For much of the twentieth century, historians of early modern Europe believed they understood religious life as a two-story house. Upstairs lived the theologians, reformers, and educated clergy—people who practiced real Christianity. Downstairs dwelt the masses, clutching their amulets and mumbling half-remembered prayers, practitioners of something that barely qualified as faith at all.

This elegant dichotomy proved remarkably durable. It shaped how generations of scholars understood the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, and the supposed 'modernization' of European religion. It also turned out to be largely wrong—or at least, far too simple to capture the messy reality of how early modern people actually believed, worshipped, and made meaning from the sacred.

The historiographical journey from confident two-tier models to our current state of productive uncertainty reveals much about how scholarly interpretation evolves. What began as an attempt to recover 'popular religion' as a distinct object of study eventually generated fundamental questions about whether such a category makes any sense at all. The people's faith, it turned out, was harder to find than anyone expected—not because it didn't exist, but because the very tools historians used to search for it kept distorting what they found.

The classic framework for understanding early modern religion drew a sharp line between elite Christianity and popular superstition. Scholars like Jean Delumeau argued that medieval Europe remained only superficially Christianized—that beneath a veneer of official religion lurked a substrate of pagan survivals, magical thinking, and pre-Christian folk practice. The Reformation and Counter-Reformation, in this view, represented the real Christianization of Europe, as both Protestant and Catholic reformers finally brought genuine religious instruction to the ignorant masses.

This model carried enormous explanatory power. It made sense of reformers' constant complaints about popular ignorance. It explained why bishops kept discovering that their flocks couldn't recite basic prayers or identify fundamental doctrines. And it provided a satisfying narrative of progress—religion becoming more rational, more interior, more modern as elite standards gradually trickled down to common folk.

Yet the framework rested on assumptions that subsequent historians would find deeply problematic. Most obviously, it adopted the reformers' own perspective as objective truth. When a sixteenth-century bishop complained that peasants venerated saints 'superstitiously,' early historians took this as evidence of popular superstition rather than as evidence of elite anxiety. The sources were read at face value, as if clerical observers were neutral anthropologists rather than participants in struggles over religious authority.

More subtly, the two-tier model embedded distinctly Protestant assumptions about what 'real' religion looked like. Interior faith, scriptural knowledge, rejection of material mediation—these markers of authentic Christianity mapped suspiciously well onto Reformed ideals. Catholics who venerated relics or sought miraculous cures appeared not as practitioners of a different but equally valid Christianity, but as insufficiently reformed, still mired in superstition. The model measured all religion against a Protestant yardstick.

The political implications were equally significant. Describing popular religion as superstition waiting to be reformed naturalized elite authority over religious practice. It suggested that ordinary people couldn't be trusted with their own spiritual lives, that they needed educated superiors to guide them toward proper belief. The historiography, in other words, reproduced the power relations it claimed merely to describe.

Takeaway

When we adopt historical actors' categories uncritically, we risk mistaking their polemics for our analysis—the reformer's complaint becomes the historian's conclusion.

By the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of scholars began dismantling the two-tier model from multiple directions. Social historians influenced by the Annales school approached religion not as doctrine but as practice, asking how people actually worshipped rather than whether they believed correctly. The results complicated every easy distinction between elite and popular.

Natalie Zemon Davis's work on sixteenth-century France demonstrated that supposedly 'popular' practices—carnival rituals, charivari, festive violence—were thoroughly integrated into official religious culture. The church calendar itself organized these events; clergy participated alongside laity. What earlier historians had classified as pagan survivals turned out to be thoroughly Christianized practices that served recognizable religious functions. The sacred and the carnivalesque weren't enemies but partners.

Studies of saints' cults proved equally revealing. Scholars like William Christian Jr. showed that the veneration of local saints represented not primitive superstition but sophisticated theological engagement. Peasants understood that God worked through saints, that miracles occurred according to divine will, that local shrines connected communities to universal sacred power. Their religion wasn't pre-Christian—it was their Christianity, shaped by local conditions but perfectly orthodox in its fundamental assumptions.

Perhaps most importantly, historians demonstrated that influence flowed in both directions. Elite religion wasn't simply imposed on passive populations; ordinary people actively shaped how Christianity developed. Popular demand drove the cult of the rosary. Lay enthusiasm sustained pilgrimage traditions that reformers wished would disappear. The church hierarchy repeatedly found itself ratifying practices that had emerged from below. The two-tier model had imagined religion flowing downward from educated elites; the evidence revealed constant upward pressure as well.

This reciprocal model did not deny distinctions between clerical and lay practice—differences in education, institutional position, and theological sophistication were real. But it refused to map these differences onto a hierarchy of authenticity. The village healer invoking saints' names and the university theologian parsing scholastic distinctions were both practicing Christianity, drawing on shared assumptions even as they emphasized different elements. Mutual influence, not top-down reform, characterized early modern religious history.

Takeaway

Religious traditions don't flow only from centers to margins—they're constantly negotiated, with ordinary practitioners shaping official belief as much as they're shaped by it.

Even as historians refined the study of popular religion, others began questioning whether the category itself made sense. The most influential critique came from Roger Chartier, who argued that 'popular culture'—including popular religion—was not a thing waiting to be discovered but an artifact of scholarly construction. Historians didn't find popular religion; they created it by deciding in advance what would count.

Chartier's intervention highlighted a fundamental methodological problem. The sources for early modern religion were overwhelmingly produced by elites—clergy, educated laity, state officials. When historians used these sources to reconstruct popular belief, they were inevitably seeing popular practice through elite eyes. The very act of documentation filtered and distorted. We know about cunning folk because they were prosecuted; we know about 'superstitious' practices because reformers complained. The archive preserved what authorities noticed, not necessarily what mattered most to ordinary people.

This critique didn't mean abandoning the study of non-elite religion, but it demanded greater reflexivity about what such study could accomplish. Historians couldn't simply recover authentic popular voices from sources designed to suppress or reform them. They needed to read against the grain, attending to the gaps and silences, acknowledging that their reconstructions were always partial and perspectival.

The political stakes of the popular religion concept also came under scrutiny. Some scholars argued that the very distinction between elite and popular served contemporary political agendas—romanticizing 'the people' or alternatively dismissing their beliefs as primitive. The category could be mobilized by left and right alike, by those celebrating popular resistance and those justifying modernizing reforms. Its apparent neutrality concealed ideological work.

Contemporary historiography occupies an uncomfortable but productive position. Most scholars recognize that religious practice varied by education, occupation, geography, and social position—that a merchant's Christianity differed from a peasant's. Yet they resist the old hierarchies that made these differences into measures of authenticity. The challenge is describing religious diversity without reproducing the condescension of earlier frameworks, acknowledging difference without ranking belief. The problem of popular religion remains unsolved, but we understand far better now why it's so difficult to solve.

Takeaway

Sometimes the most important historiographical move isn't answering a question but recognizing how the question itself shapes—and limits—possible answers.

The historiographical journey through popular religion reveals a discipline learning to distrust its own categories. What began as confident distinction-making—elite versus popular, authentic versus superstitious—gradually dissolved into questions about who gets to define religious authenticity and why those definitions matter.

This doesn't mean the study of early modern religion has reached an impasse. Rather, contemporary scholarship operates with greater awareness of its own assumptions and limitations. Historians still investigate how ordinary people practiced faith, but they do so knowing that their sources are partial, their categories constructed, their conclusions necessarily provisional.

The evolution also reminds us that historiographical change rarely means simple progress from error to truth. The two-tier model wasn't just wrong—it captured something real about reformers' aspirations and anxieties. The challenge is holding multiple truths simultaneously: that religious practice varied by social position, that these variations didn't map onto hierarchies of authenticity, and that our very ability to see this depends on conceptual tools that are themselves historically contingent.