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Austria as considered in this essay does not include all the lands under the authority of the Habsburgs of Vienna, but what we have elsewhere termed the ‘Austro-Bohemian Complex’, or what might be described after 1620 as the Hereditary Lands. Together with the Austria of today, the kingdom of Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia, it was an elongated territory stretching from the Rhine to Poland, and from Prussia to the Adriatic, where Germans and Czechs predominated with a population at the opening of the eighteenth century of around five and a half million. After the great plague of 1713 the population did not stop expanding notwithstanding the loss of the largest part of Silesia in 1745. The time limits for a study of the eighteenth-century church in Austria are best set between 1683 and 1780, from the end of the siege of Vienna to the death of Maria Theresa, for this was a period of triumphant Catholicism reinforced by the 1683 victory over the Turks and which Joseph II tried to end by his radical reforms. Three special features of the Hereditary Lands should be kept in mind: (1) We are concerned with areas of reconquista with the exception of the Tyrol. The impact of Lutheranism had been very strong in Austria; in 1560 Vienna was in the main a Lutheran city. Since the fifteenth century and the Hussite wars, Bohemia was generally receptive to heterodox currents which led to the development of the Utraquist church, the Unity of the Brethren and the Lutheran churches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1700 Mátyás Radnay, bishop of Pécs, complained that his diocese was short of 360 parish priests, and that he did not have a single candidate for the priesthood. In the diocese of Nagyvárad, 339 parishes were served by 500 clergy in 1556; by 1711, only three parishes had a priest, and when the bishop first returned to his see his situation was so straitened that he could neither reestablish his cathedral nor even begin a suitable residence for himself. Neither diocese was exceptional. In all Hungary only the diocese of Nyitra had been without a single parish under Ottoman rule during the preceding century and a half. Every other diocese had been occupied partially or completely by the Turks. When they were expelled, Hungary was a depopulated wasteland. Sixteen years of warfare between the Osmanlis and the Habsburgs (1683–99), and Ferenc II Rákóczi's eight-year war of national liberation (1703–11), devastated Hungary. One a war between two hostile civilizations and faiths, Islam and Christendom, the other a civil war, they were fought with ferocity. After a quarter-century of turmoil, peace was restored in 1711 when the Habsburg dynasty and the Hungarian estates concluded the Treaty of Szatmár. To raise Hungary from the ruins required immense efforts in every sphere, spiritual as well as material. The most important ingredient for moral and spiritual reconstruction ought to have been tolerance, but it was the element most conspicuously absent from Habsburg policies and attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Spanish church of the Counter-Reformation, with its array of saints, theologians, canonists and missionaries, or the church caught in the bitter political struggles of the twentieth century, has offered more attractive fields of study to the historian than an eighteenth-century church that produced no St Theresa of Avila, no St John of the Cross, no Luis de León, no spectacular missionary achievements in distant and exotic lands. Even the Inquisition went about its work with a desultory spirit that would have shocked the harsh inquisitors of an earlier age. But the church of the eighteenth century, if it lacked the vitality of its predecessors, continued to be an immensely rich and powerful institution in a land where religious practice was deeply rooted and luxuriant in its variety. Moreover, an understanding of the problem of the church in modern Spain requires some knowledge of the long process of disintegration of the Old Regime church that began in the late eighteenth century and continued through the far-reaching liberal reforms carried out between 1835 and 1860. It has been fashionable to consider the history of the Spanish church as a long continuum from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella to the militant and intolerant church of the years prior to and during the civil war of the twentieth century. But the structure, economic base and mentality of the church in modern Spain are very different from those of the church in the Old Regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The historian who would seek to summarize the history of the French church in the eighteenth century must be conscious of an unwieldy legacy. There can be few who have sat in departmental archives who have not encountered the individual in clerical collar or monk's habit, hard at work in the series G, carefully amassing material on his parish, diocese or order at any century since the middle ages, ready to embody the fruits of his labours in the Semaine religieuse de …, the bulletin of his local Société Savante, or in mammoth tome probably entitled Histoire du diocèse de…depuis l'époque gallo-romaine jusqu'à 1789, an individual endowed with those most luxurious of research prerequisites – time and freedom from economic worry. Since the second half of the nineteenth century, the church has provided its own historians, and in our own day – to cite merely three – the Abbé Plongeron, the P. Bertholet du Chesnaye at Rennes and the Abbé Baccrabère at Toulouse must be conscious that they belong to a time-honoured yet living tradition. Admittedly until the 1950s much of the work was stereotyped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eighteenth century witnessed the final flowering of the reforming efforts of the Counter-Reformation, but it also saw deep cracks appear in the facade of the traditional alliance of throne, altar and orthodox belief. These rifts have often been explained by the development of an intellectual movement, the Enlightenment, which displayed hostility both to the institutional church and even to the practices of traditional Christianity. The struggle between reforming states and the church over the use of ecclesiastical wealth, the extreme differences between the high and low clergy, the growing tension between the extravagances of baroque popular piety and simpler forms of religious expression, the inequalities of an archaic organization, the uneven distribution of resources between the urban and rural church, all pointed to the beginnings of a crisis within the church and between it and the larger society. The historiography of the church is, of course, extensive. The shelves of libraries are heavy with studies of bishops, seminaries, religious orders, relations between church and state and the analysis of theological disputes. Members of the church have studied its history with careful detail and much of their work is of considerable merit. In France, A. Schaer's work on the Alsatian clergy, in Spain, Lôpez Ferreiro's well-documented history of the archdiocese of Santiago, are examples of the solidity of clerical scholarship. But many of these works, though valuable for the information they provide on the operation of ecclesiastical institutions, neglect the problem of the relationship of the church to the wider society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]