Anna Coreth’s Pietas Austriaca: Religious Culture and Politics in the Habsburg Empire

Anna Coreth’s Pietas Austriaca was a ground-breaking study of the relationship between religious beliefs and practices and Habsburg political culture from the end of the medieval period to the early twentieth century.  This paper outlines the main ideas in the book, especially Coreth’s analysis of Eucharistic and Marian piety in Central Europe,  and shows their evolution over several centuries of Habsburg rule.  It includes special attention to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and discussion of what happened to the cult of piety in the modern period.