Kirche und Dorf: Religiose Bedurfnisse und kirchliche Stiftung auf dem Lande vor derReformation. by Rosi FuhrmannReview by: Thomas A. Brady, Jr.The Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 29, No. 1 (Spring, 1998), pp. 161-162Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2544431 .

Accessed: 20/06/2014 13:30

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

The Sixteenth Century Journal is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to TheSixteenth Century Journal.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 13:30:38 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Book Reviews 161

Kirche und Dorf: Religiose Bedurfnisse und kirchliche Stiftung auf dem Lande vor der Reformation. Rosi Fuhrmann. Quellen und Forschungen zur Agrargeschichte, vol. 40. Stuttgart: Gustav FischerVerlag, 1995. xi + 506 pp. n.p.

Since the 1960s, the brilliant revival of rural studies has become one of the most promi- nent features of the scholarly landscape of late medieval and early modern Central Europe. It long ran parallel to, but is now converging with, the French tradition that comes down from Marc Bloch.With all of its strengths, historians of the Reformation era have sometimes criticized this scholarship for treating religion in a purely instrumental manner as a static adjunct of social and, above all, political interests and motives. Even the exceptions, notably the studies by Franziska Conrad and Peter Bierbrauer, have not gone far beyond the concept of how the rural common people responded to the Protestant Reformers' provision of reli- gious legitimacy for their political desires. This tradition, long led by the Bern historian Peter Blickle, now produces a historian of religion of extraordinary depth and talent. In Rosi Fuhrmann the subject of village religion in late medieval Central Europe has found its his- torian.

Furhmann's Kirche und Dorf treats the opportunities for the common people to partici- pate in the founding and organizing of religious services and ecclesiastical institutions in decades preceding the Peasants'War of 1525. Based on extensive archival research (at Karlsruhe, Stuttgart, Freiburg, and Speyer) into the southwestern region, the generalizing quality of Fuhrmann's conclusions is greatly enhanced by the relative uniformity of canon law.The book embodies all the unsurpassed strengths of Central European historical schol- arship. It offers a handbook of local religious institutions in the late medieval Empire, a worthy successor to the pioneering works of Karl Siegfried Bader and Dietrich Kurze. If you want to know how the rural benefice system operated, how parishes were founded, or how they were actually run in the pre-Reformation era, this is the book you should read. And the entire subject is set in a developmental context, as one expects from historians trained in this tradition, which reaches back to the Carolingian age.

Here we are dealing with institutions, in the analysis of which, of course, the Central Europeans have no masters. At the very outset, however, we are served notice that the real subject of this study is religion.The book's central question is: How did late medieval villag- ers reconcile Christian views of God, humanity, the universe with the needs of everday life? Fuhrmann approaches the question by discussing the legal and doctrinal preconditions for the people's participation in the forming of a Christian society. And while she recognizes that "needs" are both inward and outward, psychological and social, she argues that the former cannot be studied directly and can, at most, be inferred from studies of the latter.This is a methodological principle, not a philosophical one, for she recognizes that while the mental and material realms stood in dialectical relationship to one another, mutually influ- enced and influencing, she also wisely concedes that what the villagers thought can at best be inferred from what they did. It was the same for the church as a whole, for the villagers had to resolve in miniature the same difficult discriminations between spiritualia and tempo- ralia.

They did so through the activity studied in the book's first major part, the act of Stftung or "foundation," which means, as it does in English, both "establish" and"endow."There follows a second part on systems of law-ecclesiastical, civil, and customary-that defined the field of lay religious actions and clerical responses to them.An essential theme in this part is Fuhrmann's discussion of the legal institution of the ban (Bannrecht), the power to give dis- tinct status to a thing or a right, which exempted it from the rules that applied to other

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 13:30:38 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

162 Sixteenth CentturyJournal XXIX / 1 (1998)

things or rights.While this power could be employed to protect thing or right for a certain purpose, it could also be employed to prevent the possessors from actually using the thing or right. This meant that the ability of villagers to protect the churches' endowments, both properties and rights, depended very much on their own autonomy and their own ability to protect themselves and their interests.This variable ability to protect the parish's endowment for the pastoral service of the village lies at the nexus between local religious life and com- munal formation and development.

The third part analyzes the data Fuhrmann collected on rural parish foundations and endowments by lay initiative in the southwestern German states.The material is fragmen- tary, of course, and its interpretation difficult-everyday conditions for rural historians-but the yield is a picture of a movement to form a kind of popular "proprietary church" (Eigen- kirche) as a counterpart and to some degree a counterstrike to the noble proprietary church of the Middle Ages. Uncovering this movement provides a demonstration of, on the one hand, the general communalist tide that led up to, and tried but failed to find completion in, the Peasants'War of 1525, and, on the other, of how deeply the villagers understood the teachings of the Bible and the Church long before the Protestant Reformation.

The larger yield of Fuhrmann's book, therefore, is twofold. Her study of late medieval, rural religion shows that the central religious needs expressed by villagers flowed from their attempts to join the church's teachings to the everyday experience of life and death; that they did so in familiar forms-cults of the saints, provisions for the souls of the dead-which could be established and protected only through the means afforded by a conflicted context of laws; and that their ability to achieve and protect these means depended on the strength of their communal sense and communal rights and their willingness to defend what was theirs.The impulses for practical Christianization in the late medieval countryside, at least in the German southwest, came from such forces and not from their lords. Fuhrmann's second finding is that the Peasants'War is intimately related to this movement of rural actions by an already Christianized people to Christianize the sites of their daily lives.Their efforts moved forward in terms of and through many accommodations to a legal world that was not of their own making, and that could be employed by them for themselves only if they were or became strong. The resort to arms was thus to some degree a legitimate defense by a free, Christian people of the Christian life it had created.

It is difficult to say enough about this brilliant book. Methodologically, its central virtue is that Fuhrmann has solved the problem of fragmentary sources by means of a broad and deep study of the legal and religious contexts of the foundations. This search for a dense enough context takes her into many aspects of late medieval religious, social, and rural life. Historiographically, Fuhrmann's work represents a synthesis of the communalist tradition's great strengths in social and institutional history with the anthropological approach to reli- gion that has come to dominate the study of preindustrial religion in Europe. There is no loss here, merely gain through the blending of strengths.

Finally, readers must be thankful for the light Fuhrmann sheds on village religious life in general, not just on the topos of "the peasants' reformation." It is nonetheless a signal virtue that her study covers roughly the same decades as Francis Rapp's magisterial book on the diocese of Strasbourg.Taken together in disregard of modern boundaries, the old southwest- ern reaches of the Empire continue to yield a generous bounty of late medieval and early modern history. Thomas A. Brady, Jr ............... Berkeley, California

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Fri, 20 Jun 2014 13:30:38 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions