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P. J. Broadhead, Public Worship, Liturgy and the Introduction of the Lutheran Reformation in the Territorial Lands of Nuremberg, The English Historical Review, Volume 120, Issue 486, April 2005, Pages 277–302, https://doi.org/10.1093/ehr/cei116
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Abstract
This article examines the receptivity of rural people and those in small towns in the territory of Nuremberg to the introduction of the Lutheran Reformation. It provides evidence which sheds light on recent debates concerning popular responses to new religious ideas, moral discipline and the survival of magic and superstitious practices. The focus is on the content and impact of the new forms of worship introduced by Nuremberg into its lands after 1525, which were designed to have a clear and comprehensive instructional content. The visitation of 1560–1 showed that rural responses to Lutheranism were not uniform and there were significant variations in the religious knowledge and attitudes of the laity between different parishes. Clear patterns emerge, with the parishes performing worst in the visitation and having the highest incidence of practices condemned as superstitious and idolatrous, being joint parishes of filial churches where worship did not take place on a weekly basis. Other parishes which did badly in the visitation were situated in borderlands, especially where there was access to Catholic ceremonies in neighbouring lands. Nuremberg attempted to deal with these problems by enforcing catechizing, and by insisting that weekly services were held. Especially where superstitious practices were detected, the authorities imposed the weekly recitation of the Litany by all the congregation, in order to substitute communal prayer for charms and magic. Most people had their greatest contact with Lutheranism in Sunday worship and the evidence from the Nuremberg territory indicates that by the 1560s it had been instrumental in establishing Protestant teachings in the life and mind of the lay population.
