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Marian Pilgrimage and the Performance of Male Privilege in Eighteenth-Century Augsburg
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 19 September 2012
Extract
Popular Marian devotion played a vital role in the Catholic Church of Germany during the early modern period, especially during the “golden age of religious revival” experienced by post-Tridentine, baroque popular Catholicism. For example, at least ninety-seven local Marian shrines scattered throughout the diocese of Augsburg attracted pilgrims in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The most famous was certainly Andechs, which drew half a million visitors each year in the seventeenth century from all over the Holy Roman Empire. In turn, Catholics from the diocese of Augsburg traveled beyond the bishopric's borders to major and minor shrines near and far, such as Altötting in Bavaria. Yet while major sites dedicated to the Virgin Mary such as Andechs and Altötting reflected the intensity of ongoing popular Marian devotions, the breadth of the Virgin Mary's cultural significance is signaled by the large number of Marian shrines within the diocese itself, such as Kobel or Violau, which were mostly small, local affairs that attracted primarily nearby populations as pilgrims and supplicants.
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References
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15 Siemons, Frömmigkeit im Wandel, 153.
16 See footnote 15.
17 The following narrative of the events that took place in 1755 and 1756 is mostly assembled from an original document signed and sealed by Franz Joseph Frölich, Johann Baptist Hafner, and Nicholas Entz, “Eügentliche Begebenheit des Violauischen Creütz-gangs!,” Pfarrarchiv Violau II/1/I, Beilage 1a. A copy of this document with only minor differences exists in StAAug, KWA B 27/14.
18 Because this unofficial pilgrimage was a serious act of defiance, the historical records, even the narratives produced by the pilgrims themselves, do not provide much detail about it. And yet the fact that the number of fifty-seven participants is always given in the documentation resists complete silencing of this event.
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41 Ibid.
42 Frölich, Hafner, and Entz, “Eügentliche Begebenheit.”
43 An undated note, probably from the 1750s, reports that the Brotherhood had already gathered 1750 gulden in capital investments. StAAug, KWA B 27/14, f. 72r.
44 I first encountered this painting in Stefan Siemons's narrative of the Augsburgers' defense of Violau. Siemons, Frömmigkeit im Wandel, 173–174.
45 “Jetzt der Creitzgang abgestellet war / Von einem ganz alleinig, / als dieß die Bürger wurden gwahr / Sich zeigten Unß ganz einig. / die antworth war: sie wollten auch / den Creitzgang helfen bschüzen / d-Ehr Mariae nach Violau / aus Liebe Unterstüzen.” Ibid., 173.
46 “Jeder Bürger zeigt sein Treu, das officium war Behent / Unsrer Bitt auch stimmet bey.” Ibid., 174.
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55 StAAug, KWA B 27/14, f. 2r-v of petition to the Catholic magistrates, November 11, 1781.
56 StAAug, KWA B 27/14, f. 9v of petition to the Catholic magistrates, November 11, 1781.
57 StAAug, KWA B 27/14, f. 10r of petition to the Catholic magistrates, November 11, 1781.
58 StAAug, KWA B 27/14, f. 11r-v of petition to the Catholic magistrates, November 11, 1781.
59 StAAug, KWA B 27/14, petition, August 11, 1787.
60 StAAug, KWA B 27/14, letter from Catholic clergy, assistant mayor, and city council of Augsburg to the bishop, 1781, f. 28v; StAAug, KWA B 27/14, letter from Catholic Mayor Jakob Wilhelm Langenmantel, July 16, 1786.
61 StAAug, KWA B27/14, joint petition defending the pilgrimages to Lechfeld, Klimmach, and Violau, November 10, 1781.
62 StAAug, KWA B 27/14, mandate, April 15, 1788.
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65 It is outside the scope of this article to analyze fully why women were readmitted to the pilgrimage in the late nineteenth century. Over the course of the nineteenth century, male public performances of power became increasingly attached to rituals of the bureaucratic state, the secular public sphere, and the marketplace rather than rituals of religion and piety, which left once again a space open for women to reclaim public expressions of religious piety. But by this time, such forms of piety as pilgrimages were less an expression of public prestige and more an expression of a feminized devotion. Women, habituated to the spaces of the household and accustomed to modes of piety focused on familial and personal devotions, reasserted themselves in the religious sphere through pilgrimage, but by then the meaning of these pilgrimages had already changed. Rebekka Habermas offers a compelling analysis of the gendered transformations of a bourgeois religiosity from the late eighteenth century, when a generally gender-neutral “intimization” (geschlechtsunspezifische “Intimisierung”) of religion began, through the nineteenth century, when the piety of the burger became strongly associated with women and the family in the private sphere (geschlechtsspezifische “Familiarisierung” von Religion im Privaten) and later developed into a predominately female religious public sphere involving women's participation in institutional religion. Habermas, Rebekka, “Weibliche Religiosität—oder: Von der Fragilität bürgerlicher Identitäten,” in Wege zur Geschichte des Bürgertums, ed. Tenfelde, Klaus and Wehler, Hans-Ulrich (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1994)Google Scholar. See also Schlögl, Rudolf, “Sünderin, Heilige oder Hausfrau? Katholische Kirche und weibliche Frömmigkeit um 1800,” in Wunderbare Erscheinungen. Frauen und katholische Frömmigkeit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert, ed. von Olenhusen, Irmtraud Götz (Paderborn: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1995), 13–50Google Scholar. On the feminization of religion in nineteenth-century Europe, see Brown, Callum G., The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000 (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2009)Google Scholar; Ford, Caroline, Divided Houses: Religion and Gender in Modern France (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 2005)Google Scholar. For both a historiographical review and some warnings about the concept of feminization of religion, see Ford, Caroline, “Religion and Popular Culture in Modern Europe,” The Journal of Modern History 65 (1993): 152–175, esp. 167–169CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
66 On the complex process by which the post-Tridentine Church reformed, appropriated, and co-opted lay Marian devotion during the Counter-Reformation, see Heal, The Cult of the Virgin Mary. On the reform measures of “enlightened“ Catholicism, see Siemons, Frömmigkeit im Wandel, 19–24, 167–185; Freitag, Volks- und Elitenfrömmigkeit, 317–357; Habermas, Wallfahrt und Aufruhr; and Forster, Marc R., Catholic Germany from the Reformation to the Enlightenment (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2007)Google Scholar, especially chap. 6.
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68 ABA, BO 2474, Dinkelsbühl 1723–1758. Andächtiges Gebett zu der wunderthätigen und schmertzhafften schweissenden Mutter Gottes Maria, auf Unser Lieben Frauen Altar zu Dünckelsbühl in Schwaben (Dinkelsbühl: Caspar Shultes, 1729)Google Scholar.
69 Stefan Siemons used these same examples in his history of Violau, but whereas he focused on the theological contexts and debates concerning Bilderverehrung, I am more interested in questions of social and institutional praxis and power. Siemons, Frömmigkeit im Wandel, 165.