On 6 January 1584, the provost of Zwettl in the archduchy of Austria below the Enns recounted events two days earlier that had greatly alarmed him. Present in the town of Zwettl on administrative business, Ulrich Hackel had been very surprised to see the town church unlocked and packed with peasants and townspeople. An additional 600 peasants, according to his reckoning, were gathered outside the church. All were dressed in their best and all were celebrating Christmas. Yet, as far as Hackel had been concerned, Christmas had already been celebrated ten days earlier. He halted worship in the church, telling the congregation that Christmas was now past and had been duly marked. He then sought out the local magistrate to ensure that the church would be kept locked and that trade would be resumed in the town. His actions had, however, aroused very great opposition. An angry crowd surrounded Hackel, accusing him of being a papist and a rogue and demanding to know why he was depriving them of Christmas. He believed that had he uttered one more word in favor of the earlier celebration of Christmas, he would have been killed on the spot. Hackel had escaped their fury only by being escorted by the town magistrate out of the local parish house in which he had taken refuge and beyond the walls of the town.Footnote 1
The letter from which this account of events is taken was sent by Hackel with an urgent request for help to the diocesan authorities in Vienna. It provides a particularly vivid picture of tensions that accompanied the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in the late sixteenth century. Additional, if less dramatic, reports received in Vienna for several years after 1584 recorded that the use of the old calendar continued, on occasion, in numerous locations within the surrounding Habsburg archduchy of Austria below the Enns.Footnote 2 Instances reduced gradually in number, however, and by the last years of the decade, the use of the old calendar ceased to appear as an issue in the records of the diocesan authorities.
Across Europe more widely a pattern developed whereby Catholic countries introduced the Gregorian calendar in the 1580s, but Protestant rulers initially rejected it. Over subsequent centuries, they adopted the same corrections to the length of the year, allowing for the compounded error since 1582, but made no reference to the Roman authority under which the reform had originally been decreed.Footnote 3 Although Austria below the Enns was a hereditary possession of the Catholic Habsburgs, it does not fit seamlessly into this model. For this Austrian example, the most telling comparisons are with bi-confessional towns in the empire, such as Augsburg and Dinkelsbühl, where the introduction of the calendar set precarious balances loose, unleashing, or at least contributing to, increasing polarization of confessional identities within the bounds of a community. In these instances, a universal measure was demonstratively received and absorbed on local terms. The reception of the new calendar—across the archduchy, rather than within a single city—provides a fascinating window on the confessional complexities in the heart of the Habsburg hereditary lands at the end of the sixteenth century. At the same time, however, the situation the calendar encountered and the responses it generated were themselves part of this process of confessional definition.
In order to right the errors that had been incorporated in the calculation of the Julian calendar, in the papal bull Inter Gravissimas of 24 February 1582, Gregory XIII required that ten days be dropped between 4 and 15 October 1582.Footnote 4 The problems resulting from the inaccurate calculation of the length of the year had challenged mathematicians and church officials for centuries, but in the 1570s, a commission in Rome had proposed specific remedies, based on a scheme devised by Luigi Giglio. After the universities of Catholic Europe were consulted, these changes were promulgated in the bull of 1582. The Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Christoph Clavius, a member of the commission, would become the major expositor and defender of the calculations behind the new calendar.Footnote 5
The timing was not coincidental: the wording of the bull stressed that this revision was integral to the reform of the breviary that had been decreed at the last session of Trent. It also called for the support of secular authorities, in particular Emperor Rudolf II, for the actions of ecclesiastical officials. The new calendar was introduced as planned in most of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Poland, and in France the following month.Footnote 6 Within German lands, however, it ignited a debate that continued throughout the decade. Opponents rejected the papal power by which the calendar had been issued, but they also disputed whether this was a matter on which local secular or ecclesiastical authorities should pronounce. There were claims that this was simply an attempt to make profit from the sale of almanacs and calendars.Footnote 7 Some, such as Kepler's teacher, the astronomer Michael Maestlin, challenged the calculations that had produced the reformed calendar.Footnote 8 Broadsheets declared the reworking of time pointless in light of the imminent end of the world.Footnote 9 In a number of prominent instances, in Augsburg, Dinkelsbühl, and Kaufbeuren in particular, the calendar served to stimulate further existing debates over the practical implications of the political settlement of 1555.Footnote 10
In Austria below the Enns, the revised calendar also encountered existing political and confessional volatility. As Hackel's account demonstrated, it was not uncommon for Protestants and Catholics to be close neighbors within many localities in the archduchy. It is, however, very difficult to establish a precise picture of confessional affiliations, for neither contemporaries nor historians have been able to fit Austria below the Enns in the later decades of the sixteenth century neatly into confessional categories.Footnote 11 Standard hallmarks of Catholic and Protestant practice could not be applied uniformly or in their entirety. Hence, for example, communion in two kinds for the laity remained common in the course of nominally Catholic worship, with the sanction of the episcopal authority.Footnote 12 Similarly, noncelibacy was not an effective accusation for removal from a Catholic living.Footnote 13 Neither the lay chalice nor noncelibate clergy were deemed desirable by the local Catholic ecclesiastical authorities, but their goals could not be divorced from the realities of the political and social environment in which they functioned. But if Catholicism within the archduchy did not fit the Tridentine mold, neither could Protestantism in the archduchy in the later sixteenth century be defined according to norms established elsewhere in German-speaking lands. Although Lutheranism had gained a degree of legal recognition in the archduchy by the Concession granted to the noble estates in 1568, only the Agenda of 1571 received princely approval and there was therefore no formal Lutheran church structure.Footnote 14 The Lutheran visitation of 1580 served to highlight diversity and the lack of cohesion between pastors and their patrons, differences that would be further animated by the conflict over the Gregorian calendar.Footnote 15
If identity is determined by what is discussed, then authority was central to confessional identity in Austria below the Enns. In his plea for help, the provost of Zwettl provided a simple reason for the double celebration of Christmas. After observing Christmas on the first occasion, the laity of Zwettl had been ordered by local landowners under threat of punishment to maintain all holy days according to the old calendar. According to Hackel's account, during the near riot there had also been cries from the crowd that the provost could not deny them the celebration of Christmas, for the emperor had not forbidden it. Opposition to the new calendar was also justified by claims that as a papal measure it lacked legitimate authority; the crowd had vilified Hackel as a “papist.” Such issues of authority, and its responsibilities, are encountered again and again in the early modern Habsburg lands.Footnote 16 The defense of traditional rights and jurisdictions by all parties repeatedly intersected and often clashed with ecclesiastical reform.Footnote 17 The introduction of the Gregorian calendar did not simply pit Catholic against Protestant. Here the boundaries of temporal and spiritual authority were tested; local definitions were challenged by wider interests; pulpit and printing press were used to challenge, fortify, and vindicate.
In 1582 a large area of the archduchy of Austria below the Enns was part of the extensive bishopric of Passau, not the poorly endowed and relatively recently created Habsburg bishoprics of Vienna and Wiener-Neustadt into which the remainder of the archduchy would only be incorporated under Charles VI (1711–1740). The city and small territory of Passau itself lay within the empire but outside the Habsburg hereditary lands. The ecclesiastical politics of Passau's neighbors, both Wittelsbach and Habsburg, repeatedly formed strategies to incorporate this “foreign bishop” within their orbit. The instructions for the introduction of the Gregorian calendar within Austria below the Enns took the form of a letter from Urban of Trenbach, bishop of Passau to his official resident in Vienna, accompanied by the patent for Upper Austria issued on 23 September 1582 and instructions for the regulation of holy days in the following three months. The official submitted plans for the introduction of the new calendar to Archduke Ernst, Rudolf II's brother and representative in Austria below the Enns, advising him that instructions had already been issued for Bavaria and Upper Austria and stressing that speedy action was necessary to meet the schedule laid down by Gregory XIII.Footnote 18 It is telling for subsequent events that the official recognized that the Lutherans would not obey this episcopal order and therefore suggested to Archduke Ernst that he publish separate orders for the Lutheran members of the estates.Footnote 19
Archduke Ernst's response rejected the independent action of the episcopal authorities within the hereditary lands.Footnote 20 The bishop of Passau, informed by his official of this opposition to the means of introduction—although not to the calendar itself—defended himself by arguing that he had no intention of invading secular rights and that no harm or disadvantage had been intended by the new calendar.Footnote 21 He had only been following papal orders and had been encouraged by William V, duke of Bavaria. He also maintained that the pope had not moved simply of his own accord, but rather at the insistence of the emperor and other most distinguished Christian rulers. He cited the examples of Spain, France, and Italy. The bishop halted the distribution of the new calendar in the Habsburg lands. It had, however, been introduced in Bavaria and within the Hochstift Passau. The bishop's original intention had been to act “in order that in our diocese . . . comprehensive uniformity may be maintained.”Footnote 22 Now, however, the diocese of Passau was divided into two time zones, ten days apart.
The following year and on the same dates, the Gregorian calendar was introduced, but specifically at the direction of the emperor. As the bishop noted, his attempt to make the changes the previous year had been frustrated by the opposition of Rudolf II. This time he was reacting to word from the emperor that he intended to oversee the introduction of the calendar throughout both his dynastic lands and the empire in October 1583. This time the orders for the official in Vienna to supervise the process were specifically supported by both emperor and bishop.Footnote 23 The secular and ecclesiastical powers were working together: when the official received the news from provost Hackel in Zwettl that the old calendar was being defended with vigor, he turned to the archduke for assistance, requesting the active support of the local magistracy and punishment of those who did not obey.Footnote 24
By 8 January 1584, the date of the provost's letter relating recent events in Zwettl, the reformed calendar therefore had princely sanction throughout the hereditary lands. Yet within the town of Zwettl there was evidently extensive and active support for the old calendar. The provost concluded his letter with a warning that the neighboring towns of Waidhofen and Weitra and other villages would likely follow the local example of Zwettl. Other reports cite specifically the towns and villages where the old calendar was being maintained, even in the midst of larger districts in which the new calendar had been uniformly accepted.Footnote 25 This picture coincided with the realities of confessional affinities within the archduchy. In the 1580s, there was no single focused confessional identity. Such identities were rather formed around geographical loci, through the confessionalization of space.
The Reformation had created a new map of Austria below the Enns in which Lutheranism was associated with distinct geographical areas of authority. Hence, for example, the towns—more numerous than elsewhere in the Habsburg lands—had often used the absence of effective princely authority as an opportunity for the introduction of Lutheran pastors and practices within their walls. Even more significantly, a subsequent but related wave of Lutheranism among the nobility had legal protection. Lutheran practices, guaranteed by the Concession of 1568, could be maintained within noble landholdings and, specifically, for their subjects within their patronage. The geography of Lutheranism, lacking a hierarchy within the province, was therefore determined by the presence of individual preachers within private chapels and parish churches. This geographical identity was reinforced by the Auslauf, whereby those without Lutheran provision within their locality attended, often in dramatic fashion, services in neighboring districts under the protection of noble landowners. The example of Vienna and neighboring Lutheran services in Hernals and Inzersdorf is well known, but this failure to attend the local parish was repeated, to the anguish of local Catholic clergy, throughout the archduchy.Footnote 26
In 1583 the confessionalization of space was supplemented by the confessionalization of time. For all the language of uniformity present in both the papal bull and the instructions issued by the bishop of Passau, the issue of timekeeping proved to be an intensely localized affair dependent on local conditions, on issues of tradition and authority.Footnote 27 In German cities where parity was precariously maintained, the introduction of the reformed calendar brought a new tension into communities where identity was formulated against the otherness of their neighbors. An additional dividing line was drawn within the community by the redefinition of time, accompanied by a visual display of difference. Similarly in Austria below the Enns, and without the legal controls of parity, the introduction of the revised calendar brought an immediate demonstration of difference into local communities.
Tension focused on the celebration of events on the correct days within the year. The existing Auslauf took on a new trait; now confessional identity was determined by both “where” and “when.” The emphasis was on confessional difference—secular cycles marking, for example, market days appear to have been synchronized among communities—but the implications of non-Catholic practice reached beyond church attendance. The shape of the liturgical week had long been an issue for confessional relations within the community. Open flaunting of fasting by eating meat, had, for example, marked Fridays. Behavior that inverted the religious practice of neighbors had become an emphasized characteristic. With the new calendar, this was extended into all aspects of ecclesiastical practice. Even events that were outwardly similar—such as the celebration of Christmas—now adopted a specifically different character by being carried out at a different time.
In his account from January 1584, the provost of Zwettl concentrated on the marks that identified the holy day: that the church was open, that the people were wearing their best clothes and, in particular, that there was no trade. He had already commented that some villagers had worked on his Christmas day; now he gave particular emphasis to his attempts to have shops reopened, in particular those selling meat and bread. His opponents specifically claimed that by forcing business to resume, he was forbidding the celebration of Christmas. Other accounts of the retention of the old calendar also emphasize working on holy days, such as the transportation of wood and manure on the Feast of the Virgin Mary.Footnote 28
It is striking that opposition was not concentrated on the loss of ten days. For the authors of the new calendar, this was indeed only a by-product of their central intention. With the calculation of the length of the year set too short, Easter was being celebrated too late in the cycle of the year. Ten days had to be dropped to relocate Easter, and dates in October were specifically chosen, as this limited the impact to the smallest number of saint's days.Footnote 29 Where the calendar was not adopted, for whatever reason, in 1582, it was, according to the papal bull, to be introduced on the same dates the following year. Plans were drawn up to accommodate the practical consequences, from the absence of saint's days to the payment of debts that fell due in this period. There is little evidence of demands for the restoration of these days. For the admittedly limited sample provided by Austria below the Enns, time appears to have been episodic rather than linear, marked by events on certain days, rather than by the passage of days and years. The debates over the timing of services, in particular on Sundays and at Christmas and Easter, are the central issues to appear in the records of the Passau diocese.
The introduction of time as an element of confessional identity provided contemporaries with a new means by which to categorize their neighbors. The Passau official in Vienna, instructed by Archduke Ernst, sent out several requests to rural deans for lists of those who were keeping the old calendar, another example of the use of recordkeeping in the processes of confessional delineation. Yet the issue of calendar reform did more than just illuminate the picture. It also stimulated evolving confessional identities. The debate over the calendar brought to the fore existing issues of association and identification that had significance beyond the 1580s. These processes took place not just between confessions, but also within confessions.
The relationship between Catholic temporal and spiritual authorities in the province had a very long tradition of both enmity and alliance. The emperor's refusal to introduce a papal measure except on his own terms was typical of many instances where the rivalry of church and state brought reform to a halt.Footnote 30 The model of episcopal centralization codified at Trent was not realized without modification.Footnote 31 The new calendar solidified—eventually—the Catholic confessional party, but on terms that had to be seen to be dictated by the secular authority. Additionally, when the emperor cited the new calendar for Austria below the Enns, its implementation—through announcements from the pulpit and published instruction—was to be overseen by the secular clergy. Indeed, the revised calendar was proclaimed from the pulpit along with a secular mandate on infection. Lutheran pastors specifically denounced the use of the local clergy, but this network of secular clergy provided a useful and, in many cases, sole conduit for princely authority in Vienna into knowledge of local circumstance. The clergy were being bound to the interests of the Habsburgs both in the eyes of the local community and in the realization of their authority. This was a model that marks the character of reformed Habsburg Catholicism in Austria below the Enns very clearly in subsequent years, and many of its roots can be found in the uneasy and formative alliances and circumstances of the last decades of the sixteenth century.Footnote 32
The debate over the new calendar also highlighted divisions within Lower Austrian Lutheranism. As suggested above, the confessional map of the archduchy was determined largely by geographical areas of authority, reinforced by the Concession of 1568. Lutheranism was highly dependent on noble leadership, in the appointment of pastors, the provision of churches and their congregations, and in its defense planned in the Herrenhaus in Vienna. Although there was a substantial number of Lutheran pastors with charges within the archduchy, many had been appointed, under the terms of the Concession, to parishes within noble patronage. Often these pastors had come from Germany and retained evident ties with German Lutheranism.Footnote 33 This working relationship between patron and pastor did not always run smoothly. The differing immediate interests and attitudes of these parties led to antagonism, heightened by the lack of a Lutheran church structure within the province that allowed each pocket of Lutheran practice its own character. It was from the midst of this local experience that the Catholic rural deans made a clear connection between the acceptance of the new calendar and the attitude of the local landowner.Footnote 34
Yet, although in their initial reports the deans noted the antagonism of the Lutheran nobility towards the calendar, as the reform gained credence as an imperial measure, the stance of the noble estates weakened. Dependent on the ruler's protection of the Concession for the legality of Lutheran worship, they were on shaky ground in their rejection of the calendar when it had Rudolf II's approval. By 1585 several Lutheran pastors were faced with dismissal from their livings by their Lutheran patrons for failing to adopt the reformed calendar within their churches.Footnote 35 These pastors utterly rejected the revised calendar as a papal act and claimed it to be the work of the antichrist.Footnote 36 Although acknowledging the authority of the emperor, the pastors refused to accept that the calendar was a princely measure. The very delay in its introduction was cited as evidence that the pope was instructing the emperor. If this was simply an imperial undertaking, there would have been no reason for a postponement; neither would the calendar itself have been named after the pope. The pastors said little about the accuracy of the alterations; rather, they warned that acknowledgment of the authority of the pope in this matter would be tacit acceptance of all that the Council of Trent had decreed.
These pastors accepted that the calendar itself was not a vital issue. Indeed, Luther, whom they so often quoted, had stated that calendars were unconnected with faith and a matter of worldly authority. Rather, they spoke out strongly against the implications of acceptance. The pastors stressed the importance of a common front with the Lutherans of Germany who were similarly refusing to accept a papal measure. The transregional character of the preachers of Austria below the Enns was evident in their sympathies, for example, with the Lutherans of Augsburg. The pastors also argued that it was their duty to retain a solid Lutheran front against the Catholic party, citing in particular their Jesuit opponents. This was their vision of a Lutheran identity, defined against Catholic encroachments in terms of the empire as whole. Their role was as models and examples. It was, they believed, better to suffer on earth—in the face of threatened dismissal by their patrons—than to put their souls and those of their parishioners at risk by obeying the antichrist. These pastors, however, were fighting a losing battle. Their case could not be separated from the ultimate loyalty of their noble patrons to their Habsburg prince and to the calendar reform that he had decreed.
The debate over the reformed calendar had a short, if animated, life. By the late 1580s, the new calendar was in use throughout the archduchy. Ulrich Hackel had become the abbot of the Cistercian abbey at Zwettl. The diocesan official and friend who had received Hackel's plea for help, Melchior Khlesl, was launched on a career that would take him far beyond the intricacies of ecclesiastical administration as a cardinal and chief advisor to Emperor Matthias.Footnote 37 Hackel's successors in Zwettl would not have feared for their lives in promoting church reforms. Although the town did not immediately conform to post-Tridentine Catholic norms, by the 1620s and dominated by the neighboring monastery, it had become an increasingly active center of reformed Catholicism.Footnote 38 Although the dispute over the new calendar was in the past, however, it had left a legacy. Again the comparison with the bi-confessional cities of the empire is telling. In Augsburg the memory of the social dislocation that had accompanied the new calendar in the 1580s continued to influence the town council in addressing the need for social welfare into the Thirty Years' War.Footnote 39 In Austria below the Enns, the manipulation of time had disrupted, challenged, and redefined relationships in a variety of contexts just as the foundations of reformed Catholicism were being laid. Consensus remained a goal of this early modern society, but its achievement was built on the exposure of difference.Footnote 40
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On 6 January 1584, the provost of Zwettl in the archduchy of Austria below the Enns recounted events two days earlier that had greatly alarmed him. Present in the town of Zwettl on administrative business, Ulrich Hackel had been very surprised to see the town church unlocked and packed with peasants and townspeople. An additional 600 peasants, according to his reckoning, were gathered outside the church. All were dressed in their best and all were celebrating Christmas. Yet, as far as Hackel had been concerned, Christmas had already been celebrated ten days earlier. He halted worship in the church, telling the congregation that Christmas was now past and had been duly marked. He then sought out the local magistrate to ensure that the church would be kept locked and that trade would be resumed in the town. His actions had, however, aroused very great opposition. An angry crowd surrounded Hackel, accusing him of being a papist and a rogue and demanding to know why he was depriving them of Christmas. He believed that had he uttered one more word in favor of the earlier celebration of Christmas, he would have been killed on the spot. Hackel had escaped their fury only by being escorted by the town magistrate out of the local parish house in which he had taken refuge and beyond the walls of the town.Footnote 1
The letter from which this account of events is taken was sent by Hackel with an urgent request for help to the diocesan authorities in Vienna. It provides a particularly vivid picture of tensions that accompanied the introduction of the Gregorian calendar in the late sixteenth century. Additional, if less dramatic, reports received in Vienna for several years after 1584 recorded that the use of the old calendar continued, on occasion, in numerous locations within the surrounding Habsburg archduchy of Austria below the Enns.Footnote 2 Instances reduced gradually in number, however, and by the last years of the decade, the use of the old calendar ceased to appear as an issue in the records of the diocesan authorities.
Across Europe more widely a pattern developed whereby Catholic countries introduced the Gregorian calendar in the 1580s, but Protestant rulers initially rejected it. Over subsequent centuries, they adopted the same corrections to the length of the year, allowing for the compounded error since 1582, but made no reference to the Roman authority under which the reform had originally been decreed.Footnote 3 Although Austria below the Enns was a hereditary possession of the Catholic Habsburgs, it does not fit seamlessly into this model. For this Austrian example, the most telling comparisons are with bi-confessional towns in the empire, such as Augsburg and Dinkelsbühl, where the introduction of the calendar set precarious balances loose, unleashing, or at least contributing to, increasing polarization of confessional identities within the bounds of a community. In these instances, a universal measure was demonstratively received and absorbed on local terms. The reception of the new calendar—across the archduchy, rather than within a single city—provides a fascinating window on the confessional complexities in the heart of the Habsburg hereditary lands at the end of the sixteenth century. At the same time, however, the situation the calendar encountered and the responses it generated were themselves part of this process of confessional definition.
In order to right the errors that had been incorporated in the calculation of the Julian calendar, in the papal bull Inter Gravissimas of 24 February 1582, Gregory XIII required that ten days be dropped between 4 and 15 October 1582.Footnote 4 The problems resulting from the inaccurate calculation of the length of the year had challenged mathematicians and church officials for centuries, but in the 1570s, a commission in Rome had proposed specific remedies, based on a scheme devised by Luigi Giglio. After the universities of Catholic Europe were consulted, these changes were promulgated in the bull of 1582. The Jesuit mathematician and astronomer Christoph Clavius, a member of the commission, would become the major expositor and defender of the calculations behind the new calendar.Footnote 5
The timing was not coincidental: the wording of the bull stressed that this revision was integral to the reform of the breviary that had been decreed at the last session of Trent. It also called for the support of secular authorities, in particular Emperor Rudolf II, for the actions of ecclesiastical officials. The new calendar was introduced as planned in most of Italy, Spain, Portugal, and Poland, and in France the following month.Footnote 6 Within German lands, however, it ignited a debate that continued throughout the decade. Opponents rejected the papal power by which the calendar had been issued, but they also disputed whether this was a matter on which local secular or ecclesiastical authorities should pronounce. There were claims that this was simply an attempt to make profit from the sale of almanacs and calendars.Footnote 7 Some, such as Kepler's teacher, the astronomer Michael Maestlin, challenged the calculations that had produced the reformed calendar.Footnote 8 Broadsheets declared the reworking of time pointless in light of the imminent end of the world.Footnote 9 In a number of prominent instances, in Augsburg, Dinkelsbühl, and Kaufbeuren in particular, the calendar served to stimulate further existing debates over the practical implications of the political settlement of 1555.Footnote 10
In Austria below the Enns, the revised calendar also encountered existing political and confessional volatility. As Hackel's account demonstrated, it was not uncommon for Protestants and Catholics to be close neighbors within many localities in the archduchy. It is, however, very difficult to establish a precise picture of confessional affiliations, for neither contemporaries nor historians have been able to fit Austria below the Enns in the later decades of the sixteenth century neatly into confessional categories.Footnote 11 Standard hallmarks of Catholic and Protestant practice could not be applied uniformly or in their entirety. Hence, for example, communion in two kinds for the laity remained common in the course of nominally Catholic worship, with the sanction of the episcopal authority.Footnote 12 Similarly, noncelibacy was not an effective accusation for removal from a Catholic living.Footnote 13 Neither the lay chalice nor noncelibate clergy were deemed desirable by the local Catholic ecclesiastical authorities, but their goals could not be divorced from the realities of the political and social environment in which they functioned. But if Catholicism within the archduchy did not fit the Tridentine mold, neither could Protestantism in the archduchy in the later sixteenth century be defined according to norms established elsewhere in German-speaking lands. Although Lutheranism had gained a degree of legal recognition in the archduchy by the Concession granted to the noble estates in 1568, only the Agenda of 1571 received princely approval and there was therefore no formal Lutheran church structure.Footnote 14 The Lutheran visitation of 1580 served to highlight diversity and the lack of cohesion between pastors and their patrons, differences that would be further animated by the conflict over the Gregorian calendar.Footnote 15
If identity is determined by what is discussed, then authority was central to confessional identity in Austria below the Enns. In his plea for help, the provost of Zwettl provided a simple reason for the double celebration of Christmas. After observing Christmas on the first occasion, the laity of Zwettl had been ordered by local landowners under threat of punishment to maintain all holy days according to the old calendar. According to Hackel's account, during the near riot there had also been cries from the crowd that the provost could not deny them the celebration of Christmas, for the emperor had not forbidden it. Opposition to the new calendar was also justified by claims that as a papal measure it lacked legitimate authority; the crowd had vilified Hackel as a “papist.” Such issues of authority, and its responsibilities, are encountered again and again in the early modern Habsburg lands.Footnote 16 The defense of traditional rights and jurisdictions by all parties repeatedly intersected and often clashed with ecclesiastical reform.Footnote 17 The introduction of the Gregorian calendar did not simply pit Catholic against Protestant. Here the boundaries of temporal and spiritual authority were tested; local definitions were challenged by wider interests; pulpit and printing press were used to challenge, fortify, and vindicate.
In 1582 a large area of the archduchy of Austria below the Enns was part of the extensive bishopric of Passau, not the poorly endowed and relatively recently created Habsburg bishoprics of Vienna and Wiener-Neustadt into which the remainder of the archduchy would only be incorporated under Charles VI (1711–1740). The city and small territory of Passau itself lay within the empire but outside the Habsburg hereditary lands. The ecclesiastical politics of Passau's neighbors, both Wittelsbach and Habsburg, repeatedly formed strategies to incorporate this “foreign bishop” within their orbit. The instructions for the introduction of the Gregorian calendar within Austria below the Enns took the form of a letter from Urban of Trenbach, bishop of Passau to his official resident in Vienna, accompanied by the patent for Upper Austria issued on 23 September 1582 and instructions for the regulation of holy days in the following three months. The official submitted plans for the introduction of the new calendar to Archduke Ernst, Rudolf II's brother and representative in Austria below the Enns, advising him that instructions had already been issued for Bavaria and Upper Austria and stressing that speedy action was necessary to meet the schedule laid down by Gregory XIII.Footnote 18 It is telling for subsequent events that the official recognized that the Lutherans would not obey this episcopal order and therefore suggested to Archduke Ernst that he publish separate orders for the Lutheran members of the estates.Footnote 19
Archduke Ernst's response rejected the independent action of the episcopal authorities within the hereditary lands.Footnote 20 The bishop of Passau, informed by his official of this opposition to the means of introduction—although not to the calendar itself—defended himself by arguing that he had no intention of invading secular rights and that no harm or disadvantage had been intended by the new calendar.Footnote 21 He had only been following papal orders and had been encouraged by William V, duke of Bavaria. He also maintained that the pope had not moved simply of his own accord, but rather at the insistence of the emperor and other most distinguished Christian rulers. He cited the examples of Spain, France, and Italy. The bishop halted the distribution of the new calendar in the Habsburg lands. It had, however, been introduced in Bavaria and within the Hochstift Passau. The bishop's original intention had been to act “in order that in our diocese . . . comprehensive uniformity may be maintained.”Footnote 22 Now, however, the diocese of Passau was divided into two time zones, ten days apart.
The following year and on the same dates, the Gregorian calendar was introduced, but specifically at the direction of the emperor. As the bishop noted, his attempt to make the changes the previous year had been frustrated by the opposition of Rudolf II. This time he was reacting to word from the emperor that he intended to oversee the introduction of the calendar throughout both his dynastic lands and the empire in October 1583. This time the orders for the official in Vienna to supervise the process were specifically supported by both emperor and bishop.Footnote 23 The secular and ecclesiastical powers were working together: when the official received the news from provost Hackel in Zwettl that the old calendar was being defended with vigor, he turned to the archduke for assistance, requesting the active support of the local magistracy and punishment of those who did not obey.Footnote 24
By 8 January 1584, the date of the provost's letter relating recent events in Zwettl, the reformed calendar therefore had princely sanction throughout the hereditary lands. Yet within the town of Zwettl there was evidently extensive and active support for the old calendar. The provost concluded his letter with a warning that the neighboring towns of Waidhofen and Weitra and other villages would likely follow the local example of Zwettl. Other reports cite specifically the towns and villages where the old calendar was being maintained, even in the midst of larger districts in which the new calendar had been uniformly accepted.Footnote 25 This picture coincided with the realities of confessional affinities within the archduchy. In the 1580s, there was no single focused confessional identity. Such identities were rather formed around geographical loci, through the confessionalization of space.
The Reformation had created a new map of Austria below the Enns in which Lutheranism was associated with distinct geographical areas of authority. Hence, for example, the towns—more numerous than elsewhere in the Habsburg lands—had often used the absence of effective princely authority as an opportunity for the introduction of Lutheran pastors and practices within their walls. Even more significantly, a subsequent but related wave of Lutheranism among the nobility had legal protection. Lutheran practices, guaranteed by the Concession of 1568, could be maintained within noble landholdings and, specifically, for their subjects within their patronage. The geography of Lutheranism, lacking a hierarchy within the province, was therefore determined by the presence of individual preachers within private chapels and parish churches. This geographical identity was reinforced by the Auslauf, whereby those without Lutheran provision within their locality attended, often in dramatic fashion, services in neighboring districts under the protection of noble landowners. The example of Vienna and neighboring Lutheran services in Hernals and Inzersdorf is well known, but this failure to attend the local parish was repeated, to the anguish of local Catholic clergy, throughout the archduchy.Footnote 26
In 1583 the confessionalization of space was supplemented by the confessionalization of time. For all the language of uniformity present in both the papal bull and the instructions issued by the bishop of Passau, the issue of timekeeping proved to be an intensely localized affair dependent on local conditions, on issues of tradition and authority.Footnote 27 In German cities where parity was precariously maintained, the introduction of the reformed calendar brought a new tension into communities where identity was formulated against the otherness of their neighbors. An additional dividing line was drawn within the community by the redefinition of time, accompanied by a visual display of difference. Similarly in Austria below the Enns, and without the legal controls of parity, the introduction of the revised calendar brought an immediate demonstration of difference into local communities.
Tension focused on the celebration of events on the correct days within the year. The existing Auslauf took on a new trait; now confessional identity was determined by both “where” and “when.” The emphasis was on confessional difference—secular cycles marking, for example, market days appear to have been synchronized among communities—but the implications of non-Catholic practice reached beyond church attendance. The shape of the liturgical week had long been an issue for confessional relations within the community. Open flaunting of fasting by eating meat, had, for example, marked Fridays. Behavior that inverted the religious practice of neighbors had become an emphasized characteristic. With the new calendar, this was extended into all aspects of ecclesiastical practice. Even events that were outwardly similar—such as the celebration of Christmas—now adopted a specifically different character by being carried out at a different time.
In his account from January 1584, the provost of Zwettl concentrated on the marks that identified the holy day: that the church was open, that the people were wearing their best clothes and, in particular, that there was no trade. He had already commented that some villagers had worked on his Christmas day; now he gave particular emphasis to his attempts to have shops reopened, in particular those selling meat and bread. His opponents specifically claimed that by forcing business to resume, he was forbidding the celebration of Christmas. Other accounts of the retention of the old calendar also emphasize working on holy days, such as the transportation of wood and manure on the Feast of the Virgin Mary.Footnote 28
It is striking that opposition was not concentrated on the loss of ten days. For the authors of the new calendar, this was indeed only a by-product of their central intention. With the calculation of the length of the year set too short, Easter was being celebrated too late in the cycle of the year. Ten days had to be dropped to relocate Easter, and dates in October were specifically chosen, as this limited the impact to the smallest number of saint's days.Footnote 29 Where the calendar was not adopted, for whatever reason, in 1582, it was, according to the papal bull, to be introduced on the same dates the following year. Plans were drawn up to accommodate the practical consequences, from the absence of saint's days to the payment of debts that fell due in this period. There is little evidence of demands for the restoration of these days. For the admittedly limited sample provided by Austria below the Enns, time appears to have been episodic rather than linear, marked by events on certain days, rather than by the passage of days and years. The debates over the timing of services, in particular on Sundays and at Christmas and Easter, are the central issues to appear in the records of the Passau diocese.
The introduction of time as an element of confessional identity provided contemporaries with a new means by which to categorize their neighbors. The Passau official in Vienna, instructed by Archduke Ernst, sent out several requests to rural deans for lists of those who were keeping the old calendar, another example of the use of recordkeeping in the processes of confessional delineation. Yet the issue of calendar reform did more than just illuminate the picture. It also stimulated evolving confessional identities. The debate over the calendar brought to the fore existing issues of association and identification that had significance beyond the 1580s. These processes took place not just between confessions, but also within confessions.
The relationship between Catholic temporal and spiritual authorities in the province had a very long tradition of both enmity and alliance. The emperor's refusal to introduce a papal measure except on his own terms was typical of many instances where the rivalry of church and state brought reform to a halt.Footnote 30 The model of episcopal centralization codified at Trent was not realized without modification.Footnote 31 The new calendar solidified—eventually—the Catholic confessional party, but on terms that had to be seen to be dictated by the secular authority. Additionally, when the emperor cited the new calendar for Austria below the Enns, its implementation—through announcements from the pulpit and published instruction—was to be overseen by the secular clergy. Indeed, the revised calendar was proclaimed from the pulpit along with a secular mandate on infection. Lutheran pastors specifically denounced the use of the local clergy, but this network of secular clergy provided a useful and, in many cases, sole conduit for princely authority in Vienna into knowledge of local circumstance. The clergy were being bound to the interests of the Habsburgs both in the eyes of the local community and in the realization of their authority. This was a model that marks the character of reformed Habsburg Catholicism in Austria below the Enns very clearly in subsequent years, and many of its roots can be found in the uneasy and formative alliances and circumstances of the last decades of the sixteenth century.Footnote 32
The debate over the new calendar also highlighted divisions within Lower Austrian Lutheranism. As suggested above, the confessional map of the archduchy was determined largely by geographical areas of authority, reinforced by the Concession of 1568. Lutheranism was highly dependent on noble leadership, in the appointment of pastors, the provision of churches and their congregations, and in its defense planned in the Herrenhaus in Vienna. Although there was a substantial number of Lutheran pastors with charges within the archduchy, many had been appointed, under the terms of the Concession, to parishes within noble patronage. Often these pastors had come from Germany and retained evident ties with German Lutheranism.Footnote 33 This working relationship between patron and pastor did not always run smoothly. The differing immediate interests and attitudes of these parties led to antagonism, heightened by the lack of a Lutheran church structure within the province that allowed each pocket of Lutheran practice its own character. It was from the midst of this local experience that the Catholic rural deans made a clear connection between the acceptance of the new calendar and the attitude of the local landowner.Footnote 34
Yet, although in their initial reports the deans noted the antagonism of the Lutheran nobility towards the calendar, as the reform gained credence as an imperial measure, the stance of the noble estates weakened. Dependent on the ruler's protection of the Concession for the legality of Lutheran worship, they were on shaky ground in their rejection of the calendar when it had Rudolf II's approval. By 1585 several Lutheran pastors were faced with dismissal from their livings by their Lutheran patrons for failing to adopt the reformed calendar within their churches.Footnote 35 These pastors utterly rejected the revised calendar as a papal act and claimed it to be the work of the antichrist.Footnote 36 Although acknowledging the authority of the emperor, the pastors refused to accept that the calendar was a princely measure. The very delay in its introduction was cited as evidence that the pope was instructing the emperor. If this was simply an imperial undertaking, there would have been no reason for a postponement; neither would the calendar itself have been named after the pope. The pastors said little about the accuracy of the alterations; rather, they warned that acknowledgment of the authority of the pope in this matter would be tacit acceptance of all that the Council of Trent had decreed.
These pastors accepted that the calendar itself was not a vital issue. Indeed, Luther, whom they so often quoted, had stated that calendars were unconnected with faith and a matter of worldly authority. Rather, they spoke out strongly against the implications of acceptance. The pastors stressed the importance of a common front with the Lutherans of Germany who were similarly refusing to accept a papal measure. The transregional character of the preachers of Austria below the Enns was evident in their sympathies, for example, with the Lutherans of Augsburg. The pastors also argued that it was their duty to retain a solid Lutheran front against the Catholic party, citing in particular their Jesuit opponents. This was their vision of a Lutheran identity, defined against Catholic encroachments in terms of the empire as whole. Their role was as models and examples. It was, they believed, better to suffer on earth—in the face of threatened dismissal by their patrons—than to put their souls and those of their parishioners at risk by obeying the antichrist. These pastors, however, were fighting a losing battle. Their case could not be separated from the ultimate loyalty of their noble patrons to their Habsburg prince and to the calendar reform that he had decreed.
The debate over the reformed calendar had a short, if animated, life. By the late 1580s, the new calendar was in use throughout the archduchy. Ulrich Hackel had become the abbot of the Cistercian abbey at Zwettl. The diocesan official and friend who had received Hackel's plea for help, Melchior Khlesl, was launched on a career that would take him far beyond the intricacies of ecclesiastical administration as a cardinal and chief advisor to Emperor Matthias.Footnote 37 Hackel's successors in Zwettl would not have feared for their lives in promoting church reforms. Although the town did not immediately conform to post-Tridentine Catholic norms, by the 1620s and dominated by the neighboring monastery, it had become an increasingly active center of reformed Catholicism.Footnote 38 Although the dispute over the new calendar was in the past, however, it had left a legacy. Again the comparison with the bi-confessional cities of the empire is telling. In Augsburg the memory of the social dislocation that had accompanied the new calendar in the 1580s continued to influence the town council in addressing the need for social welfare into the Thirty Years' War.Footnote 39 In Austria below the Enns, the manipulation of time had disrupted, challenged, and redefined relationships in a variety of contexts just as the foundations of reformed Catholicism were being laid. Consensus remained a goal of this early modern society, but its achievement was built on the exposure of difference.Footnote 40
Rona Johnston Gordon is an associate research scholar at Yale Divinity School. Early versions of this paper were given at the Sixteenth Century Studies Conference in 2001 and to the St. Andrews Reformation Studies Institute, Scotland in 2003; she thanks the participants for the discussion at both sessions. She is also grateful to Dr. Scott Dixon and Dr. Jennifer Powell McNutt for their very constructive comments.