Few theoretical concepts are as value-laden as popular culture, and defining it can be likened to entering a minefield. And yet, it has proved a resilient and useful tool for assessing the attitudes and beliefs of the nonliterate masses in early modern society. From the onset, however, one should be aware of the limitations and theoretical problems associated with its use and misuse in the past.
Theoretical Problems
The term "popular culture" was not in contemporary use during the early modern period, when political and social structure was understood in reference to three orders or estates. The closest contemporary equivalent of "the people" would have been the Third Estate or the commoners, a social conglomeration of urban burghers and rural peasants, as well as any other persons belonging neither to the nobility nor the clergy. Reference was made to the common man or the community, and the elite/intellectual perception of their customs and practices ranged from the paternal curiosity of Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) to the satire of artists like Peter Bruegel the Elder (c. 1525–1569) and the disdain of the moralist Sebastian Brant (1458?–1521), who presented a mirror of immoral behavior in a world gone mad in his Das Narrenschiff (1494; The ship of fools). One common allegory of contemporary social structure is the famous Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), which depicted society as the torso of the king, itself composed of thousands of people, his subjects. In this allegory, the rulers and clergy made up the head, the noble warriors the arms, and the masses the visceral lower body parts. After experiencing the horrors perpetrated during the wars of religion in the sixteenth century, the Neostoic author on statecraft, Justus Lipsius (1547–1606), wrote to compare the undisciplined mob to a headless body and popular protest to mass insanity.
The discovery (or "invention") of the people as a group worthy of study is attributed to a group of German intellectuals at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries (Burke). One of the earliest philosophical justifications for a scholarly interest in the culture of the common people (Kultur des Volkes) was offered by Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who consciously juxtaposed it with learned culture (Kultur der Gelehrten). Widespread interest followed as European folklorists flocked to the countryside to save the oral tradition of the preindustrial peasantry from oblivion. In the process, Romantic scholars embellished the occasionally unsavory content of folk tales and songs. At the time, scholars also tended to conflate the early modern period with the Middle Ages, and traditional customs and rituals were dubbed "medieval."
The ambivalent nature of the term "popular," sometimes casually equated with populism, is highly controversial, and popular culture studies have regularly been hijacked for partisan political purposes. The long-standing identification of the popular will with national identity since Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) has led to the exploitation of popular culture studies by nationalists, racists, populists, and communists alike. The association of folk studies (Volkskunde) with the National Socialist dictatorship marginalized cultural anthropology and ethnography in post-war Germany. The Marxist Antonio Gramsci expressed faith in the culture of the people as a means to exercise discontent and protest against a hegemonic ruling elite. However, not until "pop" culture in art and music began to symbolize grass roots protest during the 1960s did popular culture studies succeed in entering into the mainstream of scholarly debate. Detractors have subsequently labeled radical research on popular culture "PC" in pejorative association with "political correctness," originally a prejudicial policy to weed out the middle classes under Stalinism.
One crass example of the abuse of early modern popular culture studies is the case of nine million witch burnings. Briefly, in an attack on medieval barbarism, an enlightened archivist fancifully concocted a mythical figure of nine million people burned during the European witch craze. Anti-Catholic authors revived this fantastic claim during the nineteenth-century Kulturkampf in Germany. Later, credulous Nazi propagandists proclaimed that the statistic evidenced a racist persecution perpetrated on Nordic Aryan people by evil Mediterraneans through the office of the Holy Inquisition. During the 1970s, several authors and journalists uncritically cited the very same Nazi authors to denounce the slaughter of nine million innocent women at the hands of misogynist theologians. Today, scholars of popular culture have successfully revealed these claims for the groundless exaggerations they are (Behringer). In fact, we now know beyond a reasonable doubt that: (1) The vast majority of witch trials took place not in the Middle Ages but from 1560 to 1650, with legal executions continuing into the late eighteenth century; (2) Most trials were conducted by secular state officials, and persecutions were remarkably low in those few areas where an inquisition was present, like Spain and Italy, as it appears that the institution had a mitigating effect; (3) Trials were often instigated by popular pressure rather than official initiative, and most of the trials took place in central Europe; (4) Local women often accused other local women of witchcraft as the result of petty neighborhood disputes. The case of nine million witches demonstrates the continuing importance of popular culture studies not only to correct the glorification of history from the top down, but also to avoid the pitfalls of hackneyed eulogizing of "the people" and romanticized history from the bottom up.
A further theoretical complication is that the term "culture" is also ambivalent. The original ideal of a collective group consciousness put forward by the French sociologist Émile Durkheim stresses the unifying aspects of culture, but it lacks an explanatory dynamic for historical change. A dialectic or conflict model is the most common method to overcome this inadequacy. As a representative of this dialectical tradition, Robert Redfield (1897–1958) emphasized the divisive nature of the "great tradition" (elite or official culture) and the "little tradition" (plebian or unofficial culture), echoing Herder's distinction between popular and learned culture. The Jesuit Michel De Certeau (1925–1986) juxtaposed the relevant advantages and disadvantages facing the ruling elite and the ruled in a class-struggle model, employing the blatantly militant terms "strategy" (extensive application of great resources for long-term effect) and "tactics" (intensive maximization of limited resources with limited permanency). Modernist ethnographers tend to define culture in relational terms as a communicative system for the transmission of ideas, rather than enduring institutions or structures. In this sense, popular culture is viewed as one form of expressive culture that plays a crucial role in power struggles to negotiate meaning in everyday life (Little).
There are also many contradictory claims regarding the mechanisms of popular culture. Clearly, the view of early folklorists that popular culture is unchanging, not artificial and unadulterated by exogenous influence, is romantic and no longer tenable (Greenblatt). Proponents of dialectical materialism as well as supporters of the Annales paradigm (a historical movement in twentieth-century France) generally view even supernatural aspects of popular culture as contingent upon material circumstances (Scribner). Contrarily, Michel Foucault has reflected on the marginalization of folly and its transformation into madness as a product of discourses. He depicts the development of a system of social discipline, the "Great Confinement" of undesirables, as a power struggle played out in largely arbitrary and individualized discourses to gain control over cultural meanings. The Italian historian Carlo Ginzburg seeks the origins of early modern popular culture as an egalitarian tradition in the pre-Christian heritage of Indo-European languages, while the German historian Peter Blickle points to the late medieval origins of communalism. Again, popular culture studies serve to remind us that traditions evolve and culture is always changing in relationship to historical contexts.
Ultimately, the exact nature of popular culture is so difficult to pin down because it is applied in broad terms, to include ritual, art, literature, and cosmology. Many popular beliefs, rituals, and customs of the ordinary people were also shared by members of the social elite, clouding the boundaries between the two traditions. Tentatively, we can summarize popular culture as an expressive and shared system for the production, transmission, and consumption of cohesive yet simple values readily accessible to and accepted by most members of a given society at any given time, simultaneously fulfilling both normative and practical social interests. In the end, however, popular culture continues to elude precise definition. Perhaps the very ambivalence of the term renders it so theoretically flexible and at the same time dangerously seductive.
Historiographic Highlights
Without doubt, historians of the early modern period have paid more attention to popular culture than have any other historians. There are sound practical and methodological reasons for this. In comparison to the overwhelming documentary evidence available to historians of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, early modernists face source limitations that require them to approach their subject in a more circumspect manner. Because of this, they have proven particularly open to the interdisciplinary methods of cultural anthropology used to study comparable forms of culture in "traditional" societies. Nevertheless, the advent of printing and nascent bureaucracy coupled with a higher rate of documentary and artistic survivals offers early modernists a more satisfactory pool of evidence than is regularly available for the study of popular culture in earlier periods. Another major impetus has been the modernity thesis. In the nineteenth century, culture was generally equated with civilization and ranked according to a teleological (and Eurocentric) scale of development. Following the rise of academic sociology and anthropology, the question of modernity also informed historical consensus on the pivotal status of the early modern period as an age of transition from feudalism to capitalism in which the power of the church waned and early modern states were formed. Hence, there has been an intense search for signs of modernity in early modern popular culture.
Since the birth of the academic disciplines of sociology and anthropology in the late nineteenth century, there have been many successful attempts to recover the mental processes whereby the European identity evolved from the later Middle Ages to the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The interdisciplinary study of popular culture has provided vital access to mentality of Europeans before industrialization and secularization. Through the encouragement of the early annalists, such as Marc Bloch and Lucien Febvre, historians' attention began to focus on Durkheim's concept of the collective consciousness and modify it to explain slow changes over time (la longue durée). Bloch's account of popular perceptions of the magic touch of the king in the Middle Ages and Febvre's study of disbelief in the Renaissance concurred that the mental equipment (outillage mentale) of our ancestors was radically different from our own. Historians often miss that point by commencing their research with "a poorly posed question" (une question mal posée). Developmentally, the Soviet literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin thought he had found the key to a lost golden age prior to modern social polarization in a his study of Rabelais. Bakhtin's significant impact lies in his historical interpretation of the carnivalesque. For him, the spontaneity and laughter/ridicule of popular culture can be juxtaposed with the elite puritanical culture of Lent, the forerunner of modern bourgeois sentimentality. Similarly, the Dutch sociologist Norbert Elias charted the evolution of household manners as a "civilizing process," a form of modern psychogenesis, literally a change in our patterns of thought through behavior modification. Elias focused his research on court society, which he viewed as the source of our modern social code of etiquette.
Since the 1960s, the trend has been less toward progressive and linear interpretations in favor of examining events, material circumstances, and ideological explanations of popular culture. One of the pioneering figures has been Natalie Zemon Davis. In 1975, she published a seminal collection of essays on a variety of topics from sixteenth-century France, such as rituals of violence and the charivari. Charivaris were a virtually ubiquitous and ritualized form of autonomous popular justice. In one form of charivari, youth abbeys—literally gangs of unmarried journeymen or peasants—staged public mockeries to punish local persons of ill repute and reinforce communal norms. Young artisans employed the charivari to regulate access to limited marriage prospects, targeting cuckolded husbands, widowed masters who married younger women, or widows of masters who refused to remarry. Peasants sometimes used the charivari to harass outsiders, protest perceived injustice at the hands of a local official, or punish an immoral village priest. Charivaris might begin during a festivity or a bout of drinking at a local tavern, when it was decided to punish a local "deviate." The masked or costumed gang adjourned to the house of the person in question, harassing them with vulgar or obscene songs. When the target of abuse appeared, he or she was apprehended and humiliated—forced to ride backward on an ass, burned in effigy, or ducked in a pond. Ultimately, charivaris functioned as a method of resolving social conflicts through rough and ready communal consensus on propriety. In this and subsequent works, Davis dispenses with standard clichés and characterizes the human experiences in terms of identity formation. She has demonstrated the self-fashioning of pardon tales and the creation of identity in The Return of Martin Guerre, the subject of a French motion picture (1983) and a Hollywood spin-off, Sommersby (1993). Her historical actors are simultaneously faced with limitless individual possibilities and fettered by social constraints. Her work continues to influence an entire generation of scholarship.
In 1978, Peter Burke published what has become the standard text on early modern popular culture. Burke takes his cue from the dialectic models of the elite/popular traditions promoted by Redfield and Bakhtin. His developmental conception of popular culture is graphically illustrated by Bruegel's famous painting of Combat of Carnival and Lent, a mock joust between a fat man astride a barrel and a thin woman seated on a chair (Burke, p. 208). The Carnival season prior to Lent set the stage for a ritual inversion of normative values. In this "world turned upside down," people cross-dressed, ate and drank excessively, engaged in blatant sexual innuendo, openly mocked the clergy, and elected a prince of fools who held court in the town square. During the period between 1500 and 1650, Europe entered into the first phase of the reform of popular culture by the culture of the godly, as the arbiters of morality set a more somber tone during the catastrophic years of the Protestant Reformation, Catholic Renewal, and wars of religion. Popular performances and carnivals were banned in many areas as the elite gradually withdrew from participation in the plebian culture of mockery and grass roots protest. From 1650 to 1800, popular culture was politicized, denigrated, and completely abandoned by the ruling elite until its rediscovery by nineteenth-century folklorists.
Since the publication of Burke's text, there has been an explosion of interest in popular culture studies, many of which have introduced us to new and innovative ways of approaching the topic. Much attention has also been paid to the role of the print revolution as an innovative force during the early modern period. Roger Chartier and Robert Scribner have examined chapbooks and broadsheets and found evidence of a vibrant print culture with meanings influenced by popular consumption and appropriation. They also note how shifting demand acts as a driving force behind historical change. Individual case studies and village reconstitutions have also explored the contributions of popular culture to political and social change in early modern Europe. Chief among these has been the work of David Warren Sabean, who conducted nearly two decades of research studying the inhabitants of the small Swabian village of Neckarhausen. Sabean subtly employed a conflict model to interpret apparently minor incidents of ritualized tensions between rulers and subjects as another engine for historical change from below. Here again, historians have begun to pay more attention to negotiations and the fundamental role of transmission through cultural interlocutors.
Sources and Method
Since early modern popular culture was primarily oral or performance-oriented, the paucity of documentary evidence of practices and beliefs has proven a difficult obstacle. The so-called superstitions and fleeting theatrics of everyday custom and ritual were seldom regarded as worthy of attention. Initially, much of the pioneering work in early modern popular culture involved the identification of useful sources to document a largely undocumented historical phenomenon. Gradually, however, certain types of evidence have been exploited with great success, and a standard repertoire of sources and methods has evolved. Current scholarship still benefits greatly from the work of folklorists and anthropologists. National and regional folklore collections and dictionaries of dialect from the early nineteenth century regularly provide valuable insights. Many folktales and folk practices have since been catalogued in standard guides to folkloric motifs and ethnographic encyclopedias, like Bächtold-Stäubli's Handwörterbuch des deutschen Aberglaubens (Handbook of German superstition). These works allow the historian to critically cross-reference customs and practices that were glossed over in primary source documents, as their original meaning was largely self-evident to contemporaries but has since become lost. Early thesauruses and encyclopedias, themselves primary sources, continue to prove their worth. Some of these are now easily accessible online, such as Zedler's early-eighteenth-century Universal Lexikon, a virtual treasure trove of early modern thought. Nevertheless, one of the major attractions of popular culture studies remains the necessity to work eclectically and creatively, and historians still regularly locate hitherto unsuspected finds in the archives as the field continues to expand.
Scholars now regularly access a wide and sometimes unexpected variety of sources in their search for manifestations of popular culture. The role of cultural interlocutors, responsible for the recording and transmission of customs and traditions, is central in most of these transmissions. Standard sources include civic chronicles and diaries depicting events both everyday and unusual, such as carnivals or the elaborate Corpus Christi processions popular in Catholic urban areas. Illustrated broadsheets—the newspapers of the illiterate—depicted occurrences both mundane (the effects of drunkenness on the humors) and wondrous (monstrous births, comets, Marian apparitions, etc.). Broadsheets were the subjects of public readings by literate members of the community, both in the privacy of the home and in taverns. The hub of the local communications network, the tavern was where people from every walk of life congregated to exchange news, conduct business, and, not infrequently, foment protest and revolt. Grievances, such as songs of protest or the famous Twelve Articles of the Peasantry issued during the German Peasants' War of 1525 by an artisan named Sebastian Lotzer and a pastor named Christoph Schappeler, both of Memmingen, also inform us of popular complaints against the ruling classes as well as utopian and communal aspirations and popular rituals of justice. In one popular ritual during the revolt of the Poor Conrad in 1514, for example, community members of Schorndorf put the devalued weights and measures introduced by Duke Ulrich the Mad of Württemberg (1498–1550) to the water test in a nearby river, claiming that if the weights floated, then they had passed the judgment of God.
However, official recorders of popular culture did not always play a positive or even a neutral role in its transmission and were prominently involved in elite attempts to suppress unofficial practices. Legal records—edicts, law codes, and criminal interrogatories—are another rich genre of documentation. In their attempts to enforce elite norms, early modern rulers released a plethora of edicts reviling impious deviations from religious orthodoxy and breaches of sumptuary and moral legislation—the wearing of prohibited clothing styles, lewd dancing, and excessive consumption at weddings. They attest to the rude nature of early modern sexuality, complaining of clerical concubinage, fornication between serving men and women, and clandestine marriages. One courtship ritual in particular, the nocturnal visit, was highly suspect. Reminiscent of the balcony scenes from Romeo and Juliet or Cyrano de Bergerac and practiced throughout Europe, nocturnal visits of suitors to unmarried women took the form of a non-coerced entry, generally through the window, whereupon the couple might sit and chat until the morning hours or, not uncommonly, sleep together chastely in the same bed, at times with the full consent of parents; naturally, accidents did occur, as the edicts take pains to remind us. All-too-frequent repetitions of prescriptive legislation suggest the nature, extent, and tenacity of popular practices throughout Europe despite well-intentioned moral campaigns to eradicate them.
Inquisitorial sources provide important if somewhat less appealing information, especially in the realm of witchcraft studies. This is also the area where anthropological field research among traditional peoples, such as E. Evans-Prichard's 1937 study of witchcraft among the Azande in central Africa, has had its greatest impact. Records of interrogations are perhaps as close as we can hope to come to hearing the actual voices of ordinary individuals. They reveal a cleft between elite and popular perceptions of witchcraft. For example, the attempt to superimpose a cumulative or learned concept of demonology on the masses, replete with devil's pacts, copulations with paramours, and attendance at the Sabbath, proved alien to the popular consciousness. However, the records of criminal interrogations reveal much about the real and widespread practice of white magic—love potions, rituals to enhance fertility, talismans and charms to ward off illness in humans and animals, treasure-finding spells, counter-magic to relieve the enchanted, and so on—that persisted well into the age of the Enlightenment. Of course, it would be wrong to presume that even firsthand testimonies offered by illiterate peasants represent the unadulterated voice of the people without considering the actual circumstances of their production. Judicial confessions were exacted under duress or torture in answer to the leading questions of inquisitors and judges, only to be recorded by court scribes, who sometimes inserted their own confessions of bewilderment at certain popular beliefs and practices.
Public trials and executions were themselves a form of popular entertainment, as thousands of onlookers, hawkers, pickpockets, and prostitutes gathered in a festive mood to witness the spectacular brutality of contemporary justice. Audience participation, though not officially encouraged, regularly manifested itself as onlookers threw rotting vegetable matter at the delinquent as he or she was carted from the jail to mount the terrible stage of retribution. Of course, the presence of an audience at the official execution meant that events could take unexpected turns from the official script. Audience pressure and the threat of or actual recourse to violence effected a release if the verdict was vehemently in question or if the criminal was a local folk hero. If the executioner gave a sloppy performance and failed to carry out sentencing in one blow, crowds were known to mob the scaffold, threatening to pummel or rend the headsman, who was forced to flee for his life. Naturally, for those unable to attend the execution of infamous villains in person, details were recorded and distributed in illustrated woodcuts and broadsheets. Nor was the death sentence necessarily the end of the criminal in the popular understanding of ritual justice. After the rotting corpse was put on display and ultimately removed for dishonorable burial, executioners, who operated thriving medical practices on the side, sold decomposed body parts (so-called mummy) for use as popular remedies.
In another type of method similar to the anthropological "thick-description" used by Clifford Geertz to document Balinese customs, practitioners of microhistory have descended to the level of ordinary individuals to rescue nonprominent persons from the dustbin of history, giving a voice back to them. By far the most successful example of microhistory is Carlo Ginzburg's study of the heresiarch (the creator of his own heresy) and Friulian miller Mennochio. Ginzburg began his career as a professor in Bologna, were he was closely associated with the author Umberto Eco and the historian Piero Camporesi. Ginzburg documents Mennochio's trial and execution for, among other things, maintaining that the Virgin Mary was a whore and that the universe arose as a waste product of a cheese-eating worm. Ginzburg concludes that Mennochio's fantastic cosmological theories were in fact the product of an unconscious filter of pre-Christian notions, part of a subculture shared by peasants from Italy to Lithuania. His continued detective work in search of clues of this common antihierarchical heritage has spawned a large following, and microhistory has since found a home in the Italian journal Quaderni Storici. There are those who argue that Ginzburg's net is cast far too broadly and that his claims about the common pagan origins of European popular culture are overgeneralized. Critics have focused on particular regional or local contexts, as in Wolfgang Behringer's microhistory of the Alpine herdsman Chonrad Stoeckhlin (1549–1587) or Richard Kagan's analysis of the political content of the dreams of Lucretia de Leon of Madrid, which at once empowered and endangered her. Whether one agrees with Ginzburg's conclusions or not, the fact remains that his method of accessing contemporary cosmology through the experiences of one ordinary person has reached a large audience, reawakening interest in popular culture and generating lively and productive debate.
Social Experiences of Popular Culture
The story of popular culture in early modern Europe is one of mounting social stratification and a concerted effort at repression by the political and religious elite. An interesting example of this is found in a series of questionnaires on communal religious practices distributed by Spanish officials under Philip II (ruled 1552–1598) in the sixteenth century. Communities had long associated themselves with local patron saints, who served as symbols of both internal unity and external competition. Communities entered into sacred contractual agreements with their saints, promising to honor them with lavish shrines, feast days, and votive offerings in return for agrarian fertility, economic prosperity, and protection from internal factionalism or natural catastrophes. Many of the saints operated as specialists, and localities often received outside pilgrims seeking types of assistance particular to their patron saint; some saints cured specific illnesses, others ensured good harvests, and so on. Spanish authorities in turn considered the plethora of local feast days and specialized saints as an obstacle to their campaign of centralization. Gradually, particularistic interests were countered through crown sponsorship of multipurpose cults associated with the ruling dynasty, especially the cult of the Virgin and the Bleeding Heart. Furthermore, the crown fought against popular disrespect for saints who failed to fulfill their local obligations. One such ritual included the ducking of a saint's image in a river or lake as an expression of communal displeasure. Analogous struggles occurred in other areas of Europe, as in seventeenth-century Bavaria under Duke Maximilian I, where ducking of saints' images was legally prohibited and local revolts over access to communal cemeteries were put down under threat of force. With the help of the Jesuits, the ruling dynasty gradually subordinated local saints in a regimented hierarchy to the Virgin Mary, a policy manifest in artistic representations as well as an official sacred geography, the Bavaria Sancta et Pia (1615–1628) authored by the Tyrolian Jesuit Matthaeus Rader (1561–1634).
Hierarchical subordination had gender implications as well, the most prominent example being the rise and fall in the popularity of apparitions, sainthood, exorcism, and demonic possession. Once again in Spain, women initially availed of apparitions as a means of empowerment during the fifteenth century, but church authorities ultimately discouraged this practice. With this avenue closed to them, women like Teresa of Ávila and the Italian Angela Merici, founder of the Ursulines, sought recognition as holy women, and after their deaths their followers petitioned for their beatification and canonization. Church officials generally discouraged female incursions into the male-dominated realm of Catholic spirituality, though many succeeded through almost irrepressible popular support. Dynastic support for the cult of the Virgin had an ambivalent effect on the role of women in society, enabling empowerment only for exceptional figures while popularizing the image of merciful women as powerful and personal intercessors for those in need or seeking justice. At the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century, cases of demonic possession were clearly on the rise and opened another window of opportunity for women to enter the public domain. However, this means of access was fraught with danger, and it was not unusual for demoniacs to end their lives at the stake as accused witches. In one rare case, a peasant woman even achieved official recognition as an exorcist; during the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), Rosina Huber survived sixteen weeks of severe torture, but was subsequently allowed to exorcise ghosts from prominent households in southern Germany.
Youth culture also found itself increasingly on the defensive as the representatives of established authority channeled youthful exuberance into officially sanctioned activities. The so-called youth abbeys and other such unofficial organizations of apprentices and journeymen were integrated into religious confraternities sanctioned by urban masters. This was part of a broader trend in political culture to limit guild participation in civic government in cities of the Holy Roman Empire after the Schmalkaldic War (1546–1547) and regulate cooption into the ruling elite. Cooption into the large council in Venice or in German towns with a Venetian-style constitution, primarily a ceremonial body, provided a testing ground for the political reliability of up-and-coming town councillors and created a pool of future recruits for the small council, where true political authority lay. In the eighteenth century, male vagrants became the target of persecutions for witchcraft in Austria, as the gender stereo-type of the witch shifted from the traditional image of the witch as an old hag to incorporate unruly gangs of young men.
The fight against superstitions and popular magic is one of the best-documented examples of the attempt of the mixed success of the ruling elite in limiting popular access to the supernatural. Initially, the ruling elite reviled superstitions as real and diabolical magic. In 1585, the papal bull Coeli et Terri condemned all forms of popular superstitions, including incantations, treasure finding, and necromancy, as covenants with Satan, "the Father of Lies." The Flemish jurist and demonologist Martin Del Rio attacked magic and the veneration of evil spirits as vile superstitions—as dangerous and efficacious magic. Still, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was often difficult to differentiate between popular and elite superstitions since many attitudes remained shared. During the witch craze in Augsburg during the 1560s, the Jesuit Peter Canisius and the wealthy Fugger family supported a series of exorcisms that ended with accusations that Johann Fugger shared in an "old and damnable heresy" about demoniacs, which held that they were possessed by repentant souls from purgatory rather than by the devil.
Another common belief involved the fear that the interment of suicides in hallowed ground resulted in celestial displeasure, manifesting itself in the form of hailstorms that destroyed crops and livestock. In fact, this belief reveals that many popular superstitions had a sound empirical basis. For example, waves of suicides sometimes followed famine and plague, but the popular consciousness held the former responsible for natural catastrophes, in an inversion of cause and effect. In the sixteenth century, elites also shared similar fears about ghosts, but by the eighteenth century, the Enlightenment adopted a new method of combating them—derision. By then, superstitions were no longer viewed as dangerous practices, rather as backward peasant ignorance and nonsense. Ironically, however, the victory of the Enlightenment over popular culture was short-lived. As folklorists reacted against pure reason, popular culture became the rallying point of nationalists and Romantics, who sought originality, purity, and the source of common aspirations in the simple culture of the common people of early modern Europe.
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—DAVID LEDERER
