Histories of Experience in the World of Lived Religion

Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Raisa Maria Toivo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN: 9783030921392
• eBook ISBN: 9783030921408
• Edition: 0
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

'At a historic moment, when religion shows all its social and political strength in various post-modern societies around our globe, this fascinating collection of studies from the Middle Ages to twentieth-century Europe demonstrates all the richness and innovative force of investigating individual and shared experiences when questioning the cultural, political and social place of religion in society. It also makes known in English the work of a series of Finnish historians elaborating together a pioneering vision of the notion of experience in the discipline of history.' - Piroska Nagy, Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada This open access book offers a theoretical introduction to the history of experience on three conceptual levels: everyday experience, experience as process, and experience as structure. Chapters apply 'experience' to empirical case studies, exploring how people have made and shared theirreligion through experience in history.This book understands experience as a simultaneously socially constructed and intimately personal process that connects individuals to communities and past to future, thereby forming structures that create and direct societies. It represents the crossroads of a new field of the history of experience, and an established tradition of the history of lived religion.Chapters offer a longue durée view from the fourteenth-century heretics, via experiences of miracle, madness, sickness, suffering, prayer, conversion and death, to the religious artisanship of soldiers in the Second World War frontlines. It concentrates on Northern Europe, but includes materials from Italy, France and United Kingdom.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Religion as Historical Experience
• 2. From Lived Reality to a Cultural Script: Punishment Miracles as an Experience
• 3. A Taste of Dissent: Experiences of Heretical Blessed Bread as a Dimension of Lived Religion in Thirteenth- and Early Fourteenth-century Languedoc
• 4. The Religious Experience of Ill Health in Late Sixteenth-Century Italy
• 5. Prayer and the Body in Lay Religious Experience in Early Modern Finland
• 6. Extended Families as Communities of Religious Experience in Late Seventeenth-Century Eastern Finland
• 7. Constructing “Mad” Religious Experiences in Early Modern Sweden
• 8. The Trials of Sarah Wheeler (1807–1867): Experiencing Submission
• 9. Working-Class Women Living Religion in Finland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• 10. To the Undiscovered Country: Facing Death in Early Twentieth-Century Finnish Poorhouses
• 11. Artisans of Religion at the Moral Frontiers: Finnish Soldiers’ Religious Practices, Beliefs, and Attitudes in World War II
• Correction to: Working-Class Women Living Religion in Finland at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
• Back Matter