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2 A Changing World The Cultural Backdrop to the Reformation

      To understand the origins of the Reformation and its religious and intellectual agendas, it is necessary to reflect on the culture of western Europe in the fifteenth century. Recent scholarship has placed an emphasis upon the need to place the Reformation movement in its historical context and to try to integrate the insights of late medieval, Renaissance, and Reformation studies into a larger vision of this “Age of Reformation.” The separation of these fields – for example, through each having their own university chairs, journals, and learned societies – has done little to help this process of synthesis and consolidation, which is essential if we are to understand both the intellectual context within which the ideas of the Reformation emerged, and the reasons why they proved to have such appeal.

      During the fifteenth century, as we noted in the previous chapter, many protest movements emerged, urging reform of the church at multiple levels. Some of these movements – echoing themes from Jan Huss’ fourteenth-century campaign for reform in Bohemia – were entangled with local demands for regional autonomy; others expressed concern at the excessive wealth and social influence of the church. Some are best seen as processes of reform and renewal, initiated by influential figures within the church, such as the reforms introduced in Spain during 1480s by Francisco Ximénez de Cisneros, which laid the foundations for the church playing a major role in the Spanish “Golden Age” of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.

Yet it is important to look beyond these demands for reform and consider some deeper changes in outlooks and expectations on the eve of the Reformation in western Europe, which help us understand the emergence of reforming movements, the agendas they pursued, and their popular appeal. The present chapter offers a sketch-map of some relevant aspects of late medieval European culture which will help contextualize the developments of the sixteenth century. The two chapters which follow examine in some detail the two most important intellectual forces in late medieval Europe: Renaissance humanism and scholastic theology.

      The Rise of the Individual: The Demand for Personal Relevance

      One of the most interesting phenomena on the eve of the Reformation is the surge of interest in the development of a personal spirituality on the part of many educated laity. This phenomenon is well documented for the period 1490–1520 in Spain, northern Italy, and parts of France. This quest for a deeper vision of the Christian life was not necessarily linked with any demands for institutional reform of the church, or a review of its theological commitments. It was primarily concerned with searching for personal fulfilment and authenticity, often linked with a new interest in reading the New Testament at a deeper and more satisfying level.

      During the Renaissance, lay Christians appear to have become increasingly dissatisfied with approaches to their faith which stressed its purely external and institutional aspects – such as merely attending church. As the rise of the movement sometimes known as “Evangelism” in northern Italy in the late Renaissance makes clear, there was growing lay interest in achieving spiritual authenticity, often through a close reading of the Pauline epistles. A group of spirituali – as such individuals came to style themselves – gathered around charismatic individuals such as Gasparo Contarini in Venice, Vittorio Colonna and Reginald Pole in Viterbo, and the Spanish exile Juan de Valdés in Naples. This movement, notable for its emphasis upon a personally assimilated faith, became firmly established within the church without being regarded as in any way heretical, schismatic, or even problematic.

      Older studies of the background to the Reformation tended to portray the later Middle Ages as a period in which religion was in decline. Modern research, using more reliable criteria, has indicated that this judgment was premature and unreliable. Between 1450 and 1520, Germany saw a considerable increase in popular religious piety. It is important to realize how deeply embedded religious ideas were in the culture of this period. While there were certainly problems in late medieval religion which Protestant reformers were able to exploit subsequently, the existence of these vulnerabilities is not in itself adequate to explain why Protestantism came into being, or took its specific historical and religious forms.

Underlying such criticisms was a growing spiritual and cultural confidence within the laity, accompanied by a solidifying realization of the disparity between the vision of the church set out in the New Testament, and the somewhat different social reality that they encountered in western culture. The increasing volume and stridence of such complaints is often assumed to reflect failings on the part of the church; yet it might equally reflect growing expectations on the part of the laity, and an increased confidence in expressing these concerns. A growing popular interest in religion during the fifteenth century led to lay criticism of the institutional church where it was felt to be falling short of its obligations.

      In many respects, salvation became institutionalized within the western church during the Middle Ages. The church was the institution which bestowed salvation through its sacramental system. The two sacramenta mortuorum (“sacraments of the dead”), baptism and penance, represented the gateway to eternal life on the one hand, and a means of restoring grace after a lapse. Cyprian of Carthage’s famous maxim “there is no salvation outside the church” was interpreted to mean that salvation could only be attained through the institution of the church. Christ made salvation possible; only the church could make it available. This basic principle was expressed in tangible form in church architecture. The great west doors of churches were often decorated with slogans, declaring that it was only through entering the church that salvation could be attained. To leave the church was to leave behind any hope of salvation.

      Yet such institutionalized visions of Christianity were of little value to many educated laity, who were searching for forms of Christianity that were relevant to their personal experience and private worlds. Not only were lay Christians in the period 1450–1520 more interested in their faith than their counterparts in earlier generations, but levels of lay literacy had soared, partly due to the introduction of printing, enabling the laity to be more critical and informed about what they believed – and what they expected of their clergy. With the advent of printing, books became more widely available, now lying well within the reach of an economically empowered middle class. Devotional books, collections of sermons, traditional “Books of Hours,” and translations of the New Testament regularly appear in these inventories. Lay people were beginning to think for themselves and did not consider themselves to be dependent upon their clergy in matters of Christian education. Studies of inventories of personal libraries of the age show a growing appetite for spiritual reading, allowing people to make connections between their faith and their experience of the world.

      This point

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