A Franciscan Kind of Hell

Nearly five hundred years after Martin Luther stopped indulging the pope, it looks as though historians will never tire of debating the impact of the Protestant Reformations. Despite an explosion of interest in the social history of death among scholars of the early modern period, the impact of Protestantism on teachings about hell has not attracted much attention as an object of study. Neither the existence nor the essential function of hell was ever at issue between Catholic and Protestant theologians. In fact, far from aggressively diverging, Catholic and Protestant evocations of hell often drew on the same sources of inspiration. In neither Protestant nor Catholic texts of the period, however, is there much sense of writers wallowing sadistically in descriptions of hell-fire and torment for its own sake. Under the Catholic dispensation of free will and resistible grace, dying outside of mortal sin was key.