Pieties in Transition

Religious Practices and Experiences, c.1400–1640

Elisabeth Salter, Robert Lutton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9780754656166
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317080978
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Social History

This significant and innovative collection explores the changing piety of townspeople and villagers before, during and after the Reformation. It brings together leading and new scholars from England and the Netherlands to present new research on a subject of importance to historians of society and religion in late medieval and early modern Europe. Contributors examine the diverse evidence for transitions in piety and the processes of these changes. The volume incorporates a range of approaches including social, cultural and religious history, literary and manuscript studies, social anthropology and archaeology. This is, therefore, an interdisciplinary volume that constitutes a cultural history of changing pieties in the period c. 1400-1640. Contributors focus on a number of specific themes using a range of types of evidence and theoretical approaches. Some chapters make detailed reconstructions of specific communities, groups and individuals; some offer perceptive and useful analyses of theoretical and comparative approaches to transition and to piety; and others closely examine cultural practices, ideas and tastes. Through this range of detailed work, which brings to light previously unknown sources as well as new approaches to more familiar sources, contributors address a number of questions arising from recent published work on late medieval and early modern piety and reformation. Individually and collectively, the chapters in this volume offer an important contribution to the field of late medieval and early modern piety. They highlight, for the first time, the centrality of processes of transition in the experience and practice of religion. Offering a refreshingly new approach to the subject, this volume raises timely theoretical and methodological questions that will be of interest to a broad audience.

PART I
Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies

Chapter 1

Geographies and Materialities of Piety

Reconciling Competing Narratives of Religious
Change in Pre-Reformation and
Reformation England

Robert Lutton

In his recent Image and Devotion in Late Medieval England Richard Marks discusses approaches to the study of images of saints and how they were used in late medieval England:

The selective and fragmentary nature of the empirical evidence rules out any attempt to write grand narrative, even if one were so inclined. Like the medieval Church itself, image-use was not monolithic; it operated at different levels, reflected different interests and took place in different contexts. A study based on microhistories and polysemic readings in time and place precludes the shoe-horning of the relationships between medieval people and their images into inappropriate and therefore unhistorical structures.¹

It is perhaps a measure of the influence of the revisionist turn in the historiography of late medieval religion in England that the sort of approach Marks advocates is so rarely followed. Instead, there is now a tendency to emphasize the coherence, uniformity and continuity of piety in England in the decades before the Reformation over and above its contradictions, heterogeneity and dynamics of change. This is illustrated by two further comments by Marks. The first describes the pieties of the residents of the parish of Eaton Bray in Bedfordshire: ‘The wills both of these villagers and of their overlords spoke the same discourse of conventional piety. With the exception of a small minority of dissidents (the Lollards), all classes subscribed to the same set of orthodox beliefs and practices, encompassing the liturgy, the sacraments and veneration of the saints’. The second explains the stark contrasts between different parishes’ levels of testamentary giving to saints’ cults within the Bedfordshire archdeaconry of Sudbury as being ‘… determined by parish custom …’ but does not attend to the implications for piety of such differences in customary practice.²

Examination of the geography of changing pieties in pre-Reformation England remains fragmentary and without a coherent comparative framework. There is an increasing number of studies of large, medium-sized and small urban centres together with work on counties, dioceses or regions encompassing more rural parishes.³ These show that significant geographical differences existed between different parts of the country and from one centre to the next. Despite this, national surveys do not generally draw attention to these different trajectories of religious development and change before the 1530s, perhaps because such differences have not generally been seen as important in religious terms.⁴

As a result, the geographical variety of orthodox piety has not informed explanations of the different rates and degrees of compliance with state-sponsored reform in the sixteenth century from one town or county to the next. A.G. Dickens described a ‘great crescent’ of Protestant heartlands comprising Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex and Kent with London at its centre and a ‘spur’ running along the Thames valley, including Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire and Berkshire. In addition, he identified Bristol and its hinterland and towns such as Coventry and Hull as important Protestant centres. In general, Protestants were more likely to be found in the south and the east than in the west and the north and in towns rather than in the countryside.⁵ This geographical pattern broadly corresponds to the documented incidence of Lollardy in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.⁶ Whether or not local Lollard networks provided a platform or springboard for early Protestantism is, however, a matter of ongoing debate. Richard Rex, in his recent book The Lollards, for example, has sought to demolish the view that Lollards in any significant way provided converts to evangelicalism and a ready-made infrastructure for the dissemination of new doctrines.⁷

According to Rex, ‘… the vast majority of early English Protestants about whom anything is known … came not from Lollard, but from devout Catholic backgrounds’.⁸ Experiences of conversion through reception of Lutheran theology were one of the defining features of early Protestantism in the 1520s and 1530s. However, one of the things this chapter seeks to explore is how transitions in orthodox religious culture may have helped bring individuals to dramatic moments of transformation as well as aiding less violent journeys from old beliefs to new.⁹ Without some indication of their specific content, terms such as ‘devout’ and ‘Catholic’ merely beg the question.

Christopher Marsh provides a useful summary of the factors that are generally accepted as having ensured that Protestantism flourished in certain areas or contributed to the impression of the geographical pattern described above:

… proximity to continental influences; a better supply of Protestant preachers; higher literacy levels; and more advanced economic networks, which provided ready-made channels for the dissemination of new ideas. … the more vigorous official investigations that seem to have occurred in the counties closer to London, … that may make the pattern look clearer than it actually was. Some of the same factors help to explain why, even within the southern and eastern counties, Protestant forms of dissent developed most readily in towns (a Europe-wide correlation), and in rural areas characterised by dispersed settlement and proto-industry. The link between the cloth trade and radical dissent has been noted many times.¹⁰

What is, of course, absent from this set of explanations is geographical variation in orthodox piety. Nevertheless, Marsh does discuss the potential appeal of Protestant doctrines to so-called orthodox Catholics and the continuities that helped pave the way for a gradual cultural and religious transition in the sixteenth century.¹¹ There is a growing body of work that questions the degree of attachment to some aspects of traditional religion and seeks to identify continuities between pre- and post-Reformation religious life that were not subject to, or survived, the changes imposed by state-sponsored reform. This has begun to sensitively identify gradual pre-Reformation shifts in lay religious practice and belief that, consciously or not, anticipated reform, and reformist critiques of some of the central pillars of traditional religion that may have met with significant support across the countryside.¹²

Kent and the Reformation

Kent is treated as a special case in the historiography of the Reformation. The county is seen as the most responsive in England to evangelical reform and the most precociously Protestant.¹³ Explanations for Kent’s rapid acceptance of Protestantism have looked largely to the influence of Archbishop Cranmer and his promotion of evangelical preaching with the cooperation of a sympathetic group of magistrates. They suggest a model of cultural dissemination and transformation that was largely clerically driven and worked from the...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Pieties in Transition
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps, Figures and Plates
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies
• Part II Institutions as Evidence for Transitions in Piety
• Part III Reading and Representation: Material Cultures of Piety
• Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index