Popular Piety Research Articles

Global Catholicism: Diversity and Change since Vatican II (review)

Reviewed by: Global Catholicism: Diversity and Change since Vatican II Darrell Jodock Global Catholicism: Diversity and Change since Vatican II. By Ian Linden. (New York: Columbia University Press. 2009. Pp. viii, 337. $27.50. ISBN 978-0-231-15416-1.) This book tells the fascinating and important story of Roman Catholicism’s shift from a relatively Eurocentric to a more global Church. During the 1950s the policies of the Holy See were largely devised with European problems in view (pp. 30–33). By 2000, with only a shrinking 40 percent of the world’s Catholic community to be found in North America and Europe (p. 240), things had changed. Ian Linden is a professorial research associate in the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London and former director of the Catholic Institute for International Relations. In this book Linden has assembled [End Page 561] a large amount of information about complex developments in Latin America, Africa, and Asia and presented it in a readable fashion. He begins by sketching the background of the Second Vatican Council, starting with the modernist controversy of the early-twentieth century. The book explores how the decision-making during the Council only slowly began to reflect a more international perspective. Each region is analyzed vis-à-vis the initial steps toward inculturation taken in the 1950s, but developments after the Council receive the most attention. Global Catholicism treats different parts of the world separately, giving considerable attention to Catholicism in Latin America, the Philippines, South Africa, Rwanda, Rhodesia/Zaire, Malawi, and Asia outside of the Philippines. Then, since “a fully global and pluralist Church is by nature collegiate, a community of communities, rather than a rigid hierarchical structure with its satellites controlled and ruled from a dominant centre” (p. 156), it explores the degree to which ideas traveled from one region to another. The answer to this question is not uniform. The indigenous “kairos theology” that developed in South Africa, for example, employed a methodology similar to that of Latin American liberation theology but was largely homegrown (p. 197). Amid the differences around the world, the dynamics were similar. Inspired by the documents of the Second Vatican Council, some activists identified with the needs of the poor or the disenfranchised, resulting in disagreements among the local bishops. Depending on the current priorities of the pope, the Holy See was more or less cautious in its response. The outcome was mixed, but as a whole the Church moved in the direction of including indigenous leaders and standing up for justice and human rights. Linden ends his book with some attention to ongoing problems associated with globalization. One is the role of popular Catholicism. Since the 1970s the official Vatican policy has been “inculturation,” defined as “the insertion of Christianity in the various human cultures” and “the intimate transformation of authentic cultural values through their integration in Christianity” (p. 239). But what sorts of popular piety are to be honored? A second problem is the role of interreligious dialogue. Dialogue has clearly been endorsed as “an integral part of the mission of the Church” (p. 254). But to what extent can inculturation include appropriating elements from the dominant local religion and regarding “a more hybrid religious consciousness as a channel for Grace” (p. 255)? “It has been in the domain of inculturation and relations with other faiths that the post-conciliar Church looks and feels, from top to bottom, significantly different from its pre-conciliar past” (p. 260). Yet, on the problems associated with these two issues the papacy has yet to find a consistent and coherent stance. Linden also applauds the Church’s witness for nonviolence. He worries about the Church becoming an “interest group” in secular societies rather than working for the common good and especially about sexual misconduct [End Page 562] eroding respect for the priesthood in Africa and elsewhere (p. 268). Despite the excellent work done by women’s religious orders, women “do not occupy top Curial positions or exert power in Vatican consistories” (p. 274), and “Rome has still to show a comprehensive understanding of the issue of gender relations” (p. 275). Finally, in Linden’s eyes, despite the...

Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics (review)

Reviewed by: Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics Brother Jeffrey Gros FSC , Robert Emmett Curran, and Dennis M. Doyle James P. McCartin, Prayers of the Faithful: The Shifting Spiritual Life of American Catholics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010) Summary Review The venerable heritage of U.S. Catholic history has been enriched by approaches that feature great figures, institutions, movements, theology and ideas, and ethnic groups. Recent historiography has expanded to attend to the interiority, perspectives, and piety of the general membership of the community. This is an important development, giving us a window into the prayer life of Catholic Christians in the last century and a half since the nineteenth-century immigrations. This author documents the discontinuities and continuities that feed into a future “in a world where the life of prayer will be even more dramatically marked by informal, independent, lay-centered initiatives capable of feeding an enduring hunger for contact with God” (183). The chronology takes on the familiar periodization: 1) Immigrant emergence in the nineteenth century; 2) American century twentieth-century acculturation; 3) mid-century assertive crusading spirit; 4) second half century coming of age, secular and Vatican II response; and 5) end of the century pluralization, polarization, with its personal and political fragmentation. In all of this the author discerns a deepening spiritual appropriation of the faith in prayer by the lay faithful as a democratization process that, from centralized, authoritarian, post-Vatican I, immigrant devotional life; to the partisan pro-life, anti-clerical Voice of the Faithful, social activism, charismatic diversity of the twentieth century, which places the center of the Christian faith and prayer in Catholic’s relationship with God; whatever the accompanying devotional vehicle, ecclesiastical framework, or disposition of authority and ecclesial credibilities. In each era he selects various prayer themes for emphasis, which are more evocative and indicative, than scientific and descriptive of the whole community. For this reason, his book is as much an invitation to research, as it is a description of the resources available for understanding the five epochs he sketches so suggestively. [End Page 69] This approach to history; rooted in the French Annales school, and Latin American popular religion, “bottom up,” liberation hermeneutics; is an important contribution to the growing U.S. historiographical task of mining the presuppositions and content of popular piety for understanding what is going on in society and church, whatever the ecclesiastics, pundits or theologians may say. The first phase of this story outlines the contribution of the institutions and loyalty of the clergy to the peoples’ devotion, from whatever European tradition; and the pressures of an anti-Catholic ethos contributed to a prayerful, devotional solidarity that transcended old world diversities. However, this institutionally supported devotionalism, and its institutional loyalties instilled an internalization of Catholic piety that gave it an ironic independence of the institutionalized Catholic culture of the old world that enabled this emergence of lay Christian integrity. This form of piety would motivate an integration into, and transformation of American culture unimagined by those who nourished this prayerful independence and strength among lay American Catholics. The second step, in early twentieth-century Catholicism, accounts how the increase in status and integration into the culture is accompanied by devotions that encouraged solitude and personal encounter with God and therefore a personalized lay piety. Devotions to the Little Flower and the Sacred Heart of Jesus also deepened a sense of family oriented and active, missionary engagement that empowered a generation of lay Catholic faithful as they struggled, through their unions and urban parishes. This community became an established part of the American landscape, and an irreversible American phenomenon that had its own influence on global Catholicism and its affirmation of the values of pluralism, religious freedom, and lay spirituality. The mid-century assimilation, and assertive spirituality, typified here by Father Patrick Peyton’s Rosary Crusades, so adapted to contemporary media utilization and film celebrity; demonstrated a communal piety, ecumenical openness and cultural adaptation. This Crusade was as sophisticated as any of the media evangelists of the emerging Billy Graham generation or beyond. The author uses Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker piety as a counterpoint and compliment. A rich...

Venerating the Virgin Martyrs: The Cult of the "Virgines Capitales" in Art, Literature, and Popular Piety

Venerating the Virgin Martyrs: The Cult of the "Virgines Capitales" in Art, Literature, and Popular Piety

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF PILGRIMAGE: ABU MINA AND BEYOND

Christian pilgrimage offers a unique insight into popular piety in Late Antiquity. However, our sources for pilgrimage, both literary and archaeological, vary widely in quality and volume, and modern scholarship has often depended heavily on the evidence from particular wellknown sites, most notably the sanctuary of St Menas at Abu Mina in Egypt. This site has revealed a remarkable density of archaeological remains, not only buildings but also the production and circulation of a wide variety of pilgrim souvenirs. Yet it is essential that we move beyond the sanctuary of St Menas and compare the evidence from Abu Mina with that from other major pilgrimage sites in the eastern Mediterranean. As we shall see in this paper, there is no simple pattern in organisation or souvenir production that can be identified in the archaeology of late antique pilgrimage.

Converting Bohemia: force and persuasion in the Catholic Reformation

Introduction: a tale of two windows: framing the history of early modern Bohemia 1. Severed heads and holy bones: authority and culture in post-White Mountain Bohemia 2. Reshaping identity and reforming the kingdom: confessional change and the nobility 3. 'Monarchs of Knowledge': mastering dissent in post-White Mountain Bohemia 4. Finding a holy past: antiquarianism and Catholic revival 5. Reshaping the landscape: art and confessional identity 6. Formation of the faithful: Catholicism in the countryside 7. Sermons, songs and scripture: reforming believers by the word 8. Pilgrimage and popular piety 9. Making Bohemia holy: Christian saints and Jewish martyrs Conclusion: between force and persuasion.

:Leonardo's Ghost: Popular Piety and "The Appearance of a Spirit" in 1628

:<i>Leonardo's Ghost: Popular Piety and "The Appearance of a Spirit" in 1628</i>

The Witch Figure: The Witch of Edmonton

IntroductionIn 1621, Elizabeth Sawyer was hanged for the of Agnes Ratcleife, following a well-publicised court case held at the Old Bailey. Immediately after Sawyer's execution Henry Goodcole, the chaplain of Newgate prison, published a pamphlet recounting in detail the trial and confession of Elizabeth Sawyer. Goodcole refers in the introduction to a number of ballads that describe Sawyer's supernatural orchestration of Agnes Ratcleife's suicide. While Goodcole refutes these claims as groundless rumours, the playwrights William Rowley, Thomas Dekker and John Ford include these accusations in their staging of The Witch of Edmonton. Using The Witch of Edmonton as a case study, I will argue that self-murder is a dramatic tool that definitively stigmatises the staged-witch.In studying the relationship between the play and its contextual material, this article is shaped by a number of studies on early modern pamphlets. Sandra Clarke in The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580-1640, for example, has examined moralistic pamphlets at length, while Alexandra Walsham has explored prodigies and providential pamphlets in her book Providence in Early Modern England.1 Tessa Watt has also conducted research into Protestant literature in Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550-1640. In expounding the relationship between providential readings within pamphlet material and the public stage, Peter Lake's The Anti-Christ's Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England has proved especially valuable to this research.2 While suicide pamphlets differ significantly from pamphlets, Peter Lake's work provides a template for the study of early modern suicide material.3 Highlighting important aspects of the relationship between pamphlet and play, Lake argues that: 'The more convoluted accounts of the workings of divine providence reach their apogee in some of the plays where a providential reading of the events portrayed sometimes far transcends the confirmation of the soundbite moral message murder will out so prevalent in the pamphlets. On the contrary, in many of the plays a providential reading of the text becomes, in effect, a legitimating underpinning for the plotting of the play or the telling of the tale.'4 In my study of the Elizabeth Sawyer narratives, this facet of the relationship between source materials and the play proves significant. However, in contrast to Peter Lake's observation, my primary thesis challenges the notion that the dramatisations transcend the moral didacticism of the source pamphlet. Indeed, it is the contention of this article that The Witch of Edmonton wholly inverts Lake's theorisation of the morally soundbiting pamphlet. Instead, I suggest that in the case of Dekker, Ford and Rowley's play The Witch of Edmonton, the nuanced and morally ambiguous narrative of Goodcole's confession pamphlet is reduced to a simplistic morality tale that draws on contemporary fears and superstitions.As originally outlined by St Thomas Aquinas in Summa Theologicae , the sin of self-murder is threefold. Firstly, suicide is denounced as an act against nature, secondly as a crime against the state, and thirdly as a sin against God.5 From the seventh century onwards, the law against self-murder was rooted in Christianity. But while medieval and early modern ecclesiastical writers cite biblical examples, such as the hanging of Judas, in arguments against suicide, the prohibition of suicide has little scriptural basis; in denunciations of self-murder, the majority of theologians do little more than cite the sixth commandment, 'Thou shault not kill'.6 Nevertheless, in the late Middle Ages, Christian condemnation of suicide was heralded by Augustine in Of the Cities of God:This we say, this we affirme, this wee vniuersally approoue, that no man ought to procure his owne death for feare of temporall miseries; because in doing this hee falleth into eternall: Neither may hee doe it to avoide the sinnes of others, for in this hee maketh himselfe guilty of a deadly guilt, whome others wickednesse could not make guilty: nor for his owne sinnes past, for which hee had more neede to wish for life, that hee might repent himselfe of them: nor for any desire of a better life to bee hoped for after death: Because such as are guiltie of the losse of their owne life, neuer enioye any better life after their death. …

Religious TV Series: The Making of Popular Piety Culture in Indonesia

In the last few years, Indonesia's post-Suharto's era has been marked by a proliferation of popular piety culture in the media. This proliferation is situated within the political transition from authoritarianism to democracy, the industrialization of media and the emergence of Islam as one of the important keys to unlocking the ongoing transformation of the political, social and cultural spheres of contemporary Indonesian society. My thesis, in general, is a study of the role of Islam in this transformation and how popular culture is an integral part of it. Through my study case of the production of a religious TV series, I want to explore the complexity that makes up religious practices when the piety movement takes up secular/capitalist media to further their movement. In other words, this paper asks: when the logic of the piety movement and the logic of the media industry converge, what kinds of practices in terms of religious practices and film-making practices are maintained, negotiated, and challenged? Building my methodological framework on theories of media practices (Bourdieu, 1977 and 1993; Couldry, 2004; Hobart, forthcoming; Rajagopal, 2001), I divide my analysis into how and why practices and standards are constructed, affirmed and challenged in two foci: on-site and off-site.

Flesh Made Word: Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination (review)

Reviewed by: Flesh Made Word: Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination Virginia Burrus (bio) Aviad Kleinberg. Flesh Made Word: Saints' Stories and the Western Imagination. Jane Marie Todd. Cambridge: Belknap/Harvard UP, 2008. 340 pp. ISBN 978-06740-2647-6, $29.95. The quintessentially Christian biographical genre known as the Lives of Saints has not lacked scholarly attention in recent decades. Indeed, prevailing interests in gender, sexuality, asceticism, narrative, and popular piety have made hagiography a hot topic for an entire generation of cultural and literary historians of Christianity. Aviad Kleinberg's recent book, Flesh Made Word, does not directly engage that scholarly conversation, but instead seeks to reach a broader audience. A Professor of History at Tel Aviv University and a specialist in the medieval period, Kleinberg has published earlier on a closely related topic—Prophets in Their Own Country: Living Saints and the Making of Sainthood in the Later Middle Ages (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1992), and more recently, Flesh Made Word has been joined by another popularizing work issued [End Page 516] by Harvard University's Belknap Press, Seven Deadly Sins: A Very Partial List, translated by Susan Emanuel (2008). Saints' stories, argues Kleinberg, are powerful sites of cultural memory, imagination, and creativity; they may tell us far more about the religious experiences and aspirations of pre-modern Christians than can be gleaned from theological treatises, canon law, or even liturgical texts. The celebrities of their day, saints take the stage in narratives that are shaped, and reshaped, by the needs and desires of their audiences. This process unfolds within the tension not only between popular religiosity and the ecclesial hierarchy, but also between the lure of the exotic and the desire for conformity. Admittedly, saints' stories can be used by the elite to manipulate the masses, but the elite cannot control how the stories are interpreted or retold, nor is the elite itself a monolith. The ambiguity and ambivalence seemingly inherent in hagiography renders it productively malleable and unstable, capable of conveying "experiences and feelings as conflict-ridden and contradictory as life itself is," concludes Kleinberg (297). The book is comprised of twelve fairly easily digestible chapters, framed by an introduction and concluding reflections. In the introduction, Kleinberg, who professes himself "a skeptic by nature," recounts an experience he had while viewing Mother Teresa on television: "I believed her." As he represents it, the momentary overcoming of his own "usual cynicism" opens a window onto the world of medieval Christians, for whom faith was a necessity and life without saints unimaginable: "the saint offered a window of hope, a consolation, and an antidote" (ix–x). In the first chapter, Kleinberg briefly extends his introductory musings on the nature of sainthood, emphasizing "charisma" as a potentially subversive, socially constituted phenomenon. Seven subsequent chapters focus on Mediterranean antiquity, interleaving broad historical discussions with readings of particular texts. An initial overview of the history of Christianity in the Roman period emphasizes martyrdom and the rise of the cult of the saints (chapter two), thereby setting up discussion of a well known early third-century martyrology, The Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas (chapter three). An account of asceticism in the early church (chapter four) is followed by a reading of the fourth-century Life of Antony, generally lauded as the first Christian biography (chapter five). Further reflection on the social role of the ascetic saint (chapter six) is followed by readings of two more late ancient hagiographies—Jerome's Life of Paul (chapter seven) and Antonios's Life of Simeon the Stylite (chapter eight). The ninth chapter is an ambitious hinge essay, bridging the considerable gap between the fifth and thirteenth centuries: it covers the development of monasticism in the early medieval west, with emphasis on the growing rift between the monastic elite, who continued to [End Page 517] produce hagiographies, and the rest of the (less than thoroughly Christianized) population, for whom a saint's cult was far more important than his or her literary Life. It also traces the broad impact of the eleventh-century reform movements on both saints' cults and hagiography, leading up to the explosion of hagiographical literature in the thirteenth century. The last...

Christian texts for Aztecs: art and liturgy in colonial Mexico

Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial is a cultural history of the missionary enterprise in sixteenth-century Mexico, seen primarily through the work of Catholic missionaries and the native populations, principally the Aztecs. Also known as the Mexica or Nahuas, speakers of the Nahuatl tongue, these Mesoamerican people inhabited the central plateau around Lake Texcoco and the sacred metropolis of Tenochtitlan, the site of present-day Mexico City. It was their language that the mendicant missionaries adopted as the lingua franca of the evangelization enterprise.Conceived as a continuation of his earlier, well-received City, Temple, Stage, Jaime Lara's new work addresses the enculturation of Catholic sacraments and sacramentals into an Aztec worldview in visual and material terms. He argues that Catholic liturgy - similar in some ways to pre-Hispanic worship - effectively conquered the religious imagination of its new Mesoamerican practitioners, thus creating the basis for a uniquely Mexican Catholicism. The sixteenth-century friars, in partnership with indigenous Christian converts, successfully translated the Christian message from an exclusively Eurocentric worldview to a system of symbols that made sense to the indigenous civilizations of Central Mexico.While Lara is interested in liturgical texts with novel or recycled metaphors, he is equally interested in visual texts such as neo-Christian architecture, mural painting, feather work, and religious images made from corn. These, he claims, were the sensorial bridges that allowed for a successful, if not wholly orthodox, enculturation of Christianity into the New World.Enriched by more than 280 color images and eleven appendices of translations from Latin and Nahuatl, Lara's study provides rich insights on the development of sacramental practice, popular piety, catechetical drama, and parish politics. Song, dance, flowers, and feathers - of utmost importance in the ancient religion of the Aztecs - were reworked in ingenious ways to serve the Christian cause. Human blood, too, found renewed importance in art and devotion when the indigenous religious leaders and the mendicant friars addressed the fundamental topic of the Man on the cross.An important work on worship, liturgy, and the visual imagination, Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial is a vivid look at a unique cultural adaptation of Christianity.

The Development of a Chalcedonian Identity in Byzantium (451–553)

AbstractThe Byzantine Church adopted a Chalcedonian identity only slowly. At first the majority even of Chalcedonians played down the significance of the council, claiming that it did little more than repeat the teaching of the Nicene Creed. Down to 518 committed Chalcedonians, strongly upholding the teaching of the council, were vocal, but few. It is with Justin I (518–527) and his nephew Justinian I (527–565) that State and Church came to insist on the council. Justinian's commitment to it has sometimes been doubted because of his repeated attempts to win back the non-Chalcedonians (Miaphysites) to the imperial Church by inviting them back without requiring subscription to the Chalcedonian Definition. He was motivated by a desire that even the Miaphysites would look to him as their patron, as required for the maintenance of the unity of the empire. But his theological writings make it clear that he was convinced of the truth of the teaching of Chalcedon. The age of Justinian thus saw the attainment of a truly Chalcedonian identity in the imperial Church. This was a matter of official doctrine. In the sphere of popular piety Chalcedon had less impact. The affirmation of Chalcedon shaped Byzantine communal identity less than the rejection of Chalcedon shaped that of Miaphysite Syria and Egypt.

From the Man in the White Suit to the Woman with the White Mantle: Milestones in my Education as an Anthropologist

The present paper pays tribute to a teacher who profoundly influenced the author's education as an anthropologist. Beginning with a discussion of memory, it explores the impact upon him of Douglas Miles's personality and style of teaching. Dwelling upon the idiosyncratic connections that often link what one is taught to what one is then able to apply as an ethnographer, it discusses the surprising relevance of Miles’ evocation of wayang kulit and ludruk to the author's understanding of the way Ireland's remote rural poor viewed television. It then broaches how Miles’ treatment of religious syncretism helped sensitise the author to this element in popular Catholic piety, something that has continued to inform both his study of Irish visionaries and their devotion to the Blessed Virgin, and his recent research into ‘Mother Mary's’ association with Vietnamese mother goddesses. Throughout, the aim is to celebrate the importance of an approach to comparative analysis that shows how the improbable and extraordinary can be used to illuminate our understanding of the most diverse phenomena.

Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late-Medieval and Reformation Germany

Popular Piety and Modes of Visual Perception in Late-Medieval and Reformation Germany

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Teaching &amp; Learning Guide for: Politics, Print Culture and the Habermas Thesis Cluster

Volksfrömmigkeit und Katholisches Milieu: Marienerscheinungen in Heede 1937-1940 im Spannungsfeld von Volksfrömmigkeit, nationalsozialistischem Regime und kirchlicher Hierarchie (review)

Volksfrommigkeit und Katholisches Milieu: Marienerscheinungen in Heede 1937-1940 im Spannungsfeld von Volksfrommigkeit, nationalsozialistischem Regime und kirchlicher Hierarchie By Maria Anna Zumholz. [Schriften des Instituts fur Geschichte und Historische Landesforschung, Band 12.] (Cloppenburg:Verlag und Druckerei Runge. 2004. Pp. 746.) In this interesting study, a slightly revised dissertation, Maria Anna Zumholz analyzes a series of Marian apparitions which occurred in Heede, a small village in the remote northwestern German Emsland region. She uses her analysis to offer a nuanced picture of the interplay between popular piety, Catholic milieu, ecclesiastical authority, and National Socialist repression. In a 200-page introduction, Zumholz provides a detailed history of the Emsland and its predominantly Catholic population. The Emsland changed hands repeatedly in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, always between states with Protestant rulers. Repression of their faith, combined with government neglect of this poor rural region, led the Emslander to form a high level of suspicion of any state authority. Zumholz argues that this population was particularly prone to beliefs in supernatural occurrences and in special gifts of certain individuals.The author also provides a review of Marian apparitions in Germany and elsewhere in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She points out that, in contrast to circumstances in other countries, no Marian apparition in Germany received ecclesiastical approbation. Zumholz believes that German bishops were not only Germanically thorough and strict in their review of these events, but they also feared the condescension of the Protestant majority, which considered Marian devotion in general and apparitions in particular to be proof of Catholic backwardness. In this context, Zumholz points to David Blackbourn's study of the supposed apparitions at Marpingen, events which German bishops remembered only all too well. The Marian apparition in Heede occurred over the course of three years in a village cemetery. Four adolescent girls claimed to have seen the Mother of God appearing between two trees.They continued seeing the image, although not on a regular basis.The girls claimed to have spoken with the image, whose presence nobody else, even those present, could perceive. While the local priest soon supported the young women in their claims, the Bishop of Osnabruck as well as state authorities of the Third Reich were alarmed by the claims and even collaborated in banning pilgrimages to the cemetery. The bishop's decrees and the draconian measures taken by the Gestapo and the Sicherheitsdienst (the intelligence branch of the SS), however, failed to stop people, even those traveling considerable distances, from coming to Heede. Zumholz uses these events to engage current debates about the formation and strength of both popular piety and the Catholic milieu. She argues convincingly that, at least in the Emsland, the milieu was deeply rooted in the community and that it had originated among the laity. …

Les corporations de Strasbourg au Moyen Age

This article investigates guilds in medieval Straßburg, analyzing their function and significance within the context of local political and constitutional history. Demonstrating that guilds were a fundamental element of this medieval community, the study traces their powerful influence on economic life, politics, social welfare, and popular piety, as well as on legal jurisdiction and advocacy. The microhistorical and prosopographical methods applied here reveal an extraordinary dynamism within such social groups, a quality which has been hitherto overlooked by scholars. This very flexibility and versatility, moreover, was crucial to the enduring success of guilds as a model for corporate life in and beyond the Middle Ages.

Im Zeichen von Kirchenreform und Reformation: Gesammelte Studien zur Kirchengeschichte in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit (review)

Reviewed by: Im Zeichen von Kirchenreform und Reformation: Gesammelte Studien zur Kirchengeschichte in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit Ralph Keen Im Zeichen von Kirchenreform und Reformation: Gesammelte Studien zur Kirchengeschichte in Spätmittelalter und früher Neuzeit. By Heribert Smolinsky. Edited by Karl-Heinz Braun, Barbara Henze, and Bernhard Schneider. [Reformationsgeschichtliche Studien und Texte, Supplementband 5.] (Münster:Aschendorff Verlag. 2005. Pp. vi, 469. €59,00.) Heribert Smolinsky has been one of the towering figures in the late-twentieth-century interpretation of Early Modern Catholicism. A careful reader of Reformation-era dogmatic treatises and an original researcher in the area of Catholic confessionalization, Smolinsky has over three decades helped shape our understanding of political and religious history during the sixteenth century. Since much of his work appeared in collected volumes and is not available [End Page 901] in digital form, this collection by three former students of twenty-two (from a total of over a hundred) of his papers is especially welcome. Organized in four sections representing the distinct research areas to which Smolinsky has contributed (Humanism and Educational History; Reformation History and Church Reform; the Reformation in the Upper Rhine; and History of Theology and Scholarship), these articles taken together demonstrate a mastery of detail combined with a methodological acuity that is instructive for church historians of any era or region. For many American historians of Early Modern Catholicism, Smolinsky's 1983 essay on Reformation History as Church History stands alongside the contributions of Hubert Jedin and John O'Malley for its clear grasp of the religious aspects of the Catholic response to the Reformation. Whether elucidating Thomas Murner's polemical use of satire (1987) or analyzing in 1991 the ecclesiastical diplomacy of Archbishop Albrecht of Brandenburg, Smolinsky is careful to set his findings within the extended Reformation narrative that includes late-medieval thought and Catholic Reform. Historians of late-medieval theology will find in the 1976 essay on Jean Gerson a detailed account of that chancellor's reform initiative at Paris. This was Smolinsky's first statement of the thesis that university reform was a precursor to religious reform, an argument supported in this volume by a 1994 survey of reformist tendencies in the universities and a close reading (first published in 1990) of Johann Eck's lectures on Genesis at Ingolstadt in the 1520's and '30's. These investigations expand our understanding of the role humanism played in religious reform; and Smolinsky's contributions also include wide-ranging essays from 1990 and 2002 on humanism in the Catholic theological faculties during the Reformation period and in the Rhineland, as well as a 1996 revision, using Jodocus Clichtoveus as the test-case, of the view that the Romanist controversialists were as opposed to humanism as they were to Protestantism. Popular religion also comes under scrutiny in studies of educational and catechetical reforms in Jülich-Cleve-Berg (1989); of literary forms of popular piety in Freiburg and its environs (1996); and (from 1998) of the "language controversy" of the immediate post-Tridentine decades, in which vernacular translations of scripture and liturgy were promoted in the interest of pastoral care. Smolinsky's 1995 essay on literary "Mirrors of Marital Life" (Ehespiegel) offers an illuminating glimpse of early-modern moral theology in vernacular form; and his depictions of the Jewish convert Paulus Weidner and of Jakob Feucht, the bishop of Bamberg who described in detail the 1577 conversion of two Jews, add little-known figures to a controversy long associated with the names of Johann Eck and Andreas Osiander. Two final essays, on patristics and exegesis in the Catholic controversialists (1999) and on the concept of apostolic succession (2004, originally for an ecumenical working group of German theologians) display a rare constructive subtlety and are likely to be especially influential in coming decades. As the dates of original publication indicate, all but two of these essays were no more than twenty years old in 2005, and many remain the latest contributions [End Page 902] on their topics. Heribert Smolinsky's work remains influential, and the editors are to be lauded for bringing it to the attention of a wider range of historians. Ralph Keen University of Iowa Copyright...

Training in Superstition? Monasteries and Popular Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England

The monasteries of late medieval England are regularly viewed as marginal to the religious lives of the laity, and have been largely omitted from the revisionist depiction of the pre-Reformation Church. Similarly the Dissolution has often been seen primarily as a financial measure, with limited religious motivations or consequences. This article seeks to challenge both these conclusions by drawing attention to the role played by religious houses of all sizes as centres of national and local pilgrimage. It is argued that monasteries exerted a strong and enduring influence over popular piety through their saints' cults, and as a result attracted the hostility of both Erasmian and evangelical reformers in Henrician England. This hostility should be seen as an important ingredient in the Dissolution.

Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350-1500 (review)

Reviewed by: Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350-1500 Maidie Hilmo Popular Piety and Art in the Late Middle Ages: Image Worship and Idolatry in England, 1350-1500. By Kathleen Kamerick. [The New Middle Ages, Series No. 27.] (New York: Palgrave. 2002. Pp. xi, 292. $89.95.) Kathleen Kamerick refers to the process of working on this project as a "search for understanding holy images." The result is a kind of archaeological excavation of late medieval religious and social culture that was distinguished by its multifaceted approach to images. Her first two chapters deal with both sides of the image controversies of this period in English history. The Lollards charged that images were prohibited in the First Commandment as idolatrous and that money spent on them should go to the poor, who were the true image of God. The defenders of images argued that the Incarnation of Christ meant that images of his human nature could be portrayed. Christ himself sanctioned their use by imprinting his image on Veronica's veil. In addition to this and other defenses, Roger Dymmok stated that God ordained them because of the superiority of sight over hearing. The defenders and attackers of images were, as Kamerick observes, concerned chiefly with how laypeople used them. The rest of Kamerick's study is an attempt to recover how the largest segment of the population used images. Her third chapter examines the evidence of wills in Norfolk and Suffolk. She gives useful charts about the distribution of image gifts by gender and geographical distribution. Particularly valuable insights are offered in Kamerick's fourth chapter dealing with the social and political dimensions of the images used by various communities. The parish accounts of church wardens, as well as the membership lists and account records of gilds, indicate how individual groups gained a sense of communal fellowship in their support of specific images and the public spaces they occupied. Images could also inform political allegiances, as in the case of the cult images of the Lancastrian King Henry VI. A highlight of this book is Kamerick's sensitive and probing analysis of the role of images in the lives of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe. Holy images, especially the crucifix, helped Julian understand and feel Christ's Passion. Bodily and spiritual sight worked concurrently as a conduit to reveal [End Page 153] God's love. Margery Kempe also fused bodily and spiritual senses in her visions. She was able to transfer the import of Christ's suffering on the cross to the suffering of animals and people in whom she saw the Lord. It is no wonder that she reacted bodily with loud weeping! The sixth chapter deals with the variety of responses to images in prayer books that fused the acts of reading and beholding. Rather than replacing books for the unlearned, a justification for their use given centuries earlier by Pope Gregory, images combined with texts, both together comprising the book. In many cases the texts guided the viewing of the pictures. There was a dynamic interaction between image, rubric, and text. This required the reader to flip back and forth, merging visual and verbal devotion with the physical and temporal movements of reading. Kamerick goes on to discuss indulgences and charms that became associated with images. Yet, according to Kamerick, the massive iconoclasm of the early sixteenth century was sparked less by the questionable magical properties assigned to certain images than by the ways in which people attributed animate qualities to statues. This book is indispensable for scholars of late medieval culture and for those seeking to understand this period of religious transition in England. Maidie Hilmo University of Victoria Copyright © 2007 The Catholic University of America Press

Popular piety and political identity in Mexico's Cristero rebellion. Michoacán, 1927–29. By Matthew Butler. Pp. xx+251 incl. map and 12 ills. Oxford: Oxford University Press (for the British Academy), 2004. £40. 0 19 726298 8

Popular piety and political identity in Mexico's Cristero rebellion. Michoacán, 1927–29. By Matthew Butler. Pp. xx+251 incl. map and 12 ills. Oxford: Oxford University Press (for the British Academy), 2004. £40. 0 19 726298 8 - Volume 57 Issue 4