Abstract
Historical scholarship suggests that a robust cult of the saints may have helped some European regions to resist inroads by Protestantism. Based on a neo-Durkheimian theory of rituals and social order, I propose that locally based cults of the saints that included public veneration lowered the odds that Protestantism would displace Catholicism in sixteenth-century German cities. To evaluate this proposition, I first turn to historical and theoretical reflection on the role of the cult of the saints in late medieval history. I then test the hypothesis with a data set of sixteenth-century German cities. Statistical analysis provides additional support for the ritual and social order thesis because even when several important variables identified by materialist accounts of the Reformation in the social scientific literature the presence of shrines as an indicator for the cult of the saints remains large and significant. Although large-scale social change is usually assumed to have politico-economic sources, this analysis suggests that cultural factors may be of equal or greater importance.
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Notes
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For instance, in the city of Nuremberg, Evangelicals mobilized popular demonstrations that openly targeted representatives of the pope and prominent monasteries, with the city council doing little to protect them from attack or violation (Strauss 1966). In 1525, the Evangelicals prevailed in the council. They abolished the Roman mass, expelled prominent defenders of orthodoxy, and prohibited members of monastic orders from preaching. Soon after, they pressured monasteries to dissolve and decreed that priests could be appointed only with the permission of the city government. Similarly, when followers of the Evangelical reformer Ulrich Zwingli won control of the city of Augsburg in the 1530 s, the city council purged Catholic loyalists, abolished the Roman mass, and began to dissolve convents and monasteries (Locher 1979).
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There is a rich historiography of the Protestant Reformation and the urban communes. While it impossible to review that historiography in any detail given the constraints of this article, the literature makes clear that the Reformation was primarily an urban event and that the cult of saints was bound up in the civic constitution of many German towns.
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Some of the leading pilgrim destinations invested heavily in assembling impressive reliquaries. Aachen boasted the relics of the indigenous saint Charlemagne, was well as imported relics including garments belonging to Christ, Mary, and John the Baptist (Webb 2002, p. 138). Cologne, the famed “German Rome” and bastion of theological orthodoxy, boasted the relics of the locally martyred St. Ursula and her virgins, the martyred legionary St. Gereon, the relics of the Three Magi, and bones of the Maccabees (Montgomery 2009; Heal 2001). Such cities could attract enormous numbers of pilgrims—for instance, during a period of special indulgence in 1496, about 150,000 people visited Aachen (Webb 2002, p. 138).
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Note that while Rothkrug’s list has been criticized for providing questionable estimates of the number of shrines (Sargent 1987), the strategy of analysis used in this article minimizes the danger of unreliable estimates. Rothkrug’s list seems to be prone to error, in large part, because it tries to account for obscure shrines located in small towns and villages. By focusing on the population of large cities, which are better documented in the secondary literature and are readily corroborated, I mitigate the problem of inaccurate reporting.
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Acknowledgments
The author would like to thank Michael J. Halvorson for inspiring this article, Katie Corcoran for research assistance, and Karen Snedker, Katherine Stovel, James Felak, Jason Wollschleger, Marion Goldman, James Wellman and Trey Causey for helpful comments on the article. An early draft benefitted enormously from critical comments at the 34th annual German Studies Conference in 2010.
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Pfaff, S. The true citizens of the city of God: the cult of saints, the Catholic social order, and the urban Reformation in Germany. Theor Soc 42, 189–218 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9188-x
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11186-013-9188-x