Slovene (Dec 2017)
Preaching and Confessional Culture in Early Modern Germany. Catholic Sermons between 1650 and 1800
Abstract
With the Council of Trent, Catholicism defined itself for the first time as a confession with distinct identifying features. In order not only to create but also to maintain such a Catholic Confessionalised identity, Catholic preachers needed to react to contemporary settings and currents as well as to fixed points of reference, as represented by the decrees of Trent. The scope provided by the Trent decree on preaching, “super lectione et praedicatione,” was so wide that, based upon it, individual ideas could be constructed about what constituted a “good” sermon. This can be seen in the various hermeneutics of the Council that developed up to the 18th century, and the associated post-Tridentine practices of piety, which are commonly grouped under the terms “Baroque” and “Enlightenment.” This article, which analyses sermons from the perspective of aesthetics of production and reception, is nonetheless able to show that along with Baroque and Enlightened piety, Jansenist influences also coexisted, something which has hardly been appreciated so far in research. At the same time, the preachers and the audiences do not seem to have understood the complex network of variously coded elements of Catholic confessional culture as a contradiction: the pastoral strategies of Catholics from the years 1650 to 1800 seem rather not to have been characterised by wave-like motion, with specific extensions on the ritual-sensual or rational-iconoclastic levels, as has been assumed in research. Such asynchrony can also be recognised in textual samples drawn from the Russian Orthodox history of preaching.
