Introduction:
Village Religion and Cultural Change
Bishop Etienne Le Camus arrived in his new cathedral city of Grenoble on 4 November 1671, the fête of Saint Charles Borromeo.[1] He chose this day for his formal entry to signal his intention of emulating Borromeo by bringing the Counter-Reformation to his flock. He was the first representative of the Catholic Church in Grenoble determined to reform the religious lives of people who lived in the remote mountain towns and villages of the diocese. Le Camus's task had been ordained at the Council of Trent a century before his arrival and defined by the work of other reformers, such as Borromeo, throughout Europe. But the diocese of Grenoble seemed to the new prelate barely touched by the reform and its spirituality. He would be the first religious leader to make a concerted effort to turn local religious practice from what the Counter-Reformation Church considered its indecent or superstitious traditions into paths that were more consistent with Church doctrine and more carefully controlled by the Church hierarchy.
Historians of early modern religious change and of popular culture have seen the efforts of reformers like Le Camus as part of a broad attempt to tame the traditional culture of rural people. According to this view, ecclesiastics allied with increasingly powerful centralized governments and urban elites sought to stamp out the disorderliness they saw in the rural world and to establish their control more forcefully
[1] Jean Godel, "Les visites pastorales de Le Camus," in Le cardinal des montagnes: Étienne Le Camus , ed. Jean Godel (Grenoble, 1974), p. 213.
over it. In following this program, religious reformers condemned and tried to suppress pre-Counter-Reformation religion, which combined attention to the sacraments of the universal Church with an equal attention to customs often outside the clergy's control. Reformers found many of these customs indecent. Clerics directed the faithful away from showy processions, raucous confraternity banquets, excessive zeal for relics and miracles, and other practices that combined what the Church considered the profane with the sacred. And reformers hoped to steer people toward a style of religion that emphasized the individual examination of conscience, dutiful participation in the sacraments, and a more exacting understanding of proper doctrine, all as defined by the clergy. The diversity of traditional religion in which customs varied greatly from locality to locality would be stripped away. New religious practice would be uniform, centered on the universal symbols of the Church, controlled by bishops, and exercised in parish churches under the watchful eyes of priests imbued with the Counter-Reformation's ideal of religion. Le Camus's entry into Grenoble would be a sign that the campaign, a battle for control of the sacred territory on which people worshiped and hence a battle for their souls, was beginning in the alpine diocese.
Here, however, the bishop's arrival does not indicate the beginning of religious change but only one important moment in a continuous transformation. For what is at issue in this study is neither an account of the Counter-Reformation in the diocese of Grenoble nor a catalogue of the region's popular cultural customs and beliefs; it is instead an examination of the nature of cultural change in early modern villages. The Church's attempt to alter the traditional religion in this diocese may have begun with Le Camus, but innovation in the religious lives of the people who lived there did not. The reformers's efforts to impose a new style of religious belief and practice on his flock were only one part of a more complicated process of local cultural change. The process was a two-way interaction between a reforming bishop and villagers. More accurately, it involved a variety of groups at different social levels, including those within villages, with interests that sometimes prompted alliances and, at other times, provoked competition in the pursuit of cultural change.
Religion gives us the means to examine this complex process. Even if cultural change in early modern society encompassed more than the Counter-Reformation, it was still a matter of religion. Culture—in the sense of the systems of actions, symbols, and meanings that embody
the ways in which people carry out their lives, order their existence, and interpret their world—was religious. Religion provided the primary symbolic form of cultural expression. It evoked a view of the way the world worked and taught people the values, beliefs, and customs necessary for living in the world in a proper fashion. Religion was not merely a discrete group of ceremonies and beliefs separate from work and play. It provided a model and a rationale for social and political relations, a justification for the world as it was, and an explanation of how it had come to be that way. Rulers reigned by virtue of being God's representatives. The political life of villages was, as we shall see, inextricably bound up with the religious life of parishes. A divine plan fixed the earthly social hierarchy, which resembled the hierarchy of heaven. Religious strictures, even if honored only in the breach, fixed the moral boundaries of economic activity—the exaction of usury, for instance, or the care of the poor. People measured time according to a religious calendar. Divine power, at least for Catholics, was immanent; God could intervene in the world at any moment through miracles to save crops, heal illnesses, or signal support for some human endeavor.
Under certain circumstances, religion could also provide the inspiration for changing the world, as was the case in millenarian movements and often in peasant revolts. It was, however, also the case in the less dramatic but continuous processes of cultural change operating within European society. Religious innovations therefore had political and social implications as well. The Catholic reformers, in promoting obedience to hierarchical ecclesiastical authority, promoted hierarchy and authority in all aspects. Villagers, in their reaction to the reformers, responded to the broader attempt by outsiders to impose control over their lives. And so I start with Le Camus's arrival in his diocese not to privilege it as the key moment in a transformation but to contrast his ambitions and expectations with those of his flock and to contrast my approach with those of other historians who have labored over similar terrain.
Le Camus did not recognize that his work represented a new stage in a cultural transformation rather than its beginning. All too frequently historians of early modern religion have not understood that either. In fact, they have often adopted a view similar to that of Catholic reformers: change, when it occurred, resulted from the more or less successful imposition of a new set of religious and moral standards on a superstitious people. The efforts of these historians have provided us, nonetheless, with a detailed view of the program of the Counter-
Reformation Church, of the direction in which it sought to turn religious life, and of how it thought that turn could be accomplished.[2]
The program that bishops enacted through their curés followed a similar pattern everywhere.[3] Catholic reformers often described their task as a vast educational undertaking. They could achieve their goals only by instructing the populace in proper doctrine, observance, and attitude. Le Camus echoed a common theme when he reminded his parish priests that "superstitions could slip into . . . parishes through ignorance or negligence."[4] If the priests were attentive to their instructional duties, superstitions could be eradicated; proper observance would triumph. It was for this reason that reformers emphasized the importance of the Church's instructional tools such as confessions, better sermons, and new catechisms. More diligent teaching—by curés but also by schoolmasters and schoolmistresses in the petites écoles of villages—would produce better-instructed and more-obedient parishioners.[5]
Obedience, authority, uniformity, decorum: these were the larger aims of the Catholic reformers. They wished to put their own Church in order as a response to their Protestant challengers and critics. But their desire for control also stemmed from a deeper desire on the part of European political and social elites to control and civilize an unruly population. Reforming prelates wanted to instill in their flocks a religion in which superstitions would be abolished, in which no ceremony
[2] Jean Delumeau presents an overview in Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire , 2d ed. (Paris, 1979), pt. 3, chaps. 2, 4. See also Yves-Marie Bercé, Fête et révolte (Paris, 1976), chap. 4; and Robert Muchembled, Culture populaire et culture des élites dans la France moderne (XVe-XVIIIe siècles ) (Paris, 1978), pp. 255-272. Diocesan studies that contribute to our understanding of the Counter-Reformation include Louis Châtellier, Tradition chrétienne et renouveau catholique dans le cadre de l'ancien diocèse de Strasbourg (1650-1770) (Paris, 1981); Jeanne Ferté, La vie religieuse dans les compagnes parisiennes (1622-1695) (Paris, 1962); Louis Pérouas, Le diocèse de la Rochelle de 1648-1724 (Paris, 1964); Robert Sauzet, Contre-réforme et réforme catholique en bas Languedoc (Louvain, 1979); Thérèse-Jean Schmitt, L'organisation ecclésiastique et la pratique religieuse dans l'Archdiaconé d'Autun de 1650 a 1750 (Dijon, 1952); and Jean-François Soulet, Traditions et réformes religieuses dans les Pyrénées centrales au XVIIe siècle (Pau, 1974).
[3] For curés as agents of the Counter-Reformation, see Philip T. Hoffman, Church and Community in the Diocese of Lyon, 1500-1789 (New Haven, 1984), esp. chap. 4.
[4] Recueil des ordonnances synodales du diocèse de Grenoble publié dans le synode renu à Grenoble par Monseigneur l'Eminentissme et Reverendissme Cardinal Le Camus Evêque et Prince de Grenoble (Grenoble, 1687), p. 12. The passage continues, "especially in the minds of women and idiots."
[5] The subjects necessary to teach so that parishioners would understand the "horror of sin" and be awakened to "the desire for a true conversion" included an understanding of the sacrifice of the mass, the Trinity, the Incarnation, penitence, the commandments of God, the sacraments and the proper disposition to receive them, the obligations and sins that pertained to each estate or profession, and the good use of afflictions and illnesses to arrive at the proper spiritual attitude (as listed in ibid., pp. 174-175).
would obstruct the mass, and in which no devotion would attract more attention than the properly venerated Eucharist. They redefined festivity as sinful, ignorant, and dangerous to social order. Parishioners would perform the religious duties dictated by the curé, and they would lead more upright lives. Their immoral behavior (especially their sexual behavior) would be corrected.[6] Religion would become more abstract, spiritual, and individualized, less tied to the collective practices of the past. The extra-parish religious landscape filled with sacred fountains, chapels, and pilgrimage sites would give way to the parish church through which the bishop and his priests could control religious activity.[7] Here the faithful's attention would be focused on new altarpieces at the main altars, theaters of the Eucharistic service, rather than on the lateral saints' chapels. These altarpieces could also instruct the faithful in the devotions emphasized by the Counter-Reformation.
The new type of parishioners would understand their religion, want it taught to their children, and expect religious ceremonies, as well as the priest who performed them, to be dignified.[8] They would no longer be so attached to confraternities whose celebrations seemed to the reformers little more than excuses for drunken feasts and whose services interfered with the parish mass. Instead new organizations such as those of the Blessed Sacrament or the Rosary would replace the old ones devoted to saints often associated with crafts. Processions and pilgrimages to sites distant enough to require people to spend nights on the road would be prohibited; they were sure occasions for sexual license. Reformers would refuse to permit such common superstitious and indecent beliefs as that church keys could cure rabid dogs, or that the words uttered in prayers or spells could, of themselves, cure the sick, or that certain herbs could be used to tap divine power. No longer would people have the audacity to treat the Eucharist, the central cultic symbol of the Church, as a magical instrument and use it to prevent storms, stop fires, or heal the sick.[9]
[6] For the reformers' concern with sexual morality, see John Bossy, "The Social History of Confession in the Age of the Reformation," Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , 5th s., 25 (1975): 29-38. On complaints about parishioners' behavior, see Pérouas, La Rochelle , pp. 171-176; Ferté, La vie religieuse , pp. 291-293; Schmitt, L'organisation ecclésiastique , pp. 210-216; Soulet, Traditions et réformes , pp. 288-294.
[7] The idea of the Counter-Reformation's promotion of parish-centered religion is drawn from John Bossy, "The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe," Past and Present 47 (May 1970): 51-70.
[8] This description is adapted from Pérouas, La Rochelle , p. 429.
[9] These practices in the diocese of Grenoble were among many that Le Camus condemned and were typical of customs found throughout the country (Recueil des ordonnances , passim).
Hence the standard depiction of the encounter between the Counter-Reformation and village religion is one in which a clerical elite tried to impose its new religious conceptions on people with other beliefs and practices. Understanding the Church's program is not the same as understanding cultural change in early modern rural society, but this description does mirror the way historians have characterized the relationship between the culture of the learned, enlightened elite and the popular culture of the uneducated. The benefits derived from a model of culture that distinguishes elite from popular have been great. It has helped us restore to view the cultural life of the vast majority of early modern people in all its rich complexity. And yet it has left us with some troublesome problems of definition.[10]
Ironically, our knowledge of popular culture is most complete for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, precisely the period during which, according to some scholars, it was the most endangered. At this time an increasingly self-conscious elite separated itself from the lower orders. The elite was educated, urban, and either more religiously stringent (as in the case of the religious reformers and lay dévots ) or else concerned with scientific knowledge and a rationalistic view of the world. It became preoccupied with maintaining order in society by enforcing morality and discipline; this, in turn, meant attacking many of the disorderly aspects of popular culture.
To carry out its destruction of popular culture, the elite first had to define it not by its intrinsic characteristics but rather by opposition to what the elite now found permissible. In terms of religion, the Church absorbed and brought under the control of the hierarchy popular practices such as the devotion to acceptable saints or pilgrimages to new shrines honoring the Virgin Mary, to mention only two.[11] Other practices that had previously been proper, such as devotion at sanctuaires à répit (shrines where miracles revived babies who had died before bap-
[10] On problems inherent in dividing early modern cultures, see Natalie Z. Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion," in The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion , ed. Charles Trinkhaus and Heiko Oberman (Leiden, 1974), pp. 307-336; and "From 'Popular Religion' to Religious Cultures," in Reformation Europe , ed. Steven Ozment (St. Louis, 1982), pp. 321-341; also Carlo Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms , trans. John and Anne Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1980). On the issue among historians in general, see Ian McKay, "Historians, Anthropology, and the Concept of Culture," Labour/Le Travailleur 8-9 (Autumn 1981-Spring 1982): 185-241.
[11] For an example of this development with pilgrimage shrines, see Keith P. Luria, "Pilgrimage Shrines and Religious Change in the Seventeenth-Century Dauphiné" (Paper read at the Society for French Historical Studies, 13-14 March 1981, University of Indiana, Bloomington).
tism) now met with the suspicion of authorities.[12] Church authors produced catalogues of superstitions for which the clergy was to be on the alert.[13] Eventually the concern with repressing superstitious customs would turn into an interest in studying them scientifically. The erudite elite, by the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, was sufficiently removed from these customs to be able to treat them as folklore. And by the late nineteenth century, the elite could view the popular culture, which their forebears had tried so vigorously to stamp out, with a certain fond nostalgia.[14]
This schema has its merits, particularly in its description of how the elite redefined culture into that which was or was not acceptable and in its description of the attack that early modern religious reformers (with political authorities and the urban patriciate) mounted on now unacceptable cultural practices. However, the model also has severe shortcomings. Religious reformers, political authorities, and the urban elite may have possessed a common educational background. But we should be wary of thinking that they necessarily shared a monolithic elite culture.[15] Some followed Bérulle into a sort of mystical devotion; others preferred the skeptics and a rationalistic mode of thought. The two groups moved in the same seventeenth-century literary circles and partook of common intellectual preoccupations. They shared a contempt for the lower orders and a concern for making them more orderly.[16] But the cultural divisions between them were growing. Even the clerical reformers did not present a united front, as the dispute between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, who held Le Camus's sympathy, demonstrates. So too, there was a world of difference between the Parisian intellectual milieu and that of provincial nobles and townspeople who still marched in confraternal processions (though now perhaps as members of Jesuit-sponsored organizations), but who also worried about
[12] Le Camus was critical of the miracles at one such popular medieval pilgrimage site in his diocese, the sanctuaire à répit at Tullins.
[13] The best-known catalogues in France were those of Jean-Baptiste Thiers: Traité des superstitions selon l'écriture sainte, les décrets des conciles et les sentimens des saints pères et des théologiens (Paris, 1679); and Traité des jeux et divertissments qui peuvent estre permis ou qui doivent estre défendus aux chrétiens selon les regles de l'Eglise et le sentiment des pères (Paris, 1686).
[14] This progression is described with some variations by W. Th. M. Frijhoff, "Official and Popular Religion in Christianity," in Official and Popular Religion (The Hague, 1979); Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (New York, 1978); and Muchembled, Culture populaire .
[15] Richard Trexler also points out imprecision in our notions of elite religion and culture in "Reverence and Profanity in the Study of Early Modern Religion," in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 , ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (London, 1984), pp. 245-269, esp. 245.
[16] I return to this point in discussing criticisms of the cult of saints in chapter 4.
distinguishing themselves from and establishing control over their less socially elevated neighbors. Furthermore, as we shall see, the elite that often proved crucial to village cultural change was inside the community, village notables, whose view of the world differed even more from that of people we usually associate with elite culture.
The cultural variety among the elite shows how difficult it is to establish solid connections between culture and social divisions. Such divisions are important in understanding cultural change, but culture does not correspond neatly with a position on the social ladder. Elite culture seems distinctive and homogeneous only in relation to popular culture. But since we, following the lead of the reformers, have defined popular culture in relation to elite, we are left with definitions that are fuzzy at best, if not tautological. With each examination of a particular practice, custom, value, or belief, the line separating elite from popular has to be redrawn. The boundary between the two camps becomes increasingly unclear. Indeed it is my suggestion that we are mistaken in drawing such lines at all. Cultures in early modern society were not distinct entities that groups possessed in opposition to one another.
If basing cultural divergences on social divisions proves difficult, perhaps a model patterned on the political course of centralizing monarchies would be more useful. William Christian, in his work on early modern Spain, has proposed a basic contrast between local religion and that of the central and centralizing Church. Local religion was particularistic and included all social groups but was distinct from the religion of the Church, which promoted universalist beliefs and practices.[17] This approach has much to recommend it in the way it illuminates the reformers' concern with suppressing local diversity, even though, as Christian's subtle analysis shows, their campaign reinforced local religion by validating the authority of its priests and the authenticity of its saints, shrines, and relics.[18]
But by distinguishing local from universal religion, we run the risk of emptying early modern Catholicism of its meaning. Catholics everywhere had common beliefs and symbols, though the local understanding or relative importance of such beliefs and symbols varied. Nor should we overestimate the uniformity of local religion. The inhabitants of particular communities had no single understanding of religion. The problem is to grasp the complexity of village religion —a term that is
[17] William A. Christian, Jr., Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain (Princeton, 1981). This description of cultural difference and change also echoes the center-periphery model of European economic expansion.
[18] Ibid., p. 177.
more useful than local religion if we take it to describe the cultural differences among villagers as well as between their community and the outside. To do so we must analyze the local uses and meanings of Catholic beliefs and symbols and balance them against the universal content that the beliefs and symbols also contained. Then we must assess the extent to which villagers agreed or disagreed on these uses and meanings.
The attempt to delineate the boundary between two opposed cultures has hampered our efforts to understand how early modern people actually saw their cultural system at work. Where religious reformers created divisions between the sacred and the profane, modern historians have distinguished between the rational and the magical.[19] The enormous differences between our technological capabilities and those of our early modern forebears encouraged this view, which was founded on the specific act of rejecting the former view of the world to construct the modern one. We have the rational heritage of the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, and they were backward, emotional, and superstitious. People who had to struggle with a harsh natural world, an undeveloped economy, misunderstood diseases, and so forth without the benefit of scientific knowledge needed the rituals, customs, and beliefs of "primitive" popular culture to try to explain and control their environment. Of course, since such rituals, customs, and beliefs were unscientific, they could not really exert control over the natural world, but they could help ease the anxieties that threatened social cohesion. Popular culture, in this view, provided a means to allay anxiety through the belief that supernatural forces could control the environment and human behavior and that these forces could be propitiated through rituals.[20] But since the rituals could not really be effective, anxieties and fears could never really be alleviated.[21]
As Stuart Clark has pointed out, this view ignores both logic and empirical evidence.[22] Anxieties are part of any cultural situation—we
[19] Two now classic variations on this theme are Keith Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971); and Delumeau, Le catholicisme , pp. 266-271. Delumeau contends that the reformers gave true Christianity to people at best superficially christianized, who mixed pagan practices and beliefs with outward conformity to Catholic sacraments. For an overview of the functionalist sociological theory behind such views, see Thomas F. O'Dea, The Sociology of Religion (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966), pp. 1-10.
[20] I draw here on the more detailed discussion of Stuart Clark, "French Historians and Early Modern Popular Culture," Past and Present 100 (1983): 62-99.
[21] Robert Mandrou argues to this effect in Introduction to Modern France, 1500-1640 , trans. R. E. Hallmark (New York, 1975), pp. 55-61, 70-72, 239-241. See Clark's critique of Mandrou (and of Jean Delumeau, La peur en occident [Paris, 1978] and Muchembled, Culture populaire ) in "French Historians," pp. 69-74.
[22] Clark, "French Historians," pp. 68, 82.
can hardly deny that they are part of our own—but they are relieved by the sense that people possess the resources to cope with their problems. We have no reason to doubt that early modern people believed they had such resources. Natural occurrences were not mysterious. Each one had its meaning. Eclipses, comets, and the birth of monsters had significance. The interpretation of natural signs might be an art not everyone could master, but it could be done.[23] Propitiating a saint to save crops or heal illnesses might work one time and not the next, but both success and failure could be explained within the cultural framework that gave meaning to ritual acts. The failure of individual actions within the system did not destroy it. People did not think their explanations of the world fell short; they could not have thought so. Ascribing natural occurrences to supernatural causes was not a second-best means of describing the world, which thus left people fearful, but was, instead, exactly the explanation that allowed people to incorporate supernatural forces into their perception of the world. Admittedly this understanding of the mental world of early modern people can obscure processes of change. If the system of explanation was so flexible and all-encompassing, how did new habits of thought ever develop? Nonetheless Clark's critique is a useful corrective to the more dismissive view of early modern culture.
Historians such as Natalie Z. Davis and Carlo Ginzburg, who have worked from a similar understanding, have suggested that the religion of the people, whatever its relation to that of elites, provided for its adherents a complete religious experience. It was a cultural system that offered an entire range of religious satisfactions, meanings, and ways to order life.[24] We need to remember, however, that although early modern culture was complete, it was not seamless. In our concern to correct the lopsided view of popular culture, we have sometimes leaned too heavily on a particular form of functionalism that overemphasized the culture's tendency toward equilibrium. Each element fit neatly into the whole and made its contribution to the smooth functioning of a "system."[25] Early modern people certainly shared cultural practices
[23] Clark uses the interpretation of natural signs to show the "depth and enormous variety" of "popular mental resources" (ibid., p. 85).
[24] Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes," pp. 307-310; and Ginzburg, Cheese and Worms , pp. xiii-xxvi. See also Hoffman, Church and Community , pp. 3-4.
[25] O'Dea, Sociology of Religion , pp. 2-7. Although this description does not exactly characterize Geertz's model of religion as a cultural system, which has influenced historians such as Davis, Hoffman, and myself, it too stresses the overall coherency of a cultural system at the expense of explaining change or conflict within it.
that did function to provide them with a coherent understanding of reality.[26] But their culture, like any other, also contained disagreements and tensions, experiences that posed questions for the system's operation and challenged it.
Cultural change issued from tensions at all social levels and disagreements among all groups, not simply from the acculturation of the lower orders by their social superiors.[27] The current of change did not always flow from top to bottom. Certainly new religious conceptions often originated with ecclesiastical authorities, but the ideas promoted by reformers would never have taken hold if the laity had not accepted them.[28] Change came from below in the form of numerous religious phenomena not promoted, and sometimes not even sanctioned, by authorities. The founding of new pilgrimage sites or the sudden increase of religious visions, such as happened not far from Grenoble in the southern Dauphiné during the second half of the seventeenth century, provide evidence of a creative impulse. Even if they were connected, in a complex way, to the Counter-Reformation, they came first and foremost from the religion of villagers. People at all social levels were continuously engaged in remaking culture to respond to social realities and to shape them. Hence, a new religious culture in villages could develop only out of a process in which both the clergy and villagers played dynamic roles. Even when villagers did so by accepting ideas from an elite, they modified or adapted those ideas for their own use. In order to describe accurately the nature of culture in early modern society, we must find a means of describing not two distinct camps, one active and one passive, but the more fluid situation of cultural change in which everyone borrowed, adapted, and, if need be, resisted, the contributions of others.
[26] I differ here somewhat from Clark, who denies the validity of functionalist interpretations because they describe rituals as fulfilling "needs which none of the performers could in principle have recognized as his own" (Clark, "French Historians," p. 91). Later chapters suggest that villagers could, in fact, recognize many such "needs." In the final analysis, probably neither early modern people nor we understand all the ramifications of our cultural systems. My disagreement with this functionalist interpretation concerns its stress on the cohesive force of culture rather than its possibilities for internal conflict.
[27] For an exchange on acculturation in early modern society, see Muchembled, "Lay Judges and the Acculturation of the Masses," and Jean Wirth, "Against the Acculturation Thesis," both in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe, 1500-1800 , ed. Kaspar yon Greyerz (London, 1984), pp. 56-78.
[28] On the active role of the laity, see Davis, "Some Tasks and Themes," p. 309; and Hoffman, Church and Community , p. 169.
A Different Approach to Early Modern Cultural Change
The partition of culture into halves proves troublesome because it creates an artificial boundary between artificial groups, and because it obscures the process of change. By using this model, we interpret early modern culture in our terms rather than in its own. But we cannot correct the problem by reverting to a view of a single, undifferentiated culture defined by the literate elite. What we need then is a more flexible and dynamic conception. We should describe this cultural interaction as a meeting in which all groups chose, adapted, and modified cultural conceptions.[29] We must account for the collective creation of early modern culture by everyone but must also realize that it did not mean the same thing to everyone. Each symbol, practice, or belief could have different meanings for different people. In other words, the acts of creating meanings, and of adopting, adapting, or resisting those created by others, formed the culture of early modern people. Culture cannot be understood as a fixed entity that belonged to one group or another but must be seen as a continuous process. In any situation, this process could polarize into an encounter between just two opponents, a reforming bishop and a rural parish, for example. Or so it might appear to our eyes. We can, as a result, easily fall back into a description resembling the simple division between elite and popular. Such a bifurcated opposition is just the momentary outcome of a particular political circumstance, almost an optical illusion. Behind it the larger, more fluid process was always at work.
Religious change gives an example of the way this cultural palimpsest developed. First, we must note that all Catholics shared certain religious conceptions. They believed, for example, in the sacraments or the cult of saints. Yet the meanings imputed to these central conceptions could vary considerably in ways that cannot simply be divided into elite and popular. For a reformer like Bishop Le Camus, communion was one of the most important acts of Catholic worship, and the consecrated Host was an object to be treated with the utmost respect and
[29] On this point see the similar comments by David Hall, introduction, and Roger Chartier, "Culture and Appropriation," both in Understanding Popular Culture , ed. Steven Kaplan (New York, 1984), pp. 5-18, 229-253. See also Roger Chartier, introduction to The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1987), pp. 3-12. On religion more specifically, see Alphonse Dupront, the preface to M.-H. Froeschlé-Chopard, La religion populaire en Provence orientale au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1980), p. 23; Alain Lottin, "Contre-réforme et religion populaire," and M.-H. Froeschlé-Chopard, "Une définition de la religion populaire à travers les visites pastorales d'ancien régime," both in La religion populaire , ed. Guy Duboscq, Bernard Plongeron, and Daniel Robert (Paris, 1979), pp. 53-63, 185-192.
veneration. Villagers recognized the significance of communion but also saw the Host as an object imbued with divine power, which they could use for healing the sick or rescuing crops. Le Camus would not countenance such an understanding of the Eucharist's role. Here the division between elite and popular seems clear. But how are we to perceive the associates of Grenoble's chapter of the Company of the Blessed Sacrament—members of the urban patriciate and enforcers of Counter-Reformation piety—who recounted to each other the story of a miracle concerning the Host in the nearby village of Saint-Ismier? In 1658, a woman of the village left the parish church after communion with the wafer hidden in her breast, perhaps so that she could put it to some religious use of her own. Profanity was avoided when the wafer dropped to the floor, three times, and finally rolled back to the main altar and the priest.[30] The attitude of the brethren of the Blessed Sacrament mixed the reformers' concern for the proper veneration and treatment of the Eucharist with a more popular desire to find a miracle that reinforced its status as the central object in Catholic worship. The incident happened before Le Camus's arrival in the diocese, but he would likely have considered it a very dubious miracle and would certainly have been appalled by the thought of the Host touching the floor. The point is that all involved shared a belief in the importance of the religious symbol but had different ideas about why it was important, on how that importance was to be demonstrated, and on how it was to be employed in the world. All shared the symbol but not each of its meanings.
Understanding the variety of meanings that the central core of beliefs, practices, and symbols could assume is one of several necessary steps in the explanation of cultural and religious change. We must describe, as fully as possible, the way in which the meanings—those that belonged only to village religion, those that were more universal, and those that belonged to various levels in between—combined to produce and reproduce culture. And we must recognize that the combination was not static but underwent constant change as people shared, adapted, and contested cultural meanings.
The second major component in the explanation of village cultural change is an examination of how the village cultural system actually operated or, more particularly, what role village religion had in the community. Was early modern religion an integrating agent in communal life? Did rituals counteract the conflicts that erupted from political
[30] Pierre-Henri Bordier relates this story in "La compagnie du Saint-Sacrement de Grenoble, 1652-1666," Travail d'études et de recherche (Université de Grenoble, 1970), p. 221. I thank the author for permitting me to consult his work.
or economic competition to restore a sense of community to their participants? Historians have frequently portrayed them this way. The mass emphasized the need to pray for kin, friends, and enemies and dramatized it in the pax.[31] Processions displayed the community to itself in hierarchical order and organic unity.[32] Confraternities and youth abbeys gave individuals structured roles to play in the religious and social life of their communities. Their charivaris, for instance, helped maintain community norms by mocking those who transgressed them.[33] And above all, confession healed conflict by stressing the social as well as the spiritual dimension of sin and by exacting penances that entailed restitution.[34]
Much evidence exists, therefore, to support interpretations of early modern religion as an agent of social integration. And approaching it in this way has produced compelling explanations of how religion functioned in communities. But they tell only half the story. Ritual could not smooth out all social conflict. In fact, religion also contributed to village tensions. It exacerbated conflict as well as healed it. For an example we can return to the mass. When the Church, fearful of the sexual implications of neighborly kissing in the pax, succeeded (during the fifteenth century) in substituting a board that parishioners kissed instead, the ritualistic implications of the ceremony changed. Rather than assuage communal conflict the new pax board provoked it, for quarrels erupted over who would go first—that most common of conflicts in the hierarchical society of medieval and early modern Europe.[35] The reality of social life had asserted itself over the integrative force of the mass. Indeed the mass, in a sense, now fomented conflict.
Furthermore, interpretations that privilege the integrative power of religion have an incomplete view not only of religion but also of communities. These were not simply bodies in constant search of social
[31] John Bossy, "The Mass as a Social Institution, 1200-1700," Past and Present 100 (August 1983): 29-61. Bossy adds that despite the injunction to pray for one's enemies, the mass also contained ritualized means to wreak vengeance on them.
[32] Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (New York, 1980), pp. 267-271, 339-340. Trexler also recognizes that while uniting the social body and providing psychological calm, processions could be manipulated by participants (see p. 271). His concern is with early modern urban society, but much of what he says pertains also to the rural world.
[33] On youth abbeys and charivaris see Natalie Z. Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1975), pp. 97-123; E. P. Thompson, "'Rough Music': Le charivari anglais," Annales: ESC 27 (1972): 285-312; and the essays in Jacques Le Goff and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds., Le charivari (Paris, 1981). On confraternities, see A. N. Galpern, The Religions of the People in Sixteenth-Century Champagne (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), pp. 52-68; and Hoffman, Church and Community , pp. 59-63.
[34] Bossy, "Social History of Confession," pp. 24-27.
[35] Bossy, "The Mass," pp. 56-57.
equilibrium. Rather they were poised between the constantly competing demands of cohesion and familial ambition. Religion helped construct a sense of community and aided the villagers in playing out their contests for position and prestige. The interpretation of religion in early modern society must make room for this two-way interaction between religion and society. Communities contained tendencies toward both solidarity and the pursuit of family interests. The cultural system of early modern communities, namely religion with its symbols and their malleable meanings, shaped and was shaped by the attempt to balance the two.[36] Religion expressed both the aspirations of communal unity and the realities of communal conflict.
The third component necessary for an interpretation of early modern cultural change is an analysis of the effect of political power on the process. It might, at first, seem the easiest component to define: in France, the monarchy, nobles, the Church, and urban notables had power; villagers did not. The powerful might not always have worked together, but the seventeenth-century French state and Church alike strove to enforce conformity, order, and obedience either through troops and tax collectors or through a newly reformed clergy and the manipulation of religious symbols. The question of who had power is, however, considerably more complex. Most people exercised and were objects of the exercise of power. The state and Church could array themselves against villagers, and the contest would by no means be equal. But power could also be exerted from the bottom up. We should not underestimate the capabilities of the "powerless." Villagers could resist, as they did in the many revolts of the seventeenth century. Less violent means of resistance were in fact probably more frequent, if less obvious to the historian.[37] Villagers could find ways to manipulate those who sought to coerce them, reforming bishops for example.
Political power did not shape culture merely in the clash between the powerful and the less powerful. Cultural change resulted from alliances between different groups in the pursuit of interests they did not necessarily share. The impact of the Counter-Reformation depended not just on the power of reforming bishops to impose their concept of religion on their flocks but also on an alliance they established with parish elites. The bishops were interested in establishing their authority over communities while village notables wanted to cement their position within them. Catholic reformers, so interested in maintaining harmony in com-
[36] See discussion of religion's social and cultural role at the beginning of this chapter.
[37] On this topic see James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak (New Haven, 1985).
munities, actually aggravated social divisions. And just as the arrangement of political alliances between the Counter-Reformation and villagers was unexpected, so too was their timing. As we shall see below, village elites were often engaged in turning the opportunities presented by religious change to their own advantage long before reforming bishops arrived on the scene.
The Locale
The rural parishes of the diocese of Grenoble will furnish the site in which to examine the three components of cultural change at work, and an analysis of the evolution of saints' cults will provide the means. The location is good for a study of cultural change during the Counter-Reformation because the ecclesiastically sponsored reforms started there in such an abrupt manner with Bishop Le Camus's arrival in 1671. He was the diocese's first diligent Catholic reformer. His predecessors had been ineffective. And religious orders had little impact on the area.[38] Despite its remoteness from Paris and the mountainous terrain that made communications difficult, the diocese was by no means isolated from major cultural currents or political developments. The Dauphiné had felt quite strongly the pull of monarchical centralization under Richelieu and Louis XIV.[39] The city of Grenoble was a regional center with a considerable legal community attached to its Parlement and with its own group of dévots in the Company of the Blessed Sacrament. Furthermore, a major route to Italy cut through the region, making it a crossroads of northern French and Mediterranean cultures. The northern third of the diocese was not even French but part of the Duchy of Savoy. In fact, the bishopric was made up of a variety of areas with distinct topographies, historical backgrounds, and political structures. Towering alps may have surrounded the diocese's villagers, yet they were anything but closed off from the world.
For the historian, the diocese's most appealing aspect is its good supply of documents. Ecclesiastical records from the early seventeenth century are often fragmentary, but those from the second half of the century, especially during Le Camus's episcopate, are both plentiful and detailed. Numerous studies of early modern religious change have exploited similar documents—catechisms, synodal legislation, accounts of missions, spiritual writings, records of bishops' pastoral visits to
[38] They were engaged mostly in anti-Protestant missions elsewhere in the province.
[39] The most important example of this impact, the procès des tailles , will be discussed in chapter 1.
parishes—to describe the program of the Catholic reformers.[40] This study will use them somewhat differently, examining them not so much for what they disclose about the Counter-Reformation but, instead, for what they reveal about local religious change. Pastoral visits, which describe certain aspects of local religious life, will be more important than, say, spiritual writings, which villagers rarely read.
Our understanding of the vitality of village religion can be easily undermined if we depend for our information on the writings of those who condemned it. We must do what we can to avoid adopting the outlook of religious reformers even while extracting from their work a clearer picture of village religion. Indeed concepts like village religion or village culture can be defined only in relation to a larger framework. Villages were never isolated from outside institutions or culture. The documents of reformers seeking to change village religion helped to structure the interchange between the community and the larger culture and therefore helped to construct village culture itself. In other words, village culture did not exist on its own but was always the product of an interaction between the village and the outside world.[41] The contents of Church documents such as the records of pastoral visits can reveal much about the villagers' attitudes toward religious change despite the goals of the reformers who wrote them. Thus although this study seeks to diminish the role of a bishop like Le Camus as an agent of cultural change, it will emphasize his legacy to historians: the records of his pastoral visits to the parishes of his diocese.
In the final analysis, however, Church documents cannot present a full view of village life. They must be compared to records that come from the village. Such records are not plentiful for the seventeenth century, but they present what the Church documents cannot, a picture of the ways in which cultural and religious change transcended the efforts of the Counter-Reformation Church.
The most compelling reason for focusing on rural areas is that most people in early modern France lived in the countryside. If we do not examine their religious beliefs and practices, we cannot claim to know very much about early modern French culture. Since the diocese was overwhelmingly rural, it provides an excellent region in which to test ideas about the changes in village culture. By concentrating on rural areas, this study will complement the work of others who have written
[40] ee the diocesan studies listed in note 2 above.
[41] On the use of elite documents to study popular culture, see David Warren Sabean, Power in the Blood (Cambridge, 1984), p. 3.
on religious change in the city of Grenoble.[42] The provincial capital will not be absent here, but it is important to the study as it affected the cultural life of its surrounding villages.
Village religion, then, will be the object of this study's attention. It is a more specific and useful concept than popular religion because it is not a neatly delimited entity separated from elite, or high, or universal religion. Rather village religion was simply the religion of those within the village community. It was the complex of ceremonies, beliefs, and customs in which villagers engaged. The term is not meant to suggest that all inhabitants of a village participated in the same activities, shared the same values, and derived the same meanings from religious symbols. But the religious lives of villagers were most immediate and intense within their communities. Here cultural change would be most apparent.
The next chapter begins the examination of village cultural and religious change by describing the diocese Bishop Le Camus would encounter in 1671. Its political divisions as well as its variety of languages, legal traditions, and local customs presented a formidable challenge to a reformer seeking to impose cultural uniformity. But two other obstacles were greater. First was the prelate's own misunderstanding of the character of village religion in the diocese. Where he could see only decay, indecency, and superstition, villagers saw creativity and vitality. Customary festivals along with new and old shrines and confrater-nities provided a rich religious life for the bishop's flock. Only the diocese's ecclesiastical institutions were decaying and its clergy was ineffective. They were the second great obstacle to the bishop's plans. The contrast between them and the largely independent religious lives of villagers was marked. The bishop would succeed in reinvigorating his priests and institutions. But his impact on the villagers and their religion would be less forceful.
Chapters 2 and 3 describe the encounter of the bishop and the villagers, the first in Le Camus's intentions toward his flock and the second in their response to him. During his pastoral visits, Le Camus brought his authority and moral stature to bear on rural parishes. He also realized, however, that to work his will he had to manipulate both village religious symbols and the social divisions within communities. He sought allies among village leaders attracted to his program because of the opportunity it offered them for social advancement and the dom-
[42] Kathryn Norberg, Rich and Poor in Grenoble, 1600-1814 (Berkeley, 1985); and Bordier, "La compagnie."
ination of their poorer neighbors. What the bishop did not realize is that as he was manipulating villagers, they were manipulating him. They made use of his authority sometimes to settle conflicts but also to advance their own positions. And they reinterpreted the symbols and religious conceptions he brought with him to suit their purposes. These chapters therefore explore the question of how the power each side exerted shaped the process of cultural change.
To examine cultural life at village level, we must overcome one considerable difficulty. Few villagers left written accounts of how they perceived their religion or culture. We must find other means to gain access to these perceptions. One method, pioneered by Gabriel Le Bras, has been to measure the level of participation in the sacraments.[43] But since most people attended mass and took annual communion both before and after the Counter-Reformation, the approach reveals little about cultural change or the meaning people derived from these practices. Much more rewarding has been the use of wills to assess religiosity through charitable giving.[44] They do a better job of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the religious reform. A large and long series of testaments is necessary, however, and it is hard to come by in the countryside.
Pastoral visits provide another means of measuring rural religious change in the information they contain on the local cult of saints. Saints were important to reformers and their flocks alike. Of the great variety of cultural symbols that characterized village religion, none prove as fruitful or as accessible as the saints to whom villagers were devoted. Saints fulfilled a variety of functions and took on a variety of roles. They were protectors, patrons, friends, and teachers, symbols of communal unity and of familial standing. Social harmony and political order depended on the cult of saints. But so too did family honor and ambition. Reformers preferred to emphasize the saints' roles as teachers and exemplars of the proper spiritual and moral life. They promoted devotions that would encourage this interpretation of the cult. As religion changed, so did the saints whom people worshiped. Each variation of religious culture within the larger framework of Catholicism had a complex of saints' devotions unique to it, and individual saints could possess different meanings for those devoted to them. Whether people
[43] Gabriel Le Bras, Etudes de sociologie religieuse , 2 vols. (Paris, 1955); and the diocesan studies in note 2 above. One application of this approach is Jacques Toussaert, Le sentiment religieux en Flandre à la fin du moyen âge (Paris, 1963).
[44] Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1973); Pierre Chaunu, La mort à Paris aux XVIe, XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1978); and Norberg, Rich and Poor , esp. chaps. 6, 10.
adopted the meanings that the reformers intended is the concern of chapter 4.
By tracing the evolution of the cult, we can obtain a picture of changing religious sensibilities. Catholic reformers have provided us with a means and the documents to carry out the study; these are analyzed in chapter 5. The evolution of the cult of saints was visually evident in a village through the foundation and placement of chapels in the community's religious space. The texts of bishops' visits to parishes record in considerable detail the saints to whom chapels were devoted. The attention given to this information in the visits is an indication of the chapels' importance to religious authorities.
But pastoral visits also indicate the importance of chapels to villagers by noting their interest in founding new ones or in maintaining devotion to old ones. Villagers, despite the injunctions that reformers repeated in visit after visit, might continue to honor their customary saints in ways which authorities had condemned as indecent. Such devotional habits were a strong statement of the villagers' beliefs and, perhaps, rebuked those who promoted new concepts of religion.
As chapter 6 shows through a case study of one village, new devotions entered the pool from which a community or individuals chose saints to honor. To understand their decisions, we must examine the operation of the village cultural system or, more precisely, the way in which villagers used religion to construct their cultural system. The selection of saints depended on communal tradition, concurrent needs, the desires and ambitions of families, their contact with religious changes outside the community, and the influence of political as well as religious authorities. In other words, the array of saints honored in a village reflected and shaped, in the broadest sense, the village's society and culture. And this array changed constantly. We can trace the changes, assess the interplay of internal and external forces operating on the village, and thereby follow the workings of cultural change in rural society.
When seen as symbols of culture and cultural change, saints teach us about the subtle interplay between new ideas and traditions, between external demands and internal desire for stability and change, between the power of outsiders to govern villagers' lives and that of villagers to shape their own lives. Saints taught villagers how to live. They can teach us how villagers did live.