Wondrous in His saints: Popular pilgrimage and Catholic propaganda in Bavaria, 1470-1620. (Volumes I and II).

Abstract

This dissertation contributes to the growing literature on early modern popular religion and pilgrimage. In Bavaria, as in much of Germany, shrines, with their accompanying miracles, flourished and multiplied at the end of the Middle Ages. From the beginning of the Reformation, however, the great age of Bavarian pilgrimage ended. The Reformers attacked pilgrimage for a number of reasons. Shrines drained money and attention away from parish churches; pilgrimages could lead the unsophisticated into a false or idolatrous religion. Throughout the sixteenth century, Protestants also developed their own miracle literature that denounced the wonders and pilgrimages of the medieval and Tridentine Church as demonically-inspired frauds and deceits. This dissertation examines the transformation of Catholic miracle and pilgrimage propaganda as a result of Reformation criticism. In the later Middle Ages Bavarian shrines had printed two types of pamphlets: brief chronicles treating the legend of a shrine's foundation and development and miracle books narrating a number of intercessions reported by pilgrims at the shrine. After 1570, Counter-Reformation apologists published new types of pilgrimage books that combined the older functions of shrine chronicles and miracle books. This new genre narrated a shrine's legendary foundation, the development of its pilgrimage, and a selection of contemporary miracles reported at the shrine. Woven through these books is a polemical, theological and devotional defense of shrines, pilgrimage and the cult of the saints. Writers of pilgrimage books also used powerful and triumphal imagery to defend local shrines. Importantly, they countered those arguments of Protestant writers who attacked traditional miracles as diabolic sorcery. Many Catholic writers answered the Reformers' attacks by advancing the idea of a continual war waged throughout history against the saints and their shrines. This resurgent pilgrimage literature reaffirmed and reflected popular beliefs in the ever-present reality of divine intercession at local holy places.