Assertive Communities in the Fifteenth Century:
The Example of a Single Alpine Parish

Toward the end of the fifteenth century, peasants living in the remote, Alpine valley of the Pitztal in Tirol seized the initiative to improve the condition of their own village church. Until then, the Pitztalers had been able to worship only on Sundays and holidays, when an itinerant chaplain from the nearby village of Imst dropped by to celebrate the Mass in the village chapel, which was dedicated to St. Leonhard. According to local stories still current in the nineteenth century, it was customary that because of the great distance between Imst and the Pitztal (over 20 kilometers) a few of the valley residents would go to retrieve the chaplain a day before the Mass was to be celebrated and return him on Sunday after the Mass. In the winter, however, it was often necessary to dispense with Sunday Mass altogether, because snow made the footpath impassable.
    To guarantee the regularity of religious service, the peasants turned in 1485 to the cathedral chapter of Brixen—where the great reformer Nicholas of Cusa was bishop—to ask for permission to hire a priest, whom they would pay at their own expense, on the condition that he would reside with them on a permanent basis. After long deliberations, the chapter allowed the peasants to endow a priest with an annual salary of 14 Bernese Marks. The grant emphasized that for all practical purposes, the priest would be subordinate to the authority of village elders. The priest would celebrating the Mass and preach the Gospel four or five times each week and otherwise attend to the parishioners’ spiritual and ceremonial needs.

A minor event in a remote place, perhaps; yet it is revealing of several crucial aspects of late medieval religion:

1. The episode suggests how assertive ordinary people could be in matters pertaining to eternal life: the proper conduct of ritual and ceremonial life were matters of vital concern, for the worst thing that could happen to a Christian was to die without benefit of the sacraments—baptism or last rites.

2. The episode also shows how much religious life was bound up with community: a village parish was a “sacrifical sacramental community” that used religion to act out its internal workings and its relationship to the wider world.

This kind of activity was more widespread than you might think: in Tirol, one historian found 27 similar “endowments” between 1383 (which is as far back as the records go) and 1521. This may not seem like much until you recognize that in 1521, Tirol only had 57 parishes—which is to say that over half were the product of communal assertiveness. There are plenty of similar contracts from other parts of Europe: The need to promote village harmony appears to have been the denominator common to most of these interventions: that communities should have been concerned about all these matters makes a great deal of sense, when you think about it; as John Bossy writes,
[As] the hub of Christian society, [a priest] had functions to perform which might seem inherently contradictory. He had…to serve the separate families at their baptisms, marriages, and death-beds; keep his finger on their kin-relationships, their dowries, wills and burials; say mass for their living and their dead; defend their persons, offspring, beasts and possessions from malicious or diabolical interference. He had at the same time, for the sake of the parish as a whole, to criticize their misdeeds and avoid espousing their quarrels…it was his business to procure reconciliation of their enmities through arbitration, satisfaction and rituals of togetherness performed in church, at the alehouse, or elsewhere.
More broadly still, there is plenty of evidence to indicate a surge of broad-based, assertive religious enthusiasm in the fifteenth century. The numbers of pilgrims involved were often astonishingly large, even if one accounts for exaggeration in the contemporary sources: One could pile on example after example; what is crucial to bear in mind about many of these pilgrimages is that perhaps most were not of the individual sort characteristic of the Middle Ages, but organized collectively, by whole village or parish communes. All of these phenomena point at the fourth major characteristic of fifteenth-century religion: the “popularization” of Christianity—specifically, people’s appropriation of religious institutions and practices.
Image: Michael Ostendorfer (d. 1549), frontispiece to Wunderberliche czaychen vergangenen Jars beschehen in Regenspurg tzur der Schönen Maria (1522), an account of the pilgrimage to the shrine of the "Fair Virgin Mary" in the city of Regensburg. The focus of this pilgrimage was a church erected on the former site of the Jewish synagogue in the imperial city of Regensburg, which had been destroyed when the Jews were expelled from that place in 1519. The church gained sudden and immense popularity when healing miracles were reported after the expulsion; this particular image was also printed for sale to pilgrims. (c) Carlos Eire; source: http://adhoc.divinity.yale.edu.
Return to 441 Homepage