Abstract
There can be no doubt that in seventeenth-century Christian Europe, religion provided a universal mode of thinking and of expression which pervaded everything. For many, that remained unchanged. Yet historians agree that the period provided a crucial stage in the emancipation of the human mind from the blindly accepted dogma and intellectual traditions of the past. Such emancipation, as we would expect, does not occur suddenly, and it would be misleading to see what has been called the ‘intellectual revolution’ and the ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century as a compact and readily identifiable phenomenon. Its roots clearly stretched back into the early Renaissance or before, and the Reformation (as we shall see) provided a crucial impetus; similarly, its effects are not altogether clear before the high enlightenment of the eighteenth century. But did the decisive (or revolutionary) stage in the emancipatory process occur during the seventeenth century, and if so what forms did it take?
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Notes
C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: the Cosmos of a Sixteenth-century Miller (London, 1980), passim.
P. Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), pp. 65–77 and passim;
R. Muchembled, Culture and Elite Culture in France (Baton Rouge, Louisiana, 1985; French orig. Paris, 1978); Ginsburg, Cheese and Worms, pp. xiv–xix;
R. Charrier, ‘Culture as appropriation’, in Understanding Popular Culture, ed. S. L. Kaplan (Berlin, 1984), pp. 229–53;
S. Clark, ‘French historians and early modern popular culture’, PP, 100 (1983), 62–99; B. Reay (ed.), ‘Popular culture in early modern England’, in Popular Culture in Seventeenth-century England (London, 1985), pp. 1–30; and, on the enforcement of sexual morality, chs 4–5 in the same volume.
There is a very large body of literature on millenarianism in England, but see notably K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971), pp. 156–73; and
B. S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men: a Study in Seventeenth-century Millenarianism (London, 1972). For a much less significant but interesting continental manifestation,
see R.M. Golden, ‘Religious extremism in the mid-17th century: the Parisian illuminés’, EurStRev, 9 (1979), 195–210.
This extraordinary outcome of one of the most severe witch-hunts on the Franco-Spanish border is analysed by G. Henningsen, The Witches’ Advocate: Basque Witchcraft and the Spanish Inquisition (1609–1614) (Reno, Nevada, 1980), esp. chs 11–13;
see also G. Parker, ‘Some recent work on the Inquisition in Spain and Italy’, JMH, 57 (1982), 519–32.
C. Larner, C.H. Lee and H.V. McLachlan, A Source-book of Scottish Witchcraft (Glasgow, 1977), pp. 25–39, 120–42.
B. P. Levack, The Witch-hunt in Early Modern Europe (London, 1987), pp. 221–4, emphasises the spread of fashionable scepticism as an example of elite withdrawal from popular culture.
Christina Larner, The Thinking Peasant: Popular and Educated Belief in Pre-industrial Culture (Glasgow, 1982), p. 35.
An Astrological Diary of the Seventeenth Century: Samuel Jeake of Rye 1652–1699, ed. M. Hunter and A. Gregory (Oxford, 1988), pp. 154f, 175–7, and passim.
See especially J. Delumeau, La peur en occident (Paris, 1978), and his Le péché et la peur (Paris, 1983). A much more optimistic view of late medieval Christianity is adopted
by J. Bossy, notably in Christianity in the West 1400–1700 (Oxford, 1985), and in ‘The Counter-Reformation and the people of Catholic Europe’, PP, 47 (1970), 51–70.
The incident is recounted in D.W. Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (Cambridge, 1984), ch. 2.
J. Delumeau, Le catholicisme entre Luther et Voltaire (Paris, 1971; transl. London, 1977), part III, ch. 4, especially pp. 290f.
B. Lenman, ‘The limits of godly discipline in the early modern period with particular reference to England and Scotland’, and M. Ingram, ‘Religion, communities and moral discipline in late 16th and early 17th-century England’, both in Religion and Society in Early Modern Europe 1500–1800, ed. K. von Greyerz (London, 1984), pp. 124–45, 177–93.
R.J. W. Evans, The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy 1550–1700 (Oxford, 1979), p. 362 and ch. 10 passim; ominously, von Chaos became the founder of the Austrian military academy! The practice of astrology and alchemy was widespread in the royal and aristocratic houses of Europe. For one of the more enthusiastic cases,
see Evans, Rudolf II and his World (Oxford, 1973).
J. Tazbir, ‘The fate of Polish Protestantism in the 17th century’, in A Republic of Nobles, ed. J.K. Fedorowicz (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 198–217.
E. L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge, 1979), pp. 636–82, argues that the real difference in scientific and intellectual development between Protestant and Roman Catholic Europe can be related directly to the greater freedom of the press in much of the former.
R.J.W. Evans, The Wechel Presses: Humanism and Calvinism in Central Europe 1572–1627 (Oxford, 1975).
F. Furet and J. Ozouf, Lire et écrire: l’alphabétisation des français de Calvin à Jules Ferry, vol. 1 (Paris, 1977; transi. Cambridge, 1983), esp. pp. 19–27;
D. Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford, 1980), pp. 62–103, 147 and passim.
M. Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-century England (Cambridge, 1981), pp. 19–22, has emphasised that especially amongst women there may have been significantly more who were able to read than to write. However, some of the former learnt to write their signature and no more, so we may accept signature-based literacy rates as estimates standing somewhere between passive and active literacy: between the higher proportion of people able only to spell their way through texts, and the smaller proportion who were able both to read and to write satisfactorily. Evidence on southern Europe during this period is still very sparse.
For an authoritative survey of French material, see R. Chattier, The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France (Princeton, 1987), pp. 145–239 and elsewhere; for England, see M. Spufford, Small Books, especially chs 3–4.
H. A. E. van Gelder, The Two Reformations in the Sixteenth Century (The Hague, 1961). On England, see also the references and wide-ranging discussion on religion and science by C. Hill, H. F. Kearney, T. K. Rabb and B.J. Shapiro in PP, from vol. 27 (1964) through to 40 (1968);
by C. Webster, The Great Instauration: Science, Mediane and Reform, 1626–60 (London, 1975); and
by J. Morgan, ‘Puritanism and science: a reinterpretation’, HJ, 22 (1979), 535–60.
C. Ginzburg, ‘High and low: the theme of forbidden knowledge in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries’, PP, 73 (1976), 28–41.
S. Drake, Galileo (Oxford, 1980), pp. 53–72, including the citation, p. 64.
P. Redondi, Galileo: Heretic (Princeton, 1988).
The implications of Cartesianism on religious faith, and the wider repercussions of the gradual rationalisation of the supernatural environment, was explored in P. Hazard, The European mind 1680–1715 (1935; translation from French published in London in 1953).
See also M. C. Jacob, ‘The crisis of the European mind: Hazard revisited’, in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. P. Mack and M. C. Jacob (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 251–71.
M. B. Hall, ‘Science in the early Royal Society’, in The Emergence of Modern Science, ed. M. Crosland (London, 1975), p. 58.
See also M. Hunter, Science and Society in Restoration England (Cambridge, 1981), ch. 2.
On the German intellectual scene, see notably R.J.W. Evans, ‘Learned societies in Germany in the 17th century’, EurStR, 7 (1977), 129–51.
Few historians nowadays would wish to single out the ‘ideological causes’ of the collapse of political consensus in England 1625–42. Nevertheless J. P. Sommerville, Politics and Ideology in England 1603–1640 (London, 1986), pp. 231–8 and passim, has argued persuasively for a recognition of the sheer range of political ideas current among literate Englishmen at the time, and the extent to which these ideas did influence the choices of many participants when disagreement over the basic constitutional and political principles became open.
G. E. Aylmer, The Levellers in the English Revolution (Ithaca, 1975), pp. 161–8 and passim.
For the broader context, a useful introduction is F. D. Dow, Radicalism in the English Revolution (Oxford, 1985), chs 2–3.
R. Ashcraft, Revolutionary Politics and Locke’s ‘Two Treatises of Government’ (Princeton, 1986).
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© 1990 Thomas Munck
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Munck, T. (1990). Beliefs, mentalités, knowledge and the printed text. In: Seventeenth Century Europe. History of Europe. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20626-1_9
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