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Popular religion – the religion of the generality of people, especially those of the lower orders – is a large subject. It ranges from belief, worship, private prayer, and reading to morality, charity, and the payment of church dues. These elements may vary according to people's gender, age, status, and context, presenting the historian with many aspects to study and evaluate. This chapter is concerned with three of them: worship in church, the economic support of churches, and ceremonies outside church. It begins by reviewing the systems in force in early Tudor England, continues by studying the impact of “state religion” during the Reformation of the mid-sixteenth century, and concludes by tracing the survival of some pre-Reformation beliefs and practices between about 1600 and 1750. To achieve focus, the survey centers on one English county, Cornwall, an appropriate area for this purpose because it is rich both in pre-Reformation records of popular religion and in literary descriptions of its society and customs after the Reformation. Some features of Cornish popular religion were characteristic of other parts of England and illustrate general conditions. Equally, Cornwall had attributes distinct to itself, like all English counties, and some of these were untypical of England elsewhere. Its study reveals both national verities and regional variations. Cornwall is England's most maritime county: a long peninsula attached to the mainland by a short land border with Devon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We historians are latecomers to the study of ritual. Anthropologists have already spent a century gazing at various societies' formal rites and ritualized behavior, seeing in these a window onto, if not men's souls, at least the structures, dynamics, values, and aspirations of groups. European and North American early modernists began only in the 1960s to feel in a serious way the impact of the social sciences upon their endeavors. Part of this impact was indeed the analysis of ritual for all that it might yield. From my perspective, it has yielded much. Thus, I stand on the shoulders of many predecessors, some of them giants, as I turn my attention to liturgical ritual especially before, during, and after the Reformation in German-speaking lands. I wish to argue here that whether or not there was open contention over ritual content as the reformers took it on themselves to correct what they saw to have been the long-term medieval falsifications of Gospel propriety, ritual was still at the subliminal or unconscious level an ongoing bone of contention. Not only the heads of the emerging churches but their secular overlords, too, perceived the power of ritual and were determined to “get it right.” One prominent level of debate was, then, between and among theologians and heads of state. But in addition, within the ranks of the hoi poloi, ritual was a commodious and potent vessel and could not be, or at any rate was not received in a wholly passive, detached, uninvolved manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late in the 1640s, an anonymous author published an account of what he termed the eleventh persecution of the Church, particularly in London, by the “Puritan Faction (so long lying like the Canaanites, as thornes in the sides of our Israel)”: And what havoc hath been made among the Sheep, since the City-Puritan Tumults cried out no Bishops, and armed fury hath forced thousands of the Clergy from their Flocks; the almost ruins of the Church and of three Kingdoms sufficiently witnesses; a just judgment of God upon a People long contending with their Priests and mocking, and misusing the Prophets and messengers of God, till like the Jews, the wrath of God fell upon them, … and all this vengeance executed by a generation of Vipers, styling themselves … the only people of God, the meek of the earth, Christ's little flock, weak Brethren. Such a calamity was all the more remarkable in the view of the anonymous author because “all sorts of People account[ed] the Puritan faction, a simple inconsiderate party, well meaning people, tender conscienced Christians, such as deserved pity rather than punishment, little remembering our Saviour's caveat against wolves in sheep's clothing.” Whether the “Puritan faction” were wolves in sheep's clothing or a generation of vipers depended largely on one's allegiances; it could be argued that, being the meek, they had indeed inherited the earth, or at least for a moment that corner called England. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

INTRODUCTION: CHINESE ORTHODOXY In his contribution to this volume, Professor Richard Shek has illuminated the “alternative moral universe” of the Eternal Mother sects, a universe made by dissenters from a “Chinese orthodoxy” that he defines as the “doctrine of propriety-and-ritual” (lijiao). Under their religious aspect, the rites of the lijiao were understood to have been an expression of the will of Heaven and its correct performance was necessary for the maintenance of social and cosmic harmony. The sociopolitical content of the lijiao is reduced to its core, the “three bonds” (sangang), which were the paradigmatic relationships between subject and ruler, child and parents, and wife and husband. In what follows, I turn from Professor Shek's “alternative moral universe” to look at the other term of his polarity – “Chinese orthodoxy.” I start from the assumption of a Chinese social whole, and I understand the social whole under its religious aspect as a hierarchically ordered system comprising four distinct religions (each with its own evolving orthodoxy). These were, first, the legally prescribed official religion of the empire, followed in rank order by Buddhism and Daoism (both of which were quasi-legal, i.e., accommodated and regulated, but not mandated by the law), and, finally, the diffuse popular religion that was embedded in the “natural” communities of village, neighborhood, and household. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were an age of wars of religion. From the Catholic-Huguenot struggle in France to the Defenestration of Prague (1618), religious differences both caused and justified numerous civil and foreign wars. In one case – the English Civil War – political and social radicalism grew out of religious disputes. Although modern historians have come to question religious motives and justifications as the principal catalysts in struggles such as the Dutch war of independence, they have not questioned the importance of religious divisions within societies and monarchs' attempts to impose religious uniformity as major issues in early modern struggles. The European phenomenon stretched from the Urals to the Atlantic. In Russia, religious disputes and millenarianism played a major role in all revolts after the Old Believer schism of the late seventeenth century. Few events in early modern Ukrainian history drew such widespread contemporary attention as the Khmel'nyts'kyiuprising against the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Rumors of the slaughter of landlords, Jews, and Catholics in 1648 reverberated in the grain ports on the Baltic, in the Jesuit houses in central Europe, and in Jewish communities on the Mediterranean. The destruction of the armies of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth led Sweden, the Habsburgs, France, and many other powers to reevaluate their view of the balance of power. The Cossack leader Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi had upset this balance by his alliance with the Crimean khan in early 1648. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1551, John Hooper, fresh from his battle with Archbishop Cranmer over vestments and his consecration as bishop of Gloucester, prepared for the initial visitation of his new diocese. Twenty-five years later, in one of a number of nearly concurrent moves to define English Protestantism more fully, Archbishop Edmund Grindal prepared for a similar visitation of that same diocese as part of a general visitation of the province of Canterbury. In each case, the emphasis was on the reformation of ritual, and the concerns expressed were prompted by the condition of worship across the realm. A year before his elevation to the bishopric, John Hooper had written to his friend and mentor, Heinrich Bullinger in Zurich, expressing his frustration with the pace of religious reform in England. “Partly through ignorance, and partly fascinated by the inveiglements of the bishops, and the malice and impiety of the mass-priests,” the people were not turning to the new religion nearly fast enough. Now Hooper was in a position to hasten the pace of reform and to promote and enforce policies associated with English Protestantism in at least one corner of the kingdom. As bishop, he would carry out his duties with impressive vigor and attention to detail. He clearly believed, as did most of the other English reformers, that the reformation of ritual was a key to establishing “true religion” among the clergy and people of England and thereby creating a kingdom with which God would be pleased. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Russian church schism of the seventeenth century is the focal point of this brief examination of popular belief and practice and the struggles of ecclesiastical elites to shape, control, and change them. The chapter will review and reflect on the most important phases of the interaction between the leaders of Russian Orthodoxy and ordinary parishioners between the late 1630s and the beginning of the eighteenth century in light of recent studies of Christian communities elsewhere in early modern Europe. It contains no new archival discoveries: Most of the documents and monographs on which it draws have long been familiar to historians of Russia. These sources, moreover, reflect the perceptions of government officials or ecclesiastical polemicists. Thus, as Eve Levin cautions, when describing popular religious beliefs and practices, they are likely to focus on “the most heterodox elements” that diverge most dramatically from established norms. In spite of the country's enormous territory, the discussion will consider Russia as a single unit for two reasons. First, even a glance at scholarship on Western and Central Europe shows how limited and scattered are the surviving sources on Russian parish life and popular religious practice. For one thing, historians of Russia must live without systematic parish records. Second, in spite of the Muscovite monarchy's vast size, movements of popular religious protest spread quickly, in large measure through the efforts of itinerant agitators and exiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Elsewhere in this volume, Professor Romeyn Taylor offers a nuanced portrayal of Chinese religions. He identifies four traditions, with overlapping deities and shared common assumptions, but with different rituals and varying degrees of “officialness.” There is, however, a fifth tradition in the Chinese religious world, one that is qualitatively different from the other four. One can argue that the other four traditions are expressions of one orthodox camp, while this fifth tradition is indisputably heterodox by contrast. It is the late imperial version of this fifth tradition, making its appearance at the beginning of the sixteenth century in China, that is the focus of this essay. Couched in the framework of orthodoxy versus heterodoxy, this chapter attempts to establish the following points: (1) an orthodoxy existed in China since the middle of the second century before the common era and lasted until the turn of the present century; (2) this orthodoxy was not articulated by a religious authority, but rather by a political authority; (3) the content of this orthodoxy, sociopolitical and ethical in emphasis, was defined not by narrow sectarian doctrines but by a compromise consensus among all the major religious traditions in China; (4) challenge to this orthodoxy, long-lasting and variegated in nature, crystalized at the turn of the sixteenth century into a potent tradition revolving around a central matriarchal deity and a strong millenarian and eschatological vision; (5) this heterodox tradition, though similarly socioethical in content, was by definition also politically subversive and occasionally erupted into antidynastic rebellions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PROBLEM OF THE MIXED COMMUNITY We have been arguing that as a member of a believing community the Christian holds his faith in fellowship with all the faithful, saying not only ‘I believe’ (credo) but ‘we believe’ (credimus). The conception that it is faith which is central to the Church's apostolicity was not new among the reformers. It was already well developed in the Carolingian period. Christianus of Stavelot, a contemporary of Hincmar of Rheims, says that everyone who believes and confesses the faith with Peter deserves to be called an apostle as much as he. So important is the collective confession of faith by believers that Luther argues that it is this which makes the Church identifiable as a visible community. But it was also apparent to the reformers that the machinery for the collective expression of the faith has not always worked smoothly, either in Councils, or through the offices of those with a responsibility for oversight. Why has there frequently been imperfect consensus, periods of learning from mistakes, and so slow and patchy a growth in understanding? A reason for this to which Augustine could subscribe as readily as a modern commentator is that in the deep structures of decision-making human needs and failings are accepted and allowed for, and the mode of our learning together is in tune with the enabling of our growth in holiness through living together in the faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE PRIESTHOOD OF ALL BELIEVERS One of the most far-reaching of the perspectives of the Second Vatican Council was to view the Church ‘from the starting-point of baptism’, so that the ordained ministry is seen not as possessing a ‘higher power’ but as ‘a service at the centre of the Church community’. To say that ‘the greatest day in the life of a Pope is not that of his election or coronation, but the day on which he receives that which the Greek Fathers call the holy and unbreakable seal of baptismal regeneration’, is to reverse the assumption which was causing difficulty in the late Middle Ages and the sixteenth century: that that which is common to all is of less value than that which is committed only to some. For that carries with it its concomitant problems of resentment, and a sense of alienation among those who are not ordained. That had been and remained the nub of the problem about the authority of the ordained ministry in the Church. Waldensians in the twelfth century, Franciscan factions upholding the virtues of poverty from the thirteenth, a growing number of critics both within and outside the ranks of the clergy, contrasted the simplicity of Jesus' life with the pomp and display and wealth of the higher clergy. While the Church was the only alternative to a military career for the well born, and the higher offices in the Church were filled with scions of the nobility, there were bound to be many who entered the Church from worldly motives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1367 the Bohemian dissident Milíc spoke of the sacrificium Christi of the Mass, and of himself as ‘offering’ it, with no sense that he was saying something which was potentially controversial (although he uses the expression in a sermon against Antichrist with much of which his successors among the sixteenth-century reformers could have agreed). The debate about sacrifice became so central to the eucharistic controversy of the Reformation that it was the focus of a high proportion of the conversations of the Council of Trent on Eucharist and ministry, in 1547, 1551–2 and 1562. Milíc also regarded the penitential system as having a natural and proper relation to the theology of eucharistic offering and sacrifice. This relationship between the Eucharist and the forgiveness of sins was already being explored in the earliest period of the Reformation debates by Kaspar Schatzgeyer, who died in 1527. He placed an emphasis on the action of the whole Church in the Eucharist, and on the function of the Eucharist within the Church's ministry of reconciliation in this life. In a series of works written in response to the Lutherans in the 1520s he laid the groundwork of a theology of eucharistic reconciliation. But his death and a change in the focus of polemic, as Zwingli and Luther came into conflict and other preoccupations supervened, meant that his ideas were not taken further. The Trent Fathers perceived the interdependency of the Eucharist and penitential practice, but the topics were broadly separated in debate during the Council, and in the making of canons and decrees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FORGIVENESS SEALED AND RENEWED The doctrine of justification by faith (with its insistence upon the freedom and completeness of the transformation of the individual's position before God) was not intended by Luther to conflict with the theology of baptism. But he did intend it to show that an elaborate penitential system was unnecessary, and its ‘imposition’ on the faithful dangerously likely to distract them from the great simple truth of their redemption. The new emphasis brought into clear view once more an anomaly which had in fact existed for many centuries. As a rule, the first generations of Christians were baptised as believing adults, able to declare their faith for themselves and to make a deliberate choice in committing themselves to Christ. The response of faith and the rite of baptism went together without strain. There was an emphasis in the first Christian centuries on the power of baptism to wash away sin and also its consequences; and a concomitant discipline which expected those who were baptised not to fall into serious sin again, for it would make a mockery of baptism to suggest that it could be repeated. Not every community was willing to restore to fellowship those who did lapse, and where penitents were readmitted they usually had to demonstrate the sincerity of their repentance to the community so that there could be no doubt about it. Penitents were marked by the wearing of special garments, and they performed various penitential acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We are told that baptism ‘… gives … initiates … unites … effects’. It has to be asked what is meant by ‘baptism’ where this sort of language is constantly used. Is it the actual performance of the rites? If so, the language seems at best hyperbole and at worst objectionable. This hostile reaction to the 1982 Statement of the World Council of Churches on Baptism (the ‘Lima’ text) reflects the modern continuance of suspicions of a number of reformers in the sixteenth century. If we say that a sacrament has an effect, do we imply that the Holy Spirit is somehow at the disposal of the Church, so that the mere ‘performance’ of the rite ‘guarantees’ the effect, ex opere operato? The question can be put in that way only if the Church is seen as in some sense standing over against divine authority and laying claim to an independent power; with its ministers endowed with a personal ‘priestly power’, and claiming that ‘rites of the Church’ infallibly bring about the operation of the gift of grace. Such assumptions are to be found on both sides in the sixteenth century debates, and they largely dictate the shape of the discussion about the role of the Church in salvation. Luther was first and foremost concerned with the forgiveness of the individual as he responds to God in faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confession of Christ as Lord is the heart of the Christian faith. To him God has given all authority in heaven and on earth. As Lord of the Church he bestows the Holy Spirit to create a communion of men with God and with one another. To bring this koinonia to perfection is God's eternal purpose. The Church exists to serve the fulfilment of this purpose when God will be all in all. Christian authority is Christ's authority. The debates on authority which rent apart the Church in the West in the sixteenth century turned again and again on whether Christ's sovereignty was being set at risk in the Church's life; and whether his Word, Holy Scripture, was being disregarded or overridden by those in authority in the Church. The chapters which follow look first at sixteenth-century concerns over the authority on which Christians believe matters of faith. As textual scholarship investigated Greek and Hebrew and raised the possibility that there ought to be emendations, Scripture itself could no longer be looked upon, in an uncontroversial way, as a text to which one could simply point. The testimony of the authorities other than Scripture with which everyone in the West had been familiar for generations, ceased to be uncontroversially acceptable to many Protestants, and qualifications hedged about the use even of the Fathers. Proof by reasoning, which had reached a high point of sophistication in the late Middle Ages, and in which there had normally been embedded authorities to support propositions, underwent revolutionary attack. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]