Invisible Worlds

Death, Religion And The Supernatural In England, 1500-1700

Peter Marshall

• Publisher: SPCK Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780281075232
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Early Modern History
• Index: History

- Ever wonder if there was light after Dark Ages?
- This history of the Church from the 15th to the 18th centuries is explored with insight and inquisition
- Starting with the aftermath of the Reformation, this book is a must for knowing the Church's rootsAfter a historiographical and interpretative introduction, the book falls into two parts, both referencing the 'Invisible Worlds' of the title, and representing different angles of vision on aspects of early modern belief that today seem particularly strange and disturbing, even to believing Christians.The first five chapters consider the intellectual and cultural consequences of the Reformation's assault on established beliefs about the afterlife, and the experience of souls there. They show how debates about the existence of purgatory, and related matters such as the nature of hell-fire, acted as unwitting agents of modernization, but also provided scope for ordinary people to practise a kind of vernacular theology.The second part looks at deeply-held beliefs around angels, ghosts and fairies, and how these were re-appropriated and reimagined when cut from their traditional theological moorings.

Part 1

HEAVEN, HELL AND PURGATORY: HUMANS IN THE SPIRIT WORLD

1

After purgatory: death and remembrance in the Reformation world

I

Wherever it took hold, the Reformation changed the meaning and experience of death. More specifically, it picked apart a rich and complex cultural grammar of commendation and commemoration for the dead. This grammar involved ritual, doctrine, liturgy and material objects, as well as deeply ingrained habits of thought, language and gesture. What bound it together was the conviction that the dead were in a dynamic condition of change and improvement in the next life, something which kept them connected in intimate ways with the motives and actions of those left behind in the world. The living had responsibilities towards the dead, to remember them in specific ways and in specific contexts. The aim was not to bind, but to release them, to help see them safely to journey’s end and to their final heavenly home. To pray for the dead was to partake in the process of their redemption, and in so far as society was geared up and equipped for this task, it collectively volunteered itself to support the salvific work of Christ.

The great strength of the medieval scheme of commemoration was that it aligned an emotional impulse to do right by the dead with a cosmological explanation of their condition and location. Purgatory – that crowning achievement of the medieval social imaginary – was at once a place of confinement, a state of being and a clarion call for acknowledgement and response. Death, paradoxically, served to affirm the claims and character of common humanity, exemplified in the ubiquitous medieval legend of the three kings who encounter a trio of animated rotting corpses: ‘What you are, so once were we; what we are, so you shall be.’1 Such imagery, in addition to its memento mori function, pointed towards the powerful unwritten contract between generations past and present. Precisely because the living would come to share the fate of the dead and their condition of need, they must not forget them, but stir themselves to action to alleviate their plight. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

But right across Europe in the course of the sixteenth century, that contract was challenged, tested at law and found to be without validity. Purgatory – so the reformers taught their congregations – was a lie, a fiction and an invention. From an early date, Europe’s disparate reform movements were remarkably unanimous in this conclusion. Unlike the Eucharist, baptism or predestination, the question of purgatory was hardly ever a cause of doctrinal dissension among Protestants. It may have taken Luther more than a decade from the time of his protest over indulgences in 1517 to finally and explicitly deny the possibility of any middle state for souls in his Widerruf vom Fegefeuer (Repeal of Purgatory) of 1530. But already in 1521 he was denouncing masses for the dead, and he soon came to regard all forms of post-mortem intercession as Gaukelwerke, works of trickery.2 Other early reformers were less hesitant. In the preaching and polemic of English evangelicals like William Tyndale or Hugh Latimer, purgatory was simply ‘purgatory pickpurse’. In a still more resonant phrase, the early Swiss reformers Pamphilius Gengenbach and Nicholas Manuel denounced traditional teaching about the afterlife by the Catholic clergy as Totenfresserei, feasting, or rather guzzling, upon the dead.3

The ferocity of such assaults has perhaps never been thoroughly accounted for. It is often pointed out that purgatory had uncertain scriptural foundations, but then so did other key doctrines largely uncontentious within mainstream Protestantism, such as infant baptism and the Trinity. The rage seems to come from a deeper place – a sense of anger and betrayal at being hoodwinked by the clergy, certainly. Or was the revulsion in any way fuelled by ambivalent feelings towards the dead themselves, that fear and resentment which can sometimes accompany the grief of bereavement? Whatever the psychological imperatives in play, wherever Protestantism came to power, it was agreed that the dead had no right to demand the prayers of the living, and the living had no obligation to supply them. In the space of a few years, the doctrinal rationale for a plethora of ritual observances and material constructions was entirely swept away, and the whole basis on which the dead were to be honoured and remembered was open for renegotiation.

For Catholic observers, this was frequently an occasion of bewilderment, shock and trauma. Johann Leyp, the last remaining Catholic pastor in Chemnitz in Lutheran Saxony, looked around him in 1534 and saw how ‘the dead are buried without a cross or candles in silence, like senseless beasts, like dogs’. Similarly, in France in 1556, a Catholic writer caustically observed how Huguenots would ‘throw the body into the grave without saying anything or making any more ceremony than for a dog or a horse’. Another French Catholic considered the heretics’ ‘miserable treatment of the dead . . . tearful to see’.4 The Elizabethan English Catholic William Allen looked across the channel from exile in 1565 and lamented that ‘nowe there is no blessing of mannes memorie at all’. Towards the end of the century, the Dutch humanist Arnoldus Buchelius bewailed the fact that Protestants ‘neglect the monuments of the ancients, and do not attend to the memorial masses of our ancestors, saying that their names have already been written in heaven, so that some of them seem more barbaric than the Goths themselves’.5 Such statements are evidence of an immediate and instinctive reaction to sacrilegious transgression, in the setting aside of familiar and valued rituals, but they also point to a wider unease about a kind of social amnesia, an abandonment of the crucial symbolic connections between current and past tenants of the earth.

II

Modern scholarship does not in the main share the spiritual anxieties and regrets of sixteenth-century Catholics, but it has been inclined to echo the perception that in this area, even more than in others, the Reformation initiated dramatic and long-lasting patterns of change, with implications far beyond the world of ecclesiastical ritual and doctrine. It is commonly asserted, for example, that what the Protestant reformers effected was nothing less than a thoroughgoing redefinition of human community, severing all connections between the living and the dead, and casting out the latter from the position they had enjoyed as an honorary ‘age group’ in medieval society.6 The dead were not just dead; they were dead and gone. This did not necessarily mean that they were forgotten, but rather that they were remembered in profoundly new ways, ones which brought about far-reaching changes in the meaning of memory itself. Medieval concepts of memory were profoundly structured by what, in a classic discussion, the German historian Otto Gerhard Oexle called ‘Die Gegenwart der Toten’ – the presence of the dead. Subsequent scholarship has done much to elaborate the concept of memoria as an organizing principle of medieval social and cultural life, noting how it was constituted through a multitude of gift exchanges, and a ritualized refiguring – literally re-membering – of the dead through the recital of their names in a variety of liturgical and quasi-liturgical contexts.7 Medieval memoria, it is argued, served to collapse the gap between past and present which is central to modern ideas of memory. The Reformation, however, by ejecting the dead from a ritual and intercessionary ‘present’, demarcated the past more clearly and endowed it with a new ontological status. ‘The rejection of memoria’, suggests Craig Koslofsky, ‘was essential to the modern order of memory based on linear, directional time and a past of dead individuals, absent, with whom the living could have only the most disturbing contact.’8 Thus, it would seem, the origins of the modern discipline of history itself turn out to be surprisingly closely entwined with the eschatological concerns of the Reformation.

Such models of explanation are based in part upon developments in twentieth-century art-historical theory, particularly around the interpretation of tombs and monuments. A seminal study of Tomb Sculpture by the German art historian Erwin Panofsky argued that post-Reformation monuments were fundamentally ‘retrospective’, seeking to enumerate and commemorate the achievements of the dead person during a life now terminated; quite unlike the ‘prospective’ monuments of the Middle Ages, with their evident concern for the still mutable condition of the deceased in the afterlife.9

This, then, was a new idiom of commemoration with potentially far-reaching social and cultural consequences. One line of development scholars have spotted leads towards a greater emphasis on the lived identity of the dead person, and intersects with the rise of modern individualism.10 Here, a greater biographical emphasis in tombs, monuments and epitaphs seems of a piece with the abandonment of collective rituals for the achievement of a good death, and successful navigation of the afterlife. For had not Luther preached in a sermon of 1522 that ‘everyone must fight his own battle with death by himself, alone’?11

A second and related argument sees the retrospective and this-worldly character of Protestant memorial culture as a symptom of a larger process of conceptual reorientation, one of desacralization or secularization. Funerary monuments in churches came to be much more about celebrating honour and lineage, and about articulating the social and political order, than about providing symbols of Christian hope.12

It is not hard to find examples to support the thesis, whether in the apparently excessive concern with heraldic display that can be found on elite monuments across northern Europe, or in seemingly merely naturalistic and unspiritualized representations of the recumbent form. It was of such sepulchres that the English playwright John Webster was thinking when he has a character in The Duchess of Malfi exclaim:

Princes images on their tombes

Do not lie, as they were wont, seeming to pray

Up to heaven: but with their hands under their cheekes,

(As if they died of the tooth-ache) . . . not carved

With their eies fix’d upon the starres; but as

Their mindes were wholly bent upon the world

The self-same way they seeme to turne their faces.13

It has seemed, moreover, to some modern commentators that in promoting a stronger sense of the finality of judgement at death, the Reformation sharpened a contrast between worldly achievements to be celebrated and conserved, and the dark oblivion that awaited beyond.14 In his brilliant and provocative Very Brief History of Eternity, Carlos Eire suggests that the abrogation of purgatory and what followed from it was no less than ‘a significant first step toward the elevation of this world as the ultimate reality and towards the extinction of the soul’.15

It is clear, then, that the Reformation’s rethinking of the meaning of commemoration, shaped by the reformers’ unmasking of ‘fraudulent’ purgatory, has been asked to do a lot of historical work. As an important foundational component, both of a modern sense of individual selfhood, and of a profoundly secularizing impulse, it would seem as if the abolition of purgatory is being made into one of the defining conditions of modernity itself. It is of course the task and responsibility of historians to construct ambitious explanatory models of historical development, to suggest connections between disparate synchronous phenomena, and to identify the processes and dynamics at work in effecting changes we might well want to regard as epochal. But, attractive though they are, grand theories about the relationship between the assault on purgatory and the emergence of the modern world pose some significant problems, as grand theories always do.

In the first place, there is the need to consider the existence of the very different patterns of funerary ritual and commemorative culture to be found in different parts of the Protestant world. Second, and still more pertinently, such theories have a convenient tendency to forget that most parts of western Europe did not abandon purgatory, because they did not ultimately adopt the Reformation. In much of Catholic Europe, as several studies have noted, interest in post-mortem intercession and the cult of the holy souls actually intensified in the post-Reformation era.16 If radical reform of the afterlife is made the condition of modernity, then Catholicism is by definition excluded from a role in the making of modernity, which seems not so much discriminatory as deeply implausible. Third, now that historians have caught up with sociologists of religion in becoming sceptical about the secularization thesis itself, and as it has become increasingly evident that secularity is hardly the most prominent feature of the world we collectively inhabit, a need to identify so emphatically its putative historical roots is arguably a less pressing task.

III

The rest of this chapter seeks to probe some of these concepts a little further, asking what patterns of mortuary and commemorative practice in the post-Reformation world can tell us about the prioriti...

Table of contents

• Introduction
• Part 1 HEAVEN, HELL AND PURGATORY: HUMANS IN THE SPIRIT WORLD
• 1 After purgatory: death and remembrance in the Reformation world
• 2 ‘The map of God’s word’: geographies of the afterlife in Tudor and early Stuart England
• 3 Judgement and repentance in Tudor Manchester: the celestial journey of Ellis Hall
• 4 The Reformation of hell? Protestant and Catholic infernalisms c.1560–1640
• 5 The company of heaven: identity and sociability in the English Protestant afterlife c.1560–1630
• Part 2 ANGELS, GHOSTS AND FAIRIES: SPIRITS IN THE HUMAN WORLD
• 6 Angels around the deathbed: variations on a theme in the English art of dying
• 7 The guardian angel in Protestant England
• 8 Deceptive appearances: ghosts and reformers in Elizabethan and Jacobean England
• 9 Piety and poisoning in Restoration Plymouth
• 10 Transformations of the ghost story in post-Reformation England
• 11 Ann Jeffries and the fairies: folk belief and the war on scepticism in later Stuart England
• Notes
• Further reading
• Acknowledgements
• Search terms