Church, Religion and Morality

A challenge when striving to distill the role of Church and religion in Europe in a specific social field such as education from 1650 to 1800 is the impossibility to separate religion from other spheres in society. Distinctions between religion and other social spheres are a product of not least the political and ideological waves of reforms and revolutions that broke at the end of the period in question. Much schooling during this time and across the European states was driven by religious orders, groups, and churches, and much of what went on belongs—when narrating the history of education—just as much to other areas, for instance literacy and the development of ideas of how to instruct and learn.
However, the period was also when the relation between religious institutions and the state started to be questioned.
The sharp historiographic divide between “Protestant early modernity” and “Secular modernization” is going through scholarly change. Catholicism was modernizing, too, and Enlightenment was also religious. This chapter puts an emphasis on the reform effort in the European states that culminated in revisions as well as in revolutions in the late eighteenth century, but which to a large degree draws on reform movements dating further back.