Brad S. Gregory - Augustana College

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