270 Chapter 14Jeanne de Chantal, and the other great female figures
of post-Tridentine Catholicism had few Protestant
counterparts.
From the standpoint of the reformers, whether
Catholic or Protestant, such issues were of secondary
importance. Their primary concern was the salvation of
souls and the transformation of popular piety. Heroic
efforts were made to catechize or otherwise educate the
laity in most parts of Europe, and after about 1570 an
increasing tendency was seen toward clerical interfer-
ence in lay morals. Catholic church courts and Protes-
tant consistories sought to eliminate such evils as
brawling, public drunkenness, and sexual misbehavior.
Inevitably the churchmen were forced to condemn the
occasions on which such activity arose. The celebration
of holidays and popular festivals came under scrutiny as
did public performances of every kind from street jug-
glers to those of Shakespeare and his troop of actors.
Dancing aroused special concern. No one worried
about the stately measures trod by courtiers, but the
rowdy and often sexually explicit dances of the peas-
ants seemed, after years of familiarity, to induce shock
(see illustration 14.6).
Civil authorities supported this attack on popular
culture for practical reasons. The celebration of holi-
days and popular festivals encouraged disorder. When
accompanied as they usually were by heavy drinking,
public amusements could lead to violence and even ri-
ots. Moreover, like street theater, most celebrations
contained seditious skits or pageants. They mocked theprivileged classes, satirized the great, and delighted in
the reversal of social and gender roles. The triumph of a
Lord of Misrule, even for a day, made magistrates ner-
vous, and prudence demanded that such activities be
regulated or prohibited outright. Popular beliefs and
practices were attacked with equal vigor. The authori-
ties rarely took action against academic magic, astrol-
ogy, or alchemy—sciences that, though dubious, were
widely accepted by the wealthy and educated—but
they no longer tolerated folk magic. In some cases, offi-
cial suspicion extended even to the traditional remedies
used by midwives and village “wise women.”
The epidemic of witch hunting that convulsed Eu-
rope in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth cen-
turies may have been related to these concerns. In the
century after 1550, Protestant and Catholic govern-
ments in virtually every part of Europe executed more
than sixty thousand people for being witches or sa-
tanists. Medieval thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas had
denied the power of witches, but a later age thought dif-
ferently. Magistrates and learned men built theories of a
vast satanic plot around their imperfect knowledge of
folk beliefs. Their ideas crystallized in manuals for witch
hunters, the most famous of which, the Malleus Malefi-
carum(Hammer of Witches) went through twenty-nine
editions between 1495 and 1669. Its authors, like most
people in early modern Europe, believed that in a provi-
dential world there could be no accidents; evil required
an explanation. Otherwise unexplained disasters were
caused by witches who gained extraordinary powersIllustration 14.6
A Village Wedding.In this paint-
ing, Pieter Bruegel the Younger illus-
trates the sort of peasant behavior that
political and ecclesiastical authorities
hoped to restrict in the later sixteenth
century.