Pews

In her The Reformation of Ritual: An Interpretation of Early Modern Germany , Susan Karant-Nunn argues that the Reformation churches ended with a more rigid hierarchy than the medieval church: “The fluid atmosphere inside the late medieval sanctuary, in which people milled about and set up portable seats at the foot of the pulpit or pressed forward to witness transubstantiation, gave way during and after the Reformation to a far more rigorously striated and controlled ritual environment.”

A main culprit was pews, which fixed positions and therefore became an object of rivalry: “Informal and flexible ways of looking and listening now gave way to an orderliness that was soon engraved in the ecclesiastical ordinances. To the earlier pews of princes, magistrates, and canons were added others, first for women . . . and then for men as well. But one had to be able to afford them. Acrimonious disputes arose everywhere over the positioning, height, and ownership of pews. The well-to-do wanted theirs placed to give them a clear view of the Communion table and pulpit, and this often made it impossible for the lesser folk who knelt or stood behind them to see at all.”

Eventually, pews were added all along the nave, so that everyone could see. Still, Karant-Nunn says, the fixity of pew-sitting communicated a certain view of church and inculcated bodily discipline: “Pews held each individual’s body in place, aiming the head (as the center of attention) toward the focal points of Communion table and pulpit. Congregations blended into what seems to us like an undifferentiated mass, perhaps to be equated with communion; but in truth they incorporated rigid hierarchical values, which is to say, values that emphasized the differences among people.”