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'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.
List of contents
1. Introduction: Religion as historical experience, by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Raisa Maria Toivo.- 2. From lived reality to a cultural script: Punishment miracles as an experience- Sari Katajala-Peltomaa.- 3. A taste of dissent. Experiences of heretical blessed bread as a dimension of lived religion in 13th- and early 14th-century Languedoc- Saku Pihko.- 4. The religious experience of ill health in late 16th-century Italy- Jenni Kuuliala.- 5. Prayer and the body in lay religious experience in early modern Finland- Raisa Maria Toivo.- 6. Extended families as communities of religious experience in late 17th-century eastern Finland- Miia Kuha.- 7. Constructing "mad" religious experiences in early modern Sweden- Riikka Miettinen.- 8. The trials of Sarah Wheeler (1807-1867) - experiencing submission- Mervi Kaarninen.- 9. Working-class women living religion in Finland at the turn of the 20th century- Pirjo Markkola.- 10. To the undiscovered country: Facing death in early twentieth-century Finnish poorhouses- Johanna Annola.- 11. Artisans of religion at the moral frontiers: Finnish soldiers' religious practices, beliefs, and attitudes in World War II- Ville Kivimäki.
About the author
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa is Senior Research Fellow at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences and Chair of Trivium (Tampere Centre for Classical, Medieval and Early Modern Studies). She has published widely on lived religion, hagiography, family and gender in medieval Europe.
Raisa Maria Toivo is Professor of History at Tampere University, Finland and leader of the 'Lived Religion' group at the Academy of Finland Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences. She has published widely on the social history early modern religion, gender and domestic violence.
