MacCulloch, Reformation, 608-667.

Identify: bundling, sodomy, favourites, revolution of manners, guaiacum, espousal, Tametsi, St. Joseph, enclosure, Mary Ward, Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Ursulines, Sisters of Charity (aka Daughters of Charity), closed season for marriage, Pietism

In Chapter 14, we read about "the great Protestant-Catholic fault line" (576). In Chapter 15, MacCulloch deploys the geological metaphor again: "The greatest fault-line in Christian attitudes to sex lies in the status of virginity and celibacy relative to heterosexual marriage" (608). We learn that early Christianity viewed virginity as morally and spiritually superior to marriage, and that the Council of Trent canonized this view (Session 24, canon 10). Protestantism took the opposite view. Its revaluation of marriage and repudiation of mandatory celibacy for clergy (as well as of monasticism) was an important way in which it differed from Catholicism.

MacCulloch's focus in Chapter 15, however, is not difference, but continuity, i.e. "staying the same." Christian views about men, women, and sexuality were based on ancient Greek thought and on patristic theology. These views amounted to "nonsense," albeit an "ancient nonsense," and the combination of classical and Christian ideas "had a lunatic coherence" (611). Is MacCulloch's language defensible?

He certainly does not display contempt for Christian theology, for he acknowledges: "sometimes Christian theory was capable of transforming situations, while sometimes theologians discreetly found ways of dealing with and explaining situations in danger of escaping their control" (615). You will observe that Augustine remained highly influential in the West and that not even Renaissance humanism upended patriarchal assumptions in the Reformation era. Catholics and Protestants alike held to another patristic and medieval legacy: the idea that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was a virgin before, during, and after the birth of her son. There was no scriptural warrant for this, but Protestants accepted the doctrine of Mary's perpetual virginity all the same. In this, MacCulloch claims, "Protestants ignored Erasmus" (613). You should not think, however, that Erasmus rejected the doctrine. He honoured Mary as a virgin, and, when defending the cult of the saints against Protestant charges that Scripture did not authorize it, he reminded them that they believed in Mary's perpetual virginity. [On this, see Conversing with God: Prayer in Erasmus' Pastoral Writings (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), 86-90, 95.]

Catholics and Protestants excoriated homosexuality. The "fear of sodomy" (620) lay behind the burning of homosexuals by the Spanish Inquisition and the Protestant horror of popery (623). MacCulloch points to the emergence of "a recognizably gay subculture only right at the end of our Reformation era" in Amsterdam and London (628). He attributes this to "a reflection of a decline of the integrated divine view of society, the desacralization of the world, in which ecclesiastical prescriptions and proscriptions were no longer able to provide a coherent framework and hold the imaginations of everyone in society" (628). Echoing the idea of the end of "our Reformation era"--why does he say "our"?--MacCulloch opines that the "radical change in the perception and self-perception of homosexuality" might "mark the end of the Reformation" (629). Does this make sense to you?

In Chapter 16, MacCulloch turns from continuities to "what changed" (630). New on the scene was a sexually transmitted disease, originally often called the French pox until Girolamo Fracastoro introduced the term "syphilis" in 1531. The disease "undoubtedly played a major role in the increased sexual regulation of the sixteenth century" (632). The closing of brothels by Protestant and Catholic magistrates constituted "one of the more remarkable ecumenical phenomena of the sixteenth century" (632). (Remember what "ecumenical" means.) Another such phenomenon was "the Europe-wide campaign to change the laity's attitude to espousal custom in the process of getting married" (634).

We see more evidence for a convergence between Catholicism and Protestantism. Although Protestants rejected the idea that marriage and clerical ordination were sacraments, they still highly valued these institutions. Among them marriage "was still sacred" (648). Clergy were expected to officiate at weddings (651). This was mirrored an important reform of the Council of Trent, which abolished clandestine marriages (637). Protestant clergymen enjoyed tremendous social prominence. They "founded long-lasting clerical dynasties;" their wives "came to provide a new model for all the wives of Protestant Europe" (653). When it came to their place in the life of the Church and of the family Protestant and Catholic women experienced the same sort of pattern: "self-assertion, followed by male reassertion and renewed traditional discipline" (657). An example of this is the early decision of Dutch Reformed Protestantism to ordain women as deacons, a possibility that faded away once the Dutch Reformed Church was "properly established" (658).

Within Catholicism the "mushrooming of female participation in the regular life" (642) was a new and prominent development in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. You should know what this means, given that we have already spoken about "regular" clergy, but remember that Catholic women were never part of the clergy. The growth of female religious orders resulted from "women who wanted to play their full part in the movement of renewal that the Church was fostering" (642). The Ursulines, founded by Angela Merici (d. 1540), became one of the largest religious orders of women. Their expertise lay in education. Eventually, in line with the legislation of Trent, they were enclosed in convents, and taught girls who came to their convent schools. Inspired by the Jesuits, Mary Ward wanted her new Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1609) to be an order of women serving people in the world, not cloistered from the world in a convent. But her plan suffered a "spectacular defeat" (644). Where the vision of Merici and Ward failed, the Daughters of Charity succeeded. They avoided enclosure in large part because they did not take formal vows.

Catholic family life received a boost too in the Reformation era. Church and commonwealth emphasized the "sacred quality" of family (637). The cult of the Holy Family and of St. Joseph helped accomplish this emphasis. In Protestantism, the family was as sacred as marriage. It was "almost a church of itself" (661). With the elimination of monasteries, convents, and confraternities the Protestant family "had no serious competitor in social organization" (661). In church, Protestant families sat as a unit, breaking with the pre-Reformation custom of separating men and women at the liturgy (661-62).