My jaw hit the floor when I read that whole bit, by the way. Conceding on faith alone!!! conceding on clerical marriage!!! what!!!
Ah! I'm sure Roper gets into this, but it's commonly argued by historians of late medieval Europe that the Western Latin Church is pretty lax and chill and loosey-goosey and "tolerant" of all sorts of things until the German reformers* start kicking up a fuss, which then forces greater rigidity and impatience/fear with anything that appears to destabilize the shared, common understanding of orthodoxy and canon. Thus, some of Rome's early interactions with the German reformers demonstrate a great deal of pragmatic flexibility. And the church debates over clerical marriage are, uh, long-standing, so this is an easy and obvious wedge issue for the reformers in a lot of ways.
[*insert "printing press operators" or "Lollards" or "Castilian conversos" here, depending on the historian]
Anyway, I feel like you might like Eamon Duffy's The Voices of Morebath and William A. Christian Jr.'s Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain whenever you get done with the Germans!
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Date: 2024-11-21 02:07 pm (UTC)Ah! I'm sure Roper gets into this, but it's commonly argued by historians of late medieval Europe that the Western Latin Church is pretty lax and chill and loosey-goosey and "tolerant" of all sorts of things until the German reformers* start kicking up a fuss, which then forces greater rigidity and impatience/fear with anything that appears to destabilize the shared, common understanding of orthodoxy and canon. Thus, some of Rome's early interactions with the German reformers demonstrate a great deal of pragmatic flexibility. And the church debates over clerical marriage are, uh, long-standing, so this is an easy and obvious wedge issue for the reformers in a lot of ways.
[*insert "printing press operators" or "Lollards" or "Castilian conversos" here, depending on the historian]
Anyway, I feel like you might like Eamon Duffy's The Voices of Morebath and William A. Christian Jr.'s Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain whenever you get done with the Germans!
(hello!)