Outline of the March 5th Lecture / L. Babaoğlu

REFORMATION AND SOCIETY

Gender, family, literacy, charity, elite vs. popular culture

The interaction between society and culture and the balance between tradition and innovation during the Reformation is the subject of this lecture.

Q- How did the Reformation alter the order of society?
Q- How did the religious experience, the new style of worship, effect the traditional meaning system?

The fact that we are dealing not with a monolithic cultural system but with different intersecting cultures makes the issue even more complicated.

Culture; in the broad sense refers to all aspects of the way in which a society relates to and makes sense of the world.
We may define culture; as patterns of behaviour and belief, as assumptions, value sustems and expectations.
We may define society; as an integration of social units which provide their members with tradition and identity.
The members of each social order belong to and participate in a meaningful collectivity respectively. This is the pattern how people define themselves (as a member of a family, of a community, of a group, etc.).
However, the particiants in intersecting classes have different even conflicting founding assumptions, value systems and expectations.

Within this context, we will look at the change of social patterns and practices.


FAMILY

Q- Is there a connection between the changes in the religious doctrine and the changes in the organization of the family.?

Steven Ozment, in his book The Ancestors (2001), looks at the premodern and preindustrial societies and compares them with the modern family.
Ozment, defines family; as “an organization of discrete individuals interacting with one another in a sui generis familial world created by and large by that interaction.”
According to Ozment beneath the external structure and organization of a family exists the private life of individuals within a household.
The houshold maybe composed of extended families or nuclear families. Another important question is about the relations between husband and wife, and parents and children.





Lawrence Stone, in his book The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (1990),
Posits three overlapping chronological periods, each of which presented a predominant family type.
1) The open lineage family 1450-1630.
2) The restricted patriarchal nuclear family 1550-1700
3) The closed domestic nuclear family.


Stone, analysis each type according the composition of the family and the existing relations among the members of the family and the child rearing practices.

Ozment provides us with more detailed accounts concentrating on the concept of marriage. According to him the Protestant Reformation supplied a new concept of marriage (Luther legalized clerical marriage).

GENDER

The Protestans rejected ancient and medieval portrayals of women as physically, mentally amd morally inferior to males.
Lutherans insisted on the on the husband’s biblically commanded headship, but they also praised intellectual cameradarie between husbands and wifes and thought a pragmatic equality within marriage. According to Ozment, the legal innovation of divorce and remarriage had farreaching consequences fort the future equality of the sexes.
Natalie Zemon Davis, in her book Society and Culture in Early Modern France (1987),
Gives us a new definition of marriage and accepts the changes but she argues that the changed roles of women within life, liturgy, symbolism and the organization of the reformed Church are more important in illuminating the changing relations within the family.
Her search on the judicial records and private contracts reveal that the Mediaval women were beter off compared with the Early Modern women.
With the Reformation a new image of the Christian women was presented in the Calvinist popular literature. Women should read the Bible, in order to be able to provide companianship to their husbands at home and to educate their children about good behavior. But they had no voice concerning the organization of the institution of the Church and religious experience.
Although there were differences among women of varried social classes the converted males gained more in religious aspects than the converted females.


LITERACY

According to Davis, the urban elite women had at least a vernacular education usually by private tutors. The non-noble city women were rarely educated.
Protestantism made efforts to encourage literacy, even poor girls in orphanages were educated. But although in the populous middle rank of urban society, both male and female, literacy may have risen from the mid 15.century under the impact of economic growth and the invention of printing, literacy of the men increased much more than that of the women.





CHARITY

The tradition of alms giving as a religious obligation underwent changes as well. Yet it is important to note that the novelties concerning charity were introduced by a coalition of Catholic and Protestant notables and not by the clerics. The leaders of the Church were theoretically protectors of the poor but practically this was not the case.
The rising poverty and problems coming along with it threatened the total population of the cities. Thus the social forces shaped the city dwellers’ attitudes and actions.

Based on brotherly love, according to the Bible, it was (is) among the duties of the faithful that they care for their neighbours. This was accepted as a path to their salvation.
And the strong believers who wanted to avoid thisworldly pleasures and materialism led an ascetic life depending on this alms giving tradition.

The demographic recoveries in urban centers had a negative impact on poverty. Which led to a change of treatment of poverty. Due to the changing urban conditions the increase of immigration and furthermore the decline in death rates let the population rise to 45000s even to 60000s. Parallely the growing numbers of the poor population led to urban disorder, misery, and illness. That the riots were harshly punished only worsened the sitaution. Finally, to eliminate begging and starvation and to alter these conditions a wellfare and health reform was introduced. An administration of laymen was formed who took certain measures.
As an outcome begging was prohibited and alms giving was brought under a central control. It turned out that centralization had economic and social advantages.
What was realized was a novel conception of charity. Plus a new conception of labor.

According to Protestantism all men can and should live the religion and men live such a life if they impoly their calling, their life task, their place in this world.
Protestant asceticism, as Max Weber puts it in his book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904/05), was a worldly asceticism and had to replace monastic asceticism which was not a means of justification. In contrast labour in a calling appeared to Luther as the outward expression of brotherly love.
To repeat, a life pleasing to God and obedient to the divine law was to be lived in the ordinary occupation of men.
Thus labor became a religious duty and profit was not something to be ashamed of, on the contrary, it was cherished.