| Summary: | Eighteenth-century Austria inherited a rich festival culture from the Baroque Catholicism of the Counter-Reformation. Even before the Josephinian Enlightenment of the 1780s, however, both secular and ecclesiastical authorities tried to reduce the number of processions, pilgrimages and feast-days, on the grounds that they distracted people from work, encouraged disorder and vice, and were incompatible with the inward, rationally based devotion that was increasingly considered exemplary. The reforms pursued under Joseph II pitted two mentalities, two sets of values, against each other, and were part of the long-term process known as modernization.
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