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Blood and baptism: kinship, community and christianity in western Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 March 2016

John Bossy
John Bossy*
Affiliation:
Queen’s university, Belfast
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Extract

Historians of west-European Christianity in its late medieval and early modern phases have recently been much concerned with the relations of the church and the devil. Our subject here, the church and the world, may seem by comparison, and notably for the period immediately preceding the reformation, a well-worn topic; inspired by the achievements of historical demography, we may be tempted to abandon it for more promising researches into the relations of the church and the flesh. This is indeed what I shall be doing here, at least to the degree that ‘flesh and blood’ can be considered as falling under the last heading. Yet, since it may be argued that ‘flesh and blood’ formed, for the average western Christian of this time, a major constituent of his ‘world’ or social environment, I do not feel that I am stretching a point in offering, within the present context, some comments on the subject indicated in my title. I am concerned with the connections of the Church and the ‘world’, meaning by that the complex of human relations it lives in. I am particularly concerned with the structure of one such society, that of western Europe in the immediately pre- and post-reformation age. And I am finally interested in pursuing or criticising some socio-historical arguments about what happened to European Christianity in and after the sixteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Church History , Volume 10: Sanctity and Secularity: The Church and the World , 1973 , pp. 129 - 143
Copyright
Copyright © Ecclesiastical History Society 1973

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References

1 Bossy, [J.], [‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Europe ], PP 47 (London 1970) pp 56 ff, 68Google Scholar.

2 Hill, [Christopher], [Society and Puritanism in Pre-Revolutionary England] (London 1964)Google Scholar esp cap xiv, ‘Individuals and Communities’.

3 Thomas, [Keith], [Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Six teenth and Seventeenth Century England] (London 1971) caps vi, xvii Google Scholar; Macfarlane, [Alan], Witchcraft [in Tudor and Stuart England] (London 1970) for example p 197 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 There is a valuable recent discussion in Du Boulay, [F. R. H.], [An Age of Ambition] (London 1970) pp 80–108 Google Scholar.

5 Homans, [G. C.], [English Villagers of the Thirteenth Century] (Cambridge, Mass, 1942) pp 160-76Google Scholar, ‘Trothplight and Wedding’.

6 B Text, Passus ix, 11. 113-6, following Du Boulay’s modernised version.

7 Homans pp 170-2; Delaruelle, [E.] , [Labande, E. -R., Ourliac, P., L’Eglise au temps du Grand Schisme et de la crise conciliaire], FM XIV.2 (1964) p 740 Google Scholar; unlike the provençal rite there described, the Sarum rite has the spouses simply joining their right hands at the church door, and not kissing until the pax during the mass: The Sarum Missal, ed Legg, J. Wickham (Oxford 1916) p 413 Google Scholar.

8 Campbell, [J. K.], [Honour, Family and Patronage] (Oxford 1964) pp 39 ffGoogle Scholar.

9 Schevill, F., History of Florence (New York/London 1961) pp 106 ffGoogle Scholar.

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11 Mintz, [S. W.] and Wolf, [E. R.], in [Kinship, ed Goody, J.] (London 1971) p 350 Google Scholar; Adam pp 104 ff; an introduction to the literature of the subject in Macfarlane, [Alan], [The Family Life of] Ralph Josselin (Cambridge 1970) pp 144 ffGoogle Scholar.

12 Bossy, John, ‘The Counter-Reformation and the People of Catholic Ireland’, in Historical Studies, VIII: Papers read before the Irish Conference of Historians, ed Williams, T. D. (Dublin 1971) p 163 Google Scholar - in the passage quoted in n 22, ad should read ab; Definities van der Generate Kappitels van de Orde van het H. Kruis, ed Van de Pasch, A., Koninklijke Commissie voor Geschiedenis (Brussels 1969) pp 196, 408Google Scholar: that the relationship envisaged here is primarily with the parents.

13 Mintz and Wolf pp 346 ff, esp 351-2.

14 E. R. Wolf, Peasants (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1966) pp 84 ff.

15 B Text, Passus xviii, 11. 371-6: commentary in The Pelican Cuide to English Literature: I, The Age of Chaucer, ed Ford, B. (London 1954) pp 344 ffGoogle Scholar; Cohn, Norman, The Pursuit of the Millennium (London 1970) p 200 Google Scholar.

16 All my evidence here comes from Wood-Legh, K. L., Perpetual Chantries in Britain (Cambridge 1965): cases cited at pp 30, 34, 42, 289 ff, 309 ffGoogle Scholar.

17 Bloch, Marc, Feudal Society (London 1965) pp 123-4Google Scholar; Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin p 143.

18 Ariès, Philippe, Centuries of Childhood (London 1962)Google Scholar; compare Du Boulay pp 87 ff.

19 Jungmann, [J. A.], [The Mass of the Roman Rite], 2 vols (New York 1951) 11 pp 159-69Google Scholar (living), 237-48 (dead); The Lay Folks Mass Book, ed Simmons, T. F., EETS (London 1879) pp 34 ff, 44 ffGoogle Scholar; Smith, [H.] Maynard, [Pre-Reformatioit England] (London 1965) P 99 Google ScholarPubMed.

20 Burckhardt, J., The Civilisation of the Renaissance in Italy (London 1951) pp 265-8Google Scholar; Huizinga, [J.], [The Waning of the Middle Ages] (London 1952) pp 12 ff, 20Google Scholar; Toussaert, see index under faide, and p 789; Phillpotts, B., Kindred and Clan (Cambridge 1913) caps iv, vGoogle Scholar; Mandrou, R., Introduction á la France moderne (Paris 1961) pp 112 ffGoogle Scholar.

21 For example Macfarlane, Witchcraft pp 161 ff.

22 Bras, Gabriel le, Institutions ecclésiastiques de la Chrétienté medievale FM XII (1964) p 407 Google Scholar, n 11 - reading ut for et.

23 [The English Works of George] Herbert, ed Palmer, G. H., 1 (Boston/New York 1915) pp 229, 274, 316Google Scholar: compare Patrick Collinson, ‘The Godly: Aspects of Popular Protestantism in Elizabethan England’, papers of Past and Present conference on popular religion (1966) typescript, p 6; Macfarlane, Ralph Josselin pp 30 ff; Thomas pp 154 ff; Heath, Peter, The English Parish Clergy on the Eve of the Reformation (London/Toronto 1969) pp 97 ffGoogle Scholar.

24 Jungmann II pp 275-350 passim, esp pp 321 ff (Pax); Lay Folks Mass Book, pp 114 ff (York use).

25 Bloch, Feudal Society pp 408 ff.

26 Jungmann II pp 325 ff; Maynard Smith pp 96 ff; Huizinga p 37.

27 Maynard Smith p 96; The Prayers and Other Pieces of Thomas Becon, ed Ayre, J., Parker Society (Cambridge 1844) pp 279-81, 256Google Scholar; Liturgies of Edward VI, ed Ketley, J., Parker Society (1844) pp 76, 87Google Scholar; repeated in 1552, pp 265, 274.

28 Herbert 1 pp 316 ff.

29 Hill p 192.

30 Compare Campbell p 123.