Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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combined sharp limits on orthodoxy with a wide tolerance of diverse local beliefs and practices. We are now well aware that any picture of medieval Latin Christianity as a homogeneous, uniform set of rigidly prescribed, strictly enforced, and closely followed practices is simply mistaken. Beyond a few basic expectations and implicit affirmation of the truth claims that they presupposed, variety and voluntarism marked late medieval religious life, from minimal participation in collective practices to the spiritual athleticism of individuals such as Henry Suso or Catherine of Genoa. 1 At the same time, however, orthodoxy conceptually and necessarily implied heterodoxy, simply as a corollary of the fact that the church made truth claims, no less in the fifteenth century than it had in the fifth. If some things are true, their contraries are necessarily false. Crossing the wrong lines could quickly land one in serious trouble—as the late medieval Waldensians, Lollards, and Hussites knew first-hand. 2 Hence the church around 1500 exhibited an identifiable unity in doctrinal, liturgical, devotional, and institutional terms across Latin Christendom from Iceland to Poland, from Scandinavia to Spain. But it also manifested a cornucopia of local religious customs, voluntary devotional practices, specific ecclesiastical sub-groups, particular jurisdictional privileges, divergent theological approaches, and syncretistic beliefs in a spectrum ranging from the impeccably orthodox to the edge of heresy. 3 Any adequate depiction of late medieval 1 John Van Engen, “Multiple Options: The World of the Fifteenth-Century Church,” Church History, 77:2 (2008), 257-284; R. N. Swanson, Religion and Devotion in Europe, c. 1215-c. 1515 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Richard Kieckhefer, Unquiet Souls: Fourteenth-Century Saints and Their Religious Milieu (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). 2 Malcolm Lambert, Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002); Euan Cameron, Waldenses: Rejections of Holy Church in Medieval Europe (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000); Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wycliffite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); Thomas A. Fudge, The Magnificent Ride: The First Reformation in Hussite Bohemia (Aldershot, U. K.: Ashgate, 1998). 3 Van Engen, “Multiple Options,” and idem, “The Future of Medieval Church History,” Church History, 71:3 (2002), 492-522; Swanson, Religion and Devotion; Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: 2
Christianity must include both of these historical realities. One-sided references to medieval “Christianities” that downplay the common beliefs, practices, and institutions of Latin Christendom are as distorting as older, facile exaggerations about the Middle Ages as an allegedly homogeneous “age of faith.” The second paradox of late medieval Christianity is its combination of longstanding, widely criticized shortcomings with unprecedented, thriving lay devotion and dedication. Notwithstanding Huizinga‟s influential opinions about its purported spiritual decadence, 4 considerable recent research suggests that the fifteenth century was arguably more devout than any preceding century in the history of Western Christianity. Never before had so many of the laity thrown themselves into their religious lives with such gusto, with so many devotions to Christ and the saints, participation in confraternities, works of charity, practices of pious reading and prayer, and monetary contributions in support of the church. 5 At the same time, criticisms of clerical corruption and greed, of lay superstition and ignorance, of manifest sinfulness by individuals in every station of life, were legion throughout the late Middle Ages. 6 From Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1580, 2nd ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2005). 4 Johan Huizinga, The Autumn of the Middle Ages, transl. Rodney J. Payton and Ulrich Mammitzsch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 5 Duffy, Stripping of the Altars; idem, Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers, 1240-1570 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006); Bernd Moeller, “Frömmigkeit in Deutschland um 1500,” Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte, 56 (1965), 3-31; Anne Winston-Allen, Stories of the Rose: The Making of the Rosary in the Middle Ages (University Park, Pa.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997); Ellen Ross, The Grief of God: Images of the Suffering Jesus in Late Medieval England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); Christopher F. Black, Italian Confraternities in the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Christianity and the Renaissance: Image and Religious Imagination in the Quattrocento, ed. Timothy Verdon and John Henderson (Syracuse, N. Y.: Syracuse University Press), pp. 229-404; Berndt Hamm, “Normative Centering in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries,” transl. John Frymire, in Hamm, The Reformation of Faith in the Context of Late Medieval Theology and Piety, ed. Robert J. Bast (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2004), pp. 1-49; Caroline Walker Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 6 See, for example, the documents in Manifestations of Discontent in Germany on the Eve of the Reformation, ed. and transl. Gerald Strauss (1971; Bloomington, Ind.: University of Indiana Press, 1985); 3
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Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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