Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Gábor Tüskés

Narrative Literature and the Reformation: Focal Points of an Interdisciplinary Discussion of the Scholarship

The roots of the current discussion of the scholarship on narrative literature and the Reformation stretch back into the last third of the twentieth century. This discussion has been ongoing in several disciplines, often working independently of one another and to some extent on different levels of inquiry, and sometimes with only minimal exchange of findings and conclusions. These studies are significant first and foremost because the operative terms themselves denote a field of inquiry in which one can trace processes of the history of science that are not sufficiently understood, processes the further mapping of which can lead to a better understanding of events in literary history and the history of ideas in the early modern era. The goal of my survey here is to examine the conceptual formation of the relevant terms and shed light on their development within the history of science. I also identify some lacunae in the scholarship and formulate several hypotheses. I have concentrated in my inquiry on German speaking areas, with some consideration of the situation in Hungary.

keywords: narrative literature, impact of the Reformation, interdisciplinarity, comparative approaches

Clarification of Terminology

The term “narrative literature” presents both literary studies and the historical study of narrative with a daunting challenge. The origins of the term itself (“Erzählliteratur”) do not lie in German scholarship on literary history as associated with names like Paul Böckmann or Eberhard Lämmert.1 The term refers first and foremost to narratives within existing printed literature that could be regarded as “popular,” collections of short entertaining or moralizing stories that are widely dispersed or disseminated and longer prose narratives that recently have come to be grouped under the term “prose novel.”2 Other kinds of text that often contain narratives are also taken into consideration.

In the historical background of this term there was a debate, now long past but nonetheless rich with implications, between philologists and researchers of popular literature regarding the problem of oral traditions and the epithets “folkish” and “popular.” The difference of opinions concerned first and foremost the question of the actual possibilities of spreading oral tradition among broad layers of the population and the role of literature in the process of mediating narrative. In the wake of the work of the Brothers Grimm, for a long time the direction of inquiry was determined by targeted investigations and selective practices of inclusion.3 Didactic narratives were neglected, both by literary scholarship and scholars of folklore. The desire to achieve, as a precondition to any study of narrative, a precise knowledge of literarily discernible narrative motifs could only begin to be realized in the 1960s. Indeed to this day there is no real consensus regarding the definition of narrative, neither in literary studies nor in the study of narrative. The historical study of narrative4 as a multidisciplinary, comparative field of scholarly inquiry5 has developed primarily out of the study of German literature and the folklore research since the 1950s.6

The central tasks of the historical and comparative study of narrative involve first and foremost questions regarding the age, mediation, dissemination, and functions of narrative types and motifs, as well as the question of continuity and the interdependence and penetration of literary and oral transmission and the problems of genres of popular narrative. The hypothesis of unbroken continuity in oral transmission is actually discarded through the study of sources and exact analyses of literary interconnections, and cross-linkages are exposed. Since the mid-1960s a discussion of comprehensive theory and methodology that would provide a coherent foundation for the discipline has been sought in narratology, in which efforts have been made first and foremost to arrive at theories of narrative that transcend genre.

At roughly the same time there was a dawning realization in the study of literature of how inappropriate it was to separate from the outset so-called popular texts (in other words the texts addressed to all social groups) from rhetorics, which suggests the conclusion that one cannot arrive at an adequate interpretation of the narrative literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries without the study of rhetoric. The scholarly use of apophthegms led to studies that allegedly discerned the point of origin not only of all history writing, but also of the epic genres in this gnomic form. Modern narrative theory, in the meantime, developed from a form of inquiry rooted in the older approaches of the humanities into a field of study based on modern, structuralist, textual-linguistic or communication-theory foundations.7 The terminology deals first and foremost with the analysis of the narrative instance, the narrative event, and the narrative perspective. In more recent scholarship, affinities between speech and fictional narrative were emphasized. In the attempts to apply textual-linguistic and semiological terms to the restructuring of the rhetorical study of figures one sees a revamping of the relationship between rhetoric and narrative.

Only in the 1990s did the realization gradually emerge that since its beginnings in the Romantic era German literary history has been shaped by the Protestant views of its most prominent figures.8 One of the consequences of this was that, as Wolfgang Harms has so aptly put it, “[t]he idea of a new commencement, a caesura, a revival of literature with and since the Reformation […] [could lead to] a forfeiture of Tradition […] in the sense of […] a devaluation of anything older.”9 This forfeiture or repudiation of tradition, a consequence of value laden designations of epochs, is characteristic not of the period of transition into the early modern era, but rather of the assessment of this period in the literary history of the nineteenth century. The study of German literary history has only recently begun to free itself from the normative views that were given firm foundation by the hypothesis concerning a historical break in the transition into the modern era. As Klaus Schreiner noted in 1981, the notion of a discrete border alleged in the study of German literature and language between historical epochs at the turn of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has increasingly been thrown into question in light of new research on the culture of the late Middle Ages and the Reformation. This has raised new doubts in literary and historical scholarship regarding the dialectical foundations of the historiography of the early modern era.10 Now we are better able to observe in widely scattered areas the actual proximity or combinations of uses of tradition and shifts in position and function.11

Recently there have been efforts not simply to identify lacunae in the history of the literary production in the early modern era of territories in Middle Europe (Mitteleuropa) that had once been Catholic, but also to go beyond the skewed perspective of this denominational approach in general. The notion of “oberdeutsche Literatur” (or “upper German,” referring German spoken essentially in what today is Austria and the southern parts of Germany), which has gained currency largely due to the writings of Dieter Breuer12 und Hans Pörnbacher,13 refers neither exclusively to Catholic literature nor simply to the Baroque. Rather one notes today the political-social commonalities and exchanges in the cultural self-conception of the leadership of the various denominations who invoked the “old order of the estates” of Middle Europe. The concept of unity in German national literature also began to seem questionable from non-denominational approaches, and it became increasingly clear that a revision of earlier views of (literary) history was unavoidable.14 The new thesis, according to which first the artistic and literary doctrines of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries pushed upper German literature and culture out of national consciousness and thereby consigned it to oblivion, is widely accepted.

Over the course of the past few decades a concept of literature has emerged in the study of literary history that is open with regards to the whole literary production of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the oral tradition, which was always in a relationship of mutual influence with written culture.15 This concept places emphasis on the process of literary communication and rejects the distinction between “literary” and “non-literary.” Modern inductive-descriptive poetics defines the literary genres as pragmatic groupings of the diversity of actual texts. According to this definition, the genres are variations of mediation or systems of communication that prevail under specific historic, social, and cultural conditions. By now this concept of literature and genre has gained widespread acceptance, even among scholars of the history of narrative.

One of the difficulties (one that has not yet been overcome) of the endeavor to arrive at a common theory, definition, and systematization of narrative literature lies in the fact that both the collective criteria of narrative and the corpus of narrative texts elude precise definition. The traditional generic designations of narrative texts remain in use, however, both in the study of literature and in the study of narrative, in spite of the fact that they have been and are being subjected to critical interrogation and are increasingly seen as retrospective constructions that are unsuitable for an adequate description of both the innumerable sub-types and transitional forms and various genres and kinds of texts.

In the folk-narrative research a canon of motifs, genres, types, and topics was constructed over the course of the past century that is increasingly recognized as a pure construct.16 The constructed nature of this canon exhibits numerous assumptions rooted in the history of ideas, society, and scholarship that continue to exert an influence on research.17 The notion of the denominational origins of the scholars and most prominent figures of German literature, which was widespread in the international folklore research (and in particular the scholarship of the nineteenth century), defined the dominant canon of folk narrative genres in accordance with the German-Protestant national conception of Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian traditions.18 But the ultramontane bias of Catholic authors, which was a persistent assumption in the scholarship, also led to a kind of reciprocal culture war which in turn distorted perceptions of the historical reality.

The romantic-patriotic heritage and ideological sympathies have also influenced the methodologies in and conclusions of the scholarship on the Reformation for far too long.19 Protestant biblical exegesis, beginning with the work of Hermann Gunkel and his functional understanding of narrative genres through the question regarding their “real-life setting” (“Sitz im Leben”), led to the articulation in the first third of the twentieth century of a unique philological genre theory, so-called “Formgeschichte” (or what has come to known today in English as form criticism), the most prominent representative of which was Martin Dibeulius.20 The presuppositions of the ethnographical and folklore research discourses were therefore based for a long time on conceptions of folk culture and tradition that today would be characterized as secularized evangelical theologoumena. Seen from the perspective of this insight, the Reformation and its ideological aftermath have a constitutive significance for the scholarship on narrative.

But alongside terms such as “narrative literature,” even the word “Reformation” is used differently and sometimes even in contradictory ways in the various disciplines. In literary history it is a term borrowed in the second half of the nineteenth century from the history of the church for a literary era which in the larger sense spans the whole of the sixteenth century and in the more narrow sense refers to the period between 1517 and the Peace of Augsburg. There are many sound reasons to speak of a “Reformation” era in the history of literature, but one is increasingly unable to ignore the fact that the roots of the notion of the “Reformation” as a designation of an epoch lie primarily in the conservative or liberal-Protestant national science of history of the nineteenth century. The overemphasis on the Wittenberg Reformation (which was most influential in Germany) led until recently to a neglect not only of counter-Reformation alternatives, but also the reform ideas of Huldrych Zwingli, not to mention Calvinist trends, which while they may have been more limited geographically and temporally, nonetheless remained more significant in certain regions.21 The European foundations of Latin academic culture were underestimated. The European interconnections of the literature of the Reformation became a subject of inquiry only thanks to the study of the Baroque. The notion of a “Lutheran pause,” which was introduced by Wolfgang Stammler, was also recognized recently as a misconception. Increasingly there is agreement that the written culture of the Reformation should be taken seriously as literature, and aspects in the literature that seem to have been less influenced by Reformation thinking also are given more attentive consideration in more recent works.

For the scholarship on the history of rhetoric, the rhetoric of the “Reformation,” defined by Peter Blickle as “a disputation with almost no social boundaries regarding the correct understanding of the Gospels” and by Peter Matheson as “a paradigmatic shift of religious imagination” and a “rhetorical event through and through,”22 creates a relatively new field of inquiry. Scholarship on the Reformation and rhetoric were both called upon to consider the “common man” (in other words the addressee) not simply as an object of a linear process, but rather as a participant in an interactive process.23 In one of his articles Robert W. Scribner established the “totality of the communication process” of the Reformation as a field of inquiry that included not only texts, but also deeds and oral, visual, and symbolic forms of communication.24

From the perspective of the study of narrative it is important, first and foremost, that the representatives of the Reformation put rhetoric in the service of textual and Biblical exegesis while also putting history as a rhetorical store of exempla in the service of rhetoric.25 The relationship between Protestant sermon-exempla and theological training has been made a topic of inquiry, but the rhetorical praxis of functional literature (“Gebrauchsliteratur”) has hardly been studied. According to recent research, book printing did not mark a new shift in media, but rather merely accelerated a development of handwritten mass production that had been ongoing since the late Middle Ages, only then to be given new impetus and temporarily dominated by the Reformation.26 The success of the Reformation is not simply a consequence of book printing. Given widespread illiteracy, the early phase of the communication process known as the “Reformation” must be understood as a process that was dominated more than 95 percent by unwritten forms of semi-oral “reading.” The effectiveness in the spread of ideas of fliers and pamphlets, with their diverse forms of texts, was in fact a result of uses of the spoken word. Until roughly 1700 the dominant medium remained the sermon, in which the various themes and forms of narrative were ascribed a fundamental meaning.27

For the historical study of narrative, the “Reformation” is no longer merely a term referring to an epoch, but rather is in a larger sense the starting basis for denominational cultural development from the early modern era to the present.28 The entire complex of the “evangelical” minting of so-called popular literature is at the center of scholarly attention. Included in this is the promotion of narrative traditions through the reform movements and their aftermath, both in the realm of ideas and institutions. Source use that is specific to denomination has only emerged in recent decades, first and foremost through the discovery of the sermon and catechism as social sites of the mediation of stories.29 Only in the last third of the twentieth century did the study of narrative begin to become open to literary history and textual exegesis and, in accordance with philologists’ broader notion of literature, take seriously their study of rhetoric as a means with which to arrive at a more nuanced grasp of means of mediation and narrative strategies. This involved taking into consideration, beyond knowledge of medieval functional literature, the entire production in the early modern era of homiletic handbooks and histories by all of the denominations.

Ever since the publication in 1974 of Volkserzählung und Reformation by Wolfgang Brückner, a handbook on the transmission and function of folk narrative material and narrative literature in Protestantism,30 interest in Luther has been limited not simply to (for instance) his use of proverbs, his collections of fables and folk superstitions,31 but also to the literary origins of his knowledge, his use of narrative genres, forms, and motifs, his theoretical position in the establishment of “histories” (in the sense given the word by Melanchthon) and the phenomenon of the “narrated” Luther, who himself became a figure of literary tradition. Brückner also proposed a comparable handbook on the narrative literature of the Catholic reform movement, but this still awaits realization.32 The intellectual preconditions of the emergence of a literature of exempla that was to some extent peculiar to specific denominations, the calendar and reform martyrology have only begun to be studied in recent decades. This is also true of drolleries and so-called devil’s literature (“Teufelsliteratur,” which refers to didactic, satirical treatises against sin and indulgences), which have only recently been studied in their theological context. Sermons, catecheses, and catechisms have been recognized as important fields of study, and the collections of tales of curiosities, wonders, portents,33 monsters and murder are understood in the context of the Reformation notion of the end of days.

New Directions in the Scholarship

Brückner’s handbook proved programmatic for the new scholarship on the history of narrative and can indeed be seen as a culmination of the ascertainments regarding Protestant authors and works specifically. In Frankfurt and Würzburg Brückner’s work inspired a series of dissertations that focused on previously overlooked authors and narrative forms of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and examined narrative literature first and foremost as a medium of education, transcending denominational, political, and national boundaries.34 These works expose mutual relationships of influence between the literary establishment as a cultural construct and its popular reception. Furthermore, they yield narrative catalogues and check both theological and homiletical sources for their credibility and usefulness in the reconstruction of the culture of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era. One finds attempts at a theory of exemplary subject matter in Brückner’s own essays, in which he alludes to the complexity of the notion of history in the early modern era and the modus excerpendi,35 as well as in the work of Christoph Daxelmüller, who analyses exempla as a form of scholarly discourse and a factor that contributes to percipience (Daxelmüller also provides an extensive bibliography of the research on exempla).36

In 1987 Rudolf Schenda, another prominent figure in the study of the history of narrative, offered an overview of the new tendencies in this discipline in German-speaking areas.37 He catalogued the systematic work on the narrative sources of the Reformation and the Counter Reformation, whereby thousands of confirmations of the written mediation of narratives from the sixteenth century until the eighteenth century were discovered, but at the same time also evinces a strong inclination towards recent scholarship and the decline in the number of the few university chairs dedicated to the historical study of narrative. This tendency is far more pronounced today as a consequence of the university reforms that have been implemented. With the reestablishment of a commission for the historical study of narrative in 1997 on the occasion of the congress of the German Society for Ethnography in Marburg this area of study got a boost in German speaking countries, though no commission can compensate entirely for the absence of an institutional basis. The primary task of the study of narrative was redefined to extend beyond philology and the study of motifs and include the study of stereotypes and conflict. Narrative types are interpreted as cultural constructs, as a means of coming to terms, through narrative, with difference and estrangement and as a discursive manner of handling otherness.38 The forfeiture here of the historical perspective is quite apparent. The sources from the fifteenth century to the eighteenth, which are the basis of the majority of the so-called folk narratives of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, are largely neglected.

The outlook of the more recent historical study of narrative is determined first and foremost by book genres and source texts on the transmission of narrative content, as well as the work of prominent authors of so-called pastor-literature and the polyhistors of the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.39 The methods of the searches for Loci communes, which led to the sought-after memorabilia, are fundamentally reconsidered. The extensive literature of compilations, peculiarities, and magical wonders is consulted primarily in order to facilitate the exploration of literary sources of narratives from the oral tradition. The dispute between the evangelical theologian Hieronymus Rauscher and the Catholic Johannes Nas regarding legends, revelations of miracles, and exempla was identified as a highpoint in the denominational polemics on short narrative prose.40 Regarding the newer narrative genres and narrative content of Pietism and the Enlightenment, in addition to the notion of a break with so-called pastor-literature (as collections of stories), a constant catechetical-pedagogical use function of the continuously developing objectives of the reformers was alleged. The various kinds of texts of the so-called moralistic stories written by evangelical pastors and teachers, which as of roughly 1760 began to give rise to the canon of virtue of the Enlightenment and the new code of behavior for the modern civil religion, was made the subject of inquiry only a few years ago.41 Similarly, scholars have only recently begun to study the evangelical catechisms with exempla of the nineteenth century.42

Religious autobiographies and biographies have been recognized as the primary genre of pietistic narrative literature, meaning a distinctive version of hagiography with the leitmotifs of conversion or rebirth.43 Narratives of wondrous rescues of copies of the Bible and of devotional books were used by the Pietists since the middle of the seventeenth century. The extensive pietist literature of edification (or “Erbauungsliteratur,” a term that was used first in the fourteenth century and refers essentially writings that are not strictly speaking theological, as they are not bound by scholarly discourses or dogma, but which are nonetheless motivated by religious aims, for instance providing examples of virtuous life), which enjoyed considerable international influence because of numerous translations, has not so far been studied in detail.44 The compilation of a systematic catalogue of motifs from written sources with parabolic stories also remains a desideratum, as does a thorough examination of the regional differences in narrative contents and the study of the relationships between written and oral forms of communication among the Pietists.

Since the 1960s and 1970s, literary studies, classical philology, theology, the history of rhetoric and the historical study of narrative have all focused in particular on exempla. But only since the work of Rudolf Schenda,45 Hermann Bausinger,46 Wolfgang Brückner,47 Frederic C. Tubach,48 Peter Assion,49 Christoph Daxelmüller,50 Jacques Berlioz,51 Walter Haug,52 Peter von Moos53 and others54 has there been consensus regarding the fact that the term “exempla” does not designate a genre so much as a function. A text becomes an “exemplum” only through its application. In the earlier scholarship, the term “Predigtmärlein,” or “sermon-tale,” was used as a synonym for exemplum, although it is not immediately apparent that this is justified, since the former refers to a narrative text. The use of exempla of individual authors can only be fruitfully studied according to a complex methodology and with simultaneous consideration of content, genre-specific and functional aspects, the socio-cultural context, and principles of text generation that are determined in accordance with these aspects (the so-called para-textual constellation of characteristics).

In 1977 Ernst Heinrich Rehermann published an important book on the exempla in Protestant collections of exempla and sermons of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (a source which until then had gone largely unnoticed) from the Low German region.55 The work contains an examination of sources, sermon styles and spiritual intentions of the exempla, as well as selected and annotated texts of exempla and sermon books. The first catalogue of exempla of Protestant authors from Hungary was published by Ákos Dömötör in 1992.56 As a comparison of the Catholic and Protestant exempla tradition of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reveals, there are significant correlations and differences in the use of exempla in the two confessions.57 Luther essentially followed the medieval tradition of conveying problems by interspersed exemplary stories, but given his demand for historic factuality, only events that actually had taken place could serve as exempla. Together with Melanchthon he attributed particular importance to the extraordinary occurrences of the present, the so-called wonders, as a source of exempla. In his Homiletics (1553),58 the standard work for the compilation of sermons for the Lutheran orthodoxy, Andreas Hyperius reduced the permitted number of exempla for medieval preachers from three to one (a stipulation that was seldom enforced in practice). According to the recent work of Gábor Kecskeméti, the Homiletics of Hyperius also had an effect on the sermon and communication theory of Calvinist preachers in Hungary.59

In particular, the aforementioned works focused on individual exempla and their reception history, providing important preparatory work for the topical corpus and the commentary on narratives of the early modern era. The book types, which functioned as vehicles of exempla (including systematically organized collections of exempla), gained widespread recognition only gradually.60 Concerning the denomination-specific themes, here and there a kind of basic stock of exempla evolved. In the end the use and elaboration of the texts depended on the handbooks that were consulted, as well as the preferences for exempla and the narrative skills of the individual authors. For Protestant authors, the most important function of exempla was to convey the new value system and ideal of life, as well as the new conception of personality and piety, a task they sought to achieve first and foremost by modifying interpretations, the focal points of the story, and the textually immanent accents. In general biblical examples predominated, in particular examples from the Old Testament and exempla that touched on mythological and historical themes and themes from Antiquity, as well as fables, fairy tales, and devil’s tales. In contrast, legends regarding the lives of saints were rarely used. Parallel to the decline and devaluation of hagiographical elements, the Protestant martyrology became a frequent theme of the exempla.61

Research also focused on earlier Protestant collections of exempla the structural model of which was provided first and foremost by the sayings of Luther from the Tischreden (1566) ordered alphabetically after Loci communes and Melanchthon’s collection of sayings, which was published by Johannens Manlius in the Collectanea locorum communium in 1563 (it consisted of examples of the Ten Commandments, a Calendarium historicum, and a Libellus medicus). The first collection of Protestant exempla (which was also by far the most influential over the course of the sixteenth century) was Andreas Hondorff’s Promptuarium exemplorum (1568), which was also divided according to the Ten Commandments. As Heidemarie Schade has demonstrated, Hondorff’s sources included, in addition to the Bible, the church fathers and the old church historians, secular authors of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the Reformation, chronicles and historical works of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Catholic collections of sermons, exempla, and legends, Protestant devotional works, and the devil’s literature and tales of wonders.62 Among Hondorff’s exempla, one finds, alongside widespread international narrative themes, numerous narratives that can be regarded as legends without wonders. They give accounts of devotion and persecution, the sufferings and deaths of Protestant witnesses of the faith. The work was republished in supplemented editions roughly forty times over the course of the next century. A Latin translation (1575), which by 1633 had been republished thirteen times, ensured that it would be read well beyond the German speaking territories, for instance in Hungary.63 After Hondorff, the exemplum was adopted quite deliberately as an additional device in Protestant sermons and literature.

Following the research of Burghart Wachinger, the collections of exempla not only constitute important sources regarding the transmission of narratives, but also bear witness to the history of moral indoctrination and ethical consciousness.64 Wachinger was able to demonstrate, by comparing three collections from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, that while in the Middle Ages virtue and vice dominated as criteria for the categorization of collections of exempla, for the Protestant collections the Ten Commandments provided one of the most important ordering schemes. He makes a welcome call for further special studies on the typology and history of collections of exempla, whereby the various findings that have been reached would merit a consistent synopsis transcending epochal and denominational boundaries. In order to facilitate further study of the sources, in 2006 Hans Jörg Uther made many collections of curiosities and exempla of the early modern era available on CD-ROM.65

Two postils by Johann Jacob Otho offer a revealing example of the wealth of exempla in the evangelical sermons of the seventeenth century. According to a catalogue of regesta by Wolfgang Beck both books contained a total of 1,081 historical narratives and dictums taken from contemporary historical, theological, and humanist literature.66 In Othos Kranckentrost (1665), which was reissued many times up until the middle of the nineteenth century, the “last words” of respected and influential figures (which resemble the Apophthegmata) occupy a place of central importance. Beck draws a distinction between textual levels and scopes of function, and he suggests that one keep the following analytical aspects in mind: 1) the context of an exemplum; 2) the quantitative use; 3) the functionality and its relationship to 1); 4) the narrative tendency; and 5) the relationship of mutual influence between intention and content.

In a collection published in 2007 the focus is placed on the epistemology of exempla, in other words on forms, dynamics, and functions of the production of parables.67 Andreas Pečar, for instance, studies biblical exempla as a medium of polemical exchange in the political discourse of the early Stuart era in Scotland and England.68 He comes to the conclusion that the exempla were useful not only as rhetorically persuasive devices or references to divine law, but also as bearers of revelatory knowledge and as a guide to God’s eternal will. A comparison by Maximilian Bergengruen of the various ways in which the Magdalena exemplum was used by Jean Bodin, François Rosset and Georg Philipp Harsdörffer reveals that Harsdörffer’s goal in Grosser Schau-Platz jämmerlicher Mord-Geschichte was to stage in the exemplum what is paradoxical and contradictory to the original argumentation until it comes to seem the opposite of this.69

Collections of narratives from the sixteenth century have always been part of the canon of German literature, but a discussion of the collections of narrative from the seventeenth century was first held in 1999 in the Herzog August Bibliothek in Wolfenbüttel.70 At the moment very few of these source works have been appended with indexes of motifs and exempla. Most of them are self-standing literary works with a broad spectrum of artistic potentials, which must be examined within the frameworks of genre and organizational forms and also with consideration of the individual personality of the author.71 The significance of these sources is also emphasized by the fact that Grimmelshausen, Harsdörffer, Bidermann and other canonized authors of the seventeenth century made use of diverse collections of histories and narratives as sources. Johann Anselm Steiger studies the exemplum hermeneutics of Luther and the narrative collections of the Lutheran orthodoxy and comes to the conclusion that the collections of exempla are not merely intended for the preacher and the patresfamilias, but also constitute an important component of the Lutheran-Orthodox church historiography.72

The tales and exempla used in sermons became a self-standing subject of study in Hungary only in the 1980s.73 At the center of inquiry one finds first and foremost the exempla in Calvinist sermons and polemical writings, the thematic focal points, the diffusion and contamination of various types of story lines, the narrative characteristics of the exempla, and their relationship to Protestant ideals and oral narrative traditions.74 Gábor Kecskeméti has studied the interconnections of the exempla over history.75 János L. Győri has analyzed the typology of exempla based on form, function, and content in the homiletic interpretations of psalms.76 Idikó Bárczi has written a monograph on the sources of the Latin homiletic handbooks from the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. She notes the need for a comparative study of the analytical indexes of the collections of Protestant exempla and collections of Loci communes as significant intertextual systems in the early modern era.77

Luther’s demand for historical factuality was directed first and foremost against the “miraculous” details of the lives of saints.78 He considered such “lies” and fabulae fictae unsuitable for educational goals (in the sense of a humanist education).79 However, he also did not want to forgo the use of edifying histories and therefore urged the adaptation of legends, as Annemarie and Wolfgang Brückner have shown, beginning with the “old fathers” (one thinks for instance of the Vitae partum of Georg Major, 1534) and historical calendars and soon collections of evangelical martyrologies, “truthful histories” of apostles, martyrs, confessors, participants in confessional polemics and other evangelical testimonies.80 In his criticisms of medieval legends Luther regards some of the motifs in the miraculous narratives of saints as valuable fictions, because they are useful in catechistic allegorical interpretation. Luther’s critique of legends did not prevent the emergence, soon after his death, of an idealized vision of him that gave rise to a tendentious formation of histories, legends, and myths regarding him as the figure around whom so many ideas crystalized, a tradition that persisted into the twentieth century.81

In an illuminating study Rudolf Schenda examined Catholic and Protestant collections of legends in their dialectical interdependency. He concluded that legends have functions in legitimization, stabilization, and indoctrination regardless of denominational affiliation.82 Only recently has scholarship on narrative recognized the so-called devil’s literature of the sixteenth century, which ultimately went back to Luther’s demonological histories and tales, as a specifically Protestant literary genre that was structurally related to older and younger allegorical versions of the type of the fool.83 These moralistic writings, which were prevalent in orthodox Lutheran areas, contained series of legendary exempla and were one of the vehicles of the spread of Protestant social critiques of the early modern era. Their stylization in the early study of German literary history as texts of a “German” image of the devil was influenced by a national mentality and therefore should be subjected to critical reflection.

One should also note, in connection with this, that problems concerning the stories of witchcraft have attracted the attention of scholars today. The first comprehensive treatise on witchcraft (Malleus maleficarum, 1485/87), with its narrative accounts, was seen as valuable by Protestant compilators of the sixteenth century. There were no differences between denominations when it came to the narrative aspersions against witches. The genre of tales of magic, wonders and portents may not go directly back to Luther, but they were first exploited as modern omens of divine justice through his notion of the coming of the end of days. Wunderzeichen (1556-1562), a three-volume work by Job(us) Fincel(ius), represented a new kind of compilation in which the portent literature of the humanist revival of augury culminates as an expression of the Lutheran view of the coming of the end of days, while also functioning as historical testament to the first decades of the Reformation.84 It contains a total of 47 stories of the devil or events that can be interpreted as the work of the devil, and it was read, interpreted, and for a long time passed on as a work of historical-theological revelation.

The influence of the vogue of devil’s literature went far beyond the borders of the German speaking territories. For instance, the fourth volume of Ördögi kísírtetekről, or “On devilish apparitions” (1578), a Hungarian-language collection of postils of evangelical pastor Péter Bornemisza, led to the condemnation and banishment of the author by the competent Protestant Church court. Sometime around 1556 Bornemisza studied with Melanchthon in Wittenberg. The primary sources for his devil’s takes were Melanchthon’s anecdotes (as reported by Manlius), Chronicon Carionis, Cyriakus Spangenberg, and the Vitae patrum of Georg Major.85 The sources have not yet been fully exploited. A new historical-critical edition of the work would be useful. Bornemisza organized the narratives thematically, and in the sixth part the grouping of the histories follows that of Manlius. This collection also contains the first traces of the Faust legend in Hungary.

Luther’s aversion to idle tales and fables and his fondness for Aesopian animal fables and proverbs have long been noted.86 Less familiar, however, is the fact that his interest in Aesop made an impression on his companions at table and moved some of them, such as Johannes Mathesius, to include this narrative matter in homilies. Luther’s adaptation of 13 of Aesop’s fables was first printed in 1557 and gave further impetus to the collection of fables and the rich fable poetry of the sixteenth century. In contrast with research on the goals and functions of fables, only isolated studies of their morphology and poetological status have been done. Unlike the study of New Testament parables in the nineteenth century, recent attempts gave rise to a systematic approach to narrative forms of non-actual speech whereby there is also an attempt to determine the status of the fable. A few years ago Reinhard Dithmar published a chronologically ordered collection of texts on the theoretical statements regarding fables, parables, and allegories from Antiquity to the twentieth century. He devotes a separate chapter to fable theory from Luther to Mathesius.87

Between 1536 and 1592 three different translations and adaptations of Aesop were published in Hungary. From the perspective of the development of Hungarian prose narratives, the most significant of these was Száz fabula, or “One-hundred fables” (from before 1566), by Gáspár Heltai.88 In 1543, Heltai, a late evangelical preacher, author, and printer of books and other written materials, had visited Luther and Melanchthon and studied at the university in Wittenberg. His collection constitutes a free adaptation of the Steinhövel–Brant version (which was in widespread use) with the use of additional sources. According to recent studies, one can situate the work in direct proximity to the fable theory and fable collection of Luther.89

The fact that Luther’s own collection, with almost 500 proverbs, represents only a fragment of his knowledge of proverbs is of particular significance in this context. 90 In the complete German-language works there are some 5,000 documents verifying legends and proverbial oral idioms. To my knowledge the Latin proverbs have not yet been collected systematically. Luther’s enthusiasm for Georg Major’s collection of Latin proverbs (Sententiae, 1534) is clear, but its influence remains almost entirely unexamined. New approaches to the study of proverbs that examine the language, manner of transmission and use, temporally and culturally specific appraisals, and everyday, educational, and literary functions of proverbs have yet to be adopted.91

The reciprocal influence between Reformation and so-called “Meistergesang” (a didactic or religious song composed to correspond to traditional monophonic melodies) has long been recognized. But it was not until Horst Brunner and Dieter Merzbacher published the findings of their research that historians began to realize that the narrative moment in the mastersongs of Hans Sachs played a considerably larger role after the Reformation than in the songs before the Reformation.92 He ceased to limit himself to the Bible. The index of the narrative subjects in his work includes several dozen international types of narrative.93 One finds innumerable narrative references in Protestant historiography94 that have hardly been made the subject of study, as well as in the handwritten Calvinist visions95 and the denominational polemical writings.96

Melanchthon’s significance for the transmission of narrative subject matter of Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and Humanism is—in contrast with that of Luther—only beginning to be recognized.97 In his works one finds the most genres of short narrative genres: exempla, medieval and early evangelical legends, dicta, facetiae, maxims, epigrams, proverbs, fables, dreams, jokes, riddles and myths. The theoretical foundation of the inclusion of such a diversity of historical narrative subject matter lies first and foremost in Melanchthon’s concept of the exemplary nature, pedagogical function, and hermeneutic nature of all things historical. As a consequence of his theological concept of history, in the sixteenth centuries the term “history” became “in an unusual way a key term in the area of narrative literature.” Collections of the narratives used by Melanchthon were intended for his contemporaries and were often mixed with narratives used by Luther, in whose Tischreden Melanchthon played his own role as narrator and narrative object. Part of this collection of exempla and histories has not yet been adequately made accessible. If perhaps not nearly to the same extent as Luther, soon after his death Melanchthon also became the subject of Reformation legends and Catholic anti-legends.

The narrative texts referred to as folk books (“Volksbuch”) and prose novels constitute a particularly fruitful subject of inquiry both for literary history and the historical study of narrative. The term prose novel first began to be used to designate long narratives of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in the 1970s, replacing the imprecise and misleading term “folk book,” which was inherited from Romanticism and was often used as a collective name for texts for which it was inappropriate given their literary-sociological implications.98 As Hans Joachim Kreutzer has shown, the term folk book should be reserved for a type of book from the period between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries with particular publication features. According to Jan-Dirk Müller, the prose novel is “no generic term, but a term which, because it groups together a corpus of texts that are heterogeneous from the perspectives of their provenance, subject matter, and structure, can only be described as a ‘target form’ towards which common developmental tendencies move.”99 This corpus of texts, which includes for instance Melusina, Fortunatus and Faust, constitutes a kind of catch-all of narrative subject matter and motifs from Antiquity, the Middle Ages, and the early modern era, not to mention narrative models. Its formidable significance for the history of the genre of the novel and its value as testimony to the development of modern individuality has only recently been recognized.

Hans Joachim Kreutzer discerns a clear break in the printing history of the prose novel in the 1620s and 1630s and suggests a connection between this and the Reformation. He does not offer an explanation of this phenomenon, however.100 The long debate regarding the question of the intention behind the creation of the figure of Faust and the problem of the role of the denominational traditions has not yet been resolved.101 The numerous adaptations (sometimes back into verse) of German prose novels in other languages should be studied collectively and systematically, on the basis of international comparisons, and with particular consideration of the structural, social and functional differences, as well as differences (and connections) in subject matter, storyline, and reception, tendencies towards rational vs. mythical explanation, and the literary work of the person responsible for the adaptation.102 Denominational structures have recently been identified in novels from the seventeenth century.103 It is high time for a history of the prose novel that sees this genre not simply from the perspective of alleged medieval forerunners.

Conclusions and Proposals

1. The terms “narrative literature and Reformation” denote an area of common inquiry for the study of literature, the history of rhetoric, the historical study of narrative, and the history of the Reformation, an area of inquiry that can be precisely defined but has not yet been satisfactorily researched. The problems that arise in these fields of study demand continuous interrogation of the usefulness of certain categories. Most of the modern terms of the science of literature and the study of narrative can only be used with considerable caution when speaking of the period in question. A functional definition of the terms “narrative literature” and “narrative” and greater openness to the findings and questions of various fields of inquiry are both unavoidable. Segmentation in (and as a consequence of) the sciences should be overcome, at least to the extent that this is possible.

2. “Narrative literature” and its subdivision into genres are shifting historical products and observational models of the history of science which in the context of the Reformation constitute fruitful objects of study. In the course of the studies mentioned above it became clear that with an approach that is based on the study of the history of transmission and circumstances of use it is possible to distinguish and specify the connection between narrative literature and the Reformation. The formula “narrative literature and Reformation” seems increasingly dispensable when one observes the texts of the narrative literature of the early modern era in the concrete circumstances of their use, thereby furthering a more discriminating understanding of historical reality.

3. In the history of the transmission of the narrative literature of the late Middle Ages and the production of the literature of the early modern era, the Reformation had considerable significance. The forms and content, but also the mindset and points of view of the literature of the late Middle Ages continued to exert an influence across the alleged threshold of the Reformation.104 Until now, the narrative traditions of the late Middle Ages and the early modern era have only been discussed separately. Comparisons that stretch beyond the borders of epochs must be ventured in order for the outlines of historical processes to become clear.

4. Less radical hermeneutical innovations as an interdisciplinary test of circumscribed questions addressing a broad array of fundamental sources may lead to progress in our knowledge of “narrative literature and the Reformation.” Narrative texts of the period of the Reformation can only be studied in clear historical context, as parts of a larger whole, with consideration of the intentions and conditions of mediation. Thoroughly researched studies that are temporally, geographically, or socially focused create a solid foundation for more general conclusions regarding the narrative literature of the Reformation.

5. There is a need for an examination (that is sensitive to historical processes) of the relationship of narratives to reality, which suggests not only narratological but also social-historical, cultural-historical, and psychological differentiations. Accepted distinctions between narrative genres, such as their claim to authenticity, are questionable, and one should always keep in mind that the borders between narrative motifs, narrative types and themes are fluid.

6. Little study has been devoted to the processes whereby individual narrative motifs are adapted to different, denomination-specific contexts and sometimes transferred from one form to another. It is often difficult to clarify whether the spread of theme and motif is due to processes of transfer, a trans-denominational or trans-cultural narrative potential, or other circumstances. We know next to nothing about narrative in the substrata in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.105 The influence of Protestant rhetoric on narrative literature should be made the subject of detailed study, but one should also consider the role of Protestant students and exiles who traveled abroad in the transmission of narrative texts.

7. The hypothesis according to which for hundreds of years almost nothing was published in the “upper German” area apart from folkish reading material, while in the Protestant north and east academic writing dominated has become obsolete. Narrative literature played a significant role in the popularization of both Reformation thought and Catholic reform.

8. The disciplines still have failed to provide a clear statement of the precise uses of so-called functional literature, which includes, among other things, the printed collections of narratives, sermons, and exempla of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, which often had features that were peculiar to specific denominations. The relationship between literary education and so-called folk traditions between Humanism and Historicism can only be precisely assessed when one compares the actual use value of narrative literature with the entirely different aspirations of the national historians and mythologists of the nineteenth century.

9. I urge fundamental comparative research in well definable source areas of the narrative literature of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the inclusion of the literature of Central Europe in the scholarship on the Reformation to a greater extent. It is increasingly important to consider the cultural and literary imprints of religious denominations.106 We still lack a comparative study of the attributes of the narrative literature of the early modern era, both those specific to individual denominations and those that transcend denominational boundaries.

10. As Jan-Dirk Müller astutely noted, “[p]rojected research should continue to dismantle denominational, linguistic, and national limitations. It should examine the effects of the factional battles of the Reformation on literature […], but first and foremost, it should dismiss the concept of a continuous denominational culture and describe the Reformation more as a symptom of the differentiation in the early modern era of social and academic discourses. The catalytic effect of the movement […] should be profiled more distinctly.” As Müller also observes, one should discuss all tendencies that eluded this movement or reach beyond it.107 Systematic collaboration among philologists, comparatists, and researchers of the Reformation from different national traditions would be essential.

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Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Réka Kiss

“The women do not want to go to church.” Church Discipline and the Control of the Public Practice of Religion in the Calvinist Diocese of Küküllő in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries

The Calvinist model of Church discipline introduced a considerably more intensive and elaborate system of enforcing moral rules and controlling social behavior than the one that had formerly prevailed. Its religious, cultural, and social role and the regional variants have remained subjects of debate to this day. In this essay, I examine a form of this institutional system that is unique from many perspectives, using as my sources the seventeenth and eighteenth-century visitation records and diocesan court documents from the Hungarian Reform Diocese of Küküllő (the name of which is taken from Küküllő River, in Romanian the Târnava River). In the first half of the essay I offer an overview of the peculiarities of the Transylvanian church organisation and the institutional system of church discipline, addressing in particular the question of the extent to which these institutions differed from or resembled Western European models. In the second half of the essay I survey the guiding role of the Church and the relationship between norms and actual practice as seen through the study of efforts to supervise and enforce religious conformity. By analyzing seventeenth and eighteenth- century documents pertaining to the control and sanction of participation in public Church rituals, I seek to provide a nuanced image of the religious practices of the era and further an understanding of how Church surveillance was asserted in the everyday lives of members of local communities.

keywords: Calvinist Church discipline, public Church rituals, marriage, local communities, Transylvanian Principality

One of the most significant innovations of the Protestant Reformation was a thorough transformation of the institution of Church discipline, the classic example of which one finds in Calvinist Geneva. The Calvinist model of Church discipline introduced a considerably more intensive and elaborate system of enforcing moral rules and controlling social behavior than the one that had formerly prevailed. The fundamental impact it had on society and mentality has been a focal point of social historical scholarship on the early modern era since Max Weber. Referring to the strictness of its principles, historians have until recently tended to see the Calvinist model of Church discipline as “the effective motor behind the establishment of the first Puritan society” and “an early example of an attempt at social engineering on a social scale.”1

While scholars seem to agree that the Calvinist model of Church discipline brought about profound changes, there is less agreement on the actual impact it had. Its religious, cultural, and social role, its effectiveness, and the regional variants have remained subjects of debate to this day.2

The question of Church discipline has become one of the cornerstones of confessionalization theories intended to model the construction of the early modern absolutist state and the development of confessional identities.3 In The Disciplinary Revolution. Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe (2003), the American historical sociologist Philip Gorski explicitly argues that the rapid rise of modern state power in the early modern era was due in part to the impact of the military and capitalist revolutions, but primarily to the disciplinary revolution, which was spread most strikingly by the Calvinist Reformation.4

In this essay, I examine a form of this institutional system that is unique from many perspectives. My sources are from Transylvania, seventeenth and eighteenth-century manuscript documents from over thirty parishes in the Küküllő Calvinist Diocese. Some are visitation records, others are protocols of the diocesan court body. Amounting to several thousand pages in all, the documents represent a unique collection. What makes them exceptional is that they are almost the only case within the Hungarian-speaking territory where local-level church disciplinary documents have survived from the first half of the seventeenth century (from 1638) and the fact that they are more or less continuous. Thus one finds very few case studies on local operation of Church discipline in the period in question based on Hungarian-language sources.

The great advantage of the registers from Küküllő is that they offer a deep glimpse into the actual everyday reality of Church discipline in different regions. While the Church laws and synodal decisions constitute fundamental sources that enable us to investigate the normative regulations of the era, the registers from Küküllő offer insights into questions from the perspective of actual social practice. A comparative analysis of the two source types can bring us closer to the complex issue of the relationship between norms and practice. We can obtain a more detailed picture of how church governance was asserted in reality in the everyday life of the local communities. This is of particular importance because we know that in early modern Europe people experienced religion for the most part in small rural communities. Thus the sources offer us a better grasp not only of the institutions, but also of the religious mentality and religious attitudes of ordinary people.

Equally significantly, with the help of the Küküllő sources we can examine a long period of time, embracing several generations. Thus on the one hand we can describe long-term trends, while on the other we can discern peculiarities arising from the personality of the church leaders, their ideas on church governance, as well as from the given historical periods.

Hungarian Calvinism is regarded as the easternmost contiguous group of international Calvinism but at the same time as a branch that has become separated from the western Protestant bloc. Many historians have noted its distinctive organizational, dogmatic, liturgical and cultural features.5 The systematic analysis of the Küküllő sources offers us an opportunity to investigate a relatively rarely studied topic in an international context. To what extent did the system of Church discipline in Transylvania differ from or resemble models in Western Europe?

The Institutional Framework of Church Governance and Church Discipline in the Transylvanian Calvinist Church

The novelty of Calvinist Church discipline derives in part from its theological roots, but it was also accompanied by radical renewal in church organization and governance. The model of Church discipline found in the Genevan Ecclesiastical Ordinances (1541) which served as a model for western Calvinist Churches, contained two significant innovations. Firstly, it involved elected local lay office-bearers in the administration of church justice, alongside the pastors, and secondly it made great efforts to separate the spheres of church and secular power and to ensure the autonomy of the new Church bodies and their independence from the state authorities. However the Hungarian and Transylvanian Church governance structure differed significantly from the Western European models. During the time of the independent Principality of Transylvania (1541–1690) Calvinism not only came to be the dominant denomination but even developed a particularly close connection between state and church.

Furthermore, in the history of the Hungarian Reformation the Transylvanian Calvinist Church came closest to achieving the status of state church, though the formal, institutional relationship between the state and the Calvinist church always remained limited.6 This close relationship between Church and state can also be observed in Church governance and jurisdiction. The Calvinist Church preserved many elements of the medieval Catholic heritage, and adjusted to the social structure of the estate system on a large scale.7 As of the sixteenth century, the institution of the Calvinist bishopric (superintency) was gradually canonized, and consistories emerged only considerably later, with functions that differed in part from their original goals. From the late sixteenth century to the early and mid-eighteenth, the Calvinist Church in Transylvania was governed to a large extent by ministers and ministerial bodies. Of these, the most important unit of Church governance was the diocese, headed by the archdeacon. Like the organizational structure of the Church in Transylvania, the system of Church discipline also differed from the classic Calvinist model. In the period under discussion, the most relevant forums for Church discipline and Church administration of justice were the annual decanal visitations and the (so-called partial) synodic court of the diocese, which consisted of ministers and was led by the archdeacon.8 The visitation covered three essential aspects of the life of the parish. A significant part of the scope of its duties involved administrative and economic surveillance. In addition, it served as the tribunal of the clergy, and they monitored the religious and moral lives of the members of the congregation. The more serious disciplinary issues on which the visitation was not able to pass a sentence on the spot were discussed by the synodic court of the diocese. This was the forum for litigation involving Church officials (pastors, instructors), and it also functioned as a court of marriage where matrimonial cases were held.

To summarize, according to the original Calvinist model decisions pertaining to Church discipline were reached 1. at weekly meetings of the consistories, 2. at the congregational level, 3. “from below,” 4. by presbyters and lay office-bearers who were acquainted with the local circumstances and had personally and thoroughly inspected them in accordance with strict stipulations. In contrast, in Transylvania decisions were reached 1. in the course of the annual visitations or the slightly more frequently held partial synods, 2. not at the congregational level, 3. by a church superior working together with pastors 4. who were less familiar with local conditions and who therefore had to rely on what was said by the pastor and the congregation.

The traces of the close linkage between Church and state that developed over the course of the seventeenth century in Transylvania can be detected in another fundamental issue raised by the Protestant Reformation, namely questions pertaining to the alteration of the relationship between Church and state. Which sphere should be responsible for determining and enforcing the rules necessary in order to ensure social concord and disciplining the church members?9 According to the theoretical essentials of the Geneva model, bodies rigorously independent of the state exercised church discipline, but in Transylvania secular and ecclesiastical administration of justice were never entirely separate. Rather they functioned in a complementary fashion. The layered governmental, administrative, and jurisdictional structure of the society of estates was reflected in the parallelism in Church and secular judicial decisions. The degree of separation or interconnection depended on the historical period, the region, and the offences in question.

Over the course of the seventeenth century, with the consolidation of the absolutist state in Transylvania, civil magistrates gradually took over the Church’s role of supervising social conduct. Following the separation of powers, cases involving criminal offences came before the secular trial courts, while the Church dealt first and foremost with issues involving the private sphere (including handling strictly Church affairs). Its most important sphere of authority remained marital jurisdiction. In practice, however, at times the Church and secular institutions still often had contradictory regulations regarding transgressions with moral aspects (such as fornication, adultery, blasphemy, failure to attend church, and breaking of the Sabbath).

Thus the two forums differed from each other first and foremost in the nature of the punishments they imposed. The range of disciplinary measures available to the Church was not broad. The punishments were usually of a spiritual nature, though spiritual and “secular” sanctions were a bit intermixed in the Church’s administration of justice. Essentially the Church had three forms of punishment at its disposal: 1. various grades of oral admonition, 2. “secular” punishments, such as fines and corporal punishment, for instance the pillory or a caning, and 3. the most severe spiritual sanction, excommunication. The sources suggest that in practice this meant “excommunicatio minor,” in other words expulsion from the church and ban from communion. In addition, people who had committed more serious offences were turned over to the secular courts, and reconciliation could only be carried out after the sentence passed by the secular authorities had been implemented.

At the same time, because of the distinctive linkage between Church and state, in accordance with state law the archdeacon was accompanied on his visitation by a representative of the secular authorities who assisted in the execution of sentences and the collection of Church taxes. The presence of secular authorities essentially meant that the visitation was not simply an internal Church matter.10 The prestige of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction and the implementation of punishments imposed by the church bodies were ultimately assured by the state power.

Thus, the seventeenth-century Calvinist disciplinary registers were written within the framework of a stable church organizational structure supported by a strong state. After Transylvania lost its independent statehood in 1690, fundamental changes took place in the life of the Calvinist Church. The attempt to incorporate Transylvania into the Habsburg Empire was accompanied, over the course of the eighteenth century, by intensive efforts to re-Catholicize the region, efforts that were not always free of violent incident. For the Calvinist Church in Transylvania, this was a period of continuous attack and repression. Not only did it lose the support it had had from the state, it found itself confronted with the measures of an inimical government. Not surprisingly, this influenced the formal course of Church discipline proceedings as well. At the same time, however, following the period of wars, local administrative bodies could hardly disregard, in their efforts to maintain order, the role of the Church and its established practices as a stabilizing force. Thus the Church and the secular authorities continued to be bound by common interests, which is why the civil officials in general continued to participate in the enforcement of the disciplinary decisions of the Church.

Types of Disciplinary Cases in the Seventeenth Century

On first reading of the 850 pages of seventeenth-century Küküllő protocols, one is struck by the complete absence of church disciplinary cases involving lay persons, a fundamental difference compared to Western European case studies. The written sources that have survived pertaining to the work of the visitation and the Church court of highest instance in the seventeenth century essentially involve three spheres. The decisive majority of the visitation records concern administrative affairs and matters of finance. The Church courts functioned as little more than forums for marital disputes and the court of justice for Church officials (pastors, instructors).

In the fragmentary records that survived between 1638 and 1700 there are 219 matrimonial cases in other words breaking-off of engagement or divorce. They comprise 73 percent of all the cases. Comparing the disciplinary activity of the various denominations, R. Po-chia Hsia concluded that while the various rival Christian Churches developed similar structures of Church direction, there were significant differences between the denominations concerning the spheres of life in which they strengthened their control. While in the Catholic territories emphasis was placed on conformity in religious life, the protestant and, first and foremost, Calvinist Churches focused on the development of a new ethical system of norms, the regulation of sexual life, strengthening the institution of marriage, and maintaining family cohesion. These tendencies prevailed in the case of the practices of the Küküllő diocese as well.11

In the seventeenth-century Küküllő sources the majority of the remaining cases not related to marital law involved the conduct of local clergy and instances in which they had violated social standards. These cases, of which there were far fewer than the matrimonial matters, comprised some 12.4 percent of the total. Cases involving public scandal, drunkenness, disorderliness, quarrelling and slander were only entered into the visitation records or the partial (synodic) protocols if one or both of the persons involved was a clergyman or a member of his family.12 In other words, the sources that survived from the era concerning measures taken against persons offending against the standards of social behavior involve only clergymen. The most common kind of conflict involved disputes between preachers and rectors belonging to the same congregation or preachers and members of the local nobility.

Thus there is little written trace in the seventeenth-century Küküllő records of control of the personal behavior and public conduct of members of the laity. Thus is true in spite of the fact that lengthy church articles enumerated the spheres of the lives of the parishioners to which the Church was extending its authority. Almost every contemporary canonical collection and synodical decree dealt with Sabbath breaking, and worldly amusements, such as dancing or revelry, were strictly forbidden during days of feast. However, the seventeenth-century Küküllő sources contain hardly any data of affaires involving disciplinary measures taken against members of the laity for such offences. There are no notes regarding matters of blasphemy, swearing, drunkenness, quarrelling, failure to attend church, or profanation of feast days. There is no data concerning religious behavior regarded as unusual, and only sporadic mention of attempts in real church disciplinary practice to ban games, dances or folk customs considered contrary to Church teachings. The number of cases dealing with the behavior and beliefs of the laity is trifling despite the fact that all synodic decrees contained provisions for the punishment of such transgressions and the church visitation protocols of a contemporary, István Csulyák Miskolci, archdeacon of Zemplén also preserve many such records.13 In Küküllő, however, of the extremely sporadic cases almost all came up in the context of marital conflicts, sexual offences or disciplinary matters of the local clergy. These sources do however enable us to draw indirect conclusions regarding the customs of the larger community. In the course of the visitation in 1653, for instance, it came to light that on the second day of Easter youths danced in the granary of pastor Dániel Küküllővári from the village of Dányán (Daia, Romania) and the priest had his wheat reaped and a violinist invited on Sunday. Dániel Küküllővári faced no serious punishment for the transgressions, however. The archdeacon contented himself with a mere oral admonition. As far as the names of sinners are concerned or the punishments they were given, this information was not considered important enough to record in writing. It also turned out that the pastor of Gógánvárallja (Gogan Varolea, Romania) “freely allowed dance in the congregation” and did not enforce the punishment given to those who celebrated carnival. The names of the people who were dancing and taking part in the carnival games again were not noted, nor were the specific punishments.14

It is not easy to assess the available information and compare these data with other models of Calvinist Church discipline. The protocols suggest that carnival and dancing on feastdays were banned by Church decrees in Transylvania as well, and the archdeacon attempted to enforce this to some extent. But on the other hand, it is clear that there were pastors in rural congregations who, along with the local communities, didn’t adhere to these standards. One must also take into consideration that the protocols were drawn up in a society fundamentally based on orality, and no written records at congregational level survived from the period under investigation. Thus, compared to the Western European church examples that carried out extensive administrative activity and were organised at the congregational level, we are able to form a picture of only a slice of church discipline and the level of diocesan supervision in the Küküllő region in that period. All this raises serious problems of source criticism and also imposes limitations on comparability. However, the lack of sources at the congregational level can be partly counterbalanced by the fact that (due to the broad range of the archdeacon’s jurisdiction, in particular his right to impose excommunication) the more grievous disciplinary cases were settled not on the local level, but rather at diocesan forums. This means that the rulings in the most serious cases were made in a forum that has left us written records of its operation. This serves as a guide, even if they did not keep a regular register of persons condemned to excommunication or public penance.Thus we do not know precisely how the Church forums sanctioned the profanation of feast days or indulgence in banned customs, or how widely they extended these sanctions among the parishioners. Nonetheless, the lack of written documentation concerning matters of Church discipline involving members of the laity is striking. After all, in that period more important issues and escalated conflicts were recorded in writing, yet here we find no trace of mass bans or mass conflicts. The names of members of the laity who had committed transgressions were not even recorded. Like carnival and dancing, drunkenness and swearing were not mentioned in the registers as separate offences but rather as transgressions involving other violations of norms, as “aggravating circumstances,” for instance, and it is not clear on the basis of the sources whether they were sanctioned separately at all.

Thus one cannot conclude, on the basis of the absence of written records dealing specifically with the commission of such transgressions, that the Church forums of Küküllő did not handle such cases. But if a “coordinated purification campaign”15 resembling examples in Western Europe had been waged, it would certainly have left a trace in the protocols. The Küküllő disciplinary records that have survived from the seventeenth century indicate that the emphasis in Church discipline was not placed on the regulation of the behavior or religious lives of lay persons. We can also presume that in practice Church discipline was narrower in its range of motion than the sphere of transgressions designated by Church law as meriting sanction, and also narrowed in range than the practices characteristic of numerous Calvinist communities in Western Europe.16

Why is there little or no mention of failure to attend church, the profanation of feasts, or bans on folk customs in the seventeenth-century records of the Küküllő diocese? It seems unlikely that the communities of the valley of the Küküllő River were unusually devout in the practice of their religion. The causes in part arise from the nature of the sources. Many disciplinary cases were simply not recorded in writing. It is also probable that, because of the almost continuous military conflicts and the prevailing uncertainty, religion constituted a more powerful force for the communities, and perhaps they were more conscientious in their adherence to social norms and the expectations of the Church. However, one can also venture an explanation that is from a certain point of view contradictory, namely that in spite of the norms dictated by contemporary church and state laws, in reality the church expectations of the churchgoers did not cover a very broad spectrum and were largely adapted to local customs. Furthermore, given the prevailing instability and the recurring warfare, Church leadership only asserted its disciplinary authority in cases of severe transgressions. The fundamental question was the maintenance of basic social order, first and foremost strengthening the stability of the institution of marriage and the respect of norms by church office-bearers. And finally, there may have been significant regional differences in the matters of Church discipline. The predispositions of Church leaders and the customs regarding the maintenance of records both may well have determined the contents of the protocols and the types of cases that were regarded as important enough to merit written mention.

Changes That Took Place in the Eighteenth Century

Towards the end of the seventeenth century István Gönczi (1689–1712) arrived in the Küküllő diocese as archdeacon. The new archdeacon, who was unfamiliar with local conditions, became head of the diocese at an extremely challenging moment in the history of Transylvanian Calvinism, as the Habsburgs were endeavoring to assert their control and reassert the influence of the Catholic Church. As soon as he was able, Gönczi made a thorough assessment of the conditions. In consequence, he left historians with comparatively detailed written records. Records were drawn up regarding the relationship between the preacher and the congregation, and questions were raised concerning unsettled, sensitive issues in the interactions between the preachers, instructors, and churchgoers. As is eminently clear on the basis of the registers, one of the primary subjects of controversy between the Church and the members of the congregation was the issue of Church taxes. Notes regarding conflicts between the Aediles, who were responsible for overseeing the collection of Church taxes, and the members of the congregation (first and foremost the local nobility) became increasingly common, as did records regarding the imposition of fines for failure to assume the obligation of an office. In addition, in the course of the visitations increasing attention was paid to those who failed to attend church, and the names of individuals notorious for not going to church or not having taken the Lord’s Supper for a long time were registered. Also, parents were instructed to send their children to school. The last decade of Gönczi’s service as archdeacon was coincidental with the uprising against Habsburg dynasty led by Ferenc II Rákóczi. Regrettably very few written records survive from this period, a time of considerable devastation because of the constant military conflicts. The reorganization of diocesan government was undertaken by the next archdeacon, Simon György Bonyhai, who assumed the position as head of the diocese in 1712, under similarly difficult circumstances.

Bonyhai brought several innovations to the proceedings of visitations. For instance, he introduced the custom of a catalogue-type registering of church disciplinary matters in writing in the course of the annual visitations. In his first tour of inspection, between December 1712 and February 1713 he registered 183 more or less serious disciplinary affaires in the 36 congregations to which he paid visits. 13 of these concerned cases involving clergymen and their family, while the other 170 involved members of lay people. It was a relevant novelty compared to the previous visitation activity that a significant focus has been brought to the conduct of the laity besides the behavior of pastors and instructors.

The figures of disciplinary cases concerning lay people (Table 1) reveals that the new visitational practice of frequently and systematically registering various transgressions became an accepted custom in the diocese over the course of the eighteenth century. And as the changes in the items of the table indicate, after the first visitation (1712–1713) following the uprising led by Rákóczi the “most intensive decade of registering” was the period between 1721 and 1730. The number of disciplinary cases between 1731 and 1740 was barely more than two-thirds of the previous decade (69.9 percent). Between 1741 and 1750, this number dropped again to just over one-third (37.9 percent) and in the period between 1760 and 1770 it fell below one-third. Thus the figures suggest that the first third of the eighteenth century was the period of the most intense activity in the Küküllő diocese from the perspective of Church discipline conducted by the archdeacon.

In the context of individual settlements, while in the first third of the eighteenth century the visitation handled on average between two and four cases a year in an individual village or market-town, in the period between 1741 and 1750 this number dropped to an average of one or two. After 1750 it dropped again to one. These averages conceal significant differences, however. In extreme years seven or eight people were summoned by the visitation officials in a single settlement. There were also striking differences in the course of a single visitation. While in some villages there was not a single case of Church discipline, in others the number of the affairs discussed was extraordinarily high. In 1713, for instance, twelve people were convicted in Küküllővár (Cetatea-de-Balta, Romania), eleven in Kóródszentmárton (Coroisânmartin, Romania), nineteen in Marosbogát (Bogata, Romania), and twenty-one in Radnót (Iernut, Romania), all in the course of a single visitation.

Clearly these divergences are due in part to the size of the individual settlements and the differences in its confessional composition. Moreover, sometimes there were cases of local scandals that affected many of the members of the community and received considerable publicity, a detail not reflected in the mere numbers. But one of the most influential factors in the differences between the various congregations was the role of the pastor and noble patron and their attitudes towards Church discipline, not to mention the manner in which the local community adapted the institution of Church discipline into the prevailing system of customary law.

Controlling Public Religious Behavior

Considering the various categories of transgressions examined by the visitation in the period in question (Table 2), one notices that the second focal point of discipline of the period after efforts intended to ensure enforcement of sexual norms, was participation in Church rituals and communion. This was hardly incidental, since external signs of religious practice, and in particular participation in public services, were the most measurable and most easily verified indications of religious conformity. It is therefore not surprising that from the beginning of the eighteenth century almost all of the visitation protocols and Church court proceedings contained a wealth of information regarding observance of religious services by members of the local communities and the personal and public customs pertaining to church attendance. Below I examine disciplinary cases involving the offences against standards related to public religious conduct and the means with which the Church attempted to assert its authority and maintain control.

In that period violation of religious conformity, including the failure to attend Church services counted as a crime punishable not only under Church laws but also under state laws. Beginning with the first disciplinary Church rules in the sixteenth century, one of the recurring punishments for failure to attend church was exclusion from communion and the denial of funeral rites. The canon collection assembled by Superintendent István Geleji Katona in 1649, which served as the Church lawbook for Transylvania at the time, included this ruling.17 Contemporary state laws imposed typical secular punishments. According to the notable Act of 1619, however, which were points of reference in the secular jurisdiction in Transylvania, those who profaned feast days or broke the Sabbath were to pay fines. The Act of 1664 added the stipulation that peasants should be put in the stocks if they failed to attend church three times without justification.

In spite of the strict Church and state laws, one finds only a single case in the Küküllő disciplinary sources for the whole of the seventeenth century that can be tied to the public practice of religion and transgressions of religious standards and conduct. In 1668 a woman and her daughter were punished by the ecclesiastical court for disorderly conduct in the church. They were punished, however, with little more than a trifling fine (4 forint), half of which was dropped as they were able to provide bond.18 Apart from this case, there are no written records from the period before the end of the century regarding the control or supervision of the religious conformity and convictions of the members of the congregation, or for that matter their knowledge of religious dogma. The visitation registers began to deal with the religious conduct of the laity towards the end of the seventeenth century. It is worth noting that the first visitation records of that kind were still exclusively concerned with public praxis of religiosity and referred to the communities as a whole. But as of the 1720s, attention gradually shifted to the level of the individual. They began to enter the names of notorious absentees from church and of persons who failed to take communion for a long time.

While the first notes concerning the transgression of religious norms were made at the end of the seventeenth century, the maintenance of regular records of participation in public religious ceremonies can be regarded as one of the novelties of the eighteenth century. The complaint that members of the community were not attending church regularly arose in only three of the thirty-six congregations visited in 1713, and in addition twelve of the sinners were listed by name in the pages of the protocol. In contrast, over the course of the visitation in 1726 pastors in one out of every four (seven out of twenty-seven) parishes made the general complaint that “people do not [feel that they] need the church,” and the names of fifteen “negligents” living in the diocese were recorded. In 1731 some kind of critical remark was made regarding church attendance in every other parish, and the names of thirty-four persons were recorded in the documents regarding disciplinary measures. Of the thirty-one congregations visited by the archdeacon, he found only six in which not a single complaint was made regarding regular religious practices. In other words, in 80 percent of the congregations offenses against standards involving the public practice of religion were recorded. In 1734 the intensity of the supervision of religious regulations on the communal level dropped significantly, but the proportion of matters regarding individuals who failed to attend Church services did not change. While the general complaint that Church attendance was not satisfactory was made of only three of the twenty-seven communities, twenty-one people were summoned individually to appear before the archdeacon. One notices a similar though less pronounced tendency two years later. In 1736 complaints were made regarding two congregations and the names of sixteen people who had committed transgressions were recorded in the visitation protocols.

Thus as of the beginning of the eighteenth century the Church gradually devoted increasing attention to regular church attendance and taking of the Communion. In the 1720s, the number of entries regarding disciplinary measures taken against those who failed to attend services rose dramatically in the Küküllő diocese, reaching a peak in the 1730s. After this, although registers continued to be kept up until the end of the century regarding violations of religious norms, but as of the 1740s the number of written comments concerning participation in public ceremonies became sporadic. Although the number of individuals whose names were included in the records grew in the 1720s and the first years of the 1730s, the average number in the diocese still did not exceed one or two persons per congregation.

While in general the entries did not give details on the nature of the transgressions, a few references can serve as an indication of the causes of the absence and the nature of the religious behavior expected by the church. It becomes clear, for instance, that in some of the cases the entire congregation failed to attend weekday services. However, it is worth keeping in mind that at least in principle the Church decrees required quite frequent attendance at church. According to the Geleji canon, Church services were to be held four times a week. Sermons were supposed to be held twice every Sunday, morning and afternoon, and according to the Church statutes two services were to be held on weekdays as well. Furthermore, on days when there were no services, in principle the pastor held prayers twice a day and read passages of Scripture.19 In practice, however, these regulations were rarely met. For instance, according to the 1721 visitation notes, in the village of Bethlenszentmiklós (Sânmiclăus, Romania) no services were held on weekdays whatsoever.20 In many cases the religious zeal of the members of filial congregations in which there was no permanent pastor were found wanting. For instance, according to the records of the 1721 visitation, in Egrestő (Agrişteu, Romania), the “filial” village of Balavásár (Bălăuşeri, Romania), when the instructor rang the church bells, sometimes no one went to the service.21 Furthermore, failure to attend church was often more common in the summer, when members of the congregation saw to seasonal agricultural work instead of meeting the expectations of the Church.

In addition, the first signs appeared in the records referring not simply to the impious behavior of individuals, but to the irreligious, profane conduct of whole communities. Failure to attend church services began to be associated with profanation of a feast day, in other words the indulgence in secular forms of entertainment in sacred time. For instance, in 1722 the complaint was made that the parishioners of the community of Csávás (Ceuaş, Romania) failed to attend services and preferred instead to carouse. According to the 1728 visitation many of the members of the congregation of Erzsébetváros (Dumbrăveni, Romania), including many of the elderly, profaned the Sabbath by dancing and drinking.22 In certain cases the difficulties encountered in introducing the new religious regulations can be sensed; in a number of cases, for example, local resistance to schooling and the catechism of girls can be observed. In these cases, complaints regarding poor church attendance were made as part of the larger endeavor of the Church to promote new religious teachings and change the religious mentality.

The division of the complaints according to gender is also interesting. Complaints against men usually involved agricultural work or indulgence in worldly pleasures, such us spending time at the inn. More surprising, however, were the frequent complaints concerning the habits of women with regards to church attendance, such as the laments that “the women do not want to go to church,” “the women do not really go to church,” and “both the men and the women are admonished, but primarily the women, not to neglect to attend church.”23 The very brief entries in the protocols reveal little concerning possible explanations for what lay behind the phenomenon. One might venture the hypothesis that in this case there was tension between a traditional conception of religious representation and a new approach. The feudal world tended to think in terms of households, not individuals, and thus earlier it may well have been considered sufficient if only the head of the household attended services. The records from the early eighteenth century may well indicate that the Church had begun to call this custom into question and had aspired to insist that women also attend services. It hardly seems mere coincidence that these records appeared, if sporadically, precisely at the time that the Church increased its efforts to supervise the catechism of girls more closely.

Another important note pertaining to the religious conduct of women concerned a debate regarding Church seating order and the behavior of the congregation during the service. For instance, the women were admonished not to converse on the benches beside the church building during the service, but rather to sit in the pew that had been assigned to them and listen to the sermon. Seating order in the church mirrored the local social hierarchy. Matters in which someone failed to attend a service because of a debate concerning seating order reflected veiled communal conflicts and tensions in the local social hierarchy. The Church court dealt with these cases individually and accurately specified seats in the pews for the litigants according to their social positions, and these decisions were attentively recorded in writing by the visitation officials.

Many entries can be read from the period in question that drew distinctions between the sinners on the basis of their social status. However, these data lead to different conclusions. For instance, among the villagers of Bernád (Bernadea, Romania), particularly the peasants were accused of negligence about attending Church services, while in Csávás the local pastor complained about the habits of the well-to-do husbandmen. With regards to the people of Egrestő, the visitation noted that “the members of the nobility are particularly cold in their service of the Lord.”24

Thus in the early eighteenth century we see the appearance of a new dimension of disciplinary activity focusing on the intensity or laxity of public religious practice. Since data from Küküllő on the earlier periods of religious practice at local level enabling a comparison has not survived, it is difficult to assess the religious, social, or cultural factors that lay in the background. Have we really detected a shift in the models of communal religious behavior and a drop in participation in religious services? Do the sources suggest that a system of rules that more or less had prevailed was weakening? What lies in the background of this phenomenon? The slackening of communal norms as a consequence of armed conflicts? Unfavorable shifts in political circumstances in the wake of efforts by the Habsburg Court to reassert Catholicism? Or were there other factors? Or perhaps the attitude of the Church leadership changed, devoting greater attention than in the previous periods to the perception of transgressions of the law regarding church presence and recording them in writing. And of this was so, can this be interpreted in the larger framework of the endeavor to change the religious mentality of communities?

In order to offer a nuanced answer to this obviously complex question, one would need additional sources. But even in this stage, it is nonetheless worth considering a few possibilities on the basis of the available sources. Religious prescriptions for individuals and communities and actual religious practice coincide only in exceptional cases, to use Max Weber’s expression, only in the case of religious virtuosi. For this reason the tension between norm and practice can always emerge in conflicts, regardless of the historical era in question. As described above, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Church and secular laws often specified the punishments for transgressions involving the public practice of religion.

The familiar topos of the moral decline of the community that is turning away from God and the church and has become forgetful of divine punishment already figured prominently in the famous laws passed by Prince Gábor Bethlen in 1619. However, in actual church disciplinary practice, on the basis of the written sources in the Küküllő diocese, failure to attend church only began to be treated as a serious transgression in the eighteenth century. Although the brief, formalized language of the protocols offers few insights into the actual circumstances, it is nevertheless a fact that as they moved from one congregation to another they named various social groups and divergent circumstances in their catalogues of transgressions (women, men, smallholders, nobles, old people, young people, weekdays, Sundays, feast days, etc.), suggesting that what lay in the background was not simply the revival of the old stereotype of decline, but rather departures from religious norms at the level of concrete, individual realities. At the same time it is worth keeping another phenomenon in mind. The texts of a few of the judgements suggests that in addition to adopting increasingly strict expectations concerning religious conduct, the Church was striving to find a balance between the liturgical requirements and real life. This led to subtle compromises between communal customs and the church’s expectations. This can clearly be seen in the wording of a judgement made during the visitation in 1734, stating that the members of the congregation of Királyfalva (Crăieşti, Romania) were expected to attend church on weekdays too whenever they could. In 1736 a ruling was issued in Teremi (Teremia Mare, Romania) admonishing the members of the congregation to be more conscientious about attending church. Otherwise, those who failed to attend the services would be buried without a church ceremony.25 Thus the expectations of the Church were by no means absolutely categorical. Only those who did not attend the services with due frequency were threatened with spiritual punishment. In 1728 the visitation warned the pastor of Kóródszentmárton, instructing him, “when there are believers present [on Sunday], to deliver a sermon twice.”26 In this case, the preacher had neglected to hold the afternoon Sunday sermon. Some members of the congregation, however, presumably continued to call for the second Sunday ceremony. Notably, the visitation did not reprimand the members of the congregation who had failed to attend the second service, but rather, making allowances for local conditions, admonished the pastor. In any case, the surviving written records indicate slow changes in habits pertaining to church attendance and a gradual decline in participation in church services other than the Sunday morning sermon.

Matters revealing, the brevity of the sources notwithstanding, some kind of personal conflict constitute another important group of violations of religious conformity. In general one has the impression that when people’s names were included in the written records, this was because of some kind of personal motive. One of the reasons for failure to attend services may have been a personal conflict with a family member or a member of the larger community or an unresolved family dispute. A further reason may simply have been the desire to avoid the public penance and reconciliation before the assembled community. Failure to attend services in certain cases stretched over long periods of time, even years. However, most frequently the refusal to attend church could be traced back to a personal conflict with the minister. Indeed, in certain cases even the brief texts reveal that absence from church was interpreted as a public gesture of open opposition to the minister that was clearly understood as such by the community. The case of Mihály Nagy of Bernád offers a clear example of this. While the instructor was dictating the first hymn of the service, he remained in the church, but when the pastor began to preach, he left the building.27

The sources offer few insights into the conflicts. Some of the entries referring to the causes indicate a difference of views regarding church services. Frequently the disciplinary activity of the minister or the instructor was the cause of the anger. Other conflicts were due to economic considerations. People failed to attend services because of disputes arising over provision of the minister’s payment in the form of produce, or refusal to do the required work led to absence from religious services. In certain cases the minister’s behavior seems to have been the cause of the resistance. This seems to bee true in the case of the pastor of Kerelőszentpál (Sânpaul, Romania), who was accused of family quarrels, frequently neglecting to hold services, failing to announce Communion at the proper time and squabbling with members of the congregation. Given his conduct, people “didn’t even go to church.”

Thus when someone failed to take part in the religious life of the community, the most common reason was a personal conflict with the local clergyman. Failure to attend church, however, did not necessarily mean failure to participate in all religious rituals. The case of Mrs. István Szabó of Kutyfalva (Cuci, Romania) is one example of this. She was angry at the local pastor and so had her child baptized by the minister in another village. Her example indicates a phenomenon that has not yet been made the subject of thorough study. Because of her conflict with the local priest, she turned for assistance to the minister of another congregation to administer the sacrament. Historians have been familiar with this phenomenon, but most often with regards to weddings. In such cases, the bride and groom would turn to another pastor, often (Church and secular prohibitions notwithstanding) a pastor belonging to a different denomination, if in the course of the proceedings some obstacle were to arise, for instance if one of the two families happened to oppose the marriage or the prevailing Church laws for some reason prevented the two from marrying. In the case of Mrs. Szabó, however, her decision to have her child baptized by another pastor was due not to some external hindrance, but rather her personal conflict with the local priest. The records from Küküllő indicate that her case was by no means unique.

The 1738 visitation forbade the members of the congregation in general from taking Communion in another parish. This prohibition was made without mention of any specific individual case, suggesting that in fact the practice was widespread.28 In Búzásbesnyő (Valea Izvoarelor, Romania), the Church body that performed the visitation threatened the ex-churchwarden and another man, both of whom were embroiled in a conflict with the local pastor over the collection of taxes, with exclusion from the churches in the neighboring villages. It is an indication of the limits of church control that despite the general ban, the visitation was unable to take any effective action against the two men. In 1754, after a good ten years had passed, the two men, who regularly took Lord’s Supper in another congregation, were again admonished to attend services and take Communion in the church in their village.29 The sources thus indicate that there existed a pattern in the religious practice of the period that overstepped the local parochial order, and members of local congregations would attend services in other communities as a consequence of conflicts with local pastors.

While the citations above suggest that it was not unheard of for churchgoers to attend the Calvinist church of a neighboring village instead of the one in their own communities, references have survived in the Küküllő sources to examples of persons crossing denominational borders on occasion in areas with a mixed population. The people of Balavásár who attended services at the evangelical Saxon church and the people of Harangláb (Hărănglab, Romania) and Ádámos (Adămuş, Romania) who attended the Unitarian church raise another important question, namely the nature of the borders of individual and communal confessional consciousness and identity in the early modern era. The Church leadership made repeated efforts to strengthen confessional identity, reinforce the borders between different denominations, and forbid members of one congregation from participating in services held by other denominations. For instance, women who attended services at the Unitarian church were admonished: “Do not disgrace our sacred faith by attending the churches of other faiths. If you consider yourselves Calvinists, attend our church and provide the pastor and instructor with their pay.”30 The sources, however, reveal that some of the members of local communities overstepped these borders. In order to be able to assess the actual frequency of this phenomenon, however, we would need additional sources.

The sources yield further insights if the surviving remarks are considered from the perspective of the individuals involved. In many of these cases one can sense that the persons who were summoned to appear before the Church disciplinary bodies had violated the moral standards of both the village community and the Church with their conduct in a number of ways. In most cases the various conflicts and violations of individual and communal norms were intertwined, as for instance in the case of István Vas of Csávás. In the three decades between 1712 and 1744 Vas was summoned to appear before the visitation on ten different occasions. His transgressions included blasphemy, swearing, bearing false witness, mistreating his wife, and refusing to pay Church taxes. Furthermore, he was repeatedly admonished for having failed to attend church or take Communion. In addition to numerous oral admonitions and threats of excommunication, he was in fact excommunicated three times, twice for blasphemy and once for having born false witness. His case was by no means unique. If one examines the cases of individuals who were summoned to appear before the visitation more closely, one notes that many of the names recur frequently. In Bonyha and its filial church, Bernád, between 1721 and 1741, of the 74 people listed by name in the protocols 20 recur more than once (27 percent). In Kóródszentmárton 40 names were recorded once, but 30 were registered at least twice (43 percent), and it was not at all uncommon for one name to figure more than three times in the visitation records (there were twelve such cases). In the villages of Balavásár and Egrestő, over the course of the two decades in question 56 people were summoned to appear before the visitation. 24 of them (40 percent) were summoned at least twice. Nine people were summoned more than three times.

Refusal to Take the Lord’s Supper

One of the most powerful symbols of conflict, both for the community and for the Church superiors, was refusal to take Communion. According to Church teachings, as a ritual the sacrament of Communion bore the essence of all of the articles of Christian faith, reminding churchgoers of the crucifixion, forgiveness, and the promise of redemption and also enabling them to express their submission to the will of the Lord. The Lord’s Supper also served as a symbolic manifestation of the unity of the congregation. It made the group of churchgoers a sacred community of believers. Thus it was both sacrament and public ritual expressing communal cohesion. The refusal to take Communion thus represented rejection of the sacrament but also of the larger community.

Thus alongside participation in church services, the Lord’s Supper was the other emblematic element of the public, communal practice of religion. The regular taking of Communion has therefore been considered by scholars as a good measure of religious conformity.31 In many cases, however, refusal to take Communion was due to personal conflicts, as was the case with failure to attend church services. This was true in the case in a dispute between two men from Kóródszentmárton, both of whom were admonished by the visitation not to bear anger towards each other, which causes them not to partake in the sacrament of Lord’s Supper.32

In his study of the protocols of the visitation of the Württemberg Lutheran Church David Warren Sabean examines the conflicts that arose regarding Communion and the refusal to attend the Lord’s Supper. He contends that behind the cases of refusals among the peasantry to take part in the celebration of Communion in the sixteenth century one can detect internal communal conflicts and ritual expressions of dissension. According to the teachings of the Church and the local communal norms, the attending of Communion had to be preceded by a show of repentance of the sins and reconciliation. The Württemberg peasants who lived in a state of conflict, restlessness, and ultimately sin, were, according to their convictions, in a ritually endangered state. If they were to take Communion unworthily, they would face the Lord’s judgment and would endanger not only themselves, but the entire congregation.33 According to Sabean’s analysis, in contrast with the Church leaders, who sought to reconcile the parties to disputes and urged them to take Communion as quickly as possible, the villagers saw the conflict as a secular affair that the individual’s conscience and inner spiritual relief could not remedy. Such disputes, in their view, could only be dealt with by the secular juridical institutions, in a well-ordered, legal manner.

The judgements of the Küküllő diocese in the eighteenth century reveal signs of this conception as well. If a Church forum found someone guilty of a transgression, the person in question first had to settle the case in the secular court. The offender first had to suffer the penalty issued by the secular court and only then came the ritualized form of repentance, public penance. The religious community only then could re-integrate him or her into the fold, and only then could a penitent offender take Communion as part of the congregation. The conflict could be solved with the assistance of formal juridical institutions. One finds an example of the acceptance of this approach by the Church in the case of the elder Mrs. Beregi of Boldogfalva, who according to the visitation was embroiled in a conflict with Mrs. György Molnár and so did not take Communion. Her case was heard by the village court. She appealed the decision of the court, but she did not take the other necessary steps and she did not demonstrate to the visitation officials any willingness to make peace. Thus she did not move her case forward. She did not do everything to settle the conflict legally and restore peace. The visitation threatened her with excommunication if she did not resolve the case within two weeks.34 Thus the Church officials in Küküllő in the eighteenth century—in contrast with officials in Württemberg in the sixteenth century—accepted that litigation held before the secular tribunal excluded contestants from taking Communion. The litigants were obliged to resolve the legal situation, which meant temporary exclusion from the community of the faithful, as soon as possible in order to restore the peace. Since Mrs. Beregi was unwilling to do this, she herself was seen as culpable.

If, however, the Church did not find a reason to ban someone from taking Communion, neither a crime awaiting the punishment of the secular court nor a litigious matter, it required the believers to attend the Lord’s Supper. This attitude was reflected in the case of Mrs. Márton Székely. The Church warned her “not to neglect Communion just because of base household quarrels, but rather take the Lord’s Supper more often.”35 Mrs. Székely, demonstrating her lay interpretation of Communion, understood refusal to take Communion as a ritual expression of a tense situation that represented a direct physical and spiritual danger. The local church leaders, in contrast, did not consider the “base household quarrels” as a matter to be addressed by the criminal forums, nor did it see them as transgressions that would endanger the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. They interpreted the conduct of members of the congregations who failed to take Communion “without real reason” as a challenge to the orthodox ritual religious practices and a sign of resistance to Church authority, since refusal to take Communion constituted a withdrawal from the community of the faithful.

In an essay on the practice of attending Communion in the village communities of Wiltshire, Donald A. Spaeth examines another reason for refusal to participate in the fundamental ritual. He analyzes cases from the Anglican Church in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in which the parishioners were unwilling to take Holy Communion if they saw the minister as immoral. According to Spaeth, in their view a pastor who led an unholy life was not fit to administer the sacrament. To accept Holy Communion from such a pastor would be to violate the sacrament itself. This folk interpretation may explain a case noted by the Küküllő visitation in 1722, when members of the congregation in the town of Radnót indicated that they were unwilling to take Communion if the sacrament were administered by the local pastor.

These examples all suggest that, given the ambiguous popular attitude of lay people towards Communion, an attitude marked both by awe and respect, and their fear of the Lord’s wrath should they violate the ritual, one cannot interpret failure to take Communion simply as a sign of a lack of interest in the ritual or a decline in religious commitment or piety. Indeed in certain cases it may well indicate a more strict interpretation of and adherence to the spiritual importance of religious ritual. Thus (to echo Spaeth’s conclusion) failure to attend the Lord’s Supper cannot be seen as an index of piety or religious zeal.36

Punishments

In the period under investigation violations of religious conformity, including failure to attend church services, were seen as crimes that were punished by Church and state alike. The sixteenth and seventeenth-century state laws sanctioned failure to attend church with characteristically secular penalties. However, the Church strove increasingly to enforce religious conformity by referring to the spiritual dangers that awaited offenders. Indeed in the 1720s and 1730s these kinds of transgressions were punished exclusively with spiritual sanctions.

As the visitation records reveal, however, the continuous admonitions notwithstanding, no one was ever actually excommunicated for having failed to attend sermons. In contrast, those who were found guilty of swearing or having broken oaths or committed sexual transgressions comprised the overwhelming majority of people sentenced to excommunication or reconciliation; persons who failed to attend church and lived without taking communion were ordered again and again to appear before the visitation, their names were recorded, they were admonished and threatened with the most severe spiritual sanctions, but in no case were they condemned to excommunication or public penance.

Summary

The period in which the greatest emphasis was placed on the enforcement of religious conformity coincided with the period when maintenance of written records regarding transgressions committed by members of the laity became far more widespread than previously.

The requirement of a more intensive presence arose from the same aspiration as the efforts to ensure control of schooling and catechism and efforts to spread Christian teachings more effectively. Moreover, this process began in a political context that had undergone a fundamental shift. The Principality of Transylvania lost its independence, becoming part of the Habsburg Empire. The Transylvanian Church, which had enjoyed the status of a quasi-state Church, found itself the target of the Habsburg’s recatholicization efforts.

Within a short while its most urgent problem became the struggle against the occupation of its churches, conversions and cuts in ministers’ benefits. In a hostile environment in which it was increasingly difficult to have sanctions against members of the community carried out by the secular authorities, increased emphasis must have been placed on the ritual strengthening of denominational community bonds. Church membership could be defined most clearly through participation in the rites, and for this reason the church leadership also interpreted church attendance and taking communion as a sign of belonging to the community.

However, the more extensive, comprehensive control did not at the same time mean that punishments became more intensive or severe. We cannot speak in this diocese of an all-embracing, strict disciplinary campaign, of a systematic, consistent endeavor to change religious mentality, in the words of the American sociologist Philip Gorski of a “disciplinary revolution” in the control of public religious practice. The expectations of the Church were not that high.There is no indication that the church strove to impose regular attendance on all members of the community. It did not really have the means to have done so. The list of recurring names of notorious offenders does suggest that there was a clearly identifiable stratum impervious to the efforts of the visitation, against whom the instruments of church discipline proved inadequate.

Archival sources

KükEhmLvt prot. I/1: A Küküllői Református Egyházmegye levéltára. Parciális zsinati jegyzőkönyv [Archive of the Küküllő Calvinist Church. Partial Synodic Protocols]. 1639–1673. OSZK Filmtári dsz: MF/1. 3713.

KükEhmLvt prot. II/1. Vizitációs jegyzőkönyv 1648–1658 [Visitation Protocols 1648–1658]. OSZK Filmtári dsz: MF/1. 3710.

KükEhmLvt prot. I/2. Vegyes vizitációs és parciális zsinati jegyzőkönyvek 1677–1713 [Visitation and Partial Synodic Protocols 1677–1713]. OSZK Filmtári dsz: MF/1. 3711.

KükEhmLvt prot. II/2. Vizitációs jegyzőkönyv 1713–1725 [Visitation Protocols 1713–1725]. OSZK Filmtári dsz. MF/1. 3712.

KükEhmLvt prot. II/3. Vizitációs jegyzőkönyv 1725–1761 [Visitation Protocols 1725–1761]. OSZK Filmtári dsz. MF/1. 3718.

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Buzogány, Dezső, Sándor Előd Ősz, and Levente Tóth, eds. A történelmi Küküllői Református Egyházmegye egyházközségeinek történeti katasztere 1648–1800 [The Historical Cadaster of the Parishes of the Reform Diocese of Historical Küküllő, 1648–1800]. Vols 4, Cluj: Koinónia, 2008–2011.

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Gorski, Philip S. The Disciplinary Revolution. Calvinism and the Rise of the State in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

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Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Mihály Balázs

Tolerant Country – Misunderstood Laws. Interpreting Sixteenth-Century Transylvanian Legislation Concerning Religion1

In this essay, I offer a new interpretation of the religious laws that were passed in Transylvania between 1568 and 1571. I conclude that the interpretations that have been ventured so far in the secondary literature have failed to provide a concrete analysis of the relationships between different confessions, either because of national prejudice or because of general ignorance of prevailing conditions at the time. As a consequence, a view has gained acceptance in several comprehensive works according to which, by recognizing the four confessions in Transylvania, lawmakers sought to ensure the survival of the newly emerged principality. I offer a thorough study of the texts of the laws in support of my contention that this is not the case. The laws include no specific list of the four confessions. The first such list dates from 1595, the year after which the laws make mention of the Orthodox religion of the Romanian speaking population as a tolerated religion. As my analysis clearly demonstrates, up until the end of the century the most important goal of the laws was the continuous assertion of the Protestant identity of the Principality, and paradoxically this did not even change in 1571, when the Roman Catholic István Báthory came to the Transylvanian throne. Until the middle of the 1570s this Protestant identity was essentially undivided due to the unparalleled slowness (in comparison with the rest of Europe) of the spread of confessionalism. It is worth noting that until the early 1570s the prince and those closest to him saw the restoration of Protestant unity in Europe as the mission of Transylvanian Protestantism, and this meant attempting to spread Protestantism among the Orthodox communities of the country. At the same time, the estates in Transylvania, a principality that saw itself as fundamentally Protestant, sought to ensure the preservation of conditions necessary for the survival of the religious lives of the dwindling number of Catholics.

keywords: Principality of Transylvania, religious plurality, confessionalization, tolerance

Introduction: Legislation in 1568 and 1571

The process that eventually led to the formulation of a new state, the Transylvanian principality, in the eastern region of medieval Hungary gained additional momentum in the mid-1550s. In addition to new institutions of statehood, the new organizational forms of religious life also had to be established. Probably the most important step, which in the long run determined the limits of this process, was a claim by Queen Isabel, the widow of János Szapolyai, who returned from Poland. At the diet of Torda (today Turda, Romania), held in February 1557, she declared that according to her office and her royal dignity (pro functione et dignitate nostra regali) she regarded it as her duty to protect all religious denominations within her country. Various explanations suggest that her son, who considered himself the King of Hungary at the end of his life (Johannes secundus electus rex Hungariae), followed the same principle, as did his sixteenth and seventeenth-century followers, whose titles were restricted to Princeps Transylvaniae. This law (ius patronatus) meant that until the end of the seventeenth century the bishops of the emerging denominations could only begin their endeavors after they had acquired the necessary royal warrant.

At the same time, the actual ruler always proclaimed his religious orders after having heard the Diet. Therefore, the Diets were probably the most important forum for the discussion of such orders, although these discussions might have been instrumental to some extent because of the superiority of the royal power. For alongside representatives of the three nations who participated in the operation of the state (Hungarians, Saxons, Székelys), it was the actual ruler who made decisions about the participants of any given diet. The Prince and the Council operating alongside him were also responsible for selecting the topics to be discussed, so it was ultimately the Prince who decided when and in whose presence religious questions would be put on the agenda. Because of the later destruction in the archives of the Principality, no documents from the preparatory phase of decision-making remain, so historians have little more than the texts of the legal articles themselves on which to base conclusions. From the 1560s on, these were written in Hungarian, although the introductory formulas, which declare that the ruler vouchsafes to confirm the text of the law in question on the request of the citizens of the country, remained in Latin until the end of the sixteenth century. Under these circumstances, the laws are of profound importance to any attempt to study the boundaries of contemporary religious life, and they tend to include more elaborate, developed arguments as of the second half of the 1560s. There is consensus among historians that in this respect as well, the highest standards are represented by the texts composed in the last phase of the reign of Zsigmond János, between 1568 and 1571. Yet the assessments made by Hungarian scholars differ in tone and content from the international secondary literature on the topic.

Hungarian scholars frequently claim that these laws turned Transylvania into an exceptionally tolerant country, the pioneer of legislated religious freedom, an example that was followed by other European countries only centuries later.2 Foreign scholars, when placing the Transylvanian phenomena on the map of early modern Europe, seem completely ignorant of these claims, or they tacitly dismiss them as exaggerations.3 Both approaches are based on topoi instead of a precise and detailed discussion of the individual characteristics. In the first case, the topos of national bias is obvious. In the second instance, the topos is linked to the borderline position of the principality (which became a buffer zone between two world empires) and to its varied ethnic and religious landscape. (As early as the Middle Ages, several ethnic groups lived in Transylvania, and the presence of the Eastern Orthodox Church ab ovo assured confessional pluralism.4) Recent works by Gábor Barta and Ágnes Várkonyi, although providing a more refined historical background, give no concrete analysis of confessional relationships; they offer a picture that is already widely accepted in Hungary because of popular accounts and summaries.5

According to this concept, the important laws conceived during the second part of the 1560s were the result of a fascinating confessional pluralism caused by the unique situation of the Principality. With these laws, the leaders of Transylvanian political life were able to secure internal order and peace. For a country wedged between two world powers, this was a basic precondition of survival; the already ethnically fragmented new political construction could not afford to become the site of bloody confessional struggles and religious wars. This led to a unique event in European history, namely the institutionalization of the four received religions (Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, Calvinist, Unitarian), with the further addition of tolerance for the Orthodox Church.

In what follows, I attempt to draft a new model. The most important claim is that the purpose of the famous laws created in the final period of Zsigmond János’s reign was to establish the Protestant religious identity of the newly created country, and the rights of other non-Protestant denominations were acknowledged only in the last decade of the century. In the course of this inquiry, I concentrate on the texts of two laws to which the representatives of the aforementioned concept frequently refer. Below is the text of the laws enacted in Torda in January, 1568, then in Marosvásárhely (today Târgu Mureș, Romania) in January, 1571, both originally written in Hungarian.

January 1568, Torda

According to agreements reached at previous sittings of the Diet between His Majesty and the people of his realm concerning matters of religion, it is once again confirmed by this present sitting that pastors shall be free to preach and teach the Gospel wherever they may be and according to their own interpretation. If a parish chooses to accept this interpretation, well and good; if not, the parish shall not be forced to accept it against its will and shall be free to insist upon the maintenance of a preacher whose teachings suit its requirements. Following former constitutions, none of the superintendents, nor any other person shall have the right to offend a pastor or abuse anyone on the basis of his religion, nor shall anyone be threatened with imprisonment or removal from office for his preaching. Faith is a gift of God received through hearing, the vehicle of God’s word.6

January 1571, Marosvásárhely

It has been decided concerning the preaching of God’s word that, just as Your Majesty earlier decided with the Diet, the word of God shall be preached freely everywhere. No one, neither preacher nor listener, shall come to harm on account of his confession, but if a minister should fall into criminal excess, he shall be condemned and deprived of all his functions by the superintendent, and then shall be banished from the realm.7

However, it is equally important from the perspective of this inquiry to emphasize the importance of two other laws which many representatives of the aforementioned concept treat only superficially, if at all. Thus, in another part of the previously cited text of the law from Torda one reads the following:

We humbly report to your Majesty that there are many in your Majesty’s country who disobey the Wallachian bishop, who was appointed to this position by your grace; they prefer to follow the former priests and their heresies, and prevent the bishop from properly fulfilling his duties; therefore we beg your Majesty to graciously grant the advancement of the Gospel according to your Majesty’s earlier decree concerning the country, and to punish those who dare oppose it.

The Limits of Tolerance

The enactment in Medgyes (today Mediaș, Romania) of the following law in January 1570 is also highly relevant:

January 1570, Medgyes

We will carry out Your Majesty’s order concerning the newly emerging heresies and their initiators; that Your Majesty considers honoring God and respecting his royal dignity of foremost importance, therefore he does not tolerate such blasphemy and heresy in his realm, but rather scrutinizes them and punishes both their authors and propagators in order to avoid an even greater divine wrath upon us.

If, as a first step, one interprets this latter passage, it becomes obvious that in contrast to the passages cited from 1568 and 1571, there are serious restrictions here, and those who propagated ideas deemed heretical or blasphemous had to face the prospect of retribution.

More serious historians, however, did not ignore these laws. Rather they attempted to arrive at an explanation for the restrictive character of the last one cited here and for its vast difference from the first two. There are two common types of explanations regarding this. According to one, those who drafted this law had long-term considerations in mind. The extremely influential historian, Gyula Szekfű, offered the most suggestive explanation: in his view, the reason for introducing these restrictions was that unconstrained freedom in religious matters following the edict of 1568 was visibly leading to liberalism and anarchy.8 Another version of this interpretation is Márta Fata’s recent extensive summary, published in Germany. In Fata’s view, the resulting “individuelle Konfessionswahl bedrohte jedoch die bestehene Ordnung, so 1570 das Gesetz auf Ersuchen der Stände zurückgezogen werden musste. Individuelle Religionsfreiheit konnte im ethnisch–ständisch organisierten Siebenbürgen des 16. Jahrhunderts noch nicht funktionieren” (“individual choice of confession, however, threatened established order, so in 1570 the law had to be withdrawn given the conditions. Individual freedom of religion could not yet function in the ethnically-corporative Transylvania of the sixteenth century”).9

Given the significance of this interpretation, I wish to make it clear that I consider the modernizing attitude palpable in this quotation highly suspect. In line with Axel Gotthard10 and others, I believe that there is no reason to project twentieth-century notions of individual religious freedom and human rights onto sixteenth-century documents. The sixteenth-century laws deal not with individuals but with groups of people, communities, and confessions, as well as the territories in which they lived all over Europe. Only as the result of a long process could freedom of conscience emerge as a problem of the individual. Returning to the topic at hand, Szekfű and his followers obviously made the mistake of failing to provide an answer to the following question: after the 1570 restrictive law, why did the Diet of January 1571 in Marosvásárhely once again accept a law much like the one in 1568, that is, a tolerant one?

I share the view of the second group of historians, who think that in 1570 the short-term measure was directed against a newly emerging group or phenomenon. This view can be supported by the following consideration: it had been customary even in the case of religious laws that the introduction to the core content also makes reference to the earlier, related law. This is not the case here; the article does not refer to any antecedents. More importantly, the text refers not to customary “matters of religion” or confession, but rather heresies, moreover, “recently emerging heresies.” It is highly probable that this was related to the sudden appearance of a representative of anabaptist-spiritualist ideas. The information comes from a letter that Samuil Goldenberg found in the archives in Kolozsvár (today Cluj-Napoca, Romania).

The German-language letter, written in Krakow, Poland in February 1570, was sent to Gaspar Helt (Gáspár Heltai), one of the ministers and most important men of the Saxon congregation. The author of the letter was a preacher named Elias Gczmidele, who had earlier been expelled from Kolozsvár. The letter, which is full of reproaches, reports that Gczmidele, a sort of wandering preacher, was spreading pacifism and communitarianism in the city of Kolozsvár. Because of this activity, some kind of church court of justice sentenced him to be expelled from the city.11 Heltai’s prayer book (Gebetbuch) is a rich source of additional information. It turned out that Heltai re-wrote Johann Habermann’s prayers and added his own commentaries to bring them up-to-date. The commentaries written during these months reflect Heltai’s overwhelming concern with similar views, which were even being spread among the Hungarian speaking population. He passionately condemns those who viewed prayer and churchgoing as entirely futile.12 If one also considers that Gczmidele admittedly interpreted Luther’s much-debated ideas concerning the Turks to suggest that taking any action against the Turks would be a great mistake, one can understand why both religious and secular leaders of the city had to register the spread of ideas that were extremely dangerous in a political sense as well. Therefore, it seemed reasonable for the Diet to take measures. One should remember that this view concerning the Turkish problem in Kolozsvár had a very different meaning than in other places within the empire. In support of upcoming reflections we can at least state that when circumstances dictated, freedom in preaching the gospel was also restricted in Kolozsvár.

Protestant Universalism in Sixteenth-Century Transylvania

If one considers Olivier Christin13 and Eike Wolgast’s14 attempt to arrive at a complete typology, or other comparisons15 when examining these long-term laws, one realizes that, despite the remarkable presence of theological argumentation, the taxonomy of the relevant confessions is missing. This omission is hardly compatible with the popular view cited earlier. If these laws reflected an inter-confessional peace among the established churches, a careful listing of them would be inevitable. How can such an enumeration be missing when the condition for the creation of these laws was precisely the balance of forces among the four established confessions in Transylvania—the Roman Catholic, Evangelical Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian? I think we blur the essential characteristics of these laws if we downplay the importance of this fact, and instead, based on our historical knowledge, consider the list simply implied. Furthermore, it is not the list alone that is missing, but also the overview and evaluation of events during the previous years—the supporting arguments for establishing this inter-confessional peace. To exaggerate somewhat, these laws were intended not to bring something to a close, but rather, quite the opposite, to drive a scarcely begun process to full victory. This process, in the end, was supposed to abolish all confessions.

In order to substantiate my contentions, I should offer a detailed presentation of the distinctive history of the Transylvanian Reformation, but I restrict myself to the most important moments.16 First, this peculiar history was essentially influenced by the fact that a new country was coming into existence. This country was developing in the Eastern parts of Medieval Hungary, split apart by the Turkish invasion. It relied on certain pre-existent historical events, yet lacked a significant institutional background. As a consequence, following the fall of Buda, the royal family, escaping to the East, moved into the Bishop’s residence at Gyulafehérvár (Alba Iulia, Romania), which was turned into a royal, then a princely palace. Moreover, most of the Bishop’s incomes also went into the hands of this new secular power. Consequently, even before the Reformation’s more intense development, the newly formed secular power had already weakened the Roman Catholic Church’s institutional system. Later, with the advances of the Reformation in the 1550-60s, Catholicism essentially lost its followers. As the end of this process, the Diet in 1566 made arrangements about the remnants of the Catholic hierarchy by ordering that “those priests who insist upon the papal teachings and upon what was made up by humans, and refuse to convert, should be ousted from His Majesty’s realm.”17

Historians have always suspected that the Roman Catholic Church suffered great losses, but the drastic nature of these losses has only recently become clear with the publication of many documents from the archives of the Vatican. These selected documents attempt to describe the situation during the last third of the sixteenth century in an objective way, hoping for the possible return of the Catholics. Recent research on this period claims that by mid-1560 the number of Roman Catholics still living within the principality was insignificant. They lived primarily on the estates of Catholic members of the nobility who had not converted and also in certain settlements of the so-called Székely Land.

This explains why the Protestant prince and the Protestant estates did not consider indispensable the mention of this insignificant minority in the laws of a country in which Protestantism became increasingly part of self-identity, and which was continuously forced to take up arms in self-defense against the Habsburgs, who had the support of the Papacy. Not even incidental sources from the era help one decide whether there had been disputes about the necessity to regulate their legal status. When in the 1580s this matter came up for debate, documents attest that the Diet repeatedly declared that no one limited the ancient right by which every noble man was free to keep a clergyman of his choice on his estate. From the majority Protestant viewpoint, a 1588 document offers the clearest assessment of their status.18 In 1588, the estates insisted on expelling the Jesuits, whom had been brought into the Principality in the meantime by the Roman Catholic Prince, István Báthory. Their representatives, however, insistently separated their demand for the ban from the question of the rights of the small number of Catholics. The document states that even at the time of the introduction of the “true faith,” that is, Protestantism, there had been a certain number of Catholics; it then declares that only the greatest majority can constitute a universality. Therefore, the Diet may legislate universally only in their case, but it guarantees freedom of conscience for the Catholic minority. We have no documentation regarding the manner in which this freedom of conscience was practiced, but this lack of elaboration could have meant more than a meticulous staking out of the rights of the minority, as we read in the Edict of Nantes. For this framework allowed the inclusion of the religious life naturally surviving on the estates of the Catholic aristocracy, as well as the practice of allowing the use of the church building and the performance of Mass in settlements in which there was a recognized Catholic majority.19 This document therefore clearly demonstrates that until the end of the sixteenth century, although Catholicism was not a legally recognized religion in Transylvania, there were no excessive restrictions limiting its religious practice.

The reason that the laws of the 1560s omitted any list of other confessions must then lie elsewhere. The simple cause for a confession going unnamed is that in the period they still lacked church structures organized along lines of dogma. One can discern no more than an incipient process tending towards their formation. I wish to emphasize that I am not simply speaking about a delayed development of certain processes in East-Central Europe, but about the fact that the emerging solutions are original and particular in character. One notes this during the formation of the church’s organizational framework. The extinct Catholic bishopric was replaced by Protestant bishoprics, which were organized for a long time not on a confessional basis but on territorial and national bases in a medieval sense. Thus, all Protestant residents living in Saxon territories (cities and villages)—whether they or the larger community had accepted the Augsburg Confession, adopted some of the Helvetic beliefs, or already become followers of the Antitrinitarians or not—belonged under the supervision of the Saxon Bishop residing in Hermannstadt (Sibiu, Romania; Nagyszeben in Hungarian). The same is true of the so-called “Hungarian” Bishop who resided in Kolozsvár; that is, each Protestant community formed in a dominantly Hungarian county fell under the jurisdiction of the Hungarian Bishop, whether the community remained Evangelical Lutheran or—as the majority did—became Calvinist or Antitrinitarian. The dogmatic homogenization was no doubt more advanced in the Saxon territories, where the Hermannstadt headquarters and their circles successfully fought for the Saxon settlements to become dogmatically and organizationally perfectly unified and loyal to the Augsburg Confession. However, this process was still in the making.

This is even truer of the later Calvinist and Unitarian churches. All one can assert regarding this period is that the predominantly Hungarian-populated territories of contemporary Transylvania fell under the supervision of the bishop residing in Kolozsvár, that is, Ferenc Dávid. And after 1564, the majority of the congregations accepted a Helvetic type of the doctrine of communion. Therefore, one cannot speak of the existence of a Unitarian denomination, and it is an especially troubling anachronism to assign even the date of its beginning to the time of the “first” law, that is, to 1568 January. Antitrinitarianism, which only stepped on the stage in 1566, was still considered a fresh and novel phenomenon within the religious life of the principality. Moreover, the idea of establishing an independent Unitarian church by quickly breaking away from the Calvinists was completely alien to the program presented by the Antitrinitarians. Their objective was not simply one more church among many, but significantly more. Building upon the Apostolic Creed, they wanted to win over the population of all of Transylvania—which, of course, would (they hoped) have been a mere prelude to the victory of their teachings all over Europe. They viewed this as the fulfillment of the process that had begun with Martin Luther. They believed that they were the people capable of restoring the unity of Protestantism.

This concept might provoke a smile today; but its stubborn representation can be witnessed not only in the religious debates held between 1568 and 1570 with the participation of the Prince, but also in a persistent striving to win over leading theologians or politicians of other Protestant states. Several signs suggest that they considered it the mission of the Principality to establish Protestant unity by consistently applying Biblicism as its dogmatic foundation. They assumed that since they had successfully eliminated the supposedly biblical foundation of the Trinity, they would be able to persuade everybody of the truth of their theological teachings.

According to a recently surfaced document, this program is delineated in the inscription of one of the publications that they sent to Queen Elisabeth of England in the early days of 1570.20 The Latin letter draws a parallel between King Eduard VI and his successor, Queen Elisabeth, and Johannes secundus electus rex Hungariae, that is, John Sigismund. Obsessed by this mission, Unitarians obviously did not rush any organizational break away from the Calvinists. Although by 1571 it might have become clear that they would be incapable of winning over even the entire population of the Principality, the organizational consequences would not yet become clear during John Sigismund’s rule. Ferenc Dávid remained the bishop of all Protestant Hungarians in the territory of Transylvania.

So, just as no Unitarian church existed at the beginning of the 1570s, according to the explanation above, one cannot speak of an independently organized Calvinist church either. All one can say is that there existed congregations unwilling to step on the path of religious innovation offered by Italian Giorgio Blandrata and his fellows, but Ferenc Dávid still remained their bishop, whose teachings concerning several theological questions obviously differed from the ideas of the Swiss reformers.

The Spirit of Protestant Proselytizing

This universal Protestant character, which also included the Antitrinitarians, can be recognized in the distinctive nature of the laws, as well as in the character of the theological argumentation. The very presence of theological argumentation is also exceptional, and we can consider it symbolic that the 1568 law quotes Apostle Paul’s Letter to the Romans 10:17, one of Luther’s favorite biblical passages: “Ergo fides ex auditu, auditus autem per verbum Christi.” It is remarkable that during the religious debates of the time the Antitrinitarians held Luther in high regard, naturally thinking of themselves as the authentic fulfillers of his unfinished work. All this is probably not entirely unrelated to the fact that in the tolerance-debate following Servet’s death, the Basel representatives of heterodoxy made the young Luther speak once again. It was their reminder of the exceptionally close relationship between Transylvanian Antitrinitarians and Basel. They read, copied and revised the works of Castelio, Aconcio and Celio Secundo Curione, and even rewrote and republished the most important parts of De hereticis non sint persequendi.21

Returning to the practical level, in the 1568 law the biblical argumentation of the early Reformation is revitalized with the help of the humanists from Basel, and this textual tradition is reminiscent of the early period of the Reformation. This careful theological argumentation might compel one to attribute a great role to theologians in formulating the laws. This has a great tradition in the Unitarian church, where this is basically an axiom, and even the title of a highly revered painting refers to the proclamation by Ferenc Dávid of religious freedom. In reality, we do not know anything about this, for at the end of the sixteenth century the royal library was destroyed, and nothing survived from the Diets other than the texts of laws already passed.

The laws written in Protestant theological language thus ascribe an exclusive role to the sermon, which stands in an obvious opposition not only to Catholicism, but also to the Orthodox Church, where icons have pivotal importance in the genesis of faith. And all Romanians, who represented one-third of the population, belonged to this church. Concerning this issue, Hungarian and Saxon historians correctly emphasize that Romanians were not included in the early sixteenth-century state and church documents indicate that politically they were not a so-called “state-creating” nation. Since the Romanian population was comprised almost entirely of shepherds and peasants, their rights were limited according to the prevalent European practice that regulated the life of these social groups. According to another accurate scholarly statement, this was not the result of national discrimination, for neither Hungarian nor Saxon serfs were granted any rights not enjoyed by members of the Romanian speaking peasantry.

Another issue, however, requires explanation: why does the handling of the matters of faith among the Romanians change during the period of inquiry, that is, in the mid-1560s? The most spectacular documentation of this change is in the first part of the 1568 law, not yet discussed here. For the sake of simplicity, I cite it again:

We humbly report to your Majesty that there are many in your Majesty’s country who disobey the Wallachian bishop, who was appointed to this position by your grace; they prefer to follow the former priests and their heresies, and prevent the bishop from properly fulfilling his duties; therefore we beg your Majesty to graciously grant the advancement of the Gospel according to your Majesty’s earlier decree concerning the country, and to punish those who dare oppose it.22

This makes it obvious that the political establishment of the time set the goal of spreading Protestant teachings among the entirety of the Romanian population. The Wallachian bishop of the text is obviously the Romanian Protestant bishop, appointed by the Prince, and we even have some data about his life. So, the law calls the Romanians to account because of their obedience to this bishop, and reiterates an article of the 1566 law that calls on the Romanians to come forward and challenge him on biblical matters in order “to get to know the truth this way.”23

Hungarian historians traditionally remain silent on this, while Romanian historiography tends to view it as an early manifestation of national prejudice. But the context does not support this. It is obvious that the aforementioned Protestant proselytizing tendencies are at work in the measures taken on behalf of the Orthodox population, which explains why they urge that the spread of the Gospel must be granted. It is the fervor of the Protestant preacher that bursts forth in that particular decision, which first appears in the 1566 legislation. As noted, it was ruled that the Orthodox priests should be persuaded to engage in debate with the Protestant bishop whom the Prince would appoint, and the debate would be based on the Bible. The 1566 text clearly indicates that they declared war against idolatry, which was seen as having gained ground both among Catholics and Orthodox; they even proclaim that “this kind of idolatry must be erased from all generations of this land.”24 Both laws, that of 1566 and that of 1568, concern the propagation of the Protestant faith. The reason for the separate mention of the Orthodox in 1568 is that, unlike the Catholics, they were still significant numbers of them living in the Principality. Catholics were no longer mentioned, since they were seen essentially as having already vanished, and the few remaining representatives or groups could be managed according to local conditions.

Obviously one can have lengthy discussions about how the events in Transylvania fit into the Protestant experiment of winning over the Orthodox world, and there is a rich, continuous (if somewhat fluctuating in its intensity) secondary literature on this topic. Concerning these discussions, I wish to put one single issue on record: this Protestant proselytizing zeal also meant that, parallel to the creation of the law, in the spirit of the universal ideas of the Reformation, serious efforts were made to promote literacy among Romanians. Romanian translations of excerpts from the Bible, catechisms, and sermons were published. I do not think that the culture that was intended to be spread was superior to the one already present in the Orthodox world, but I also find unacceptable the position of some Romanian historians, who suggest that this introduction of literacy, in fact, was intended to annihilate Romanian national character. They argue that, as the reverence of Romanians for icons was under attack, their culture and the core of their spirituality were also violated, and in this sense, the events of the sixteenth century form part of centuries of actions of denationalization.25

A Protestant Political Theology?

I return now to the characteristics of the text of the laws. Without exception each of the laws instituted in Europe, from the religious peace of Augsburg, the confederation of Warsaw and the union of Utrecht to the edict of Nantes, expresses, whether briefly or at length, the goal of avoiding turmoil and wars and preserving the peace of the country. These exordiums are occasionally extremely significant. For example, in the interpretation of the edict of Nantes, the question of who is responsible for drafting the preamble of the political reasoning is crucially important, as is the question of how it is to be understood. The Transylvanian laws created at the end of the 1560s completely lack this secular and political argumentation. This cannot be explained simply with reference to formal reasons. While these European laws were festive documents, dealing exclusively with religious matters, the articles on religious matters in Transylvania were embedded in the most mundane affairs. The formal explanation is insufficient, because up to the beginning of 1560s, all other documents were similar to this, and each contained a similar secular explanation, so we read that “pro quiete regnicolarum,” that is, the measures are taken for the sake of the peace of the population. Laws instituted in the 1560s are just the opposite, as if they explicitly wanted to avoid secular reasoning. Moreover, the one in 1571 begins with the statement that, in their decision, lawmakers focused on the most important matter, God’s kingdom: “Because our Lord Jesus commands that we first should seek God’s kingdom and its truth…”26 I believe that this is also connected to the strong theological character of the laws. Since the measures taken by the prince and the estates nevertheless concerned secular-political interests, this polity must have been intended precisely to emphasize this Protestant character, deemed universal. Therefore, a Protestant country proclaims its ideal of making the reformed faith universal by means of continuous preaching and evangelizing.

In this context, it seems appropriate to interpret the exceptional manner in which these laws delineated the authority of the bishops. According to the aforementioned ecclesiastical organization, they do not allow the bishops to interfere with the content of the sermons preached by the ministers. Their role is only to watch over the moral conduct of the ministers. The 1568 law, however, fails to formulate expressis verbis even this right of the bishops. So the 1571 law seems to clarify the situation, specifying that if a minister should commit a criminal offense or fall into criminal excess, the bishop has the right to punish him. Perhaps I am not mistaken when I consider the strikingly balanced and thorough nature of the 1568 law as extremely significant. We can see that it is intended to avoid coercion and despotism on several fronts. It seeks to protect the congregation from this, which is reminiscent of the early period of the German reformation, but it also protects the preachers from intimidation by the bishop or anyone else.

We do not know, of course, what the consequent practice was once the law was accepted. Since almost all of the documents that might have yielded answers to this question perished in the seventeenth century, we do not know whether it was really the community, the communitas, that decided what kind of minister to choose from the Protestant offer. Katalin Péter has collected enough data to assert that noble patrons of Transylvania and Hungary, observing the medieval practice, did not care at all about the confessional affiliation of their subjects. They refrained from forcing their own religion on their subjects living in the villages and market-towns. Thus these communities enjoyed a degree of autonomy in this decision. 27 This statement seems too bold, and there are data that contradict it. It is clear, of course, that in the big cities the final word belonged to the magistrates, but there is no way of knowing exactly what happened in the market towns (Marktflecken) and in the villages. The few case-studies offer a varied picture. There were places where the forceful patron did not tolerate interference in the selection of the minister. In other places, the actual communitas successfully asserted its will.

Of course, it is logical to assume that the nobility, operating inside the Diet, as well as the cities thus created an opportunity for themselves to enforce their will. Another objective that cannot be excluded was to moderate the disputes and animosities on the higher level. This must have been relevant for a country forced repeatedly to take up arms against the Habsburgs.

According to the above, the practice of tolerance, far from being unlimited, developed within a unique and peculiar ecclesiastical framework that understandably made sixteenth-century Transylvania famous. Contrary to popular views, institutionalization of the one tolerated and four received religions had not yet taken place, but paradoxically it would come about as a result of the increasingly strained religious and political hostilities in 1595. Here I can only highlight the most important stages of the process leading up to it.

Aftermath: Catholicism as a Received Religion in 1595

The transformation began with the death of the Unitarian prince, whose successor on the throne was the Roman Catholic István Báthory. After the events described above, it may seem surprising that a Catholic ruler came to the throne, but the country was so unequivocally Protestant that this did not seem to pose a risk. Báthory was favored because of his extensive estates and the high political prestige he had acquired partly through his extraordinary talents, but also because of his committed work on behalf of an anti-Habsburg political movement—despite his being a Catholic. During an important diplomatic mission, he was even imprisoned in Vienna. The zealous Catholic prince respected the Protestant nature of the country. He chose an Evangelical Lutheran court preacher, and, following the tradition of his predecessors, he viewed himself as a religious patron of all his subjects. However, he continuously discriminated among them and did not make it a secret that among the Protestant confessions, he considered only the Augsburg confession somewhat acceptable. Obviously, his measures mostly affected the Unitarians, whose presence he considered politically harmful because it forced the principality into total isolation. For this reason, he pushed through a law that prohibited further religious innovations. Furthermore, he introduced a decree of censorship, the obvious goal of which was to obstruct the printing of Unitarian works. It resulted in an accelerated process of confessional crystallization. By the mid-seventies, Protestant confessions were totally separated in all respects, for both Calvinist and Unitarian congregations came into existence, each with its own bishop. It is highly revealing that the laws dealing with the libertas religionis of this period explicitly name them: Evangelical Lutheran, Calvinist and Unitarian. As is well-known, Báthory was elected king of Poland in 1576, and he used his increasing prestige to begin rebuilding the Catholic Church. Based on a distinct royal privilege, he settled the Jesuits in Gyulafehérvár and Kolozsvár.28 His choice was highly circumspect when he brought in an order without precedence, thus establishing that their institutions required no legal disputes. The other extraordinary wisdom in this solution was that the Jesuits arrived from Poland, so they were subordinated to that province (Provinz), not to the Austrians. The justification given for bringing them to Transylvania was the exclusive task of teaching the youth, and in 1582 Báthory made his first attempt to found a Catholic university. However, it is important to point out that these measures did not mean the legitimization in law of what the sources refer to as the pontificia religio; Jesuit activity and its regulation gave birth to successive, separate articles.

It would be wrong to think that the legitimization of the Catholics happened as the achievement of an initially slow and calm process. On the one hand, the situation was complicated by the king’s death and the resulting power vacuum, because the king entrusted the Transylvanian Principality to a minor cousin. The reason for the grave conflicts was not even the Jesuits’ striving to evade the restrictions, propagate the religion they considered the only true faith, and continue to organize their successors. As their reports published during the last decades indicate, they were unable to keep themselves out of high politics, and, from the very beginning, they aroused suspicion by not letting the education of the minor prince elect out of their hands. The result of this evolving political struggle was an ultimatum issued by the estates: they would be willing to elect Zsigmond Báthory, who was coming of age, as prince if he agreed to expel the Jesuits. This would indeed happen, only to force the Diet in 1593 to resettle many of them. This resettlement took place within the framework of a political struggle that would decisively influence the future history of the principality. The essence of this was the following. The Transylvanian Principality was established as a Turkish vassal state, the princes of which exercised power with the approval of the sultan. They paid the sultan large taxes, and they depended on the sultan in their external affairs. The more talented princes successfully attempted to create some space for themselves. They, however, were allowed to manage their internal affairs independently. Based on the sad experiences of the first years following the establishment of the Principality, it became an axiom for the Transylvanian politicians to strictly avoid any engagement in risky political adventures that threatened their relative independence. This position had to be maintained even if Vienna or Habsburg-Hungary offered adequate forces to oust the Turks from the country and reestablish Medieval Hungary. This was also the rule if one of the Popes called for a crusade and made promises to reestablish the kingdom, or even if all of Europe offered its support for the Principality. The Transylvanian rulers had learned in the first years that such support usually failed to materialize, and they stood to lose more than anyone else. This politics required great wisdom and cautious realism. Of course, they never intended to give up their ambition of reestablishing the unity of Hungary in some distant future. They considered themselves Christian, even if many of them were mocked as “Turk-friendly lords.”

At the encouragement of the Jesuits, Zsigmond Báthory drastically broke away from this politics. He thought he would become the hero of a great crusade that would liberate Europe. This, however, was not easy, for the old political positions proved to be extraordinarily strong. In 1594, in this evolving political fight, in order to break their resistance, he had the most prestigious representatives arrested and cruelly executed. Among them were several humanists who had studied in Padua, men of great erudition, Catholics, Evangelical Lutherans, Calvinists and Unitarians alike.29

It is thus not a minor paradox that Catholicism became a received religion at the Diet held in April 1595 in the royal palace, which was surrounded by the royal army. The Diet began with an offer of thanks to the prince by the intimidated estates for having graciously put the pacifist philosophers to death. Following this event, the Diet invalidated the expulsion decree of the Jesuits, adopting the following text: “Concerning the matter of religion, we decree on behalf of the country that the received religions, that is, Catholic, sive romana, Lutheran, Calvinist and Ariana, should everywhere be upheld with no restriction.”30 It was then, therefore, that the well-known legal text, which historians and popular opinion date back to 1568, was composed. At the beginning of the seventeenth century several amendments mention that there was another religion in the country, that of the Romanians, professed by many, but not a received religion, only a tolerated one. And this formulation also found its way into the law book compiled in the first years of the seventeenth century.

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Lukács, Ladislaus S.J, ed. Monumenta Antiquae Hungariae, vols 4, 1550–1600. Roma: Institutum Historicum Societatis Jesu, 1969–1987.

Madonia, Caudio. “I gesuiti in Europa Orientale. Strategie di riconquista cattolica.” In György Enyedi and Central European Unitarianism in the 16th–17th Centuries, edited by Mihály Balázs and Gizella Keserű. Studia humanitatis 11. Budapest: Balassi Kiadó, 2000.

Pásztori Kupán, István. “Invocation of Biblical Authority in secular Decision. The Theoretic Relevance of Torda Edict (1568).” Református Szemle 101 (2008): 677–99.

Péter, Katalin. “Die Reformation in Ungarn.” In European Intellectual Trends and Hungary, edited by Ferenc Glatz, 39–52.  Etudes historiques hongroises 4. Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézet, 1990.

Péter, Katalin. “The Way from the Church of the Priest to the Church of the Congregation.” In Frontiers of Faith. Religious Exchange and the Constitution of Religious Identities, edited by Eszter Andor and István György Tóth, 9–19. Budapest: Central European University, 2001.

Péter, Katalin. “Tolerance and Intolerance in Sixteenth-Century Hungary.” In Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation, edited by Ole Peter and Bob Scribner, 249–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

Philippi, Paul. “Staatliche Einheit und gesellschaftliche Pluralität in der Religionsgesetzgebung des Fürstentums Siebenbürgen.” Heidelberger Jahrbücher 18 (1974): 5–65.

Pompiliu, Teodor. “Beziehungen zwischen Reformation und Rumänen im Spiegel vornämlich rumänischer Geschichtsschreibung.” In Luther und Siebenbürgen. Austrahlungen der Reformation und Humanismus nach Siebenbürgen, edited by Georg und Renate Weber, 78–94. Cologne–Vienna: Böhlau, 1985.

Révész, László. “Die Entwicklung der konfessionellen Toleranz in Siebenbürgen.” Ungarn-Jahrbuch 12 (1982): 112–14.

Szekfű, Gyula. Magyar történet [History of Hungary], vol. 3. Budapest: Királyi Magyar Egyetemi Nyomda, 1935.

Szilágyi, Sándor, ed. Monumenta Comitalia Regni Transylvaniae – Erdélyi Országgyűlési Emlékek, 1540–1699 [Monuments of Transylvanian Diets], vol. 2. Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1875.

Tóth, István György. “La tolérance religieuse au 17 siècle en Hongrie en Translvanie et sur le territoire hongrois occupé par les Turcs.” In La Tolérance. Colloque international de Nantes (mai 1998), edited by Guy Saupin and Marcel Launay, 127–33. Paris: Perrin, 1999.

Várkonyi, Ágnes. “Pro quiete regni – Az ország nyugalmáért. (A vallási toleranciát törvénybe iktató 1568. évi tordai or­szággyűlés 425. évfordulójára) [Pro quiete regni – for the Peace of the Country. (For the 425th Anniversary of the 1568 Diet that Legislated Religious Tolerance)].” Protestáns Szemle 55 (1993): 260–77.

Várkonyi, Ágnes. “Pro quiete regni – for the Peace of the Realm. The 1568 Law on Religious Tolerance in the Principality of Transylvania.” The Hungarian Quarterly 34, no. 130 (1993): 99–112.

Völkel, Ekkehard. “Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der konfessionellen Toleranz dargestellt am Beispiel Siebenbürgens im 16. Jahrhundert.” Ungarn-Jahrbuch 4 (1972): 46–60.

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Translated by Judit Gellérd and Thomas Cooper

Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Pál Ács

Holbein’s “Dead Christ” in Basel and the Radical Reformation

My intention in this essay is to examine Hans Holbein’s painting Dead Christ (1521–1522) from a new point of view. Earlier interpretations of the painting which approached it from various perspectives, ranging from late medieval piety and the Renaissance to the Reformation and early modern “modernism,” have proven unsatisfying. I suggest, as an immediate context for the interpretation of the message of the painting, the so-called “Radical Reformation,” the views of which were closely linked to the notions of Erasmus advocating the spiritual reformation of humankind. I argue that both Erasmus and his portrait painter Holbein belonged to the same intellectual group and the painter sought to emphasize the real death and true Resurrection of Christ as a human being. By doing so with great artistic force, he got close to the central message of the radical Reformation, namely the denial of the divinity of Christ and the recognition of his human nature. Consequently, Dead Christ also captures the central tenets of the spiritualism of the Radical Reformation.

keywords: Hans Holbein, iconography of Christ in the grave, Erasmus of Rotterdam, radical reformation, spiritualism

Radical Holbein?

If one speaks about Hans Holbein’s Dead Christ,1 painted in 1521–22, the interpretation in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot inevitably bears mention:

I know that the earliest Christian faith taught that the Saviour suffered actually and not figuratively, and that nature was allowed her own way even while His body was on the cross. […]. It is strange to look on this dreadful picture of the mangled corpse of the Saviour, and to put this question to oneself: Supposing that the disciples […] saw this tortured body […] how could they have gazed upon the dreadful sight and yet have believed that He would rise again?2

In this essay, I seek to answer this question, also discussed by Julia Kristeva in her seminal essay on Holbein’s Dead Christ, in which she interprets the painting as an emblematic demonstration of the “melancholic nature” of Holbein’s art.3 The starting point of Kristeva’s essay is the disturbing effect of Holbein’s Dead Christ, which finds expression in Dostoyevsky’s novel The Idiot. She transformed the shock of the Russian writer into a cultural theory of pre-modern melancholy. As Sara Beardsworth writes in her probing study of the motives behind Kristeva’s choice of subjects, “[i]n Black Sun Holbein’s Dead Christ is the first exemplar of the artwork as indicator of and counterindication to nihilism, the one that stands at the threshold of the modern world and seems, on Kristeva’s analysis, to exhibit the ethic that would support the separation of Church and State. The choice of Holbein as the starting-point for her minor history of works of mourning reveals that Kristeva is not writing a general history of art and melancholia but tackling the problem of modern nihilism.”4 Dostoyevsky scholars who contest Kristeva’s interpretation suggest that perhaps the roots of Dostoyevsky’s response to Holbein lie not in the existential fears of modern man, but rather in the fundamental difference between Eastern and Western visual culture. The Eastern concept of images was in essence transcendental,5 and Dostoyevsky found this transcendence wanting in Holbein’s painting.6

I am not interested here in why the Russian author was so irresistibly fascinated by this painting (he was nearly in a state of shock when standing in front of the Basel picture in 1867),7 but seek rather to answer the question concerning what it was in the picture and in the message it conveyed that moved him with such force.

The story of the interpretation of the painting seems to justify the strange uneasiness it caused in Dostoyevsky.8 Holbein’s Dead Christ has been studied by many people from various perspectives, but there is still no accurate answer regarding the picture’s genre, function, ideological background or precise meaning. The message of the painting has been interpreted within the framework of four different mentalities, but neither medieval piety, nor Renaissance thought, nor the Reformation, nor early modern “modernism” seem to have offered an adequate context for an understanding of the picture.9 This feeling of dissatisfaction urges me to examine Holbein’s painting from a point of view that until now has been neglected.

Hans Holbein, Dead Christ

 

I call the point of view in question “Radical Reformation,” although I am fully aware of the fact that the spiritual-religious movements to which this term refers were only in the making at the time the picture was painted.10 They were not yet organized into churches, and if they existed at all, they functioned as loose intellectual circles. Their radicalism targeted not the revolutionary transformation of the world, but rather lay in their ideas concerning the need for an inner rebirth of man. Their spiritual horizons were closely linked to the ideas regarding spiritual Reformation of Erasmus, who can justly be called “radical” in this respect: “The freedom to choose, to approve or reject, was essential to him; no revelation could get in the way of that freedom. Also, he did indeed form a number of new concepts that were radical in the early modern period, and some that still are radical. What is more, he tended to defend, rather than abandon these radical concepts,” writes Peter G. Bietenholz.11 It is important to note that Holbein, Erasmus’s friend and portrait painter and the illustrator of his books,12 also belonged to this path-seeking humanist intellectual group. It seems therefore justified to suppose that his Dead Christ, in addition to its medieval, Renaissance and Protestant contents, also captures the most important traits of the spiritualism of radical Reformation rooted in Erasmus’ ideas. I argue that it was most probably this radicalism that disturbed Dostoyevsky—and later Kristeva13—and they (mis)interpreted it as a challenge to the Christian faith, as a manifestation of enlightened atheism. The Russian author saw Dead Christ as a work of art that denies the Resurrection, and he claimed that “a man looking at that picture might even lose his faith.”14

The Imitation of Christ

Dostoyevsky’s attention was caught by the unusual shape of the picture: “however, there was one of strange and rather striking shape; it was six or seven feet in length, and not more than a foot in height”.15 Those attempting to determine the original genre of the painting began with the same observation. For a long time, the view prevailed according to which Holbein’s picture served as the predella of a winged altarpiece of the Passion that was never completely finished.16 The obvious parallels between the painting in question and Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim altarpiece reinforced this view. Many signs indicate that Holbein knew the famous Isenheim winged altarpiece, and one discerns Grünewald’s influence in Holbein’s depiction of the blue and green corpse of Christ in the grave.17 Although the minute optical study of the perspective used by Holbein has by now completely invalidated the interpretation of the picture as a predella,18 representations of the Lamentation on Medieval panel paintings could have been natural forerunners to Dead Christ, deeply rooted in late medieval piety.19

According to another ingenious idea, Holbein’s picture could have been the cover of a Holy Grave installation used in the ceremonies of the Holy Week. New research has provided precise proof of the links with the iconographic traditions of the representations of “Christ in the grave” recently found in places of worship near Basel.20 Holbein’s picture, however—given its verism and naturalism (which far exceed Medieval traditions)—was probably inadequate for devotional public use, and there is no concrete proof of its origin as part of a Holy Grave installation.

What is true of all of these speculations is that the Basel painting is inseparable from the idea characteristic of late Medieval Passion mysticism of following Christ. In Holbein’s era, the conviction that Christ put on a mortal body to save humanity with his death dated back a very long time. According to Medieval thought, man must take part in the Savior’s sufferings in order to show gratefulness for God’s goodness.21 Passion altarpieces and Holy Grave installations were intended to give this notion visual expression. In the spiritual turbulence of the first decades of the sixteenth century, these old spiritual teachings were reinforced and given new meanings.22 The words of Theologia Germanica, a fourteenth-century mystical booklet rediscovered in 1516 by Martin Luther, affected people with unusual strength: “Behold! Where the old man dieth and the new man is born there is that second birth of which Christ saith, ‘Except a man be born again, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God’ […] now, if all mankind abode in true obedience, there would be no grief, nor sorrow […] In this obedience a man were one with God and God himself were the man”.23 This booklet spoke of the possibility of the complete integration of divine and human nature (Vergottung), of real death24 and real rebirth, and—together with The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis25—is well-known for becoming one of the basic books of radical Reformation.26 (In the early stage of the Reformation both magisterial Protestant Churches and spiritual movements rejected the idea of Purgatory and Hell and interpreted Christ’s descent to the dead as a “real death.”) “Man could only be ‛deified’ if he renounced his own will and imitated the life and sufferings of Christ,” writes Alastair Hamilton.27 When Holbein painted Christ’s greenish, decomposing corpse, he conveyed the same radical message of death and Resurrection in visual language. The depiction might easily fool someone who does not understand the main point of this message.

Erasmian Piety

In his classical lecture, Holbein and the Reformation, Fritz Saxl presented Holbein as an Erasmian who—with serious reservations—gradually accepted the teachings of the Lutheran Reformation and at the same time could never identify with Luther’s opposition to culture and always remained faithful to Erasmus’s spiritual Humanism.28 In a penetrating study of the relationship of people who commissioned Holbein’s paintings to the ideas of the Reformation, in her monograph on Holbein Jeanne Nuechterlein arrives at a similar conclusion: “The humanist scholars, however, had very mixed reactions to the Reformation: some of them sympathized with it and even became its intellectual leaders, but others were ambivalent or opposed it. Holbein’s direct commissions from scholars, as far as we can tell, were mostly portraits and came from individuals who were ambivalent about reform”.29 We know that when Holbein depicted Luther in ancient costumes as “Hercules Germanicus” he was accused of being “too Erasmian”.30 This ambivalence between Erasmus’ Humanism and Luther’s Reformation can be discerned in Dead Christ as well, although it was painted eight years before the painter officially joined the Reformation.

According to Dostoyevsky, “there was nothing artistic about it”.31 This remark regarding Holbein’s Dead Christ probably alludes to the undoubted lack of decorative elements—in Kristeva’s words, “Holbein’s minimalism”32 – and the striking simplicity of the painting. Research on Holbein also raised the possibility that the painter consciously avoided gilding and overly strong colors,33 in line with the hostility towards pictures (which by that time was growing in strength in Basel as well) of the Reformation.34 Apart from the date and signature in Roman capitals,35 there are no independent all’antica elements of style. On the other hand, this is obviously a refined Renaissance work of art that uses naturalistic allusions, making good use of the symbolic perspective. This is one of the reasons why it is one of the most brilliant pieces of “Northern Renaissance” art.

In studies of the perspectivist illusion-making and inner lighting of the picture, the idea has been raised that Holbein may have done the painting on private commission as part of an epitaph. As the work was preserved in the collection of the Basel family of Amerbach, it is possible that Holbein painted Dead Christ for the family tomb planned by the famous Humanist lawyer Bonifacius Amerbach, which was supposed to be placed in the small cloister of Basel Charterhouse,36 but together with many other Holbein paintings it was taken to a safe place in order to protect it from the particularly destructive burst of Protestant iconoclasm in Basel in 1529, thus becoming part of the so-called Amerbach-Kabinett, a collection of art founded by Bonifacius Amerbach’s son, Basilius.37

Whether this is true or not,38 we do know that the commissioner and first owner of the painting was Bonifacius Amerbach (CE I, 42–46), one of the most faithful disciples of Erasmus in Basel. It is a telling fact that Erasmus trusted him with the handling of his bequest, and he became the first curator of Legatum Erasmianum, a Humanitarian foundation supporting widows, orphans and poor students, founded by the Rotterdam master.39 He was a moderate Protestant, and his active tolerance played a very important role in the fact that for a long time, Basel served as a refuge for the representatives of different spiritual and religious trends who suffered persecution elsewhere.

This tendency to openness also meant that even in the decades following 1529, the strict Reformation Mandate was never implemented to the letter. This in turn gave rise to a climate that enabled late humanism to thrive better than it could elsewhere. Among the many representatives of Basel’s flourishing intellectual life during this period were the staunch defender of religious tolerance, Sebastian Castellio, and the physician and instigator of the Paracelsian renaissance, Theodor Zwinger—to name but two.40

Thus, the commissioner and the painter of Dead Christ both belonged to Erasmus’s innermost circle, so it is a good idea to approach the message of the picture through Erasmus’s teachings. “Holbein understood, like none other, the ‘wiry concord’ of Erasmus’s personality: the fragile delicacy of his body and the strength of his mind; his need for solitude and his craving for friendship; his humor and his seriousness; his love of tranquility and his thirst for action; his urbanity and his sarcastic conceit.” 41

Of course, one cannot avoid the question: which Erasmus did Amerbach and Holbein follow? The “Protestant” Erasmus who rejected mechanical ceremonies and meaningless piety, or the “Catholic” one, who objected to the rude destruction of ecclesiastical traditions? Or perhaps the one who felt sympathy for the persecuted Anabaptists?42 The one who considered the cult of saints and pictures a “folly,” or the one who broke out in tears because of Christ’s sufferings and so realistically described Jesus’s bitter tears and the blood streaming from the thousands of wounds of his tortured body?43 It is difficult to arrive at a definite answer to a question to which Erasmus himself probably could not have given a single reply. It is, however, sure that his life, work and entire spiritual existence centered around the “true philosophy of Christ”: since Christ is the source of life, there is no life outside Christ—he said.44 In a letter dating from 1521, the year of the painting of Holbein’s Dead Christ, Erasmus movingly recalled a Good Friday sermon of his English friend, the interpreter of Saint Paul John Colet; this sermon described Christ’s victory over death with brilliant erudition and also talked about the difficulty of living and dying as a Christian (To Justus Jonas, 13 June 1521, CWE 8: 242). Nevertheless, this was the sine qua non of salvation for them. Erasmus was charmed by Colet’s naively radical interpretation of the Bible. These two scholars and the Christian Humanists who followed them—among them, Holbein—read the Gospels with a new understanding: He died and was resurrected, and if you believe in him and follow him, you will live even if you die (“I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live.” John 11:25). Erasmus’s friends tried to take this literally. They simply wanted people to read the Bible as if it were true.

“The Eyes”

Dostoyevsky writes the following of the painting: “It represented Christ just taken down from the cross. It seems to me that painters as a rule represent the Savior, both on the cross and taken down from it, with great beauty still upon His face. […] But there was no such beauty in Rogojin’s picture. […] This face in the picture was beaten all over, there were swollen, awful bloody and blue traces on it, the eyes were open, the pupils distorted, the white of the eyes shining with a kind of deadly, glassy light”.45

Jeanne Nuechterlin offers a similar description: “The Dead Christ, however, offers no sign at all that this body can or will return to life, or even the usual emotional hints at Christ as a full person. The crabbed hand, stiff limbs, and most of all, the blank-eyed and open-mouthed stare announce that there is no spirit to reverence here”.46

They are right: there is nothing in the painting to mitigate the terrors of death. Christ’s body lies in the grave in complete abandonment, and nothing alludes to his future fate. However, since the picture inarguably represents Jesus with wounded hands, feet and sides (this is evident even if we forget about the inscription47 on the late sixteenth century or more belated frame), an artistic intention emphasizing the impossibility of Christ’s resurrection is out of the question in Holbein’s world.

It has been shown that the dreadful calmness of the painting is broken by stirring elements of scenery, such as the folds of the blanket covering the rocks, which allude to the moment at which Christ was put in the grave. A similarly intensive element is Holbein’s strangely distorted perspective, which shows the legs “from above,” while the shoulders, the neck and the face are shown “from below”. The right hand is placed in the symmetrical center of the picture, “closest” to the viewer; the hand almost reaches out from the tomb, its dark silhouette emphasized by the white shroud into which the improbably long middle finger is digging.48 The hand is flabby but the gesture of the fingers is evidently symbolic, as in the case of all Renaissance pictures: the dead Jesus is showing the ancient sign of the cross, symbolizing resurrection, with the two middle fingers straight, the other three bent.

We see the inner space of the tomb from the left: we see the narrow wall of the tomb by the legs, with the date and the signature: M.DXXI. HH. However, the wall next to the head is invisible. Light enters the space from the opposite direction, from the right, and touches the corpse from bottom to top: it casts a sharp light on the feet, the upper part of the leg, the ribs and the shoulder, but the neck and the face are left in shadows, so that the half-open, distorted eye gives a mystic flash. Light interprets the scene, and this makes the space symbolic. It leads the eyes of the viewer from the leg to the hand, then to the head, settling on the eye, from which the viewer cannot remove his gaze. Dostoyevsky perceives the strange light flashing in the eye. But he may be wrong in saying that this is the empty stare of someone “just taken down from the cross.” The picture shows a corpse that has been dead for several days, and this is emphasized by the well-known but evidently false legend that the artist used a corpse fished from the Rhine as his “model”.49 Jesus’s half-open eyes show not the emptiness of death, but life returning. Those who feel that Holbein depicted Jesus at the moment of the miracle of Resurrection are probably right. The symbolism of gestures and space seems to justify this view.

Conclusions

When the depiction was painted, the Reformation was unquestionably only in its initial stages. Nonetheless, the essential questions of the new teachings clearly interested the painter and his patrons. As I have noted, the painting’s lack of ornamentation almost certainly reflects an affinity with the ideas of Erasmus’ Humanism and the Reformation’s critique of images, which was increasingly adopted by members of the intellectual community in Basel at the time, presumably Holbein among them. According to Nuechterlin, the objectivity of the painting, which resists any abstraction, is also a reflection on the theological debates brought to the surface by the Reformation:

Fundamentally, reformers questioned whether any material object, be it relic, image, or even the Eucharist, could serve as a direct conduit to God. By painting Christ’s body as so startlingly dead, using a descriptive mode as if he were visually re-creating a seen object, Holbein too appears troubled by the same question. Anyone approaching this image hoping to access Christ is confronted instead with a representation of dead matter—which is precisely how reformers perceived religious images and relics. […] His viewers would have to draw their own conclusions.50

According to this view, Holbein’s avoidance of any visual element that might be interpreted as a reference to the invisible essence of the Eucharist or the divine nature of Christ was based on considerations of principle. Precisely this “materialness” of the depiction allowed him to lead the viewer to something essentially imperceptible.

This interpretation seems both logical and historically credible, but one could approach the problem from a different perspective. If one attributes first and foremost not a theological, but rather a spiritual meaning to the painting (and this is justified by the subject, the genre, and the mentality of the circle of people who commissioned the painting, which was influenced by the ideas of Erasmus), then the striking objectivity of the depiction can be seen in a different context. From this perspective, the painting does not so much endeavor to guide the viewer’s gaze from the visible world to the invisible, but rather consistently follows the path that Christ himself (and his followers) had to take. Hans Belting is astute in his observation that “the painter plays with fire” when “he inserts a breathtaking fermata between life and death into the spectacle of the body still spared from decay”.51

The radical message of the painting regarding death and resurrection is found in this enigmatic “fermata.” We have no reason to suppose that Holbein’s painting contributed in any way to the dogmatic, Christological debate of the time. Nonetheless, the disturbing objectivity of the painting is perhaps related to Erasmus’ version of medieval piety, in which the radical implications of this spiritualism can be discerned. But by emphasizing the real death and true Resurrection of Christ known as a human being with such enormous artistic force, Holbein got close to the most important message of the radical Reformation’s rejection of the dogma of the Holy Trinity: namely the denial of Christ’s divinity and the recognition of his human nature. It is a well-known fact that Erasmus’s new translation of the Bible, based on the original Greek sources, served as a philological basis for antitrinitarian radicalism, since it demonstrated that the verses of the New Testament on the Holy Trinity are fake.52

This conclusion is not entirely free of problems in its chronology, but it is perhaps also not entirely anachronistic if we consider that various radical trends in religious reform emerged and made their influence felt at the same time as the magisterial tendencies of Protestantism. Most of the representatives of the dissident trends (Anabaptist, spiritualist, and others) to some extent drew on (if in varying ways) the teachings of Erasmus. As Johan Huizinga notes,

One of the best historians of the Reformation, Walter Köhler, calls Erasmus one of the spiritual fathers of Anabaptism. And certain it is that in its later, peaceful development it has important traits in common with Erasmus: a tendency to acknowledge free will, a certain rationalistic trend, a dislike of an exclusive conception of a Church. It seems possible to prove that the South German Anabaptist Hans Denk derived opinions directly from Erasmus.53

In addition to the meanings suggested above, the painting might have had another, more current message that was self-evident to everyone in Holbein’s time. According to Saint Paul, the Church is Christ’s body: “Now ye are the body of Christ, and members in particular” (1 Cor 12:27). When Holbein depicted Jesus’s death with such shocking and convincing force, he formulated in pictorial language something that Erasmus, Luther and the radical Protestants all believed: the Church, the old Church—and the old man in it—is dead. He does not exist anymore. Not only symbolically dead, but in the most literal sense of the word. But he will be resurrected if he follows his master, Jesus.

The only question was: when? The answer given by the painting is now. This is probably why the inscription marking the date of the painting is given a particularly important position. The X-ray study of the painting demonstrated that Holbein corrected the date from 1521 to 1522,54 then later returned to the original version for some mysterious reason.55 What we know for sure is that he gave considerable thought to the placement of the inscription. Julia Kristeva explained Holbein’s inscription in the spirit of Nietzsche’s nihilism (“God is dead”): “The painter’s name is not lower than Christ’s body—they are both at the same level, jammed into the recess, united in man’s death, in death as the essential sign of humanity, of which the only surviving evidence is the ephemerid creation of a picture drawn here and now in 1521 and 1522”.56

The inner symbolism of the picture provides a different, in some respects opposite meaning. Light enters the symbolic space precisely at the place of the inscription, moves on from the date 1521 to enter the white flashing eye of the resurrected Christ. It is true that the eye does not show beauty in the classical sense. It burns, however, with the determination of the radical Reformation, which sought to create God’s realm here and now. In this sense, Holbein was not simply a distinctive artist of the “Northern Renaissance,” but also of the “Northern Reformation”.

Abbreviations

CWE 8 (1988): Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 8. The Correspondence of Erasmus, Letters 1122 to 1251 (1520 to 1521), trans. R. A. B. Mynors, ed. Peter G. Bietenholz. Toronto: University of Toronto Press

CE 1–3 (1985–1987): Contemporaries of Erasmus. A Bibliographical Register of the Renaissance and Reformation, vols 3, ed. Pieter G. Bietenholz, Toronto: University of Toronto Press

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Le Goff, Jacques. The Birth of Purgatory. Translated by Arthur Goldhammer, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1990.

Lienhard, Marc. “Die Radikalen des 16. Jahrhunderts und Erasmus.” In Erasmianism: Idea and Reality, edited by M. E. H. N. Mout, Heribert Smolinsky, and Johannes Trapman, 91–104. Amsterdam: Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1997.

Müller, Christian, ed. Bonifacius Amerbach 1495–1562: Zum 500. Geburtstag des Basler Juristen und Erben des Erasmus von Rotterdam: Ausstellung. Basel: Kunstmuseum Basel, 1995.

Müller, Christian. “New Evidence for Hans Holbein the Younger’s Wall Paintings in Basel Town Hall.” Burlington Magazine 133 (1991): 21–26.

Müller, Christian et al. Hans Holbein the Younger: The Basel Years, 1515–1532. Munich: Prestel, 2006.

Nuechterlein, Jeanne. Translating Nature into Art: Holbein, the Reformation, and Renaissance Rhetoric. Pennsylvania: Penn State Press, 2011.

Ozment, Steven E.. Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973.

Panofsky, Erwin. “Erasmus and the Visual Arts.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 200–27.

Peteghem, P. P. J. L. van. “Erasmus’ Last Will, the Holy Roman Empire and the Low Countries.” In Erasmus of Rotterdam. The Man and the Scholar. Proceedings of the Symposium Held at the Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 9–11 November 1986, edited by Jan Sperna Weiland and Willem Th. M. Frijhoff, 88–97. Leiden: Brill, 1988.

Rowlands, John. Holbein: The Paintings of Hans Holbein the Younger. Complete Edition, Oxford: Phaidon, 1985.

Sander, Jochen. Hans Holbein D. J. Tafelmahler in Basel 1515–1532. Munich: Hirmer Verlag, 2005.

Saxl, Fritz. “Holbein and the Reformation.” In Saxl, Lectures, vol. 1, 277–85. London: Warburg Institute, 1957.

Séguenny, André. “Religions en contacts. Le problème du transfert des idées: Moyen âge, Renaissance et Réformes protestante et catholique.” In L’Étude de la Renaissance nunc et cras. Actes du colloque de la Féderation internationale des Sociétés et Instituts d’Étude de la Renaissance, edited by Max Engrammare, Marie-Madelaine Fragonard, Augustin Redondo, and Saverio Ricci, 257–73. Geneva: Librairie DROZ, 2003.

Spinka, Matthew. “Desiderius Erasmus, a Humanistic Reformer.” In Spinka, Advocates of Reform from Wyclif to Erasmus, 281–379. Louisville, Kentucky: Westminster, 2006.

Tracy, James D. Erasmus of the Low Countries. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996.

Trapman, Johannes. “Erasmus’s Precationes.” In Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Torontonensis. Proceedings of the Seventh International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, edited by Alexander Dalzell, Charles Fantazzi, and Richard J. Schoeck. Medieval And Renaissance Texts And Studies, 86, 769–79. New York: Binghamton University, 1991.

Walker, Daniel Pickering. The Decline of Hell. Seventeenth-Century Discussions of Eternal Torment. London: Warburg Institute, 1964.

Winkworth, Susanna, trans. Theologia Germanica. Introduced by Martin Luther (1893). New York: Cosimo, 2007.

Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Gabriella Erdélyi

Lay Agency in Religious Change: the Role of Communities and Landlords in Reform and Reformation

In this essay I seek to illuminate “from below” the process of growing lay agency in matters of religion within the frame of a case study. Although the expansion of lay control over church affairs is usually considered an urban phenomenon, I focus on the Hungarian countryside, on how peasants living in villages and towns under feudal authority participated in late medieval reform and sixteenth-century reformations. I contend that the late medieval observant reform of the mendicant friary of the market-town of Körmend was initiated by laymen, and the process of reform itself took place primarily in the interplay of the social and religious needs of the community and landlord. In order to assess on a more general level the role of lay participation in church affairs, I test my findings against village parish religion. I investigate negotiations between peasant communities and landlords over issues related to the election of the local parish incumbent, as well his livelihood and the maintenance of the parish church. I conclude that the high level of lay participation and investments in matters of local religion made it possible for Luther to speak about communal rights and transform locally diverse practices into a universal Christian norm.

keywords: observant cloister reform, mendicant orders, parish religion, lay agency, election of pastors

In this essay I explore the role of the laity in late medieval and early sixteenth-century religious changes. The late medieval crisis and observant reform of the mendicant friary in the market-town of Körmend, which offers illuminating insights into the religious practices and mentality of the laity,1 is approached here as an episode in the long-term process of growing lay agency in church affairs, which was shaped, I argue, in the dynamic of communal and seigniorial agendas.2 In the second part of the essay, I draw general lessons from the Körmend story. To what extent was the active participation of community and landlord typical in bringing about religious change? To answer this question, I compare findings concerning lay agency in monastic reform with the achievements of communities and landlords in religious activities centered around the parish church, which has remained (and this constitutes a divergence from West European tendencies) the primary focus of lay devotion, even if the mendicant ethos has increasingly attracted the laity.3 Thus I recreate the original context and reintegrate what has been separated only by historical discourses: local religion centered around two institutions, the friary, if there was one, and the parish church, with their related institutions, such as hospitals, schools and confraternities. In order to be able to reflect on continuities and changes, I also extend the timeframe of the inquiry: how did the scope and limits of communal and seigniorial action change during the early phase of the protestant reformation in the Hungarian countryside?

By the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century, religious life within the mendicant friary in the town of Körmend in West Hungary had dissipated. Friars were rare and they lived scandalously. Körmend was an average-size late medieval market town of the country, and although it was not a manorial center, its seigniorial and religious institutions placed it among the most important towns of the county. Market-towns were franchised settlements, as the townsmen of Körmend had the right to choose a town judge each year and they traded in the region custom free and had a weekly market. Still, as opposed to free royal cities, their inhabitants were considered serfs by law and lived under the authority of landlords. Körmend underwent conspicuous development in the second half of the fifteenth century under the Ellerbach magnate family. János Ellerbach fortified the medieval castellum at the north-east corner of the town and founded the parish church of Saint Elisabeth in the south-east. When he died, Thomas Bakócz, cardinal-primate of Hungary, took over his estates. Under the pressure caused by local scandals and the laity’s drive for reform, in 1513, during his stay in Rome, he asked the pope’s license to take control of the reform of the friary and introduce observant Franciscan friars in place of the Augustinian hermits.

The relationship between cloister and community oscillated for decades between conflict and solidarity. While the friars were an important media in the local economy of the sacred, the monastery buildings shaped communal identity. However, since the sacred economy was often endangered rather than enhanced by the friars, who proved to be unworthy mediators (and the ruinous monastery was more a source of shame than pride), the general tranquility of the streets was occasionally disturbed by clamorous scenes. The community tried everything to reform the Augustinians, ranging from derision to physical violence. They repeatedly turned to the provincial of the Augustinian mendicant friars, orally as well as in writing, to take care of the cloister of the order “for God and for the salvation of all of us,” to which effect the provincial sent more friars to Körmend.4 At certain times, even the idea of driving the friars away was voiced. One of the witnesses recalled that people were not only talking about driving the friars away, but even had come to the decision that this was the only solution.5 Another eye-witness called the actions of the townsmen against the negligent mendicants a “rebellion.”6 György Király in turn stated that in the end the community did not dare to expel the friars. His words suggest that people perceived this to be beyond their authority, as a breach of prevailing norms and structures of power from which they refrained. How did the presence of the landlord alter the scope and limits of communal needs, aims and action?

While the notion that the Reformation constituted a complete break with the Middle Ages has gained wide acceptance, the ‘observant’ reform, in other words the foundation and reorganization of monasteries implemented by secular authorities (Klosterreform by territorial princes, city magistrates and landlords), was self-evidently described as a process running against the dissolution of the same cloisters by the next generation of the Reformation. In the past thirty years, however, as the paradigm of confessionalization has gained ground and the new focus on continuities between the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries has come to the fore, the interpretive gaze has become keener and has noticed, instead of ruptures, the structural parallels and continuities between the two subsequent processes.7 Within this framework, both the late medieval reform and the Protestant reform, including the closure of religious houses, are considered to be movements that began within the church, but as in the course of events the laity took the upper hand in channeling the process, in the end they brought about the “laicization of religion.” The church(es) that had thus evolved­­, the argument goes, responded more actively to the needs of the laity and came increasingly under lay supervision.8 While historians unanimously interpreted both events within the macro-historical process of the laicization of religion, opinions diverge regarding the underlying intentions of actors. Did the laity strive to expand their power over the church, which is more easily recorded subsequently, or were people moved rather by religious goals and values? Answers vary on the matter, granting primacy in the mind of actors either to religious motives or to the expansion of political power, but narratives tend to be reduced to this simplistic alternative.9

Looking closely at the local events in Körmend, I have become increasingly convinced, however, that the long-term processes captured by hindsight and the categories constructed to describe them cannot be adapted to the historical understanding and representation of everyday cultural practices. The experiences, choices, and decisions of social agents can hardly be reduced to a dichotomy of religious versus political variables.10 On the contrary, in order to capture the perspective of historical agents, a more flexible vocabulary and a more inclusive frame of reference is necessary. Therefore, after reconstructing the role played by subsequent landlords of Körmend in religious reform in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, I will interpret their motives and actions as integral to the processes of the legitimization of power and aristocratic self-fashioning.11 Moreover, instead of trying to distinguish between the underlying political and religious agendas of religious reform, it seems more fruitful to acknowledge the fact that medieval (in fact, pre-modern) non-clerical authorities felt as responsible for the Christian religion and the church as they did for the building of society. Inevitably, as will be demonstrated below, the religious-devotional practices and the day-to-day practice of domination (Herrschaft) targeted to harness the loyalties of subjects were inseparable processes at the grassroots level. For contemporaries, the intersection of political and religious dynamics, to which modern sensibilities object, seemed natural.12

Cloister Reform in Körmend

With regard to the relationship of town and landlord it is striking that the community did not—as we might assume based on the silence of witness testimonies on the matter—turn to the landlord, who was the patron of the monastery, with its grievances against the friars. The people of Körmend, however, were very pro-active in their relations with other authorities: on occasion, they mobilized either their parish priest or the castellan against the friars, and they even requested the help of the Augustinian provincial in writing. Moreover, letters of complaint were a well-established manner of communication between peasant communities and landlords. Can we interpret this as an act of passive resistance reflecting the tense relationship between town and landlord? In other instances, however, the people of Körmend readily sought the mediation and protection of Péter Erdődy, who came to govern the earlier Ellerbach-estates on behalf of Bakócz in 1505 and became heir and landlord by law in 1517.13 Erdődy never hesitated to petition the king to request protection for his peasants when they had been done harm in person or in goods by neighboring landlords.14 No surprise, then, that the witnesses commented recurrently that as peasants they were held in respect and honor by their landlord. And even if this is measured as a calculated platitude, one of the witnesses proudly added that Erdődy was a benevolent and generous landlord, which probably reveals something of their actual relationship. In sum, landlord and town seem to have cherished a harmonious relationship.

Perhaps the community did not request the mediation of the patron of the friary, since he was doing what was expected of a good landlord anyway. This would also help to answer our initial dilemma as to why the community’s action did not extend in the end to the often-mentioned “rebellion,” the violent banishing of the friars. Lukács Mindszenti of Hollós, the earlier client (familiaris), recalled at the interrogation regarding his patron, that “he often heard the magnificent (magnificus) lord János Ellerbach, the landlord of the town of Körmend, reproving the Augustinian friars for neglecting the divine services and threatening to expel them from their monastery and replace them with others.”15 Another former client, Ferenc Nádasdy, also remembered the determined conduct of his patron, Ellerbach, who was landlord before Erdődy:

János Ellerbach [...] often intended to exclude and turn the Augustinian friars out from the monastery of Körmend on account of their unbounded negligence and evil life. [...] He has also seen and heard as he threatened the friars with beating and other punishments unless they changed their lives, performed the divine services regularly, and took adequate care of their buildings. Had the landlord lived longer, the friars, he believes, would have already been expelled from the monastery, since he knows that Ellerbach had already taken some steps to this end.16

What did Nádasdy mean when he referred to steps taken by the landlord? Did Ellerbach also­—as Bakócz later did—intervene legally and turn to the general of the Augustinian order or the pope himself with a request for permission to reform the monastery as its patron? The above words of his men, Mindszenti and Nádasdy, who knew him face-to-face, suggest a more pragmatic and authoritative personality. I would therefore assume that Ellerbach started to negotiate the affairs of the friary straight away with the potential newcomers, that is, with the superiors of the religious order whom he had marked out to live in Körmend. The words of Lukács Mindszenti show that Ellerbach had also contacted the observant Franciscans: “he himself is fond of both orders, however, he would prefer that the Franciscans rather than the Augustinians stay in the friary, since the earlier landlords of Körmend had also wished, while they lived, to introduce the Franciscans to the monastery.”17 Ellerbach was probably only prevented from realizing his goal by his sudden death in 1499.

His successor, Péter Erdődy, encouraged the friars, as his more gentle manner dictated, with

benevolent words to live as friars should live, and he promised them that he would be ready to support them in any possible way, providing them with food and clothing and helping them restore the devastated buildings, and as a sign of his promise, as the witness himself saw, lord Péter supplied them with bread and wine and made other provisions.18

As all his efforts were to no effect, however, his failure to reform the friars must have urged him to mobilize the authority of his prelate uncle in order to place the observant Franciscan friars in the place of the Augustinians.

Beyond the noble clients of landlords, the townsmen of Körmend most probably also knew about the intentions and the actions of their subsequent landlords. As Mátyás Tapasztó claimed at the hearing, “had the citizens of the town been able, they would already have banished the Augustinians friars, as their landlord at the time, the late János Ellerbach, also wanted to expel them, as far as he knows.”19 Town community and landlord shared the goal of reforming the friars, and although they did not coordinate their actions, they both strove to overcome the crisis of the friary using any means at hand.

Some of the witnesses’ words even suggest that the community’s mental horizon and scope of action went beyond the goal of driving away the bad friars. The parish priest of Kölked, a village in the neighborhood, heard the townsmen murmuring only that “they want to expel the friars on their own and they would rather have the cloister empty than inhabited by these sinful friars to the scandal of the people.”20 But this appears to have been only one of several communal plans, and by no means the most ambitious. No coincidence perhaps that it was Gergely Polgár, a former town judge, who remembered that “at certain moments the indignation of the people rose so high that the citizens murmured that they would banish the negligent friars, who deserved to be driven out and replaced by others of a more religious standing.”21

We have now seen that the landlords of Körmend, who were also patrons of the monastery, all dedicated themselves to overcoming the crisis of the friary. Although with varied tones and varied tools depending on differences in character, they all tried first to prompt the Augustinians to mend their ways, and when they failed, they sought to reform religious life by inviting another religious order to the town. The fundamental uniformity beyond the variety in detail of their actions, which in other words seem to follow a cultural pattern, suggests that a mapping of their motives will render landlord-peasant relations more comprehensible, or framed more generally the everyday practices of power beyond the pursuit of individual purposes.

In the documents designed to record and publicize and, by the same token, to legitimate their actions of religious reform, secular authorities represented their intervention as a practice of private devotion: as a good deed, pleasing to God, intended to mend their ways and help them gain individual salvation. The witnesses echoed the words of the articles of the questionnaire construed by the Erdődys: driven by religious zeal (zelo fidei), their landlord reformed the cloister. Similarly, King Wladislaus (Jagiello) II (1490–1516), who in 1493 closed the monastery of Visegrád because of the scandals of the Benedictine friars and donated it to the Paulines, claimed to have acted pro salute anime nostre.22 In his petitions to Rome, Palatine Mihály Ország argued in 1467 that he wished to restore the desolate monastery in Szécsény because of his own devotion to the Franciscan order and his desire to achieve salvation.23

The Erdődy family also cherished close links with the Franciscan order. The brother of Péter, Simon, bishop of Zagreb in 1519, was granted a share in the spiritual merits accumulated by friars in return for the favors he did for the order.24 Even more interesting, in 1531 Péter founded a friary for the observant Franciscans on his Slavonian estates of Okics (today Okić, Croatia).25

The practice of private devotion, however, was almost always represented simultaneously as a gesture in service of the spiritual needs of subjects. The questionnaire in Körmend gave voice to the seigniorial perspective: the landlord reformed the friary “to promote religion and further the salvation of the Christian flock.” This was paraphrased by the parish priest of Hollós as follows: “so that the people’s devotion to God would increase.” A Körmend townsman thought that the reform “would day-by-day intensify the divine service and the devotion of the people.”26 As repeated unanimously by landlords, they reformed the religious houses in order to increase the faith of the people and to further their salvation.27

Private and collective devotion, or, more precisely, the authority’s responsibility for the spiritual well-being of its subjects, were closely interwoven, but so were the sacred and the secular realms. Péter Erdődy admittedly hoped to provide for the terrestrial safety and prosperity of his family by raising the friary.28 The crisis of religious institutions and the occasional violent brawls and heated quarrels between the laymen and the friars that accompanied it and disturbed everyday tranquility were undesirable for the secular authority. And such street conflicts were foreseeable when the embittered or outraged townsmen lost their temper, as probably happened not only in Körmend but also in the streets of Újlak (today Ilok, Croatia).29 The anxieties of the authorities must have intensified when disrespect for the local friars tended to turn into a general anticlerical attitude on the side of the laity. As some of the witnesses in Körmend confessed, the contempt of the people extended beyond the deviant friars to their religious order and even the entire clergy.30 Any kind of mistrust or challenge of well-established power structures could not be watched idly by those in positions of authority. Kings and landlords alike expected that the “new friars of good life” would provide an example of model behavior for the town: “more than anyone else, with their holy life, they give a daily example for the faithful, by conduct and word alike, worthy of being followed.”31 As King Matthias wrote in his reform edict (1489) of all religious orders in the country: “our forerunners, kings and subjects alike, enjoyed peace and security afforded by the dedicated prayers of the religious to God. It is our duty to follow in their sacred footsteps.”32

The discourse and its central notions concerning the religious reform activity of secular authorities help us understand them as integral to the process of domination at both the local and national levels. In other words, the authorities’ endeavors to provide regular divine service and friars of exemplary lifestyles in monasteries were a symbolic means of soliciting the obedience of their subjects. In this context, the late medieval practice of Hungarian monarchs of transferring monastic houses of substantial wealth but ebbing lay demand to the mendicant orders or the hermit Paulines becomes understandable. Even if such transfers were disadvantageous economically, they functioned as gestures to legitimate and stabilize existing structures of power.33 And returning to the case of Körmend, the fact that the anxiety, rage and contempt of the townsmen towards the friars never amounted in practice to a “rebellion” must have been due to the activities of landlords. As subsequent seigneurs all performed their duties as patrons of the friary, in the end this stopped the community from assuming their role.34

So far we have seen that communal and seigniorial interests ran parallel. Commoners and authorities alike strove to use all available means at hand to restore the religious life of the friary for both sacral and secular benefits, including the salvation of the soul and the restoration of civic peace and communal unity. The communal drive for reform, however, reached a stalemate and was successfully accelerated and channeled by seigniorial intervention.

How can we account for the fact, then, that their shared interests notwithstanding, even if we find no traces of direct communal and seigniorial cooperation, the reform of the friary, in the long run, ended in failure? Rather surprisingly, in later years the Erdődys, going back on their initial promises and the repeated requests of the Franciscans, neglected to restore the ruinous monastery buildings. Since the costs of restoration surpassed the financial capacities of both the town and the Franciscans, the friars eventually abandoned the uncomfortable place in 1524.35 The failure of Péter Erdődy to restore the monastery, either out of disinterest or parsimony, renders the religious reform at Körmend an exception. Other landlords, who similarly engineered the renewal of the religious houses in the territory of their estates, never hesitated to invest financially.

If we compare the circumstances of the above cases of reform, one important difference emerges. The market-towns of Újlak, Sárospatak, and Szécsény, where the reformed monasteries in question stood, were at the same time the residences of their landlords, who came from the highest echelons of society.36 The landlords and their families, the members of their households, often stayed in the castles adjacent to the market-towns, which also functioned as administrative centers and burial places for their kindred.

The reform of the monastery of Körmend seems to have been a more limited enterprise due to the fact that it did not form part of a grandiose plan to create a splendid burial place for an aristocratic family, nor was it integrated into a more general scheme of estate development and urbanization. Can we perhaps attribute the final failure of the reform to this missing context? Péter Erdődy kept his residence in Monyorókerék (now Eberau in Austria), the headquarters of his estates in Vas County, which was well suited to the purpose due to the castle-construction works and foundation of ecclesiastical institutions (a parish church and Pauline monastery) carried out by his predecessors, the Ellerbachs.37 On the other hand, Körmend at that time had no large estates attached to it, and although Erdődy turned the castellum here into a castle by fortification works, he had no earnest reason to spend much time there. Consequently, if Erdődy kept his residence elsewhere, the representation of the sacrality of his seigniorial authority played no role in reforming the monastery of Körmend. This would explain why he did not invest the time and money necessary in order to restore the monastery buildings.

The various strands of this inquiry, especially some of the earlier thoughts on communal action and the present discussion of seigniorial reform, suggest the conclusion that the landlord’s intervention in the life of the Körmend friary seems to have been primarily triggered by clerical abuses and the discontent of the laity. With the observant Franciscans appearing on the scene, however, the scandals stopped and the feeling of insecurity quickly dissipated. The conduct of the new friars after the passing of a year met communal expectations, or at least the witnesses whose testimony has survived attested to a feeling of general satisfaction. The Franciscans made the most pressing repairs to the buildings and were said even to have tidied up the gardens. Once the daily routine set in again, the conditions of the monastery buildings, which did not serve Erdődy as a tool of aristocratic self-fashioning, were of no further interest to him, which reinforces the argument according to which the drive for reform lay with the community.

Reform was shaped in the dynamic of communal and seigniorial agendas. Their common desire to secure private and collective salvation and civic order and peace proved adequate motivation to expel the disobedient Augustinian friars. Subsequent lords of the town deemed it advisable to take charge of religious reform initiated by energy that came “from below,” but which served at the same time their own agenda of restoring peace and stabilizing power structures. In the long run, however, their interests diverged: for the community the cloister was an important factor, which both shaped and represented civic identity. Since communal financial resources were insufficient to accomplish the restoration, however, the fate of the friary was sealed. The final failure of reform resulted from the divergence of communal and seigniorial actions.

The Election of Pastors by Communities and Landlords

In the following, I draw general lessons from the Körmend story. Can we consider the active participation of community and landlord typical in the making of religious change? I contrast experiences with regard to mendicant reform with lay participation in religious life within the parish structure. This approach was prompted by the much contested, but established thesis according to which the protestant reformation created something originally new by turning the medieval church run by the clergy into a church of the laity. As is often claimed, under the impact of the new teachings, communities that previously were conceptualized as entirely passive suddenly realized their rights and began to demand the right to choose their own priests and supervise and control church incomes and properties.38 A more nuanced understanding of the late medieval situation in general and villagers’ busy piety and readiness to run local churches in order to further their work in particular may help us evaluate more precisely the nature of sixteenth-century religious changes. From a more general perspective, instead of assuming that practices automatically followed from ideas and that commoners passively followed the dictates of the elite, I again emphasize the constituent role of everyday practices in bringing about social and religious change.

The analysis is facilitated, furthermore, by an exceptionally rich source material on rural religion in the middle of the sixteenth century. By this time, the new teachings, which were first embraced in the royal court (where Mary of Habsburg arrived in the early 1520s with her courtiers) and the German-speaking cities, had reached the countryside, the Hungarian nobility and peasantry.39 The detailed records of the church visitation carried out in the north-western regions of the country are therefore the early fruits of confessional rivalry. The commissioners of the reform-minded Catholic archbishop, Miklós Oláh (1493–1568), spared no time or energy to record what they had heard and seen in tiny villages and small towns in preparation for the national synod designed to restrain the epidemic spread of “heresy.”40 For the modern reader, their descriptions open a window onto communities in the process of religious change.

This change can best be grasped in the way local clergymen were elected and appointed to parochial positions. The ability of lay agents to elect and call reformed friars into monasteries was the key element, as we have seen, of observant reforms. It was also a crucial moment in the sixteenth century. As Robert Scribner observed writing on the early reformation in German cities:

What made the Reformation a movement rather than a collection of abstract theological ideas was the attempt of ordinary people to put their belief into action. The most important step was to obtain a godly preacher who would proclaim the Word and share in the building of some kind of revivified Christian community. For this reason, the efforts of little communities [...] to find and keep a godly preacher are central to the understanding of Reformation.41

As for the countryside, villages and small towns with feudal authorities above them (which are our primary concern), we can build on Peter Blickle’s convincing claim that city and village shared their basic reformation agenda of “communalizing the church,” the crucial element of which was the appointment of pastors.42

It seems all the more intriguing to approach the appointment of clergy in the interplay of communal and seigniorial attitudes and practices, since historical scholarship, and Hungarian historians in particular, portray the process as orchestrated either by the one or the other. The first modern master narratives of the Hungarian reformation, in accordance with European trends of historical writing of the interwar period, are organized around the alleged “heroes” of the reformation, converted lords and “star” Lutheran pastors working in their courts. Consequently, their narratives rest on the assumption that tenants had to follow the new faith of their landlord passively. This means, on the one hand, that these narratives make no distinction between aristocratic private devotion and patronal conduct, which we observed with regard to cloister reforms conducted by landlords. On the other hand, by conjecturing that the right of patronage mechanically governed social behavior, they leave no space whatsoever for communal action.43

Against this background, the recent account of the rural reformation can be read as a counter narrative. Here, the protagonists are peasants who freely choose their religion, since they can find their ways in matters of religion autonomously and can make rational decisions. Their freedom of religious choice is facilitated, as the argument goes, by the indifference of their landlords. The apparent cases when Lutheran patron lords kept evangelical preachers in their castle churches yet did not remove the old village clergy from their estates made the author conclude that they were simply not interested in the religion (in what kind of divine service they attended and who performed it for them) of their subjects, just as they did not interfere with the choice of spouse and other personal affairs of their serfs. The author accounts for this seigniorial attitude within the process of domination: after the open conflict between lords and peasants in the 1514 peasant revolt, the issue of religion became neither a tool with which to elicit the obedience of subjects nor a means of everyday peasant resistance in the sixteenth century.44

My aim is therefore to draw a more balanced picture of the ways in which communities and landlords participated in religious reform. First of all, the large discrepancy of seigniorial action with regards to the friary and parish church is astonishing. The suggested indifference of lords to the religion of their subjects runs against the sense of responsibility for the spiritual well-being of parishioners manifested by Péter Erdődy and other secular authorities of previous generations through their acts of reforming religious houses. The figure of the indifferent landlord emerged from the church visitation records mentioned briefly above. The thesis of indifferent communities, which is even more shocking, was voiced, moreover, on the basis of their correspondence with their landlord. In this case study on seigniorial-communal relations with regard to religion from the 1520–1530s, not only did George the Pious, Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach (1484–1543), a marked Lutheran convert, not take any interest in the spiritual needs of the subjects on his estates in Eastern-Hungary, but the small town communities also passively observed the appointment of his officials to parochial benefices, which consequently left the people with no mass.45 On the one hand, we need to explain how this is compatible with the elevated communal concern for religious matters (aimed at a sufficient provision for sacraments and the preparation for the afterlife) witnessed, as one case among many, in Körmend. On the other hand, it is important to notice that active and passive communities obviously coexisted. Did the level of communal autonomy change in relation to the conduct of the lord? Or are we deceived by our sources? The church visitation record is a product of a dialogue between clergy and commoners: the church officials, when they arrived in the remote little places, asked the parish priest about his flock and the members of the community about their priest, respectively. Lord patrons, who were most often absent magnates, participated in this dialogue only exceptionally, and are mentioned only when they had done something exceptional. Do they appear as more marginal figures in the process of religious change as a consequence of this? And if communities did not negotiate with their landlords in matters of religion, does this necessarily mean that they were passive and indifferent? In order to be able to draw a more balanced picture of communal and seigniorial attitudes in matters of religion, it is worth considering a few relevant but often neglected aspects.

For one thing, if village priests followed different creeds than their patron lords in the mid-sixteenth century, this can be attributed to other factors than the alleged indifference of landlords toward religious practice in the parish. Several communities had the right to elect their own priest, a fact that was first given due attention in the narrative of the communal reformation. While in England a lower level of communal participation in religious life developed in the form of the election of churchwardens, on the Continent (including in Hungary) several examples testify to the control of both town and village governments over the parish church. As the findings of the leading medievalist András Kubinyi suggest, communal participation in late medieval Hungary had diverse origins and involved diverse rights and practices. The right of electing the pastor could be part of the authority of the municipal government granted by royal privilege. In other instances, the “communitas parochialis,” which tended to be identical with the political community, was granted the right to elect the parish incumbent by the local patron lord (subpatronatus).46 But it was not unusual for the patron and community to present their common nominee to the bishop together.47 Random examples attesting to the varied equilibrium of communal-seigniorial roles prop up relatively frequently in the fifteenth-century corpus: members of the local noble patron family, the churchwardens and the entire community of Várkony (today Vrakúň, Slovakia), a village near Pozsony (Bratislava, Slovakia), elected their new pastor together, whom they had previously dismissed for his misbehavior.48 And we have the rare written evidence from Szentendre, a village under royal authority, where the community explicitly claimed to be acting on their right of patronage over the parish church dedicated to Saint Andrew when electing their pastor.49

Patrons, consequently, were probably not indifferent, but rather their scope of action was limited by communal rights. And their willingness to share rights seems to have been a natural consequence of the sharing of fiscal burdens, which is suggested not only by the admittedly scanty medieval evidence, but also by the more systematic data produced by church visitors in the early 1560s. Members of the official church usually met the elected representatives of village and parish community, the judge and the churchwarden (vitricus). In addition to interrogating members of the community about the moral and religious profile of the priest and asking the priest about the morals of the community, visitors were interested in the state of the church, inside and outside. When they found the church building in bad condition (ruinosa, desolata), as was often the case, they admonished the judge and the churchwarden, the elected representatives of the village community and congregation, to see to the repair of the church.50 Decayed, disorderly churches were not exceptional, whatever the creed of the patron and community. In a few instances, however, patrons also appeared on the scene. They were the petty nobles living in the village, as opposed to the distant magnate patrons. And when visitors met patrons, they always urged patron and community together to renovate the church.51 Looking at the ruinous church in the village Kosztolány, the visitor commented: the state of the church is due not to the priest, but to the negligence of patrons [the magnate family Ország] and community.52 Visitors put the blame on the patrons alone when they attributed the decay to the disputes among local petty nobles, who cared little for the church buildings.53 Obviously, the church authorities held patrons and community together responsible for the physical condition of the church. Peasants and nobles shared this view. Usually they promised to do the work.54 When peasants refused, they claimed to be heavily overloaded by their landlord with tasks, but they never argued that it was not their duty.55

The visitation records also offer examples of instances in which communities actively participated in the election of the parish incumbent. For example, the peasants of Garamszentbenedek (today Hronský Beňadik, Slovakia) living under the authority of the local Benedictine abbey, caught a priest in the street themselves. The “heretic” priest of the neighboring village had run away from the visitors. He was arrested in Szentbenedek, and the villagers took the opportunity to fill the vacancy in the parish church by electing him. They asked only the visitor for permission, which was necessary since the priest was obviously a no-good Catholic, wearing a beard but no tonsure.56 In Magasfalva (Vysoká, Slovakia) the parishioners took good care of the church, but it had no incumbent. The visitor apparently asked them why they did not have a parish priest, to which they replied: “they are ready to keep a good Catholic priest if they are authorized.”57 This shows the people’s awareness that the issue was open to negotiation and they could obtain the right to appoint their priest. And they also considered it natural to cover the living expenses of their pastor. In Szentpéter (Liptovský Peter, Slovakia), the priest was a local boy and a fierce heretic, openly refuting Catholic tenets, which the visitor noted: “confident of his parishioners’ support, he fears nothing.”58 There can be little doubt that he was picked by the community.

Even these few examples offer ample testimony to the widespread experience of communal participation, though at different levels, in the election of priests. This does not contradict the contention of historians according to which communal patronage and nomination rights remained an exception throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in most parts of Europe.59 Nevertheless, several parish communities exerted influence over the choice of the parish priest as a natural consequence of their financial responsibilities in the maintenance of the parish church and the provision of a livelihood for the priest, to which I return later.60

From the perspective of this inquiry, the consequence of communal participation in the election of parish priests is obvious. If the parish priest followed a different religious creed than his patron in the sixteenth century, this might have ensued through varied scenarios. True, the landlord may have been indifferent to parish religion and appointed any priest available. The shortage of priests in the transitional period of the mid-sixteenth century, with the decay of the old Church and the gradual formation of new ones, seriously limited choices. But it is just as possible that the village community selected its own candidate. Either scenario (and the alternation of the two) might have resulted in the confessional diversity of parish priests within the territory of a single estate. Surprisingly, however, this was not the case. When the data of the visitation records are grouped and compared by estates, it becomes clear that in some of the estates one of the confessions, Catholic or non-Catholic, prevailed. The only plausible explanation for this is that the magnate enforced his will over all his lands, since it seems improbable that hundreds of small localities all shared the same religious sympathies. Even if it did not interfere with their feudal authority, for some magnates the creed of the village priests still mattered, as did the kind of religious services they performed for their congregations. Others did not bother. This variance of seigniorial conduct can be accounted for only by personal dispositions, the influence of which was further facilitated by the multiplicity of legal standards providing ample scope for individual action.

András Báthori, who is commonly known as having been a fierce persecutor of “heretics” as voivode of Transylvania (1552–1553) and judge royal (1554–1566), seems not to have endured any opposition in his role as lord patron on his estates either. He made sure to have Catholic priests in all parish churches, and if the community inclined to the new faith, the clashing sympathies of lord and community resulted in vacant churches.61 Under such willful lords, communities that opted to negotiate with the priest instead of the landlord did better, as village clergy adapted more willingly to parishioners and served communion according to different practices, in one or two kinds, to everyone as requested.62 At the same time, the “attentive” landlord rewarded Catholic congregations by renovating the church.63 On the other side of the confessional divide there was another aristocratic combatant of the evangelical movement, György Bebek, who had a similar temperament. The new preachers to whom he had granted the old benefices openly challenged the authority of the visitors, calling Bebek their prelate, king and defendant.64 The bewilderment or, respectively, the fascination of visiting officials, which made them comment profusely when they experienced such an overwhelming power of landlords, suggests, however, that this was not the order of the day.65

In contrast, on the estates of the Forgách brothers, the Révay brothers, Ferenc Thurzó and Gáspár Mágochy, parish priests (as Table 1 shows) followed various creeds, a fact which suggests no intensive seigniorial control over appointments. Whether Catholic or Protestant, their personal dispositions allowed communal tastes to prevail in matters of religion. Finally, the estate of Kristóf Ország also manifested religious diversity, with a strong Catholic majority under a landlord with Calvinist inclinations. Although in Csejte (Čachtice, Slovakia), the place where the landlord had his residence, the parish priest was a “heretic, who infected a great part of the town,” those still clinging to the old faith could attend services held by two different altar-priests.66

While law, legal customs and the principle of reciprocity integral to social relations defined the scope of communal action, on some occasions this could be reduced to nothing by the policies of aggressive magnate lords. The process of domination, if not in relation to their peasants, also influenced seigniorial attitudes to parish religion. The scope of communal participation was limited not only by head-strong landlords, but also by the increasing role played by parish benefices in the system of noble patronage in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. As was the case in German territories, Hungarian magnates, modeling their actions on the royal practice, often rewarded their noble clients (familiares or servitores) for their services in the management of estates with ecclesiastical benefices under their patronage, parish churches featuring high among them.67 In other words, the role of magnates as patrons of churches and as patrons in the system of noble clientele intersected at this point. Although the phenomenon can be documented all over the country, there is no single rule: the conflict of roles was resolved differently depending largely on personal dispositions.

This kind of conflict of seigniorial roles, which affected parish religion, did not arise with regard to monastic affairs. Mendicant houses had no substantial properties, which limited the incentive of patrons to interfere. And although town and city magistrates fostered growing ambitions to control matters of local religion, religious orders, perhaps due to the direct supremacy of the pope over them, more efficiently defended the immunity of their jurisdiction over the nominations of local superiors.68 As a result, mendicant houses could not be turned into a means of fund raising or noble patronage in the hands of secular lords, which rendered them rather predisposed to act as good patrons with no loss. And the reorganization of religious life, a process in which they willingly participated, served also the legitimation of their power, of which they were fully aware. Alongside the contingencies of individual character, the structural variables inherent in the parish and monastic contexts therefore seem sufficient to explain the varied proceedings of magnates as church patrons.

I have considered some of the factors that were at play in the dynamics of communal and seigniorial agendas, which as a consequence meant that the appointment of local clergy could proceed according to varied scripts from place to place. Just as the character of magnates exerted an enormous influence on the scenario of priest appointments, the ability of communities to act autonomously also varied independently of seigniorial behavior, an initial impression reinforced by visitation records. One is astonished by the huge differences between communities living next door to one another. In one place there were people capable of taking care of themselves, or at least the autonomous ones got the lead, whereas a few miles away people seemed to be totally passive. The diverse attitude of congregations towards religion was also reflected, irrespectively of confessional sympathies, by the condition of their churches. Several congregations lived without a priest and did nothing to change the situation. Some of them—willingly or under pressure—ungrudgingly followed the faith of their lord.69 But for example in Liptószentmiklós (Liptovský Mikuláš, Slovakia), the community, going against the Catholic parish priest, was ready to pay a Lutheran pastor in cooperation with the patrons.70 I suspect it is no coincidence that the parish priest of Handlovalehota (Handlová, Slovakia), who was unwilling to serve the communion to his parishioners under both kinds, was replaced the following year by another priest who was ready to do so.71

Finally, for a more realistic portrayal it is essential to stress that religious life at the parish church was multi-layered and complex. The parish incumbent was very often not the only clergymen performing religious services. Rather there were several other clerics employed under various circumstances. Thus even when a community seems to have accepted the nomination of the landlord or the lack of a resident parish priest passively, this did not mean that they were watching helplessly as they were left deprived of priests and sacraments. The subjects of George of Brandenburg may have simply accepted that there was no priest to bury their dead, baptize their babies, and administer the Eucharist in the mass, and they calmly went without. Several other examples, however, attest to the great variety of alternative strategies that were used by communities in order to secure regular and versatile sacramental worship. Although with changing intensity, this seems to have been a general ambition of late medieval small communities.

Temporary vacancies were usually remedied at least at an individual level: some of the people visited the nearby churches to receive the sacraments.72 Several communities, or their elected officials, judges and churchwardens, invited a nearby parish priest to hold mass a few times a week and administer the sacraments in their church in return for communal payment. This kind of mother-filial church relation was organized in the village of Grünau/Grinád (Myslenice, Slovakia) under Serédy. Serédy’s official did not let the alien priest enter and declared himself their parish priest so that—as villagers complained to the investigators—he could take possession of the wine from the church’s vineyard, which the villagers had started to cultivate collectively when their pastor had left them.73 Although perhaps to no avail, even under the worst of landlords the community tried to provide for their spiritual needs.

At other places, people did not satisfy with having no parish priest. The high level of autonomy of the people living in Jánosfalva (Bačka Palanka, Serbia), a tiny village in southern Hungary, is very striking. Although they had a parish priest, he was absent and “ran after worldly affairs” instead of performing his pastoral duties, as they complained repeatedly to the diocesan vicar. Their insistence brought success. As the priest Imre refused to obey the vicar’s summons, the vicar allowed the community to elect and present a new priest.74 What rendered this remote little community capable of acting so independently? Was there a landlord involved in the story, whose authority they tried to evade by appealing instead to the ecclesiastical superior of the non-resident priest? In this case the disobedient incumbent, who perhaps managed the affairs of his lord elsewhere while enjoying the benefice, trusted in the support of his patron. But it is equally possible that the community’s confidence was founded by law or custom and they had long acted as patrons. We are left with the vicar’s words: he allowed the community to choose and present another pastor, acknowledging the danger imminent in their being left without a priest administering the sacraments, especially in times of plague. So be it as it may, the necessity, the ultimate need to perform the last rites for the dying and to bury the dead, must have added additional impetus for communal action.

Petitioning the diocesan court concerning absent priests or vacancies seems to have been an efficient and well-established strategy that the people living on the Brandenburg-estate could also have used. If not, they had other possibilities. The peasants of Jánosfalva were totally dependent on their parish priest, as they argued, since they had no auxiliary clergymen employed at the parish church. In other words, their financial capacities were probably only sufficient to pay for the services of one priest, although they well knew, as their comment suggests, that several other villages could afford to have and did have more than one priest. There is evidence indicating that parochial assistant clergy, chaplains and schoolmasters were often hired directly by parishioners to assist the incumbent.75 Only a systematic collection of the scanty data will persuasively demonstrate that alongside feudal patrons, village and small town communities, or communal institutions like confraternities and guilds were able and eager founders of side-altars and chapels in parish churches (as well as outlying chapels independent of the parochial structure). Yet we have good reason to conjecture that the practice, well documented in German territories, existed in Hungary too.76 Throughout the late middle ages, several churches were founded and built by parishioners, who in consequence had the right of patronage.77

In the case of Körmend, the data available indicates only that some of the altars in the parish church were raised by landlords, while the origin of others is unknown, but the confraternity had its altar in the cloister, which was a financially rational decision, as the friars were able to celebrate the divine services of the confraternity without having to shoulder the burden of maintaining a priest. But even village churches often had two, three, or even more side-altars, as is indicated both by the scattered late medieval data and the findings of the mid-sixteenth-century visitation.78 And like village parish priests, chantry priest not infrequently were local boys, suggesting that the community or their families bestowed the small benefice for their sons, just as citizens also provided in this manner for both the sacred and social prestige of their families.79 And if they had no local candidate, they could freely choose from among the increased number of vagrant priests on the lookout for benefices or at least some temporary employment.80 Peasants in command of more moderate economic resources left their purchased vineyards, mills or the few forints they had in order to pay a priest to say perpetual or temporal masses, wishing to provide for their personal salvation and the salvation of their kindred while also aiming to meet the needs of communal clerical provision.81

To cite one example, a couple in the market-town of Sátoraljaújhely left a deserted mill to contribute to the cost of building a local parish church. Their private legacy came under communal management: the three churchwardens sold it to the parish priest of the neighboring market town, Patak, and through them the tota communitas was responsible for defending him in its peaceful possession.82 Another parochial event in the same place a few years earlier also shows tangibly that parish religion was a communal matter. In 1506, the citizens of the free royal city of Bártfa (Bardejov, Slovakia), who were cultivating vineyards in the wine-growing hills of Újhely, proposed to the councilors of Újhely that they would raise a new chantry in the parish church provided also with living expenses for a chantry-priest. The people of Újhely were so enthusiastic about the enterprise that they added two more vineyards, obviously from the communal asset accumulated by similar pious donations, to the chantry-benefice. The chantry foundation letter issued by the parish priest and councilors of Újhely entrusted the citizens of Bártfa to elect the person of the chantry-priest, whom they subordinated to the incumbent, also specifying his liturgical obligations, which included ministering the incumbent in festive masses. Thus the entire community profited from the religious services of the third chantry-priest in the town.83 The patrons of the parish church, the members of the magnate Pálóci family, played no role in the joint enterprise of the two communities, the actions of which illustrate well the scope and limits of communal participation and financial resources.

Conclusion

Whether communities managed to influence absentee incumbents to nominate as their vicars people from among the assistant clergymen fostered by parishioners is a question that still waits to be answered. As the rich German evidence suggests, in practice this tendency rendered congregations capable of controlling parish religion.84 One nonetheless can conclude that local religious life was manifold and complex, including communal and individual practices that created autonomous levels of parish religion, independent of patrons. Negotiation with landlords was only one means among many for communities to provide for their priests and their sacramental demands. Much as the people of Körmend mobilized their resources in order to restore religious life in the friary, parish communities actively participated in the maintenance of parochial religion. Sacramental piety and clergy served a variety of individual and communal needs, both spiritual and temporal. The vitality of the sacramental mentality is well reflected by the general demand of communion under both kinds. The widespread practice of people taking both the body and the blood of Christ irrespectively of their Catholic or Protestant sympathies was recorded by visitors with little astonishment in the 1560s.85

The appointment of local clergy, which I consider the focal point of religious change, was shaped in the countryside in the matrix of communal and seigniorial agendas. The comparison of the monastic and parish context reveals that the differences in seigniorial behavior, the tendency to be dedicated to monastic reform and disinterested in parochial provision for clergy and sacraments, was unquestionably influenced by individual dispositions, but more importantly was also structurally rooted. As opposed to parochial livelihoods, mendicant houses could not be used to reward their noble clients, and magnates were predisposed to act as good patrons.

Diverse scenarios in relation to the parish church resulted partly from fragmented local conditions. The right of patronage was shared in various forms between lords and communities. And irrespectively of written law, communities had diverse strategies to participate in the election and appointment of local clergy. The late medieval multiplicity of legal standards in turn increased the scope of individual action: we have observed landlords who asserted their will in parish religion as in any other sphere of life, while others did not interfere with the religious choices of their subjects. Communities also manifested different levels of autonomous action in matters of religion, often independently of feudal authority, but rather as a result, presumably, of local politics.

Communal election of local clergy, which in the late middle ages depended on local privileges and negotiations (in other words it was a sporadic secular matter), was turned by Luther into a universal Christian right legitimated by the Gospel, an ideological shift that must have given impetus to communal agendas.86 Similarly, the laicization of religion, the expanding sphere of lay activities in church affairs, had already blurred the distinction between clergy and laity when Luther turned it into a general Christian norm by proposing the principle of the priesthood of all believers. My inquiry thus reinforces the scholarly perception of the interconnected nature of late medieval reform and sixteenth-century reformations, all being part of the long-term processes of Christianization of society and growing lay agency in matters of religion.

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (The National Archives of Hungary, MNL OL), Mohács előtti gyűjtemény (Pre-Mohács Collection), Diplomatikai Levéltár (Archive of Medieval Charters)

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (The National Archives of Hungary, MNL OL), Fényképgyűjtemény (Photo Collection), Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény (Photo Collection of Medieval Charters)

Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Haus-, Hof- und Staatsarchiv (ÖStA HHStA), Familienarchiv Erdődy (Arch. Erd.)

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Kubinyi, András. “Mátyás király és a monasztikus rendek” [King Matthias and the Monastic Orders]. In Kubinyi András. Főpapok, egyházi intézmények és vallásosság a középkori Magyarországon [Prelates, Ecclesiastical Institutions and Religiosity in Medieval Hungary], 239–48. Budapest: METEM, 1999.

Kubinyi, András. “Nagybirtok és főúri rezidencia Magyarországon a XV. század közepétől Mohácsig” [Great Estates and Aristocratic Residences in Hungary from the Middle of the Fifteenth Century to Mohács]. A Tapolcai Városi Múzeum Közleményei 2 (1991): 214–217.

Kubinyi, András. “Plébánosválasztások és egyházközségi önkormányzat a középkori Magyarországon” [Election of Parish Priests and Congregations in Medieval Hungary]. Aetas 7, no. 2 (1991): 26–45.

Kurze, Dietrich. Pfarrerwahlen im Mittelalter. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gemeinde und des Niederkirchenwesens. Forschungen zur kirchlichen Rechtsgeschichte und zum Kirchenrecht 6. Cologne–Graz, 1966.

Kümin, Beat. “The English Parish in a European Perspective.” In Katherine French, Gary Gibbs, and Beat Kümin. The Parish in English Life. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997.

Majorossy, Judit and Katalin Szende. “Hospitals in Medieval and Early Modern Hungary.” In Europäishes Spitalwesen: institutionelle Fürsorge in Mittelalter und früher Neuzeit, edited by Martin Scheutz, 275–320. Wien–München: Oldenbourg, 2008.

Marosi, Ernő. Magyar falusi templomok [Village Churches in Hungary]. Budapest: Corvina, 1975.

Ozment, Steven. Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution. New York: Double-day, 1992.

Péter, Katalin. “Hungary.” In The Reformation in National Context, edited by Bob Scribner, Roy Porter, and Mikuláš Teich, 150–167. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

Péter, Katalin. A reformáció: kényszer vagy választás [The Reformation: Coercion or Free Choice?]. Budapest: Nemzeti Tankönyvkiadó, 2004.

Reformbemühungen und Observanzbestrebungen im spätmittelalterlichen Ordenswesen, edited by Kaspar Elm. Berliner Historische Studien 14, Ordensstudien 6. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1989.

Regényi, Kund. “Az eperjesi Szentháromság karmelita konvent története” [The History of the Carmelite Cloister Dedicated to the Holy Trinity of Eperjes]. In Tanulmányok a középkori magyar történelemről [Studies on the Medieval History of Hungary], edited by Sarolta Homonnai, Ferenc Piti, and Ildikó Tóth, 103–114. Szeged: SZTE, 1999.

Scheler, Dieter. “Patronage und Aufstieg im Niederkirchenwesen.” In Sozialer Aufstieg. Funktionseliten im Spätmittelalter und in der frühen Neuzeit, edited by Günther Schulz, 315–36. München: Oldenbourg, 2002.

Schilling, Heinz. “Reformation–Umbruch oder Gipfelpunkt eines Tempts des Réformes.” In Die Frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch: wissenschaftliches Symposium des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1996, edited by Bernd Moeller. Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 199, 13–34. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag, 1998.

Schmidt, Heinrich Richard. “Die Ethik der Laien in der Reformation.” In Die Frühe Reformation in Deutschland als Umbruch: wissenschaftliches Symposium des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte 1996, edited by Bernd Moeller, Schriften des Vereins für Reformationsgeschichte, 333–70. Gütersloh: Gütersloher Verlag, 1998.

Schulze, Manfred. Fürsten und Reformation. Geistliche Reformpolitik weltlicher Fürsten vor der Reformation. Spätmittelalter und Reformation, Neue Reihe 2. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1991.

Solymosi, László. “Két középkor végi testamentum Szabolcs vármegyéből” [Two Late Medieval Testaments from Szabolcs County]. In Emlékkönyv Rácz István 70. születésnapjára [Festschrift for the 70th Birthday of István Rácz], edited by Ágnes Kovács, 218–20. Debrecen: KLTE, 1999.

Stievermann, Dieter. Landesherrschaft und Klosterwesen im spätmittelalterlichen Württemberg. Sigmaringen: Thorbecke, 1989.

Lawrence Stone. “The Educational Revolution in England.” Past and Present 28 (1964): 41–80.

Takáts, Sándor. “Bebek György” [György Bebek]. In Sándor Takáts. Régi idők, régi emberek [Old Times and Their People], 67–87. Budapest: Athenaeum, 1922.

Tringli, István. “Sátoraljaújhely egyházai a reformáció előtt” [The Churches of Sátoraljaújhely before the Reformation]. In Erősségénél fogva várépítésre való. Tanulmányok a 70 éves Németh Péter tiszteletére [Proper for Castle Building for its Strength. Studies in Honour of Péter Németh on his 70th Birthday], edited by Juan Cabello and C. Tóth Norbert, 377–96. Nyíregyháza: Jósa András Múzeum, 2011.

Volume 2 Issue 1 CONTENTS

Zoltán Csepregi

The Evolution of the Language of the Reformation in Hungary (1522–1526)

The spatial framework of this study is the strip of towns lying in the region that used to be known as Upper Hungary (today Slovakia), communities that in the sixteenth century had German speaking minorities. At the time in question, there were numerous events and historical texts in which one can discern the use of a new ecclesiastical language. These sources are given voice with the help of philological methods, for instance intertextual analysis. A letter written by Bartholomeus Francfordinus Pannonius in 1522 constitutes the first example of church language reform in Hungary, though his words exemplify more the linguistic tendencies of Humanism than of the Reformation. A letter written by Mary of Habsburg in 1523 demonstrates the queen’s interest in and understanding of religious reformation, but also her desire to maintain her distance as sovereign. According to the views revealed during the inquest against alleged heretics in Sopron in 1524, traditional Franciscan criticism of the Church had intermingled with ideas deriving from Lutheran thought. At the time of the mining town revolt (1525), miners used (for instance) Saint Paul’s apostolic greeting (Romans 1:7) as a sign of difference and usually included them in the introductory section of letters to their comrades. As the sources make evident, the apostolic greeting served as a form of identification within the Evangelical Movement. These textual analyses illustrate the significant impact of the Reformation in Hungary in the period before the Battle of Mohács (1526).1

keywords: urbanization, evangelical movement, language event

The Reformation as a Language Event

“Language event” (Sprachereignis) is a key term related to Gerhard Ebeling’s (1912–2001) famous lectures on Luther.2 In 1962–1963 these presentations made this term, originally invented by Ernst Fuchs, popular in historical theology, thus making it a kind of keyword in all of the scholarship and research on the Reformation, not simply the figure of Luther himself.3

Ebeling offers this approach, the concept of the language event, as a dynamic alternative to replace the more fixed, dogmatic and denominational views. He concluded his lecture with the following remarks:

Examining Luther’s way of thinking we should be open to the encounter with him as a language event too, since he did little else than strive to give proper voice to the word (das rechte Zur-Sprache-Bringen des Wortes).4

Addressing the fundamental interdependency of language and theology, Ebeling then cites Luther, who in his pedagogical program of 1524 wrote the following:

Although the gospel came and still comes to us through the Holy Spirit alone, we cannot deny that it came through the medium of languages, was spread abroad by that means, and must be preserved by the same means. […] And let us be sure of this: we will not long preserve the gospel without the languages. […] If through our neglect we let the languages go (which God forbid!), we shall not only lose the gospel, but the time will come when we shall be unable either to speak or write a correct Latin or German.5

To summarize, given the following experiences, which took place primarily in Germany, it is worth examining the Reformation as a language event. The gestures that were made by reformers (breaking monastic oaths, celibacy, the fast, occupying properties and taking possession of goods, innovations in rituals and in the organization of the congregation) were preceded by reform preaching (in oral or written form). Furthermore, as an evangelical movement the Reformation created its own terminology, which served as a means of identification as well, while the spread of the ideas of the Reformation acknowledged linguistic boundaries. Finally, the contents of the textual sources themselves are inseparable from the linguistic context in which they survived.6

I attempt in this essay to address two interrelated questions. Using philological methods, can one discern in Hungary signs of the new language of the Church and the language reform of the Reformation in the most controversial early phase of the history of Reformation in Hungary? And does this constitute adequate substantiation for the contention that in the Hungarian state of the late Middle Ages (in other words before the Battle of Mohács in 1526) the principles of the Reformation were met with some interest and enthusiasm among the burghers of the cities?

I have found three well-known series of events in the early history of the Hungarian Reformation in which the use of the new language of the Church is manifest. The first is the letter of Queen Mary of Habsburg, the wife of King Louis II, dated 7 June, 1523. The second involves the texts related to the inquest launched against people accused of heresy in Sopron (1524). The third involves the documents regarding uprisings in mining towns in the region known at the time as Upper Hungary (today Slovakia, 1525–1526), including a letter of Bartholomaeus Francfordinus, notary of Selmecbánya (today Banská Štiavnica in Slovakia), dated 19 May, 1522.7 Each of these texts was written by a member of a German-speaking community (most of them in cities populated primarily by German-speaking burghers, among the German-speaking miners and in the openly multilingual royal court, where German was used primarily as the lingua franca), and most of the examples of language events in question here survived in German (though there are also some examples in Latin). Although the language of state was Latin (the records of the inquest in Sopron were written in Latin, for instance) and even Humanists tended to prefer to correspond in Latin, private correspondence and documents pertaining to municipal administration were written in the language of the local majority.

Propriety, Piousness and Righteousness: Luther’s language in the Royal Court

In the Brandenburger Literalien of the Nuremberg Staatsarchiv there is a strange file that was first cited by Vilmos Fraknói (1843–1924) when he published one of the twelve letters.8 With one exception, the letters were all addressed to Casimir, Marquis of Brandenburg (1481–1527), the cousin of electors Joachim of Brandenburg and Albert of Mainz, who served as a diplomat and military leader in the service of the Emperor. The authors were Louis II (1506–1526), his elder sister Anne of Bohemia and Hungary (1504–1547, also known as Anna Jagellonica), and his wife, Queen Mary (1505–1558). Letters by Anne that were written in 1520 in Innsbruck involve the problem of her approaching marriage, a topic that is familiar in the secondary literature. Anne wished to marry Charles V (1500–1558) instead of his younger brother, Ferdinand of Habsburg (1503–1564).9 In the earlier of the two letters written by Mary (dated 9 December, 1522), the queen assures Casimir that she is doing her best to foster a ceasefire between the Polish King and the third brother, Albert of Brandenburg, the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order of Knights (1490–1568).10 However, the second of the two letters (dated 7 June, 1523), which was reprinted many times after being published by Fraknói, is a scathingly sarcastic jibe at Albert:

My honorable Prince, dear vicious cousin (poßer vetter), greetings to you. My dear vicious cousin (pößer vetter), I think you must have completely forgotten about your truthful cousin (die frume muem), and that must be why you haven’t written for such a long time. I have not forgotten about you in my pious prayers: I persevered and asked God daily to make you as just (frum machen) as I am. Please, let me know whether my prayer helped or not. If it did not, you can buy some justness (frumkait) me for a few pennies – I will not begrudge it to you; I have too much anyway (fil zu fil frumkayt). I would gladly have written more but must go to George’s garden to eat, and the messenger wishes to tarry no longer.

Written in Buda in a rush, on the Sunday after Corpus Christi in the 1523rd year of the Lord.

Your truthful cousin (euer frume muem), Mary, by her own hand.11

The letters indicate that the two of them shared an intimate relationship. They might also mark a turning point after which the teenage Queen Mary sought no longer to be the object and means of politics, but rather its subject and active agent.12

When Albert received Mary’s letter, he was already considered a supporter of Luther and the Reformation. His first surviving letter to Luther, for instance, was written only a week later.13 Mary’s “frivolous”14 accusations seemed incomprehensible to historians for quite some time. The first persuasive explanation was given by Ute Monika Schwob, who highlighted the linguistic and theological-historical dimensions of the short letter. It is worth touching on her interpretation a bit here.15

As the citation above indicates (and the few words given in the original), the axis of this short letter is the opposition of fromm (or “frum,” meaning pious) and böse (or “pöß,” meaning evil). These two adjectives were used as a kind of opposing pair since the Middle High German period, while also going through numerous changes in meaning. It is therefore not easy to determine whether in the given context the opposition is legal, moral or theological and religious in its content. Referring to a person, the term fromm (and other terms derived from it) implies respect and the respectable burgher lifestyle (including the ability to duel, marry, and socialize politely), in other words clearly a secular meaning. Were this virtue (Frommheit) in question (and this is implied by use of the word böse), the person in question would be brought before the courts, which were able to restore the honor of the offended party (fromm machen).16 Although as early as the fifteenth century one finds scattered occurrences of the use of the word fromm with religious or moral implications (as indicated by the use of the term Frömmigheit to mean “merit”),17 from the perspective of its connotations in this context the court procedure mentioned above was more decisive.

In 1518–1519 Luther deliberately applied the derivatives of the root fromm in order to express the meaning of the Latin theological terms iustus, iustitia and iustificare in German, replacing gerecht and Gerechtigkeit, terms that had been in use earlier. This theological neologism is consistently used in The Freedom of a Christian, a book that was published in 1520 in two languages18 (fortunately there is a parallel Latin version19 of the original German text, so we are spared the task of offering long-winded explanations of its meaning). The everyday process of restoring honor exemplifies the teaching on justification. The impact of Luther’s use of language and word choice was discernible in 1523 at the first disputation of Zurich,20 and it led to further shifts in meaning (for example in the writings of Philipp Melanchthon or Martin Bucer). It came to mean “pious,” an implication that allowed it to serve as the counterpart of the Latin pius, pietas (the first instances are found in the Augsburg Confession, the Apology and some other documents of the same period21). This remains the primary connotation of the word group today. Luther himself made accommodations for this shift in meaning, using the earlier term “gerecht” in his 1534 translation of the Bible and the 1537 Smalcald Articles in order to avoid misinterpretations (in the 1522 translation of the New Testament, the Greek dikaios is translated for the most part as “fromm”), even if he never abandoned his distinctive interpretation of the terms.22

From a chronological perspective, it is worth considering the above-cited letter of Queen Mary in light of the 1520 bilingual tract entitled The Freedom of a Christian. In the citations below the original terms are included in parentheses:

Who then can fully appreciate what this royal marriage means? Who can understand the riches of the glory of this grace? Here this rich and divine (frummer, pius) bridegroom Christ marries this poor, wicked harlot (bößes hürlein, impiam meretriculam), redeems her from all her evil, and adorns her with all his goodness.23

In the first quote, the dichotomy is obviously of a moral nature, but in the second one it moves on a clearly theological level and acquires connotations of redemption, justification, and salvation:

So it is with the works of man. As the man is, whether believer or unbeliever, so also is his work good (gutt, bonum) if it was done in faith, wicked (boeße, malum) if it was done in unbelief. But the converse is not true, that the work makes the man righteous or a believer (frum odder glaubig). As works do not make a man a believer, so also they do not make him righteous (machen frum, faciunt iustum). But as faith makes a man believer and righteous (frum macht, facit iustum), so faith does good works. Since, then, works justify no one (frum machen, iustificent) and a man must be righteous (frum sein, esse iustum) before he does a good work, it is very evident that it is faith alone which, because of the pure mercy of God through Christ and in his Word, worthily and sufficiently justifies (frum machet, iustificet) and saves the person. [...] Furthermore, no good work helps justify (zur frumkeyt, ad iustitiam) or save an unbeliever.24

One might well contend that perhaps Mary was unfamiliar with this specific tract, but this is hardly a substantial objection, since the terms themselves can be found in all of the pamphlets of the time25 and these pamphlets all found their way to Buda.26 In the context in which it is used in the letter, the opposition between “fromm” and “böse” can only be understood according to the Reformist implication (referring to justification), offering, furthermore, an ironic reflection on it. There are other sources from the period in question indicating that Luther’s use of the term “fromm” was a subject of debate, and in his 1522 Advent postilla Luther himself deals with this problem of translation,27 so Mary’s letter should be seen in the context of this larger discussion. The queen made deliberate use of terms with theological implications in order to demonstrate her erudition and at the same time to make plain that she intended to keep her distance. However, she makes no attempt to circumvent traditional theology of merit. A pun found in a treatise by Hieronymus Emser bears affinities with the playful teasing of her letter:

Luther: Just think it over, we must acknowledge that there are some true (fromm) Christians among us. Then why should we discard this word and its meaning?

Emser: An ass is a fine animal (from), but nonetheless we do not trust it with the treasury, but rather tie it up in the stable.28

Similarly, there is no trace of ostentatious piousness in Mary’s conduct, but behind her ironic taunt one does discern the deliberate and self-conscious tone of the initiated. While she makes no pronouncement in favor of any tenet, she indicates her familiarity with the teachings of the representatives of the reforms.

From Franciscan Tradition to Pub Anticlericalism

The town of Sopron, which lies on the border of the Hungarian and German language regions, has played an important commercial and cultural transmitting role. Its trade network has extended across Austria and Moravia to northern Italy and southern Germany. The Medieval City Archives were unusually fortunate in that they survived both fires and the ravages of war. They contain the most detailed records of the inquest launched against alleged Lutheran heretics.

The Sopron heresy inquest was carried out by Gergely Szegedi, a Franciscan from Nagyvárad (today Oradea in Romania), at the order of King Louis II of 14 October, 1524.29 The first part of the inquest, which began on 22 October, targeted Franciscan preacher Christoph. It was based on eight charges compiled by the Sopron parson Christoph Peck and it involved a total of 29 witnesses. Peck claimed that in his sermons Christoph had made the following contentions:

1. One does not have to obey the Pope;

2. Any priest can absolve a churchgoer from his or her sins;

3. A confession made by the soul can replace a confession made audibly to a priest;

4. One need not venerate the saints or the Virgin Mary, since their intervention is not necessary;

5. Fasting is unnecessary;

6. Churches and altars are unnecessary;

7. It is obvious to everyone that the Sopron clergymen have indulged in fornication, and they therefore should not be allowed to conduct masses;

8. Sopron has no need of Jews, as the priests themselves engage in usury.

The accusation was weakened by the fact that the denunciator himself was able to support only one of the accusations (the sixth) as a witness (having overheard the alleged statement), and it was not the accused (Christoph) that he had heard, but rather an earlier unnamed Franciscan preacher. The rest of the allegations were based on little more than rumor. To sum up the contents of the minutes, responding to the charges Christoph did not confess to having committed the sin of false teachings and the witnesses were unable to offer conclusive evidence.30 While it would be interesting to examine the relationships between the people who participated in the case, such a discussion would constitute too great a digression here, but it is worth noting that Christoph’s fellow priests were considerably less willing to testify against him than later on the mayor, municipal judge and ten other council members were against Paulus Moritz († 1530), a secular councilor of whom the witnesses were all personal rivals.31 Christoph denied or responded persuasively to the first six accusations, but in the case of the last two (the accusations against the city clergy) he insisted on these points so firmly that in his 16 November decree Louis II ordered the Sopron priests to dismiss their lovers.32 This final outcome is seen in the king’s letter of 11 January, 1525, in which he condemns the Sopron parson for having lodged a baseless complaint against the Franciscans and accepts the monastery’s plea for compensation for the damage caused to its reputation.33 Even from the perspective of today, the eight accusations do not seem to constitute aberrations so egregious that they would have represented stark opposition to the accepted views of the Church at the time. Ideas that seem to diverge slightly from the dogma, such as the notion of inner confession, social responsibility, asceticism and the lifestyle of the clergy, still fit within the Franciscan tradition, which was open to mysticism, spiritualism and social issues. The same applies to the statements made by Christoph’s unknown predecessor, a Franciscan preacher who had been active in Sopron two years earlier and who, according to the recollections of the Sopron parson and the witness Leonhardus Hengst, shared views similar to those that Jenő Szűcs has found in Observant sources of the period between 1516 and 1520: the criticism of the construction of altars and churches and the call for the equality of priests with regards to their power to absolve.34 Jenő Házi believes that these teachings show the influence of Lutheranism.35 According to Károly Mollay, the accusations made against Christoph bear affinities with ideas found in the Lutheran text entitled To the Christian Nobility of the German Nation from 1520,36 which was the second largest success on the book market after the German translation of the Bible.37 However, of the other ideas listed in the records, the only one I cannot situate in the radical tendency of the Observant tradition is the notion that one need not call on the saints for succor (the sermon of 6 December, 1522).

The second part of the inquest involves a statement made by vicar Thomas Radinger (in my view simply with the intention of sparking outrage) according to which God is a soul and therefore has neither senses nor limbs and can obtain no knowledge of the world nor give it any care.38 The third part examines the scandalous behavior of Paulus Moritz, a burgher of Sopron.39 In the case of Moritz, the accusations of having broken the fast and being in possession of Lutheran books are upheld, but it is not clear whether the accused actually made the (stereotypical) contentions that he was alleged to have made, for instance derision of wooden and stone idols (it is worth noting, however, that this accusation in closely intertwined, at least from the perspective of its content, with the criticism of Saint Nicholas Day as an example of the veneration of saints). The judges must have arrived at this assessment of the findings of the investigation, since after having surrendered his books (which, as is noted in King Louis II’s letter of 28 January, 1525, were burned on 2 January40) the accused was only punished for a one-time breach of the fast.41

Házi underlines the fact that between 22 February, 1522 and 18 January, 1527 (in other words already at the time when Christoph’s predecessor was active) Paulus Moritz worked as a church caretaker (guardian) for the Franciscans. Furthermore, without offering any detailed argument in support of his contention Házi emphasizes the role of the Sopron clergy, who considered the canonical regulations a nuisance, in the spread of the new teachings.42 Thus the Observants’ criticisms of the Church and the relaxed morals of the Conventuals must be among the sources of the “aberrations” in Sopron, though Luther’s writings and genuinely reformist sermons may also have played a role.

The situation is quite different in the case of the accusation made against Christoph by the parson in the course of the interrogation. Indeed Christoph himself did not deny the accusation, and more than one witness corroborated it, namely the two notaries in the case, Thomas Radinger and city notary Jacob Auer, but also priest Wolfgang Payr. On the basis of their statements, we can reconstruct the train of thought in one of Christoph’s sermons. The saints deserve no veneration for their own merits, and anyone who contends they do tell a terrible lie, rather saints “through faith subdued kingdoms” (Hebrews 11:33). It is natural that theologically the parson and the vicar say precisely (nihil meruerunt coram Deo) what in the simplified words of the layman scrivener is simply the following: the saints would not have made it to heaven (celum non meruissent). It is also no surprise that Christoph explains and justifies his contentions thusly: “but rather out of the merits of the sufferings of Christ.” It is surprising, however, that the testimony of the only layman to bear witness, a man named Auer,43 contains the only other reference to a passage from Scripture: “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves” (2 Corinthians 3:5).44 This argument can be understood as a reformist preaching that shatters the framework of the medieval theology of merit. Furthermore, the above-cited argument of Saint Paul played an important role in the shift of emphasis away from the problem of the veneration of saints and towards the more general question of individual justification.

Berndt Hamm used the term gradualism to refer to the late medieval concept that was thrown into question by the “three solae” of the Reformation45 (sola fide, sola gratia, sola Scriptura) and the focus on Christ and the Evangelium. The latter two are neatly encapsulated by the widespread use of the pair of terms “christlich und evangelisch.” According to the “gradualist” view of the world, fallen man gains salvation step by step, beginning in earthly life and finishing in heavenly eternity, achieving redemption with the help of the means of winning grace offered by the Church, wandering in Purgatory but finally saved in the act of the Last Judgment. This notion of gradual development reflects the hierarchical structure of the Church and the gallery of saints, the priority of the sins and their gravity, the priority of forms of expiation, the monastic oaths and the hierarchy of the church orders. Reform teaching is not (simply) the refusal of certain tenets or criticism of everyday abuses, but a categorical denial of the notion of gradualism itself, in that it insists on the futility of human agency, promulgates the idea that one can achieve redemption without such hierarchical contingencies, and dismisses the significance of good deeds, acts of penitence and formal expressions and oaths of piety as means of making amends. It restructures the previously complex hierarchy into a far simpler one, placing bishops, monks and laymen into a single clerical-civic order. To apply a traditional expression, this is a universal priesthood of all believers. Bernd Moeller uses the term “new monkery,” and Berndt Hamm adopts a model called “normative centering” to emphasize continuity. Evangelical teaching discredited the raison d’être of traditional rules of the game and replaced them with a new system that did not match the old one in any regard. This has been formulated in the well-known oppositions, for instance, “not out of merit but out of grace,” “freedom instead of compulsion,” “the words of the Scripture instead of human contrivance,” or in Lucas Cranach’s famous wood carving series Passional Christi und Antichristi (1521),46 in which depictions of scenes from the Passion of Christ are paired with images deriding the practices of the Catholic clergy.

All three parts of the Sopron inquest contain elements that cast light on the origins and discursive spaces of the new ecclesiastic language. In the first part, one reads:

[…] when they gather in the pub, one who understands them [the Lutheran books], reads them, the others listen, ten, twenty, however many of them there are, and they abuse his Holiness, the bishops and others so terribly that it is terrible to hear it. Then we [Sopron priests] are reproved by the laymen.47

In the investigation of the Radinger case, an introductory half-sentence refers to the same social and communicative context: “while having a drink, they were talking about the priests and the rumor that they should get married.”48 Paulus Moritz’s words precisely evoke the double origins of Hungarian Reformist language: he has drawn his views both from the Germans (ex dominis germanis) and from his own experiences,49 as shown in the abovementioned pub scene, in which the local stories and the Lutheran texts that are read aloud seem to engage in a dialogue with each other.

At the Crossroads of Ideas: Humanism and the Reformation

One could consider the letter written by Bartholomaeus Francfordinus Pannonius, the notary of Selmecbánya,50 on 19 May, 1522 to Georg Eysker, the notary of Körmöcbánya (Kremnica in present day Slovakia), as the first example of the ecclesiastic neologisms in Hungary. In this letter, having just returned from “Babylon,” i.e. Rome, the author greets Conrad Cordatus (ca. 1480–1546), who by that time had become convinced of the teachings of the Reformation, as Cunradum nostrum and then comments on Luther’s alleged summons in Nuremberg: “The emperor holds an imperial gathering in Nuremberg, where our Luther (Lutterus noster) is invited too, who is to be blessed by the Lord Jesus, of whom he is the most steadfast preacher.”51 The letter is a typical example of Humanist correspondence, one link in the vast information network of the Humanist movement. One notes both the unidentifiable nature of its source and the striving to transmit the news. However, Bartholomaeus Francfordinus’s letter is also an authentic document of an age in which contemporaries still saw the Humanist and Evangelist movements as parts of a single trend,52 and following Luther’s appearance they hoped to have an opportunity to create a stir similar to the reception with which the publication of the Epistolae clarorum virorum had been met. But the text nonetheless is more expressive of Humanism in Hungary than the linguistic innovations of the Reformation,53 much as the Wittenberg registration of Georgius Baumheckel from Besztercebánya (today Banská Bystrica in Slovakia) in the summer of 1522 indicates not the reception of Reformation ideas in the mining town, but rather an increase in the general interest in Lutterus noster.

The opening words of the letter are problematic: Reversus ex Babilone. There is no question that the author is referring to Rome, since the news reported from abroad, first and foremost from Rome, makes this abundantly clear even for those who otherwise might not have considered the association of Rome with Babel self-evident (an association that became increasingly widespread in the course of the later religious wars). Gustav Hammann contends that there is a reference here to Luther’s The Babylonian Captivity of the Church,54 which was published in 1520 and quickly became familiar in scholarly circles. One finds support for this contention in two letters of February, 1519 in which Luther explicitly identifies Rome with Babylon, in one case with the beast of the Book of Revelation (Revelation 17:1–6),55 and in the fact that two years later, in front of the Imperial Assembly in Worms, he used Babylon as an unmistakable metaphor for the Papacy.56 One should note that the data are surprisingly scattered. Many years were yet to pass before a detailed characterization of the Pope as the whore of Babylon was made (1530).57 However, as underlined by a letter by István Brodarics, these words can be interpreted as a reference to Petrarch, a paraphrase of the first line of sonnet 114 (De l’empia Babilonia, ond’è fuggita…). That Petrarch was originally writing about Avignon is incidental. The context of Brodarics’s letter makes it evident that the sixteenth-century reader would clearly have thought of Rome.58 Our ability to arrive at sound conclusions is somewhat complicated by the fact that in each of the instances mentioned the captivity in Babylon of the Old Testament and the notion of the apocalyptic Babel are mixed and even applied to Petrarch’s reference to the Avignon papacy. Nevertheless, it is worth noting that in the period in question Humanist language use and the use of Lutheran metaphors coincide and overlap in meaning and implication. De captivitate Babylonica is a treatise written specifically for Humanist circles, and the aforementioned three abstracts from Luther’s letters also refer to his acquaintances among Humanists. In light of all this, one cannot regard Bartholomaeus Francfordinus’s letter as indisputable evidence of the acceptance of Lutheran ideas in Hungary, even if it is remarkable that the notary of Selmecbánya began his letter of 1522 with the Babylon metaphor, which was still new in the Humanist movement.

Revolt, Movement, and Unity in the vocabulary of the miners

Setting aside the question of the vicissitudes suffered by Conrad Cordatus after 1522,59 let us skip to the year 1525, when the situation in the mining towns began to become particularly tense,60 primarily due to internal political instability and factional struggles (i.e. depreciation of currency, the tempestuous national assemblies in Rákos and Hatvan, the dismissal of the treasurer, the imprisonment and later release of the vice treasurer, and the dispossession of the Fugger company).61

In 1525, Cordatus returned from Wittenberg and went again to Körmöcbánya, now with his former colleague from Buda, Johannes Kresling (ca. 1489–1549). The sources still mention them as people from Buda, so they probably did not have any permanent employment in the mining towns, but rather worked as “guest” preachers. Kreisling is mentioned as the rector of the Saint George Chapel in Buda, while in the report of Guidoto (the envoy from Venice) from 29 May Cordatus is mentioned as “uno Priosto di S. Maria,” i.e. the priest of the Church of the Blessed Virgin,62 a designation that later was misinterpreted as queen Mary’s court priest.63 According to later communications, they were not vagrant itinerant preachers, but rather invited pastors in Körmöcbánya,64 so it is worth clarifying their exact positions in the mining town. There is considerable data indicating that in the 1520s the town councils in Besztercebánya, Selmecbánya, and Körmöcbánya employed guest preachers for shorter or longer periods of time at their own expense. This practice was in part an indication of the tension between the councilors, who were open to the teachings of the Reformation, and the parsons, who sought to halt or slow the spread of these teachings. Where the town councils were unable to fill the posts with preachers willing to spread the new teachings, they found temporary solutions in the form of guest preachers.65

The account books of Church income and expenses in Besztercebánya for 1525 and 1526 indicate the expenses for the accommodation of a preacher from 29 March, 1525 to 3 January, 1526 and two preachers from January 4, 1526 to March 28, 1526.66 If I have understood the information contained in the record books correctly, then from the spring of 1525 to the end of the year a preacher whose name is not given stayed in Besztercebánya, then in the early months of 1526 Simon Bernhard of Silesia and his chaplain filled the post.67 There is at least mention in the account records of Besztercebánya of a preacher named Simon and a preacher named Gilg, as well as the preacher’s chaplain.68

Selmecbánya and Körmöcbánya adopted different solutions to the problem of spreading the word. While Selmecbánya invited temporary preachers, Körmöcbánya maintained the position of preacher for years.69 Both the aforementioned letter of Bartholomaeus Francfordinus and the Besztercebánya inquiry addressed to the Bishop of Esztergom at the end of 1525 indicate that Cordatus and Kresling worked as preachers in communities along the Garam River. They were centered in Körmöcbánya and Kresling received a regular income from the town.

At Easter, 1525 the parson of Besztercebánya, Nicolaus Cibinius, denounced Cordatus and Kresling to László Szalkay, the Bishop of Esztergom (ca. 1475–1526), who was only then ordained as a priest by Lorenzo Campeggio (1474–1539), the cardinal legate of the Pope in Esztergom (even though, having served as the Bishop of Vác, he had occupied the highest position in the Hungarian Church a year earlier). The prelate, who was also serving as chancellor, was glad to have the opportunity, through the inquest, to restore his reputation, which had been shaken in the eyes of the lesser nobility. The only accusations involved the Lutheran sermon and Kresling’s marriage.70 In other words, no one blamed the preachers for the miners’ uprising that was breaking out at the time (this association wasn’t made until a year later, by István Werbőczy).71 No formal measures were taken against Cordatus or his partner, and at first they were shown forbearance.72 Primate Szalkay probably had no need of a show trial, and the collective intervention of the mining towns in December was also perhaps not without effect.73

The data related to the Besztercebánya preacher whose name is unknown (though he might be identified as Gilg) are important, because on 21 and 22 September, 1525 three letters were written in Besztercebánya by the same hand. On the basis of their phrasing, Gusztáv Heckenast has quite astutely attributed them to a preacher with Lutheran inclinations.74 Each of the letters begins with the same greeting: “Grace to you and peace from God our Father, and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Romans 1:7).75 One of them, which was sent by the Besztercebánya workers to the people of Hodrusbánya (Banská Hodruša), contains the following lines:

Furthermore, we kindly ask you, our dear siblings, to proceed with your case in a Christian and Evangelic manner. […] Also, we ask you, our siblings, not to use violence against God, the king or the divine orders.76

I do not share Peter Ratkoš’ conclusion according to which this is a case of popular or radical Reformation,77 but I would argue that the evangelical movement was present in Besztercebánya at the time of the miner revolt and the imprisonment of Cordatus and Kresling, and indeed this was most probably in part a consequence of their work. The use of the words cristes unnd ewangeliß clearly indicate the spread of the evangelical movement, and the short sentence calling for respect for the social order is not simply a paraphrase of the familiar idea of Saint Paul (Romans 13:1), but rather corresponds quite precisely to the relevant Wittenberg teaching, a detailed exposition of which one finds in Luther’s Temporal authority: to what extent it should be obeyed of 1523.78 One sees this clearly on the addressee’s page in Hodrusbánya, where two days later chaplain Jacob Zanacker gave a considerably more nuanced version of the same ideas, fearlessly admonishing the secular authorities.79 Data from 1524 indicate that the printing of German Reformation books was as much an issue in the mining towns of northern Hungary as it was in Sopron or Nagyszeben (Hermannstadt in German, today Sibiu in Romania).80

In the documents pertaining to the uprising, five of the authors of letters use indisputably Lutheran introductory greetings and closing regards or greetings and closings reminiscent of Luthern formulas.81 One of them is Benedikt Lang of Hodrusbánya, presumably a layman.82 He offered a decisive argument in the debate regarding whether or not the ideas of the Reformation played a role in the uprising and whether the Reformation itself had a significant influence in Hungary in the period before the Battle of Mohács. However, one must also bear in mind the fact that the use of apostolic greetings was not peculiar exclusively to the rebels and the clergy who were in contact with them. In the summer of 1526, following the suppression of the uprising, representatives of the mining towns (who were most probably of the patrician class) began their report, which was sent from Buda to Besztercebánya, with the same words: Gnade unnd fride in Christo Jesu beivor.83

It is not easy to decide whether one can take the miners’ letter of 29 December as an example of literary remnants of significant language use. It contains the phrase verbi Dei ministri, which was later to rise to considerable importance as a designation.84 Gustav Hammann (1922–1978) considers it less a medium of conveying an idea and more a technical term referring to the preacher employed by the town,85 and he may well be correct. János Breznyik quotes a Slavicus verbi Dei minister from Selmecbánya in 1521 and makes mention of other information from 1515 too.86 It is worth noting, however, that the former Besztercebánya guest priest Simon Bernhard used the innovations of Reformation language in his letter of May 1526 to Selmecbánya. He begins with the apostolic greetings and writes that he is going to a place “where they gladly hear the word of the Lord and let it be spread freely.”87

The question of the Corpus Christi Fraternity of Besztercebánya and the similar organizations of the neighboring mining towns (the Corpus Christi Fraternity of Körmöcbánya and the Blessed Virgin Fraternities of Selmecbánya and Hodrusbánya) seems distant from the search for traces of the new language of the Reformation. In the case of such institutions, it is difficult to draw clear distinctions between their religious and secular functions, in other words the roles they played in promoting piety and the roles they played in serving specific interests. The problem can be briefly summarized as follows. During the days of the revolt, the miners had taken their guild boxes from their original guarding posts, the chapels, and did not pay their religious dues, but rather spent the money of the fraternity to address their “own” needs. With the suppression of the uprising, the boxes had to be returned and the miners’ roles in the handling of their finances were limited. One finds the first interpretation of these events in a letter of judgment written by palatine Werbőczy (who opposed the miners) and the investigation reports of the local authorities. The miners’ act is considered theft and sacrilege.88 Given analogous situations abroad, one could not exclude an explanation according to which the handling of the funds constituted a Reformation reinterpretation of old Church institutions, though the available sources do not provide any specific support for this view. One can however take seriously the notion that the loss of prestige of the tradition of the Eucharist and the spread of new communal forms of piety had some influence on the events.

The peculiarly medieval world of the fraternities and the old Church vocabulary were enriched with new elements. An organization above the townships appeared, the collaboration of the aforementioned fraternities, a new “unity” (anikait),89 a treaty of mutual defense and alliance “in body and soul” (mit leib, guett unnd leben).90 This mutual cooperation did not go so far as to bring about the unification of the guild treasuries, though this would not have been practical anyway, but there were signs of collaboration across the borders of the guilds: the manner in which members of the guilds greeted one another. The term “Bruder” no longer referred solely to the members of one’s guild, but also included allied fraternities,91 and the apostolic greeting and its variants functioned as another tool for identification.

The aforementioned unidentified scrivener and preacher (possibly Gilg) can perhaps be identified with the help of some of the letters written at the time by Heinrich Keschinger, the preacher of Korpona (today Krupina in Slovakia). The primary topic of the correspondence between Keschinger and the council of the town of Bártfa (today Bardejov in Slovakia) in the spring of 1525 was the frustration of the people of Bártfa that they were unable to acquire the preacher, who in his letters used an unmistakably “evangelical” style, for their city. Keschinger hesitated not simply because of the promise he had made to the people of Korpona and his sense of responsibility with regards to them, but also because of information indicating that the archbishop of Esztergom (who was the sovereign pontiff of the parish of Bártfa) had written a letter endeavoring to prevent his invitation.92 The Korpona council intervened in the exchange of letters on Keschinger’s side on 7 May, 1525, arguing in support of maintaining his status:

[…] since your Prudences can obtain a good or even better preacher far more easily than we could, much as for instance preacher Gorg from Teschen, a true, scholarly and evangelical man (ain frumer, gelerter, ewangelischer man), came to Besztercebánya to substitute for the preacher until his return, if your Prudences were to ask him in a Christian manner, we do not think he would refuse.93

This sentence suggests that the chaplain or deputy of the preacher Simon Bernhard (who was invited from Teschen) was Georg (Gorg, Gilg), who at the time of the revolt and in the absence of Bernhard, Cordatus and Kresling stayed in Besztercebánya, and he may have been the author of the letters, the style of which is “evangelical,” on behalf of the miners. On the basis of the style of his letter written in 1539, this particular Teschen preacher Georg, who in May 1525 played a role in a criminal investigation in Besztercebánya94 and who was also invited to the mining towns in 1528,95 can be identified as Georg Rother, who in the end succeeds in sending one of his colleagues to Hungary.96

Cordatus and Kresling were released from the prison in Esztergom in February, 1526 and from the next year on they worked in Lower Silesia. Cordatus taught at the academy in Liegnitz,97 while Johannes Kresling probably regained his strength in the mining towns before beginning his service at the Church of Saint Barbara in Wrocław (Boroszló).98 According to the municipal account books, in the summer of 1526 he received wine at the expense of the town, and as did a certain pfarrer von Ofen (a person who can be only identified as Kresling), once in Selmecbánya and twice in Besztercebánya.99 This conclusion is also supported by the fact that after working in more Silesian towns and then in Korpona, from 1541 until his death he was the parson of Selmecbánya.100

The close relationship between Kresling and the mining towns, and more specifically Selmecbánya, was guaranteed by his ties to the notary of Selmecbánya, Francfordinus, who influenced his invitation to serve as preacher and his rehabilitation following his imprisonment. Francfordinus was not only Kreslinger’s peer and schoolmate in Vienna and Krakow but also a Humanist co-author belonging to the circle of primate György Szatmári. Since Francfordinus’s fate is obscure after 1536, it is hard to tell if he had any direct role in Kresling’s invitation to Selmecbánya in 1541.101

On the Language of the Defenders of Faith

There is considerably more documentation available regarding the language of those who rejected the teachings of the Reformers in the period in question, and it is replete with more stereotypes than the sources I have discussed so far, so I will not provide a detailed examination of it. However, in her essay on the Reformation Katalin Péter makes an observation that merits more thorough analysis. In 1514, Tamás Bakócz labeled the ideas of the Reformers “zizania,” a wild species of grass. This term, however, is absent from the texts written against Luther, in which one finds instead characterizations such as “schism,” “sect,” and “heresy,” alongside other dismissive terms.102 The difference in the notions is evident: the schismatic, the sectarian and the heretic break away from the body of Christ, from the Mother Church, and are considered enemies, like the Hussites, the heretics par excellence of the age and region. Zizania, in contrast, is a weed that mixes with the grain, and Christ himself offers a parable against destroying it: “lest while ye gather up the tares, ye root up also the wheat with them” (Matthew 13:29). The implication is that the preachers of falsehoods cannot be distinguished from the true children of the Church on the basis of recognizable markers and thus they cause it to break up from within. Thus it is clear that while primate Tamás Bakócz acknowledged the false preachers as members of his own Church, since the 1521 Bull of Pope Leo X the followers of Luther, like the Hussites, did not belong to the Church.

One does find one mention of zizania with reference to Reformation ideas in Hungary, but this finding supports the interpretation given above. In the spring of 1526 the city of Kassa (today Košice in Slovakia) came to the defense of its accused preacher (in all likelihood Wolfgang Schustel), explaining to the vicar of Eger that he did not listen to false teachings.103 The author of the letter presumably used the zizania metaphor (which is more mild in the traditional language of the church) in order to avoid any open and unambiguous condemnation of the false teachings against which objections had been raised.

Following the Leipzig debate of 1519 there were clear political and propaganda reasons behind the use of a single term by their opponents for the Czech Hussites and the Saxon Lutherans, and following the issue of the aforementioned Bull of 1521 there was no longer any real need to explain this. Nonetheless, there is a deeper explanation for the fact that in the eyes of its critics the “hopeless confusion” (“ein heilloses Durcheinander”)104 of the early Reformation was seen as such a unified system or worldview that it could be denoted with reference to a single person: “Lutheran.” The defenders of the faith, whose verdict, according to Dorothea Wendebourg’s famous thesis, made the Reformation what it was,105 were absolutely aware of the fact that the new faith fundamentally rejected the established system, even if in individual elements of the teachings there was not that much that was new. However, the categorical call of the Reformation to draw qualitative distinctions (between divine right and human right, the law and Scripture, faith and love, the kingdom of Christ and the world of mortals, etc.106) made it more dangerous than any spiritualist or Humanist critique of the Church.

Conclusion

On the basis of the intertextual analysis I have offered here, one can consider the 1522 letter of Bartholomeus Francfordinus Pannonius one of the texts of Hungarian Humanism. In contrast, the 1523 letter of Queen Mary of Habsburg demonstrated the queen’s interest in and knowledge of Lutheran theology, but also was expressive of her desire to maintain distance as a sovereign from the Reformation. The views that found expression in the course of the 1524 heretic inquest in Sopron manifest a mix of traditional Franciscan criticism of the Church and Lutheran ideas. At the time of the mining town revolt (1525), clearly following Luther’s example, the miners use the apostolic greeting of Saint Paul (Romans 1:7) as a distinguishing marker with which to begin their letters to their comrades. In their use, the greeting served as a means of identification, as was also true in the case of the so-called evangelical movement in Germany. In addition, the pairing of the terms “Christian and evangelical” was also a new linguistic turn that marked the new language of the Reformers. These details and the sources cited here indicate the significant influence of the Reformation in the pre-Mohács German speaking communities in Hungary, but there is little data to suggest that the movement ever crossed the border between German and Hungarian speaking communities at the time.

As for questions pertaining to the use of language in sixteenth-century Hungary, language varied considerably depending on whether it was written or oral use. In the multilingual communities each language had its own spaces and functions, and languages could not easily be switched or substituted one for the other. I have examined only a slice of this polyglot system in this essay, first and foremost the Latin and German written sources, and while I hope to have demonstrated the relevance of peculiar turns of phrase that are indicators of the spread of the ideas of the Reformation, I nonetheless would not venture to say exactly how these and similar turns of speech figured within the complex systems of written vs. oral culture, religious and profane use of language, or “mother” tongue vs. “father” tongue.

It has become something of a cliché in the scholarship on the German and Hungarian Reformation that the ideas of the Reformers exerted a fundamental influence on society in part because they were expressed in the mother tongues of the congregations and in part because of the medium of printing. Neither of these two factors was entirely new at the time, but together they released energies that until then had not been seen. We can assess the dimensions of the linguistic event by examining bibliographies of the re-printings of individual texts, but the question remains as to whether or not contemporaries were themselves aware of these processes.107 One of the most prominent representatives of the Reformation in Hungary, Gáspár Heltai (ca. 1510–1574), definitely was, for in his work entitled “Háló” (or “Net”), when writing on the 1538 religious debate of Segesvár (Schäßburg in German, today Sighişoara in Romania), he used a metaphor that is poetic but also captures the storminess of the new uses of language: “And at the time here and there the word of the Lord began to flash like lightening, both in Hungary and in Transylvania.”108

 

Archival Sources

Magyar Nemzeti Levéltár Országos Levéltára (MNL OL) – [The National Archives of Hungary] Fényképgyűjtemény [Photo Collection] Diplomatikai Fényképgyűjtemény [Photo Collection of Medieval Charters] (DF) Nr. 267658–267669.

Staatsarchiv Nürnberg (StAN), Brandenburger Literalien (BL) Nr. 1193.

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Translated by Thomas Cooper