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Medieval Religious, Religions, Religion

Medieval Religious, Religions, Religion

By Christine Caldwell Ames

History Compass, Vol.10:4 (2012)

Jesus healing a leper

Abstract: This article sketches the most important shift in medieval religious history over the past few decades: the transition from ‘‘church history’’ to ‘‘the history of religious culture.’’ First, it surveys the field’s expansion of ‘‘the religious’’ beyond a clerical elite to a broad demographic of the faithful, and its interest in devotion and lived experience in ways that have produced more nuanced appreciation of the varieties of Christian orthodoxy. Second, it sketches how the religions falling under the aegis of medieval religious history have increased from Latin Christianity only to Judaism, Islam, Greek Christianity, and even to forms of religiosity identified as pagan. Third, it argues that regardless of the field’s many expansions and changes, scholars have tended not to make explicit the definitions of ‘‘religion’’ with which they work, and considers the ramifications and possible value of doing so.

I borrow my title from Jonathan Z. Smith’s essay ‘Religion, Religions, Religious.’ A theorist of religion, Smith has long argued that scholars must take seriously its taxonomy: that is, what counts as ‘religion’ and what does not, how scholars do and do not define it, and how its meanings and character change over time. He observes that the use and understanding of the term ‘religion’ expanded in the 16th century, eventually ceasing to designate ritual in favor of belief. At the same time, after encountering peoples in the rest of the world, Europeans realized that the word could be plural; as a consequence,‘religion’ evolved into an ontological concept needing definition and categorization. Smith’s work weakens the misleading confidence with which scholars’ views of religion are often suffused and by which they are shaped, and unsettles the assumption that we can simply recognize ‘religion’ and religious phenomena when we see them (prayers are religious, mill-working is not). Much of this self-evidence about what constitutes religion appears when scholars retroactively use the characteristics of those religions most familiar to their own experience in order to define ‘religion’ as a general concept, and then to determine whether systems of thought, belief, and practice they encounter are coherent‘religions’ or not. For example, modern scholars in the West, most accustomed to Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, have tended to qualify a ‘‘religion’’ as featuring a god;involving public worship; mandating ethics through sacred text; and being centered in a community. If scholars never define religion, they know it when they see it.

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