563 recommended that the pope undertake the reform, and still more when about 1570 the constantly increasing error in the Julian calendar reached ten days. The first two popes after Trent did little about the problem, and it was left to Gregory XIII, elected in 1572, to solve it. Gregory first assigned the task of calendar reform to Carlo Lauro, a prominent mathematician, who wrote an astrological interpretation of the nova of 1572 and was criticized by those opposed to his proposed reform as a “mere astrologer.”27 Lauro submitted a plan in 1575, but no action was taken on it. The nature of Lauro’s scheme is not known precisely since no record of it is extant, but apparently it was regarded as too complicated for common use and not accurate enough to suit the astronomers. The pope then set up a commission to solicit proposals from across Europe, evaluate them, and recommend one to him.28 The members, mostly churchmen, included two noted astronomers, the Jesuit Christopher Clavius and the Dominican Ignatzio Danti. The latter designed the still standing Galleria della Carte Geografiche in Rome, better known as the Tower of the Winds, which Gregory ordered built to make observations for use in a new calendar. The commission and its president, Cardinal Guglielmo Sileto, cast an even wider net than had Leo X to solicit advice on calendar reform. Many astrologers contributed their ideas. One of the more promising came from a Spanish Franciscan, Juan Salon. He proposed eliminating the leap year every 124 years, but he also wanted to move the spring equinox back to March 25, which was too radical for the commission members. The reform eventually accepted came from a mathematician, Luigi Lilio, from Calabria but living in Verona. He had died in 1576, but his brother Antonio submitted his proposal to the commission in 1578, when Lauro was still its head. Lauro sat on it for two years while he tried to correct his own scheme using Lilio’s numbers. By then others on the commission had become familiar with Lilio’s plan and asked Pope Gregory to adopt it. He sent it to all the Catholic universities and princes for comment. One of the few who replied, Philip II, strongly urged that 21 March be kept as the date of the spring equinox, as it was. In early 1581 the commission formally presented to the pope Lilio’s plan, which was based on 27Kaltenbrunner, Vorgeschichte, 119–21. 28On the papal calendar commission and the bull of calendar reform, see especially the articles by August Ziggelaar, Ugo Baldini, Jacinto Casanovas, and G. Moyer in Gregorian Reform of the Calendar, ed. George Coyne et al. (Rome: Specola Vaticana, 1983), 136–238.

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the Alfonsine star tables, not the Prutenic, after some tinkering by Clavius using the Prutenic tables.29 Strong objections arrived at about the same time from Adrian van Zeelst, an astrologer at the University of Louvain, arguing that the plan was not exact enough. It took another half-year to decide to ignore his objections, and the pope signed the Bull for the Reform of the Calendar on 24 February 1582.30 The bull set the date for implementing the new calendar as 4 October, with the next day becoming 15 October. That period was chosen because there were no major church feasts then. The new calendar also dropped the leap years in three out of every four century-years.31 This reform had the major advantage of being simple enough for the average parish priests to understand, so they could celebrate the church’s feast days at the right time, a crucial requirement for the pope’s approval. Was there an astrological element in choosing the timing of the papal bull? Gregory did not have a reputation for being an avid supporter of astrology, unlike many of his predecessors and several successors, but European culture was saturated with the belief that the year 1583 was a truly significant marker in God’s calendar. Cardano in particular had given credence to the belief that the great conjunction in 1583 of Jupiter and Saturn in the constellation Aries would mark a defining moment in time. Cardano had emphasized the astrological interpretation that the conjunction marked the movement of the Sun out of the watery 29Thomas Kuhn’s work on the nature of

scientific revolutions makes much of the need for a new paradigm in astronomy before a new calendar could appear. “The preface of De Revolutionibus closed with the suggestion that [Copernicus’s] new theory might make a new calendar possible. The Gregorian calendar…was in fact based on computations that made use of Copernicus’s work.” See Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1956), 126. First Copernicus in his preface was not referring to his heliocentric theory but to his new star tables. Second, Kuhn was wrong in writing that the new calendar was created from Copernicus’s star tables, which furthermore did not depend upon heliocentrism for what improvement they offered over the older Alphonsine tables. Lilio used those older tables. Thus, Kuhn is mistaken in arguing that this great achievement of early modern astronomy was a result of Copernicus’s perception of the crisis in Ptolemaic astronomy leading to a paradigm shift in astronomy. The principal reason why reform finally was instituted in 1582 was that another day had recently been added to the error in the Julian calendar. Neither the crisis nor the solution was new. 30It is dated 1581 since 25 March was still the beginning of the new year at Rome; one of the changes in the new calendar was placing New Year’s Day on 1 January. John Mccusker and Cora Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1991), 448, has a table with the old New Year’s Day for thirty-three cities across Europe. Of the four possibilities— Christmas Day, 1 January, 25 March, Easter Sunday—twenty cities used Christmas. 31There is a very small variance of about 26 seconds between the true solar year and the Gregorian year that will require the elimination of a leap day around the year 3720, unless one of several proposals for a slightly more accurate calendar is adopted by then.

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trigon into the fiery trigon—a trigon being three zodiac signs 120 degrees apart from each other that created an equilateral triangle. The movement of the Sun through the four trigons took eight hundred years (good astrologers knew that it was not exactly eight hundred years but 786), and since the sun at the moment of its creation was in the first degree of Aries, there had been six such cycles since Genesis. The beginning of the seventh would mark the end of the world according to the traditional Christian belief in the cosmic week—the six ages of the world before the Second Coming and the Millennium. Cardano’s strong advocacy of this interpretation was a major reason why the approach of the year 1583 had raised eschatological expectations across Europe. Also Joachim of Fiore, whose millennial thought still had appeal in the late sixteenth century, had deemed that his new age of the Spirit would require a new calendar, just as one had appeared at the time of Christ to mark the age of the Son. There is no evidence in the records of the papal calendar commission of any discussion about creating a new calendar for the coming Millennium, but it is plausible that some of those involved in the process believed it. Pope Gregory mandated that the Catholic states adopt the Gregorian calendar immediately, and they implemented it over the next several years: Italy, Poland, and the Iberian lands already in 1582, France in December 1583, the Habsburg lands of central Europe in January 1584, except in Hungary where it was implemented in 1587, and the Spanish colonies in the Americas in December 1584. The Protestant and Orthodox lands, however, refused to adopt the new calendar immediately, and in some countries, not for centuries. The refusal of the Protestants to accept the Gregorian calendar, primarily on religious grounds, left the field open for continued debate over calendar reform, which otherwise would have rather quickly disappeared, as it did in the Catholic lands. There were, to be sure, objections from some Catholics, including several astrologers, for a decade or so after 1582. Van Zeelst at Louvain objected in 1585 that the new calendar violated tradition, in which he included astrological tradition as well as religious. Criticism also came from a French bishop, François de Foix, a noted astrologer but better known today for his belief in Hermeticism. He objected to the retention of 21 March as the date of the spring equinox, strongly preferring 25 March as it had been originally designated in the Julian calendar. A third Catholic objector was Paulus Fabricius, an astrologer at the court of Emperor Rudolf II, who composed his own, supposedly more accurate calendar in 1583 and asked the emperor to use it alongside the Julian calendar until 1600, after which it would stand alone.32 However, most Catholic astrologers accepted the Gregorian reform 32Ziggelaar, “Bull of

1582,” Gregorian Reform, 226.

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with little or no hesitation. The French astrologer Jean Morin, who is generally regarded as the best of the seventeenth-century astrologers, made their case by arguing that the incorrect calendar had caused the errors of past astrologers in prognosticating. He proclaimed that the new calendar had vastly improved astrology, and thus it was now truly scientific.33 The real action in respect to the Gregorian calendar came in the Protestant lands, where it was commonly seen as another aspect of the popish plot against the truth.34 The Lutherans, for example, complained that the Holy Roman Emperor, not the pope, had the authority to impose a new calendar, as Constantine had done in 325 for the date of Easter. The German astronomer Maestlin denounced the pope as the Antichrist for designating the new calendar as a “perpetual calendar,” thereby denying the doctrine of the end of the world. Some objections were humorous, such as the complaints that the peasants would no longer know when to plant or harvest their fields, and the birds would not know when to make their nests or fly south. Catholic responses to this last sort of objection involved the flowering of a nut tree ten days early in response to the calendar change and the miraculous liquefaction of the vial of St. Januarius’s blood on its proper day of 19 September in the new calendar. Looking more specifically at the response of Protestant astrologers, we find that the two most famous among them, Johannes Kepler and John Dee, were favorable to the new calendar.35 Both, of course, are far better known for their contributions to the revolution in astronomy than as astrologers, but astrology was an essential part of their life’s work. In particular that was true of Kepler, for whom astrology provided the raison d’être for his search for an explanation of the motions of the heavenly bodies. Kepler’s discovery of the three laws of planetary motions in the early 1600s provided a rational, regularizing explanation for the movements of the planets. He thereby undermined astrology more than Copernicus had, because astrology had developed out of the apparent capriciousness of the planetary motions that seemed to mirror the capriciousness of human life. Kepler continued to use the Julian dates for his letters and work, but in 1613 before the Imperial Diet he made a strong case for adopting the Gregorian calendar. In response to those objecting that the new calendar was not accurate enough 33Jean Morin, Astrologica Gallica (Paris, 1661). Morin remained a committed geocentrist and wrote that at the end of time God would show the truth to the Copernicans, “if they are still Christians.” 34Michael Hoskins, “The Reception of the Calendar by Other Churches,” Gregorian Reform, 253–63. 35H. M. Nobis, “The Reaction of Astronomers to the Gregorian calendar”; and Owen Gingerich, “The Civil Reception of the Calendar,” in Gregorian Reform, 243–54, 268–71.

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in dating Easter, he remarked that “Easter is a feast, not a planet; you do not measure it to hours, minutes, and seconds.”36 In 1582 Dee was given a royal commission to reform the calendar in England.37 Using Copernicus’s star tables, he arrived at the conclusion that eleven days ought to have been dropped, not the ten of the Gregorian reform. He devised his own calendar based on his dating of the birth of Christ, which would have been three days out of synch with the Gregorian. Other scholars, including Thomas Digges, reviewed Dee’s work and recommended that only ten days be dropped in order to stay in conformity with the continent. Queen Elizabeth I and the privy council looked favorably on the proposal, and it passed two readings in the House of Lords. The English bishops adamantly objected, however, arguing that the pope was clearly the fourth great beast of Daniel (8:25) for proposing to change the times and the law. Furthermore, since the end of the world was imminent, there was no need to reform the calendar. The queen, not eager to dissipate her political capital on a matter of no great importance to her, allowed the matter to be quietly dropped, and the reform was not instituted.38 Kepler has been called the last of the astrologers who also did good astronomy, and it is true that by Kepler’s time the view of astrology was changing. In the sixteenth century, astrology had lost some of its luster among the elites. It is difficult to put a finger on exactly why it happened. That era was certainly too early for any spirit of modern science to have had an impact. At Bologna, a specific incident can be identified as a turning point: The chair in astrology remained vacant after its last holder died in 1572.39 This is not to suggest that astrology disappeared from the universities—it certainly did not—but its standing was not as high by the end of the sixteenth century as it had been at the beginning. Adding to the decline was the papal bull Coeli et terrae from Sixtus V in 1586, which condemned that branch of astrology known as judicial astrology. This referred to the casting of horoscopes to predict the future of individual humans, which had 36

See also articles by J. V. Field, “A Lutheran Astrologer: Johannes Kepler,” Archive for History of Exact Sciences 31(1984), 189–272, and “Astrology in Kepler’s Cosmology,” in Astrology, Science and Society, ed. Patrick Curry (Wolfeboro, N.H.: Boydell Press, 1987), 143–70. 37 Dee set out his reasons for his scheme for calendar reform in A triple Almanack for the Yeare of our Lord 1591. On his royal commission and the government’s response to his recommendation, see Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, for the Reign of Elizabeth, 2:107; and the report printed in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 21 (London, 1699), 355–56. Joannes Kepler, Opera Omnia, 8 vols. (Frankfort: Heyder, 1858–71), 4:37. 38 According to Mike Spathaky, “Old Style and New Style Dates,” http://www.geo.ed.ac.uk/home/ scotland/time2.html (1995; accessed 12 November 2002), Scotland accepted 1 January as New Year’s day in 1600 but did not adopt the Gregorian calendar in other respects until 1752. 39 Thorndike, History of Magic, 5:247.

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always been and remains the primary focus of astrologers. It was not a loss of faith in astrology that led Sixtus and Urban VIII, who issued a follow-up decree in 1629, to denounce judicial astrology, but too great a belief in it, since the key clause in their bulls prohibited predicting the death of the popes and members of their families. It was said that Urban was especially outraged when astrologers’ predictions of his imminent death persuaded the Spanish king to send his cardinals to Rome for the coming conclave.40 On the other hand, popular astrology was surging upward, especially in Germany and England.41 The most obvious manifestation of its growth was the enormous number of almanacs printed. The almanac was not a new idea, but the spread of the printing press had made it possible to produce vast numbers of cheap copies. There were at least three hundred different English-language almanacs written in the seventeenth century. The most popular had press runs as high as fifty thousand copies around 1670, the high point of almanac production, and the total number of copies of almanacs printed at that time was about a third of a million a year. Some of them had annual editions for over a period of a century or more. The popular ones made fortunes for their authors, to say nothing of the printers; one almanac author began as a cobbler’s apprentice and died with £2,000 to distribute in his will. The almanacs were by definition astrological in nature, since the major component in all of them, and virtually the only one in some, was the astrological calendar with the zodiac signs, the phases of the moons, eclipses, and similar data. The question of the calendar thus was very important to their authors. The approximately three hundred English almanacs published between 1583 and 1752 handled the problem of the calendar in various ways. Seventy-five percent had both the Gregorian and the Julian calendars. The new calendar was variously referred to as the Gregorian, Roman, Lilian (for Lilio), Clavian, the new, the foreign, the account from across the sea; the old one was called the Julian, the English, ours, the Church of England’s. Two-thirds of those without both calendars were printed before 1615, but the earliest found with the new calendar is for 1591. Several of the long-running almanacs, such as John Woodhouse’s first editions of the early seventeenth century lack the Gregorian, but added it around 40Germanna Ernst, “Astrology, religion and politics in Counter-Reformation Rome,” in Science, Culture and Popular Belief in Renaissance Europe, ed. Stephen Pumfrey et al. (Manchester: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 266. 41C. Scott Dixon, “Popular Astrology and Lutheran Propaganda in Reformation Germany,” History 84 (1999): 403–18; Bernard Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500–1800 (London: Faber and Faber, 1979); Cyrian Blagden, “The Distribution of Almanacks in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century,” Studies in Bibliography 11(1958): 107–17.

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1615. There is clearly a religious element in the decision whether to include the new calendar; those almanac authors who clearly revealed their antagonism against the Beast of Rome usually did not include it. For example, one with the title “A Protestant Almanac” does not have it. Consequently, there was an increase in almanacs without the Gregorian calendar in the era of the Puritan Revolution, when denunciations of the pope as Antichrist for proposing to change the times and the seasons were common. Given their enormous readership, it seems appropriate to conclude that the large proportion of almanacs with the new calendar helped to prepare the English people for its eventual adoption in 1752. After Elizabeth’s attempt, the next significant effort for calendar reform occurred in 1645, when the royal astrologer John Greaves proposed to the privy council that the Gregorian calendar be adopted.42 It was an inauspicious time to make such a proposal, and the matter was again dropped. In 1699 it came up again since the difference between the English and the continental calendars was about to become eleven days. Among the opponents of change, John Wallis, Oxford professor of geometry and author of several almanacs, had a wide audience for his charge that “popish influence” lay behind the proposal. Again calendar reform failed in England despite the support from the archbishop of Canterbury. Lord Chesterfield, a former ambassador to France, began what would prove to be the successful campaign to change the calendar, largely because of the inconvenience of using both calendars during his stay at Versailles. Parliament passed a bill setting the day following 2 September 1752 as 14 September, which left only Sweden and the Orthodox lands still on Julian time. The time for the change was chosen for the same reason as the pope had chosen his: no major church feasts or civil holidays fell in it.43 Most of the almanacs for the year in which the calendar change went into effect provided explanations of why the reform was taking place and what it involved. About half of the almanac writers included both calendars for another two decades, and a small number insisted on using only the Julian calendar for about the same length of time. Robert Poole has shown recently that popular response to the calendar change was in fact very muted, contrary to the accepted opinion that English mobs loudly and even violently opposed the calendar

42

See the documents on Greaves and Wallis in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 21 (1699): 343–59. 43 Robert Poole, “‘Give Us Our Eleven Days!’ Calendar Reform in Eighteenth-Century England,” Past and Present 149 (1996): 111–12.

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44Poole, “Give Us Our Eleven Days!” 95–139; and Poole, “Making up for Lost Time,” History Today (December 1999): 40–47. See also Malcolm Freiberg, “Going Gregorian, 1582–1752: A Summary View,” The Catholic Historical Review 86 (2000): 1–19.

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Planning Jesuit Education from Loyola to the 1599 Ratio Studiorum John Patrick Donnelly, S.J.

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hen centennials of important events come round, conferences and scholarly papers spring up like weeds. To scholars of Jesuit education, 1999 was significant as the four hundredth anniversary of the 1599 Jesuit Ratio Studiorum or Plan of Studies, the most important milestone in the history of Jesuit education. This paper will present a summary of the development of early Jesuit education culminating in the Ratio, which continued in force down into the twentieth century. This anniversary of the Ratio generated several conferences and many scholarly papers. The Sixteenth Century Studies Conference at St. Louis devoted three sessions with nine scholarly papers to the Ratio, and an October conference on the Ratio at Fordham yielded seven papers. This chapter draws on several of those papers.1 In addition, Boston College published a short book with eleven essays commemorating the Ratio’s anniversary.2 First, let us review the background of Jesuit education and the Ratio. Ignatius of Loyola and six companions, whom he had gathered earlier when they were fellow students at the University of Paris in the 1530s, determined to found a new religious order when their initial plan to go to the Holy Land was destroyed by conflict between the Turks and the Venetians. Pope Paul III authorized the order in 1540. At that point education played no part in their plans; rather they were to devote themselves to preaching, administering the sacraments (mainly confession and communion), giving the Spiritual Exercises, 1I am indebted to John Padberg, Mark Lewis, Daniel Schlafly, and Claude Pavur for sharing their papers with me. 2Ratio Studiorum: Jesuit Education, 1540–1773, ed. John Attebury and John Russell (Chestnut Hill, Mass.: Boston College Library, 1999). For a massive collection of recent essays on Jesuit education, see Franco Guerello and Pietro Schiavone, eds., La pedagogia della Compagnia di Gesù (Messina: E.S.U.R. Ignatianum, 1992).

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reforming convents and monasteries, and mission work (notably the work of St. Francis Xavier in the Orient). While their later efforts at education tended to focus on the upper classes, the early Jesuits often devoted themselves to teaching catechism to children, helping in the hospitals for syphilitics, and helping prostitutes reform their lives. That first group of Jesuits were remarkable men; all were talented, dedicated, and highly educated by the standards of their day. The Jesuits were founded in Italy, but the first members were Spanish, Portuguese, and Savoyard, followed by some new French recruits. Several other orders were founded roughly at the same time, but only slowly became multinational. The Jesuits were so from the start. The first Jesuit colleges were not schools but residences where young Jesuits lived while they attended classes at established universities, notably Coimbra, Padua, Paris, and Louvain. Francisco Borgia, duke of Gandia near Valencia, underwent a religious conversion and developed ties with Jesuits in Spain. He determined to set up a college for young Jesuits to study on his estate at Gandia; he used his influence at Rome, where two of his ancestors had been popes, to have this minicollege given the title and legal status of a university. The college started in 1545 and some lay students were admitted to the philosophy courses in 1546. Later Duke Francisco became a Jesuit. Technically Gandia was the first Jesuit college. The real flagship Jesuit college was at Messina in Sicily. The town council backed by the Spanish viceroy and his wife, who were strong supporters of the Jesuits, promised to provide a school building, a church, a Jesuit residence, and an annual subsidy if the Jesuits would provide teachers for the school. Loyola agreed and sent ten of his best men to start things off right in the spring of 1548. The early Jesuit schools charged no tuition, but good education never comes cheap. Who met the expenses? Rich benefactors such as Borgia or town elites whose sons would benefit the most from the new colleges. Messina and almost all the early Jesuit schools were called colleges, but that is somewhat misleading; they catered to male students between the ages of ten and twenty. They usually required students to know some Latin before entry; this tended to exclude boys from the lower class. Most Jesuit schools in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries were the equivalent of junior high school, high school, and junior college in the United States today. When the Jesuits founded colleges in cities that had established universities, conflict usually resulted. As the Jesuit schools grew, they offered more advanced courses which overlapped with what the university professors were teaching. The universities tended to appeal to the government, claiming a legal monopoly on higher education. Usually the government then closed down the Jesuit college or restricted it to the high school level, as happened at Paris, Padua, Louvain,

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John Patrick Donnelly, S.J. Lima, Krako, and elsewhere.3 To return to Messina: What did the Jesuits teach there and how many students took various classes? Of the 214 students at the end of the first year, the beginning grammar class had seventy-eight students, the next class had fifty-six, and the most advanced grammar class had forty. The next level up was humanities with fourteen, then rhetoric with sixteen students, followed by ten students studying Greek. Courses were offered in Hebrew, mathematics, philosophy, Scripture, and theology, but all had very low enrollments.4 Note the pyramid: many students at the bottom, relatively few at the top level. This was characteristic of many early Jesuit schools. Later Jesuit schools north of the Alps tended to be rather larger than those in Italy. Students did not graduate from one level to another at the end of a year but passed up to the next level whenever their teachers felt they had mastered the material at the lower level, whether this was after six months or two years or whenever. The people of Messina and the students were much pleased by the new school, and the Jesuits helped by staging two days of public disputations early in 1549 to show off their students before the town elite. Word went around Sicily about the college, and several towns asked for their own Jesuit colleges.5 In 1549 a Jesuit college was set up at Palermo. Soon requests came to Ignatius Loyola from most Catholic countries in Europe. The Jesuits were growing rapidly at this time; at Loyola’s death in 1556 there were about a thousand, by 1600 there were 8,272. The requests for colleges consistently outran the number of Jesuits who could staff them. Often the Jesuits sent to new colleges were insufficiently trained and had to learn on the job. To win popular approval and get a new college off to a flying start, the Jesuits used a somewhat deceptive, Jesuitical practice. As at Messina they sent top men to new colleges, then gradually replaced them with second stringers. The turnover of teachers at a given Jesuit college of the sixteenth century was great as teachers were redeployed from one school to another. Still the schools mushroomed. By 1615, seventy-five years after the foundation of the Jesuits, there were 372 Jesuit schools stretching from Estonia to Seville, from Goa to Lima, dense throughout Catholic Europe, but with claims to being almost a worldwide educational system. The number of schools kept growing till 1773 3John Patrick Donnelly, “Padua, Louvain and Paris: Three Case Studies of University-Jesuit Confrontation (1591–1596),” Louvain Studies 15 (1990): 38–52. 4Allan P. Farrell, The Jesuit Code of Liberal Education: Development and Scope of the Ratio Studiorum (Milwaukee: Bruce, 1938), 38. The origins of the college at Messina are treated by Loyola’s secretary Juan de Polanco in his chronicle of early Jesuit history printed in Monumenta Historica Societatis Iesu (Madrid: Societas, 1894), 1:242–43, 281–82. 5Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 245.

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when the Bourbon monarchs pressured the pope into suppressing the Jesuits. The number of Jesuits could not keep up with the demand for schools; Claudio Aquaviva, the Jesuit general, claimed that he turned down 150 requests for colleges between 1581 and 1589.6 This explosion of schools led to a felt need for a uniform system or organization: the seeds of the Ratio Studiorum. A crucial role was played by Loyola himself, both in approving the new Jesuit ministry of education and in formulating guidelines. Loyola was at once an idealist and a pragmatist. Education was not part of earliest Jesuit plans, but Loyola recognized the opportunity to branch out in an area where no previous Catholic religious order had operated and to influence morally and religiously the leaders of the next generation. Where did Loyola get his educational ideas and ideals? Largely from his own experience. When he decided to devote himself to serving God in other people, he realized he needed an education and attended Latin grammar classes at Barcelona with young teenagers. He then went to Spain’s leading bastion of humanism, the new University of Alcalà, and did poorly. He then transferred to the University of Salamanca with a more scholastic curriculum; again he did badly, taking courses at random, without a clear sequence. He then transferred to the University of Paris, where he gathered the nucleus of disciples who became the Jesuits. They all were trained at the University of Paris, which did have a system, a set progression of courses and a coherent curriculum in which professors lectured on a regular schedule—unlike the more haphazard pattern at Spanish and Italian universities. Initially at Paris, Loyola lived at the conservative Collège de Montaigu, which stressed scholasticism; in late 1529 he switched to the Collège de Sainte-Barbe, where a more humanist curriculum was regnant. There he stayed for three and a half years.7 The best way to characterize the last fifteen crucial years of Loyola’s life is “the mystic as bureaucrat.” During these years he drew up the Jesuit Constitutions, which contrast sharply with the main previous rules for religious orders—those of Sts. Benedict, Augustine, and Francis. Loyola’s Constitutions are much longer 6John

Patrick Donnelly, “The New Religious Orders, 1517–1648” in Handbook of European History, 1400–1600, ed. Thomas Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 1995), 2:292. 7The influence of the Paris model on later Jesuit education is traced by Gabriel Codina Mir, Aux sources de la pédagogie des jésuites: Le “modus parisiensis” (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1968). On documents illustrating the “modus Parisiensis” see Ladislaus Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica Societatis Iesu (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1965), 1:616–45. The Constitutions of the Society of Jesus, ed. and trans. George Ganss (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1970), 217 n. 7, urges that pt. 4, chap. 17, of the Constitutions reflect the influence of “the method of Paris.” The Constitutions are cited hereafter in the text as Const.

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and more detailed. A. G. Dickens has said about The Spiritual Exercises, “The craving of a troubled but order seeking century was a craving for precise guidance, and this was what Loyola offered.”8 His observation applies equally well to Loyola’s Constitutions and the Ratio Studiorum. Loyola takes up education in the fourth part of the Constitutions (210 n. 1), and the section dealing with universities was the last section he wrote. Part 4, chapter 7, deals with lower level colleges; chapters 11 to 17 deal with Jesuit universities. Here are a few main points laid down by Loyola. The general alone can approve new universities and has ultimate authority over them, although he cannot suppress them without authorization by a General Congregation (Cost. ¶¶393, 419–21). The rector of the Jesuit community is also in charge of the university on the local level, and he decides at which level a student is to be admitted and when he should be promoted (Const. ¶460). Promotions are not tied to time in a class but mastery of the subject matter (Const. ¶471). The rector also determines the vacation periods, although Loyola himself insisted that classes should not be held on Sundays and on one afternoon per week (Const. ¶462). The Constitutions (¶457) assume that most teachers would be Jesuits but allowed lay teachers. Religion was to be taught once a week, students were expected to receive the sacraments but were not to be expelled for not complying unless their behavior was scandalous (Const. ¶¶481–83). Loyola stressed flexibility in applying the rules several times (Const. ¶¶395, 509). The very last two rules Loyola wrote in the Constitutions dealt with insignia identifying teachers and university officials: “After considering the circumstances [the rector] will order, either by himself or through somebody else, what he judges to be for the greater glory and service of God our Lord and for the universal good, which is the only end sought in this matter and in all others. However, what seems best for each place in regard to these insignia will be clearly stated in the rules for each university” (Const. ¶¶508–9). The Jesuit Constitutions, of course, enjoyed greater authority than later academic rules and plans, but they were less specific. Later individual Jesuits wrote plans for Jesuit education, and three preliminary drafts of a Ratio were drawn up by committees working toward a more detailed and systematic plan of studies. This work culminated in the Ratio Studiorum of 1599. In 1562–63 Jerome Nadal wrote an “Ordo Studiorum Germanicus” which adapted the practice of the Jesuit Collegio Romano to Germany after Nadal returned from a visit to that country.9 In 1564 Diego Ledesma gave the Jesuit general Francisco Borgia a set of rules or Ratio he had drawn up in 8A G. Dickens, The Counter-Reformation (New York: Norton, 1968), 81. 9Nadal’s “Ordo” is printed in Ladislaus Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica Societatis Iesu II (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1974), 413–24. It is discussed by Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 76–82.

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Jesuit Education from Loyola to the 1599 “Ratio Studiorum” consultation with the faculty of the Collegio Romano; it ran to 113 pages.10 Borgia sent it to most of the European provinces but recommended that it be adapted to places and particular circumstances. More important than these earlier efforts were three versions of a Ratio Studiorum prepared by committees working at the behest of the new Jesuit general, Claudio Aquaviva. The texts of the 1586, 1591 and 1599 Ratios were edited in 1986 by Ladislaus Lukács in volume 5 of the Monumenta Paedagogica Societatis Iesu.11 In 1583 Aquaviva, following the request of the Fourth General Congregation that had elected him, set up a commission of six Jesuits, veteran teachers from five nations, to write a Ratio Studiorum. Their draft was reworked in collaboration with Jesuit professors at the Collegio Romano, but they got bogged down in a theological quagmire. The Jesuits had accepted Thomas Aquinas as their basic guide, but how closely must they follow Aquinas? Which theses of Aquinas were required, which optional? Any answer was bound to stir up trouble with the Dominicans, to say nothing of other theologians. Also the stress was on what was to be taught, not on the teachers doing the teaching; thus the rules were organized by subjects being taught. The definitive Ratio of 1599 would reverse this. Aquaviva circulated the 1586 draft and instructed each Jesuit province to set up a committee to examine and revise the 1586 draft. Basically the 1586 Ratio incorporated a typical humanist curriculum for the years before students began to study philosophy. The material being covered did not differ much from that in Johann Sturm’s earlier curriculum for the academy in Lutheran Strasbourg. Both avoided pagan authors and writers that might give scandal; thus students should read Virgil’s Aeneid rather than Ovid’s Ars Amatoria. Committees of Jesuits met throughout Catholic Europe in the summer and fall of 1586 to formulate corrections and additions, which they sent to Rome. The original committee that drafted the 1586 Ratio then went over the responses. Their new draft had two parts. One part largely dealt with the teachings of Aquinas, dividing them into three classes: the definitive, the probable, and those open to free choice. This division was eventually quashed and abandoned after the Holy Office forbade its being printed since it would set off a fire storm among other religious orders. Still Jesuit teachers were basically to follow Aristotle in philosophy and Aquinas in theology, but they were allowed wiggle room.12 It should be noted that the 1586 10For the text, Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1974), 515–627; Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 153–87. discusses Ledesma’s various drafts of a Ratio. 11Ladislaus Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica Societatis Iesu, V, Ratio atque Institutio Studiorum Societatis Iesu (1586, 1591, 1599) (Rome: Institutum Historicum Societatis Iesu, 1986). For the 1586 version, see 1–162; for the 1591 version, 163–354; for the 1599 version, 357–454. 12On the 1586 Ratio, see Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 219–83.

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draft, unlike those of 1591 and 1599, was never implemented in the classroom. The text was circulated for criticism and revision, and it received severe criticism from Jesuit teachers throughout Europe. The 1586 draft had young Jesuits assigned to teaching before they had undergone the three years of studying philosophy traditional among the Jesuits. The later versions of the Ratio sent them into the classroom after studying philosophy. Those three extra years meant much more mature teachers. The discussion of teaching methods in the 1591 and 1599 versions was more precise than in the 1586 Ratio, and the scope of the five classes covering grammar, humanities, and rhetoric was defined more clearly. So were the requirements for promotion to a higher class and the role of prizes, competition, and emulatio, which will be discussed later.13 The new Ratio of 1591 had two parts: the first presented rules for various officials and teachers. The second part dealt mainly with theology but allowed for considerable variation in emphasis and teaching methods in various countries. The 1591 version was to be implemented on an experimental basis for three years; then reactions to it were to be gathered and forwarded to Aquaviva with an eye to revision and a final, binding version.14 In 1593–94 the Fifth General Congregation met and mandated drafting a new Ratio—the Ratio of 1599 which remained in effect into the early twentieth century, although much modified around the fringes. The Congregation itself decided that the final version should simply drop the speculative, theological part of the 1591 Ratio. A committee of three spent 1595–98 reworking the more practical first part of the 1591 Ratio, entitled “Praxis and Order of Studies,” through several draft versions before the final, published Ratio Studiorum of 1599. Responding to many requests, the Ratio of 1599 radically cut the number of rules from 837 to 467. It also allowed for much more local adaptation and flexibility in applying the rules; there was an appendix with sets of special rules proper to Italy, France, Portugal, and Germany.15 By the late eighteenth century some Jesuit schools were introducing modern languages, history, mathematics, and science. In his edition of the Latin texts of the 1586, 1591, and 1599 Ratios, Ladislaus Lukács conveniently provides an alternative index to the 1599 Ratio in English. The Ratio is a set of rules for everyone involved in Jesuit education from Father Provincial down to the beadle or student helper of the teacher. Thus the ninetysix rules for the Provincial in 1591 were cut to only forty in 1599, thanks be to God! The best way to get a concrete feel for these rules is to read a few of them. 13Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 287–93. 14For the 1591 Ratio, Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 284–313. 15Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 333–336.

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Here are some rules for philosophy professors: “Let him not retreat from Aristotle in matters of some importance, except things touching on a teaching which schools everywhere regard as foreign, and much more if it is repugnant to the orthodox faith. Let him strive hard in accord with the Lateran Council against such teaching if there are arguments from [Aristotle] or another philosopher.”16 “He should not let himself or his students be attracted to any sect like the Averroists or Alexandrians [i.e., followers of Alexander of Aphrodisias] or the like. He should not cloak over the errors of Averroes or Alexander or the rest but should undermine their authority.”17 If Aristotle was the approved master for philosophy, St. Thomas Aquinas was so for theology. The Thomistic revival of the sixteenth century was spearheaded by Cardinal Cajetan in Italy and a cluster of gifted Dominicans in Spain, but the adhesion of the Jesuits to Aquinas struck a major blow to the Nominalist tradition and helped make Aquinas the quasi-official theologian of modern Catholicism. The Summa Theologiae increasingly replaced Peter Lombard’s Sentences as the basic text for lectures. The Capuchins, who were growing even faster than the Jesuits, also chose a thirteenth-century master, the devout St. Bonaventure, over the later Franciscan giants, John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. Loyola’s Constitutions still have the Jesuits lecturing on both Aquinas and Lombard; the 1599 Ratio dropped Lombard, a sign of the times.18 Biblical studies were not neglected on the advanced level in Jesuit schools; the Ratio gives twenty rules for the professors of sacred Scripture and five for professors of Hebrew. There were also twenty-one rules for professors of scholastic theology. Here are some of them: “Let all of ours without exception follow the teaching of St. Thomas in scholastic theology and have him for their own master.… Still they should understand they do not have to adhere so strictly that they may never dissent from his teaching.… If sometimes the position of St. Thomas is ambiguous or in those questions he perhaps did not treat or Catholic teachers differ among themselves, it is legitimate to follow any position, as rule 5 of the common rules said.… The whole course of theology must be completed in four years” (Const. ¶387). A sort of appendix in six pages of fine print (Const. ¶388–94) gives a detailed list of which sections of the Summa Theologiae are to be taught. The beadle was a student who helped the Jesuit teacher in various ways, plus watching the clock lest class run over. Here are some of his rules. “He should take 16Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 397. 17Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 397. 18Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 219 n. 1. Constitutions, ¶¶464, 466.

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care that the classroom and the teacher’s chair are clean.… Let him warn in good time the students who are later going to take turns in disputing, making presentations, defending theses and what pertains to similar activities, as the teacher has decided” (Const. ¶445). Teachers today might like to have a beadle around. But maybe not. Here is the beadle’s last rule: “If any Jesuit is absent from prelections, repetitions, disputations, or drops anything pertaining to the plan of studies or the discipline of behavior, let him [the beadle] write it down and call it to the superior’s attention” (Const. ¶446). Loyola’s Constitutions urges that the beadles “since they will have much to do they should receive a good salary,” but he immediately goes on to suggest that they can be used as the corrector (Const. ¶500).What was the corrector? Not a paper or test grader—teachers were supposed to do that. Few educators in the sixteenth century doubted the wisdom of “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Jesuit schools used less physical punishment than most schools of that day, but a corrector was assigned to administer it. Loyola, always concerned about the reputation of Jesuits, laid it down that such correction should never be done by a Jesuit, but by a layman (Const. ¶¶395, 397). It is doubtful that the rod hurt any the less. The fact that the Ratio insists on lectures on Aristotle and Aquinas obscures the Jesuit popularization of textbooks. Medieval university professors spent most of their time explaining a classic text: Aristotle in philosophy, Justinian’s code in civil law, Gratian in canon law, and so on. Many Jesuit courses instead had a modern synthetic textbook, much as we use today, at least as a supplement to our own lectures. Sometimes a specific textbook was made mandatory for Jesuit schools, for instance that of Manuel Alvarez in Latin grammar (Const. ¶¶377, 404, 407). When the professors at the University of Padua successfully pressured the Venetian government into closing down the Jesuit college at Padua, their main argument was that they alone had a legal monopoly on higher education in Venetian territory. They also condemned the Jesuits for using textbooks rather than lecturing directly on Aristotle’s text, because the Jesuits could thereby slide over difficult problems presented by Aristotle’s own text. Worse, they were forcing the university professor to use the same inferior approach to keep students from transferring to the Jesuit college.19

19The rectors of the Paduan commune reported to the Venetian government (5 December 1591) about the complaints of professors against the Jesuits: “They objected that in teaching philosophy the Jesuits used a few modern summisti rather than the text of Aristotle with the result that the Jesuits have forced philosophy professors to use the same inferior methods lest they lose their students to the Jesuits.” Antonio Favaro, Lo Studio di Padova e la Compagnia di Gesù (Venice: G. Antonelli, 1878), 91–93, gives the whole report. The translation is mine.

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The explicit teaching of religion was less prominent than one might expect— only once a week, on Friday or Saturday. But religious practice and belief pervaded the atmosphere of the schools. Someone, often a student, was appointed to start class with a short prayer. Students were expected to attend daily Mass.20 Extracurriculars played an important part in Jesuit education. Famous were the dramas; many were spectacles involving more than a hundred students. Jesuit colleges usually put on two dramas a year, most of which proved very popular, such as those Edmund Campion wrote and directed for the imperial court at Prague. But smaller-scale classroom dramas were also employed as a teaching tool and to get students more involved.21 Rule 13 for the rector deals with dramas the colleges put on: “Tragedies and comedies, which are not to be given except in Latin and on rare occasions, must have a sacred and edifying theme; let nothing be introduced as an interlude which is not in Latin and is not becoming. No female characters or costumes are permitted.”22 The prohibitions suggest that the things prohibited were in fact being done. The most important extracurricular was the Marian sodalities, Jesuit-run confraternities which members entered as students but in which they could remain for their whole lives.23 Jesuit schools were famous for stimulating emulatio, competition among students. Thus in philosophy classes there were monthly disputations.24 But here the main focus was on the extracurricular “academies,” study groups or writing clubs.25 Here is part of the rule for academies for students of humanities and rhetoric: “Again with the moderator’s approval, let them hold debates, or let someone explain a passage from an author and answer the objections of two or more opponents. Topics should be proposed for defense and attack, using rather an oratorical than a dialectic form.… Or again let them exercise themselves in oratorical invention, each one thinking out, either impromptu or after study, the types of proof bearing on the proposed subject.”26 The students 20Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 416. 21Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 428. For an overview of

Jesuit drama, see William McCabe, An Introduction to Jesuit Theater (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1984). Interest in Jesuit drama has increased greatly in recent years; as an example see L. J. Oldani and M. J. Bredeck, “Jesuit Theater in Italy: A Bibliography,” Archivum Historicum Societatis Iesu 66 (1997): 184–235. 22Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 371. 23The best study of the Marian sodalities is Louis Châtellier, The Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Reformation of a New Society, trans. Jean Birrell (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989). 24Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 399, 432. 25Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 321–26, discusses the academies. 26The translation of Farrell, Jesuit Code of Liberal Education, 324, is quoted here; for the Latin text, see Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 452.

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here would have been twelve or thirteen years old. How does what they were doing compare with students today? The students who competed in writing or problem solving would be given prizes, sometimes privately by the teacher or in a public ceremony before town dignitaries: “Likewise more solemn prizes can be distributed to all the academies together once a year, whether from contributions or on a different basis which the rector of the colleges prefers.” On a feast of the Blessed Virgin chosen by the rector with celebri pompa, copies of the prize-winning orations, poems, and verses were posted on the college walls.27 As we have seen, most Jesuit colleges of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries trained students ten to twenty years old. Three years, usually ages nine to eleven, were spent on the three levels of grammar, mainly Latin but some Greek. The first year aimed at a solid knowledge of nouns and verbs, with declensions, gender, tenses, gerunds, and participles. The next year students were expected to gain a complete knowledge of grammar and cut their teeth on Cicero’s letters to his family plus some easy poetry. The third year, when students were about eleven, they dove into Cicero’s more difficult letters plus his treatises on friendship and on old age. In poetry, they did selected/expurgated poems from Ovid, Tibullus, and the easier books of Virgil’s Aeneid. They also studied rules for Latin poetry. In Greek, students read from Aesop’s fables and sermons of St. John Chrysostom. At about twelve, students moved from grammar to humanities, reviewed Latin syntax, but read extensively in Cicero’s orations, plus Sallust, Livy, and Horace. In Greek, they were likely to read some Plato and Isocrates, plus the Greek church fathers. The last year in the lower level courses was devoted to rhetoric and included the study of Cicero’s orations plus Aristotle’s Rhetoric and his Poetics. The whole lower level of studies was clearly based on a humanist curriculum and was offered at most Jesuit colleges. The larger Jesuit schools offered training in philosophy (usually two or three years) and even theology (four years).28 Here the scholastic tradition remained dominant. Jesuit education embraced both the humanist curriculum of the Renaissance and medieval scholastic tradition of Aristotle and Aquinas in philosophy and theology. Only a handful of the students who started in a large Jesuit college at age nine would finish four years of theology at age twenty or more. Those who did usually sought ordination. Many students would have transferred to a university where they could study law or medicine. 27Lukács, ed., Monumenta Paedagogica (1986), 453. 28For a recent study, see Ugo Baldini, Legem Impone Subactis: Studi su filosofia e scienza dei Gesu-

iti in Italia, 1540–1632 (Rome: Bulzoni, 1992). Much of the same ground is studies in Alan Dennis Bartlett, “The Evolution of the Philosophical and Theological Elements of the Jesuit Ratio Studiorum: An Historical Study, 1540–1599” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of San Francisco, 1984).

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The Ratio of 1599 was symptomatic of a larger development in Jesuit history. Claudio Aquaviva was, after Ignatius of Loyola, the most important of all Jesuit generals, partly because he ruled so long (from 1581 till his death in 1615), partly because he was a hardworking and able administrator, but mainly because his years as general came at a crucial period in Jesuit history. Most religious orders enjoy a charismatic period of rapid growth during and immediately after the life of their founders—the Franciscans are the classic example—but a generation or two later the élan tends to wane, and the need to consolidate the original charisma takes hold. Rules are formulated, experiment declines. This seems to have prevailed among the Jesuits under Aquaviva, as we have seen with the Ratio, but 1599 also was a milestone in the use of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises. Hardly had the Exercises been published in 1548 than the need for more precise instructions and regulations for the directors giving the exercises was felt. Several of Loyola’s closest associates wrote directoria with such instructions, some more, some less flexible. These Aquaviva consolidated in the official Directorium of 1599 which remained normative down until the Second Vatican Council.29 Most Jesuits do not think that the 467 rules of the 1599 Ratio are appropriate for 2000 and beyond. Some would even argue that the Oratorian colleges in seventeenth-century France had a better curriculum with more history, science, and modern languages.30 The Jesuits stuck with the Ratio far too long. In 1773 the papacy suppressed the Jesuits; they were restored in 1814. In 1832 a revised version of the Ratio was issued; it tried to adapt Jesuit education to the new world of the nineteenth century, but the old classical curriculum still prevailed. On the other hand, the classical curriculum pioneered by Erasmus and others dominated the education at Harrow and Eton, at the French Lycées and the German Gymnasia, and even the posh New England private schools down to the First World War. Latin remained the medium of instruction in some European universities into the eighteenth century. Matthew Arnold created a sensation at Victorian Oxford when he gave his poetry lectures in English, not the traditional Latin. Is there then anything to be learned about planning or revising curricula for today from the Jesuits involved with the 1599 Ratio? Not much, from its contents. 29See

Martin Palmer, trans. and ed., On Giving the Spiritual Exercises: The Early Jesuit Manuscript Directories and the Official Directory of 1599 (St. Louis: Institute of Jesuit Sources, 1996). 30Less than a century after 1599 the Jesuit curriculum was being criticized as outmoded. See Marina Roggero, “La crisis di un modello culturale: I Gesuiti nello stato sabaudo tra Sei e Settecento” in La “Ratio Studiorum“: Modelli culturali e pratiche educative dei Gesuiti in Italia tra Cinque e Seicento, ed. Gian Paolo Brizzi (Rome: Bulzoni, 1981), 217–48. For an overview of the background of Jesuit education, with special emphasis on Italy, France, and Savoy, see Aldo Scaglione, The Liberal Arts and the Jesuit Educational System (Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1982).

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John Patrick Donnelly, S.J.

The modern world is too different. But the process can teach us. Real teachers, not bureaucrats, worked long and hard to prepare a plan to help students to meet the needs of their time. They went through many drafts; they sought outside evaluation from other teachers down in the trenches. Their final product could lay down very precise rules, yet also allowed considerable flexibility. We could do worse today.

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Laity and Liturgy in the French Reformed Tradition Raymond A. Mentzer

istorians of the Reformation can readily identify the principal liturgical transformations initiated by John Calvin and his associates. Reformed theologians, in keeping with their understanding of Scripture, reduced the traditional seven sacraments to two: baptism and the Lord’s Supper. The Mass, which the medieval priest celebrated daily for the salvation of souls, was deemed unscriptural and suspiciously pagan. It was, accordingly, abolished. The new worship centered on the regular sermon service (le prêche) and the celebration of the Eucharist (la Cène) four times each year. Ecclesiastical officials introduced communal singing of the psalms and discarded medieval Latin prayers. Knowledge of the Decalogue and the ability to recite the Lord’s Prayer and Apostles’ Creed in the vernacular became fundamental.1 These and related shifts in the life of worship raise a number of obvious, critical queries. How did the leaders of the Reformed churches in France go about filling the liturgical void left by the eradication of numerous medieval religious practices? What exactly was modified and, conversely, what remained more or less constant? What was the underlying relationship to Reformed theology and, perhaps most important, how did the faithful receive the changes and adjustments? Put slightly differently, what was the place of the laity within the new liturgy and how did ordinary believers perceive and respond to the revisions? What did they embrace? What did they resist? The evolution of religious ritual and ceremony during the Reformation has attracted considerable recent attention. A number of interpretative frameworks bear directly on the present examination of changes within French Reformed

H

1For an assessment of these changes at Geneva, see Robert M. Kingdon, “The Genevan Revolution in Public Worship,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 20 (1999): 264–80.

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circles. Edward Muir has emphasized a general restructuring of ideas relating to ritual during the early modern period. The Reformation constituted, in his words, a “revolution in ritual theory.”2 Susan Karant-Nunn, whose work concentrates on the practice and the theology of a “reformation of ritual” within the German Lutheran orbit, effectively demonstrates how profound and far-reaching the effects of these liturgical shifts could be. Ritual in Karant-Nunn’s view became a contentious process by which the powerful elite disciplined ordinary believers.3 Still, the ritual revisions instituted by Lutheran churches appear to have been more conservative than those undertaken by Reformed religious leaders, leastways in France.4 A related development is the recent scholarly investigation of Catholic piety, especially as evidenced in the lay confraternities of France, Italy, and Spain. The emerging associations announced civic as well as religious identity and frequently emphasized a strongly penitential devotion.5 The impulses giving rise to this collective religious expression and the prominent participation of laypersons were no less powerful within Protestant circles. Reformed rituals in which contrite sinners stood before the assembled congregation to beg forgiveness or observances such as fasting possessed a robust communal character. Indeed, the prominence of shared rituals within French Protestantism runs counter to the notion of Protestant devotion as a move away from a shared medieval religious experience toward a more individual sensibility.6 Close examination of the Reformation in France indicates that communal concerns were in fact crucial to Protestant 2Edward Muir, Ritual in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7. 3Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London and New York: Routledge, 1997). 4German Evangelicals retained many traditional ceremonies and practices, although they were altered and downgraded. Lutherans in Alsace, to take an example that bordered on francophone religious culture, continued the practice of confirmation and duly recorded the names of those who underwent the ceremony, even after the area fell to French control in the late seventeenth century. Archives Départementales (hereafter AD), Bas-Rhin, 3 E 517/2. 5See, among other studies, Andrew E. Barnes, The Social Dimension of Piety: Associative Life and Religious Change in the Penitential Confraternities of Marseille 1499–1792 (New York: Paulist Press, 1994); Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); John Patrick Donnelly, S.J., and Michael W. Maher, S.J., eds., Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France and Spain (Kirksville: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999); and Nicholas Terpstra, Lay Confraternities and Civic Religion in Renaissance Bologna (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 6John Bossy, for example, argues that shifts in the conceptualization of sin signify a movement in both Protestantism and Catholicism away from a collective religious mentality toward a focus on the individual. Bossy, “Moral Arithmetic: Seven Sins into Ten Commandments,” in Conscience and Casuistry in Early Modern Europe, ed. Edmund Leites (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 214–34.

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Raymond A. Mentzer religious life.7 With these interpretative perspectives in mind, let us turn to four key elements of the Reformed liturgy—each of the two sacraments of baptism and the Lord’s Supper, regular worship (to include the sermon service as well as domestic devotion), and fasting. Reformed theological concepts regarding baptism differed noticeably in their emphasis from medieval views. Baptism for Calvin was a sign of divine forgiveness and the act which initiated the recipient into the church.8 He dismissed the medieval perception of the sacrament as a washing away of the stain of original sin. It was not, furthermore, a means of salvation but the beginning of a lifelong process of repentance. Still, Protestants and Catholics recognized the validity of baptism performed in one another’s church. Perhaps more important were the consequences of the Reformed doctrinal position for the administration of the sacrament. An immense seventeenth-century engraving with watercolor now housed in the Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français at Paris contains, in part, a depiction of the baptismal ceremony (fig. 1).9 The godmother carries the infant. She is accompanied by the godfather and perhaps the father. The mother is likely to have remained at home, recuperating from having given birth. In a time-honored gesture,10 the pastor, dressed in a black gown with white collar, greets them at the entrance to the temple, as French Reformed Protestants dubbed the structures in which they worshiped. He holds a prayer book in his left hand and the water, which will be poured over the child, in the right. An elder, standing behind him, carries a pitcher.11 A far more famous painting of the interior of the Temple de Paradis at Lyons (fig. 2) provides an analogous depiction from the 1560s.12 In this instance, the godparents enter the temple from the left, 7Françoise

Chevalier, Prêcher sous l’Edit de Nantes: La prédication réformée au XVIIe en France (Geneva: Labor et Fides, 1994), 21–34, suggests the rich interplay between “an individual and familial piety and communal practices.” 8John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, ed. J. T. McNeill, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1960), 2:1303–8. 9Attributed to Guillaume Anglois, Tableau ou induction des simples, représentant deux religions différentes, 0.66m x 1.87m. Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, Paris. Attached notes by Elisabeth Labrousse (June 1988) suggest a seventeenth-century date. 10The medieval priest traditionally met the infant at the church door. Karant-Nunn, Reformation of Ritual, 44; and Hughes Oliphant Old, The Shaping of the Reformed Baptismal Rite in the Sixteenth Century (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992), 9. 11Jacques Pannier, “Le baptême et la sainte cène au XVIe siècle, d’après trois représentations contemporaines,” Bulletin de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français (hereafter BSHPF) 82 (1933): 234–37. The water was “pure and simple,” rather than consecrated as in the medieval practice. See Old, Shaping, 260. 12Temple de Paradis, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, Geneva.

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Figure 1: Tableau ou induction des simples, représentant deux religions différentes, attributed to Guillaume Anglois, 0.66m x 1.87m. Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, Paris.

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Figure 2: Temple de Paradis, Bibliothèque publique et universitaire, Geneva.

Raymond A. Mentzer

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presumably near the conclusion of the worship. The godfather carries the child, who is wrapped in an elaborate white cloth. The godmother with pitcher in hand stands immediately behind. Several elements in these portrayals bear note. Because baptism explicitly noted an individual’s admission to the community of believers, a vigorous public element permeated the ceremony. It normally occurred in the temple immediately prior to the completion of the principal Sunday sermon service. Baptism took place before the final singing of a psalm and the concluding benediction. The entire congregation—the community of believers—witnessed the event and welcomed the newest member. The church unquestionably frowned upon private baptisms. In the mid-seventeenth century, for instance, the elders of Dangeau to the southwest of Chartres criticized their pastor for having baptized an infant in his private chambers. Several decades earlier, a pastor of Montauban was faulted for performing a baptism at his farmhouse.13 In addition, although an elder assisted, the pastor alone was authorized to baptize. Reformed officials sought to eradicate the medieval practice of the socalled ondoiement or emergency baptism by a layperson. Their reasons derived from a theological position and a desire to eliminate older religious customs. Medieval Christians generally favored a newborn’s immediate baptism by the midwife or possibly a neighbor. This was technically a provisional baptism invoked especially if the infant was sickly. Parents believed the ceremony was essential for the protection and salvation of their children. Infants who died unbaptized were, according to the medieval church, forever consigned to limbo and thus denied entry into heaven. The French Reformed churches vigorously rejected the medieval notion of limbo as the abode of innocent souls kept from heaven by lack of baptism. Protestant pastors and elders similarly condemned midwives and helpful neighbor women who provided this preliminary baptism.14 Yet old ways obstinately persisted. The elders at a village in the Cévennes mountains of southern France reprimanded a young couple whose infant daughter had been baptized by a neighbor. They also chastised the woman who had performed the baptism. The Nîmes consistory summoned a widow and her daughter to answer for having baptized a

13Paul de Félice, Les protestants d’autrefois. Le temple, les services religieux, les actes pastoraux (Paris: Fischbacher, 1896), 182; Yves Guéneau, “Protestants du centre, 1598–1685 (Ancienne province synodale d’Orléanais-Berry). Approches d’une minorité” (doctoral thesis, Université François Rabelais de Tours, 1982), 261; Isaac d’Huisseau, La Discipline des Eglises Réformées de France (Geneva, 1656), 74–75, 79; and Old, Shaping, 171–76. 14Calvin, Institutes, 2:1320–23, 1349.

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friend’s baby, and it severely punished another woman for acquiescing when the parents of a newborn asked her to baptize their child.15 The practice was so deeply entrenched that two mothers from Nîmes were able to persuade a deacon to baptize their frail babies. The outraged consistory subsequently dismissed the man from the diaconate, suspended him from the Lord’s Supper, and demanded that he atone publicly for his transgression. It also seems likely that many of the parents rebuked by the consistory, particularly in the sixteenth century, for having a child baptized by a priest, did so in order to obtain a quick baptism for an infant who appeared in danger of death. Even Reformed ministers occasionally yielded under intense parental pressure. In 1650, the pastor of Blois agreed to a special gathering in the temple for the express purpose of baptizing a frail baby. He, nonetheless, felt obliged to admonish those in attendance that this extraordinary practice was wholly unnecessary. Several years later, the pastor of the same church baptized newborn triplets in their parents’ home, “due to the frailty of the infants.”16 Ideally, the church encouraged a reasonable delay between birth and baptism. By the seventeenth century, some parents extended the interval to several months, presumably to distinguish themselves from unreformed “papists.” A related confessional distinction involved naming patterns. The Protestant penchant for Old Testament names—Abraham, Daniel, Isaac, Judith, Sara, and Suzanne—was striking, particularly during the early decades of the Reformation. Yet care must be taken not to overemphasize the shift. Traditional, presumably ancestral names such as Anne and Marie, Pierre and Jean persisted. Still, by the seventeenth century, strongly biblical names readily identified the Protestant faithful struggling to survive within an ever more suffocating Catholic majority.17 Baptism is an instance where the French Reformed churches sought to restrict liturgical participation by the laity, especially women. The effort ran counter to concepts such as the priesthood of all believers and the increased involvement of at least laymen in other aspects of the Reformed liturgy. The reasons were twofold. Ecclesiastical authorities obviously wished to eradicate what they considered erroneous beliefs regarding the existence of limbo and the fate of unbaptized infants. In addition, the strongly patriarchal reformers sought to 15Archives Nationales, TT 269, dossier 25, fol. 947v; and Bibliothèque Nationale (hereafter BnF), ms fr 8666, fols. 57, 159, 162. 16One of the infants was, in fact, stillborn. BnF, ms fr 8666, fols. 57, 159, 162; and Guéneau, Protestants du centre, 261–62. 17Philip Benedict, Rouen during the Wars of Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 257–60; and Didier Poton and Patrick Cabanel, Les protestants français du XVIe au XXe siècle (Paris: Nathan, 1994), 52.

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discourage the sacral roles that women had enjoyed in medieval religious culture. Yet feminine participation seems to have endured. As late as 1636, the provincial synod of the Orléanais-Berry “expressly condemned and forbade” a practice in several churches whereby women shared in the baptismal ceremony, specifically by pouring the water into the pastor’s hand.18 Another ingredient in the decidedly antifeminist approach to baptism concerned the ancient customs surrounding godparents. Although a woman often carried the child to the temple for the ceremony, she could not present the infant alone. She was deemed incapable of fulfilling the godparents’ duties on her own and therefore had to be accompanied by the infant’s godfather. In addition, although the child’s father almost always attended the ceremony, the mother’s presence was less frequent.19 The dangers associated with childbirth and the importance of proper recovery likely explain her absence. In the end, the thrust of the changes surrounding baptism was to make the sacrament a communal celebration administered by the pastor. Private and feminine elements were sharply reduced or excluded altogether. Finally, tensions between ecclesiastical authorities and apprehensive parents over the sacrament’s meaning and urgency were never entirely resolved. Theological reconsideration of the Eucharist—above all, an insistence upon Christ’s spiritual presence and the laity’s reception of both the bread and wine— had equally dramatic repercussions within the liturgy, although the changes moved in a slightly different direction. Reformers substantially enhanced the participation of laypersons, notably lay elders, in the sacramental celebration. The elders, who served annual, generally nonrenewable terms, were technically members of the ministry, although they were neither ordained nor formally trained in theology. Reformed churches celebrated the Cène, whose vocabulary evokes the sense of a meal, four times a year: on Easter, Pentecost, early September, and Christmastide (though not Christmas day, unless it happened to fall on Sunday). This was probably three times more than most people’s annual reception of the sacrament in the late Middle Ages. Scattered evidence suggests that a few individuals, who had grown up in a pre-Reformation world, felt uncomfortable with the more frequent services and the laity’s reception of the cup.20

18BnF, ms fr 15829, Recueil des actes des synodes et colloques de la province d’Orléanais-Berry, 1582–1643. 19Sylvie Cadier-Sabatier, Les Protestants de Pont-de-Veyle et lieux circonvoisins au XVIIe siècle (Trévoux: Editions de Trévoux, 1975), 50; and D’Huisseau, Discipline, 76. 20Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, ms 6536, fols. 54v, 62v–63, 77, 79v, 81v, and 82; and Poton and Cabanel, Protestants français, 52.

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Other worshipers, particularly nobles, magistrates, and members of the municipal elite, continued to demand the liturgical precedence that their ancestors had enjoyed. Consequently, they occasionally scuffled over the order in which they received the Lord’s Supper. Members of the leading noble families of Ganges in the uplands north of Montpellier engaged in a fierce shoving match, trying to elbow their way ahead of one other, as they moved toward the communion table at the Christmas 1598 celebration of the Lord’s Supper. They demanded that the Reformed liturgy perpetuate the “honors” and “rights” that the pre-Reformation religious culture had accorded them. For its part, the local consistory was unable to resolve this battle over sacramental privilege and social stature.21 In reality, most Reformed churches observed an order of reception for the bread and wine: pastor, elders, local nobles, municipal consuls, magistrates, and finally, the less distinguished members of the faithful.22 The celebration of the Lord’s Supper usually consisted of two services on consecutive Sundays to allow the entire congregation over the age of twelve years to receive.23 Individual churches carefully regulated participation in the sacral meal through an elaborate system of general catechism, the screening of worthy communicants, and the use of entry tokens. In all of this the elders took a decided lead. To avoid profanation of the Eucharist, only those persons deemed qualified by virtue of correct belief and proper conduct could share in the celebration. Churches used the several weeks prior to the Lord’s Supper as an occasion for contrition and reconciliation. Notorious sinners and excommunicates were invited to seek forgiveness. It was the appropriate moment for repentance and the restoration of communal harmony. In addition, pastors, elders, and deacons offered general and obligatory adult catechism lessons during this period.24 Attendance was a prerequisite for participation in the service. The assumption was that communicants ought to comprehend the essentials of the faith, know the Ten Commandments, and be able to recite basic prayers such as the Lord’s Prayer and Apostles’ Creed. The elders and deacons maintained a record of the catechized, who were in turn eligible to receive the sacrament. In most churches, the 21The

quarrel eventually spilled over into the sermons service and subsequent communion services. See AD, Hérault, E Dépôt, Ganges GG 24, fols. 100, 101v, 106v–108v, 116v, 117v. 22Janine Garrisson, Protestants du Midi, 1559–1598 (Toulouse: Privât, 1980), 241–46. 23The practice of celebrating the Lord’s Supper on two consecutive Sundays may also have worked to break its popular association with the traditional feast days. See Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard, “Le temps de la cène chez les réformés français,” in Edifier ou instruire? Les avatars de la liturgie réformée du XVIe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. Maria-Cristina Pitassi (Paris: Champion, 2000), 62. 24For practice at the churches of Layrac and Montagnac in Gascony, see AD, Gers, 23015, 20 mai 1594, 24 février 1596, 25 mai 1596, 25 et 26 novembre 1596; and 23067, 3 mars 1579.

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elders distributed entry counters—sometimes paper chits, more often metal (typically lead) tokens called méreaux—at the conclusion of catechism. The tokens were subsequently collected at the communion service. At Le Mans in the early 1560s, for example, “each of the faithful placed his méreau on the [communion] table.” In other churches, an elder collected the tokens at the temple door. No one could participate without one.25 If the elders assiduously screened participants for the Eucharist, they also shouldered substantial responsibility in the conduct of the service. The church assigned each elder a specific task. The consistory at Layrac in Gascony, much as its counterparts throughout France, coordinated an elaborate ceremony. One elder distributed the communion tokens to the members of the community qualified to receive, another collected them at the service. An elder supervised the faithful as they moved toward the table. One read during the service. Two or three others furnished the bread, wine, and linens. Similarly, at Marchenoir near Blois during the late sixteenth century, one elder provided the bread and wine, another collected the tokens as people approached the table. Yet a third elder gave the readings, while a fourth collected offerings for the poor.26 The Lord’s Supper followed, with minor modifications, La manière de célébrer la Cène, first published by Calvin in 1542.27 The rite began much as the usual Sunday morning worship: prayers, singing of a psalm, reading from Scripture, and a sermon. A special prayer then introduced the sacrament. Following a lengthy exhortation, which enumerated those who were specifically excluded, instructed the faithful, and prepared the bread and wine, the congregants proceeded two by two toward the communion table, segregated according to gender, the men followed by the women.28 The men bared their heads, while the women 25MM. Anjubault

and H. Chardon, Papier et registre du Consistoire de l’Eglise du Mans, réformée selon l’Evangile, 1560–1561 (1561–1562 nouveau style) (Le Mans: Ed. Monnoyer, 1867), 35–36; CadierSabatier, Protestants de Pont-de-Veyle, 46–47; and Raymond A. Mentzer, “The Printed Catechism and Religious Instruction in the French Reformed Churches,” in Habent sua fata libelli: Books Have Their Own Destiny. Essays in Honor of Robert V. Schnucker, ed. Robin B. Barnes, Robert A. Kolb, and Paula L. Presley (Kirksville: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1998), 93–101. 26Garrisson, Protestants du Midi, 241–46; and Guéneau, Protestants du centre, 306–7. In a deeply communal touch, the city of Montauban furnished the wine for celebration of the Lord’s Supper in the mid–1560s, see Gaston Serr, Une église protestante au XVIe siècle, Montauban (Aix-en-Provence: La Pensée Universitaire, 1958), 101 n. 20. For arrangements at Nègrepelisse in 1627, see “Communications relatives aux marraux,” BSHPF 2 (1853): 13. 27John Calvin, Ioannis Calvini Opera quae supersunt omnia, ed. G. Baum, E. Cunitz, and E. Reuss, 59 vols. (Brunswick: Schwetschke, 1863–1900), 6:193–202. 28According to Moïse Amyraut, Apologie pour ceux de la religion (Saumur, 1647), men received first, given the “prerogative of their sex,” quoted in Samuel Mours, Le protestantisme en France au XVIIe siècle (1598–1685) (Paris: Librairie Protestante, 1967), 95.

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modestly covered theirs with veils. The French churches conducted an ambulatory service. Communicants did not sit around the table in the explicit image of a common meal. The French Reformed tradition consciously disassociated the Eucharist from the Passover meal shared by Jesus and his disciples. It was not an imitation of the Last Supper; the Lord’s Supper was a Christian rite of communion with the divine.29 In many churches, an elder read scriptural passages or the people sang psalms during the service. The pastor could, if he wished, offer a devout phrase in distributing the bread and wine. Practice seems to have depended on individual preference. Some pastors said: “Ce pain est le corps de Christ; ce vin est le sang de Christ.” They occasionally added: “Mangez, buvez en assurance.” Others used the words: “Le pain que nous romprons, c’est la communion du corps de Christ” or even “Elevez votre coeur au ciel.” Various additional pious utterances were also employed.30 Each person received a piece of ordinary table bread, not a special host, from the pastor. The communicant remained standing and held the bread, placed it in the mouth, chewed, and swallowed it. The complex of gestures reinforced Reformed notions regarding the Eucharist in several important ways. The posture diverged pointedly from the Catholic tradition of kneeling. In addition, common bread rather than a wafer appeared to accord better with the biblical account. Finally, its deliberate mastication underscored the Calvinist rejection of the real presence. The bread, which the communicant took in her or his hands, had not been miraculously transformed into the body of Christ. It could be touched and did not have to be swallowed whole to avoid possible profanation. The engraving from the Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français in Paris (fig. 1) shows the pastor standing behind the communion table. A serviette covers the central portion of the table. On it rests a large plate with the bread. The pastor distributes bread with his right hand and the cup with the other to male communicants, who form a double line. A second pastor 29Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard, “La Cène dans le ‘Prêche’ réformé (XVIe–XVIIe siècles),” in L’Eucharistie. Célébrations, rites, piétés, ed. A. M. Triacca and A. Pistoia (Rome: Edizioni liturgiche, 1996), 133–47; Félice, Les protestants d’autrefois. Le temple, 148–149; Bernard Roussel, “Comment faire la Cène? Rite et retour aux Ecritures dans les Eglises Réformées du Royaume de France au XVIe siècle,” in Les Retours aux Ecritures: fondamentalismes présents et passés, ed. Evelyne Patlagean and Alain Le Boulluec (Louvain and Paris: Peeters, 1993), 195–216; and Roussel, “‘Faire la Cène’ dans les églises réformées du royaume de France au seizième siècle (ca. 1555–ca. 1575),” Archives de Sciences sociales des Religions 85 (1994): 99–119. 30Félice, Les protestants d’autrefois. Le temple, 142–43, 150; D’Huisseau, Discipline, 81; and François Méjan, Discipline de l’Eglise Réformée de France annotée et précédée d’une introduction historique (Paris: Editions ‘Je Sers,’ 1947), 276–77.

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or perhaps an elder stands in the pulpit. He is reading from Scripture or possibly leading in the singing of a psalm. An elder located between the pulpit and the communion table pours ordinary wine from a large ewer into a cup. The manner of administration for the cup varied. Indeed, the innovations associated with the wine were both remarkable and controversial. In principle, the pastor distributed the cup. An elder handed him the cup and he presented it to the faithful, each of whom took a sip. Sometimes, and it is unclear how often, an elder administered the cup directly to the people. The Discipline des Eglises Réformées de France insisted that the pastor present the cup and then quickly added “insofar as possible.” The National Synod held at Lyon in 1563 specified that when the minister places “the cup in the hand of an elder,” it becomes “the very hand of the minister.” The practice, according to the synod, followed Jesus’ own command at the Last Supper when he said: “Distribute it among yourselves.”31 In the early seventeenth century, the church of Layrac asserted that “the minister distributes the bread for the Lord’s Supper and the senior elder (premier ancien) the cup.”32 Not everyone, however, was pleased. A merchant balked at receiving the cup from an elder rather than the pastor. He maintained that Jesus had presented the cup to his disciples and the pastor should do likewise.33 The discussion at the local and national levels was plainly ongoing, and eventually the elder’s role was subject to greater restriction but not eliminated entirely. In large congregations, elders could distribute the cup, lest the service take too long. They had, however, to do so in silence; only the pastor could voice a pious phrase.34 Procedures differed even among neighboring churches. Take, for example, seventeenth-century practice at a cluster of churches in the Cévennes mountains. At Sumène, an elder “held the cup” and “passed it to the pastor” who “gave the wine to the participants.” At the nearby town of Alès, the elders were also restricted to “assisting” the pastor in the distribution of the cup. On the other hand, at the village of Saint-Roman-de-Codières, an elder, aided by a second elder, “distributed” or “gave” the communion cup. The elders similarly “administered” the wine at Aubenas.35 31Jean

Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux des Eglises réformées de France, 2 vols. (The Hague, 1710), 1:57; D’Huisseau, Discipline, 81; and Méjan, Discipline, 277. 32AD, Gers, 23067, 19 juin 1587, 1 avril 1588, 31 août 1591, 11 juin 1593, 25 mars 1594, 24 mars 1606. 33AD, Gers, 23067, 24 mars 1606. 34Méjan, Discipline, 277; and Roussel, “Faire la Cène,” Archives de Sciences sociales de Religion 85 (1994): 109–110. 35Archives Communales, Sumène, GG 12; AD, Gard, 5 E 295/5, fols. 1–5 and 27–28; I 6, le 9 avril 1659, 30 mai 1659; AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, fols. 3v–10.

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The elders’ close association with the celebration of the Lord’s Supper exhibited a multilayered dynamic. The laity participated in a fashion that had been closed to ordinary men and women during the Middle Ages. Protestant believers now drank from the cup. In addition, lay elders were intricately involved in the ceremony. They furnished the bread, wine, and linens; supervised the congregation; and performed ancillary tasks such as collecting entry tokens and alms. Finally, the elders sometimes, perhaps frequently, distributed the cup, which medieval communicants could not even receive. The elder’s administration of the wine was a stunning practical reinforcement of one of the most visible differences in the liturgical divide between Protestant and Catholic. In addition, Reformed figural representations associated with the Lord’s Supper contrasted pointedly with Catholic images. Whereas the latter frequently displayed the host and its various symbols during the Mass and in connection with feasts such as Corpus Christi, French Protestants directed visual attention to the cup. For instance, the most common figuration on the elaborately decorated metal communion tokens was the cup; the bread was far less prominent.36 The two contrasting representations captured, as well as anything, in prevailing public imagery the confessional distinctions of the Reformation. Later, following the revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, French Catholic authorities took particular care to confiscate communion cups and vernacular Bibles—the two elementary, popular symbols of Reformed faith.37 Sacred Scripture, printed in the vernacular and widely disseminated, serves to introduce the next element in this overview of the Reformed liturgy. Sunday worship involved two sermon services. By the seventeenth century, the morning prêche, literally a “preaching,” began with an invocation and selections from Scripture read by an elder, deacon, or local schoolmaster. The congregation then sang a psalm. Wealthy churches even hired cantors to direct the singing. The pastor next read the Decalogue, then ascended the pulpit and offered a general confession. All sang another psalm and the pastor said a prayer. He then proceeded to a substantial sermon, explaining a specific biblical passage, which was part of a larger, extended plan to examine one of the biblical books over the course of many months. The sermon itself was not supposed to be excessively long. At Geneva, the entire sermon service lasted ideally about an hour.38 The 36Raymond A. Mentzer, “The Reformed Churches of France and the Visual Arts,” in Seeing Beyond the Word: Visual Arts and the Calvinist Tradition, ed. Paul Corby Finney (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1999), 220–28. 37See, for example, AD, Aisne, B 1371. 38Nonetheless, the Genevan services “often” ran over the hour limit. Kingdon, “Public Worship,” Princeton Seminary Bulletin 20 (1999): 279–80.

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depiction of worship in the Lyon temple displays an hourglass immediately to the pastor’s right; presumably, he was attentive to it. The worship concluded with various announcements, some final prayers, another collective singing of a psalm, and the pastor’s benediction.39 Later, in the afternoon, a second service, called the catechism service, concentrated on religious instruction for children and at least some adults. Pastors and elders explained the truths of Christianity as presented in Calvin’s printed catechism. This afternoon worship was the occasion for the pastor’s second sermon for the day, this time explaining a section of Calvin’s catechism. To this end, Calvin had divided his catechism into fifty-five lessons or “Sundays.” The faithful usually gathered two additional times during the week: typically for a Wednesday sermon service and often on Friday for a prayer assembly, which included readings from Scripture, prayers, and the singing of psalms. An elder or deacon sometimes conducted the weekday prayer assembly. A final dimension of lay involvement in worship concerned small rural churches that had no permanent pastor. In the absence of a minister, an elder would conduct weekly prayers. A pastor visited only sporadically for the celebration of the Lord’s Supper.40 Altogether, the worship was meant to be communal, participatory, and edifying. It was, furthermore, permeated by substantial lay involvement. Elders had an integral role in the conduct of the worship and everyone participated in singing the psalms. The incorporation of psalms allowed women as well as men to engage actively in the liturgy; this had been previously restricted or altogether prohibited.41 Clément Marot and Theodore Beza had translated the psalms into metrical French by 1562. Calvin apparently enjoyed music, and composers such as Loys Bourgeois and Claude Goudimel wrote tunes appropriate for congregational singing of the sacred verses. The national Discipline counseled that singing the praises of God would “console and fortify” the faithful. Indeed, most churches followed a precise order for singing the psalms, covering the entire body approximately twice over the course of the year.42 39Carbonnier-Burkard, “La Cène,” 137–38; and Mours, Le protestantisme au XVIIe siècle, 89–93. 40AD, Ardèche, 65 J 4, fol. 5v; Garrisson, Protestants du Midi, 240–241; Mours, Le protestantisme au XVIe siècle, 220–221; Mours, Le protestantisme au XVIIe siècle, 93–94; and Raymond A. Mentzer, “Le consistoire et la pacification du monde rural,” BSHPF 135 (1989): 373–89. 41Catholics found the singing of the psalms particularly offensive. Local curés often complained and the crown progressively limited the practice to the temples. Cadier-Sabatier, Protestants de Pontde-Veyle, 48. 42Félice, Les protestants d’autrefois. Le temple, 66, suggests that the congregation “sang the psalms, one after the other,” roughly “two times per year.” See also, AD, Ardennes, 31 J 4, fol. 67; Mours, Le protestantisme au XVIIe, 90; Pierre Pidoux, Le psautier huguenot du XVIe siècle, mélodies et XXX

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A closely related development was the vernacular’s replacement of Latin, the exclusive tongue of the intellectual and ecclesiastical elite, as the language of prayer and ceremony. The use of the vernacular certainly broadened participation, but not so widely as may appear at first glance. The adoption of a French liturgy extended comprehension to a particular, albeit important, segment of society. Outside the Ile-de-France and the immediate surrounding area, French tended to be the domain of government officials and the bourgeois, the middling urban dwellers who were the strongest supporters of Protestantism in France; the vast majority of elders came from their ranks. On the other hand, thousands of artisans and rural inhabitants, particularly in the southern provinces, neither spoke nor understood French well, if at all. Although the evidence is far from conclusive, it appears that pastors in Protestant Béarn, which bordered France to the southwest, preached in Béarnais, a variant of Gascon. The Bible was not translated from the French, but common prayers as well as a printed psalter and catechism were available in the local language. Practice in the adjacent, strongly Protestant southern portion of the French kingdom, where most people spoke Occitan, is far less obvious. Pastors in urban centers undoubtedly preached in French. Some scholars have suggested that in the rural areas, ministers initially offered sermons in Occitan, if only for basic instructional purposes. Prayers may also have been recited in Occitan. Even so, French quickly became the liturgical language. At best, Occitan was the tongue in which pastors conducted daily exchanges with the faithful.43 Curiously, the linguistic arrangement with its insistence upon a French language liturgy does not appear to have provoked critical comment by the non-French speakers. Did their complaints simply go unrecorded? Were they powerless to object? 43

documents, 2 vols. (Basel: Baerenreiter, 1962); Menna Prestwich, “Calvinism in France, 1559–1629,” in International Calvinism, 1541–1715, ed. Menna Prestwich (Oxford: Clarendon, 1985), 75; and Barbara Diefendorf, “The Huguenot Psalter and the Faith of French Protestants,” in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis, ed. Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993), 41–63, explores the deep attachment to the psalms among Huguenots. 43Philippe Chareyre, “‘La difficulté à s’esnnoncer en béarnais.’ La prédication protestante en Béarn dans la seconde moitié du XVIIe siècle,” Bulletin du Centre d’Etudes du Protestantisme Béarnais 21 (1997): 18–19; and Chareyre, “Les minorités protestantes en Occitanie,” Actes de l’Université Occitane d’été (Nîmes: MARPOC-IEO, 1997), 92–96. The consistory of Montestrucq near Orthez recorded its deliberations in Béarnais: see Michel Grosclaude, “Registre du consistoire de Montestrucq, 1642– 1663,” Bulletin du Centre d’Etudes du Protestantisme Béarnais 20 (1996): 6–9. Garrisson, Protestants du Midi, 236, raises the possibility that people in southern France recited their prayers in Occitan as well as French.

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French Protestant historians have argued that the liturgy and other devotional practices, such as the reading of religious books, promoted knowledge of French and, generally, the ability to read and write.44 Another perceptible change, the introduction of pewing, while clearly having the disciplinary function of obliging people to sit and listen attentively, had extensive social implications, as some members of the congregation sought a more prominent presence in the liturgical enclosure. For a variety of reasons, French Protestants could not or would not utilize medieval religious edifices and instead constructed new temples. These structures were auditory spaces, designed according to either centralized (typically polygonal) or longitudinal (basilican) plans. The architectural focus was the pulpit, around which the reformers arranged benches in concentric arcs or elaborate grids.45 Women and children sat directly before the pulpit; men installed themselves farther back, along the sides and in the galleries. The depiction of the Lyon Temple de Paradis (fig. 2) illustrates the placement, even though the service appears sparsely attended. The segregation of worshipers by sex and age was not the only distinction. Temples in most towns had preferential pews reserved for the most eminent members of the congregation: municipal consuls, judges, royal officials, elders and deacons, theology students, nobles, and leading members of the bourgeoisie. These benches typically flanked the pulpit. The church of Lyon distinguished such preeminent seating by draping blue cloth complete with fleurs-de-lis over the backs of the benches. The church of Montauban went further and cut a special door that allowed the civic elite direct access to their privileged pews.46 These arrangements gave definition to status and prerogative. The Reformed civic and religious elite gathered around the pulpit much as Catholic canons and other dignitaries concentrated their presence near the altar. 44Auguste Brun, Recherches historiques sur l’introduction du français dans les provinces du Midi (Paris, 1923; repr., Geneva: Slatkine, 1973); Patrick Cabanel, “‘Patois’ marial, ‘patois de Canaan’: Le Dieu bilingue du Midi occitan au XIXe siècle,” in Les parlers de la foi: Religion et langues régionales, ed. Michel Labgée (Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 1995), 117–31; and Elisabeth Labrousse, “L’Eglise réformée du Carla en 1672–1673 d’après le registre des délibérations de son consistoire,” BSHPF 107 (1961): 252. 45Hélène Guicharnaud, “An Introduction to the Architecture of Protestant Temples Constructed in France before the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes,” in Finney, Seeing Beyond the Word, 133–61; and Mentzer, “The Reformed Churches of France,” in Finney, Seeing Beyond the Word, 200–16. 46Philippe Chareyre, “Le consistoire de Nîmes, 1561–1685” (doctoral thesis, Université Paul Valéry–Montpellier III, 1987), 400–401; Annick Saupin, “L’Eglise Réformée de Sedan de ses origines jusqu’au rattachement de la principauté à la France (1562–1642)” (thesis, l’Ecole des Chartes, 1974), 74; Serr, Montauban, 149–150; and Etienne Trocmé, “L’Eglise Réformée de La Rochelle jusqu’en 1628,” BSHPF 98 (1952): 174.

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The benches immediately beyond those reserved for the civic and ecclesiastical elite were theoretically open to all without distinction or privilege, excepting a certain age and gender segregation. Yet despite repeated pronouncements decrying precedence in seating order within the temple,47 the benches became contested space, as individuals fought over who sat where. The consistory of Castres regularly noted people’s “fondness for certain seats.” The judgment that some benches were “more honorable than others” permeated the system and efforts to eradicate it proved futile. Several women at Montauban, for example, laid claim to their favorite space by nailing cushions to the benches.48 No church seemed immune.49 Eventually most conceded defeat and allowed private pews; they surrendered to an overwhelming desire among the faithful to occupy a specific place within the temple and, by extension, within the community’s religious activities and hierarchical social order. Pewing added a spatial and proprietary element to the liturgy and individuals responded more fervently than ecclesiastical officials had anticipated or even desired. People swiftly interpreted and adapted the benches for their own purposes. These innovations also encompassed a vital, everyday family worship. The father—the male head of household—became a petit pasteur who led morning and evening prayers, readings from Scripture, and the singing of psalms. The 1545 edition of Calvin’s Catechism contained several prayers drawn from Psalms for use before and after meals. In the years following the 1562 publication of Marot and Beza’s French version of the Psalms, the psalter gathered additional prayers, contained in a section entitled “L’Exercice du Père de famille et de tous ses domestiques pour prier au matin et au soir.” The Bible and psalter became the printed instruments for daily household worship,50 which presumed literacy and reinforced bourgeois patriarchy. Traditional clerical authority gave way to the power of the printed book and the dominion of the father and husband. Calvin himself likened the household to a small individual church where the devout father, as the head and master of his family, supervised and instructed the members—wife, children, and servants—in accordance with the talents and capabilities that he received from God.51 The father, the ancient and sacred paterfamilias, once again assumed a sacerdotal role at the heart of the family. Much as 47AD, Gers, 23016, 16 mai 1649. 48AD, Tarn-et-Garonne, I 1, fol. 332v. 49Nearly

every Reformed church in France experienced disputes over seating arrangements. See the discussion in Félice, Les protestants d’autrefois. Le temple, 45–52. 50Marianne Carbonnier-Burkard, “La pratique réformée du culte de famille,” La vie spirituelle (mai–juin 1995), 307–17; and Mours, Le protestantisme au XVIIe siècle, 124. 51Aymon, Tous les synodes, 1:85.

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he directed other aspects of family life, the father became its spiritual and moral guide. Again, Protestant emphasis on the priesthood of all believers and the Reformation’s affinity for patriarchy imbued these familial rites and the father’s role in them. On the other hand, mothers undoubtedly continued to teach children basic prayers and inculcate other elements of devotion, much as their maternal predecessors had done in a medieval religious universe. Later, following the 1685 revocation of the Edict of Nantes and the expulsion of ministers, domestic worship and the fundamental role of women for transmission of the prayers, gestures, and attitudes associated with Reformed piety became crucial. Men and women, acting within the family, maintained and transmitted vital religious traditions. Another, less explored yet important, aspect of Reformed devotional life was fasting. Protestants everywhere in France fasted. It was a collective, well-regulated ritual whereby the members of the congregation met at the temple and spent the day in prayer, psalm singing, and abstinence from food. While Martin Luther and, to an even greater degree, Ulrich Zwingli tended to reject the practice of fasting, Calvin thought that fasts, particularly public fasts, could be salutary. He emphasized the disciplinary and penitential dynamics. Much as Martin Bucer, Calvin maintained that public fasting, when combined with extraordinary prayer and repentance, was an appropriate custom whose roots ran deep in the early church. Calvin’s principal caution was that the faithful must guard against lapse into “superstition” and hypocrisy. Fasting, furthermore, was neither “a work of merit” nor “a form of divine worship.”52 Still, this pious exercise was entirely consonant with the public, collective nature of Reformed piety. It possessed the same civic and communal character that distinguished other elements of the Reformed liturgy. Public fasts were an irregular but not uncommon observance in the French Reformed churches. People gathered in the temple, work was suspended, shops were closed, and recreation was forbidden. No food would have been consumed until the final prayers concluded. The Reformed churches of France held a national fast in early November 1610 to mourn the assassination of King Henri IV. The observance at Dieulefit in Dauphiné offers a good indication of the nature and sequence of this fast. The faithful spent eight hours in the temple, going without food. They began with a prayer, followed by the singing of psalms and listening to readings from Holy Writ. The heart of the service was a series of three protracted sermons. The first two focused on Joel 2:12–18 with its theme of fasting and repentance; the third drew inspiration from Psalm 72, a prayer for 52Calvin, Institutes, 2:1241–48. On Luther and Zwingli’s negative reaction to fasting, see John T. McNeill’s comments, ibid., 2:1241 n. 27.

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God’s blessing on the king. Fasts at Ablon and Charenton, successive sites of the temple for Parisian Protestants, followed a similar procedure: introductory prayer followed by the reading of scriptural verses, psalm singing, three sermons, and abstinence from food and drink. No one dared leave the temple as the community gathered to “preach, pray, and sing” from 8:00 in the morning to 4:00 in the afternoon.53 The fast, an occasion for collective penitence, had both religious and political significance. The moment could be “any difficult matter of great importance” such as a religious controversy or the selection of a minister. Other occasions were natural catastrophes or political crises, whenever “there appear the judgments of the Lord’s anger,” namely famine and pestilence, persecution and war. By the seventeenth century, local churches could not call fasts; the power was reserved for the provincial and national synods. The fasts, consequently, extended well beyond a single community and its church. They united Protestants within a particular region or across the kingdom.54 Fasts in France were frequently held in connection with national political events. The French Reformed churches declared a national fast in May 1623 to honor the king and celebrate the (temporary) return of peace in the latter stages of the struggle between crown and Huguenots. In the southwest near Agen, some six hundred or seven hundred persons gathered on a Thursday at the temple of Layrac to demonstrate loyalty to Louis XIII. The participants came from the towns of Agen, Nérac, and Lectoure; their ranks included high-ranking Reformed judges from the Protestant chamber of the Parlement, members of the regional presidial court, and many far more common folk. The assembled body heard the pastor’s sermon, listened to readings from Scripture, and sang psalms. The service lasted all morning, with no break at noon, and concluded late in the afternoon.55 In this instance, the pastor’s final words were a reminder that disasters were God’s punishment for sinful behavior; all must amend their lives and seek divine mercy.56 Numerous similar fasts had taken place throughout the sixteenth53Musée du Protestantisme Dauphinois (Le Poët-Laval), A 1, fol. 41. Chevalier, Prêcher, 27–29; Félice, Les protestants d’autrefois. Le temple, 154–155, 165–168; Henri Lehr, “Les deux temples de l’Eglise Réformée de Paris sous l’Edit de Nantes,” BSHPF 2 (1853): 265–266; 3 (1854): 458, 471, 553. See also AD, Ardennes, 31 J 4, fols. 197, 227, 235v, for the fast celebrated on 1 January 1632 at Sedan, an independent principality with a francophone if not quite French Reformed church. 54The consistory of Montagnac, for example, noted general fasts declared for 29 November 1601 and 25 May 1623. The provincial synod, which assembled at Châtillon-sur-Loire, announced a fast for early November 1657. AD, Gers, 23015, 23 novembre 1601, 19 mai 1623. 55AD, Gers, 23067, 25 mai 1623. 56Mours, Le protestantisme au XVIIe siècle, 94.

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century Wars of Religion. The church of La Rochelle observed several fasts during the siege of 1572–73.57 A kingdomwide fast occurred in 1585 as the Catholic League threatened the Protestant cause, and the church of Montauban held a fast in 1597 to mark the delicate negotiations leading up to the Edict of Nantes.58 Political crises were not, of course, the only circumstances for a fast. The national synod, which met at Saint-Maixent in 1609, called for a general fast to atone for the moral corruption and impiety into which the Reformed community had fallen.59 Other circumstances could be more specific. Throughout 1578 and 1579, the church of Nîmes held a series of fasts as plague ravaged the town and adjoining area. In 1662, the provincial synod of Berry authorized a fast to appease God’s “ire and end the blight of famine which desolated the province.” Churches also held fasts in association with the election of new pastors.60 Whatever the occasion, the “humiliation of the fast”61 was, in a manner deliberately reminiscent of the ancient Hebrews, an effort to appease God’s wrath and implore divine pardon in times of grave calamity and catastrophe. There are other significant elements within the Reformed liturgy—penitential rituals, ordination procedures, marriage celebrations, and burial rites—which this essay does not address.62 The Reformed churches of France, even as they rejected the sacramental character of penance and emphatically dismissed earlier notions of auricular confession, developed a rigorous system of collective penitential discipline, which included close supervision of the faithful by the elders and embarrassing public appearances to beg forgiveness of the entire congregation. Ecclesiastical officials installed new ministers with prayers, fasts, and the imposition of hands.63 The Reformed church regulated marriage far more than 57Trocmé, “La Rochelle,” BSHPF 98 (1952): 179–80. 58Gaston

Serr, Une église protestante au XVIe siècle, Montauban (Aix-en-Provence: La Pensée Universitaire, 1958), 90–92. 59Aymon, Tous les synodes nationaux, 1: 375. Musée du Protestantisme Dauphinois, A 1, fol. 35. 60BnF, ms fr 8667, fols. 3, 54v, 76. Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, ms 1528/I, p. 114; and Saupin, Sedan, 79–80. See also Guéneau, Protestants du centre, 308. 61Philippe Le Noir, sieur de Crevain, Histoire ecclésiastique de Bretagne, depuis la Réformation jusqu’à l’Edit de Nantes, ed. Benjamin Vaurigaud (Paris: Grassart & Guéraud, 1851), 277. 62For discussion of penitential rites and marriage with reference to the themes outlined in the present essay, see Raymond A. Mentzer, “Fostering Penitence within the Protestant Community of Early Modern France,” in Penitence in the Ages of the Reformations, ed. Katherine Lualdi and Anne Thayer (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 2000); and Mentzer, “The Reformed Churches of France and Medieval Canon Law,” in Canon Law in Protestant Lands, ed. Richard H. Helmholz (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1992), 165–85. 63In December 1590, for example, a certain Gantois was “elected minister and received the imposition of hands…in the presence of the ministers” of the Church of Sedan. The elders and sevXXX

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had its medieval counterpart. Pastors solemnized the union during the regular worship service, typically prior to the sermon, and recorded it publicly in the parish registers.64 Funeral observances continued, but were largely desacralized. Although deeply imbued with theological meaning, the interment was devoid of special ceremony. The Discipline was explicit: pastors ought not to offer prayers or a sermon in order to “avoid all superstition.” In all of this, the underlying forms and original character of Reformed worship and devotion closely resemble the rites and observances that we have examined. Leading elements of the Reformed liturgy—baptism, Lord’s Supper, sermon service, fasting, penitence, and marriage—were firmly connected to the gathering of the entire community. This was a shared worship, a piety exercised in common. It took place in the public sphere—the temple—and employed ordinary objects—linen and table, wine and bread, to cite the example of the Lord’s Supper—collectively provided by lay members of the congregation. Many familiar features of the communal order—dress, gender divisions, political privilege, and social distinction—were maintained and reinforced. Still, the Reformed liturgy was vibrant and adaptable. Though the theological foundations remained constant, the ceremonial details and their application developed over time and appear to have varied slightly between communities. The process was continuing and suggests that individual congregations influenced developments. The reality reflected the French Reformed churches’ insistence upon the fundamental importance of the local community and the federative nature of the Protestant churches in France. The movement accommodated, in small ways, local tastes; modifications by individual congregations were possible. Again, it goes to the interactive nature of the Reformed liturgy. In general, the rites and ceremonies were collaborative and communal. Inclusion, however, was uneven and stratified. The liturgy rewarded literacy, offered laymen preeminent position, and underscored the leadership of the middling urban elite.65 For persons empowered by the changes, the response to religious change was decidedly positive. Women and ordinary believers found the 64

eral refugee pastors from French churches were present too. AD, Ardennes, 31 J 3, fol. 155. For practice at Dieulefit, see Bibliothèque de la Société de l’Histoire du Protestantisme Français, ms 654, p. 48. For practice at Saint-Léger-de-Peyre see AD, Lozère, I 110, le 23 août 1615. 64Pierre Bels, Le mariage des protestants français jusqu’en 1685 (Paris: Librairie Générale de Droit et de Jurisprudence, 1968), 183, while acknowledging some contrary evidence, emphasizes that the celebration followed the Genevan model and occurred before the sermon. 65The situation was not lost on Catholics. In 1630, a Capuchin preacher lamented that “in this new church the sheep lead the pastors.” Guéneau, Protestants du centre, 339.

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experience more ambiguous, less accommodating, occasionally challenging. Some laypersons demanded greater status. Others plainly struggled with the changes. Female liturgical participation was curtailed, although women continued to function in discreet fashion and would reemerge dramatically after 1685. While the distinction between cleric and laic remained, it was attenuated. Laypersons, particularly elders drawn from the urban bourgeoisie, enjoyed a degree of participation and involvement that was unknown prior to the Reformation. The stature and situation accorded laymen certainly increased the Reformation’s appeal to middle level professionals and those engaged in commercial activities. The elders, who as members of the consistory had enormous responsibility for enforcing proper behavior in the community, found that their role in the Lord’s Supper—the social and religious center of the Reformed community—palpably strengthened their authority and moral prestige. In a larger perspective, lay involvement and participation in the liturgy energized community solidarity and sustained group cohesion. The Huguenots’ position as a hard-pressed religious minority only magnified their confessional awareness. The Reformed liturgy possessed a liminal quality and, in a wholly reciprocal dynamic, bolstered religious identity while conferring upon the faithful a powerful role in shaping who they were and who they were not.

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Reflections on a Quarter Century of Research on Women and the Reformation Merry Wiesner-Hanks

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s I contemplated possible topics for a paper honoring Bob Kingdon, I surveyed the various things I had agreed to write this year, particularly those having to do with women and the Reformation. These included an article on Elisabeth of Braunschweig, the ruler and reformer whom we first learned about in Roland Bainton’s 1971 Women of the Reformation, a book of translations of Luther’s writings on women that Susan Karant-Nunn and I are doing, and a paper on German abbesses during the Reformation for a conference in Italy on women’s monasticism. None of these would have been surprising a quarter-century ago, when men’s opinions about women and “women worthies” (to use Natalie Davis’s phrase) were primary foci in women’s history. This was not 1975, however, and several generations of women’s history lay between then and now. So why was I still working on such projects? Women’s history began as a revisionist methodology; it started with a story that had already been written, but was still incomplete. We said: “Where are the women?” Then we found them, wrote about them, and convinced a few people who wrote general “history” to add a few women (usually first in boxes). Then we found out more about women, started thinking about and talking about gender, and convinced some “generalists” to stir a little when they added women, which resulted in separate sections out of boxes, usually labeled “women and the family,” a linkage many of us criticized. Then because we were used to being revisionist, we revised ourselves and became extremely self-critical, asking “who are the women?” and “are there really women?” and sometimes “is there really sex? (the difference, not the act).” So for a while we looked at representations of women and searched out categories of difference or in the words of several Berkshire Women’s History conferences, we “moved beyond,” “complicated categories,” “crossed” (in 1993) and then “broke” (in 1999) “boundaries.” We argued that

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talking about gender rather than women meant we had to say something about men…but were there really men, or was masculinity all performative? While we were breaking down the distinction between sex and gender, we threw sexuality into the mixture, so that the categories of difference and the intersections among them became even more complex. There was, of course, the Holy Trinity of race, class, and gender, but now we also thought about sexual orientation, age, marital status, geographic location, able-bodiedness…a complexity that could at times be paralyzing, or lead to musing frequently on the aphorism “in Heaven you get to think of only one thing at a time.” Scholarship on women and the Reformation over the last quarter-century has been caught up in this stress on diversity, difference, and complexity.1 It has emphasized the differences between the ideas and ideals of the reformers and the institutions that were established and ended, highlighted women’s agency and its ambiguities in Protestantism and Catholicism, discussed the great differences between northern and southern Europe, between rural and urban women, between women who handed out public welfare and women who received it, between women who published witch-pamphlets and women who were the subjects of those pamphlets, and so on. Those of us who investigate women and the Reformation are much less willing to generalize and are more tentative in our conclusions. Some of this uncertainty may come from the general loss of certainty in history over the last several decades and from self-critical theoretical speculation, but it also grows out of traditional historical methodology, including intensive archival research. We emphasize complexity and diversity, and appear much more tentative, not because we know so little, but because we know so much. The enormous amount of scholarship over the last quarter-century has made us less willing to generalize, but it has also dramatically changed our view of women and of the Reformation, both separately and together. It has developed new theoretical and methodological directions, and also given us new ways to look at more “old-fashioned topics,” such as the lives of great women and the ideas of great men. Thus rather than present findings from one of my current projects, this paper will instead take a closer look at this breadth of scholarship, discuss its impact on traditional areas of research, and end with some comments about where I see the field headed. 1Recent bibliographies on women and the Reformation include: Kathryn Norberg, “The Counter-Reformation and Women, Religious and Lay,” in John O’Malley, S.J., ed., Catholicism in Early Modern History: A Guide to Research (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1988), 133–46; Merry E. Wiesner, “Studies of Women, the Family and Gender,” in William S. Maltby, ed., Reformation Europe: A Guide to Research II (St. Louis: Center for Reformation Research, 1992), 159–87; and idem, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe, 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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Most considerations of women and the Reformation go off in one of two directions. The first explores women’s actions in support of or in opposition to the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and looks more broadly at women’s spiritual practices during this period. The second focuses on the ideas of the reformers and the effects of the Reformations on women and on structures which are important to women, such as the family. In surveying recent scholarship it will be useful to consider these separately, as they tend to focus on different issues and incorporate different theoretical perspectives. The first line of inquiry began in the 1970s with the work of Roland Bainton, Miriam Chrisman, Charmarie Blaisdell, and Nancy Roelker, and tends to emphasize women’s agency. Studies have looked at women active in iconoclastic riots and religious wars, women defending convent life in word and deed, women preaching in the early years of the Reformation, pastors’ wives creating a new ideal for women, women defying their husbands in the name of their faith, women converting their husbands or other household members, or women writing and translating religious literature.2 Research such as this might seem quite elementary and perhaps overly celebratory, but it is still surprisingly controversial within the field of Reformation studies. I experienced this about ten years ago when I began studying women’s writings as well as women’s work, and gave my first paper on women’s religious writing in Germany. I presented what I regarded as a rather innocuous group of poems, hymns, and spiritual reflections—certainly less dramatic and scandalous than the tales of prostitutes and bath-maids I often told—but a rather senior colleague became visibly upset. When we asked for questions, he burst out with, “but you’re not talking about women here, you’re talking about what women think!” Somehow women spinning or caring for the sick was fine, but having independent religious thoughts was not. This sentiment has lessened somewhat in the United States—or at least its open expression has lessened—but it is still quite strong in Germany. In a 1991 article discussing the status of women’s history in Germany, Heide Wunder wrote: 2See, for example: Sherrin Marshall, ed., Women in Reformation and Counter-Reformation Europe: Public and Private Worlds (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Marian KobeltGroch, Aufsässige Töchter Gottes: Frauen im Bauernkrieg und in den Taüferbewegungen (Frankfurt: Lang, 1993); Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1750 (London: Routledge, 1993); Luise Schorn-Schütte, “‘Gefährtin’ und ‘Mitregentin’: Zur Sozialgeschichte der evangelischen Pfarrfrau in der Frühen Neuzeit” in Wandel der Geschlechterbeziehungen zu Beginn der Neuzeit, ed. Heide Wunder and Christina Vanja (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1991), 109–53; C. Arnold Snyder and Linda A. Heubert Hecht, eds., Profiles of Anabaptist Women: Sixteenth-Century Reforming Pioneers (Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996); Diane Watt, Sectaries of God: Women Prophets in Late Medieval and Early Modern England (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell & Brewer, 1997).

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“female students and doctoral candidates who inquired about ‘female people’ received little attention from professors or thesis advisors. If not rejected outright, research on women’s issues was under no circumstances encouraged or promoted …the historical brotherhood of Germany persistently resists (with only a few exceptions) women’s history and up to now has hardly deigned to notice the results.”3 Last fall, at a conference in Stuttgart honoring Heide Wunder’s sixtieth birthday, I reminded her and the conference attendees about those words, and asked if things had changed. She was somewhat equivocating, but younger attendees were not, commenting that, if anything, things had gotten worse because the horrible job situation made them even more fearful of going off in any direction displeasing to a Doktorvater, women’s history among them. What this has meant, of course, is that a greater share of the research on women and religion in the early modern period in Germany has been done by outsiders than is true in, say, England or Italy. It has also meant, sadly, that those who do work on women or gender or sexuality in Germany rarely get permanent positions, but are stuck for years as Privatdozenten, positions in which, I learned to my horror only recently, they receive no salary at all. Research exploring women’s actions in the Reformation originally focused primarily on female rulers who supported or opposed the Reformation, but within the last ten years convents have received more and more attention. In part this is a function of sources, for convents housed literate women, controlled property and people, and were often linked with powerful families, all of which means they have left extensive records. These records were often transferred as a body to some larger archives, but remain a manageable group of sources for a dissertation project. As with everything in women’s history, or perhaps one could say as with everything in history, the convents that have left the most records or whose story is the most interesting are those that are in some way anomalous. Most anomalous were convents in areas becoming Protestant, which often fought the Reformation through letter writing, family influence, physical bravery, and what we might call sheer cussedness, stuffing wax in their ears so as not to hear Protestant sermons and refusing to leave their houses unless they were physically dragged out; in some cases authorities finally gave up and the convents remained islands of Catholicism for centuries. Others supported the Protestant Reformation theologically on some issues, but ignored its message about the value of convent life and remade themselves into institutions that were acceptable to Protestant 3Ute Frevert, Heide Wunder, and Christina Vanja, “Historical Research on Women in the Federal Republic of Germany,” in Writing Women’s History: International Perspectives, ed. Karen Offen, Ruth Roach Pierson, and Jane Rendall (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 292.

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authorities, educating girls and providing an honorable place for women who could not or chose not to follow the Protestant injunction to marry.4 Research on convents and religious women in Catholic Europe has also focused on those who challenged boundaries. Not surprisingly, Teresa of Avila has been explored from the most angles: her milieu, her political influence, her spirituality, and her sense of authorship and of self.5 These studies have been joined recently by several which focus on her predecessors and contemporaries and which make it clear that though Teresa is unique, she also followed a pattern found in other Spanish and Italian women: close relationship with a confessor, physical manifestations of her piety, doubts about her own self-worth, and effective alliances with local and sometimes national political leaders.6 Some of these 4Merry

E. Wiesner, “Ideology meets the Empire: Reformed Convents and the Reformation,” in Germania Illustrata: Essays Presented to Gerald Strauss, ed. Susan C. Karant-Nunn and Andrew Fix (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1991), 181–96; Ute Braun, Frauentestamente: Stiftsdamen, Fürstinnen-Äbtissinnen und ihre Schwestern in Selbstzeugnissen des 17. und ihre Schwestern in Selbstzeugnissen des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, Beiträge zur Geschichte von Stadt und Stift Essen (Essen: Historische Verein für Stadt & Stift Essen, 1991/92); D. Jonathan Grieser, “A Tale of Two Convents: Nuns and Anabaptists in Münster, 1533–1535,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995): 31–48; Lucia Koch, “Vom Kloster zum protestantischen Damenstift: Die Nassauischen Stifte Gnadenthal und Walsdorf in der 2. Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts” (M.A. thesis, Johannes Gutenberg–Universität Mainz, 1995); Paula S. Datsko Barker, “Charitas Pirckheimer: A Female Humanist Confronts the Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 26 (1995): 259–72; Patricia Ranft, Women and the Religious Life in Premodern Europe (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996); Ulrike Strasser, “‘Aut Murus Aut Maritus?’ Women’s Lives in Counter-Reformation Munich” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Minnesota, 1997), idem, “Bones of Contention: Cloistered Nuns, Decorated Relics, and the Contest over Women’s Place in the Public Sphere of Counter-Reformation Munich,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 90 (1999): 255–88; Amy Leonard, “Nails in the Wall: Dominican Nuns in Reformation Strasbourg” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Berkeley, 1999). 5Jodi Bilinkoff, The Avila of St. Theresa (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Alison Weber, Teresa of Avila and the Rhetoric of Femininity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990); Janice Mary Luti, Teresa of Avila’s Way (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1991); Carole Slade, Saint Teresa of Avila: Author of a Heroic Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Gillian T. W. Ahlgren, Teresa of Avila and the Politics of Sanctity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996). 6Gabriella Zarri, “Monasteri femminili e città (secolo XV–XVIII),” Stori di Italia: Annali 9 (1986): 359–429; Electa Arenal and Stacey Schlau, Untold Sisters: Hispanic Nuns in Their Own Works (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1989); Craig Harline, The Burdens of Sister Margaret: Private Lives in a Seventeenth-Century Convent (New York: Doubleday, 1994); Ronald E. Surtz, Writing Women in Late Medieval and Early Modern Spain: The Mothers of Saint Teresa of Avila (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995); Sherry M. Velasco, Demons, Nausea and Resistance in the Autobiography of Isabel de Jesús 1611–1682 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Studies of the relationships between female penitents and their confessors include: Rudolph M. Bell, “Telling Her Sins: Male Confessors and Female Penitents in Catholic Reformation Italy,” in That Gentle Strength: Historical Perspectives on Women in Christianity, ed. Lynda L. Coon et al. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia XXX

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women were able to retain reputations as holy women—beatas—throughout their lives or even, like Teresa, make it somewhere on the ladder to sanctity. Others were judged to be false saints, accused of faking their stigmata or ability to live without food and exerting malicious influence over their followers and confessors, and ultimately appearing before an Inquisition or other type of religious court, which is why we know their stories.7 Along with Catholic women who walked the (narrow) boundary between sanctity and heresy, there were also those who challenged the boundaries between lay and religious life. Mary Ward (the eventual founder of the English Ladies), the Ursulines and Daughters of Charity in Italy and France, and other so-called “Jesuitesses” have all received scholarly attention in the last decade for their attempts to create an active religious vocation for women out in the world.8 The older opinion about such efforts is that they were either a failure or insignificant—what are a few hospitals or a few schools for girls?—but increasingly we recognize that 7

Press, 1990), 118–33; Jodi Bilinkoff, “Confessors, Penitents, and the Construction of Identities in Early Modern Avila,” in Culture and Identity in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800): Essays in Honor of Natalie Zemon Davis, ed. Barbara B. Diefendorf and Carla Hesse (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993); Patricia Ranft, “A Key to Counter-Reformation Women’s Activism: The Confessor-Spiritual Director,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 10 (1994): 7–26; Stephen Haliczer, Sexuality in the Confessional: A Sacrament Profaned (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). 7Recent studies of beatas and “living saints” in southern Europe include: Richard Kagan, Lucrecia’s Dreams: Politics and Prophecy in Sixteenth Century Spain (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990); Jodi Bilinkoff, “A Spanish Prophetess and Her Patrons: The Case of María de Santo Domingo,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 21–34; Fulvio Tomizza, Heavenly Supper: The Story of Maria Janis, trans. Anne Jacobson Schutte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); Luisa Ciammitti, “One Saint Less: The Story of Angela Mellini, a Bolognese Seamstress (1667–17??)” in Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective; Selections from Quaderni Storici, ed. Edward Muir and Guido Ruggiero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 141–76; Gabriella Zarri, “Living Saints: A Typology of Female Sanctity in the Early Sixteenth Century,” in Women and Religion in Medieval and Renaissance Italy, ed. Daniel Bornstein and Roberto Rusconi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 219–303. 8Ruth Liebowitz, “Virgins in the Service of Christ: The Dispute over an Active Apostolate for Women during the Counter-Reformation,” in Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions, ed. Rosemary Radford Ruether and Eleanore McLaughlin (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1979), 132–52; Elizabeth Rapley, The Dévotes: Women and Church in Seventeenth-Century France (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1990); Anne Conrad, Zwischen Closter und Welt: Ursulinen und Jesuitinnen in der Katholischen Reformbewegung des 16./17. Jahrhunderts (Mainz: Philipp von Zabern, 1991); Jeanne Cover, I.B.V.M., Love, The Driving Force: Mary’s Ward’s Spirituality: Its Significance for Moral Theology (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1997); Susan Dinan, “An Ambiguous Sphere: The Daughters of Charity between a Confraternity and a Religious Order,” in Confraternities and Catholic Reform in Italy, France, and Spain, ed. John Patrick Donnelly and Michael Maher (Kirksville, Mo.: Thomas Jefferson University Press, 1999).

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their actions and those of women religious in Protestant areas actually disrupt standard narratives about the Reformations. It is difficult to make the claim that “the Reformation led to the closing of the convents in Protestant areas” when they survived in Saxony, Braunschweig, Strasbourg, and who knows yet where else; it is difficult to say that “convents in Catholic Europe after Trent were all enclosed” when the convent walls were permeable in so many places. The activities of early modern women religious also disrupt standard narratives in women’s history; to follow a thread that just emerged on H-Frauen, the e-mail discussion group on early modern women, it is difficult to say that “Florence Nightingale was the first female nurse” or even that “Florence Nightingale made nursing respectable for women” when completely respectable middle-class French women had been nursing as Ursulines for several centuries. Studies of women religious have not only examined those who broke boundaries, they have also broken boundaries themselves, particularly those between disciplines. In this era when, as Sheila ffolliot has commented, every department seems to be mounting its own interdisciplinary program, convent studies have been a leader in providing a genuine cultural studies perspective, not simply inviting a historian or two to a conference of literary scholars or asking art historians for “visual reflections” of some historical development. Art historians have explored how convents acted as patrons of the visual arts, ordering paintings and sculpture with specific subjects and particular styles for their own buildings and those of the male religious institutions they supported, thus shaping the religious images seen by men as well as women; music historians have shown how women sang, composed, and played musical instruments, with their sounds sometimes reaching far beyond convent walls; religious historians have examined the ways in which women circumvented, subverted, opposed, and occasionally followed the wishes of church authorities; social historians have explored the ways in which women behind convent walls shaped family dynamics and thus political life. More importantly, scholars in all these fields have thought about the ways their stories intersect, as art and music both shape devotional practices and are shaped by them, as family chapels and tombs—often built by women—represent and reinforce power hierarchies, as artistic, literary, political, and intellectual patronage relationships influence and are influenced by doctrinal and institutional changes in the church.9 This scholarship has thus changed our narrative of the 9 9For convent residents and the arts, see: Craig Monson, ed., The Crannied Wall: Women, Religion

and the Arts in Early Modern Europe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992); M. Dunn, “Piety and Patronage in Seicento Rome: Two Noblewomen and Their Convents,” Art Bulletin 76 (1994): 644–63; Jeryldene M. Wood, Women, Art, and Spirituality: The Poor Clares of Early Modern XXX

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Catholic Reformation, and also provided a good example of how problematic the notion of a clear public/private dichotomy can be in women’s history; even in post-Tridentine Europe, convents and their residents were very much part of the public realm of power politics and culture. Many of the abbesses and other female religious wrote extensively, and their works are beginning to see modern editions and translations, or in some cases the first appearance of their words in print. This scholarship parallels the explosion of editions and reprints of the works by early modern secular women, particularly women in England.10 Indeed, speaking as a continental historian, I can only bless all those scribbling nuns, for otherwise my students might get the idea that the 10

Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Ann Matter and John Coakley, Creative Women in Medieval and Early Modern Italy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997); Robert Kendrick, Celestial Sirens: Nuns and Their Music in Early Modern Italy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1996); Craig Monson, Disembodied Voices: Music and Culture in an Early Modern Italian Convent (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Cynthia Lawrence, ed., Women and Art in Early Modern Europe: Patrons, Collectors, and Connoisseurs (University Park.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). For the economic patronage of religious women, see: Monica Chojnacka, “Women, Charity and Community in Early Modern Venice: The Casa delle Zitelle,” Renaissance Quarterly 51 (1998): 68–79; Jodi Bilinkoff, “Elite Widows and Religious Expression in Early Modern Spain: The View from Avila,” in Widowhood in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Sandra Cavallo and Lyndan Warner (London: Longmans, 1999), 181–92. The relationship between family politics and women’s entry into convents has been explored in: Elizabeth Rapley, “Women and the Religious Vocation in Seventeenth-Century France,” French Historical Studies 18 (1994): 613–31; P. Renée Baernstein, “In Widow’s Habit: Women between Convent and Family in Sixteenth-Century Milan,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 787–807; Barbara Diefendorf, “Give Us Back Our Children: Patriarchal Authority and Parental Consent to Religious Vocation in Early Counter-Reformation France,” Journal of Modern History 68 (1996): 265–307; Joanne Baker, “Female Monasticism and Family Strategy: The Guises and Saint Pierre de Reims,” Sixteenth Century Journal 28 (1997): 1091–1108; Thomas Worcester, “‘Neither Married nor Cloistered’: Blessed Isabelle in Catholic Reformation France,” Sixteenth Century Journal 30 (1999): 457–76; Jutta Gisela Sperling, Convents and the Body Politic in Renaissance Venice (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). JoAnn Kay McNamara, Sisters in Arms: Catholic Nuns through Two Millennia (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), stresses women’s agency in monasticism and includes several chapters on the early modern period. 10There are now three series devoted to the reprinting or electronic dissemination of their works: The Early Modern Englishwoman: A Facsimile Library of Essential Works, published by Ashgate and edited by Betty S. Travitsky and Patrick Cullen; Women Writers in English 1350–1850, published by Oxford University Press and edited by Susanne Woods and Elizabeth H. Hageman; the Brown University Women Writers Project, which offers more than two hundred texts from 1450 to 1830, and is available on-line (with some parts free and some by license) at www.wwp.brown.edu. For further references to the vast literature on English women writers, see Betty S. Travitsky and Josephine A. Roberts, English Women Writers, 1500–1640: A Reference Guide (1750–1996) (New York: G. K. Hall, 1997).

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Merry Wiesner-Hanks only women who wrote in early modern Europe were English.11 These texts have deepened our understanding of convent life and female spirituality, showing us plays that nuns wrote for their sisters to perform, letters telling of attempts at converting Protestants in the street and supporting Catholics in prison, and polemics praising convent life for its richness and others attacking it for its shallowness.12 These newly discovered or newly-made-available sources have provided excellent examples of women’s religious opinions and spiritual creativity, but they further increased the complexity of the story instead of making generalizations easier. Editing, analyzing, and translating women’s religious writings has not been limited to Catholic women or convent residents. Though we have known the names of a few Protestant luminaries for decades, only within the last several years have their whole works finally been made available. The model of such scholarship is Elsie McKee’s magisterial two-volume work on Katherina Schütz Zell, a woman whom I used to describe as “the wife of the reformer Matthias Zell” and who now, following Elsie, is known as “a Strasbourg reformer.” 13 Most of this work has so far concentrated on previously known works and figures, such as Argula von Grumbach or Anne Askew, but the works of lesser-known writers, such as Dutch Anabaptist women who wrote hymns and songs, are beginning to see the light of day.14 11There

is now a series devoted to translations of works by early modern continental European women, primarily French and Italian works, including several by female religious: The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe, edited by Margaret King and Albert Rabil, Jr., and published by the University of Chicago Press. 12The Other Voice in Early Modern Europe has issued: Cecelia Ferrazzi, Autobiography of an Aspiring Saint, ed. and trans. Anne Jacobson Schutte (1996); Antonia Pulci, Florentine Drama for Convent and Festival, ed. and trans. James Wyatt Cook and Barbara Collier Cook (1996); Bartolomea Riccoboni, Spiritual Letters, ed. and trans. Daniel Bornstein (2000); Lucrezia Tornabuoni, Sacre Rappresentazioni, ed. and trans. Jane Tylus (2001). Reformation Texts with Translation (1350–1600): Women of the Reformation Series, edited by Kenneth Hagen and Merry Wiesner-Hanks, and published by Marquette University Press, has issued: Merry Wiesner-Hanks and Joan Skocir, ed. and trans., Convents Confront the Reformation: Catholic and Protestant Nuns in Germany (1996), and Elizabeth Rhodes, ed. and trans. “This Tight Embrace”: Luise de Carvajal y Mendoza (2000). 13Elsie Anne McKee, Katharina Schütz Zell (Leiden: Brill, 1999), includes one volume of biography and interpretation (vol. 1: The Life and Thought of a Sixteenth-Century Reformer) and one of edited texts (vol. 2: The Writings: A Critical Edition). For further work on Zell, see: Elsie Anne McKee, Reforming Popular Piety in 16th Century Strasbourg: Katherine Schütz Zell and Her Hymnbook, Studies in Reformed Theology and History, 2/4 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Theological Seminary, 1994), and “Katherina Schütz Zell: Protestant Reformer,” in Telling the Churches’ Story: Ecumenical Perspectives on Writing Christian History, ed. Timothy J. Wengert and Charles W. Brockwell (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 73–90; Merry E. Wiesner, “Katherine Zell’s ‘Answer to Ludwig Rabus’ as Autobiography and Theology,” Colloquia Germanica 28 (1995): 245–54. 14For von Grumbach, see: Peter Matheson, Argula von Grumbach: A Woman’s Voice in the Reformation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1995); idem, “Breaking the Silence: Women, Censorship and the XXX

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No matter how many Protestant women we may eventually discover, however, research into women’s actions and spirituality in the Reformation era will no doubt continue to favor Catholics and convents. This contrasts with the earliest years of research, when the focus was almost solely on Protestant women, but it should actually come as no surprise, given our dependence on institutional records; there simply are many more sources about women religious than their lay sisters. This situation contributes to the sense that Catholic women had more options than Protestant women during this period: they had, as we have long recognized, maritus aut murus (marriage or the convent) but also various inbetween forms, limited and criticized though these were. This is not to say that those studying Teresa, or convents, or women striving to be Jesuits explicitly argue this, as they are very careful to talk about the many constraints within which women acted. But the sheer number of studies—whatever their tone or conclusions—makes it appear as if Catholic women were more likely than Protestant to have lives and ideas worthy of note. If the Protestant/Catholic balance in the work emphasizing women’s agency implicitly suggests comparisons between Catholic and Protestant women, much of the work in the second line of inquiry—studies of the ideas of the reformers and the effects of the Reformations—makes these comparisons explicitly. This is particularly true for scholarship focusing on Germany, which began even earlier than studies investigating women’s actions with works like William Lazarus’s Luther on the Christian Home published in 1960.15 The older studies of Protestant ideas about marriage and the family were written from a clear confessional viewpoint and are, not surprisingly, very positive. Perhaps more surprising however, is the fact that more recent work still tends to split along what I would term “confessional” lines, although these lines are not determined by denominational allegiance, but by one’s methodology and the location of one’s training. Those who view Protestant, and particularly Lutheran, ideas and their impact positively are generally intellectual or church historians trained in Germany, such as Luise Schorn-Schütte and Gerta Schaffenorth.16 Those who view such ideas and their 15

Reformation,” Sixteenth Century Journal 27 (1996): 97–109, and idem, “A Reformation for Women? Sin, Grace, and Gender in Argula von Grumbach,” Scottish Journal of Theology 49 (1996): 1–17. For Dutch Anabaptist women, see: “Elisabeth’s Manly Courage”: Testimonials and Songs by and about Martyred Anabaptist Women, ed. and trans. Hermione Joldersma and Louis Grijp (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 2001. 15William Lazarus, Luther on the Christian Home (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg, 1960). 16Gerta Scharffenorth, “’Im Geiste Freunde werden’: Mann und Frau im Glauben Martin Luthers,” in Wandel, ed. Wunder and Vanja, 97–109; and Schorn-Schütte, “‘Gefährtin’ und ‘Mitregentin.’”

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impact negatively are generally social historians or literary scholars trained outside of Germany or with extensive contacts with scholars outside of Germany, such as Lyndal Roper, Susan Karant-Nunn, and the late Sigrid Brauner.17 This split, combined with the still chilly attitude toward research on women in Germany, may explain why there is still no book-length study of Luther’s ideas about women, nor even a collection of his writings on women.18 This gap is still surprising, however, for had you told me twenty-five years ago that any aspect of Luther would be understudied I would never have believed it. This “confessional” split is less pronounced in work on ideas of the reformers or the effects of the Reformation outside of Germany. Jane Dempsey Douglass and John Thompson have disagreed sharply about Calvin’s ideas, but their dispute has centered on the degree to which Calvin broke with his predecessors and contemporaries, with only implicit references to the issue of whether the impact of Calvinism on women was positive or negative.19 Older scholarship on the radical reformation usually did make statements along these lines, with G. H. Williams arguing that the radical groups offered women more opportunities and Claus-Peter Clasen that they were more restrictive and patriarchal.20 More recent 17Lyndal Roper, “‘The Common Man,’ ‘The common good,’ ‘common women’: Reflections on Gender and Meaning in the Reformation German Commune,” Social History 12 (1987): 1–21, and idem, The Holy Household: Women and Morals in Reformation Augsburg (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989), and idem, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality, and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994); Susan C. Karant-Nunn, “Continuity and Change: Some Effects of the Reformation on the Women of Zwickau,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13 (1982): 17–42; idem, “The Transmission of Luther’s Teachings on Women and Matrimony: The Case of Zwickau,” Archive for Reformation History 77 (1986): 31–46; idem, “The Reformation of Women,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Susan Mosher Stuard, and Merry E. Wiesner, 3d ed. (Boston: HoughtonMifflin, 1998), 175–202; Sigrid Brauner, Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). 18The recent controversy over Richard Marius’s biography of Luther indicates, of course, that old-fashioned confessionalism is still alive and well in Luther studies, which may be yet another reason people have avoided tackling the topic. See, for example, Heiko A. Oberman’s review of Richard Marius’s study of Luther in The New Republic, August 1999, 40–45. 19Jane Dempsey Douglass, Women, Freedom and Calvin (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985); John Lee Thompson, John Calvin and the Daughters of Sarah: Women in Regular and Exceptional Roles in the Exegesis of Calvin, His Predecessors and His Contemporaries (Geneva: Droz, 1992). 20George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1962), 506–7; Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972), 207. For more recent scholarship on the radical reformation, see: Marion Kobelt-Groch, “Why Did Petronella Leave Her Husband? Reflections on Marital Avoidance among the Halberstadt Anabaptists,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 62 (1988): 26–41; Wes Harrison, “The Role of Women in Anabaptist Thought and Practice: The Hutterite Experience of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries,” Sixteenth Century Journal 23 (1992): 49–70; Snyder and Hecht, Profiles: Craig D. Atwood, “Sleeping in XXX

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research has emphasized the differences among radical groups, however, thus fitting with the general stress on difference and diversity in women’s history; it has also been less confessional than work on Luther, even in places where one might expect some confessional tendencies, such as that published in the Mennonite Quarterly Review or The Conrad Grebel Review. While current work on the radicals reinforces the emphasis on difference, research on women in the English Reformation and English Puritanism fits with another strong theme in women’s history, the questioning of periodization. Such questioning has led many women’s historians to dump the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the golden age of Athens, or at least to put quotation marks around them when they use them in reference to women. In this instance, examination of the ideas of Christian humanists on such issues as marriage, spousal relations, and proper family life has led historians of England such as John Yost and Margo Todd to question whether the Protestants or Puritans were saying anything new.21 They might have emphasized spousal affection and the importance of stable families to the social order more loudly and at greater length than their predecessors, but these were hardly new ideas. These same doubts about the novelty of the Protestant message also emerge in the work of Heide Wunder, though she looks to a different source for their ideas than do Yost and Todd. She sees changes in family life and ideas about marriage as a result not of changes in religious ideology, but of social and economic changes which allowed a wider spectrum of the population to marry and made the marital pair the basic production and consumption unit. This “familialization of work and life” happened, in her view, in the High Middle Ages, which means Reformation ideas about the family did not create the bourgeois family, but resulted from it. 22 21

the Arms of Christ: Sanctifying Sexuality in the Eighteenth-Century Moravian Church,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 8 (1997): 25–47. 21John K. Yost, “Changing Attitudes towards Married Life in Civic and Christian Humanists,” American Society for Reformation Research, Occasional Papers 1 (1977): 151–66; Margo Todd, “Humanists, Puritans and the Spiritualized Household,” Church History 49 (1980): 18–34, and idem, Christian Humanism and the Puritan Social Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). See also: Kathleen M. Davies, “The Sacred Condition of Equality—How Original Were Puritan Doctrines of Marriage?” Social History 2 (1977): 563–80; Edmund Leites, “The Duty to Desire: Love, Friendship and Sexuality in Some Puritan Theories of Marriage,” Journal of Social History 15 (1982): 383–408; Daniel Doriani, “The Puritans, Sex, and Pleasure,” in Christian Perspectives on Sexuality and Gender, ed. Elizabeth Stuart and Adrian Thatcher (Leominster: Gracewing, 1996), 33–52. 22Heide Wunder,“Er ist die Sonn,’ sie ist der Mond”: Frauen in der frühen Neuzeit (Munich: Beck, 1992).

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Wunder, Yost, and Todd are not the only ones to question whether the great gulf of 1500 (or 1517 or 1521 or whatever exact date you choose) has any relevance for women. As you might expect, medieval historians, most prominently Judith Bennett, have also questioned the significance of this great divide.23 Some of them, including Susan Stuard and JoAnn McNamara, have suggested that the twelfth century might be a better choice for a major turning point—thus agreeing with Wunder—while Bennett goes even further and calls for rejecting the idea of significant transformations altogether in favor of a focus on continuity. 24 Doubts about 1500 have also surfaced among historians who focus on subjects other than women, as well as scholars in literature and cultural studies. These have led to mild revisions, such as the new Handbook of European History 1400–1600 edited by Tom Brady, Heiko Oberman, Jim Tracy, and more sweeping rejections, such as several books that range from the tenth century through the eighteenth and use the word “premodern” to identify their contents.25 The rejection of the centrality of 1500—and thus, of course, of the Reformations—has occasioned resistance from a number of quarters. A review of the Handbook of European History from the Frankfurter Allgemeine was headlined “The Beginning of Modern Times Did Not Take Place” (“Das Beginn der Neuzeit findet nicht statt”).26 It describes the book as one in which the 41 authors set out “with the fresh energy of foresters who are fitted out with chain saws and fell lofty but rotten trees in the forest of historiography.” Though I did not mind being labeled a “forester”—I was one of the 41—being outfitted with chain saws clearly made us unacceptable, which is the general opinion of the reviewer about the entire Handbook and its attempt to dethrone 1500 and stress continuities. The term “premodern” also has its critics. Lee Patterson, in a recent article in Speculum, sharply attacks this “crude binarism that locates modernity (‘us’) on one side

23Judith

Bennett, “Medieval Women, Modern Women: Across the Great Divide,” in Culture and History 1350–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. David Aers (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), 147–75. 24JoAnn McNamara, “The Herrenfrage: The Restructuring of the Gender System, 1050–1150,” in Medieval Masculinities: Regarding Men in the Middle Ages, ed. Clare Lees (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994), 3–30; Susan Stuard, “The Dominion of Gender: Women’s Fortunes in the High Middle Ages,” in Bridenthal et al., Becoming Visible, 153–54; Judith Bennett “Confronting Continuities,” Journal of Women’s History 9 (1997): 73–94, with responses by Sandra E. Greene, Karen Offen, and Gerda Lerner, 95–118. 25Handbook of European History 1400–1600: Late Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation, ed. Thomas Brady, Heiko A. Oberman, and James Tracy (Leiden: Brill, 1994–95). 26Wilhelm Ribhegge, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 8/8, 1996.

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Research on Women & the Reformation and premodernity (‘them’) on the other.”27 Historians of areas other than Europe, such as Barbara and Leonard Andaya, have wondered whether “especially in light of subaltern writings that reject the notion of modernity as a universal,” both premodern and early modern “implicitly set a ‘modern Europe’ against a ‘yet-to-bemodernized’ non-Europe.”28 These doubts about a premodern/modern dichotomy have emerged at just the same time that this dichotomy has been reinforced in an exploding area of historical research, the history of sexuality. Because of the influence of Foucault, or better said, because of the influence of a particular way of reading Foucault’s work on sex, much research has explored the development of “modern” sexuality, or simply taken “modern” sexuality as its topic29 Foucault, in the first volume of History of Sexuality, locates the beginning of the “transformation of sex into discourse” with the practice of confession, and recognizes that this expanded after the Reformation as Catholics required more extensive and frequent confession and Protestants substituted the personal examination of conscience for oral confession to a priest.30 This discourse about sexuality was later taken over by medical, political, and educational authorities, and it is this point that most of Foucault’s successors (and disciples) see as the beginning of what interests them, going on to explore the mechanisms that define and regulate sexuality and investigating the ways in which individuals and groups described and understood their sexual lives. Even those who do look at earlier periods, and who stress the socially constructed and historically variable nature of all things sexual, tend to accept this notion of one clear break, terming their work the study of “premodern” or even “before” sexuality.31 27Lee

Patterson, “On the Margin: Postmodernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies,” Speculum 65 (1990): 107. 28Leonard Y. Andaya and Barbara Watson Andaya, “Southeast Asia in the Early Modern Period: Twenty Five Years On,” Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 26/1 (1995): 92. 29For surveys of modern western sexuality, see Carolyn Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture (New York: Twayne, 1996); Jeffrey Weeks, Sex, Politics, and Society: The Regulation of Sexuality Since 1800 (London: Longmans, 1981); John C. Fout, ed., Forbidden History: The State, Society, and the Regulation of Sexuality in Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992); Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds. The Making of the Modern Body: Sexuality and Society in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). 30Michel Foucault, L’Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1: La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). 31Jacqueline Murray and Konrad Eisenbichler, eds., Desire and Discipline: Sex and Sexuality in the Premodern West (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996); Louise Fradenburg and Carla Freccero, eds., Premodern Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1996); David M. Halperin, John J. Winkler, Froma I. Zeitlin, eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

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This notion of a decisive break sometime in the eighteenth or nineteenth century works fine for medievalists, who have always been before the break anyway; this situation, combined with the significant and highly respected early work on sexuality by James Brundage and Vern Bullough, may explain why there is so much good research on medieval sexuality going on right now.32 For those of us who are Reformation scholars, however, this is more problematic; we’ve always been on this side of the great break, trained to think that what we were exploring was the “early modern” period. We’ve talked blithely about the development of all things modern in our period, including, of course, the modern family. So how is it that the modern family emerged from the Reformation (or, following Heide Wunder, even earlier and then was strengthened by the Reformation), but modern sexuality did not develop until several centuries later? If 1500 is dethroned but there is a break later, does that make us all late medievalists? Or should we just junk the concept of the Middle Ages entirely (as a few medievalists themselves are suggesting) as yet another piece of Renaissance intellectual baggage, junk Foucault (as many feminist and postcolonial scholars recommend) and welcome those who study the thirteenth century as modernists like ourselves? That way we could certainly quit arguing about whether women had a Renaissance, because no one had a Renaissance. The thought of dumping 1500 in favor of an earlier, later, or no break is frightening (or perhaps better said, anathema) to many early modernists, as well as textbook publishers and department chairs who would have to revamp their entire offerings. To get back to my narrower topic, there are also two lines of research related to women and the Reformation which suggest that such a dethroning may be premature. My projects for this year involve neither of these directly, but both of them shape what I say about Elisabeth of Braunschweig, German convents, and Luther, and represent what will be areas of exciting research in the next twenty years. The first of these are studies of confessionalization, social discipline, the reform of popular culture, or the civilizing process (whatever term one uses) that recognize there were two sexes (or more, given the new scholarship on third sexes and transgendering). Early scholarship on confessionalization, though very aware of class and geographic differences, was largely blind to gender, which seems particularly odd given the fact that so much about social discipline related to sex. That has changed for many scholars. Though most of this newer gendered scholarship 32The best introductions to the scholarship on medieval sexuality are: Joyce E. Salisbury, Medieval Sexuality: A Research Guide (New York: Garland, 1990), and Vern L. Bullough and James A. Brundage, Handbook of Medieval Sexuality (New York: Garland, 1996).

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on social discipline recognizes the medieval roots of such processes as the restriction of sexuality to marriage, the encouragement of moral discipline and sexual decorum, the glorification of heterosexual married love, and the establishing of institutions for regulating and regularizing behavior, it also emphasizes that all of these processes were strengthened in the sixteenth century, and that this had a different effect on women than on men. Laws regarding such issues as adultery, divorce, “lascivious carriage,” enclosure of monastics, and interdenominational and interracial marriage were never gender neutral. The enforcement of such laws was even more discriminatory, of course, for though undisciplined sexuality and immoral behavior were portrayed from the pulpit or press as a threat to Christian order, it was women’s lack of discipline that was most often punished. The newer scholarship on marriage, divorce, the family, and sexuality makes clear that the roots of this strengthening are complex, and include much more than theology; though most studies are not directly comparative, as a whole they make it clear that these changes occurred in Catholic areas as well as Protestant.33 This line of scholarship is thus developing parallel to contemporary witchcraft studies, in which the best also stress complexity over older monocausal explanations such as misogyny, rotted rye bread, or jealousy of midwives. This complexity leads to an unwillingness to draw up grand schema and timetables— no one is currently setting dates for the “restricted patriarchal nuclear family,” for example, as Lawrence Stone once did—but this scholarship does suggest that there was enough of a break with a pre-1500 past to retain this date as significant. It also makes clear that this break is a process that takes many decades or even 33For examples of gendered scholarship on social discipline, see: Thomas Max Safley, Let No Man Put Asunder: The Control of Marriage in the German Southwest (Kirksville, Mo.: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1984); Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England 1570– 1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); James R. Farr, Authority and Sexuality in Early Modern Burgundy (New York, Oxford University Press, 1995); Jeffrey R. Watt, The Making of Modern Marriage: Matrimonial Control and the Rise of Sentiment in Neuchâtel, 1550–1800 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Eric Josef Carlson, Marriage and the English Reformation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994); Joel F. Harrington, Reordering Marriage and Society in Reformation Germany (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Robert Kingdon, Adultery and Divorce in Calvin’s Geneva (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995); Richard Adair, Courtship, Illegitimacy and Marriage in Early Modern England (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996); Michael F. Graham, The Uses of Reform: “Godly Discipline” and Popular Behavior in Scotland and Beyond 1560–1610 (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Susan C. Karant-Nunn, The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany (London: Routledge, 1997); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the LifeCycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Christianity and the Regulation of Sexuality in the Early Modern World: Regulating Desire, Reforming Practice (London: Routledge, 2000); Helen Parish, Clerical Marriage and the English Reformation: Precedent, Policy and Practice (London: Ashgate, 2000).

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centuries, but that it is just as significant as and also tightly interwoven with the more familiar processes such as “the rise of the nation-state” and “the growth of protoindustrial capitalism.” What I eventually say about Luther in the introduction to Susan’s and my translation of his writings on women will be influenced directly by this scholarship. For one, I (or actually we) will view Luther alone as less significant than he would have been in an essay twenty years ago, but the consequences of the Protestant Reformation as more significant. Our comparisons between pre- and postReformation ideas about women will include developments within Catholicism on both sides, rather than—as was the case with much early scholarship on the effects of the Reformation on women—comparing fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Catholicism with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestantism. (Doing that in women’s history generally makes the more recent period look worse, as the sources are usually more detailed and women’s situation tends to look rosier the fewer sources we have.) My articles on Elisabeth of Braunschweig and on German convents will also place them within this wider context, viewing Elisabeth, like her male counterparts, as an agent in this process—she did issue a church ordinance in 1542—and the convents as places of confessional indoctrination as well as resistance. The second line of research is one which is only beginning to be related to the Reformations, but which will clearly be a key area of research in the coming decades—the expansion of Christianity beyond Europe with the first wave of colonialism. The Andaya’s reference to subaltern theory noted above reminds us that viewing 1500 as a great gulf did not come solely from the chain of events that began in 1517, but also from the events that began in 1492. Were I reviewing recent and looming developments in early modern economic or cultural history or English literature (or course offerings in U.S. colleges and universities) I would certainly have started rather than ended with this. Viewing European women in the sixteenth century in a global context has begun, not surprisingly, for scholars of Iberia, who now regularly hold conferences, publish article collections, and carry out their own research from a transoceanic perspective. 34 The one article which looks beyond Europe in the recent special issue of the Sixteenth Century Journal focusing on gender is one on Portugal35 that examines the role 34 Mary G. Giles, ed., Women in the Inquisition: Spain and the New World (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998); Kenneth J. Adrien and Rolena Adorno, eds., Transatlantic Encounters: Europeans and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Josiah Blackmore and Gregory S. Hutcheson, eds., Queer Iberia (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999). 35 Darlene Abreu-Ferreira, “Fishmongers and Shipowners: Women in Maritime Communities of Early Modern Portugal,” Sixteenth Century Journal 31 (2000), 9–26.

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of Portuguese women in the fishing Trade that linked several ports of Newfoundland. Research on English topics has also begun, though because these have been dominated so far by scholars of literature, they tend to focus on representation, images of gender, and discourse, with some arguing, as is to be expected, that this is all we can know.36 Those of us who are, or who at least began life as continental historians of areas other than Iberia, need to assert our presence in this area, however. Many of the descriptions of the New World so favored by cultural analysts in their analyses of “othering” and “orientalizing” were printed in Germany, as were the maps both armchair and real travelers examined. Though America was named by an Italian, the name stuck because of the influence of the German mapmaker Martin Waldseemüller, who wrote: “I see no reason why, and by what right, this land of Amerigo should not be named after that wise and ingenious man who discovered it, America, since both Europe and Asia had been allotted the names of women.”37 Comments like Waldseemüller’s suggest links we are only beginning to follow—between social discipline and colonization, between overseas expansion and witchcraft, between gender and nationality. It is clear, however, that suggesting any area of research is limited to one continent (or half a continent, like Europe) is not only politically shortsighted in the current academic climate, but also intellectually narrow, reminiscent of all those comments twenty years ago

36

See, for example, Peter Mason, Deconstructing America: Representations of the Other (London: Routledge, 1990); Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991); Anthony Pagden, European Encounters with the New World: From Renaissance to Romanticism (New Haven: Yale, 1993); Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker, eds., Women, “Race” and Writing in the Early Modern Period (London: Routledge, 1994); Kim F. Hall, Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995). Most of this scholarship looks to the work of Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), and Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper & Row, 1984), for its origins, but Edmundo O’Gorman’s pioneering study of European colonial discourse predated these in both its Spanish and English versions; see Edmundo O’Gorman, La invención de América; El universalismo de la Cultura del Occidente (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1958); an expanded and modified version appeared in English as The Invention of America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961). For debates about going beyond discourse, see the introduction to Implicit Understandings: Observing, Reporting and Reflecting on the Encounters between Europeans and Other Peoples in the Early Modern Era, ed. Stuart Schwarz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 37 Martin Waldseemüller, Introduction to Cosmography (1507), translated in George Kish, A Source Book in Geography (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978), 319.

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“but what does this have to do with women?” I am not sure exactly how this will play out in my tasks for this year, though, like their French counterparts, German Ursulines thought about the world beyond Europe as in need of their services, and Luther linked not only popes but also Turks with the Whore of Babylon and clearly saw himself as a “world-historical” figure. This broader perspective is particularly exciting for those of us who have been doing women’s history for a while, as it challenges us to develop a completely new approach. Because the master narratives in global history are still so fluid, we may not have to be revisionist, but instead could make gender part of the story from the start. I am therefore especially eager to see research that is both local and global, like microhistories of the many border and mixed communities in the sixteenth century, comparative studies of individuals and areas, interdisciplinary analyses of artifacts, texts, and events—all, of course, with gender integrated as a category of analysis. Of course such topics and approaches are trendy, but if women’s history, that fad that has now been around for decades, isn’t trendy, what will be?

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Rethinking the Social History of the Poor Thomas Max Safley

riderich Miller was eleven or twelve years old by his own reckoning. His father had died long ago, his mother but recently. Since entering the Lutheran Orphanage in Augsburg, he had learned his catechism and the Psalms and “had made [my] way with God’s help.”1 He was an unprepossessing boy by all accounts. The Orphan-Father never noticed him, and the OrphanMother had little contact with him.2 All that changed in March 1689, when Friderich was accused of witchcraft. Over the months that followed, the authorities examined the orphan-witch with great care. They learned little about Friderich’s antecedents. He had been baptized in the Lutheran Church of the Franciscans on 20 April 1676, the son of Hans Jerg Miller, possibly a pedlar by trade, and Anna Maria Schribenstein, a rope-maker.3 His family had settled in St. Catherine’s Alley, a side street in the city’s principal mercantile district, where they had joined the ranks of the laboring poor.4 He had no surviving relatives; certainly none came forward to claim him. Now Friderich was alone in the world. Though under the governance of the Holy Alms—supervised by its deputies and appointees—Friderich was a masterless boy: a child without family or place, a thing apt to mischief or criminality, an object of suspicion and even fear. So attention turned to his actions and his associates, his wanderings, and his imaginings. All were questioned, considered, and recorded. Friderich’s case conforms to none of the current assumptions and historical models of witchcraft. An exceptional crime in the sixteenth and seventeenth

F

1Stadtarchiv

Augsburg (henceforth, StadtAA). Urgichtensammlung, 360. Urgicht des verhafften Friderich Millers, 29 March 1689: “Habe sich eben mit Gottes Hilff vortgebracht.” 2StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Bericht, 5 April 1689. 3StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Taufzettel, 20 April 1676. 4StadtAA. Steuerbücher, 1677.

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centuries, witchcraft generally assumed a common pattern: the Devil’s pact (and apostasy), sexual relations with the Devil, aerial flight to a witches’ sabbath, worship of the Devil, maleficent magic.5 Friderich readily admitted to having contracted with the “Evil Enemy,” he even hinted at the possibility of midnight flights on a hayfork, but he never stood accused of apostasy or “maleficia” of any sort. As a rule, “the witch was expected to be an old and ugly woman.”6 Young men occasionally fell victim to the witch-hunters, most notably the indigent bands of beggars caught in the “Little Sorcerer Jack” (Zauberer-Jackl) trials in the Bishopric of Salzburg during the 1670s and 1680s, but Friderich was a child not yet old enough to enter into apprenticeship and a burgher of a city not particularly subject to witch-crazes.7 The entire history of Augsburg yields only seventeen executions on the charges of sorcery and witchcraft.8 Still, given the possibilities, Friderich was handled gently. At first the Orphan-Father and -Mother were admonished to separate him from the other orphans, keep a close eye on him, and never leave him alone.9 This strategy accords well with notions of a grand renfermement, but its execution leaves something to be desired.10 Friderich came and went much as he pleased inside the orphanage, throughout the city, and beyond the walls. Later, he was arrested and placed in the city’s prison, where he was questioned repeatedly and earnestly, in full view of the public executioner and his instruments of torture. What might 5Wolfgang

Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria: Popular Magic, Religious Zealotry and Reasons of State in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 1–33. 6Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 160–62. See also E. William Monter, Witchcraft in France and Switzerland: The Borderlands during the Reformation (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1976), 122–24; Nikolaus Paulus, Hexenwahn und Hexenprozeß, vornehmlich im 16. Jahrhundert (Freiburg/Br., 1910), 195–247; Gerhard Schormann, Hexenprozesse in Deutschland (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1981), 116–22; and Heide Wunder, “Hexenprozesse im Herzogtum Preussen während des 16. Jahrhunderts,” in Hexenprozesse: Deutsche und skandinavische Beiträge, ed. Christian Degn et al. (Neumünster: Wachholtz, 1983), 187–89. 7H. Nagl, “Der Zauberer-Jackl Prozess: Hexenprozesse im Erzstift Salzburg (1675–1690),” Mitteilungen der Gesellschaft für Salzburger Landesgeschichte 112/113 (1972/73): 385–541; 114 (1974): 79– 243. See also Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 336–38, 342–44; Fritz Byloff, Hexenglaube und Hexenverfolgung in den österreichischen Alpenländern (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1934), 116ff. 8Behringer, Witchcraft Persecutions in Bavaria, 43–45. See also Bernd Roeck, Eine Stadt in Krieg und Frieden: Studien zur Geschichte der Reichsstadt Augsburg zwischen Kalenderstreit und Parität (Göttingen: Vanderhoeck & Ruprecht, 1989), 111–16, 539–53. 9StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Bericht, 5 April 1689. 10Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason (New York: Pantheon, 1965); and idem, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1977). For a general discussion of the theory of a “great enclosure,” see: Thomas Max Safley, Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (Boston: Humanities Press, 1996), 7–11.

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Thomas Max Safley have been a stern exercise in social discipline ended rather ambivalently.11 When twelve strokes of the rod failed to alter his testimony, his case closed: “The arrested Friderich Miller should be released from prison and, before this is done, the Elders of the Holy Alms consulted to see how he might be assigned for a time to a third place with good care and adequate spiritual and other instruction.”12 What they called his “evil reputation and lifestyle” did not incline the authorities to give up on this wayward orphan.13 They did not execute him, banish him, or confine him. Rather, they chose care and instruction—the return to what one might call a normative existence—in the hope of his eventual rehabilitation. The actions of the magistrates conform to none of the current assumptions and historical models of poor relief. Accordingly, Friderich Miller’s case raises profound questions about our understanding of the lived experiences of poor relief and, by extension, of the laboring poor themselves. But how do we make sense of it all? Most scholarship focuses on the functions and structures of poor relief. From this perspective, the poor—whether deserving or undeserving, whether laboring or idle—appear as little more than an aggregate, a faceless mass upon which social ideologies and institutions exercise their influences. They are not accorded any sense of historical agency. The most accessible sources for the study of poor relief are prescriptive, some influential edicts and treatises having been published in nineteenth- and twentieth-century editions. From that literature, historians sought to capture what they considered to be the ultimate purposes of its formulators. The results are uniformly teleological. Certain studies describe early efforts at poor relief as nothing more than attempts to police the extreme effects of poverty.14 Thus, the 11

Gerhard Oestreich, “Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 55 (1968): 329–47; idem, “Policey und Prudentia civilis in der barokken Gesellschaft von Stadt und Staat,” in Strukturprobleme der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Brigitta Oestreich (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1980), 367–79. 12 StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Decretum in Senatu, 3 May 1689: “Der verhaffte Friderich Miller solle des Verhaffts entlaßen, und ehe solches bewerkstelliget wird, mit denen Verordneten Eltern des Heil. Almosens Aug. Conf. conferiert werden, wie er auf eine Zeitlang an einen dritten ort in guter Obsicht, auch mit geiste und andern benötigten Underricht gehalten werden” (The term, “dritten ort,” appears occasionally in the records of the Alms Office and refers usually to an apprenticeship, the third “household” through which an orphan would pass before achieving his independence). 13 StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Bericht, 13 April 1689. 14 Hermann Barge, “Die älteste evangelische Armenordnungen,” Historisches Vierteljahresschrift 11 (1908): 193–225; Ludwig Feuchtwanger, “Geschichte der sozialen Politik und des Armenwesens im Zeitalter der Reformation,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft 32 (1908): 167–201; 33 (1909): 191–228; Johann N. Förstl, Das Almosen: Eine Untersuchung über Grundsätze der XXX

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emergence of the modern absolute state explains the changing shape of poor relief. By probing religious and moral treatises, other histories associate the transformation of charity with the changing value ascribed to good works.15 Under the influence of religious reform, charity became a duty and a necessity that could not be left to the chance of private largesse. More contemporary examples of this traditional perspective cast poor relief as one of the ritual sinews strengthening early modern society against the centrifugal forces of scarcity and inequity.16 Accordingly, charity becomes a reliable benchmark for the political 15

Armenfürsorgung im Mittelalter und Gegenwart (Paderborn, 1909); Felix Pischel, “Die erste Armenordnungen der Reformationszeit,” Deutsche Geschichtsblätter 17 (1916): 317–29; Otto Winckelmann, “Die Armenordnungen von Nürnberg (1522), Kitzingen (1523), Regensburg (1523), and Ypern,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 10 (1912/13): 1–18. 15 Brian Pullan, “Catholics and the Poor in Early Modern Europe,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th series, 26 (1976): 15–34; Miriam U. Chrisman, “Urban Poor in the Sixteenth Century: The Case of Strasbourg,” in Social Groups and Religious Ideas in the Sixteenth Century, ed. Miriam U. Chrisman and Otto Gründler (Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute, 1978), 59–67, 169–71; Natalie Z. Davis, “Poor Relief, Humanism, and Heresy: The Case of Lyon,” Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History 5 (1968): 217–75; Franz Ehrle, Beiträge zur Reform der Armenpflege (Freiburg/Br., 1881); Thomas Fischer, Städtische Armut und Armenfürsorge im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert: Sozialgeschichtliche Untersuchungen am Beispiel der Städte Basel, Freiburg i. Br. und Straßburg (Göttingen: Otto Schwartz, 1979); Harold J. Grimm, “Luther’s Contribution to Sixteenth-Century Organization of Poor Relief,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 61 (1970): 222–34; Robert M. Kingdon, “Social Welfare in Calvin’s Geneva,” American Historical Review 76 (1971): 50–70; Carter Lindberg, “There Should Be No Beggars among Christians: Karlstadt, Luther and the Origins of Protestant Poor Relief,” Church History 46 (1977): 313–34; idem, Beyond Charity: Reformation Initiatives for the Poor (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1993); Elsie McKee, John Calvin on the Diaconate and Liturgical Almsgiving (Geneva: Droz, 1984); Georg Ratzinger, Geschichte der kirchlichen Armenpflege (Freiburg/Br., 1884). Scholars have long recognized that the reform of charity was not limited to Protestants. Many Catholics, especially those inspired by humanist treatises on the topic, shared it. Interestingly, those initiatives that placed charity under the administration of the state were still likely to be labeled Lutheran and heretical by conservative Catholic prelates. See especially: Davis, “Poor Relief, Humanism and Heresy”; Philip Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence: The Ospedale degli Innocenti, 1410-1536 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990); Linda Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain: The Example of Toledo (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); Brian Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice: The Social Institutions of a Catholic State to 1620 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971). 16 See, for example: Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice; Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1980), and Ronald Weissman, Ritual Brotherhood in Renaissance Florence (New York: Academic Press, 1982). More recent monographs, however, have tended to extend the ceremonial elements of charity to color the early modern response as a whole to the problem of poverty and marginality. Cf. Maureen Flynn, Sacred Charity: Confraternities and Social Welfare in Spain, 1400–1700 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), and Robert Schneider, Public Life in Toulouse, 1463–1789: From Municipal Republic to Cosmopolitan City (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989).

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and social dominance of a self-seeking elite: an integral part of their effort to maintain dependence and enforce deference; a cynical ploy to disguise a rigid social hierarchy with a mask of paternal solidarity. In each of these schools, scholars explain historical phenomena by appealing to the ultimate purposes or designs that drive them forward. Their conclusions, though superficially compelling, tend to ignore or discount as irrelevant such evidence as does not immediately contribute or conform to the overarching paradigm. Consequently, the purposes of poor relief are oversimplified, a construct of the scholars rather than a product of the sources. There is no place for the obvious conundrum that charity was both selfless and selfish: it expressed a genuine concern for people in need; it also denoted an intention to discipline the poor.17 The poor themselves are rendered invisible: they were to be disciplined to lives of productivity; their poverty was to be rooted out with the spade of self-sufficiency. Indeed, they themselves seem unworthy of study. Yet, teleologies cannot explain the fate of Friderich Miller. Were he simply a witch, the authorities would have executed or, at least, imprisoned him. Were he simply a pauper, they would have banished him from the city and left him to his own devices. In fact, they did none of these things. Rather, the Burgomasters and Alms Deputies spent months questioning Friderich. They learned that, after his father’s death, while his mother worked as a rope-maker, Friderich gathered wood outside the city walls and sang at night in the city streets to help make ends meet.18 During these forays the Devil first tempted Friderich, offering him gifts of sweets and money, compelling him to sign his name in blood, and inviting him to dances with witches. The authorities did not know what to make of him, but they did not simply dismiss or punish him. In the end, despite the conclusion that Friderich had consorted with the Devil, they released him. He would enter an apprenticeship and learn a trade; Friderich would have his chance to become a burgher. The motives of the magistrates remain inaccessible to us. Their actions, however, underscore the fact that contemporaries took the poor more seriously and treated them more complexly than scholars have done. Another tradition of scholarship attends to structures and institutions rather than ideologies. According to this school, the changing organization of poor relief 17Among the scholars attending to the history of early modern poor relief, Sherrill Cohen has pointed directly to the fact that coercive and repressive elements as well as charitable and humanitarian aspects could and did coexist in the workhouses, asylums, and orphanages of early modern Europe. Sherrill Cohen, The Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500: From Refuges for Ex-Prostitutes to Shelters for Battered Women (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), passim. 18StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Bericht des Bürgermeisters Melchior Mattsperger, 26 March 1689.

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reflects the changing conditions of early modern European society. Chronic price inflation, periodic crop failures, and frequent political instability—themselves the products of omnipresent, metahistorical forces—bred a marginal, immiserated subpopulation. The poor were omnipresent, a predictable problem to be controlled but never solved. Confronting this crisis with insufficient resources, states sought to limit the extent of poor relief both by discriminating between the deserving and undeserving and by disciplining them in order to promote their self-sufficiency.19 In so doing, the authorities were forced to consider the poor themselves in order to alter the mode of assistance in such a way that the poor would cease to burden their betters.20 With some exceptions, these attempts at reform neither relieved suffering nor reduced costs.21 The sheer magnitude of the problem frustrated all such efforts.22 19The localized charities of smaller polities may have been better suited to respond to the exigen-

cies of early modern poverty than the institutions of emergent nation states. This argument is certainly implicit in Mack Walker’s classical study of German hometowns and is born out in much of the literature on charity in Germany and Italy. See: Max Bisle, Die öffentliche Armenpflege der Reichsstadt Augsburg mit Berücksichtigung der einschlägigen Verhältnisse in anderen Reichsstädten Suddeutschland (Paderborn, 1904); Fischer, Städtische Armut und Armenfürsorge im 15. und 16. Jahrhundert; Gavitt, Charity and Children in Renaissance Florence; Robert Jütte, Obrigkeitliche Armenfürsorge in deutschen Reichsstädten der frühen Neuzeit: Städtisches Armenwesen in Frankfurt am Main und Köln (Cologne: Böhlau, 1984); Pullan, Rich and Poor in Renaissance Venice; Werner Moritz, Die bürgerlichen Fürsorgeanstalten der Reichsstadt Frankfurt am Main im späten Mittelalter (Frankfurt/M.: W. Kramer, 1981); Christoph Sachse, Florian Tennstedt, Geschichte der Armenfürsorge in Deutschland: Vom Spätmittelalter bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1980); Mack Walker, German Home Towns: Community, State, and General Estate, 1648–1871 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971). 20Edward P. Thompson’s work on labor history understood early attempts to remake the poor as efforts to discipline and subjugate the lower orders of society. See: E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Pantheon, 1964), and idem, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” Past & Present 38 (1967): 56–97. A more recent study of England in the eighteenth century combines elements of social and labor discipline by interpreting the connection between charity and discipline in terms of a shifting elite consciousness of the national condition and national needs. Donna T. Andrew, Philanthropy and Police: London Charity in the Eighteenth Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 21Above all, these notions of poverty as an unknowable and structural element of early modern society and of charity as a hopeless enterprise come to the fore in annaliste studies. See especially: Jean-Pierre Gutton, La société et les pauvres: L’exemple de la généralité de Lyon, 1534–1789 (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1971); idem, L’état et la mendicité dans la première moitié du XVIIIe siècle: Auvergne, Beaujolais, Forez, Lyonnais (St. Etienne: Centre d’études foréziennes, 1973). 22Cissie Fairchilds, Poverty and Charity in Aix-en-Provence, 1640–1789 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Allen Forrest, The French Revolution and the Poor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); Olwen Hufton, The Poor of Eighteenth-Century France, 1750–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); Colin Jones, Charity and Bienfaisance: The Treatment of the Poor in the Montpellier Region, 1740–1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982); idem, The Charitable XXXX

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Ironically, despite a documented awareness among early modern authorities that they must distinguish among the poor, modern scholars have rendered them not as individuals but as an undifferentiated sum. They have resorted to quantitative methods to locate the poor and to explain their behavioral patterns. The appeal to statistics, whether in history or in social science, contains an assumption of natural law; that is, that human conditions and organizations are shaped by knowable, immutable forces and are, therefore, regular and predictable. Accordingly, human beings, the laboring poor in this case, are little more than vectors of those same inhuman social and political forces. Lost is all evidence of spontaneity and idiosyncrasy. To adopt for a moment the language of statistics, measures of deviation are sacrificed to measures of central tendency. Moreover, the supposition of natural laws governing human interactions deprives humans not only of agency but ultimately and more seriously of responsibility. As Isaiah Berlin asked: “once we transfer responsibility for what happens from the backs of individuals to the casual or teleological operation of institutions or cultures or psychical or physical factors, what can be meant by calling upon our sympathy or sense of history?”23 Under the influence of natural law, human behavior is determined, and human history is inevitable. Yet, it is precisely Friderich Miller’s tale, with its seeming oddities and idiosyncrasies, that confounds paradigmatic explanations. Friderich was not indigent; his father had managed to accumulate a small amount of property.24 The householder’s death had nonetheless quickly reduced the household to poverty. In all of this, Friderich resembles the majority of orphans upon entry into Augsburg’s orphanages. They were the children of burghers, most of whom came from artisanal backgrounds and possessed a small amount of property. We know far less about them inside the orphanage walls. Apart from house regulations, little documentation survives that could make visible the contours of their daily lives. In this context, the details of Friderich’s demonic encounters become all the more intriguing. They expose—and confound—common expectations of childlike behavior, what children might want or think. Any child might want cash and candy. 23

Imperative: Hospitals and Nursing in Ancien Régime and Revolutionary France (London: Routledge, 1989); Martz, Poverty and Welfare in Habsburg Spain; Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600–1814 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985); K. D. M. Snell, Annals of the Laboring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England, 1660–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). 23Isaiah Berlin, “Historical Inevitability,” in The Proper Study of Mankind: An Anthology of Essays (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 1998), 143. 24StadtAA. Steuerbücher, 1677. Hans Jerg Miller rendered a modest tax on property worth anywhere from 80 to 160 Gulden.

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The Devil also gave Friderich a rod that would beat anyone to whom it was shown.25 Any child might dream of parties with plentiful food and drink. The Devil specifically plied Friderich with sausage, meat, beer, and even a soup without bread in it—a perfect contrast to orphanage fare.26 Any child might imagine the wonders of flight. The Devil also taught Friderich to put water in his superiors’ beer so that they would never scold him.27 Any child might wish to escape, if only for a moment, the constant observation and supervision of parents or masters. The Devil always came to Friderich when he was alone in the arcade (Lauben).28 The temptations and hazards of psychohistory notwithstanding, we can grant Friderich a few short-lived moments of imagined resistance and independence in a regime that might often have seemed alien and oppressive. Such details break the models of disciplinary regimes and carceral institutions. The poor with their concerns, reactions, and dreams have little bearing on a historical drama, treated as though it were being played out over their heads. The most recent fashion in historical interpretation manages to accord the poor a degree of agency, if not individuality, by combining teleology and science. What one historian has called “a hard core of theorists still under the spell of Marx and Foucault” treats poor relief as a means by which “the rich tranquilize the poor.”29 Poverty is a consequence of the social relations of production that elites wish to preserve and control rather than ameliorate or eradicate. Capitalist enterprise requires state-sponsored support in order to police a reserve of labor and maintain its availability at the lowest possible price.30 Rather than relieve poverty, therefore, poor relief renders the lower strata of society dependent by shaping their activities to the established requirements of the economy. Workhouses, prisons, and hospitals place the marginal in a minutely scrutinized regime based on industry, regularity, authority, and obedience in order to encourage economic dependence and social deference.31 Though the poor resist this coercion 25StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Fragestuck, 14 April 1689. 26StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Urgicht, 22 March 1689. 27StadtAA.

Urgichtsammlung, 360. Bericht, 5 April 1689: “ains mahl habe er zu nacht seinem herren ain bier auff dem lederhaus hollen sollen, da seye Jhme ain rother man bekhommen, der Jhne gefragt, wo er hin wolle, deme er geanthwortet, seinem Herren ain bier zu hollen, worauff diser man gesagt, solle ain wasser darein thue, und da er Jhne ausszankhen werde, solle er seinem Herren aine andere arbeith heissen....” 28StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Urgicht, 22 March 1689. 29Frank Prochaska, “Charitable Motives, “Times Literary Supplement 4804 (1995): 27. 30See especially Catharina Lis and Hugo Soly, Poverty and Capitalism in Pre-Industrial Europe (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1979). 31Cohen, Evolution of Women’s Asylums since 1500; Margaret DeLacy, Prison Reform in Lancashire, 1700–1850: A Study in Local Administration (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986); Foucault, xxx

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and oppression, historical instances of rebellion serve only to demonstrate the heroism of their struggle and the hopelessness of their situation. Even those scholars most sensitive to the voices and aspirations of the poor cannot liberate them from their historical fate. No longer merely the objects of change, the poor become its creatures—instruments of elite ambitions and victims of impersonal forces—locked in an evolutionary process, the end of which is predestined. Scholarship has lost sight of the poor. This is not to say that the recent historiographical schools on poverty and poor relief have not contributed positively to our understanding. They have established a context for human action and interaction. Who would deny that impersonal factors, such as institutions or environment, influence the scope of human action and narrow the range of human freedom? The problem remains that such studies treat poor people as “the poor,” ignoring their individuality and limiting their agency for the sake of generally applicable conclusions. Yet, early modern magistrates understood—and the case of Friderich Miller demonstrates—that the poor were not all alike. They could not be analyzed and condemned in their entirety; they had to be understood and treated on their own terms. Historians should do likewise. The ambivalence and inconclusiveness of the experience of poverty confound teleologies. The records of the orphanages of Augsburg provide an opportunity to rethink the poor in early modern Europe. Failures, such as Friderich’s, galled in part because they defied the logic of the institution. Augsburg modeled its orphanage—one of the first of its kind in Europe—on an urban household. It was set in a modest residence with garden and outbuildings, a husband and wife governed all activities, and a small staff of servants lived with the children.32 Thus organized, it provided a salutary environment in which orphans enjoyed a better diet, lower mortality, and higher education than did the city’s youth in general. As its organization was domestic, so the Orphanage’s self-styled intentions were paternal, teaching orphans “the fear of God, prayer, work and other virtues,” that is, the essence of a bourgeois morality: diligence and persistence, asceticism and sobriety, deference and reverence.33 It 31

Madness and Civilization; idem, Discipline and Punish; Michael Ignatieff, A Just Measure of Pain: The Penitentiary in the Industrial Revolution, 1750–1850 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978); David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum: Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little, Brown, 1971). 32See Safley, Charity and Economy, passim. 33StadtAA. Almosenamt. Waisenhaus, 10. Ain ungeferlicher Überschlag was ain Waisenhauß darinnen 200 Kinder erhalten mochten werden jerlich kosten möcht, 1572: “welche die Kinder zu der forcht gottes, dem gepett, auch zur arbaitt, und allen gueten thugeten trewlich underwisen und leerten....”

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reflected an idealized, institutionalized vision of family life, upholding the established social and political order at the least possible cost and influencing commodity, capital, and labor markets.34 Unlike biological parents, however, the Orphan-Father and -Mother exercised an authority without affection, based on explicit standards of behavior and equally explicit sanctions to enforce them. One hard case notwithstanding, orphans might reasonably be expected to become productive, dutiful members of the community under such conditions. Such ambitions required the keeping of meticulous records. The orphanages’ governors carefully checked the background of each orphan admitted to their care.35 They noted the child’s age and health, the parents’ names and occupations, the family’s possessions and wealth, their debts and obligations, and their closest friends and associates. Such details captured the circumstances that led to the family’s dissolution and might expose certain elements of the orphan’s character. The governors observed the orphans: their virtues were marked, their vices monitored. As Friderich reminds us, that observation could be haphazard, but it reveals the discourse of discipline within the organization. They also superintended their subjects for years after they left the orphanages, listing information on employment, debt, residence, and family. Their records measured the success of the orphanages, in terms of shifting social and economic status and of changing ideologies and strategies, case by case. Though they belonged—along with the aged, the sick, and the disabled—to the deserving poor, Augsburg’s orphans were not simply the favored recipients of civic charity. They possessed a distinctive quality: being young, they might yet be made productive. Unlike Friderich Miller, most orphans passed quietly into a world of work. The girls entered domestic service. The boys were apprenticed into local crafts. Most settled in Augsburg, found marriage partners, and joined the laboring strata of society. Yet, as Friderich reminds us, the orphans were not passive. As the orphanages shaped them to be conscientious and dutiful consumers, laborers, and citizens, they appropriated the disciplinary regime for their own purposes. The limits, possibilities, and choices by which the poor daily shaped their own lives—and occasionally connived in their own destruction—reveal their personal agency. Their experiences speak to the reality of charity and the efficacy of discipline in the transition from a traditional hierarchical to a nascent capitalistic society. Augsburg’s orphanages provide an opportunity, as E. P. Thompson put it, to rescue the poor from the condescension of posterity. 34See Safley, Charity and Economy, passim. 35StadtAA. Almosenamt. Waisenbücher. The so-called Orphan-Books, kept by orphanage administrators between 1572, when they admitted the first residents, and 1806, when institutional oversight and accounts changed, contain more than six thousand detailed biographies.

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Friderich Miller was neither instrument nor victim. Through his encounters with the Devil, he dreamed of bringing his world into conformity with his own aspirations. In his encounters with the magistrates, he entered into a complex exchange with those who had things he wanted and demanded certain behaviors from him in return. The entire case can be viewed as an exercise in deviance and discipline, in which a single poor person lapsed into error, was punished, expressed his regret, and received his reward. The conclusion would not be false. However, it can also be interpreted as an exercise in connivance and cooptation, in which a poor person maneuvered within a system of poor relief in the pursuit of his own ends. Nor was Friderich the only Augsburg orphan capable of taking matters into his own hands. Hans Gsell was another. The nine-year-old son of a propertyless weaver, he entered the City Orphanage in 1618.36 He was a bright lad; the authorities sought to enroll him at an elite academy, the St. Anna Collegium. Yet, he had a problem with authority; he repeatedly fled and swindled his way across southern Germany. In 1621—at only twelve years of age—he left school and headed for the city of Ulm. The Orphanage retrieved him and apprenticed him to a goldsmith. Hans deserted his master and stole several pieces of silver. Caught in a neighboring village where he had fenced the goods to a Jewish peddler, Hans was punished and returned to the Orphanage. He escaped again. In 1623, the Orphanage received a report from the Goldsmiths’ Guild of Nuremberg that the truant had appeared in the nearby town of Wörth, where he had passed himself off as the son of an Augsburg smith. There he had “borrowed” a large sum of money from a local baker and skipped once again. A year later Hans wrote directly to the Orphanage from Ulm, asking it to connive with him by certifying him as a farrier. Though usually constant in support of its own, the Orphanage finally washed its hands of the scoundrel. Still the governors never ceased to follow his movements in the hope that he would settle into an honorable existence. Like Friderich, Hans’s fate is unknown. Extant records do not reveal what became of him. Yet, they make clear that he took control of his fate. Hans came from a laboring background, the child of an artisan. In this respect, at least, his background matched those of the vast majority of Augsburg’s orphans. His household was not indigent, to judge both from city tax records and the Orphanage’s own accounting, but it was precarious. The flight of his father to avoid creditors initiated a slow descent into poverty, marked by resort to byemployments, makeshifts, and mendicancy. His experience emphasizes that poverty was not a stable state, and the poor were not a fixed subpopulation. Shifting in 36StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus. Waisenbuch, 1580–1676.

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accordance with social and economic circumstances, the boundaries were elastic, as Bronislaw Geremek has described them, and people moved back and forth across them.37 An anonymous Augsburg poet captured this process during the inflation of 1572: “Many were driven from the city, / Leaving wife and child in necessity. / Time and again they set aside / All their commerce and their trade.”38 Self-supporting families suddenly felt “necessity” where it had not pinched before. Productive members of the community left their work and took to the road in search of employment. Whether abandoned or widowed and orphaned, wife and children struggled to make do with whatever resources they could muster, just a half step ahead of real indigence, the loss of every means to keep food on their table and a roof over their heads. The end came for Hans, as it did for Friderich, when his mother died and his household dissolved. In this, too, they resembled the majority of Augsburg’s orphans. The magistrates defined the term with great care to apply strictly to the father- and motherless children of the city’s burghers.39 Yet, it possessed a deeper meaning beyond the familiar formulation. The authorities also understood as orphans, and admitted to the Orphanage, a surprising number of needy children, one or both of whose parents were living. Thus the term acquired a social as well as a biological connotation, describing not only the parentless but also the unsupported. Well aware of this, parents often turned to the Orphanage in hard times as a means of providing temporary care for their children. By so doing, they demonstrated a capacity for calculation and opportunism that made use of existing institutions but turned them to different purposes.40 Not surprisingly, their children proved no less able to seize the initiative. In Hans’s case that initiative first appeared in his rejection of the education offered him by the Orphanage. Given his background, the promise of a university education and the possibility of a professional career were rare occurrences in the history of Augsburg’s orphanages. Such preferment usually awaited the orphans 37Bronislaw

Geremek, The Poor in Late Medieval France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), passim. 38StadtAA. Evangelisches Wesensarchiv, 48. Poetische Beschreibung der Teuerung, 1571–72: “Wie hab ich mit ungedult / Offt forderen sehen ainer shuldt / Dem Reichen vonn ainem armen Mann / Der doch mit nott sein brott gewan / Vill worden aus der statt getriben / Ist weib und kind im seckhel bliben / Es legen sonst auch hin und wider / Alle gewerb und handel nider.” 39StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus, 1. Ordnung und Beschaffenheit der Waisenkinder so sich im Waisenhauß befinden alhier in Augspurg, 21 January 1638. Although admissions practices remained consistent, no ordinance specifically defined an orphan until some fifty years after the organization’s founding. 40See Thomas Max Safley, “Augsburger Orphans and Weberian Traditionalism: Reflections on the Economic Behavior of the Poor in Early Modern Europe” (unpublished MS).

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of well-to-do families, whose estates could help to underwrite the costs. Far more typical was a basic education, followed at the appropriate age by outplacement into domestic service or craft apprenticeship. Beyond the rigors of their catechisms, every orphan in Augsburg—whether male or female—learned to read, write, and reckon. The proposed budget for an orphanage, drafted in 1572, foresaw the permanent employment of an in-house praeceptor.41 Until 1780, however, the orphans learned their lessons on the benches of private schoolmasters and mistresses, scattered throughout the city. The Devil often accompanied Friderich on his way to and from the school of Hans Winckelmann in the Grain Alley.42 Once again, those moments apart from other orphans and away from daily routines, whether in the arcade of the Orphanage or about the streets of the city, were opportunities for temptation. There were, in principle, precious few of them. The earliest regulation of daily life in the Orphanage, written in 1599 and in force virtually unchanged by the time Hans and Friderich were residents, echoed the monastic cadence of study, work, and prayer, all measured and marked by the ringing of a bell. 43 The children rose at 6:00 a.m. and promptly prayed, dressed, and washed before roll call. After further prayer, they proceeded to breakfast, which they ate silently to the accompaniment of a lectio continuo. After breakfast, the orphans attended school. The midday meal followed, complete with lengthy prayers and biblical readings. Afternoons varied. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the girls received instruction in sewing or housekeeping, while the boys returned to school. Tuesdays and Thursdays were reserved for religious instruction. After the evening meal, a brief period of quiet contemplation preceded worship and bed. On Saturdays the orphans applied themselves to cleaning the orphanage; on Sundays they attended church. Only Saturday afternoons were seen as a time of rest, if not recreation: the girls busied themselves about the house, the boys devoted themselves to the study of Erasmus’s Civilitate morum. Thrice daily inspections assured that orphans large and small kept up the unrelenting pace. Not until the late seventeenth century did orphanage governors permit “a whole hour of recreation” after the midday meal.44 It seems unlikely that this free time was spent in 41StadtAA.

Almosenamt. Waisenhaus, 10. Ain ungefarlicher uberschlag Was ain Waisenhaus Darinnen 200 Kinder Erhalten Mochten werden Jerlich Kosten möcht, 8 April 1572. 42StadtAA. Urgichtsammlung, 360. Urgicht, 16 November 1689. 43StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus, 1. Ordnung in dem Waisenhauß wie es mit den Kindern gehalten wird auf alle tag wie auch andere ding im Waisenhauß durch das ganze Jahr, 17 February 1599. 44StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus, 1. Ordnung und Beshaffenheit der Waisenkinder so sich in Waisenhauß befinden allhier in Augsburg, 21 January 1638.

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undirected play. Expected to while away the hour with some quiet, constructive activity, the children nonetheless may have stolen the opportunity for a bit of constructive mischief. That seems to have been Friderich’s downfall; Hans may have dabbled in more serious misdeeds. Still, orphans got few chances to play, at least, according to the rule. Perhaps it is not surprising that Hans fled and Friderich dreamt. Though their thoughts remain obscure, their experiences demonstrate convincingly that disciplinary and educational regimes did not run smoothly or successfully in every instance, all their prescriptive certainty and teleological inevitability notwithstanding. The Orphanage did much more than teach specific competencies. It inculcated habits of mind and body. In addition to reading, writing, and reckoning, which all orphans learned and any master might value, the orphans’ daily agenda supplied an orderly, fixed routine that required of all a degree of persistence, stability, and regularity. A chronic indoctrination in time discipline, complete with “the division of labour; the supervision of labour; fines; bells and clocks; ... preachings and schoolings; the suppression of fairs and sports,” by which “new labour habits were formed,” took place in Augsburg’s orphanages long before the advent of machine technology and centralized production.45 The orphanages of Augsburg served as schoolhouses of labor.46 They also served as clearinghouses and halfway houses. Friderich and Hans knew this well. The Orphanage placed both boys in craft apprenticeships: Friderich after his imprisonment for witchcraft, Hans after his withdrawal from school. During the 1620s, about the time Hans became apprentice to a master goldsmith, 87 orphans were apprenticed, 8 of them in the goldsmithing trade.47 Only weaving employed more orphans. It is a remarkable statistic. In the first place, very few orphans survived. These were hard times in Augsburg, and most orphans—about 52 percent—died in the Orphanage. Only 22 percent became apprentices; a further 14 percent entered domestic service. In the second place, goldsmiths were labor aristocrats, and goldsmithing enjoyed the status of an elite craft. Augsburg’s goldand silversmiths were famous across Europe in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century. Their wares stimulated commerce and generated capital to such an extent that, a century and a half latter, Paul von Stetten—patrician, councilman, and historian of Augsburg—could justly claim that “a large share of the flowering of commerce [after the middle of the seventeenth century] rested on 45Edward P. Thompson, Customs in Common (New York: New Press, 1991), 394. 46Safley, Charity and Economy, 247–73. 47StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus, 22. Waisenbuch, 1580–1676. Statistics based on information derived from the “Orphan-Books,” as cited in Safley, Charity and Economy, 234–35.

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Thomas Max Safley their skills.” 48 By 1615, Augsburg workshops employed 199 master and 164 journeymen goldsmiths. And they had great need of apprentices, which the orphanages helped to supply. Perhaps orphans enjoyed a reputation for a high degree of education and discipline, perhaps the material support of the orphanages made them more cost effective as laborers, perhaps the organization of production created conditions for which orphans were better suited. Whatever the reasons, goldsmiths welcomed orphan-apprentices, and goldsmithing was a fortunate choice of trades for an orphan. Hans’s experience ended unhappily, however, in theft and flight, capture and punishment. In principle, it should have happened otherwise. Augsburg’s orphanages began the process of outplacement with an assessment of the child. A 1721 directive stated explicitly that “the youths who were recognized to be sufficiently raised, instructed, and grown and to be suited and have the desire to enter service or a craft should be shown to the deputies, who will make suitable arrangements for their placement.”49 It merely codified a process based on certain rules of thumb that were as old as the orphanages themselves. First communion constituted the boundary of suitable age and instruction, the point at which orphans were sufficiently strong physically and spiritually to enter the world of work and its associated world of temptation.50 At that time, the Deputies took it upon themselves to locate an appropriate position, taking into account abilities and inclinations. Few children were placed against their wills; regulations specifically forbade it.51 Thus, Augsburg’s orphans should have entered apprenticeship and service readily and willingly. Be that as it may, only fourteen of the eightyseven orphans apprenticed in the 1620s actually finished their training.52 Hans 48Paul

von Stetten, “Gedanken über Erweckung des schlafenden Kunsttriebes, des Fleißes und der Gewerbigkeit unter der hiesigen Bürgerschaft” (Denkschrift, 30 March 1779) as cited in Safley, Charity and Economy, 228. 49StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus, 1. Instruction für den Weysen Vatter und Mutter, 11 May 1721: “die Jugend in einem, und anderm zimmlicher massen aufferzogen, unterrichtet und erwachsen, zu Herrn oder Frauen diensten, Item Handtwerckhen zu lernen Lust und Liebe haben auch tauglich zy seyn erkandt werden, Solle es den Herrn Deputierten beyzeiten angezeigt und sie dessen gehorsamlich berichtet werden, damit sie weiter Verordnung mit anderwärtiger Unterbringung Solcher im Weysen-Hauß erzogene Kinder verfüegen und vornehmen können.” 50StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus, 12. Waisenhausordnung, 1780. Articulus 15, §1: “auch um der von allzu großen Knaben zu besorgenden Unordnungen willen hinfüro keiner der bereits comunciert hat und gesund ist länger mehr im Waisenhaus gedultet werden.” 51StadtAA. Almosenamt. Instruction für beide Waisenhäuser, s.d., s.a.: ...lust und lieb haben und tauglich sein mögen....” 52StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus, 22. Waisenbuch, 1580–1676. Statistics based on information derived from the “Orphan-Books,” as cited in Safley, Charity and Economy, 260.

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may have been the only one who knew where to sell stolen property or who yearned for a life of crime, but his employment record was not so singular. His tale ends—more accurately, the written record ceases—on a seemingly bizarre note: Hans shamelessly appeals to the Orphanage to conspire in fraud by certifying him as a farrier to guild officials in the Imperial city of Ulm. The Deputies react predictably, but a question remains. What prompted Hans to make such a strange request? That orphans asked the Orphanage for various types of assistance was not, in itself, unusual. In the 1620s alone, the Deputies responded to over sixty petitions from outplaced orphans.53 Even as they worked to support themselves, even after they had families and households of their own, orphans relied on the Orphanage for help in need. They asked for and received cash, clothing, and tools when they suffered loss. They asked for and received food, shelter, and care when they fell ill, unemployed, or homeless. They asked for and received mediation when they experienced difficulties with their masters and mistresses. They asked for and received representation when they ran afoul of the law. They asked for and received employment and encouragement when they could find none. In every instance, the Orphanage helped to maintain the city’s labor force, contributing to its stability, persistence, and productivity. Hans did nothing more than other orphans might have done, when unemployed and in need of a job in a foreign city. Were he surprised at the reaction, he might be forgiven. His is one of the very few requests the Deputies refused outright. Yet, they did not abandon him entirely. For all their expressions of outrage, the Deputies continued for several years to record Hans’s movement across southern Germany. Orphans did not cease to be orphans after they left the Orphanage, grew into adults, or descended into deviance. Rather, a surprisingly durable relationship existed, marked by an element of reciprocity. As long as the orphans worked, the Deputies supported them. It was marked by mutuality as well. Each side had a claim on the other for solidarity and conformity. Obviously, the connection between behavior and assistance was less than perfectly consistent. Orphans who failed to meet the expectations of the Orphanage might suffer the loss of aid. Yet, the hope of eventual improvement often led the Deputies to maintain miscreants, such as Friderich or Hans, far longer than was strictly reasonable. This is hardly the social discipline of an Oesterreich or a Foucault. It speaks to the numerous orphans who steadfastly and successfully refused the moral and material regime of organized charity. It speaks also to the patience of 53StadtAA. Almosenamt. Evangelisches Waisenhaus, 22. Waisenbuch, 1580–1676. Statistics based on information derived from the “Orphan-Books,” as cited in Safley, Charity and Economy, 258–72.

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the authorities who alternately policed and promoted the laboring poor. They understood—as modern scholars do not—that they had a scope for negotiation beyond the bounds of “propriety.” Though unique, Hans and Friderich are not solitary. Only through careful attention to the degree to which each was both distinct and indistinguishable from his peers, can we recapture the significance of their lives. Only by maintaining the tension between—and exploiting the advantages of—narrative and statistical history in a way that balances the lives of individuals with the experience of the population, can we accurately grasp the working of social forces without denying the possibility of human agency. Friderich was a witch, Hans was a thief. The authorities destroyed neither. Rather, they admonished and punished, supported and assisted. They acknowledged both their individuality and their potentiality. In the annals of history, however, the laboring poor suffer a sort of anomie. Treated as a faceless, threatening hindrance to the progress of society or ignored as irrelevant to a history of great men and ideas, they are literally alienated from the collective memory of humankind. Yet, the records of the orphanages of Augsburg suggest that the laboring poor were not a class beyond the margin of society. In many respects, their behavior was surprisingly mainstream. While most demographic histories flounder for lack of extant records, orphanage documents bear witness to lower marital rates, higher age at first marriage, smaller family size, larger birth intervals, and lower child mortality, all of which contradicts current accounts of preindustrial lower classes. Most labor histories point to the lack of persistence and the incidence of makeshifts among the working poor, but the orphans and their families preferred steady work in small-scale trades, evidence of greater stability than hitherto assumed. Economic histories assume that the poor possessed no resources beyond their labor power, but even the poorest orphan usually possessed some property, and many were modestly involved in local land and capital markets. Though social histories argue that poverty became a form of deviance in the early modern period, resulting in the alienation of the poor, Augsburg’s orphans participated in a wide range of associations that tied them to their relatives and neighbors, their peers and betters. Cultural histories tend to treat the poor as a world apart, but inventories of material possessions and reflections on shared values indicate that the poor constituted not a counterculture but rather an integral part of the established culture. Finally, while institutional histories cast the poor as a group that had to be rendered politically docile and economically productive in a rapidly developing world, the orphans and their families readily

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embraced both, albeit on their own terms. All of these findings suggest new ways of understanding—and the necessity of rethinking—the poor. While the laboring poor of early modern Europe were not apart from their world, they were frequently at odds with it. The struggle to survive sometimes called for behaviors that others might perceive as deviant. Friderich and Hans reveal the complexities of this relationship. They were at once individuals who were partly responsible for their fates, and parts of a group who were influenced by climate, market, regime, and religion. Their world was marked not so much by elastic boundaries as by elastic governance that linked institutions in formal and informal ways and that encouraged flexibility and resilience in dealings with the laboring poor.

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Preparing the Pastors: Theological Education and Pastoral Training in Basel Amy Nelson Burnett

he coupling of Protestant doctrine with the pedagogical goals and priorities of the humanist movement led to a major transformation of the educational system throughout Germany and Switzerland during the sixteenth century. Although the ramifications of educational reform extended far beyond the creation of an educated clergy, the expenses entailed by the foundation or reformation of schools, academies, and universities were frequently justified by the need to prepare boys for the service of church and state. Despite the priority placed on creating an educated pastoral corps, progress towards improvement of clerical education was uneven. Nevertheless, studies of the Protestant clergy reveal that by the early seventeenth century a significant proportion had attended a university.1 Concentration on the amount of education, however, tells little about how well these future ministers were prepared for exercising the tasks of pastoral care. After all, a university was not the only place where a future pastor could obtain a

T

1See

the two articles by Luise Schorn-Schütte which compare Catholic and Protestant clergy, “The Christian Clergy in the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire: A Comparative Social Study,” Sixteenth Century Journal 29 (1998): 717–31, and “Priest, Preacher, Pastor: Research on Clerical Office in Early Modern Europe,” Central European History 33 (2000): 1–39. For more detailed studies on a regional level, the two most important works are Luise Schorn-Schütte, Geistlichkeit in der Frühneuzeit: Deren Anteil an der Entfaltung frühmoderner Staatlichkeit und Gesellschaft: Dargestellt am Beispiel des Fürstentums Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, der Landgrafschaft Hessen-Kassel und der Stadt Braunschweig, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte, 62 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996), 159–99; and Bernard Vogler, Le clergé protestant rhénan au siècle de la Réforme (1555– 1619) (Paris: Ophrys, 1976), 46–78. See also Martin Brecht, “Herkunft und Ausbildung der protestantischen Geistlichen des Herzogtums Württemberg im 16. Jahrhundert,” Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte 80 (1969): 163–75; and Bernard Vogler, “Recrutement et carrière des pasteurs strasbourgeois au XVI siècle,” Revue d’histoire et philosophie religieuses 48 (1968): 151–74.

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theological education. Even more importantly, theological education is not synonymous with pastoral training. The former is, of course, an important component of the latter, but preparation for the cure of souls required much more than knowledge of doctrine. In fact, Ian Green has argued that although the early modern clergy were better educated than their medieval counterparts, they were not necessarily better trained.2 His statement exaggerates the disjunction between education and pastoral training, but it highlights an important question: how did the Reformation affect the preparation of parish clergy to exercise the cure of souls? It is hard to generalize about either the educational level or the quality of pastoral training of parish clergy in the late medieval church. Even a cursory look at research on this topic reveals considerable variation over time and between regions.3 The church provided opportunities for parish clergy to study at a university, and by the later fifteenth century a large minority of priests, particularly in southwestern Germany, had at least matriculated at a university. Newly ordained priests could gain experience in the care of souls through a type of apprenticeship with older, more experienced clergy, and in dioceses such as Chur where admission to ecclesiastical benefices was fairly strictly regulated, newly approved clergy were not to exercise the cure of souls.4 Priests with pastoral responsibilities could 2Ian Green, “‘Reformed Pastors’ and Bons Curés: The Changing Role of the Parish Clergy in Early Modern Europe,” in The Ministry: Clerical and Lay, ed. W. J. Sheils and D. Wood (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989), 249–86. 3On clerical education and pastoral training in the late Middle Ages, see Leonard E. Boyle, “Aspects of Clerical Education in Fourteenth-Century England,” repr. in idem, Pastoral Care, Clerical Education and Canon Law, 1200–1400, Variorium reprints, CS 135 (London: Variorum, 1981), 9:19– 32; Erich Meuthen, “Zur europäischen Klerusbildung vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert,” in Mediävis tische Komparatistik, ed. W. Harms et al. (Stuttgart: Hirzel, 1997), 263–94; James H. Overfield, “University Studies and the Clergy in Pre-Reformation Germany,” in Rebirth, Reform and Resilience: Universities in Transition 1300–1700, ed. J. M. Kittelson and P. J. Transue (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 254–92; Friedrich Wilhelm Oediger, Über die Bildung der Geistlichen im späten Mittelalter (Leiden: Brill, 1953); J. van Laarhoven, “La formation des prêtres dans la primière moitié du XVIe siècle: quelques considérations méthodiques,” in Miscellanea Historiae Ecclesiasticae III. Colloque de Cambridge 24–28 Sept. 1968, ed. Derek Baker (Louvain: Publications Universitaires de Louvain, 1970), 151–65; Reinhold Kiermeyr, “On the Education of the Pre-Reformation Clergy,”Church History 53 (1984): 7–16; Oskar Vasella, Untersuchungen über die Bildungsverhältnisse im Bistum Chur, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung des Klerus, Jahrsbericht der historisch-antiquarischen Gesellschaft von Graubünden 62 (Chur, 1932), 91–112. R. Emmett McLaughlin has pointed out that even the church fathers did not view learning as an important prerequisite for the priesthood; idem, “Universities, Scholasticism and the German Reformation,” History of Universities 9 (1990): 1–43. 4Oskar Vasella, “Über das Problem der Klerusbildung im 16. Jahrhundert,” Mitteilungen der Institut für Oesterreichische Geschichtsforschung 58 (1950): 441–456.

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consult the numerous varieties of pastors’ manuals written in the later Middle Ages. The multiple editions of these manuals printed in the later fifteenth century attest to their popularity.5 Nevertheless, decisions to make use of any of these opportunities were generally left to the individual priest. There was no official mechanism for enforcing or overseeing preparation for the cure of souls. At best, preparation for pastoral care in the late medieval church was unsystematic and unsupervised; at worst, it could be haphazard, idiosyncratic, or nonexistent. This situation was to change significantly after the Reformation. Reformers everywhere worked to create institutions to educate, supervise, and give some practical training to future clergy. Green argues, however, that they were unable to overcome several structural and institutional problems: clerical training was often ill planned or poorly funded; the student’s relatively short stay at a university could not overcome educational defects at the elementary level; variations in curriculum and educational emphasis could produce clergy with differing understandings of the church’s tasks, and the education of Protestant clergy was limited to the study of biblical languages and preaching with little or no attention paid to other pastoral responsibilities such as catechization, consoling the bereaved, or maintaining parish registers.6 While Green’s characterization of the shortcomings of pastoral training might apply to the Anglican and Catholic priests described in the studies he cites, it cannot be applied without reservation to all early modern clergy. This paper will describe the system of pastoral training and theological education established in the city-republic of Basel as an example of how much Protestant church leaders could accomplish, given the right circumstances. In the wake of the Reformation, a series of reforms were introduced to Basel’s educational system to make it conform with both humanist and Protestant ideals. The—almost unintentional— result of these reforms was to combine theological education with more practical training in pastoral skills as students moved from the lower levels of the city’s Latin school(s) through first a bachelor’s and eventually a master’s degree and beyond. Looking at all levels of instruction, from elementary through university, will give a complete picture of pastoral training in Basel in the wake of the Reformation. An analysis of the Basel model reveals much about what was considered important for a Protestant pastor to know and when he was to learn it. The proper provision of pastoral care was uppermost in the minds of reformers and magistrates alike in areas that adopted Protestantism. The Basel 5The

best overview of late medieval pastoral manuals is Peter A. Dykema, “Conflicting Expectations: Parish Priests in Late Medieval Germany” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Arizona, 1998), 118–224. I thank Dr. Dykema for making a copy of his dissertation available to me. 6Green, “‘Reformed Pastors,’” 264–68.

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Reformation Ordinance of 1529 specified the duties of parish pastors and their assistants. First and foremost, of course, was the pastor’s duty “to proclaim faithfully only the holy divine word, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, good news for the faithful, pure, clear and unadulterated, for God’s honor and the implanting of brotherly love.” Together the pastors and deacons were responsible for leading the morning worship services, administering the sacraments (baptism and the Lord’s Supper), blessing marriages, visiting and consoling the sick, admonishing the erring, instructing the young in “the fear of God and Christian discipline,” and remembering in their sermons those who had just died.7 Protestant rejection of the sacramental nature of most of these acts meant that the emphasis would be on their pastoral rather than their liturgical function. Having laid out the duties of a Protestant pastor, the leaders of Basel’s church faced the challenge of ensuring that these duties were properly carried out. In this, they faced a twofold challenge. First, they had to provide remedial theological instruction for their colleagues who held positions in the parish churches, both urban and rural. Even where the parish clergy were relatively well educated in general and were committed to the evangelical cause, as was the case in Basel, it was important that these pastors be trained in the new approach to biblical exegesis so that they could preach the “pure, clear and unadulterated” word of God.8 It was also necessary to “re-educate” the host of pensioned-off Catholic clergy still in the city.9 More important for the future, however, was the training of the next generation of pastors. The reformers were not initially concerned about providing training in the cure of souls, seeming to believe that a sound knowledge of evangelical doctrine would equip their students to carry out this aspect of their duties in a satisfactory fashion. Over time, however, it became clear that future pastors would have to be taught some of the skills that would eventually be required of them once placed in a parish. 7Emil

Dürr and Paul Roth, eds., Aktensammlung zur Geschichte der Basler Reformation in den Jahren 1519 bis Anfang 1534 (Basel: Historische und antiquarische Gesellschaft, 1921–50 (hereafter ABR), 3: 384, 389–90, no. 473. 8Basel was more fortunate than many other newly reformed areas in that almost all of the city clergy and roughly half of the rural pastors already identified themselves as evangelical before the official adoption of the Reformation in 1529. In cities or territories with large rural areas, many of the parish pastors were former Catholic priests who had embraced evangelical doctrine with varying degrees of enthusiasm (or lack thereof). See Susan Karant-Nunn, Luther’s Pastors: The Reformation in the Ernestine Countryside, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, 69/8 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1980), on the backgrounds of the first generation of Lutheran clergy in Ernestine Saxony. 9The Reformation Ordinance of 1529 required that all priests remaining in Basel attend the daily sermons in the cathedral as well as the public lectures on the Bible, ABR 3:390–91 (no. 473).

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Fortunately for Basel’s reformers, the existence of a university in the city made it relatively easy to resolve the initial problem of teaching evangelical doctrine to the clergy. In his description of the new Reformed academies created in Switzerland following the model of Zurich, Ulrich Im Hof has pointed out that the University of Basel was unique because it remained within the older academic tradition.10 Basel’s historical roots as a medieval university and its later approximation to universities in Germany should not obscure the influence of Zurich, however, particularly with regard to theological education during the 1530s.That influence consisted of two things: the integration of theological education within a system that included both Latin school or gymnasium and university instruction, and the attitude that an academic degree was not necessary or even desirable for either students or their professors. The first steps towards educating the clergy (and the laity as well) in evangelical doctrine were made in the spring of 1523, when the Basel Senate appointed Johann Oecolampadius and Konrad Pellikan as the university’s two theology professors.11 From his first lectures on the prophet Isaiah, Oecolampadius commented on the original Hebrew, the Greek Septuagint, and the Latin translation of each day’s text. He followed his academic presentation with a sermon on the text in German for the laity who also came to hear him.12 This method of theological instruction would be imitated in Zurich with the establishment of the Prophezei in 1525.13 Pellikan moved to Zurich in 1526, and the lectures were continued by Oecolampadius alone. The turmoil caused by the Reformation led to a drastic drop in matriculations, however, and in June of 1529 the Senate decided to close the university.14 This did not mean the end of the public lectures in theology, however. 10Ulrich Im Hof, “Die Entstehung der reformierten Hohen Schule. Zürich (1528)—Bern (1528)—Lausanne (1537)—Genf (1559),” in Beiträge zu Problemen deutscher Universitätsgründungen der frühen Neuzeit, ed. Peter Baumgart and Notker Hammerstein, Wolfenbütteler Forschungen 4 (Nendeln: KTO Press, 1978), 243–62. 11Ernst Staehelin, “Die Entstehung der evangelisch-theologischen Fakultät in Basel,” in Festschrift für Hans von Schubert zu seinem 70. Geburtstag, ed. Otto Scheel (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1929), 137– 54; Eberhard Vischer, “Die Lehrstühle und der Unterricht an der theologischen Fakultät Basels seit der Reformation,” in Festschrift zur Feier des 450-jährigen Bestehens der Universität Basel, ed. Rektor und Regenz der Universität Basel (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1910), 113–242. 12Ernst Staehelin, ed., Briefe und Akten zum Leben Oekolampads, zum vierhundertjährigen Jubiläum der Basler Reformation, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 10, 19 (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1927–34) (hereafter B&A), 1:219–20, no. 151. 13Fritz Büsser, “Reformierte Erziehung in Theorie und Praxis,” in idem, Wurzeln der Reformation in Zürich. Zum 500. Geburtstag des Reformators Huldrych Zwingli (Leiden: Brill, 1985), 199–216. 14Rudolf Thommen, Geschichte der Universität Basel, 1532–1632 (Basel: Detloff, 1889), 6–8.

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The Reformation Ordinance issued a few months earlier had called for the establishment of daily lectures on the Bible, and these continued even after the university’s closing. Oecolampadius was soon joined by Paul Phrygio, who also taught theology, Simon Grynaeus, who received a chair in Greek, and Sebastian Münster, who taught Hebrew. In 1531 the procedure for the lectures was modified so that the lectures would alternate between Old and New Testaments on a weekly basis.15 Although the four professors held university appointments, their responsibilities and their goals differed fundamentally from the older model of the university’s theology faculty. At its most general level the study of theology was now open even to the laity, and it was praxis-oriented, as reflected in the fact that the Latin lectures were required to end with a German “summary with short, comforting admonition.”16 More particularly, though, it was oriented towards those who had learned at least some Greek and Hebrew and who shared the humanists’ belief in the superiority of studying the texts in their original languages. The model for theological education that grew out of the Zwinglian Reformation was almost entirely unlike that of the late medieval university system, and in Basel it was the former, not the latter, that dominated during the 1520s and 1530s. With the reestablishment of the university of Basel in 1532, however, this new approach to theology instruction was gradually eroded, as is reflected in the conflict that broke out over a proposed revision of the university’s statutes at the end of the decade. In July of 1539, the Senate issued several revisions to the university statutes. Two new provisions required that all of the city’s pastors matriculate in the theology faculty and specified that all those holding chairs at the university must either have the appropriate academic degree or obtain it without delay.17 Both Oswald Myconius, the leader of the city’s church, and Simon Grynaeus, the renowned humanist scholar who taught both Greek and New Testament, were strenuously opposed to these two provisions.18 The conflict over the new requirements was the result of a complex interweaving of personality conflicts with larger issues, especially the question of who

15The lectures themselves proceeded much as they did in the Zurich

Prophezei: Münster opened with a discussion of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament passage, Oecolampadius followed with a Latin exegesis of the text, and Phrygio closed with the German summary. On the New Testament weeks Grynaeus replaced Münster with an explanation of the Greek text. Oecolampadius to Martin Bucer, 5 August 1531, Staehelin, B&A 2: 638–39, no. 904. 16Cited in Staehelin, “Enstehung,” 146–47. 17See Thommen, Geschichte, 1–31; Theophil Burckhardt-Biedermann, “Die Erneuerung der Universität zu Basel in den Jahren 1529–1539,” Beiträge zur vaterländischen Geschichte 14 (1896): 401–87. 18The 1539 statutes are printed in Thommen, Geschichte, 325–32; see §6 and §15.

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Amy Nelson Burnett had the ultimate authority to judge doctrine. 19 While Myconius and Grynaeus argued that only the church through its ministers could exercise this authority, the supporters of the new statutes believed that this right properly belonged to the theology faculty, as was the practice of the medieval university.20 By adopting the revised statutes, the Basel Senate clearly endorsed the latter view and, since the university was a city institution subject to the Senate, it underlined its own position as the ultimate authority over the church.21 Institutionally, the decision made by the Basel Senate that all professors must have the appropriate degree meant the victory of the older medieval view that an academic degree guaranteed one’s academic and ecclesiastical credentials. Although Basel’s theology faculty was modeled after Zurich’s Prophezei during its first decade, from 1539 on it would move closer to the older university model. Despite this apparent rejection of the Zurich model of theological education, in more subtle ways the Basel church continued to be influenced by the practices of its evangelical allies in Switzerland and South Germany, as the events of the next decade would show. The same impulses that had led to the revised university statutes in 1539 also led to the reorganization of the city’s Latin schools and the coordination of education from the elementary level through the creation of a 19Myconius’ and Grynaeus’s bitter but ultimately unsuccessful campaign against these new requirements is a standard feature of all accounts of the history of Basel’s university as well as in the biographies of both men; see Thommen, Geschichte, 22–31; Vischer, Lehrstuhle, 14–21; BurckhardtBiedermann, Erneuerung, 457–478; Willem van t’ Spijker, “Bucer en de twist over het doctoraat in Basel (plm. 1535),” Theologie Reformata 26 (1983): 98–112; and Karl Hagenbach, Johann Oekolampad und Oswald Myconius, die Reformatoren Basels. Leben und ausgewählte Schriften, Leben und ausgewählte Schriften der Väter und Begründer der reformirten Kirche 2 (Elberfeld: Friderichs, 1859), 341–46. 20On Myconius’s concern about the oath sworn before the theology faculty, see his letter to Bullinger, 19 January1539, Heinrich Bullinger, Briefwechsel, ed. Hans Ulrich Bächtold and Rainer Henrich (Zurich: Theologischer Verlag, 1973– ), 9:32–34, no. 1215 (hereafter HBBW); the oath required by newly created doctors of theology is in Die Statuten der theologischen Fakultät der Universität Basel, ed. Carl Christoph Bernoulli (Basel: Universitäts Buchdruckerei, 1910), 31–32. Grynaeus explained his position both to the Zurich pastors (30 November 1539, HBBW 9:253–56, no. 1332)), and to Bullinger (1 January 1540; Zurich Staatsarchiv (hereafter ZStA) E II 342, p. 97). 21It is not coincidental that at approximately the same time, the Basel Senate reorganized the institutional structure of the city’s church, changing the emphasis of the synods from an occasion where the clergy could present their grievances to the magistrate into an opportunity for both secular and ecclesiastical authorities to examine the teaching and conduct of the pastors. One of the consequences of both changes was the effective end of the synod as a significant part of Basel’s church. After the issuance of the synodal ordinance in November 1539, the practice of holding yearly synods came to an end. There are records of only four synods held over the next fifteen years, in Jan. 1540, June 1542, May 1545, and June 1550; see Amy Nelson Burnett, “Controlling the Clergy: The Oversight of Basel’s Rural Pastors in the Sixteenth Century,” Zwingliana 25 (1998): 129–42.

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Pedagogium that served as an intermediate stage between Latin school and university.22 In August 1540, the Basel Senate adopted a new school ordinance, drafted by the jurist Bonifacius Amerbach. According to this ordinance, the city’s schools would be divided into four classes. The first class, which would include all of the city’s German schools, would teach reading and writing. The three Latin schools would begin with the second class, where boys would not only begin the intensive study of that language but would also be exposed to the elements of Greek. By the time students reached the fourth class, called the Pedagogium, all instruction was to be in Latin. In order to be admitted to this top level, all students had to pass an examination. Meanwhile, the arts faculty of the university issued a new statute dividing its course of study into two halves, each to last about eighteen months. The first, leading to the bachelor’s degree, required the study of rhetoric and dialectic, and the second, leading to the master’s degree, added mathematics and natural sciences. Four years later, the arts faculty revised their statutes, now dividing the “academy” into three levels: the first class or Pedagogium, the second class leading to the B.A., and the third class leading to the M.A.23 Although there were some minor modifications, this remained the basic structure of Basel’s Latin school and university until 1589. In that year, the two Latin schools in the main part of the city were consolidated. The new Gymnasium, as it was now called, was divided into six classes. The top or first class was in fact the former Pedagogium, which was formally separated from the university and reintegrated into the Latin school. The new division between gymnasium and university established a clearer distinction between Latin and Greek grammar and literature as it was taught in the gymnasium and the greater concentration on the philosophical and scientific works taught at the university level.24 It is clear that Basel’s reorganized educational system, like those already introduced in Bern, Lausanne, and Strasbourg, was modeled after Zurich.25 The resemblance between the schools becomes even more apparent when we look 22See Theophil Burckhardt-Biedermann, Geschichte des Gymnasiums zu Basel; zur dritten Säcularfeier im Auftrag der Schulbehorde (Basel: E. Birkhaeuser, 1889), 25–34. 23See the Studienordnung reprinted in Thommen, Geschichte, 339–42. 24See Burckhardt-Biedermann, Geschichte des Gymnasiums, 57–65; Thommen, Geschichte, 42– 44, 263–65. A small Latin school remained attached to the church of St. Theodor in Kleinbasel (on the right bank of the Rhine), but the Münster school (or “Schul uff Burg,” as it was called) and the school from St. Peter’s parish were now combined. 25In his memo to the Deputaten concerning the structure of the Münster school from 1541, Thomas Platter explicitly cited the example of the schools in Zurich, Bern, and Strasbourg; reprinted in Burckhardt-Biedermann, Geschichte des Gymnasiums, 276–79.

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more specifically at the religious component of the boys’ education, which was quite extensive. The important place of religious education in the Latin schools can be seen as a specific form of the general Protestant emphasis on the priesthood of all believers: those who would assume leadership positions in society must have a thorough knowledge of basic religious doctrine. But it was also an important component of the education of future clergy, since almost all of Basel’s pastors began as students in the city’s Latin schools. 26 An examination of the schools’ curriculum sheds light on the course of their religious training from boyhood until they entered the university. According to the curriculum drawn up by Amerbach in 1540, the precepts of evangelical religion were to be an integral part of every boy’s education. As students of the second class, they studied sentences from the Gospels along with Donatus’s Latin grammar, Aesop’s fables, and Erasmus’s colloquies. In the third class they progressed to the (Latin) catechism taught on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, a practice that continued through the fourth class or Pedagogium.27 Although Amerbach did not specify this, it is likely that the boys were also required to attend the Tuesday morning sermons given in the cathedral, as well as the three sermons on Sundays.28 Thomas Platter was even more specific about the religious component of education in the curriculum he drew up in 1546, two years after assuming the position as head of the cathedral’s Latin school. Students in the first class were taught their prayers on Saturdays, although, in Platter’s words, the students “pray every day, morning and evening, in all classes.” In the second class, students began the morning with a reading from Castellio’s “Sacred Dialogues” during the week and the catechism on Saturdays. In addition to the Saturday catechism, the third class progressed to morning readings from the New Testament, a practice that continued in the fourth class, “although with somewhat more exegesis than in the third class.” Students in the fourth class also learned “one or two Psalms” during 26Anton

Schindling also emphasizes that the laity and future pastors were to receive the same basic education following Christian-humanist principles, “Schulen und Universitäten im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert. Zehn Thesen zu Bildungsexpansion, Laienbildung und Konfessionalisierung nach der Reformation,” in Ecclesia militans. Studien zur Konzilien- und Reformationsgeschichte: Remigius Bäumer zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet, ed. Walter Brandmüller, Herbert Immenkötter, and Erwin Iserloh (Paderborn: Schoningh, 1988), 561–70. 27Amerbach’s curriculum is reprinted in Burckhardt-Biedermann, Geschichte des Gymnasiums, 272–75. 28The first mention of this requirement that I have found dates from 1589 (Basel Staatsarchiv) (hereafter BStA), Kirchen Archiv A3, no. 1, Ludi Literarij, but Burckhardt-Biedermann, Geschichte des Gymnasiums, 68–69. says this requirement was in place while Platter assumed responsibility for the cathedral school.

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their Friday afternoon music class, and their Saturday catechism instruction now included quarterly examinations. They evidently also studied the Gospels, for Platter specified that “when an Evangelist has come to an end, they should be read something from the Catechism, so that any new students will also be introduced to our holy religion from the ground up.”29 Even university students were not excused from learning the catechism. Amerbach’s curriculum from 1540 required that university students attend catechism instruction on Saturdays; those preparing for the pastorate were also to attend the theology lectures while completing the course work for their master’s degree.30 This was by no means a new requirement for university students. While a student at Basel in 1538, Rudolf Gualther reported to Heinrich Bullinger that Simon Grynaeus was teaching both the catechism and Latin oratory.31 Obviously the catechism played a key role in the religious training of those boys intended for positions of leadership in both state and church. One of the most important tasks of the pastors, especially those in Basel’s rural territory, was to teach the catechism to their villages’ children.32 Regular catechetical instruction in the Latin schools thus served two important purposes in the training of future pastors. First, it ensured that they, like their comrades who would go on to serve the state in other capacities, were firmly grounded in the doctrines endorsed by the city.33 The educated laity and the clergy were all thoroughly indoctrinated with the same fundamental religious knowledge. Equally important, however, was the fact that Basel’s future pastors would take what they had learned as boys and pass it on to their parishioners. Their training in both the contents and the methods of catechetical instruction came while they were themselves students at the Latin school, and not as a formal element of their theological education at the university. The teaching of the catechism created a basic level of religious uniformity throughout city and territory. It was also an important tool of religious indoctrination. By the 1580s the original text was considered to be doctrinally insufficient, 29Platter’s lesson plan in Burckhardt-Biedermann, Geschichte des Gymnasiums, 280–83. 30Burckhardt-Biedermann, Geschichte des Gymnasiums, 274–75; also in Thommen, Geschichte, where it is mistakenly attributed to Hieronymus Artolph, 339–40. 31Gualther to Bullinger, 12 September 1538, 9:217–19; HBBW no. 1174. My thanks to Reiner Henrich of the Bullinger Briefwechsel edition for bringing this passage to my attention. 32The Reformation Ordinance of 1529 required each pastor to examine the children of his parish on their knowledge of the catechism four times a year. Over the next several decades, the clergy agitated for more frequent catechism instruction, and by the end of the century, monthly catechism instruction was an established practice in the rural villages. See Amy Nelson Burnett, “Basel’s Rural Pastors as Mediators of Confessional and Social Discipline,” Central European History 33 (2000): 67–85. 33It is significant in this respect that all students learned the catechism rather than the Basel Confession, the city’s official statement of faith adopted in 1534.

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and one of the consequences of the gradual adoption of Reformed Orthodoxy in Basel was the modification of the catechism in order to bring it more into accordance with Reformed doctrine.34 The growing influence of Reformed Orthodoxy can be illustrated by a handwritten copy of the Basel catechism made by Thomas Platter the younger in 1587 when he was thirteen years old; it is preserved in Basel’s university library.35 Platter’s catechism is noteworthy because it includes fairly lengthy sections discussing the proper Reformed interpretation of the Lord’s Supper, Christ’s two natures and his session at the right hand of the Father (shibboleths for Lutheran and Reformed theologians), as well as other fairly technical theological issues. None of these doctrines are mentioned in the text of the catechism itself; they must therefore be understood as “explications” being taught to the boys in the upper classes. Curricular changes also reflect the growing influence of Reformed Orthodoxy in Basel. The class schedule adopted for the new Gymnasium in 1589 reflected the concern that, at every step of their religious education, the boys be taught the proper interpretation of both Scripture and catechism. Students in the lowest class recited the Lord’s Prayer, Creed, and Ten Commandments at the opening and close of each morning and afternoon session, and they learned the sections dealing with baptism and the Lord’s Supper on alternate weeks. Their memorization of the catechism continued into the third class, where “the more obscure parts” were explained to them. In the fourth class they practiced translating the German catechism into Latin. By the fifth class they had learned enough Greek to read from the New Testament—the Gospels of Luke and John, Acts, Romans, and the pastoral epistles were recommended. During the first hour of class, the week’s Scripture passage was studied, its vocabulary and syntax analyzed, its interpretation explained, and the passage itself memorized. On Saturday the catechism was reviewed and its statements “supported and confirmed from Scripture.” In the sixth class the catechism was explained in yet more theological detail “so that they may retain and spiritually understand, as it were, a brief and perspicuous curriculum of theological commonplaces.”36 Boys in the upper two classes of the gymnasium were also expected to attend and analyze four sermons each week. On Tuesday mornings they attended the sermon in the cathedral and were required to repeat its contents afterwards, in 34The catechism attributed to Oecolampadius followed the Lutheran and Catholic, rather than the Reformed numbering of the Ten Commandments; Burnett, “Basel’s Rural Pastors.” 35Basel Uniersitätsbiliothek (hereafter BUB), MsKiAr 101. 36Schedule of classes in BStA Kirchen Archiv A3, no. 1 (Ludi Literarij); summarized in Burckhardt-Biedermann, Geschichte des Gymnasiums, 66–67; supplemented by the printed “Distributio Lectionum classis quinctae in certos dies atque Horas,” BStA Kirchen Archiv A3, no. 3.

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Latin. The same type of repetition was required for each of the three Sunday sermons they were required to attend. The standards for students in the top class were even more rigorous: after each sermon, they were to repeat the contents in Latin and analyze the oratorical style: “what type of exordium the minister of the word used, what had been proposed and how the subject had been divided into parts, and how had he confirmed the proposition with his arguments and handled each individual part, and many similar things that concern prudent invention and artful disposition.”37 The practice of analyzing sermons with regard to both theological content and rhetorical form was not just another pedagogical exercise but had obvious practical implications as well. For those who remained laymen, it trained them to listen carefully to what was spoken from the pulpit and drilled into them the elements of a good sermon. For those who entered the ministry, it was a very useful introduction to the art of preaching, teaching them the things they would need to include in their own sermons. It is clear that by the end of the sixteenth century, students at the city’s gymnasium were receiving not just a general religious education but were expected to master some fairly complicated theological concepts as well. Those who would remain laymen and enter into professional service to the city had developed high expectations concerning the preaching and teaching ability of the clergy, while those who would enter the ministry had a far more developed fund of doctrinal knowledge and significant exposure to oratorical technique than their counterparts in the first decades after the Reformation. Graduates of the gymnasium would have been much better prepared for the pastoral—and especially the preaching—ministry of the church than were their late medieval predecessors. The education of a pastor did not end here, however. A university education was an important component of pastoral training from the beginning of the Reformation, and it became increasingly significant over the course of the sixteenth century. Fundamental to the issue of pastoral training was the problem of financial support for students preparing for the pastorate. Like other newly reformed cities, the Basel Senate created a system of civic stipends for students who would become the next generation of Protestant pastors. It took roughly a generation for the Alumneum, as the system of civic stipends was called, to develop a stable institutional structure, but by midcentury it had assumed the outlines that it would retain for the next few centuries.38 The regulations governing the education of stipendiates illustrate the education 37“Distributio

Lectionum classis quinctae in certos dies atque Horas,” BStA Kirchen Archiv A3,

no. 3. 38Statutes for the Alumneum in BStA Universitäts Archiv L4, 29r–32r; those for the Upper college in BUB Mscr. A N II 12 and for the Lower College in BUB A N II 17.

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of future pastors at the university, since by the last third of the sixteenth century about half of the pastors serving Basel’s church had themselves been stipendiates.39 Stipendiates were required to live in one of the university’s two colleges, where they would be under the eye of the provost, usually a recent M.A. recipient who also lived in the college and was responsible for its day-to-day operations. Their course of study was directed by the college’s preceptor, who held one of the chairs in the arts faculty. College residents were subject to strict standards of dress and conduct, and they were required to attend the Tuesday and Sunday sermons, just as they had while students at the Latin school. In addition, they were to attend and, when sufficiently advanced, participate in the disputations and declamations held in alternation every Saturday. Most importantly for their future training as pastors, civic stipendiates were obligated to attend the daily lectures in theology. This requirement reflected the significant change in status that the theology faculty had undergone when it was reorganized in imitation of the Zurich Prophezei: it was no longer one of the higher faculties whose students had already obtained an arts degree but now functioned parallel to the arts faculty as an added discipline to be studied, along with the lectures in rhetoric, oratory, and the Aristotelian corpus required for all arts students.40 The statutes of 1539 requiring that all professors obtain the appropriate degree had done nothing to change either the structure or the purpose of the theological lectures themselves. Nevertheless, over the next several decades, the theology faculty gradually reassumed its role as a place to train not just pastors but also theologians. This was a consequence of the 1539 statutes: the university needed to prepare theologians to succeed the current chair holders. Thus over the next few decades a very small number of students who had completed their master’s degrees in arts matriculated in the theology faculty with the goal of obtaining a doctorate.41 39This

figure is based on my comparison of the names of stipendiates recorded in the Liber Stipendiatorum, BStA Universitäts Archiv L4, and the Catalogus Stipendiorum, BStA Universitäts Archiv L5, with the Basel pastors listed in Karl Gauss, Basilea Reformata. Die Gemeinden der Kirche Basel Stadt und Land und Ihre Pfarrer seit der Reformation bis zur Gegenwart (Basel: Historische und antiquarische Gesellschaft, 1930). 40Thomas Kaufmann also emphasizes this important transformation of the theology faculty’s status, Universität und lutherische Konfessionalisierung: die Rostocker Theologieprofessoren und ihr Beitrag zur theologischen Bildung und kirchlichen Gestaltung im Herzogtum Mecklenburg zwischen 1550 und 1675, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 66 (Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlaghaus, 1997), 332–333. 41Thirteen students matriculated in the theology faculty between 1542 and 1563. Only three of them received their doctorates in theology: one in 1552, one in 1569, and the third in 1584; see the Matriculation Book of the Theology Faculty, BUB Mscr. A N II 6, p. 44r.

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The decisive stage in the gradual return of the theology faculty to its position as a “higher faculty” came in the last third of the sixteenth century. The most important development during this period was an increase in the level of funding for students intending to enter the ministry. In the wake of a serious outbreak of the plague in 1564, the university received several endowments specifically established to support theology students. Like the civic stipends, these university stipends were granted to arts students who were also required to attend theology lectures. One important result of these endowments was to double the number of stipends available for future pastors. At the same time, the number of positions available in the Basel church actually declined somewhat. In 1585 several villages that had been subject to the city were restored to the secular jurisdiction of the bishop of Basel. Over the next several years, the Protestant pastors of these villages were expelled and Catholic worship was restored. Further complicating the employment situation for Basel-trained pastors was the establishment of Lutheran Orthodoxy in the margraviate of Baden, across the Rhine from Basel. For two decades after the introduction of the Reformation in Baden in midcentury, Basel students had served parishes in Baden, but after 1580 Baden required all of its pastors to accept the Book of Concord. Thus another significant source of employment was closed for Basel-trained clergy. Taken together, these developments had significant consequences for the professionalization of Basel’s pastoral corps by both increasing the supply of and decreasing the demand for clergy who had studied at Basel’s university. Through the 1560s and 1570s, the students who received civic stipends were placed in parish positions, either in Basel itself or in its rural territory, as these became vacant. Turnover in parish positions was still relatively high, particularly in the wake of the 1564 plague that claimed the lives of several pastors. Although almost all of the pastors appointed to parish positions during these decades had matriculated in the university, many had not received even a bachelor’s degree because their pastoral services had been needed before they completed the requirements for a degree. As should now be clear, this does not mean that they were completely unprepared for their pastoral duties. They had received a good deal of training in both theology and oratory while still students at the Latin school, and this was supplemented by what they had gleaned from attendance at the theology lectures as university students. By the 1580s and 1590s, though, the increased number of stipends and the decreased number of parish positions had the unanticipated effect of lengthening the time that students could continue their university studies. Supported by the new stipends, students could continue their theological education while waiting

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for a pastoral post to open up somewhere in Basel’s territory. One result of this was the virtual requirement that all pastors appointed to a position after 1585 had received their master’s degree.42 In addition, a growing number of pastoral candidates formally matriculated in the theology faculty to continue their theological training once they had received their M.A. Only thirteen future pastors matriculated in the theology faculty over the sixty years after the university reopened in 1532 (out of the 174 men appointed to parish positions during this time), but almost two thirds of the fifty-eight men who became pastors between 1592 and 1629 did so.43 During the same period the Basel church took a decisive step in the direction of Reformed Orthodoxy. Johann Jakob Grynaeus had been called to Basel as one of the two theology professors in 1575. In 1584 he was loaned to the University of Heidelberg, but he returned to Basel in early 1586 to resume his position as professor and to take up the new burden of leading Basel’s church. One of Grynaeus’s concerns over the next decade was to root out any lingering traces of Lutheran sympathies that had been allowed to take root under Simon Sulzer, his predecessor as Antistes. Grynaeus’s impact on theological education is reflected in the topics of the 180 published theological disputations over which he presided at the University of Basel. They are divided almost equally between the period before Grynaeus left for Heidelberg in 1584 (eighty-eight disputations) and the decade after his return to Basel, from 1586 through 1596 (ninety-two disputations), when he passed on the responsibility of presiding over the disputations to his colleague on the theology faculty, Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf.44 Not quite half of these disputations were held by students who received stipends from Basel, whether Baslers themselves or foreigners; a quarter of the total eventually became Basel pastors. In order to analyze the contents of these 180 disputations, they have been divided into four categories: Protestant doctrine, for those with a fairly straightforward and positive presentation of those beliefs held by both Lutherans and 42Only six pastors appointed to their first post after 1585 do not have official records of an M.A. Of these, three received stipends for several years after receiving their B.A.’s, and I suspect they actually did receive their master’s degrees. The other three were exceptional cases: one was a Basler who had been a pastor in Thurgau for many years, one held a temporary post in one of the villages being reCatholicized by the Basel bishop, and the third held a post that combined the duties of schoolmaster and pastor; he had been a teacher in another village before being promoted to the combined position. 43Between 1592-1629, 58 pastors were appointed to parish positions. Thirty-six of these had matriculated in theology. 44These disputations are preserved in bound volumes in the BUB; call numbers KiAr H III 1–5, KiAr H III 14, KiAr H III 33–35; F P IX 17–19, and VB M 63–67.

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Reformed such as justification by faith alone; Reformed doctrine, for the positive presentation of specifically Reformed tenets such as double predestination; practical/exegetical, for those disputations that either dealt with pastoral issues such as comfort in time of plague or that examined a scriptural text with emphasis on linguistic and expository skills rather than as proof-texts for doctrine; and finally, polemical, for those disputations that attacked or criticized theological opponents. Almost all of the disputations in this latter category were aimed at Catholics rather than at Lutherans, Anabaptists, or other groups. Of course these categories are very rough and there is some overlap, but they do provide a general schema for understanding the purpose of each disputation. During Grynaeus’s first period in Basel (1576–84), almost two thirds of the published disputations dealt with general Protestant belief (see table). Another 15 percent were devoted to specifically Reformed doctrine, and about the same number (16 percent) were polemical. Pastoral and exegetical disputations lagged far behind the others; only four of the eighty-eight disputations fell into this category. Three of these were exegetical and only one could be loosely classified as pastoral. Interestingly enough, this last disputation describes both the character qualities of a theology student and the elements of a proper theological education: attendance at theology lectures and at the exercitia that were in essence review sessions, participation in disputations, practice in giving sermons, and an oral profession of faith. Basel Disputations, 1576–1610 Published Disputations

Grynaeus, 1576–84

Grynaeus, 1586–96

Polanus, 1590–1610

Number Percentage Number Percentage Number Percentage

Doctrinal Protestant

57

64.8

31

33.7

29

28.7

Doctrinal Reformed

13

14.8

27

29.3

36

35.6

Practical/ Exegetical

4

4.5

15

16.3

11

10.9

Polemical

14

TOTAL

88

15.9 100

19 92

20.7 100

25 101

24.8 100

After Grynaeus’s return to Basel in 1586, the disputations take on a much more confessional nature. The number of general Protestant disputations fell to one third of the total, only slightly outweighing the number of disputations with Reformed themes, which had now doubled to almost 30 percent of the total. The percentage of polemical disputations rose only slightly, but the number of dispu-

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tations with a more practical exegetical or pastoral focus increased to about 16 percent of the total. It is possible that as chief pastor of the city, Grynaeus was now more aware of the need to expose students to these topics than he had been when he was only a theology professor. The same trend towards greater systemization of doctrine is evident in the disputations presided over by Grynaeus’s colleague, Amandus Polanus von Polansdorf, between 1590 and 1610. Of the 101 published disputations by Polanus, those concerned with specifically Reformed doctrine outnumber the generally Protestant ones (thirty-six Reformed as opposed to twenty-nine general Protestant). The number of polemical disputations (which can be seen as the negative complement to the more positive presentation of Reformed doctrine) rose to twenty-five. Last but not least, Polanus supervised eleven exegetical disputations and none concerned with pastoral issues—perhaps a corollary of the fact that Polanus, unlike Grynaeus, did not hold a pastoral post in the Basel church. One consequence of the prolonged period of study was a return to the older view of theology as one of the higher faculties. Since pastoral candidates were still required to attend theology lectures from the time of their matriculation in the arts faculty, the theology faculty did not lose its parallel status to the arts.45 Nevertheless, because an increasing number of those who attended the lectures had already completed the arts course, it was inevitable that the older view of theology’s place in the university would reassert itself. At any rate, by the end of the sixteenth century pastoral candidates began the study of theology at the same time that they were fulfilling the requirements for their arts degree, but they also continued with a more exclusive focus on theology after receiving their M.A. and while awaiting appointment to a parish post. Over the course of the sixteenth century the leaders of Basel’s church and school strove to integrate a high level of doctrinal knowledge with the more practical skills required of a parish pastor, especially the ability to preach. Humanist emphasis on the mastery of rhetoric provided a bridge between the theoretical and the practical aspects of pastoral training. Pastors were not only to be familiar with Scripture’s contents, but they were to present it to their audience in a way that was both instructive and persuasive. Likewise their own experiences of catechetical instruction provided future pastors with a model they could follow in 45This is in contrast to Zurich, where by the early seventeenth century students at the Lektorium were discouraged from studying theology until they had completed the arts course. This could be due to the fact that instruction at the Zurich Academy paralleled more closely the Pedagogium in Basel rather than the University. Cf. Karin Maag, “What Makes a Good Pastor? Training and Examination Procedures in Reformed Zurich, 1560–1620,” paper presented at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference, Toronto, Ontario, October 1998. My thanks to Dr. Maag for making this paper available to me.

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their own parishes. The combination of religious education and rhetorical training was most intense in the upper levels of the gymnasium and during the first stage of university study leading to the bachelor’s degree. As a result of the double emphasis on preaching and teaching, Protestant pastors clearly had an edge over their late medieval counterparts in the aspect of pastoral care considered most important by the first generation of reformers. In comparison to the emphasis on doctrinal knowledge, preaching and catechesis, other practical aspects of pastoral care received little attention. They were not neglected completely, as attested by the disputations on practical topics, but for the most part future pastors had to draw upon other resources in the exercise of duties such as visiting the sick and conducting worship. Even here the young pastor was not left without guidance, however, since the duties of the parish pastor were defined more precisely in a series of church ordinances issued over the course of the sixteenth century. In addition the Basler Agendbuch distributed to every parish church set the liturgical framework for the administration of the sacraments, the conduct of worship services, marriages, and funerals, and the visitation of the sick and dying.46 The balance between theory and practice that characterized the education of students in the first stage of university study was tipped in favor of theology by the increasing length of time that future clergy spent at the university. Moreover, with the growing emphasis on Reformed orthodoxy, the young men who entered the ministry at the end of the century would have been trained to approach theology in a more systematic and perhaps dogmatic way than had their predecessors of a few decades before. Both the publication of student disputations and the evolution of the disputations’ contents indicate a new concern with being able to present and defend “correct” doctrine as well as to refute Catholic opponents.47It could be argued that their prolonged theological training tended to distance these young men from the more general religious and pastoral training they had 46In

addition to the Reformation Ordinance of 1529 (ABR 3: 383–409), the Basel Senate issued the Acta Liechstalensia in 1540 (BStA Kirchen Archiv HH2, no. 6e, fols. 203–10) and a Kirchendienerordnung in 1562 (BStA Kirchen Archiv HH2, no. 6b, fols. 173–81) which was significantly revised in 1582 (BStA Kirchen Akten F6, no. 9) and again in 1597 (BStA Kirchen Akten B1). Basel’s first Protestant liturgy was printed in 1525; for a description see Ernst Staehelin, Das theologische Lebenswerk Johannes Oekolampads, Quellen und Forschungen zur Reformationsgeschichte 21 (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1939), 429–47. It was revised and expanded so that by 1537 it included liturgies for weddings, baptisms, the Lord’s Supper and visitation of the sick with communion, as well as the Basel Catechism. It was reprinted frequently in the latter half of the sixteenth century; cf. B&A 2: 780 n. 5. 47I have found only two disputations published before Grynaeus’s appointment as theology professor, although disputations were clearly a standard part of the future pastor’s training, as indicated by the college statutes.

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received before entering the university, thus perhaps taking the edge off of the skills they had learned in boyhood. The end result of such training would be to produce men who were theologians first and pastors second and to remove them further from the everyday concerns of the peasants or townspeople who would eventually be their parishioners. This development could at least potentially be forestalled by another more general consequence of the extended time of theological study: it provided a greater opportunity for the church’s leaders to mold the outlooks and attitudes of future pastors. An important component of pastoral training was the socialization that occurred while they were students, especially within the colleges where stipendiates lived. There were certainly failures in the supervision of these teenagers and young men—such as when the son of one of Basel’s most eminent pastoral families broke into his family’s wine cellar with some of his friends48—but the expectations concerning behavior, the social pressure to conform, and the general religious atmosphere of the colleges must all have functioned to help these future pastors internalize the doctrines and values they were being taught. The longer these students remained in the colleges, the greater the likelihood of success in the shaping of character and values. Likewise, their prolonged close contact with students who would eventually be their colleagues in the pastorate laid the foundations for a greater esprit de corps once they had moved out into their parishes. To what extent is the Basel example typical of pastoral training in Protestant areas over the course of the sixteenth century? The short answer to this question is that it was not at all typical. The city-republic of Basel differed in many ways from other Protestant areas. Unlike most of the Lutheran principalities in Germany— and even its fellow Reformed city-republics in Switzerland—Basel controlled an extremely small rural territory and thus did not have a large number of rural parish posts to fill. It therefore did not take long for the majority of Basel’s posts to be filled by men who met the high qualifications for the pastoral ministry.49 The presence of an existing university also gave Basel an advantage over those 48Wolfgang Meyer, the son of pastor Jacob Meyer (and the grandson of Wolfgang Capito and his second wife, Oecolampadius’s widow Wibrandus Rosenblatt), was briefly jailed in 1594 for this incident; Hans Georg Wackernagel, ed., Die Matrikel der Universität Basel, vol. 2: 1532/33–1600/01 (Basel: Universitätsbibliothek, 1956), 413. His youthful indiscretions did not harm his subsequent career; he succeeded his father as the pastor of St. Alban in Basel, went on to receive his doctorate in theology in 1611, and served briefly as a theology professor at the university. 49Charlotte Methuen describes similar developments in Württemberg, which make an interesting parallel to Basel at the level of a territorial state, “Securing the Reformation through Education: The Duke’s Scholarship System of Sixteenth-Century Württemberg,” Sixteenth Century Journal 25 (1994): 841–851.

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places with which it had many close parallels, the free imperial cities of Germany. These cities likewise had small rural territories but had to develop a system of higher education from the ground up. In most cases, Protestant cities had to send their pastoral candidates somewhere else for advanced theological study, providing either a more broadening experience of the world or exposing them to potentially dangerous ideas—depending, of course, on one’s viewpoint. Even Strasbourg, whose academy eventually won the right to grant bachelors’ degrees, was never able to give formal recognition to the study of theology, and Strasbourg’s native sons had to go elsewhere to receive the proper credentials to teach theology.50Another parallel might be Geneva, but here the situation was very different from Basel in that well into the seventeenth century a large number of its pastors were French, rather than native Genevans.51 Basel, on the other hand, was able to create a coordinated system of religious and theological education from the primary through the postgraduate level and to control completely the training of the men who would eventually serve the city’s church. For the leadership of church and university (the same small circle of men), this had the benefit of enabling them to know exactly what they were getting. They oversaw the Latin schools where boys began their education, they taught the young men themselves once they entered the university, they controlled the granting of stipends that allowed these students to continue their education, and they recommended which students be appointed to vacant parishes. It is this last fact that reveals the importance of the Basel example. The value of understanding Basel’s approach to pastoral training lies not in its representativeness but in its approximation to an ideal type. Endowed with an ability to determine the development of the church and of its personnel that might be the envy of Protestant churchmen elsewhere in Europe, the leaders of Basel’s church were able to bring about a transformation of the city’s pastoral corps in a relatively short period of time. Basel provided, as it were, a hothouse environment for the production of the model Protestant pastor. The example of Basel is unusual in the degree to which the church’s leaders were able to implement their ideas about the reform of pastoral education, but it can be seen as typical in that it reflects the assumptions about pastoral training shared by many Protestant churchmen. The skills developed by Basel’s pastors demonstrate what their contemporaries 50For example, the two sons of Johann Marbach, the leader of Strasbourg’s church, both received their doctorates in theology from Basel in 1579; Wackernagel, ed., Die Matrikel der Universität Basel 2: 196–97. 51William G. Naphy, “The Renovation of the Ministry in Calvin’s Geneva,” in The Reformation of the Parishes: The Ministry and the Reformation in Town and Country, ed. Andrew Pettegree (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 113–32.

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regarded as important: knowledge of the catechism (and its proper interpretation) that had been drilled into the pastor as a child; command of both Latin and Greek, with the ability to translate and interpret the New Testament text; the skill of preaching in accordance with the canons of classical oratory; an internalized set of values and behavioral standards instilled through close contact with the present and future educational and clerical elite; and thorough training in Reformed Orthodoxy, along with an ability to refute Catholic opponents. As a result of the intensifying confessional debates of the later sixteenth century, this last characteristic seems to have gained in importance over all the others. Nevertheless, theological education was never the sole component of pastoral training, for the leaders of Basel’s church were mindful of the ministers’ other duties. The reforms introduced in the city’s schools and university, together with the closer oversight of those intended for the ministry, ensured that those who would undertake the care of souls in Basel at the end of the sixteenth century were both better educated and better trained than their counterparts of a century earlier—and indeed, than many of their contemporaries as well. Systematization of education and improved supervision of its recipients were the fundamental elements of pastoral preparation in Protestant Basel.

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Dissertations Supervised by Robert M. Kingdon University of Iowa, 1963–65 1963

Robert G. Clouse

The Influence of John Henry Alsted on English Millenarian Thought in the Seventeenth Century

1963

Robert D. Linder

The Political Ideas of Pierre Viret

1965

W. Fred Graham, Jr.

The Permeation of Calvin’s Social and Economic Thought into Genevan Life, 1536–1564

1965

Rudolph W. Heinze

Tudor Royal Proclamations, 1485–1553

1965

Donald G. Nugent

The Colloquy of Poissy: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Ecumenism

University of Wisconsin, 1970–2002 1970

Maryanne Cline Horowitz

The Origin of Pierre Charron’s Concept of Natural Law in Man

1971

Jerome Friedman

Michael Servetus: The Theology of Optimism

1971

A. Lynn Martin

Henry III and the Jesuit Politicians

1972

Frederic Joseph Baumgartner The Political Thought of the Radicals of the Catholic League of Paris, 1584–1594

1972

John Patrick Donnelly

Peter Martyr on Fallen Man: A Protestant Scholastic View

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Dissertations Supervised by Kingdon

1973

Robert A. Kolb

Nikolaus von Amsdorf, Knight of God and Exile of Christ: Piety and Polemic in the Wake of Luther

1973

Raymond A. Mentzer

Heresy Proceedings in Languedoc, 1500– 1560

1973

Robert W. Richgels

Robert Bellarmine’s Use of Calvin in the “Controversies”: A Quantitative Analysis

1974

Nancy Marilyn Conradt

John Calvin, Theodore Beza, and the Reformation in Poland

1974

Luther D. Peterson

The Philippist Theologians and the Interims of 1548: Soteriological, Ecclesiastical, and Liturgical Compromises and Controversies within German Lutheranism

1975

Eric Weissman

François de la Mothe le Vayer: Sceptic and Statist

1979

Merry E. Wiesner

Birth, Death, and the Pleasures of Life: Working Women in Nuremberg, 1480– 1620

1980

Leslie Henry Goldsmith

Poor Relief and Reform in SixteenthCentury Orleans

1980

Thomas Max Safley

Marital Disputes and Marital Litigation in Basel, Freiburg, and the Diocese of Constance: A Comparative Study, 1550– 1600

1982

Joseph Selin Freedman

The Life, Significance, and Philosophy of Clemens Timpler, 1563/4–1624

1987

Martin Innis Klauber

The Context and Development of the Views of Jean-Alphonse Turrettini (1671– 1737) on Religious Authority

1987

Jeffrey R. Watt

Matrimonial Disputes in Early Modern Neuchâtel, 1547–1806

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Dissertations Supervised by Kingdon

1989

Amy Nelson Burnett

Penance and Church Discipline in the Thought of Martin Bucer

1992

Kevin Mark Stevens

Printers, Publishers, and Booksellers in Counter-Reformation Milan: A Documentary Study

1992

Glenn S. Sunshine

From French Protestantism to the French Reformed Churches: The Development of Huguenot Ecclesiastical Institutions, 1559–1598

1993

Hans-Fredrik Gustafson

The Genesis of Cajetan’s Exegesis: Motivation and Initial Quest

1994

Richard Joseph Ferraro

The Nobility of Rome, 1560–1700: A Study of Its Composition, Wealth, and Investments

1995

Kathleen Mary Comerford

Education and the Catholic Reformation: The Diocesan Seminary of Fiesole, Italy, 1575–1675

1995

Timothy Gene Fehler

Social Welfare in Early Modern Emden: The Evolution of Poor Relief in the Age of the Reformation and Confessionalization

1996

Susan Eileen Dinan

Gender, Class, and Vocation: The Development of the Daughters of Charity in Sixteenth-Century France

1996

Jeffrey Eugene Ford

Conviction and Necessity in the Reform of Marital Law during the Era of the French Reformation and Wars of Religion

1998

Susan Reneé Boettcher

Martin Luther Seliger Gedechnis: The Memory of Martin Luther, 1546–1566

1998

Thomas Austin Lambert

Preaching, Praying, and Policing the Reform in Sixteenth-Century Geneva

1998

Susan Spruell Mobley

Confessionalizing the Curriculum: The Faculties of Arts and Theology at the Universities of Tübingen and Ingolstadt in the Second Half of the Sixteenth Century

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2000

James Thomas Ford

Wolfgang Musculus and the Struggle for Confessional Hegemony in Reformation Augsburg, 1531–1548

2001

Karen Elene Spierling

A Child’s Place in the Community: Reformed Infant Baptism in SixteenthCentury Geneva

2002

David Christopher Mayes

Communal Christianity: Politics and Religion in Rural Upper Hesse, 1567–1730

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Contributors Frederick J. Baumgartner is professor of history at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University and the author of seven books: Radical Reactionaries: The Political Thought of the French Catholic League (1976), Change and Continuity in the French Episcopate: The Bishops and the Wars of Religion (1986), Henry II, King of France (1988), From Spear to Flintlock (1992), Louis XII (1994), France in the Sixteenth Century (1995), and Longing for the End, A History of Millennialism in Western Civilization (1999). He was president of the American Catholic Historical Association in 2002, was named Scholar of the Year in History by the Virginia Social Sciences Association, 2001, and his biography has appeared in Who’s Who in America since 1995.






Amy Nelson Burnett is associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska– Lincoln. She is the author of The Yoke of Christ: Martin Bucer and Christian Discipline (1994) and is currently writing a monograph on the formation of the Protestant clergy in Basel in the century after the Reformation.






John Patrick Donnelly, S.J., has taught history at Marquette University for thirty-two years. His main areas of research have been the early Jesuits and Peter Martyr Vermigli. He has served as president of both the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference and the Society for Reformation Research.






Maryanne Cline Horowitz is professor of history and Title IX officer at Occidental College and an associate of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, University of California, Los Angeles. In 1999, the American Philosophical Society awarded her the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History for her Seeds of Virtue and Knowledge (1998). From 1986 to 1998, she served on the executive board of the Renaissance Society of America. She is a a member of the board of editors of the Journal of the History of Ideas and is the editor-in-chief of the New Dictionary of the History of Ideas (forthcoming 2004–5).








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Contributors

A. Lynn Martin is reader in history and founding director of the Research Centre for the History of Food and Drink at the University of Adelaide. In a previous incarnation as a historian his work focused on the Jesuits, but he has now turned to drink, that is, the history of drinking. His most recent book is Alcohol, Sex, and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe (2001).






Raymond A. Mentzer holds the Daniel J. Krumm Family Chair in Reformations Studies, Department of Religious Studies, University of Iowa. His recent works include Blood and Belief: Family Survival and Confessional Identity among the Provincial Huguenot Nobility (1994), Sin and the Calvinists: Morals Control and the Consistory in the Reformed Tradition (1994, 2002), and (with Andrew Spicer) Society and Culture in the Huguenot World, 1559–1685 (2002). He serves as the general editor of the Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies series. His research focuses on the Reformation in France and, in particular, the role of the local churches.






Thomas Max Safley teaches the history of early modern Europe at the University of Pennsylvania. His work includes The Workplace before the Factory: Artisans and Proletarians, 1500–1800 (1993), Charity and Economy in the Orphanages of Early Modern Augsburg (1997), and Matheus Miller’s Memoir: A Merchant’s Life in the Seventeenth Century (2000). He is currently studying the ethics and economics of bankruptcy in early modern Europe.






Lee Palmer Wandel is professor of history and religious studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. Her works include Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (1990) and Voracious Idols and Violent Hands: Iconoclasm in Reformation Zurich, Strasbourg, and Basel (1995), and (with Robin W. Winks) Europe in a Wider World, 1350–1650 (2003). She is currently completing a book on the Eucharist in the early modern world.






Merry Wiesner-Hanks is professor of history as well as director of the Center for Women’s Studies and the coordinator of the Comparative Study of Religion program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee. Her recent publications include Gender in History (2001) and (with Susan Karant-Nunn) Luther on Women: A Sourcebook (2003).








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Index Note: Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Page numbers followed by “t” refer to tables. Acta Liechstalensia (1540), 148n.45 Advis, Advice for Establishing a Library (Naudé), 17 Agendbuch, 148 alcohol and the clergy, literary images of, 23–39; and anticlericalism, spread of, 38–39; and asceticism/temperance of monks, 32–33; and educational role of clergy, 35–36, 38–39; monks’/ laity’s consumption of wine/ale, 28– 29, 30–31t, 32; proverbs about, 26; regulations/condemnations of clergy, 25–26, 28–29, 32–33, 37–38; and sacramental functions of clergy, 33, 34– 35, 38–39; and sex, 36–39; and tavern as antichurch, 37–39; and temperance, 23; wine/ale development by monks, 26–28 ale, 27, 29 Alexander, Franz G.: The History of Psychiatry, 11 Alfonsine star tables, 45, 49–50 Almanach novum (Pitati), 48–49 almanacs, 54–56 Alsace, Lutherans in, 72n.4 Alumneum, 142–43 Alvarez, Manuel, 65 Amerbach, Bonifacius, 138, 140 America, naming of, 110 Andaya, Barbara, 106, 109 Andaya, Leonard, 106, 109 Andeli, Henry d’: “La bataille des vins,” 28 Anglo, Sydney, 16 annaliste studies, 118n.21

Anna of Techlenburg, countess, 8 Apologie (Naudé), 7–8, 16–21, 20n.67, 22 “Apology” (Denys), 17 Aquaviva, Claudio, 60, 62, 68 Aquinas, St. Thomas: in Jesuit education, 62, 64–65, 67; Summa Theologiae, 64 Aretino, Pietro, 24 Ariosto, Ludovico, 24 Aristotle, 20, 42; in Jesuit education, 62, 64–65, 67 Aristotle’s Masterpiece, 20 Arnold, Matthew, 68 Askew, Anne, 101 “Astrologers Observing an Eclipse” (Caron), 43 astrology: and calendar reform, 42, 44–45, 46–52, 54–56; judicial, 53–54; and medicine, 42–43; and star tables, 47– 48; status/popularity of, 43, 53–54 astronomy: and astrology, 42, 52; and calendar reform, 46, 52–53; and laws of planetary motions, 52 Aubrey, John: The Countrey Revell, 24–25 Augsburg (Germany): goldsmiths/silversmiths of, 126–27; orphanages of, 113–14, 119, 121, 123–28 Augustine, St.: The City of God, 15, 20 Bacon, Francis, 20n.67 Bacon, Roger, 17, 44–45 Bainton, Roland, 95; Women of the Reformation, 93 baptism: of infants, preliminary, 76–77, 77n.16; public vs. private, 76, 78;

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baptism continued in Reformed liturgy, 71–73, 72nn.10– 11, 74–75, 76–78, 77n.16, 91; women’s participation in, 78 Basel, 134, 134n.8, 135, 137n.20, 144, 148n.45, 149–50. See also pastoral training Basel Confession, 140n.33 Basel Reformation Ordinance (1529), 134, 134n.9, 136, 140n.32 “La bataille des vins” (Andeli), 28 beer, 27 Benedict, St., 28–29 Benedictines, 27 Beneti, Cipriano, 47 Bennett, Judith, 105 Berlin, Isaiah, 119 Beza, Theodore, 84 Bible, in family worship, 87 Blaisdell, Charmarie, 95 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 24, 39 Bodin, Jean, 8, 13, 21; De las Daemonomanie des sorciers, 8, 15, 20 Bolsheviks, 41 Bonaventure, St., 64 Book of Concord, 144 Borgia, Francisco, duke of Gandia, 58, 61– 62 Bossy, John, 72n.6 Bourgeois, Loys, 84 Brady, Tom, 105 Brauner, Sigrid, 103 Bromyard, John, 33, 35 Brundage, James, 107 Bucer, Martin, 88 Bull for the Reform of the Calendar (1582), 50, 50n.29 Bullough, Vern, 107 Caesar, Julius, 41 Cajetan, Cardinal, 64 calendar reform, 41–56; and Alfonsine star tables, 45, 49–50; astrologers’ interests in, 42, 44–52, 54, 55–56; astronomers’ interests in, 46, 52–53; Bull for the Reform of the Calendar, 50,

160

50n.29; and Copernicus’s Prutenic star tables, 47–48, 49–50, 50n.29, 53; in England, 53, 55–56; at the Fifth Lateran Council, 46–47; Gregorian vs. Julian calendar, 41, 54; Gregory XIII on, 49–51, 54–56; implementation of, 51–53, 53n.38, 55; and Jupiter–Saturn conjunction of 1583, 46, 50–51; and leap year, 49, 50, 50n.29; Lilio’s plan for, 49–50; and New Year’s Day, 50n.29, 53n.38; religious objections to, 51–52, 54–55; religious reasons for, 41–44, 50–51, 52–53, 55; and the solar year, 41, 44, 48; and the vernal equinox, 41, 44, 48, 49, 51; and winter solstice, 41, 44 Calvin, John, 73, 84, 87–88; Catechism, 87 Calvinists, 81, 103 Cambrensis, Giraldus, 28 Campion, Edmund, 66 Capuchins, 64 Cardano, Girolamo, 18–19, 50–51; Supplementum Almanach, 48 Cardenal, Peire, 28 Caron, Antoine: “Astrologers Observing an Eclipse,” 43 catechism: in pastoral training, 139–41, 140–41nn.32–34, 147, 150; in the Reformed liturgy, 79–80, 84 Catechism (Calvin), 87 Catholic League, 90 Catholics: on calendar reform, 51–52; on charity, 116n.15; on demonic magic, 18–19; on the Devil, 21; on drunkenness of clergy, 25–26; on the Eucharist/Lord’s Supper, 81, 83; on psalms, 84n.41; on sin, 72n.6; on witchcraft, 9, 22. See also Jesuit education charity, 116–17, 116n.15, 118n.19, 118n.21 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 24 Chesterfield, Lord, 55 Chevalier, Françoise, 73n.7 Chrisman, Miriam, 95 Christmas, 41 Cireulo, Pedro, 47 Cistercians, 27

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The City of God (Augustine), 15, 20 Clark, Stuart, 16n.46 Classen, Claus-Peter, 103 Clavius, Christopher, 49 Clement IV, pope, 44 Clement VI, pope, 44, 45 Coates, William, 38 Coeli et terrae, 53 Cohen, Sherrill, 117n.17 Collège de Montaigu (Paris), 60 Collège de Sainte-Barbe (Paris), 60 Comines, Philippe de, 21 confirmation, Lutheran, 72n.4 The Conrad Grebel Review, 104 Constitutions (Ignatius Loyola), 60–61, 64–65 convents, 96–97, 99–102, 109 Copernicus, Nicholas: De Revolutionibus, 46, 47–48, 50n.29 Council of Basel, 45 Council of Constance, 45 Council of Nicaea, 41, 43–44 Council of Trent, 49 The Countrey Revell (Aubrey), 24–25 Daemonologie (James VI), 16, 20n.67 d’Ailly, Pierre, 45 Daneau, Lambert, 14 Danti, Ignatzio: Galleria della Carte Geografiche, 49 Daughters of Charity, 98 d’Autun, Jacques (Jacques Chevannes), 17–18 Dee, John, 17, 52–53 De lamiis liber (Weyer), 8 De las Daemonomanie des sorciers (Bodin), 8, 15, 20 Del Rio, Marin Antoine, 21 demonology. See witchcraft Denys, John: “Apology,” 17 De prestigiis daemonum (Weyer), 8–9, 10, 22 De Revolutionibus (Copernicus), 46–48, 50n.29 Devereaux, Janice C., 33 Dickens, A. G., 61

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Digges, Thomas, 53 Directorium, 68 Discipline des Eglises Réformées de France, 82, 84, 91 A Discourse upon Divels and Spirits (Scot), 15, 17 Discoverie of Witchcraft (Scot), 7, 11–13, 17, 21, 22 “Doctour Doubble Ale” (Shepherd), 33– 34 Dominicans, 28, 64 Douglass, Jane Dempsey, 103 Duns Scotus, John, 64 Easter, dating of, 41, 43–47, 52–53 Edict of Nantes (1685), 83, 88, 90 education. See Jesuit education; pastoral training; universities Elisabeth of Braunschweig, 93, 109 Elizabeth I, queen of England and Ireland, 53, 55 English Ladies, 98 Erasmus, 68; Praise of Folly, 15 Essais (Montaigne), 7, 7n.1 Estes, Leland, 16 Eucharist, 71, 74, 78, 80–82 Euripides: Hercules purens, 10 evangelism, 134–35, 134n.8, 139 Evelyn, John, 17 Exafenon pronosticorum temporis, 44 Fabricius, Paulus, 51 fasting, 72–73, 88–91, 89nn.53–54 Ferminus of Belleval, 44–45 ffolliot, Sheila, 99 Fifth General Congregation, 63 Fifth Lateran Council, 46–47 Florence, 29 Florio, John, 20n.67 Foix, François de, 51 Formicarius (Nider), 19 Foucault, Michel, 107; History of Sexuality, 106 Frederick III, Holy Roman Emperor, 43 French Reformed churches. See liturgy and laity, French Reformed

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Frisius, Gemma, 48 funerals, 91 Galleria della Carte Geografiche (Danti; Rome), 49 Gaurico, Lucca, 43, 47 gender vs. sexuality, 94, 107–8 Geneva, 149 George, Harry, 33–34 Geremek, Bronislaw, 124 Ghent (Belgium), 29 Ghetti, Lodovico, 29 Godelmann, Johann Georg, 21 Godwin, William: Lives of the Necromancers, 17 goldsmiths, 126–27 Goudimel, Claude, 84 Greaves, John, 55 Green, Ian, 132–33 Gregory, pope, 48 Gregory XIII, pope, 49–51, 54–56 Grimm, Harold, 2 Grosseteste, Robert, 44–45 Grumbach, Argula von, 101 Grynaeus, Johann Jakob, 145–46 Grynaeus, Simon, 136–37, 136n.15, 137n.19, 140 Gsell, Hans, 123–30 Gualther, Rudolf, 140 Guicciardini, Francesco, 21 Guintini, Francesco: Speculum astrologiae, 48 Halle, Adam de la: Le jeu de la feuillé, 33 Handbook of European History 1400–1600, 105 Harrison, Richard, 27 Harvey, William, 20n.67 Hassfurt, Hans Virdung von, 47 Heinze, Rudolph, 3 heliocentrism, 47–48 hellebore, 14–15 Henri IV, king of France, 88 Henry II, king of France, 43 Henry VI, king of England, 43 Hercules purens (Euripides), 10

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Historia philosophica (Horn), 21 historiography, 2–3, 20–21 The History of magick (Naudé), 21 History of Philosophy (Stanley), 21 The History of Psychiatry (Alexander and Selesnick), 11 History of Sexuality (Foucault), 106 Hodges, Henry, 38 Hof, Ulrich Im, 135 Horn, Georg: Historia philosophica, 21 horoscopes, 53–54. See also astrology humanism, 67, 131, 133, 136, 139n.26, 147 hysteria, 11 Ignatius Loyola: Constitutions, 60–61, 64– 65; and Jesuit education, 57–61, 64– 65, 68; Spiritual Exercises, 68 Jacobins, 41 James VI, king of Scotland: Daemonologie, 16, 20n.67 Jesuit education, 57–69; academies/study groups, 66–67; age of students, 67; Aquaviva’s role in, 60, 62, 68; Aquinas in, 62, 64–65, 67; Aristotle in, 62, 64– 65, 67; beadles’ roles in, 64–65; biblical studies, 64; Constitutions, 60–61, 64–65; criticism of, 68, 68n.30; curricula, 63, 67–68; Directorium, 68; dramas, 66; early colleges, 58–59; extracurricular activities, 66; growth of colleges, 59–60; humanism in, 67; Ignatius Loyola’s role in, 57–59 (see also Constitutions; Spiritual Exercises); Marian soldalities, 66; at Messina, 58–59; Paduan objections to, 65, 65n; physical punishment in, 65; Ratio Studiorum, 57, 60–65, 68–69; religious studies, 66; Spiritual Exercises, 68; textbooks, 65; at University of Paris, 60 Le jeu de la feuillé (Halle), 33 Joachim of Fiore, 51 Joan of Arc, 19 John of Murs, 44–45 John XXII, pope, 44

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Karant-Nunn, Susan, 72, 103 Kepler, Johannes, 52–53 Kingdon, Robert M., 1–2, 1n.1, 3–6 Kirchendienerordnung (1562), 148n.45 Kramer, Heinrick: Malleus Malificarum, 10, 19–20 Kuhn, Thomas, 50n.29

Livy, 15 Locatelli, Sebastiano, 28 Lombard, Peter: Sentences, 64 Lord’s Supper, 71–73, 79–83, 79n.21, 79n.23, 80n.26, 80n.28, 91–92 Louis XII, king of France, 43 Loyola. See Ignatius Loyola Lukács, Ladislaus: Monumenta Paedagogica Societatis Iesu, 62–63 Luther, Martin, 2–3, 88, 103, 111 Lutherans, 52, 72, 72n.4

Lancre, Pierre de, 21 Langland, William, 39; The Vision of Piers Plowman, 24, 36 Latin schools/Pedagogium, 137–40, 138nn.24–25, 150 Latin vs. vernacular, 85–86, 85n.43 Lauro, Carlo, 49 Lazarus, William, 102 Ledesma, Diego, 61–62 Leo X, pope, 43, 46–47, 49 Lilio, Luigi, 49–50 limbo, 76–77 Lister, Martin, 32 liturgy and laity, French Reformed, 71–92; baptism, 71–73, 72nn.10–11, 74–75, 76–78, 77n.16, 91; catechism, 79–80, 84; as communal religious experience, 72–73nn.6–7, 88, 91; elite’s participation in, 91–92, 91n.65; Eucharist, 71, 74, 78, 80–82; family worship/patriarchy, 87–88; fasting, 72–73, 88–90, 89nn.53–54, 91; funerals, 91; as interactive/adaptable, 91; limbo, 76–77; Lord’s Supper, 71–73, 79–83, 79n.21, 79n.23, 80n.26, 80n.28, 91–92; marriage, 90–91, 91n.64; Mass, 71; naming patterns, 77; penitence, 90–91, 91n.63; pewing, 75, 86–87, 87n.49; psalms, 84; sacraments, generally, 71–73; sermons, 71, 72–73, 83–84, 91; vernacular vs. Latin in, 85–86, 85n.43; women’s participation in, 77–78, 84, 88, 91–92 Lives of the Necromancers (Godwin), 17

Maestlin, 52 magic. See witchcraft Malleus Malificarum (Sprenger and Kramer), 10, 19–20 Mantice (Tyard), 48 Manuale Sacerdotis (Myrc), 36 manuals for pastors, 132–33 Marius, Richard, 103n.18 Marot, Clément, 24, 84 marriage: in the Reformed liturgy, 90–91, 91n.64; and women, 104, 108 Le Mascurat (Naudé), 19–20 Masius, Andreas, 13 Mass, 71 Mattingly, Garrett, 1–2, 1n.1 McKee, Elsie, 101 McLaughlin, R. Emmett, 132n.3 McNamara, JoAnn, 105 Medici, Catherine de, 43 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 24 melancholy, 9, 11 Mennonite Quarterly Review, 104 mental illness, 10–11 Messina (Sicily), 58–59 Methuen, Charlotte, 149n.47 Meyer, Wolfgang, 148n.46 millennialism, 51 Miller, Friderich, 113–15, 117, 119–26, 129–30 modernity vs. premodernity, 104–9 monks, wine/ale developed by, 26–28. See also alcohol and the clergy Montaigne, Michel de, Essais: 7, 7n.1; Naudé as influenced by, 18;

John XXIII, pope, 45 Jupiter–Saturn conjunction (1583), 46, 50–51

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Montaigne, Michel de, Essais: continued Naudé on, 21; “On Cripples,” 20; on Weyer, 13–15; on witchcraft, 7, 10, 14–15, 22 Monumenta Paedagogica Societatis Iesu (Lukács, ed.), 62–63 Morin, Jean, 52, 52n.33 Muir, Edward, 71–72 Münster, Sebastian, 136, 136n.15 Münster school, 138nn.24–25 Myconius, Oswald, 136–37, 137n.19 Myrc, John: Manuale Sacerdotis, 36 Le mystère de la résurrection, 34 Nadal, Jerome: “Ordo Studiorum Germanicus,” 61 naming patterns, 77 Nash, Ogden, 36 national synods, 9, 82, 90 natural law, 119 Naudé, Gabriel: Advis, Advice for Establishing a Library, 17; Apologie, 7–8, 16– 21, 20n.67, 22; on Bodin, 21; on demonology, 7–8; on historiography, 21; The History of magick, 21; influence of, 21; Le Mascurat, 19–20; Montaigne’s influence on, 18 Navarre, Marguerite de, 24 Nettescheim, Agrippa von, 7 Nicholas of Cusa, 45 Nider, Johannes: Formicarius, 19 Nightingale, Florence, 98 Norcrosse, Henry, 38 Nostradamus, 43 Oberman, Heiko A., 2, 105 Occitan, 85, 85n.43 Oecolampadius, Johann, 135–36, 136n.15, 141n.34 “On Cripples” (Montaigne), 20 Order of Temperance (Hesse, 1600), 23 “Ordo Studiorum Germanicus” (Nadal), 61 orphans, 113, 119, 121–29, 122n.35 Oxford University, 68

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pastoral training, 131–51; apprenticeships, 132; the arts, 147, 147n.44; authority over, 137–38, 137nn.19–21; Basel Reformation Ordinance, 134, 134n.9, 136, 140n.32; in Basel vs. elsewhere, 149–50; biblical exegesis/lectures, 134, 136, 136n.15; catechism, 139–41, 140–41nn.32–34, 147, 150; curricula, 141; duties of pastors, 134, 140, 140n.32, 148, 150–51; and employment of pastors, 144–45, 150; and evangelism, 134–35, 134n.8, 139; funding for, 142–45; by Simon Grynaeus, 136, 136n.15, 137, 137n.19, 140; Johann Jakob Grynaeus’s disputations, 145–46; and humanism, 131, 133, 136, 139n.26, 147; and Latin schools/Pedagogium, 137–40, 138nn.24–25, 150; manuals, 132–33; by Münster, 136, 136n.15; and oath for doctors of theology, 137n.20; by Oecolampadius, 135–36, 136n.15, 141n.34; by Pellikan, 135; by Phrygio, 136, 136n.15; Polanus von Polansdorf ’s disputations, 145, 146–47; Prophezei, 135, 136n.15, 137, 143; for Protestant clergy, limitations of, 133; and Reformed Orthodoxy, 141, 145, 150; religious component of, 139–42, 139n.28, 147; sermons, 139, 142; socialization of students, 149; and theological education, 131–32, 132n.3, 133–34, 135, 140, 143–51, 144n.40, 145n.42, 147n.44; in universities, 131–33, 135–38, 140, 142–45, 144n.40, 145n.41, 147–48; and the Zwinglian Reformation, 136 Patterson, Lee, 105–6 Paul III, pope, 43, 49, 57 Paul of Middelburg, 48; Paulina, 46; Secundum Compendium correctionis Calendarii, 46 Pedagogium. See Latin schools/Pedagogium Pellikan, Konrad, 135 penitence, 90–91, 91n.63

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Pérignon, Pierre, 27 Petrarch, Francesco, 28 pewing, 75, 86–87, 87n.49 Philip II, prince, 49 philosophy, rationalist histories of, 21 Phrygio, Paul, 136, 136n.15 Pigghe, Albert, 47 Pitati, Pietro: Almanach novum, 48–49 Pius II, pope, 33 planetary motions, laws of, 52 Platter, Thomas, 139–41, 139n.28 Plutarch, 21 Polanus von Polansdorf, Amandus, 145– 47 Poole, Robert, 55–56 poor people, 113–30; agency of, 120, 122– 25, 128–30; charity toward, 116–17, 116n.15, 118n.19, 118n.21; coercion/ repression of, 117n.17, 120–21; descent into poverty, 124; distinctions among, 118–19; Gsell case, 123– 30; Miller case, 113–15, 117, 119–21, 123, 125, 126, 129–30; orphans, 113, 119, 121–29, 122n.35; scholarship on, 115–19, 117n.17, 121, 129; statistical studies of, 119; structures/institutions of relief for, 117–18, 118nn.19, 21 Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 15 premodernity vs. modernity, 104–9 printing press, 54 Prophezei, 135, 136n.15, 137, 143 Protestants: on calendar reform, 51–52, 55; on charity, 116–17; on drunkenness of clergy, 25; naming patterns of, 77; on sin, 72, 72n.6; on witchcraft, 9, 22. See also liturgy and laity, French Reformed; Lutherans Prutenic star tables (Copernicus), 47–50, 50n.29, 53 psalms, 84 psalter, 87 Pseudomonarchia daemonia (Weyer), 15 psychiatrists, on witchcraft, 11 Ptolemy, 42

Edited by Lee Palmer Wandel

Quintillian, Marcus, 21 Rabelais, François, 24, 39 Ranke, Leopold von, 2 rationalist histories of philosophy, 21 Ratio Studiorum, 57, 60–65, 68–69 Reformation. See liturgy and laity, French Reformed; women Reformed Orthodoxy, 141, 145, 150 Regiomontanus, 45–46 Roelker, Nancy, 95 Roggio, 47 Roper, Lyndal, 103 Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, 43, 51 Sacrobosco, Johannes, 44 Salimbene, 28, 38 Salon, Juan, 49 Schaffenorth, Gerta, 102 Schindling, Anton, 139n.26 Schorn-Schütte, Luise, 102 scientia astorum (study of stars), 42 scientia judiciorum (study of stars’ influence), 42 scientia motus (study of stars’ motion), 42 Scot, Reginald: on corporeality of demons, 16n.46; A Discourse upon Divels and Spirits, 15, 17; Discoverie of Witchcraft, 7, 11–13, 17, 21, 22; Weyer’s influence on, 9; on witchcraft, 7, 11– 13–16, 22 Second Coming of Christ, 46, 51 Secundum Compendium correctionis Calendarii (Paul of Middelburg), 46 Selesnick, Sheldon T.: The History of Psychiatry, 11 Seneca, 21 Sentences (Lombard), 64 sermons: in pastoral training, 139, 142; in the Reformed liturgy, 71–73, 83–84, 91 sexuality, 94, 106–8 Shepherd, Luke: “Doctour Doubble Ale,” 33–34 Sileto, Gugliemo, 49 silversmiths, 126–27

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Sixtus IV, pope, 45 Sixtus V, pope, 53–54 Sleidan, 21 Socrates, 18–19 Spanos, Nicholas P., 11 Spathaky, Mike, 53n.38 Speculum astrologiae (Guintini), 48 Spiritual Exercises (Ignatius Loyola), 68 Spitz, Lewis, 2 Sprenger, Jakob: Malleus Malificarum, 10, 19–20 spring equinox. See vernal equinox Stanley, Thomas: History of Philosophy, 21 Stetten, Paul von, 126–27 Stöffler, Johann, 47 Stone, Lawrence, 108 Strasbourg, 149, 149n.48 Strzempinski, Thomas, 45 Stuard, Susan, 105 Sturm, Johann, 62 Sulzer, Simon, 145 Summa Theologiae (Aquinas), 64 Supplementum Almanach (Cardano), 48 synods, 9, 82, 90, 137n.21 Tacitus, Publius, 21 temple construction, 75, 86 Teresa of Avila, 97–98 textbooks, Jesuit, 65 theological education, 131–32, 132n.3, 133–35, 140, 143–51, 144n.40, 145n.42, 147n.44. See also Jesuit education Thomistic revival, 64. See also Aquinas, St. Thomas Thompson, Edward P., 118n.20, 123 Thompson, John, 103 Thucydides, 21 Todd, Margo, 104 Tracy, Jim, 105 Trannstetter, Georg, 47 Tyard, Pontus de: Mantice, 48 universities, 131–33, 135–38, 140, 142–45, 144n.40, 145n.41, 147–48 University of Alcalà (Spain), 60

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University of Padua, 65 University of Paris, 60 University of Salamanca (Spain), 60 Urban VIII, pope, 54 Ursulines, 98, 111 van Uytven, Raymond, 29 van Zeelst, Adrian, 50, 51 vernacular vs. Latin, 85–86, 85n.43 vernal equinox, 41, 44, 48–49, 51 vineyards, 27 The Vision of Piers Plowman (Langland), 24, 36 Vives, Juan Luis, 21 Waldensians, 24 Waldseemüller, Martin, 110 Walker, Mack, 118n.19 Wallis, John, 55 Ward, Mary, 98 Warham, William, 29 Wars of Religion, 89–90 Watton, Thomas de, 36 Weyer, Johann, 7; De lamiis liber, 8; De prestigiis daemonum, 8–9, 10, 22; Montaigne on, 13–15; on poisoning vs. witchcraft, 13; Pseudomonarchia daemonia, 15; Scot as influenced by, 9 William of Ockham, 64 Williams, G. H., 103 William V of Cleves, Duke, 8 wine, 26–29, 30–31t, 32. See also Eucharist winter solstice, 41, 44 witchcraft, 7–22; Bodin on, 8; definitions of, 13–14; as heresy, 10, 16–17, 19–20, 22; James VI on, 16, 20n.67; Little Sorcerer Jack trials for, 114; medical explanations of/treatments for, 9–11, 14–15, 19, 22; and melancholy, 9, 11; monocausal explanations of, 108; Montaigne on, 7, 10, 14–15, 22; Naudé on, 7–8, 16–21, 20n.67, 22; and old women’s curses, 12–13; pattern of, 113–14; vs. poisoning, 13; Scot on, 7, 11–13, 14–16, 22; Sprenger and Kramer on, 10, 19–20;

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witchcraft continued trials/torture for, increase of, 8–9, 15, 19; Weyer on, 8–9, 10, 13, 15, 22 women, 93–111; agency during the Reformation, 95, 96–102; and the arts, 99; Catholic, 98, 101–2; and colonialism, 109–10; confessionalism in scholarship on, 102–4, 103n.18, 107–8; in convents during the Reformation, 96–97, 99–102, 109; and lay vs. religious life, 98–99; and marriage, 104, 108; and modernity vs. premodernity, 104–9; participation in the Reformed liturgy, 77–78, 84, 88, 91– 92; Protestant, 102; and radical groups, 103–4; Reformation’s effects on, 102–9; scholarship on/categories of difference, 93–94; scholarship on

Edited by Lee Palmer Wandel

Germany, 95–96, 102–3; and sexuality vs. gender, 94, 107–8; spirituality/ piety of, 97–98; writings during the Reformation, 100–101. See also witchcraft Women of the Reformation (Bainton), 93 Woodhouse, John, 54–55 Wunder, Heide, 95–96, 104, 107 Württemberg, 149n.47 Yost, John, 104 Zell, Katherina Schütz, 101 Zilbourg, G., 10–11 zodiac. See astrology Zurich, 135, 137, 147n.44 Zwingli, Ulrich, 88 Zwinglian Reformation, 136

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