Assertive Communities in the Fifteenth Century:
The Example of a Single Alpine Parish
Toward the end of the fifteenth century, peasants living in the remote,
Alpine valley of the Pitztal in Tirol seized
the initiative to improve the condition of their own village church. Until
then, the Pitztalers had been able to worship only on Sundays and holidays,
when an itinerant chaplain from the nearby village of Imst dropped by to
celebrate the Mass in the village chapel, which was dedicated to St. Leonhard.
According to local stories still current in the nineteenth century, it
was customary that because of the great distance between Imst and the Pitztal
(over 20 kilometers) a few of the valley residents would go to retrieve
the chaplain a day before the Mass was to be celebrated and return him
on Sunday after the Mass. In the winter, however, it was often necessary
to dispense with Sunday Mass altogether, because snow made the footpath
impassable.
To guarantee the regularity of religious service,
the peasants turned in 1485 to the cathedral chapter of Brixen—where the
great reformer Nicholas of Cusa was bishop—to ask for permission to hire
a priest, whom they would pay at their own expense, on the condition that
he would reside with them on a permanent basis. After long deliberations,
the chapter allowed the peasants to endow a priest with an annual salary
of 14 Bernese Marks. The grant emphasized that for all practical purposes,
the priest would be subordinate to the authority of village elders. The
priest would celebrating the Mass and preach the Gospel four or five times
each week and otherwise attend to the parishioners’ spiritual and ceremonial
needs.
A minor event in a remote place, perhaps; yet it is revealing of
several crucial aspects of late medieval religion:
1. The episode suggests how assertive ordinary people could be in
matters pertaining to eternal life: the proper conduct of ritual and
ceremonial life were matters of vital concern, for the worst thing that
could happen to a Christian was to die without benefit of the sacraments—baptism
or last rites.
2. The episode also shows how much religious life was bound up with
community: a village parish was a “sacrifical sacramental community” that
used religion to act out its internal workings and its relationship to
the wider world.
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Here we see a community of peasants striving to increase its autonomy as
a self-regulating religious collectivity, which in practice meant getting
independence from the absentee parish priest living in Imst.
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The endowment was communal in nature, which is to say that it rested on
a collective decision by village elders and was to be paid for out of the
community chest.
This kind of activity was more widespread than you might think:
in Tirol, one historian found 27 similar “endowments” between 1383 (which
is as far back as the records go) and 1521. This may not seem like much
until you recognize that in 1521, Tirol only had 57 parishes—which is to
say that over half were the product of communal assertiveness. There are
plenty of similar contracts from other parts of Europe:
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Many parishes, for example, entered into formal agreements with priests
which stipulated what the must and must not do.
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These could even include formal agreements requiring a village priest to
practice monogamy.
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And parishes were not shy about filing accusations against a negligent
priest.
The need to promote village harmony appears to have been the denominator
common to most of these interventions: that communities should have
been concerned about all these matters makes a great deal of sense, when
you think about it; as John Bossy writes,
[As] the hub of Christian society, [a priest] had functions
to perform which might seem inherently contradictory. He had…to serve the
separate families at their baptisms, marriages, and death-beds; keep his
finger on their kin-relationships, their dowries, wills and burials; say
mass for their living and their dead; defend their persons, offspring,
beasts and possessions from malicious or diabolical interference. He had
at the same time, for the sake of the parish as a whole, to criticize their
misdeeds and avoid espousing their quarrels…it was his business to procure
reconciliation of their enmities through arbitration, satisfaction and
rituals of togetherness performed in church, at the alehouse, or elsewhere.
More broadly still, there is plenty of evidence to indicate a surge
of broad-based, assertive religious enthusiasm in the fifteenth century.
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According to a study of Upper Austria, the number of individual
endowments for Masses soared after 1450, peaked in 1517, then suddenly
plummeted in the 1520s (similar data exist for England)
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By 1520, 20% of all parish priests in the Thurgau region of Switzerlandwere
appointed, paid for, and controlled by communal assemblies; in the Palatinate
region of the Rhineland, the proportion was 30%.
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Throughout Europe, we see the proliferation of religious confraternities—99
in the city of Hamburg alone.
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After the invention of moveable block type, Europe experienced an unprecedented
increase in the sheer number of relatively inexpensive religious texts—prayer
books, catechisms, confessional manuals, moral tracts, religious songbooks,
single-sheet images.
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The fifteenth century is also one of wildly popular pilgrimages,
often emerging quite suddenly, especially to shrines of the Virgin Maryand
of the “Bleeding Host”
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Maria Einsiedeln in Switzerland (1466);
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The Bleeding Host shrine at Wilsnack in Saxony (1476)
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Niklashausen in Franconia (1476)
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The marian shrine at Altötting in Bavaria (1490s)
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Maria Zell in Austria (1494)
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The shrine of the “Fair Lady Mary” at Regensburg (1520)
The numbers of pilgrims involved were often astonishingly large, even if
one accounts for exaggeration in the contemporary sources:
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At Einsiedeln, for example, over 130,000 pilgrims bought sourvenir tokens
in a single year, 1466.
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Altötting was inundated with votive offerings, whose worth
in 1492 was estimated at the purchase value of 600 head of cattle;
One could pile on example after example; what is crucial to bear in
mind about many of these pilgrimages is that perhaps most were not of the
individual sort characteristic of the Middle Ages, but organized collectively,
by whole village or parish communes. All of these phenomena point at
the fourth major characteristic of fifteenth-century religion: the “popularization”
of Christianity—specifically, people’s appropriation of religious institutions
and practices.
Image: Michael Ostendorfer (d.
1549), frontispiece to Wunderberliche czaychen vergangenen Jars beschehen
in Regenspurg tzur der Schönen Maria (1522), an account of the
pilgrimage to the shrine of the "Fair Virgin Mary" in the city of Regensburg.
The focus of this pilgrimage was a church erected on the former site of
the Jewish synagogue in the imperial city of Regensburg, which had been
destroyed when the Jews were expelled from that place in 1519. The church
gained sudden and immense popularity when healing miracles were reported
after the expulsion; this particular image was also printed for sale to
pilgrims. (c) Carlos Eire; source: http://adhoc.divinity.yale.edu.
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