Meanings
- uncountablehistoryAn ostentatious form of popular Catholic piety, especially in Counter-Reformation Europe.
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.
1979, Jean Bérenger, ‘The Austrian Church’, Church and Society in Catholic Europe of the Eighteenth Century, Cambridge, page 1012 more examples
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.
2002, Colin Jones, The Great Nation, Penguin, published 2003, page 94This 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 [...].
2011, Helmut Walser Smith, editor, Oxford Handbook of Modern German History, Oxford, page 213
Origin
Cite this entry
baroque piety. (n.d.). In WatkinsX Dictionary. Retrieved November 4, 2026, from https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/baroque%20piety
“baroque piety.” WatkinsX Dictionary, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/baroque%20piety. Accessed November 4, 2026.
WatkinsX Dictionary, s.v. “baroque piety,” accessed November 4, 2026, https://dictionary.watkinsx.com/word/baroque%20piety.
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