• DOI:10.1017/S0018246X00013984
• Corpus ID: 162991792

Peoples' Religions in Reformation Europe

@article{Brady1991PeoplesRI,
  title={Peoples' Religions in Reformation Europe},
  author={Thomas Allan Brady},
  journal={The Historical Journal},
  year={1991},
  volume={34},
  pages={173 - 182}
}

• T. Brady
• Published 1 March 1991
• History
• The Historical Journal

Not quite two decades ago, America's premier Marxist historian complained that 'in this secular, not to say cynical, age, few tasks present greater difficulty than that of compelling the well educated to take religious matters seriously'. Historians some of whom might qualify as ' well-educated' did indeed tend to believe that ' popular religion is basically a rural behavioural world lost through some cosmic event like the industrialisation, whose reflective meaning persists only as a mental light among the historians of those religions'. In the 1970s, however, as the old religions proved themselves very much alive, the benignly olympian mood of Genovese's' secular intelligentsia' veered round to fear and loathing. In 1979 Emanuel Le Roy Ladurie felt compelled to call his fellows to arms in the foreword to a large book on a minor incident in the French Wars of Religion. 'A great Catholic party, the League,' he wrote, 'resurrected the "popish" fundamentalism ... still lurking in the popular sensibility... [FJundamentalism surfaced intact, triumphant, in its most archaic and fanatic forms' and armed with an organization which was ' not liberal... but democratic, prerevolutionary, manipulative,