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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 March 2016
It is now over two decades since a cluster of studies by Natalie Zemon Davis, Bob Scribner, Marc Venard, Roger Chartier, Richard Trexler, William Christian, Carlo Ginzburg and others significantly modified our ways of thinking about religion in early modern Europe and in particular about the relationship between ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ religion, or as many had conceived it, between religion as preached and religion as practised. It had been simpler when writers who thought about such things had drawn neat boundaries between elite and popular and regarded communication between them as an exclusively one-way, top-down, process. They had also tended to regard the popular aspect of the polarity as qualitatively inferior to its elite corollary, depicting it variously as instrumental, functional, un-spiritual, somatic, irrational, unreflective, mechanical, amoral, magical or superstitious, or indeed as all of these things together, as if ‘the people’, a group generally defined in class terms as the socially subordinate, exhibited a vast collective unconscious. Additionally, much ethnography had taken such a divide as axiomatic, the German Volkskunde tradition, for example, often positing a process of transmission or ‘sinking’ of cultural forms from the elite down to the popular level. Such assumptions, which moreover uncritically reflected a notion of ‘religion’ which is restricted to a formal doctrinal corpus, defined and authenticated by the very body charged with its maintenance, were damaged by the historical revolution of the 1970s and 1980s and will not do for most scholars now, despite having informed a number of still influential historical schemata.
1 Landmark discussions of these developments include: Davis, Natalie Zemon, ‘From “Popular Religion” to Religious Cultures’, in Ozment, Steven, ed., Reformation Europe: a Guide to Research (St Louis, LA, 1982), 321–41 Google Scholar; Scribner, R. W., ‘Interpreting Religion in Early Modern Europe’, European Studies Review 13 (1983), 89–105 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Harline, Craig, ‘Official Religion – Popular Religion in Recent Historiography of the Catholic Reformation’, Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte 81 (1990), 239–62.Google Scholar
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3 To cite perhaps the two best known works: Delumeau, Jean, Le Catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1071)Google Scholar; Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (London, 1971).Google Scholar
4 ‘All evidence indicates that the kind of local religion described was shared by most of the people of Madrid and Toledo (and, for that matter, of Seville, Barcelona and Florence) and was as characteristic of the royal family as it was of unlettered peasants. One is therefore led to question the idea of “popular religion”, as distinct from some other kind’: Christian, William, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981), 8 Google Scholar. See also Ditchfield, Simon, ‘ “In Search of Local Knowledge”: Rewriting Early Modern Italian Religious History’, Cristianesimo nellastoria 19 (1998), 255–96.Google Scholar
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13 Ibid.
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