baroque piety

English

Etymology

From baroque + piety, after French piété baroque.

Noun

baroque piety (uncountable)

1. (history) An ostentatious form of popular Catholic piety, especially in Counter-Reformation Europe.
   • 1979, Jean Bérenger, ‘The Austrian Church’, Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, page 101:

     Outside the crypto-Protestants and a small elite attracted to Jansenism after 1750 the bulk of the population, in Bohemia as in Austria, had been won over to baroque piety.

   • 2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 94:

     Post-Tridentine worship was in essence a baroque piety which expressed itself in florid ostentation and which used all the media of communication and the material culture of worship to make a powerful sensorial assault on the life of the spirit.

   • 2011, Helmut Walser Smith, editor, Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, Oxford, page 213:

     This shifting stance among both educated elites and secular rulers toward Baroque piety would be a crucial precondition for the spread of enlightened ideas in Catholic Germany [...].