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Popular culture and the counter-reformation
History Printed
o/Europem Ideas, in Great Britam
Vol
I I. pp 493-499,
POPULAR CULTURE
1989
0191-6599/89 $3 00 + 0 00 ‘i 1990 Rrgamo” Pres plc
AND THE COUNTER-REFORMATION MICHAEL MULLETT*
The argument that the great long-term renewal in Catholicism known as the Counter- or Catholic Reformation represented a sustained and successful attack on European popular culture on a broad front is now widely accepted by historians of the period, it having been put forward with particular authority by Robert Muchembled, and by several others. In Muchembled’s terms, the long-and we must insist on the lengthy duration of the experience-the long process amounted to a kind of acculturation, analogous to what happened when Western cultures supplanted indigenous cultures in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. In post-16th century Europe, the ethos of the CounterReformation-disciplinarian, pious, proto-rationalistic, academic, urban, puritan and work-ethical-extinguished and was put in place of a largely rural, older, demotic, autonomous, oral, traditional, collective, bucolic and magical outlook and culture. Apart from one or two minor modifications, much of the overall thesis is probably irrefutable. However, there are some niggling anxieties over the model, and I should like to consider one or two of them here, Since this is necessarily a brief discussion only, I shall have the chance to touch on just a few aspects of the topic, and these mostly concern not the relationship between Catholic Reformation and popular culture as a whole but the interaction between the ‘elite’ and largely clerical religiosity of the Counter-Reformation and aspects of popular religious culture or the forms of popular culture having a predominantly religious or cultic expression. Within those terms of reference, I should like to focus particularly on two human types-saints and priests-and on any possible overlap between those two categories. Incidentally, in discussing popular culture, the populace I have in mind most of the time will be peasants-a sufficiently vast and complex category to be going on with. My overall argument will be that in the encounter between those great lumbering categories, ‘Counter-Reformation’ and ‘popular culture’, the outcome was not so much a victory of former over latter but a negotiation and a complex adjustment. The longer the view we take, the more we are likely to find, in the aftermath of the first phase of Catholic reform, first the durability of underlying popular cultural and devotional themes and, second, an interactive rather than acculturative relationship between the Church’s clerical establishment and its ‘rank and file’ lay membership. Much of my case rests indeed on giving the tag ‘Counter-Reformation’ to a great swathe of Catholic church history not just, as with Jean Delumeau, ‘between Luther and Voltaire’ but between Luther and Pius IX or even between Luther and John XXIII. And even if we are unwilling to characterise a whole 400-year span of Catholic church history as a long Counter-Reformation era, we shall certainly find that in the *Department of History, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YW, U.K. 493
494
Michael Mullett
later stages of that period-in the first half of the 19th century-some of the underlying durables of popular culture and popular piety were stridently reasserted. Let me begin with a category quite properly singled out in all accounts of the Counter-Reformation for its central importance. the parish priesthood, the arrowheads in the parishes of reform. In recent accounts, much has been made of the role of the new breed of seminary-trained priests as apostles of acculturation and about their necessary cultural estrangement from their rural parishioners, especially in contrast with the culturally indigenous country priests of the past. Delumeau, for example, writes that ‘the continuously repeated recommendations of the episcopate succeeded in cutting the priest offfrom secular life. He no longer danced on public holidays, was a stranger to the tavern, wore the tonsure and the cassock. . . He was no longer ‘of the world’, he was above his parishioners.” And there was, undoubtedly, just such a sharp contrast between the new priestly style and traditional bucolic vernacular culture. For all that, and setting aside new divergences of life-style and education between the new priests and most rural parishioners, it can be argued that the Counter-Reformation’s largely successful creation, through the seminaries and through sustained episcopal pressure, of a new sort of parish priest represented the fulfilment of long-standing lay expectations about priests. Village demands cited by Delumeau for sober, correctly dressed, chaste, diligent priests in residence testify to the existence of the demand-a kind of pious, constructive anticlericalism-at the very time it was being met. It may also be the case that demands made, and now at last fulfilled, for a purer, chaster parish clergy went back into deeper, older strata of popular mentalities: for instance, as R.I. Moore has shown, the llth-century Hildebrandine campaign for a diocesan clergy patterned essentially on monastic models met with the warmest possible lay response, especially from the popular classes. Perhaps part of the reason for this, since the drive for celibacy was at the heart of the matter in both the Hildebrandine and Tridentine reforms, was some unease on the part of the laity that sexual indulgence might impair a priest’s liturgical efficacy, in praying for, and above all in saying Mass for, communities. In any case, a priest who shared his parishioners’ lifestyles and indulged his various lusts was by no means guaranteed parochical affection, and not just for the relatively simple reason that village women were prey to those lusts. In its often highly authoritarian drive to secure a morally irreproachable parish priesthood, the Tridentine authorities were setting out to stem an anticlericalism based on long-standing lay disappointment at clerical moral failings. This anticlericalism was perceived as having driven many into the arms of the Protestant Reformers, and therefore the task of bringing the clergy up to standards largely set by the laity was particularly urgent in France where the competition between two rival forms of Christianity was still acute in the period in question. All in all, the arrival of the Tridentine priest in countless parishes-a process so fully explored by Hoffman for the important diocese of Lyon-may be seen as the official Church’s eventual successful response to lay requirements about priests-not, certainly, the imposition of clerical standards on the lay populace but the exact reverse. As well as this long-standing lay aspiration for a morally unexceptionable parochial clergy, we may detect-and Bell and Weinstein in the recentsaintsand
Popular Culture and the Counter-Reformation Society
495
analyse it brilliantly-an equally long-standing quest for saints, preferably saints in residence. Local sainthood meant the presence in communities of sexually abstinent, abstemious, self-disciplined indeed selfpunitive creatures, aloof and withdrawn, perhaps, yet profoundly solicitous for the welfare of their communities. As the Council of Trent might have put it-did put it, in fact-each parish should have in it a saintly character, ‘serious, modest and devout’, avoiding all sexual intercourse: they were parish priests. The Tridentine priest, in short, answered to a deep-seated lay and popular search for immanent personal sanctity, his puritanism and ascetism accepted as the Lenten antithesis of the carnivalesque themes of popular culture. To the best of my knowledge, the parish priest as saint is not a particularly well recognised sub-type of medieval hagiology: monks, mendicants and prelates, yes, but not that humble parochial general practitioner, the parish priest. St. Vincent de Paul (ca. 1580-1660, cd. 1737) perhaps marks something of a breakthrough into the arrival of the parish priest as saint, but even Vincent went on to other more heroic and creative activities. The saintly possibilities of the Tridentine ideal were realised at their fullest perhaps only rather later in that protracted period when the Catholic Church still remained under the long-term influence ofTrent. The Tridentine model of the resident parish priest at his post (in a 40-year unbroken stint), hearing confessions ad infinitum, preaching regularly, St. JeanBaptiste Vianney (1786-1859) was canonised in 1925 as the patron of a priesthood for whom Trent had set up the targets of attainment-a priest so dedicated to his parish that he is popularly known simply by its name-the Curi d’Ars. What is interesting, or what interests me, is that Vianney seems to conform not just to the Trentine ideal propounded in the seminaries, but also to older, popular criteria of sanctity and that in him two sets of standards, one clerica&professional and the other vernacular hagiographic, came together. Some of the vernacular hagiographic requirements are analysed by, amongst others, Bell and Weinstein, and they include, especially as they evolved in the later medieval centuries: (optionally) lower-class origins, prophetic powers and charismatic preaching; self-denial; simplicity and self-deprecation, along with a quest for seclusion, indeed for flight; the over-coming of limitations (including limitations of formal qualifications) and the defeat of scepticism about one’s sanctity; and, at the last, the triumphant recognition by a community of a saint in its midst, balancing his people’s imperfections with his own outstanding holiness. These traits are some of the most important features in an enduring popular set of stereotypic expectations about saints: saints, it has been rightly said (by Gurevic) were not individualised, at least not in popular cultural format, but were typological. Now we have already seen that our subject for the moment, St Jean Baptiste Vianney, met, as countless thousands of anonymous parish priests must have done, the standards of efficiency and virtue set out at Trent. We find that, in addition, he lived up to the stereotypic standards analysed by Bell and Weinstein, standards having an emphatically pre-Tridentine origin. Son of a peasant, unpromising seminary student, solicitous pastor, prophet, seer and visionary, Vianney had indeed to overcome not only his own intellectual limitations but the scepticism of the worldly wise, since, in highly traditional fashion he had to vanquish doubts about the authenticity of his visions. ‘Strict and rigorously “puritanical”‘, Vianney, whose Sunday preparation of a week’s diet of gruel for
496
Michael Mullet t
himself became a folk-tale, was a focus of sanctity in his region, his village becoming a major pilgrimage centre. Increasingly, we see that Vianney’s life imitates a species of folk art, the genre we might call, ‘what saints are like’. Clearly here is no cultural imposition on the part of ecclesiastical officialdom; the role of that officialdom-the Vatican, in fact-was largely that of responding, by declaring that the saint had met its own minimal criteria, to a popular initiative of recognition based on a longer, older, more elusive and typological requirements about holiness. Vax populi: popular culture presents church leadership with a saint, the information is accepted, re-expressed in official language and a kind of imprimatur is given to a hagiographic folk story, in all its veracity, in all its typological perfection. Saints in residence apart, parochial communities looked to other foci of beneficient holiness in their midst, including such sacred objects as images and relics. What has been termed the ultimate sacred relic, Christ’s living body in the eucharist, consecrated in each parish Mass on Sundays and holy days, was an extraordinarily effective guarantee of divine benevolence in communities. Let us spend a moment considering Counter-Reformation responses to this kind of essentially collective eucharistic piety, even ignoring for the moment the fact that post-Tridentine piety tried to encourage an approach to the eucharistic typical of the Imitation of Christ tradition, as an individual and private encounter. For despite an evident tendency to privatise the eucharist, in Counter-Reformation, as distinct from Reformation, practice. the eucharistic host still remained what it had been before the 16th century-not only an object received by individuals, albeit within a congregational framework, but also an autonomous object of collective veneration. Indeed, the increasingly individualised way of receiving the eucharist (in contrast with Protestant styles) meant that Catholicism’s congregational approach to the eucharist had to be visual rather than receptive. But the manner of-quite literally-looking at the eucharist arose from largely lay and popular initiatives, in the middle ages. Whereas the Holy Week feast of Maundy Thursday celebrated the inauguration of the eucharist as a meal, the subsequently developed and vastly popular summer feast of Corpus Christi, with its highly significant French title of ‘God’s feast’, was a highly collective celebration of the host as venerated object. AS a festival of God in the world, it precipitated both acts of peacemaking and also triggered off revolts of social justice. Given its origins in popular piety in the Low Countries, we can say that Corpus Christi-analogously to the compliance of priests with parishioners’ requests that they elevate the host at the consecration-indicates a clerica: response to a popular lay impulse to see God, and benefit from the view. One could go on finding instances of a popular initiative in the evolution of forms of pre-eminently visual eucharistic veneration based in highly literal conceptions of Christ as God in form of bread (and wine). It may have been the case that Aquinas’s mature formulation of the doctrine of transubstantiation represented an attempt to give coherence to a rising chorus of lay eucharistic ‘realism’: another example would be the vast profusion of stories of bleeding hosts, often associated with the worst excesses of mob antisemitism. The idea of a lasting real presence in the eucharistic host outside ofthe reception of holy communion seems on all the evidence to have been widely accepted in pre-Reformation Europe, and there is no reason to believe that this special
Popular Culture and the Counter-Reformation
497
emphasis on collective visual veneration diminished very much in the CounterReformation, since it continued to remain largely true that the priest ate the host while the congregation looked upon it. I dwell a little on these matters because in his excellent study of the CounterReformation in one diocese, Philip T. Hoffman instances the elaboration of the means of eucharistic viewing as an example of ‘imposing a new Catholic piety’. Yet it can be argued that the popular rite of benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the use of exhibitory monstrances during this rite and in processions, the Jesuits’ encouragement of the splendid son et lumibe of 40-hour expositions of the Blessed Sacrament-that all these show not a cultic imposition from ‘above’ but a continually evolving and sensitive response to perceived and longstanding lay and popular devotional demands. The newer para-liturgical forms were, doubtless, more formal, regulated and baroque, and the messages given out were more theologicaliy ‘correct’, with the partial phasing out of bleeding hosts reflecting a closer approximation to a stricter transubstantionist view that a body in the form of bread does not bleed. Despite these modifications, and compromises between popular and clerical inputs, Counter-Reformation congregational eucharistic piety must be seen as an example of the way in which popular piety continued to dictate liturgical practice. For the acculturation theory school of thought, the Counter-Reformation represented a protracted authoritarian essay in internal cultural imperialism and resulted in a class victory. As a long-term didactic process, it required all the assistance it could get-because of its coercive nature-from the secular arm-from, for example, the Jesuit-educated magistrates who, as Muchembled shows, enforced Tridentine values in early modern France and Belgium and who ‘took an active part in the vast offensive led by the elites against popular culture’. If the Tridentinist Catholicisation of masses of Europeans thus rested essentially on coercion, it should follow that the removal of constraint, in the pluralist arrangements of most of post-French Revolutionary Europe, simply led to the collapse of the coercive experiment and the consequent rapid mass rejection of the cultic and credal system held in place since the 16th and 17th centuries. Such a model might certainly apply, say, to France or to other parts of Europe where 19th and 20th century de-Christianisation can be seen as simply the belated rejection of alien constraints. Undoubtedly, the extreme disciplinarianism of the French establishment, clerical and lay, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and the marked puritanicalism of early modern French Catholicism, partly, no doubt, under Jansensist influence, turned France’s Catholic Reformation into a violent attack upon an exceptionally rich demotic cultural life. Yet perhaps too much, and too much that is good, has been written about the French case, and perhaps we ought to heed William J. Christian’s warnings about the peculiarities of the French situation-the inappropriateness of the French model for areas of Europe like Spain, where, says Christian, Catholic Reformation emphatically did not suppress popular religion or local culture. Apart from this realisation of important differences between areas of Europe, some of our difficulties over popular culture and Catholic Reformation may have arisen from our definition of popular culture. For instance, much of the discussion has so far been conducted in terms of the difficulties that Frenchcur&
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Michael MuNett
faced in imposing Tridentine norms in face of a popular male, recreational and adolescent culture, of charivaris, carnivals and reinages, of ‘dances, mummeries, shows, displays of juggling and comedies staged by actors and mountebanks where there is licentiousness, lewdness and jesting’. Needless to say, festivals and plays, with or without ‘licentiousness and lewdness’ were important aspects of popular culture, even though it may be argued that such rituals as charivari were instruments of community control doomed to extinction in the face of the eventual individualisation even of village life. Even so, to take on a whole vernacular festal culture, as the agents of the French Counter-Reformation did, was to say the least ill-advised. To some extent, the traditional festal culture remained resilient enough in some parts of France to defy cure% until well into the 19th century. Yet perhaps too much ofthe discussion has been conducted in terms only of the recreational, festal and carnivalesque aspects of popular culture. If, for example, we were to broaden the discussion beyond that of French festal culture to take in the anthropologists’ wider definition of culture as the total experience of a people-its language, self-identity, political habits, technology, family patterns and so on-we might find that post-16th century Catholicism, bringing local, regional and national cultures within its embrace, created, in important areas of Europe, not an imposed acculturation but a set of successful, and indeed apparently impregnable, identifications of people and faith. One certainly catches a glimpse of this in accounts of Polish Catholicism in which the notion of alient acculturation must, surely, be reversed. One sees it, as has been said, in Christian’s study of the resilient success of the fusion of location and piety in Spain-one of those areas where the Council of Trent’s adaptations to local cults ensured that, as Christian put it, ‘localism, regionalism and nationalism would be with the Church’. One realises it in the role of priests in the revival and defence of Flemish language and culture from the 19th century. One appreciates it in the coming together of faith, language and Gaelic nationhood in 19thcentury Irish priests like the language pioneer Peter O’Leary. One realises it in the tight solidarity, examined so well by Donald Sutherland, of priests and people in the Brittany of the French Revolution. From the petitions of their parishioners, late 18th-century Breton priests seem to have fulfilled the ‘consumer demands’ that French parishioners had been making about priests in the first phase of the Counter-Reformation-and long before that. These Breton curts were, or had become, guardians of community and locality. Undoubtedly, their predecessors, certainly in France and in the morning time of the Catholic Reformation-those new seminary trained cadres filled with precipitate revolutionary zeal-were resented, as all innovators were in traditional rural society and were fiercely opposed by some sections, especially male youth groups. Counter-Reformation or no Counter-Reformation, the French village, and beyond it the European village, was bound to change anyway-its late medieval political autonomy weakening the face of revived royal state power, its economy responding to diversification, stratification and eventually to modest affluence, its culture of speech and gesture falling prey to literacy, its terror-struck instrumental approach to religion succumbing to technology, rationality and sentimentality. Meanwhile, though, the period between the 16th and 19th centuries saw the creation of a new, if transitional,
Popular Culture and the Counter-Reformation
499
rural culture largely linked to Counter-Reformation piety and aesthetics evident in baroque and rococo church art, parish masses, mission sermons, confraternities, church choirs, processions, First Communions and new devotional developments such as the cult of the Sacred Heart in the 18th century. Much of this had recognisable medieval roots, much of it represented an open response by parishionersmarkedly that half of parishioners who were women-to Counter-Reformational trends. Labels like ‘acculturation’ and ‘imposition’ somehow do not quite fit. Michael University
of Lancaster
Mullett
o/Europem Ideas, in Great Britam
Vol
I I. pp 493-499,
POPULAR CULTURE
1989
0191-6599/89 $3 00 + 0 00 ‘i 1990 Rrgamo” Pres plc
AND THE COUNTER-REFORMATION MICHAEL MULLETT*
The argument that the great long-term renewal in Catholicism known as the Counter- or Catholic Reformation represented a sustained and successful attack on European popular culture on a broad front is now widely accepted by historians of the period, it having been put forward with particular authority by Robert Muchembled, and by several others. In Muchembled’s terms, the long-and we must insist on the lengthy duration of the experience-the long process amounted to a kind of acculturation, analogous to what happened when Western cultures supplanted indigenous cultures in the colonial and postcolonial worlds. In post-16th century Europe, the ethos of the CounterReformation-disciplinarian, pious, proto-rationalistic, academic, urban, puritan and work-ethical-extinguished and was put in place of a largely rural, older, demotic, autonomous, oral, traditional, collective, bucolic and magical outlook and culture. Apart from one or two minor modifications, much of the overall thesis is probably irrefutable. However, there are some niggling anxieties over the model, and I should like to consider one or two of them here, Since this is necessarily a brief discussion only, I shall have the chance to touch on just a few aspects of the topic, and these mostly concern not the relationship between Catholic Reformation and popular culture as a whole but the interaction between the ‘elite’ and largely clerical religiosity of the Counter-Reformation and aspects of popular religious culture or the forms of popular culture having a predominantly religious or cultic expression. Within those terms of reference, I should like to focus particularly on two human types-saints and priests-and on any possible overlap between those two categories. Incidentally, in discussing popular culture, the populace I have in mind most of the time will be peasants-a sufficiently vast and complex category to be going on with. My overall argument will be that in the encounter between those great lumbering categories, ‘Counter-Reformation’ and ‘popular culture’, the outcome was not so much a victory of former over latter but a negotiation and a complex adjustment. The longer the view we take, the more we are likely to find, in the aftermath of the first phase of Catholic reform, first the durability of underlying popular cultural and devotional themes and, second, an interactive rather than acculturative relationship between the Church’s clerical establishment and its ‘rank and file’ lay membership. Much of my case rests indeed on giving the tag ‘Counter-Reformation’ to a great swathe of Catholic church history not just, as with Jean Delumeau, ‘between Luther and Voltaire’ but between Luther and Pius IX or even between Luther and John XXIII. And even if we are unwilling to characterise a whole 400-year span of Catholic church history as a long Counter-Reformation era, we shall certainly find that in the *Department of History, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YW, U.K. 493
494
Michael Mullett
later stages of that period-in the first half of the 19th century-some of the underlying durables of popular culture and popular piety were stridently reasserted. Let me begin with a category quite properly singled out in all accounts of the Counter-Reformation for its central importance. the parish priesthood, the arrowheads in the parishes of reform. In recent accounts, much has been made of the role of the new breed of seminary-trained priests as apostles of acculturation and about their necessary cultural estrangement from their rural parishioners, especially in contrast with the culturally indigenous country priests of the past. Delumeau, for example, writes that ‘the continuously repeated recommendations of the episcopate succeeded in cutting the priest offfrom secular life. He no longer danced on public holidays, was a stranger to the tavern, wore the tonsure and the cassock. . . He was no longer ‘of the world’, he was above his parishioners.” And there was, undoubtedly, just such a sharp contrast between the new priestly style and traditional bucolic vernacular culture. For all that, and setting aside new divergences of life-style and education between the new priests and most rural parishioners, it can be argued that the Counter-Reformation’s largely successful creation, through the seminaries and through sustained episcopal pressure, of a new sort of parish priest represented the fulfilment of long-standing lay expectations about priests. Village demands cited by Delumeau for sober, correctly dressed, chaste, diligent priests in residence testify to the existence of the demand-a kind of pious, constructive anticlericalism-at the very time it was being met. It may also be the case that demands made, and now at last fulfilled, for a purer, chaster parish clergy went back into deeper, older strata of popular mentalities: for instance, as R.I. Moore has shown, the llth-century Hildebrandine campaign for a diocesan clergy patterned essentially on monastic models met with the warmest possible lay response, especially from the popular classes. Perhaps part of the reason for this, since the drive for celibacy was at the heart of the matter in both the Hildebrandine and Tridentine reforms, was some unease on the part of the laity that sexual indulgence might impair a priest’s liturgical efficacy, in praying for, and above all in saying Mass for, communities. In any case, a priest who shared his parishioners’ lifestyles and indulged his various lusts was by no means guaranteed parochical affection, and not just for the relatively simple reason that village women were prey to those lusts. In its often highly authoritarian drive to secure a morally irreproachable parish priesthood, the Tridentine authorities were setting out to stem an anticlericalism based on long-standing lay disappointment at clerical moral failings. This anticlericalism was perceived as having driven many into the arms of the Protestant Reformers, and therefore the task of bringing the clergy up to standards largely set by the laity was particularly urgent in France where the competition between two rival forms of Christianity was still acute in the period in question. All in all, the arrival of the Tridentine priest in countless parishes-a process so fully explored by Hoffman for the important diocese of Lyon-may be seen as the official Church’s eventual successful response to lay requirements about priests-not, certainly, the imposition of clerical standards on the lay populace but the exact reverse. As well as this long-standing lay aspiration for a morally unexceptionable parochial clergy, we may detect-and Bell and Weinstein in the recentsaintsand
Popular Culture and the Counter-Reformation Society
495
analyse it brilliantly-an equally long-standing quest for saints, preferably saints in residence. Local sainthood meant the presence in communities of sexually abstinent, abstemious, self-disciplined indeed selfpunitive creatures, aloof and withdrawn, perhaps, yet profoundly solicitous for the welfare of their communities. As the Council of Trent might have put it-did put it, in fact-each parish should have in it a saintly character, ‘serious, modest and devout’, avoiding all sexual intercourse: they were parish priests. The Tridentine priest, in short, answered to a deep-seated lay and popular search for immanent personal sanctity, his puritanism and ascetism accepted as the Lenten antithesis of the carnivalesque themes of popular culture. To the best of my knowledge, the parish priest as saint is not a particularly well recognised sub-type of medieval hagiology: monks, mendicants and prelates, yes, but not that humble parochial general practitioner, the parish priest. St. Vincent de Paul (ca. 1580-1660, cd. 1737) perhaps marks something of a breakthrough into the arrival of the parish priest as saint, but even Vincent went on to other more heroic and creative activities. The saintly possibilities of the Tridentine ideal were realised at their fullest perhaps only rather later in that protracted period when the Catholic Church still remained under the long-term influence ofTrent. The Tridentine model of the resident parish priest at his post (in a 40-year unbroken stint), hearing confessions ad infinitum, preaching regularly, St. JeanBaptiste Vianney (1786-1859) was canonised in 1925 as the patron of a priesthood for whom Trent had set up the targets of attainment-a priest so dedicated to his parish that he is popularly known simply by its name-the Curi d’Ars. What is interesting, or what interests me, is that Vianney seems to conform not just to the Trentine ideal propounded in the seminaries, but also to older, popular criteria of sanctity and that in him two sets of standards, one clerica&professional and the other vernacular hagiographic, came together. Some of the vernacular hagiographic requirements are analysed by, amongst others, Bell and Weinstein, and they include, especially as they evolved in the later medieval centuries: (optionally) lower-class origins, prophetic powers and charismatic preaching; self-denial; simplicity and self-deprecation, along with a quest for seclusion, indeed for flight; the over-coming of limitations (including limitations of formal qualifications) and the defeat of scepticism about one’s sanctity; and, at the last, the triumphant recognition by a community of a saint in its midst, balancing his people’s imperfections with his own outstanding holiness. These traits are some of the most important features in an enduring popular set of stereotypic expectations about saints: saints, it has been rightly said (by Gurevic) were not individualised, at least not in popular cultural format, but were typological. Now we have already seen that our subject for the moment, St Jean Baptiste Vianney, met, as countless thousands of anonymous parish priests must have done, the standards of efficiency and virtue set out at Trent. We find that, in addition, he lived up to the stereotypic standards analysed by Bell and Weinstein, standards having an emphatically pre-Tridentine origin. Son of a peasant, unpromising seminary student, solicitous pastor, prophet, seer and visionary, Vianney had indeed to overcome not only his own intellectual limitations but the scepticism of the worldly wise, since, in highly traditional fashion he had to vanquish doubts about the authenticity of his visions. ‘Strict and rigorously “puritanical”‘, Vianney, whose Sunday preparation of a week’s diet of gruel for
496
Michael Mullet t
himself became a folk-tale, was a focus of sanctity in his region, his village becoming a major pilgrimage centre. Increasingly, we see that Vianney’s life imitates a species of folk art, the genre we might call, ‘what saints are like’. Clearly here is no cultural imposition on the part of ecclesiastical officialdom; the role of that officialdom-the Vatican, in fact-was largely that of responding, by declaring that the saint had met its own minimal criteria, to a popular initiative of recognition based on a longer, older, more elusive and typological requirements about holiness. Vax populi: popular culture presents church leadership with a saint, the information is accepted, re-expressed in official language and a kind of imprimatur is given to a hagiographic folk story, in all its veracity, in all its typological perfection. Saints in residence apart, parochial communities looked to other foci of beneficient holiness in their midst, including such sacred objects as images and relics. What has been termed the ultimate sacred relic, Christ’s living body in the eucharist, consecrated in each parish Mass on Sundays and holy days, was an extraordinarily effective guarantee of divine benevolence in communities. Let us spend a moment considering Counter-Reformation responses to this kind of essentially collective eucharistic piety, even ignoring for the moment the fact that post-Tridentine piety tried to encourage an approach to the eucharistic typical of the Imitation of Christ tradition, as an individual and private encounter. For despite an evident tendency to privatise the eucharist, in Counter-Reformation, as distinct from Reformation, practice. the eucharistic host still remained what it had been before the 16th century-not only an object received by individuals, albeit within a congregational framework, but also an autonomous object of collective veneration. Indeed, the increasingly individualised way of receiving the eucharist (in contrast with Protestant styles) meant that Catholicism’s congregational approach to the eucharist had to be visual rather than receptive. But the manner of-quite literally-looking at the eucharist arose from largely lay and popular initiatives, in the middle ages. Whereas the Holy Week feast of Maundy Thursday celebrated the inauguration of the eucharist as a meal, the subsequently developed and vastly popular summer feast of Corpus Christi, with its highly significant French title of ‘God’s feast’, was a highly collective celebration of the host as venerated object. AS a festival of God in the world, it precipitated both acts of peacemaking and also triggered off revolts of social justice. Given its origins in popular piety in the Low Countries, we can say that Corpus Christi-analogously to the compliance of priests with parishioners’ requests that they elevate the host at the consecration-indicates a clerica: response to a popular lay impulse to see God, and benefit from the view. One could go on finding instances of a popular initiative in the evolution of forms of pre-eminently visual eucharistic veneration based in highly literal conceptions of Christ as God in form of bread (and wine). It may have been the case that Aquinas’s mature formulation of the doctrine of transubstantiation represented an attempt to give coherence to a rising chorus of lay eucharistic ‘realism’: another example would be the vast profusion of stories of bleeding hosts, often associated with the worst excesses of mob antisemitism. The idea of a lasting real presence in the eucharistic host outside ofthe reception of holy communion seems on all the evidence to have been widely accepted in pre-Reformation Europe, and there is no reason to believe that this special
Popular Culture and the Counter-Reformation
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emphasis on collective visual veneration diminished very much in the CounterReformation, since it continued to remain largely true that the priest ate the host while the congregation looked upon it. I dwell a little on these matters because in his excellent study of the CounterReformation in one diocese, Philip T. Hoffman instances the elaboration of the means of eucharistic viewing as an example of ‘imposing a new Catholic piety’. Yet it can be argued that the popular rite of benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, the use of exhibitory monstrances during this rite and in processions, the Jesuits’ encouragement of the splendid son et lumibe of 40-hour expositions of the Blessed Sacrament-that all these show not a cultic imposition from ‘above’ but a continually evolving and sensitive response to perceived and longstanding lay and popular devotional demands. The newer para-liturgical forms were, doubtless, more formal, regulated and baroque, and the messages given out were more theologicaliy ‘correct’, with the partial phasing out of bleeding hosts reflecting a closer approximation to a stricter transubstantionist view that a body in the form of bread does not bleed. Despite these modifications, and compromises between popular and clerical inputs, Counter-Reformation congregational eucharistic piety must be seen as an example of the way in which popular piety continued to dictate liturgical practice. For the acculturation theory school of thought, the Counter-Reformation represented a protracted authoritarian essay in internal cultural imperialism and resulted in a class victory. As a long-term didactic process, it required all the assistance it could get-because of its coercive nature-from the secular arm-from, for example, the Jesuit-educated magistrates who, as Muchembled shows, enforced Tridentine values in early modern France and Belgium and who ‘took an active part in the vast offensive led by the elites against popular culture’. If the Tridentinist Catholicisation of masses of Europeans thus rested essentially on coercion, it should follow that the removal of constraint, in the pluralist arrangements of most of post-French Revolutionary Europe, simply led to the collapse of the coercive experiment and the consequent rapid mass rejection of the cultic and credal system held in place since the 16th and 17th centuries. Such a model might certainly apply, say, to France or to other parts of Europe where 19th and 20th century de-Christianisation can be seen as simply the belated rejection of alien constraints. Undoubtedly, the extreme disciplinarianism of the French establishment, clerical and lay, in the wake of the Wars of Religion and the marked puritanicalism of early modern French Catholicism, partly, no doubt, under Jansensist influence, turned France’s Catholic Reformation into a violent attack upon an exceptionally rich demotic cultural life. Yet perhaps too much, and too much that is good, has been written about the French case, and perhaps we ought to heed William J. Christian’s warnings about the peculiarities of the French situation-the inappropriateness of the French model for areas of Europe like Spain, where, says Christian, Catholic Reformation emphatically did not suppress popular religion or local culture. Apart from this realisation of important differences between areas of Europe, some of our difficulties over popular culture and Catholic Reformation may have arisen from our definition of popular culture. For instance, much of the discussion has so far been conducted in terms of the difficulties that Frenchcur&
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faced in imposing Tridentine norms in face of a popular male, recreational and adolescent culture, of charivaris, carnivals and reinages, of ‘dances, mummeries, shows, displays of juggling and comedies staged by actors and mountebanks where there is licentiousness, lewdness and jesting’. Needless to say, festivals and plays, with or without ‘licentiousness and lewdness’ were important aspects of popular culture, even though it may be argued that such rituals as charivari were instruments of community control doomed to extinction in the face of the eventual individualisation even of village life. Even so, to take on a whole vernacular festal culture, as the agents of the French Counter-Reformation did, was to say the least ill-advised. To some extent, the traditional festal culture remained resilient enough in some parts of France to defy cure% until well into the 19th century. Yet perhaps too much ofthe discussion has been conducted in terms only of the recreational, festal and carnivalesque aspects of popular culture. If, for example, we were to broaden the discussion beyond that of French festal culture to take in the anthropologists’ wider definition of culture as the total experience of a people-its language, self-identity, political habits, technology, family patterns and so on-we might find that post-16th century Catholicism, bringing local, regional and national cultures within its embrace, created, in important areas of Europe, not an imposed acculturation but a set of successful, and indeed apparently impregnable, identifications of people and faith. One certainly catches a glimpse of this in accounts of Polish Catholicism in which the notion of alient acculturation must, surely, be reversed. One sees it, as has been said, in Christian’s study of the resilient success of the fusion of location and piety in Spain-one of those areas where the Council of Trent’s adaptations to local cults ensured that, as Christian put it, ‘localism, regionalism and nationalism would be with the Church’. One realises it in the role of priests in the revival and defence of Flemish language and culture from the 19th century. One appreciates it in the coming together of faith, language and Gaelic nationhood in 19thcentury Irish priests like the language pioneer Peter O’Leary. One realises it in the tight solidarity, examined so well by Donald Sutherland, of priests and people in the Brittany of the French Revolution. From the petitions of their parishioners, late 18th-century Breton priests seem to have fulfilled the ‘consumer demands’ that French parishioners had been making about priests in the first phase of the Counter-Reformation-and long before that. These Breton curts were, or had become, guardians of community and locality. Undoubtedly, their predecessors, certainly in France and in the morning time of the Catholic Reformation-those new seminary trained cadres filled with precipitate revolutionary zeal-were resented, as all innovators were in traditional rural society and were fiercely opposed by some sections, especially male youth groups. Counter-Reformation or no Counter-Reformation, the French village, and beyond it the European village, was bound to change anyway-its late medieval political autonomy weakening the face of revived royal state power, its economy responding to diversification, stratification and eventually to modest affluence, its culture of speech and gesture falling prey to literacy, its terror-struck instrumental approach to religion succumbing to technology, rationality and sentimentality. Meanwhile, though, the period between the 16th and 19th centuries saw the creation of a new, if transitional,
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rural culture largely linked to Counter-Reformation piety and aesthetics evident in baroque and rococo church art, parish masses, mission sermons, confraternities, church choirs, processions, First Communions and new devotional developments such as the cult of the Sacred Heart in the 18th century. Much of this had recognisable medieval roots, much of it represented an open response by parishionersmarkedly that half of parishioners who were women-to Counter-Reformational trends. Labels like ‘acculturation’ and ‘imposition’ somehow do not quite fit. Michael University
of Lancaster
Mullett