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 [...].
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