The Reformation

A Brief History

Kenneth G. Appold

• Publisher: Wiley-Blackwell
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781444397680
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Historia de la religión

The Reformation: A Brief History is a succinct and engaging introduction to the origins and history of the Protestant Reformation.

• A rich overview of the Reformation, skillfully blending social, political, religious and theological dimensions
• A clearly and engagingly written narrative which draws on the latest and best scholarship
• Includes the history of the Reformation in Scandinavia and Eastern Europe, areas that are rarely covered in any detail
• The Reformation is placed in the context of the entire history of Christianity to draw out its origins, impetus, and legacy

Chapter 1

The Different Paths of Medieval Christianization

Christianity among the Rural Poor

Medieval Europe was rural. The vast majority of Europeans who lived in the Latin West of the continent were scattered about the countryside in villages, small towns and settlements. In most regions, less than 10 per cent of the population had come to live in cities by the year 1500. This is an important fact to keep in mind when studying the developments that led up to the Reformation. Medieval Europe’s rural demographics, its feudal social structure, and its minimal rates of literacy all influenced that history to an enormous degree.

There was probably no such thing as a “typical” medieval village, since their populations could vary from a few dozen to several hundred or even a thousand. Most rural communities, however, shared a number of important characteristics that remained remarkably constant over the centuries. For one thing, village economies were almost entirely agrarian. Villagers farmed the fields that surrounded their homes. Their lives were organized by the chores of the seasons: plowing, planting, cultivating, and harvesting. Winters were times to be endured, especially in places where they were long and hard, and villagers only survived them if they had stored enough grain and produce to make it through. The fortunate had livestock to help with the chores and to produce additional food. Not surprisingly, life-expectancies were low by modern standards: few villagers could hope to live much past 40. Poor harvests, malnutrition, and vulnerability to disease kept that number low, as did additional factors such as childbirth, attacks by outsiders, or war.

Many village economies in the Middle Ages were self-sufficient and therefore isolated. Their inhabitants were subsistence farmers who produced just enough to feed themselves: grain for bread, fruit and vegetables, eggs, and occasional meat from livestock or hunting and fishing. More complex village societies included artisans, such as blacksmiths or carpenters, who played supporting roles in the economy. Beyond the village itself, trade was limited. Peasants would have produced little surplus, and communication between communities was sparse. These villagers relied on themselves. As a result, strangers were greeted with suspicion. Outsiders were not part of the village production cycle and represented additional mouths to feed, or, worse, a threat of violence or exploitation.

Some outsiders, however, had to be accepted. The most common of these were landlords. Many villagers were tenant farmers who paid rent to a landlord who often lived somewhere else and only appeared, in person or by emissary, to collect his due. In exchange, the lord offered promises of protection. The arrangement was a basic feature of feudal society, the dominant social order of medieval Europe. In such a society, peasant farmers enjoyed varying degrees of freedom. Some actually owned their own land and had no lord above them. Most, however, were subject to rental agreements and to someone who owned the land. As time went on, those agreements became more and more restrictive. Many peasants had the status of serfs; they were often tied to their landlord’s land and not allowed to move. Such serfs had virtually no freedom to travel—or even to marry without the lord’s approval. They paid a significant portion of their produce to the lord in rent and provided labor for the rent they could not pay. By the time of the Reformation, many contemporaries regarded serfdom as a form of slavery.

Within the village, one building towered over all the rest. It was the church. The church is fascinating for a number of reasons. For one thing, churches had no obvious utilitarian function within an agrarian economy. They did not house farmers or animals, nor did they store grain. They mostly stood empty. Second, they were the domain of another village outsider: the priest. Priests, too, had no obvious economic function. In many cases, they acted as landlords, which meant that they had to be paid rents by those who planted on church property, and thus consumed part of the village’s goods without producing anything tangible in return. Given the parameters of these societies, living on a knife’s edge between subsistence and extinction, one has to wonder how it came to be that churches and clergy could exist at all in their midst. Why would these people want a church?

The answer to this question lies in a complex historical process known as Christianization. After Germanic hordes swept through Western Europe in the fifth century, destroyed the urban-centered civilization of late antiquity, and settled amidst the rubble that remained, a long process of rebuilding began. Buried among the ashes of a plundered Rome, isolated embers of thought survived. From here, and from other former cultural centers, sparks of learning spread and began to illumine, very gradually, the newly dominant barbarian peoples. The primary means of transmission was religion. Religion lends meaning to existence; it also contributes to everyday existence by identifying and communicating with the powers that determine life’s trajectories. The Germans were interested in religion; some in fact were Christian, converted long before they began their westward run. Christianity, the religion of the late Roman Empire, the religion that had absorbed so much of Greek, Roman, and Jewish thought and learning, now spread to the German tribes, who had previously seen that culture mostly from afar. In so doing, Christianity became the driving force in the recultivation of Europe.

Framing the narrative in this way opens the door to a common misunderstanding. The Christianization of Europe was not simply a process that brought learning and high culture to a primitive people. For one thing, the vast majority of Europeans were illiterate and Christianity did not change that fact. Ninety-five per cent of Western Europeans remained illiterate at the time of the Reformation, which in some cases was more than a thousand years after initial Christianization. It would be a mistake, therefore, to reduce Christianity to its intellectual components, its theology, and doctrines. Most medieval Christians had little comprehension of such things, and abstract theological discourse, aside from being exceedingly rare through much of the Middle Ages, had little direct impact on their lives. Christianity was more than learning. Christianity was a religion. It included—and inspired—intellectual activities of profound quality, but it did much more, especially for common people. It embraced their lives by bringing them into contact with a power beyond their existence in the here-and-now, and by describing that power as benevolent. While that assuaged concerns about an afterlife, it also affected their present lives. People turned to Christianity for blessings on their activities and relations, or for protection in a perilous cosmos filled with forces they could not control. Those aspects were particularly important to agrarian people, whose lives depended upon successful harvests, on finding a partner for procreation, and on protection from crop-ruining weather or plundering armies. Christianity also brought a specific ethos to medieval societies: a way of being “holy” and of following the life-example of Jesus Christ. At the very least, such values affected the way people related to each other—or, barring that, it affected the way they felt they ought to relate to each other.

Christianity was not simply a religion for individuals; it was an organized religion. From its beginnings, Christianity has had a corporate, communal dimension. Christians refer to themselves collectively as one “Body of Christ.” Much of medieval history revolved around various attempts to translate that notion of a singular body of believers into an institutional and political reality. That task was made all the more urgent by the collapse of the Roman Empire, which left Western Europe without a central or unifying political authority. By offering the concept of a “universal church,” Christianity provided an important resource in that effort. Furthermore, because the most prominent church leader of the Western Empire, the bishop of Rome, continued to reside in the former capital, a vision for a new Roman Europe, consolidated under the auspices of the church’s leadership, began to emerge. While that vision never came to full fruition, it did contribute to a long-term interweaving of religious and political institutions. There would be no “separation of church and state” in the Middle Ages. As Christianity expanded, its church organization sought to keep pace. As it did so, it stepped into a political vacuum, assuming many of the functions of secular government. It also began to organize itself hierarchically in order to bring communities under joint regional oversight. In both cases, urban bishops were the key figures, supervising churches in their dioceses and functioning as governors in their cities. While the bishop of Rome early on claimed a unique position atop the entire hierarchy, those claims had little practical meaning before the eleventh century. Instead, Western Christianity began organizing its institutions at an intermediate level, with leadership located in a variety of centers, such as Tours, Reims, Mainz, Rome, or Canterbury.

Even from these more local vantage points, medieval Christianity remained more chaotic than united. Contemporary authors often underestimate this, either because they project a version of today’s Roman Catholic church and its papal leadership onto the past, or because they take the past’s papal apologists too readily at face value. Unity—however it was imagined by medieval leaders—proved elusive. That becomes increasingly evident as one considers the case of village life.

As Christianity spread through Europe, more and more villages acquired churches. Often, these were built by local lords, who also assumed rights to nominate priests (rights of patronage) and to claim a portion of the church’s income, which consisted largely of tithes (10 per cent of one’s earnings or produce) paid by the peasant villagers. The peasants themselves appear to have had an ambivalent attitude toward the church in their village. If complaints registered by priests are to be believed, most peasants had very little interest in organized worship—which, of course, is what the priest thought important. They did attend mass, but ignored most of the proceedings. In their view, “church” was a place for social interaction, and this did not require clergy. And so they talked during the readings and sermons, filed in and out during the liturgy, and behaved as though the priest were not present. If anything was likely to capture their attention, it was the elevation of the host at communion. The wafer—taught to be the body of Christ—was thought to radiate benevolent and protective powers. This was worth a moment’s attention, and many parishioners who were busy socializing outside made sure they were in the church in time to witness the event. Once it was over they went back to what they were doing.

Accounts such as these are many, but one should remember that they are usually written from the priests’ perspective. Had one surveyed peasant parishioners, one may have heard a different story, since complaints about priests’ frequent absences, negligence of duties, or onerous demands of rent and taxes were common. The fact that relations between priests and peasants were often strained does not mean that peasants were not interested in religion—or that they were only superficially Christianized, as some have argued. It simply means that many common people sought forms of religious expression that bypassed clerical control. Pilgrimages, to cite a prominent example of medieval piety, did not require clergy once they were established. Veneration of local saints, or of relics, took place outside the regular mass and was often private. Objects such as holy water, crosses, or the eucharistic host were taken out of their “proper” liturgical context and used to ward off evil spirits, bless crops, or control the weather. Clergy—and later Reformers—often criticized such practices as superstitious, but the underlying conflict is one over power and control: who has access to spiritual powers? Clergy sought to control that access on their terms, but many laypeople simply ignored those efforts and made use of Christian rites and symbols on their own. Who represented the “true” Christianity? That, in part, was at issue.

All of these factors make it difficult to speak of “the church” as a unified hierarchical institution during the Middle Ages. Even if such a hierarchy was united at the top—and as we shall see, that was seldom the case—it still needed to find a way to organize the widely scattered faithful into a coherent flock. Such institutional unity was predicated upon clerical authority and control. At the very latest, that control tended to break down at the local level, where Christians typically created their own religious programs and frequently marginalized their priests. Medieval Europe was a mission field, and Christianization was a kind of mission. As in any mission setting, the recipients of a new faith tend to appropriate it on their own terms. The results are not always what the missionaries envisioned. That was certainly the case among the rural poor who comprised the vast majority of medieval Christians.

Nonetheless, the very fact that nearly every village came to have a church building and most people looked to that church to provide basic spiritual services such as baptism, marriage and funerals, arranged their lives according to the festivals and fasts of a Christian liturgical year, and engaged in devotional practices that in some way drew on Christian thoughts and images, points to a large-scale cultural phenomenon with more than minimal coherence. For all their obvious differences, people as far apart as Italy and Iceland still attended Easter services on the same day every year and had compatible notions of what the day was about. Even when the institutional church was in disarray, such commonalities continued. That was Christianization—and the following pages offer a brief account of how it came about.

Two Sides of Medieval Christianization

Christianization refers to the process by which groups of people become Christian. Normally, this involves some form of voluntary assent to Christian truth-claims, symbols and values. Barring outright coercion, people become Christian because they are persuaded, at some level, by the new religion. Many people who become Christian—and this is true of those who inhabited early-medieval Europe—already were religious and now find themselves replacing or adapting parts of their old belief-system. Something old and familiar is replaced by something new and alien that is brought in from the outside. Accordingly, during Christianization a people’s religious life becomes formed and regulated according to Christian norms and contents. Both aspects—personal persuasion and external regulation—are part of the process.

Inevitably, Christianization is a complex phenomenon. It merits a much fuller theoretical discussion than is possible here. For the present historical survey, however, a broad distinction between two sides of medieval Europe’s Christianization may prove helpful. They correspond roughly to the two aspects of the process sketched in the section “Two Sides of Medieval Christianization.” The regulative challenges were met by institutionalization. This included, but was by no means restricted to, the creation of a hierarchically organized institutional church. That process was not only a matter for the clergy. As we shall see, non-clerical authority figures such as kings and emperors also felt responsible for the custody and supervision of the Christian religion. In medieval Europe, Christianity’s institutionalization went hand in hand with the challenge of building and rebuilding a society. That makes it hard to distinguish between political and ecclesial agendas. If kings felt responsible for the church, it is also true that priests and bishops felt responsible for society.

The second factor has to do with the persuasiveness of Christianity. If Christianity had not seemed worthy of adoption, if it had not seemed attractive and compelling on a personal level, it would not have spread. Coercion would not have sufficed (though, as always, there were some who thought it might). As it happened, one factor seemed particularly important for this development: the moral and spiritual integrity of those who brought the message. In many cases, these people were monks. It was they, more than any other representative of the church, who exemplified in their own lives what it meant to follow Christ, both on an individual and on a communal level. They presented a pattern of what a life of holiness, a Christ-like life, could look like—and their example proved inspiring. Without monks, and without their monastic ethos, there would have been no Christianization. The institutional church would have had far less credibility. This, then, is the other side of the process.

Christianity flourished when both factors—institutionalization and a compelling spiritual example—were united. Regrettably, that was not always the case. Tied as it was to the rebuilding of European society, Christian institutionalization made use of power structures that, by their very nature, were “worldly” and often indistinguishable from those of secular or even non-Christian political life. Subjugated peoples were no more likely to respect an urban bishop acting as local governor than they were a local governor who had no relationship to the church. That was all the more true if such urban bishops draped themselves with the usual secular accoutrements of wealth and power that, in their eyes, were necessary to communicate “status” (and made life more pleasant to boot). If, moreover, those same bishops preached sermons about renouncing the world and serving Christ in humility, the combination could not help but seem hypocritical. Who would believe such a man?

Such situations arose often as Europe was rebuilt after the fall of Rome. Through his conversion in 312, and subsequent rise to power as Emperor of Rome, Constantine the Great had established state sponsorship of the Christian religion. This not only allowed Christianity to move out of its minority niche, it also designated properties as belonging to the church, thereby setting an important, if controversial precedent. While that sponsorship ended in the West after the Empire’s decline, it was revived, at first on a more local level, by the Frankish kings. Beginning with Clovis (c. 466–511), whose conversion account mirrors that of Constantine in many ways, royal support of the Catholic faith and its institutions returned.

The interconnectedness of ecclesial and temporal powers took several forms. In cities that had long served as episcopal residences, the bishop in many cases remained the most significant person of authority after the empire’s disintegration. As the Franks established new administrative structures in their kingdoms, those bishops served in both a secular and religious role, at the same time governor and pastoral supervisor. The ambiguity resulting from such arrangements was exacerbated by the wealth and property that the bishops accrued.

The very notion that the church could own property remained problematic. Legally, there was the question—not fully clear from precedents in Roman law—of who, exactly, the owner in such cases was. Some deeds designated Jesus Christ; others mentioned individual saints. Even if one conceived of a corporate identity defined as “the church,” there still remained questions of who acted on behalf of that church. In practice, bishops felt that they did. That assumption was often contested by lords and kings, however, and such conflicts permeate the entire era.

The situation was even less clear in rural regions. Here, most churches were built and maintained by local lords. Those lords understandably felt that they owned that church. They nominated and paid the clergy; they retained a portion of the parish income. In principle, all of this required approval by a bishop, but that had little impact on the day-to-day workings of these so-called “proprietary churches” under a lord’s control. The priest was, for all practical purposes, a subject of his landlord. At the same time, the priest drew a portion of the parish’s income himself. That placed him in a social position above that of the peasants whose rents and taxes helped support him.

Politically, even the wealthiest Frankish bishops had to face the reality that their king guaranteed the viability of their claims and protected them from outside aggression. They were dependents of the king. That dependency was all the more obvious when the church did not own properties outright, but received property rights from a lord or king. The transfer of such rights was typically accompanied by a ritual known as “investiture.” This was not the same as consecration, by which the bishop received his spiritual authority from other bishops, but it was significant nonetheless. In investiture, the king solemnly handed the bishop symbols of authority—a ring and staff—and said the words accipe ecclesiam, or “accept this church.” That effectively made the bishop a vassal to the king. He now owed fealty to his worldly superior, and in turn exercised land-owning privileges over all those who, by living on “his” land, became his worldly subjects. In this way, clergy were integrated into the feudal system. If Christianity had a long history of placing itself over and against “the world,” that notion now became harder to maintain. The church wa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Contents
• Halftitle page
• Series page
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Map
• Chapter 1: The Different Paths of Medieval Christianization
• Chapter 2: The Luther Phenomenon
• Chapter 3: Reformation Reforms
• Chapter 4: The Reformation’s Establishment
• Epilogue: The Reformation’s Legacy
• Index