But how did Reformation-era people live?

I was surprised, on coming close to the end of Diarmaid MacCulloch's The Reformation: A History, to encounter several chapters dealing with cultural elements that are central in present day, modish historiography. I did not expect these themes in a sweeping early modern history published fifteen years ago. This historian prefigures current "woke" preoccupations. The result is fascinating.

MacCulloch was not content to provide merely a chronicle of the thinking and struggles of insurgent preachers, theologians, popes and rulers. Instead he made the choice to share his understanding of how the social transformations implicit in the implosion of medieval Christendom was lived by ordinary people. These topics form separate chapters among in his conclusions. Hence the section called Patterns of Life which contains Death, Life and Discipline; Love and Sex -- Staying the Same; Love and Sex -- Moving On; and Outcomes. Rather than integrating community life themes into a timeline or geographical narrative, he offers his wide-ranging observations in thematic form. The result is absorbing, sometimes hard to follow as when he jumps from conditions in tolerant Poland to among early Jesuits in Spain, and likely problematic to a different sort of historian who delves more deeply into a single, restricted, even manageable, time and place.

In MacCulloch's telling, our hidden, private preoccupations get a light touch. Introducing Love and Sex he writes:

Augustine [Bishop of Hippo, 354-430 CE] speculated wistfully about the time before the Fall in Eden, when Adam and Eve's private parts behaved in orderly fashion. The Church has been trying to tell private parts what to do ever since.

What Christian theologians asserted about men, women, and sexuality was nonsense, but it was ancient nonsense, and humanity has always been inclined to respect the assertion of ancient wisdom. [No more?] The classical and Christian package of ideas also had a lunatic coherence. ...

One might have expected that in the seventeenth century, the more generous or pluralist impulses of humanist scholarship would have had an effect in widening the possibilities open to human beings. There was nevertheless a double problem: Humanist scholars were mostly men, and the powerful lay and ecclesiastical rulers who picked and chose what they wanted to hear from their humanist clients were also mostly men ... one female scholar of the 1970s posed the question "Did women have a Renaissance?" and having surveyed Renaissance humanism across Europe, came to a resounding negative. ...

... To examine the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in relation to marriage, gender, sexuality, and the family is to weigh [a] balance of massive practical continuity against equally significant change and transformation. ...

I'm not going to try to summarize all he offers about these themes, just a few highlights that jumped out for me.

• Northwestern Europe -- England, Scandinavia, the northern Holy Roman Empire [much of Germany], the Netherlands, and northern France -- was characterized by nuclear families consisting of no more than two generations living together during the Reformation as now.

• In those societies, if the general pattern followed English records, people married late at an average of 28 years. Because both man and wife were adults, patriarchal domination was not so pronounced as in areas where older men took teen brides.

• But death in the midst of life was a constant presence what with simmering wars and unchecked pestilences. In this circumstance

  ... the Church's insistence on lifelong marriage meant something different then than now: One partner or other would have the experience of serial monogamy at much the same rate as is now created by the secular deaths of marriages through divorce or legal separation.

• Women's best chance of winning some autonomy and personal respect in these societies came from outliving husbands.

  With time on their hands and a lively consciousness of the approaching afterlife, elderly women often became key players either in enforcing religious norms or promoting religious change

• MacCulloch explores what can be divined about homosexuality in European societies of the Reformation era. Some Protestants became obsessed with horror about "sodomy" -- not very precisely defined -- which they attributed to "popery." He finds some glimpses of homosexual relationships among a few males, including monarchs and courtiers, but this discussion suffers from the usual defect of historical research into suppressed subcultures: what records survive show us only the lives of the most privileged with little inkling of the experience of ordinary men -- and women.

• In Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation countries, the Virgin and an idealized Holy Family were offered as models for what were usually multi-generational extended families of the laity. Concurrently, the Church insisted far more rigorously on clerical celibacy, led by the new Jesuit order of militant priests.

• 
  Meanwhile, Protestants, despite encouraging their ministers to marry, refused to be out-manned by their Catholic competitors.

  Commonly [newly married ministers] grew beards (it also helped their central task of preaching that a full beard would make them look like everyone's picture of an Old Testament prophet).

  Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer's 1547 portrait represented him in full bewhiskered majesty.

• The religious enthusiasms unleashed had all too similar consequences for the role of women in these devout societies:

  ... women might discover that God intended previously unheard of possibilities for them in the early years when Protestantism was still not even a name, and when the main traditional outlets for women's independent religious life had been destroyed with the suppression of nunneries. The general pattern in Protestantism was very similar to the experience of some religious [nuns] in the Counter-Reformation Catholic Church -- self assertion, followed by male reassertion and renewed tradition discipline.

MacCulloch's conclusion of this enormous history recognizes how foreign his sweeping panorama must seem to 21st century readers. He thinks we let ourselves off too easily when we emphasize how different we are from these tempestuous early modern Europeans. We too are much driven by anxiety and fears both genuine and imagined.

Modern westerners -- including modern Christians -- are likely to deplore much in the struggles of the Reformation. Both late medieval Christianity and the mainstream Protestantism that sought to destroy it were religions of fear, anxiety, and guilt, although they both claimed remedy and comfort for anxiety and guilt through the love exhibited by God to humanity in Jesus Christ. The Reformation arguments were in large part about how human behavior and actions could influence God into saving them from eternal despair.

... Radical thinkers and preachers in the early stages of the Reformation in particular represented possible future identities for Latin [western] Christianity. Yet they have been marginalized and rejected by Catholics and Protestants alike, because they radically questioned the grim certainties both sides shared, and suggested new, more constructive approaches to divine power and its interplay with humanity. ... A modern Anglican -- or even a modern Roman Catholic -- is likely to be more like a sixteenth century Anabaptist in belief than he or she resembles a sixteenth century member of the Church of England.

... Europeans were prepared to burn and torture each other because they disagreed on whether, or how, bread and wine were transformed into God, or about the sense in which Jesus Christ could be both divine and human. We have no right to adopt an attitude of intellectual or emotional superiority, especially in the light of the atrocities that twentieth-century Europe produced because of its faith in newer, secular ideologies. Anxiety and a sense of imperfection seem to be basic components of being human, for those of no religion as well as the religious. Some continue to call the answer to these mysteries by the name of God. ...

Previous posts in my The Reformation: A History series:
The Reformation: Islamophobia and a slavery past
The subversive weapon of the Reformation: musical propaganda
Bishop Laud and his cats
On blaming capitalism on the Protestant Reformation