Im Zeichen der Krise. Religiosität im Europa des 17. Jahrhunderts (review)

Abstract

This book is the result of an interdisciplinary conference held at the Max-Planck-Institute of History at Göttingen in June of 1996 to discuss the state of Christian influence at the close of the Confessional Age and to find the preconditions and prejudices upon which the subsequent Enlightenment was to build. The work contains thirty-two contributions by thirty-one authors from Germany, Switzerland, France, England, and the United States. These are divided into six sections dealing with prophecies and prodigies including monstrosities; plagues, hunger, disease, and death; the relations between Christians and Jews; the presence of marginal outsiders, such as witches, specters, and demons; the relationship between the old and new sciences and the interpretation of the world; and the transformation of the sacred, including the influence of Stoicism, libertinage, and atheism. For each section there is an introduction, which might variously be a summary, a critique, or even a reinterpretation. Given the location of the meeting, it should come as no surprise that on balance there was a preponderance of Lutheran influence among the contributions, although Calvinism and Catholicism were also represented, the latter particularly in the final section. It would exceed the constraints imposed by a brief review such as this to discuss all the articles with their variegated and divergent topics and approaches. As Hartmut Lehmann put it in his general introduction, their consensus hints at a change in the religious condition during the 1570's, particularly at a decline in eschatological thought. Then at the start of the seventeenth century the Confessional Age of the previous century gradually gave place to a prolonged period of disciplining, both social and religious. This transition caused some disorientation, which usually accompanies unknown changes. The popular response to omens, such as comets and births of monstrosities, had been, especially among Lutherans, an apocalyptic one, indicating the nearness of the Last Judgment. By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, at the close of the Thirty Years' War, they began to be taken as a warning by God of unpleasant things to come, instead. Such interpretations served as a substitute for the absence of scientific explanations. Added to this was the fact that pre-Christian magical thought had not been totally eliminated from [End Page 687] popular thought and practice. Ordinary people did not think of magic and Christianity as two competing, but rather as two complementary, systems, both permitted by God to help people survive the rigors of life in the seventeenth century. Magic certainly was not a sign of unbelief or defective religiosity. The Lutheran attitude toward the Jews was ambivalent. During the earlier eschatological phase with their expected conversion, Jews were regarded in a more tolerant light. Indeed, they became unbeknownst drawn into the confessional strife between Catholics and Protestants, each accusing the other of "judaizing." Yet with the failure of the Jews to respond, orthodox Lutheranism followed Calvinism and Catholicism in assuming a more hostile attitude toward them. Even the rare Jewish convert was mistrusted. Indeed, the growing Protestant Hebrew scholarship, bringing with it a new comprehension of the Old Testament, strengthened the Protestant claim that they were now the "new Israel." Thus, while the socio-economic and legal conditions of Jewry slowly improved, ecclesiastical anti-Semitism hardened. Vagrants, beggars, suicides, and, of course, witches, constituted the other marginalized group. In general, a more moderate, secularized approach to these categories emerged, although the popular attitude toward vagrants was harsher in Germany than in France. In France the myth of a counter-cultural hierarchy of the underworld tended to mitigate the picture, but such was lacking in Germany. Suicide, or rather the disposal of the corpse of one, was to become...