• DOI:10.1007/S11186-013-9188-X
Corpus ID: 144049459

The true citizens of the city of God: the cult of saints, the Catholic social order, and the urban Reformation in Germany

@article{Pfaff2013TheTC,
  title={The true citizens of the city of God: the cult of saints, the Catholic social order, and the urban Reformation in Germany},
  author={Steven Pfaff},
  journal={Theory and Society},
  year={2013},
  volume={42},
  pages={189-218}
}

• Steven Pfaff
• Published 2013
• Sociology
• Theory and Society

Historical scholarship suggests that a robust cult of the saints may have helped some European regions to resist inroads by Protestantism. Based on a neo-Durkheimian theory of rituals and social order, I propose that locally based cults of the saints that included public veneration lowered the odds that Protestantism would displace Catholicism in sixteenth-century German cities. To evaluate this proposition, I first turn to historical and theoretical reflection on the role of the cult of the… Expand

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