Holy Fabrications: The Catacomb Saints and the Counter-Reformation in Bavaria

Abstract

True to its catholicity, the Counter-Reformation was in spirit a universal movement. The new universalism of the post-Tridentine Church produced greater centralisation, enhancing the authority of the papacy, and was reflected in the attempted imposition throughout the Catholic world of institutional uniformity and liturgical, cultic and devotional standardisation. In practice, however, the Counter-Reformation must also be seen as a local phenomenon, not only in the obvious sense that it was within their immediate locality that early modern Catholics were exposed to the new impulses originating at Rome, but also in the sense that such impulses were filtered through a prism of localism. Throughout the Catholic world, individual communities sought to preserve their traditional, home-grown institutions and customs, often by imaginatively adapting the new norms to suit local requirements. The existence of a complex relationship between centre and periphery, resting on a process of often tense negotiation and cultural exchange (since it could be a dynamic and not simply a one-way affair) has provided recent historians of Catholic reform with a fresh conceptual polarity, that of local versus universal, to set alongside the more standard dichotomies of popular and elite, official and unofficial or learned and lay religion.

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