Modeling religion: bureaucratic reform and the transformation of popular piety in the 18th century

Abstract

From 1750 to 1790 the Theresian and the Jo sephinian governments of Austria tried to transform the re ligious life in the Habsburg lands from the traditional ba roque piety to a Reformed Catholicism. This paper ex amines the reactions of the population to these admini strative reforms and its ideological elements. It is based on testaments, a common source in the research on popular piety since the 1960s. The multivariate analysis shows that there was a far-reaching turning away from the baroque forms of piety in the whole population The changes in the testaments began gingerly in the 1770s, were fastest in the 1780s, and ended in the 1790s. As these changes in the sources Indicate a transformation of the mentality 30-40 years before, the whole development cannot simply be seen as a transfer of attitudes from an enlightened elite to the masses, but rather as an autonomous process of debaroqui zation in a country where the counter-reformation had been highly successful in the 17th century. * Address all communications to Michael Pammer, Institut f?r Sozialund Wirtschafts geschichte, Johannes Kepler Universit?t Linz, A-4040 Linz-Auhof, Austria. E-Mail: NflOiAH.PAMMER@JK.UNI-LINZ.AC.Ar. The model presented in this paper was calculated using data gained originally for my dissertation at the Universit?t Salzburg (Pammer, Glaubensabfall und Wahre An dacht). The results of the dissertation are based on simpler statistical procedures; first reflections on a complex model were presented in the course of the ZHSF-Herbst seminar 1992 on Structural Relationship Models, held by Helmut Giegler from the Friedrich-Alexander-Universitat Erlangen-N?rnberg. I should like to thank also J?r gen Sensen (ZA-ZHSF) for his helpful comments.