Religion and Conflict in Medieval and Early Modern Worlds

Identities, Communities and Authorities

Natasha Hodgson, Amy Fuller, John McCallum, Nicholas Morton, Natasha Hodgson, Amy Fuller, John McCallum, Nicholas Morton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9780429835995
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This volume seeks to increase understanding of the origins, ideology, implementation, impact, and historiography of religion and conflict in the medieval and early modern periods.

The chapters examine ideas about religion and conflict in the context of text and identity, church and state, civic environments, marriage, the parish, heresy, gender, dialogues, war and finance, and Holy War. The volume covers a wide chronological period, and the contributors investigate relationships between religion and conflict from the seventh to eighteenth centuries ranging from Byzantium to post-conquest Mexico. Religious expressions of conflict at a localised level are explored, including the use of language in legal and clerical contexts to influence social behaviours and the use of religion to legitimise the spiritual value of violence, rationalising the enforcement of social rules. The collection also examines spatial expressions of religious conflict both within urban environments and through travel and pilgrimage.

With both written and visual sources being explored, this volume is the ideal resource for upper-level undergraduates, postgraduates, and researchers of religion and military, political, social, legal, cultural, or intellectual conflict in medieval and early modern worlds.

PART I
Propaganda, polemic, and religious identities

1
RELIGION AND CONFLICT, CONFLICT AND RELIGION

Long-distance pilgrimage and the (re)building of Catholic identity in an era of religious war in France 1550–1650

Elizabeth Tingle

Since I am not capable of choosing for myself, I accept the choice of others, and remain in the state wherein God has placed me. … Thus, by the grace of God, I have kept wholly, without being stirred or troubled by conscience, within the ancient tenets of our religion, amidst the many sects and divisions that our times have brought forth.¹

The sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne claimed to have been little troubled in matters of inner faith during his lifetime, despite confessional disputes all around him. The faith of his ancestors was good enough for him. Montaigne was an observant Catholic, travelling on pilgrimage to Rome in 1581, where he accumulated indulgences and purchased blessed medallions. He moved on to Loreto, where he took Easter communion and, in the Holy House, left a silver votive plaque to Our Lady inscribed with donor images of himself, his wife and daughter.² These were the ordinary, traditional devotions of a wealthy French pilgrim. Yet Montaigne’s exterior life as a French nobleman was entirely affected by religious conflict. As a senior judicial magistrate, courtier of the later Valois kings, mayor of turbulent Bordeaux, and participant in and victim of war, Montaigne had intimate experience of a world rent politically and socially by dispute between Protestant and Catholic. It is highly unlikely that his religion was as tranquil as he asserted. Montaigne’s journey to Rome might have been that of an enquiring Renaissance scholar and Valois diplomat rather than a religious zealot, although his visit to the station churches and to the exposition of the Veronica on Good Friday clearly made this a religious journey as well. His visit to Loreto, however, was a conscious affirmation of a faith under attack from Protestantism, which was strongly critical of saints’ devotions and miraculous cults. In this chapter, the relationship between confessional conflict and Catholic religious practice will be explored for France during the religious wars of the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, through the lens of the traditional devotion of long-distance pilgrimage. Conflict is used as an analytical category to consider agency, that is, the motors of religious change. It was a significant factor in the changing nature and expression of piety among contemporaries.

Study of the relationship between religion and conflict, particularly religion as a cause or catalyst of conflict, has a very long history and historiography. For the early modern period and more especially for the wars of religion of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, dispute and violence resulting from religious differences between Protestants and Catholics have been key analytical factors. Of course, interpretations of this relationship have shifted over time, from religion as a mask for political ambition proposed by nineteenth-century writers such as Jean-Hyppolite Mariéjol and Lucien Romier to belief as a cause of cultural friction proposed by more recent historians such as Natalie Davis, Philip Benedict, and Denis Crouzet.³ The relationship between religion and conflict through an inverted lens, that of the impact of conflict on religion, is currently of great interest in academic study, particularly issues such as “fundamentalism” and “radicalisation” as causes and consequences of contemporary wars and insurgencies. In the French wars of religion, there were clearly religious effects of war in theology and practical devotions. The growth of existing and the foundation of new religious orders in the century between 1550 and 1650 is particularly striking, with the emergence of the Jesuits and augmentation of reformed Franciscan houses being particularly prominent, shown by studies by Megan Armstrong and Eric Nelson, among others.⁴ The effect of conflict on devotional forms is most striking in the enhanced importance given to the Eucharist in Catholicism, shown by studies of Lee Wandel Palmer, Anne Ramsey, and Christopher Elwood.⁵ Lay religious responses to war were particularly evident in the creation of many new confraternities, some for piety and some for proclaiming confessional allegiance, amongst which Penitents and Holy Sacrament confraternities were prominent.⁶ Direct conflict was not the only cause of change, of course, although other factors at work were often themselves influenced in some way by religious dispute. Such was the renewed confidence and militancy of the church after the Council of Trent, itself a response to religious schism.⁷ How conflict impacted on the religious lives of “ordinary” Catholics in France, remains to be considered in a systematic way.

In this chapter, the influence of conflict on the religious lives of “ordinary” French Catholics, those who were not members of religious orders or political elites, who lived in the populous areas of towns and overwhelmingly in the countryside, will be explored. This will be attempted through a case study of a practice that was widespread in its participation, that of long-distance pilgrimage to ancient shrines in the Atlantic European region, northern Spain, and northern and western France, with particular reference to French pilgrims visiting the Mont Saint-Michel and Santiago de Compostela. This allows for an examination of religious continuities and changes over a long period of time in a geographical region where there was frequent dispute between Protestantism and Catholicism and which was distant from the well-studied Mediterranean region, including Rome. The chapter will explore the nature and narrative of religious conflict as it affected pilgrimage, then examine different ways in which shrine-keepers and pilgrims responded to the conflicts and disorder around them. It will be argued that French Catholics reacted to conflict by remoulding traditional practices into something new and relevant to their needs, which reaffirmed the validity of their faith and of their own religious identity.

Protestant reformations and long-distance pilgrimage

Pilgrimage was one of the defining features of medieval Christianity, demonstrated by Alfred Dupront, Jean Chelini, and André Vauchez, among many others.⁸ But the practice declined across Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, a result of criticism by evangelical reformers and abolition by Protestant regimes and because of wars and instability in many regions. Disapproval of pilgrimage was not new; it was found even in the early Church, for to quote Robert Bartlett, “it was difficult to reconcile sacrally-charged space with the universality and spirituality of Jesus’s teachings,” but this was not a commonplace viewpoint.⁹ By the early sixteenth century, however, humanist criticism became prominent and more widespread. In the devotio moderna tradition which originated in the fifteenth-century Low Countries, piety was increasingly interior, focused on Christ, rather than externally expressed.¹⁰ Erasmus exemplified this viewpoint with his colloquy “The Religious Pilgrimage” in which Ogygius travels to Compostela “for the sake of religion” and returns home “full of superstition.”¹¹ But it was the violent eruption of Protestantism that really reduced pilgrimage.¹² The new theology fundamentally rejected the two key doctrines on which pilgrimage was based, saintly intercession and the salvific efficacy of good works. The Word of Scripture rather than bodily presence in a physical space brought contact with God through the intermediary of the Holy Spirit.¹³ Martin Luther attacked pilgrimages and called for their elimination, for they provided opportunities for sin and they involved useless expenditure of resources which could be better used at home.¹⁴ For Jean Calvin, saints’ cults, relics, and images on which pilgrimage was based led to idolatry and therefore came from the devil. Thus, in Protestant soteriology, often forcefully and even violently put forward, pilgrimage had no purpose.

Dispute over theology led also to physical conflict. Reformed Protestants responded to the veneration of saints with iconoclasm. In France, from 1525 onwards there were sporadic attacks on churches and shrines, but from the outbreak of religious wars in the early 1560s, violence became systematic. Huguenots targeted sacred sites and objects for destruction: major shrines such as St Martin of Tours, Notre Dame de Rocamadour and Notre Dame de Liesse were badly damaged, and smaller sites all over France were “cleansed.”¹⁵ Further, Protestant rejection of saints’ cults and intercession seems even to have reduced Catholic confidence in holy people and places. There were few canonisations in Europe in the sixteenth century; numbers visiting shrines fell away.¹⁶ Yet from the mid-1570s, pilgrimage revived, slowly at first, then more rapidly after 1600.¹⁷ In December 1563, the Council of Trent confirmed the validity of saints’ cults in its decree “On Invocation, Veneration, and Relics of Saints, and on Sacred Images,” which stated that while “Christ is our sole redeemer and saviour,” it was good and useful to invoke the saints and to honour their relics because they had been “living members of Christ and temples of the Holy Spirit.”¹⁸ Trent’s decrees were followed throughout Europe by the widespread revival of traditional devotional activities by an increasingly confident and militant Catholic Church eager to revive the faith and to thwart Protestantism. This included a renewal of pilgrimage as part of a wider reclamation and celebration of holy places and people.

However, it was not simply a matter of the revival of old practices; many of pilgrimage’s “medieval” features changed across the Catholic Reformation. Firstly, there was some decline in long-distance pilgrimage and instead a greater localisation of shrines and religious life in general, based on the parish or neighbouring sites.¹⁹ Secondly, there was growing stress on interior pilgrimage, as a spiritual rather than a physical activity.²⁰ Thirdly, an increasing role was played at shrines by the new and reformed religious orders such as Jesuits and Capuchins, as a part of their missionary agenda, while dedications to universal saints – above all Mary – expanded at the expense of older cult...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Propaganda, polemic, and religious identities
• Part II Religious conflict in local contexts
• Part III Religion, gender, and authority
• Part IV Religion and conflict in the city
• Part V Legitimising religious warfare
• Conclusion
• Index