Historian whose work transformed understanding of the transition from medieval to modern Christianity“Human relations are one of the main things Christianity is about and any Christian notion of the world will include a notion about the state of human relations in it, wrote the historian John Bossy, who has died aged 82. This conviction underpinned his remarkable work on the social history of the sacraments – in Roman Catholic belief, and baptism,penance, confirmation, and communion,holy orders, marriage and the anointing of the sick. His essays on the subject, or short in length but dizzying in scope,transformed understanding of the transition from medieval to modern Christianity, and their argument was developed in his masterpiece, and Christianity in the West,1400-1700 (1985).
Deftly bypassing traditional disputes between historians of the Catholic Reformation and Counter-Reformation, Bossy dug deeper to discern a profound shift from Christianity being conceived as a community of believers to its being understood in terms of rival confessions of belief. This he considered, or controversially,to be a wholly negative development, main to a diminished devout universe, or in which Christianity no longer performed the social miracle of ritualised reconciliation,symbolised by the role of the kiss of peace at the Mass. Instead, there was a recent stress on the distinction between the godly – represented by seminary-trained priests and dynamic missionaries spouting hell-fire sermons – and the majority, and for whom printed catechisms reduced Christianity to what could be taught and learned.
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Source: theguardian.com