Christianity In The West 1400-1700

"In some ways, perhaps, this is a self-indulgent choice. The book has simply been a great favourite of mine for a long time. My own copy was bought hot off the press in 1985 as a 20-year-old undergraduate, and is covered in rather shocking bright green felt-tip underlinings. It was a book that completely changed the way I thought about the history of religion. A subject that had seemed rather dry was revealed as really exciting. One thing I would say is that it’s a very deceptive book. Perhaps I was deceived when I originally bought it, because it looks like a student-friendly textbook. It’s less than 200 pages long, nice big print, hardly any footnotes, a brief bibliography at the end, and a title which is deceptively straightforward as well, Christianity in the West . So it looks like a primer, things you need to know. In fact, it’s an extremely daring and iconoclastic book that ranges extraordinarily widely. Some of its claims are perhaps exaggerated, or we might think differently about them, as Bossy himself came to. But the kind of book that makes you think differently about an entire field is very rare and is absolutely to be treasured. “In the Middle Ages, Christianity or ‘the Christianity’ signifies a body of people. By the time we get to the end of this process in the later 17th century, Christianity has become an ‘ism.’ It has become a body of doctrine” In some ways, it’s a difficult book to describe because it’s so rich, and almost every sentence carries an important thesis. The argument is that Christianity in Western Europe is profoundly transformed over the course of the 16th and 17th centuries, not just as a result of the theology of Martin Luther, but as part of a much wider process of religious, cultural, political transformation, in which the Protestant Reformation and what we used to call the Counter-Reformation—and now tends to be called the Catholic Reformation—are not only rivals but are also, in many ways, working in parallel to transform people’s experience of Christianity. That’s a really important development that other scholars have picked up over the past few decades as well. The Reformation is not the same thing as the Protestant Reformation, and indeed, if it were, it would be a less significant phenomenon, because only the northern third of Western Europe, in the end, really settled for Protestantism. Catholicism remains the majority faith. In John Bossy’s view, the Catholic Reformation is just as transformative of Christianity as the Protestant one. John, who died in 2015, was a very elusive and subtle writer who used powerful metaphors. One of these is what he calls ‘moral arithmetic.’ The ordering principle of Christian morality shifts, over time, from being focused primarily on the seven deadly sins towards being fixed much more heavily on the Ten Commandments. That sounds very obscure, but it supplies an insight into a broader process. In Bossy’s view, Christianity had, originally, been a means of ordering social relations. It was profoundly communitarian and collective, and was concerned with the seven deadly sins because they involved things like anger and envy that were socially disruptive. Christianity was a way of managing these social conflicts. But towards the end of the Middles Ages , it started to become much more internalised, much more doctrinal. The thou-shalt-nots of the Ten Commandments are very much more about a Christian’s interior life, about their relationship directly with God, rather than with their neighbour. So it’s a profound set of not just spiritual but also political and cultural transformations that, in a sense, are summed up in that deceptively simple title, Christianity in the West. Bossy is extraordinarily interested in the meaning of words, crucial terms like ‘charity’ or even ‘ religion ,’ which radically change their meanings over time. The key one, perhaps, is in the title: ‘Christianity.’ In the Middle Ages, Christianity or ‘the Christianity’ signifies a body of people. By the time we get to the end of this process in the later 17th century, Christianity has become an ‘ism.’ It has become a body of doctrine. That’s an important question, and I think you’re absolutely right that some of the recent scholarship—and Bossy is not entirely free of this—that has seen the Reformation primarily as a process of social disciplining of populations and greater political centralization and cultural uniformity, has been tempted to iron out the differences. Of course, as a historian, it really is the differences that should interest us, because this was what was most important to people of the time. There are many great doctrinal debates in the Reformation, aspects of which can seem strange—if not almost incomprehensible—to modern people. Perhaps the greatest one is what on earth Jesus meant when, at the Last Supper, he said, ‘This is my body,’ and then exhorted his disciples to ‘Do this in memory of me.’ It’s been semi-jokingly said that the Reformation is a bitter, 200-year-long dispute about the exact meaning of each of those four words: this, is, my, and body. People were literally put to death for having the wrong views on that. The temptation is to say, ‘Oh my goodness. These ridiculous, barbaric people of the past. Thank goodness we’ve got over that!’ I think that is a dereliction of duty. One of the things I think all my chosen authors share is a willingness to seek to understand it rather than just dismiss it, and to enter imaginatively into that world which is, in some ways, like ours, but, in other ways, very different from it."