a symptom of the transition from medieval to early modern Christianity.

50
Historiographical trends have thus paradoxically served to cement even as
they have complicated the models of periodization that we have inherited
from the medieval and early modern eras themselves.

Approaches, models, and interdisciplinary influences

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The foregoing tendencies are one dimension of the problems we still face
when trying to conceptualize and explain religious change. The second part
of this essay examines the ways in which scholarly approaches to the past
have evolved in the last fifty years and the impact of interdisciplinary influ-
ences upon this.51 Once again, the ensuing discussion is organized schemati-
cally and artificially disentangles threads that are very closely interwoven
in practice.
The first theme is teleology. All of the processes examined above
have been imported into grand linear narratives about the making of the
modern world. The displacement of paganism by Christianity, the Refor-
mation, the disenchantment of the world, and the rise of toleration are part
and parcel of a whiggish story of progress toward the more rational and
civilized world, infused by a respect for difference and a commitment to
liberty of speech and thought, in which we think we live. Together with the
demise of feudalism, the advent of printing and mass literacy, the apotheosis
of new scientific theories, and the emergence of individualism, these changes
have been seen as a prelude and stepping stone toward enlightenment and
modernity. Within this tradition of Anglo-­A merican history, Catholicism
has often been depicted as a reactionary force of resistance and as an obsta-
cle to development. A further leitmotif is an emphasis on the rapidity and
inevitability of change — change envisaged as change for the better— and an
implicit or explicit tone of self-­congratulation. At root it has entailed celebra-
tion of our eventual liberation from the constraining and benighted mindset
that marked the Middle Ages. This view underpins prevailing models of
periodization and explains why medievalists resent the residual tendency of
early modernists to see their period as a mere prelude to a more interesting
and important era.52 The determination of earlier scholars to locate phenom-
ena like the rise of individualism and to identify Renaissances and Refor-
mations prior to 1500 — to, as it were, stress the “modernity” of the Middle
Ages — may itself be an index of the degree to which we all remain gripped
by these paradigms.53 Efforts to recast the Catholic Reformation less as a
rearguard response to Protestantism than as its elder cousin might likewise

Walsham / Migrations of the Holy 251

be seen as an attempt to rescue Catholicism from relegation to the status of
an enemy of modernization and to claim at least part of the credit for engen-
dering it. The tendency of earlier Italian historians to present Tridentine
Catholicism as an essentially negative force in the march toward modernity
is no less symptomatic: according to these accounts, one of its few virtues
was to have provoked a healthy reaction that ushered in the age of reason
and the Neapolitan Enlightenment.54

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The more recent backlash in the academy against teleological his-
tory is one of the reasons why many historians (including myself ) have been
so squeamish and skeptical about charting development and so reluctant
to acknowledge that decisive change took place. Hence, for example, the
emphasis on the intolerance of the early modern world and on its continu-
ing adherence to an essentially medieval if slightly modified economy of the
sacred; hence, too, the tendency to question associated narratives about the
advent of the mechanical press as an agent of major cultural and epistemo-
logical transformations. The problem here is that we have not succeeded in
escaping from the stranglehold of narratives of modernity; we have merely
pushed its emergence further forward in time. Nor has our reaction against
these models helped us to comprehend better the origins of the mental and
cultural world which we inhabit, or the agents and instruments that brought
about those transformations.
It is a striking feature of the recent resurgence of grand narratives
like Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age that they are often less concerned with
causation than with describing the secession of religion from public life
and space and the process by which unbelief eventually became the default
option in modern society.55 Insofar as they attempt the task of explanation,
they tend to fall back on earlier Weberian models of “disenchantment” and
reproduce ideas about the rise of disciplinary structures and ideals of “civi-
lization” linked with Foucault and Norbert Elias. Explicitly conceived as a
counterpoint to traditional triumphalist tales of intellectual emancipation,
Brad Gregory’s The Unintended Reformation revolves around the argument
that the cultural preoccupations of Western modernity were an unforeseen
consequence of the religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth cen-
turies. Pointing to societal sea changes and slow, long-­term shifts, his book,
too, is reticent about both the part played by human agency and the precise
motors and mechanisms by which the incremental developments he charts
came about. The story he tells, moreover, is tinged with recrimination: he
regards Protestantism as overwhelmingly, if indirectly, responsible for ten-
dencies that amount to a “disaster” and that have left us with “a poisoned

252 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 44.2 / 2014

legacy.” In this respect, he reinstates the very polemical framework he avow-
edly eschews, albeit in reverse.56
The second theme is closely linked with the first: the evolving role
played by confessional sentiment in the writing of religious history. It is a
truism to say that the study of religion in the medieval and early modern
eras was, until the late twentieth century, dominated by believers. It was the
domain of people convinced of the spiritual truth of the bodies of doctrine

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and practice that they investigated; it was overtly or subconsciously apolo-
getic in character.57 This perspective on events presented Protestantism as a
swift and popular movement that grasped the hearts of minds of the popu-
lace rapidly and put down firm and lasting roots. Its triumph rode on the
back of deep dissatisfaction with the late medieval church and its hierarchy,
which was riddled with abuse and increasingly failing to meet the spiritual
needs of society at large. Burdensome, oppressive, and superstitious, pre-­
Reformation Catholicism was a yoke that the laity was delighted to throw
off in favor of the Gospel of justification by faith. Finding its taproot in the
propagandist histories of Protestantism written in the period itself, which
heralded its arrival as quite literally providential, this narrative depicted
the Middle Ages as a period of deterioration and moribund stagnation and
presented the Reformation as an act of liberation.58 Meanwhile, those who
chose to study medieval Christianity as a religious system rather than (or as
well as) a political institution were typically members of the priesthood or
monastic orders, or committed and devout Catholic laypeople. Protestant
historians, by contrast, neglected pre-­Reformation piety as an unsuitable
and distasteful subject for study. Heirs of the Enlightenment, they dismissed
it as irrational and credulous.
The decisive shift in interpretation that emerged in the 1970s and
gathered pace in the 80s reflected a more critical awareness of the affini-
ties of these existing historical orthodoxies with confessional myths, and it
turned some of them on their heads.59 The revolution in understanding of
the English Reformation is indicative: now this was seen as an unwelcome,
unwanted, and haphazard development that did not spring up from below
but rather was imposed from above. Contingent on political events and vul-
nerable to reversal, it met with considerable passive and active resistance:
ordinary people dragged their feet and complied reluctantly where they did
not rebel outright. Protestant theology and piety, as presented by revision-
ists such as Christopher Haigh, was alien and forbidding, especially in the
guise of predestination and its renewed insistence upon moral asceticism.
It faced an uphill struggle to implant itself successfully in the infertile soil

Walsham / Migrations of the Holy 253

of popular culture.60 Echoing tendencies in the scholarship on the German
Reformation embodied in the research of Gerald Strauss and others, the
keynote of this historiography was its emphasis on the ultimate failure of
the Reformation to transform collective mentalities— a theme that reflected
the complaints of Protestant ministers of the second generation, whose disil-
lusionment with the superficial, insincere, and “carnal” religion of many of
their parishioners shines through the ordinances and homiletic literature of

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this era.61
This pessimistic reassessment of the appeal and impact of Protes-
tantism was accompanied by a reappraisal of the late medieval church and
pre-­Reformation piety. “Traditional religion,” as depicted in Eamon Duffy’s
deeply influential The Stripping of the Altars, was in robust health. It was
vibrant, flexible, and vital and continued to command the support and
devotion of the English laity until and indeed beyond the eve of its vio-
lent demise. Cohesive, harmonious, and community-­building, it was unruf-
fled by the specter of significant heresy and untroubled by the privatizing
tendencies that some historians have seen as a kind of Trojan horse under-
mining it from within.62 Of course, Duffy’s reinterpretation might be seen
less as a side effect of the withering of religious feeling in historical writing
than of its redirection. Not shy of wearing his denominational colors on
his sleeve, Duffy’s powerful new analysis can be seen as another version of
confessionalism. It is impossible to ignore the tone of regret at the passing of
this mental and cultural world in his book, and in the evocative picture and
exquisite miniature he paints of the rape and pillage of traditional religion
in The Voices of Morebath.63 A similar if more muted note of lament can be
detected in John Bossy’s depiction of the translation of Christianity from a
social miracle to an isolating, individual, and asocial creed. For all his sensi-
tive engagement with French sociology, Bossy, too, has found it difficult to
elude his Catholic upbringing.64
These trends have had three consequences. First, they have made
it much harder to account for both the origins and the entrenchment of
the Reformation. In seeking an explanation for why this unpopular revolu-
tion prevailed, historians have been confronted by what has been christened
the “compliance conundrum.”65 Why did people go along with a movement
that destroyed a church they allegedly loved? Was the power of the Tudor
state so great that it could merely impose its will, or, as more recently pro-
posed by Ethan Shagan, did the common people pragmatically collaborate
with a process that enabled them to gain materially?66 Both the strength and

254 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 44.2 / 2014

the weakness of Shagan’s self-­styled “post-­revisionist” account is its deter-
mination to deflect our attention away from a confessional preoccupation
with evangelical conversion. In doing so, though, he arguably perpetuates,
indirectly, the revisionist precept that Protestantism was an inherently unat-
tractive system of practice and belief and eclipses the significance of a Refor-
mation “loosed by the Holy Spirit” and fuelled by genuine zeal. At times he
seems in danger of denying religious belief its agency as a force for historical

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change.67 The difficulty implicit in some “post-­confessional” history is that
it contains a whiff of an older instinct to see religion as a mere cipher of
political, economic, and social self-­interest.68
Secondly, these developments have been responsible in large part for
the rise of the trope of the “long Reformation.” The prolonged process that
entrenched the Reformation in society has been envisaged as a function of
the populace’s ongoing resistance to the aggressive assault upon its religious
heritage. This has also fostered a tendency to see cultural continuities either
as forms of defiant “survivalism” or dissimulation or as concessions made
by reformed ministers to a mindset that they proved unable to eliminate.
Their failure in this respect stemmed mainly from the fact that Protestant-
ism could not offer the same level of sacramental or magical compensation
for the day to day problems that beset premodern people living in a hostile
environment untamed by technology as that offered by medieval Catholi-
cism. Perceptible beneath the surface of Bob Scribner’s work, such function-
alism has infiltrated a vast swathe of recent historiography, and few of us
have proved completely immune to its seductive influence.69
Thirdly, revisionist history has tended to stifle exploration of the
changes taking place within late medieval religion. Although Duffy him-
self emphasized how Catholic devotion adapted to the new conditions and
impulses confronting it in the fifteenth century, his work has nevertheless
repressed interest in the ways in which “traditional piety” was evolving in
the context of fresh intellectual, social, and environmental challenges. The
organic transformations and fissures that were developing inside the church
are now beginning to receive renewed attention,70 together with the “per-
plexing fragility” that some elements of piety (including the cults of pilgrim-
age and purgatory) exhibited when confronted by Protestantism. Some of
these strands of opinion and feeling were inflected by heresies like lollardy,
but others had a quite different genesis. They evolved from within “ortho-
doxy,” rather than in defiance of it.71 George Bernard’s recent reassessment
of the late medieval church marks a pendulum swing toward greater recog-

Walsham / Migrations of the Holy 255

nition of the vulnerabilities that coexisted uneasily with the vitality of this
institution and that facilitated its disintegration in the 1530s.72
Historiographical paradigms that echo denominational myths
persist in other respects. One of these is what Diarmaid MacCulloch has
called the “myth of the English Reformation” — the idea that from the
start it embodied a carefully constructed via media between the extremes
of radical Calvinism and Catholicism.73 Anglicanism, we have learned,

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did not emerge fully formed in the critical decades of initial upheaval, but
was “invented” by later churchmen like Richard Hooker.74 More recently,
Shagan has shown that the claim to religious moderation was a tool of power
used by both contemporaries and their Anglican heirs.75 A related myth is
the notion of English exceptionalism and the accompanying tendency to
extract England from the rest of mainland Europe and treat it as sui generis.
MacCulloch’s magisterial work has sought to correct this view by stressing
the interplay and traffic between reform in the British Isles and in the coun-
tries that comprised what, with “an element of imperial nostalgia,” we still
call “the Continent.”76 The longstanding neglect of radical and dissident
elements within the Reformation in favor of the dominant and triumphant
mainstream further reflects the degree to which our vision continues to be
distorted by the story told by the victors in the struggles for hegemony that
occurred inside Protestantism in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
The relative marginalization of Anabaptism from professional scholarship
is one manifestation of this displacement of varieties of belief that don’t fit
the monolithic categories engendered by confessionalization.77 The virtual
absence of the Freewillers from accounts of early evangelicalism is the result
of the “airbrushing” of this group from the historical record as an embarrass-
ing “heretical” tendency.78 Other silences in current historical writing indi-
cate just how far our interpretations are constrained by the decisions made
by those who produced the sources upon which we are compelled to rely.79
What we have seen, then, is not so much the death of confessional
historiography as its reconfiguration. Discussions of whether belief is an aid
or obstacle to understanding have not yet evaporated, and although scholar-
ship is steadily moving away from a tendency to take sides, to identify win-
ners and losers, and to answer ill-­conceived questions about “success” and
“failure” using contemporary standards as a yardstick, narratives born of
partisan polemic continue to color the spectacles through which we view the
past. Our analyses still bear the trace of ideological concepts and analytical
models created by the Reformation and earlier religious movements and are

256 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 44.2 / 2014

shaped by covert biases that derive from these.80 James Simpson has made
the compelling observation that post-­Enlightenment, Anglo-­A merican
scholarship is itself indebted to and a “reflex” of the Reformation discourse
of iconoclasm. Modern categories such as art, taste, and the aesthetic are
ironically shaped by fear of idolatry; they neutralize and render licit interest
in objects and practices which Protestantism ostensibly repudiates.81
Even the tendency “to commend the advantages of emancipating

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religious history from specific religious commitment” and to assume that
those without confessional affiliation are more capable of objectivity and
“properly detached scholarship” can be seen as a product of historical pro-
cesses that have led to the apotheosis of secular values and viewpoints in
the academy.82 Gregory himself provocatively makes this case in The Unin-
tended Reformation. He traces the intellectual formation of the assumptions
that now govern historical enquiry and calls upon scholars to abandon the
conventions of scientific rationalism and religious impartiality that prevail
and to be open about their beliefs. The controversy and discomfiture Greg-
ory’s book has provoked may itself be a symptom of how much we are the
children of the developments he describes, though his own position is not
wholly immune to criticisms of internal inconsistency.83
The third trend that has impeded, even as it has deepened, our
understanding of religious change is the profound influence that the dis-
ciplines of sociology and especially anthropology have exerted on our fields
of study over the last two generations. The absorption of the insights of
social scientists like Emile Durkheim and Clifford Geertz into the histori-
cal mainstream that occurred first in France in the circles of the Annales
School and then spread more widely into Continental and Anglo-­A merican
scholarship has been immensely fruitful.84 It has fostered a highly produc-
tive tendency to approach the past as a foreign country and as the quarry of
ethnography, though initially this entailed a not wholly helpful comparison
between historic forms of Christianity and the “primitive” cultures encoun-
tered by anthropologists in remote parts of the world, cultures removed in
space rather than time. But particularly in its earliest Annaliste phases it also
engendered a concern with the inertia and immobility of history — with the
extremely gradual geological and biological shifts that take place within the
lumbering entities that are collective mentalities. It prompted a preoccupa-
tion with the slow Darwinian evolution of the species that is culture rather
than with dramatic and violent revolutions of short duration, and it sup-
pressed investigations of the relationship between cause and effect and the

Walsham / Migrations of the Holy 257

impact of human action in favor of considering the more impersonal forces
by which societies are buffeted in the longue durée. Historical anthropology,
in short, has been less interested in change than in durability and stasis.85
The cross-­fertilization of history with sociology and anthropology,
together with the influence of Marxist ideology in the 1950s and 60s, has
had two other significant side effects. It precipitated a turn away from eccle-
siastical toward social history, and from popes, bishops, priests, and minis-

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ters toward ordinary (and often eccentric and marginal) laypeople, and it
encouraged a tendency to view the relationship between elite and popular
culture as essentially antagonistic and adversarial.86 Hence the fascination
of Carlo Ginzburg, Jacques le Goff, Jean-­Claude Schmitt, and others with
the ways in which the unlearned and illiterate victims of official coercion and
repression subverted but were also subdued by hegemonic processes of accul-
turation. Such scholars have been interested less in the religious changes asso-
ciated with Christianization, reformation, disenchantment, and persecution
than in Gramscian forms of resistance to them.87 Despite recent awareness
of the problems of these bipolar models and growing emphasis on reciprocal
interaction and negotiation rather than aggressive confrontation, we have not
entirely succeeded in discarding their underlying assumptions. The current
revival of interest in the history of medieval clerical elites and ecclesiastical
institutions may be seen less as an abandonment of these traditions of cultural
anthropology than as an effort to extend them to embrace individuals and
structures that have hitherto been disregarded by its practitioners.88
Secondly, the rise of historical anthropology and one of its most
characteristic techniques, microhistory, has served to harrow our focus
onto particular episodes and incidents. These are approached as emblems,
hieroglyphs, and microcosms of wider cultural traits and are investigated
using the device of “thick description.” They are excavated like archaeologi-
cal artifacts or fossils or dissected as frozen biological specimens, and the
emphasis in analyzing them has been on deciphering meaning rather than
inferring causation and examining change over time. This has been deliber-
ate, an attempt to avoid reproducing the grand narratives that have hitherto
prevailed.89 In this respect, the work of microhistorians bears some resem-
blance to that of early and subsequent folklorists, whose preoccupation with
discerning the primordial pagan origins of the beliefs and practices they
recorded blinded them to the influences that conditioned their evolution
in the interim period.90 These instincts persist despite growing stress on the
need to recognize the mobility of culture and to see it less as a static entity
than a fluid and dynamic process.91

258 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 44.2 / 2014

 The fourth trend that has simultaneously facilitated and hampered
our comprehension of religious change is postmodernism. One of the more
curious effects of postmodern disillusionment with narratives of progress has
been a tendency to reproduce them by inversion: Foucault’s own story of the
dark underside of Enlightenment and the internalization of the mechanisms
of discipline and repression that marked the eighteenth century is a case in
point.92 Moreover, the preoccupation of scholars influenced by the linguistic

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turn with recovering the inner logic and rationality of past ideologies and
with emphasizing the relativity of “reason” has not been accompanied by
sufficient consideration of how one form of rationality and reason gave way
to another. Stuart Clark’s remarkable book Thinking with Demons studies
demonology as “a working system” of thought “at the height of its powers
to persuade.” His emphasis on its extraordinary resilience and capacity to
contain and absorb pockets of doubt makes it more difficult in many ways
makes to solve the riddle of why belief in witchcraft and demonic activity
eventually waned. Having dismissed the scientific revolution as the grim
reaper of what earlier historians labelled “superstition,” it leaves us with a yet
more intriguing and intractable problem of explanation.93
One of the difficulties associated with assessing long-­term trans-
formations of this kind is that the underlying causes of cultural change are
often hard to disentangle from their symptoms and side effects. In the case
of magic and the supernatural, some recent work has argued that the eight-
eenth century saw not so much the disintegration of belief in such phenom-
ena as its relocation from the public domain into the private sphere. Some
sectors of society became embarrassed to admit openly to an interest in the
occult for fear of being dismissed as “credulous,” but continued to ponder
and investigate it more discreetly. Michael Hunter describes this as the “rise
of schizophrenia,” while Blair Worden sees it as indicative of an alteration
in fashion and taste.94 Whether this split preceded or followed a shift in
the center of intellectual gravity is hard to assess, but both symptoms and
side-­effects must be credited with agency. Similar issues arise in relation to
iconoclasm: should abhorrence of idolatry be seen as the prelude to or the
outcome of these rites of violence? We need to think of them as examples not
merely of doctrine in action, but also as events in and through which theo-
logical positions were forged.95 The question of what precipitates shifts in
individual (and collective) attitude and opinion remains a tricky one. When,
how, and why do people change their minds? To what extent were medieval
and early modern men and women conscious of the “beliefs” they held, or
should we rather conceive of belief as a process and a practice, a verb rather

Walsham / Migrations of the Holy 259

than a noun? Such issues are only just beginning to be subjected to theoreti-
cal analysis, but one straw in the wind is the attention now being paid to
the notion of “conversion” and to the traces these internal “turnings” leave
in the contemporary record.96 One central issue here is the impossibility
of unravelling intellectual and affective experience from the narratives in
which such internal transformations are described, and by which they are
often retrospectively constructed. Another is the need to see “conversion”

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less as a unidirectional event, in which the outlook of one body of belief and
believers prevails, and more as a conversation, involving reciprocity.97
This brings us directly to a further consequence of postmodernism
that impinges on our understanding of change: the insistence that historians
cannot get beyond documents and discourses to the realities that lie behind.
The effect of claiming that a veil of language always divides us from the past
has been to reduce historical events to epiphenomena of texts and to make us
suspect that the movements and transformations we notice in them may be
no more than optical illusions and tricks of evidentiary light.98 The linguistic
turn has also sensitized us to the possibility that the continuities we observe
in texts might be deceptive: as in the charters and hagiographical lives that
proliferated in the wake of the Norman Conquest, textual continuities might
disguise genuine moments of rupture and change, and camouflage innova-
tion in the cloak of antiquity and tradition.99 Furthermore, postmodernism
has reminded us that literature and language are not merely mirrors but
may also operate as motors and catalysts of transmutation. Words are “social
deeds.” Shifts in the register of discourse and in literary convention and form
may be generative as well as indicative of cultural transformations.100 Altera-
tions in the use and meaning of words likewise illuminate the conflux of
changes in mentality and culture that ought to be at the center of our atten-
tion. John Bossy designated this as one of his “migrations of the holy.” He
considered highly significant the process by which the term religion moved
from defining an attribute or attitude of piety to designating an objective
social and moral entity and an abstract system of practice and belief, in par-
ticular as a consequence of the multiplication of versions of the Christian
faith in the era of the Reformations.101 Recent work by Phil Withington has
also been attentive to the connections between terminological and social
change in ways that deserve emulation.102 And it should not pass notice that
in the guise of what Edward Muir calls the “reformed revolution in ritual
theory” the early modern period was a critical juncture in the emergence of
the distinction between sign and signified, representation and thing repre-
sented, that lies at the heart of the linguistic turn itself.103

260 Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies / 44.2 / 2014