Dealings with God: From Blasphemers in Early Modern Zurich to a Cultural History of Religiousness.

Holder, R. Ward

Dealings with God: From Blasphemers in Early Modern Zurich to a Cultural History of Religiousness. By Francisca Loetz. Translated by Rosemary Selle. St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2009. viii + 326 pp. $114.95 cloth.

Francisca Loetz's Dealings with God presents some of the best characteristics of contemporary historical scholarship. Enormously erudite, she uses the archival material from early modern Zurich's struggles with the crime of blasphemy as her exemplum through which to craft a new cultural historical model of the history of religiousness. While the issue is blasphemy, the point is far more ambitious--Loetz is attempting to generate a new paradigm for examining religiousness.

The book is deceptively simply structured into four parts. The first part is a deep historiographical exploration of the methods by which religion and religiousness have been explicated. Loetz's work here is impressive in the variety of approaches that she considers, generally showing excellent mastery of many of those methods. She finds traditional church history and political history to be too concerned with the impact of theological ideas and the influence of ecclesiastical institutions to get at the issue of religion, which she defines as "the sum of religiously charged norms that shape human behavior within a society"(6). She considers the contributions that cultural historians, legal historians, literary historians, and social historians have made to the study of blasphemy, presenting a case for her cultural history of religiousness that depends on a multivalent approach.

The second part of the book presents her evidence. While this gives the heart of the research and analysis and takes up the lion's share of the book (187 pages), a number of problems lessen the impact of this section. The analysis rarely presents the translations or transcriptions of the material, so the reader must accept the analysis at face value. Further, the book does not provide an index through which the reader would be able to determine when a specific incident was being considered again. Patience is required to navigate this section, as it is long and proceeds inductively. The numerous summaries are very helpful.

The third part of the volume gives a comparison between the records of blasphemy in Zurich and Lucerne, a nearby Catholic canton. At first, her research findings consider those overlapping conclusions. Here the author presents some of the summarized findings that make the book so valuable. She finds that oaths that swore by God's body parts died out near the end of the fifteenth century (249). The blasphemous elements that the courts dealt with most frequently from the end of the fifteenth century to the middle of the sixteenth century abused the passion and the sacramental elements (250). The next stage combined the sacraments and the elements, and was marked out by "verbal inflation," the addition of swearing by those items multiplied by hundreds or thousands (251). The new trend that appeared in the second third of the seventeenth century was swearing by bad weather (251). After 1675, Loetz finds that swearing changed remarkably, moving away from propositional content toward insult (252). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the judiciary lost interest in the "extraordinary blasphemies" (253).

In chapter 3, Loetz takes on the "received opinion" that the Protestant management of morals was stricter than that of Catholicism. She does not find this to be the case, seeing instead that the authorities in Lucerne did not give particular judicial and juridical attention to blasphemy (262). She finds a tripartite pattern--from the end of the medieval period to the beginning of the seventeenth century, prosecutions for blasphemy are comparable; then from 1640 to 1690, Zurich prosecutes far more blasphemers than Lucerne; the figures converge again in the early eighteenth century. Loetz draws the conclusion that the impact of the Reformation took a whole century to be measurable in Zurich, while both Lucerne and Zurich experienced the apparent process of secularization, regardless of confession. The main difference she finds between Zurich and Lucerne can be linked to the different doctrine of the duty of believers--the priesthood of all believers contributed strongly to Zurich's "explicitly integrated horizontal social control in its system of sanctions. Everyone was authorized and required to demand the Herdfall from blasphemers. Verbal sin was not forgiven by ordained priests in the confessional, but by the congregation of believers, publicly asked to absolve the offender" (265). Loetz discovers three differences in the patterns of blasphemy in Reformed Zurich and Catholic Lucerne. First, swearing by Mary or the saints was an indictable offense in Lucerne--as we would expect. Second, blasphemers in Lucerne showed little interest in theological issues. Finally, the blasphemous incidents do not take on heterodox characteristics. Loetz concludes that "the specifically Protestant encouragement of all believers to read the Bible had ambivalent consequences .... Those who kept their flock from individual study of the Bible and emphasised the authority of church tradition, as in Catholic Lucerne, offered better protection from going astray" (267-68).

Loetz's final chapter recapitulates her argument for the cultural history of religiousness. She sees its value in both the variety of disciplines on which it draws, and a flesh reflection upon the subject in history. She interprets the value of the approach to be the widening of the perspective of the historian, and the honoring of the actual beliefs of the historical subjects.

While Loetz's work demands engagement, it presents also particularly thorny problems for evaluation. Perhaps a number of practitioners of the sub-disciplines that Loetz finds inadequate to the task of understanding religiousness could cavil at her work; I will only consider the history of doctrine. While Loetz makes an important point about how church historians can concentrate only on theological ideas, that point by no means encompasses the whole of the field at present--there has been a burgeoning movement in the past decades to understand the complex relationship between religious authorities and religious communities. Further, her own lack in this field shows up at various points, I will consider two. First, for the Reformed, blasphemy was inherently tied to idolatry. But this well-known facet of doctrinal history is wholly missing from her analysis, even Carlos Eire's masterwork (War Against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989]) does not appear in the bibliography. Second, this lack contributes to Loetz's superficial understanding of the kind of believers and church that the Zurich reformers were attempting to form. Instead of seeing Lucerne's docile and ignorant believers as morally superior and safer, Zwingli and Bullinger would most likely have been horrified at their dependence on implicit faith, and would have feared for their souls. This is an important book, with enormous implications for the study of religious communities and ideas. But at times, its reach exceeds its grasp.

doi: 10.1017/S0009640710001794

R. Ward Holder

Saint Anselm College