Read more
From children's visions of angels to the cancerous belly of a king, this book shows how the body was at the centre of religious experience in seventeenth-century Lutheran culture. It explores what it was like to live in a body that was situated between the heavenly and earthly realms in the century following the Reformations, how faith shaped the experience of the body, and how the body shaped religious experience. Lutherans fasted and fortified their bodies through asceticism or exposure to harsh conditions. People of all types could feel the Holy Spirit entering their bodies and follow its movement within. Early modern Lutherans used their bodies to understand the complexities of their world, and by knowing about their physiology we come closer to grasping it.
Based on a varied set of sources from the expansive Swedish empire, with connections from Lapland to the North American colonies, this book shows how spiritual experience played out in relation to gender and age, revealing the powerful resemblances that connected bodies spiritually, politically, socially and emotionally. This book challenges received notions that Lutheranism implied a removed corporeality, mediated by an abstracted faith, and offers new insights into studying early modern corporeality.
The Word Made Flesh will be of interest to scholars and students in history, religion, history of medicine, gender and body studies.
List of contents
Chapter 1
All flesh is grass
Can bodies be Lutheran?
The materiality of the Word
Lutheran senses and emotions
Real bodies
Chapter 2
Bare feet: the body and the weather
Weather reports
Finding the way
The great chill
Battering storms
The Fall and God's fatty footprint
Sweetness of the earth
Being human
Chapter 3
Tending carnality: spiritual hygiene
The worldliness of the body
Relieving oneself of emotion
Digesting the sacrament
Making material bodies
Chapter 4
Blushing cheeks: prophecy and possession
First sensations
Wrestling with the devil
In bed and out of body
Knowledge, truth and the word
The blush of truth
Chapter 5
Aching bellies: the body politic
The King's illness
Putrid intestines and a healthy heart
The King and his people wasting away
The second coming of Charles
The King's belly and the law
Body politic
Chapter 6
Wide awake: bodies in dissent
Stiff necks and angry souls
The bounds of inward attention
A journey into the wilderness
Spiritual and conjugal unions
Attention and the separation of body and soul
Chapter 7
Down to earth
About the author
Karin Sennefelt is Professor of History at Stockholm University.
