Probably the most prolific, and arguably the most learned, religious historian of his generation, W. R. Ward, Emeritus Professor of Modern History at the University of Durham, has produced an admirable synthesis of his many years of labor on the history of early modern Christianity in Britain and continental Europe. In a career stretching back some 40 years, Ward has produced over a dozen seminal studies of British and German religious history, including some of the most powerful writing on Methodism and Pietism ever published.
Having once described himself in print as an old Ranter (an English Primitive Methodist), Ward was unusual in his generation for having nothing much to do with either traditional ecclesiastical history or the new-fangled social history of religion as pioneered by Marxist historians and those influenced by social anthropology. For Ward’s liking, the former was too prone to celebrate the achievements of established churches while the latter had a way of reducing religious history to the bare foundations of economic and social control. Ward has always had too much interest in the religious achievements of enthusiasts to peer at the history of religion either through the windows of cathedral closes or from the perspective of mainly reductionist theories about the social function of religion. He has been, and still remains, an iconoclast, and a formidably intelligent one at that.
For those of us who entered the academy in the 1970s, Ward was something of a hero figure. Edward Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm had written spellbinding pieces on Methodism based on the thinnest of evidence; Ward, in his Religion and Society in England 1790-1850 (1972), produced a work of intricate brilliance based on the thickest of evidence. The problem with younger Ward, as with older Ward, is that he made few concessions to the ignorance of his readers and resolutely refused to simplify a complex story. Some historians can be read by the yard, Ward only by the inch. Densely packed sentences, an endless supply of ideas and few pauses for breath or summary are his trademarks, and have persuaded some to en gage Ward, not through his monographs, but through his essays, many of which were collected and published in Faith and Faction (1993). Some of his most innovative essays were attempts to discover the roots of the Great Awakening of the eighteenth century, not in the transatlantic revivalism of common historical currency, but among the displaced and persecuted Protestant minorities of Habsburg-dominated central and eastern Europe. The themes explored in these essays were brought to a dazzling climax in the publication of his Protestant Evangelical Awakening (1992), which will re main the standard ac count of the Great Awakening for years to come, though it too is not a book for casual reading.
Not surprisingly, some of the themes and not a few of the dramatis personae of that book reappear in Christianity under the Ancien Regime, but the scope and purpose of Ward’s new book is quite different from his earlier work. His aim here was to pro duce “a brief, but comprehensible, account of Christianity in Europe between the Westphalia settlements of 1648 and the French Revolution of 1789.” The main focus of the book is not the religious institutions themselves, nor even the religious beliefs and practices of early modern Europeans (the primary work in this area according to Ward has not yet been done), but rather to investigate the religious policies formulated by rulers, churchmen, revivalists, and missionaries. With characteristic forthrightness, Ward states in the preface that his book is organized around a British/Central European axis, with comparatively less attention paid to France, Spain, and Italy. Protestantism is therefore more comprehensively treated than Catholic ism, despite the fact that there were more Catholics than Protestants in early modern Europe. Ward’s defense of such an approach is to state that the Counter-Reformation was running out of steam at any rate, and that more new things were happening on the ground in Protestant Europe than in Catholic Europe.
What then of the content? Ward’s eight chapters, skillfully organized around broad regional, confessional and chronological themes, are a virtuoso display of knowledge and interpretation. In particular, his mastery of what was going on in the Protestant corners of the Holy Roman Empire is deeply impressive. Moreover, this book allows his English-speaking readers to discover what his German readers already knew, that Ward has an unusually fine grasp of the theology and philosophy of the European Enlightenment. His chapter on the Enlightenment and its precursors is thus particularly useful, not least because he devotes almost equal space to the Catholic and Protestant Enlightenments.
Ward’s book is intended as a concise and authoritative survey of early modern European religious history suitable for high school and college students. To that end the author, and the editors of the series to which this book is a contribution, have made every effort to make it accessible to its intended readership. Each chapter is broken down into a dozen or so subheadings, and the book comes with maps, a glossary of terms, suggestions for further reading and an almost complete absence of footnotes.
But Professor Ward is not so easily tamed. Students coming to this book for a quick crib for college exams are in for a rude shock. Unfortunately the night-lights will burn for longer than most students are accustomed to. The format of the book will certainly enable them to find pithy short summaries of a range of important issues from the religious policies of Peter the Great and Joseph II to the reasons for the remarkable conjunction of Catholicism and nationalism in eighteenth-century Poland. Still, the essence of Ward’s book lies not in its encyclopedic summaries of complex material, stunning though some of them are, but in its central themes and arguments, which are sometimes more difficult to identify.
The main argument of the book is that in Europe after Westphalia religion was too important a matter to be left entirely to the churches. Most rulers before the late eighteenth century regarded religious toleration as a sign of state weakness and relied principally upon established churches to enforce conformity and order. But the established churches, which had worked so hard for their place in the political sun, soon found themselves in unexpected difficulties. Some rulers coveted their wealth, while the churches themselves struggled, unsuccessfully as it happened, to find sufficient resources to cope with rapidly expanding populations.
Disappointed mutual expectations resulted in clashes between religious and secular authorities, which were played out with equal bitterness in many different regions, from the disputes over patronage in Scotland to the almost relentless sniping between French kings and the papacy through out the period. The inability of established churches to align their resources with their objectives or to eradicate popular “superstition” left them “creaking audibly” in the generation after the Seven Years’ War (1756-63). Creaking became groaning in the 1790s when the revolutionaries summarily dealt with the French church, and the English church began to lose its affinity with national sentiment that had once been its glory.
Ward’s sympathies are mostly with the Protestant minorities who were the victims of persecution initiated by agents of the Counter-Reformation, but he is not blind to the vitality of some aspects of Catholicism in early modern Europe. The building of magnificent baroque churches in town and country, the growth of energetic religious missions carried out by Jesuits, Redemptorists, Passionists and burgeoning new orders for women, and attempts to revivify the parish system all testify to Catholic zeal at the official level. At the popular level, Ward also charts the growth of Marian devotion, interpreted as a popular search for grace against the legalism of the church, and establishes the importance of pilgrimages as grand social festivals. Despite these signs of life, it is Ward’s conclusion that whereas in 1600 Catholicism had been the religion of the towns and the countryside, by 1800 many rural areas were still centers of faith and fervor, but the towns and cities were in need of conversion.
Although Ward’s treatment of Catholic Europe is insightful, if limited in scope, his book really comes to life when he charts the rise, progress, and consequences of Protestant revivalism. Revivalism in the Habsburg lands was the response of pious minorities who had to achieve quick results or else go under. Often with no time to wait for church renewal, or more likely, with no institutional church to renew, Moravians, Silesians, and Salzburgers pioneered new forms of popular Protestantism and exported them to Western Europe and then to the New World.
Class meetings began with Spener in 1670; camp meetings originated with the Swedish army in Silesia in the early eighteenth century; and itinerant preaching developed as a survival strategy for Pietist communities. All was accompanied by a phenomenal increase in hymn writing and by revivals instituted and conducted by children. The money behind the expansion came from the commercial exploitation of medicaments, Bibles, and religious literature, and from the availability of Dutch credit at low rates of interest. Indeed, Ward is one of the few historians to take seriously the importance of the financing of religious ventures. How money was raised and how it was spent, whether on baroque churches or on Jesuit missions, is one of the most intriguing themes of Ward’s book. He also shows that redeeming debt, as much as planning expenditure, can be a defining moment in the history of religious traditions.
It is perhaps Ward’s most important argument that whereas established churches were creaking from accumulated lethargy, Protestant Christianity, at least for a couple of generations, “exhibited astonishing new vigor by going over wholesale to unconfessional, international, societary means of action, in which the laity paid for and often ran great machines which had no place in the traditional church orders.” From Methodism to the great missionary societies of the nineteenth century, the voluntary pietism of a mobilized laity achieved remarkable feats of gospel transmission throughout the transatlantic world and beyond.
It is perhaps churlish to offer criticisms of a book which ranges so far and wide, both thematically and geographically, but there are some important aspects of religious life in early modern Europe that are comparatively neglected. One is the funding and implementation of social reform and charity, which episodically drew in popes, rulers, civic leaders, confraternities, religious orders, and great numbers of religious women. The Sisters of Charity, in particular, made a remarkable contribution to the relief of distress and the teaching of catechisms in early modern France, and then worked with equal passion for the redemption of the New World in the nineteenth century. Following the money in this aspect of religious history is as deeply revealing of early modern society as is following the money in the building of churches and the expansion of religious orders. It seems that in setting himself against some of the more bizarre ideas of social historians of religion, Ward has passed over some of the more intriguing en counters between religion and the humble poor in early modern Europe.
As befits someone who casts a cold eye on the religiously powerful, Ward displays a dark sense of irony in some of his more pungent analysis of religious traditions. For example, the Jesuits who worked so hard to build up their resources and expand their religious empire, were suppressed in the 1760s and 70s when both their colonial meddling and rich resources made them attractive targets for early modern states creaking under the financial cost of state-building. On the other side of the great Reformation divide, Ward pokes fun at the absurdity of having a predestinarian church run as an inclusive, state-enforced enterprise as happened in parts of Switzerland. Ward’s comment on high Reformed Orthodoxy in Zurich, which accepted all the baptized and deceased as regenerate, is that this was indeed an attempt “to transform a miracle of grace into that curse of conventional Christianity, the belief that to do what was compulsorily enjoined was an opus operatum.”
Whereas with some historians one is constantly aware of a thin vein of material stretched over too large an area, Ward’s work is generally to be found at the opposite pole. He covers the ground with such speed and complexity that the result is a compressed and compact narrative that will repay reading, and then reading again.
David Hempton is professor of church history at Boston University. He is the author of several books, including The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion c. 1750-1900 (Routledge).
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