Plate 13.
A broadsheet illustrating the current craze for French fashions in the ‘A-la-Mode-Kampf’ of
1630.
‘High culture’, remarkably, does not appear in retrospect to have suffered
greatly: examples can readily be found of major works of art and architecture,
lyric poety, novels (such as Grimmelshausen’s
Simplicissimus
), baroque theatre,
music (particularly that of Schutz), opera, ballet, as well as developments in the
natural sciences, legal and political theory. Intimations of developments which
were to become more important later on were already evident: the expansion of
literacy, the production of books and newspapers, the formation of literary and
scientific societies – and even the adulation of French fashions in the ‘A-la-
Mode-Wesen’. It is more difficult to reconstruct changing patterns of popular
culture. The evidence left by elites – those attempting to impose social control –
tends to bemoan a decline in morals, an increase in drunkenness, illegitimacy,
and irreligion, with the masses almost unable to ‘distinguish between God and
the devil’, as a contemporary account suggested. Such perceptions gave rise to a
number of reforming and proselytising impulses in later seventeenth-century
religion. But all generations have a tendency to bewail a supposed drop in moral
standards since ‘the good old days’. It also seems to be the case that there were
growing differences between the assumptions of the more educated classes and
those of the common people. Witchcraft prosecutions began to decline, for
example, in the later seventeenth century, as magistrates were no longer so sure
of their ability to identify witches; but most non-educated people continued to
believe in the reality and powers of witches. A process of cultural differentiation,
evident in such intimate matters as thresholds of shame and embarrassment, was
to become even more marked with the development of ‘courtly culture’ in
following generations.
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