Lived Religion and Shared Experience in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

This special issue of JMEMS takes up the classical debate on the “shared” and the “individual” through the concepts of “lived religion” on the one hand and “experience” on the other. Starting from the emerging perspective of lived religion and experience, our aim is to explore negotiations between the individual and the communal in the field of lived religion. The articles in this special issue ask, in various ways, when and how medieval and early modern religion was claimed as “one's own” and, on the other hand, when it was shared or made visible and understandable to others by using one's body or one's personal and intimate objects. How did shared practices and rituals create personal experiences? How did this change from the medieval to the early modern period? As the individualization of religion has also been seen as a major component of Reformation-era changes, it is particularly fruitful to study these questions across the medieval–early modern divide.

While scholars have failed to define “religion” in a way that would be applicable across time periods and cultures, “lived religion” has been even more evasive, almost by definition.¹ Scholars have given the term conflicting or ambivalent meanings. From an anthropological point of view, Peter Verhagen has proposed to define “lived religion” in the following way:

Other scholars, such as Nancy Ammerman, Meredith McGuire, and David Hall, seek to define not so much what lived religion is, but rather what can be done with it by religious participants or academic scholars using the term. Lived religion is, then, an inquiry into how the religious is encountered and experienced in different environments. Instead of serving as a predefined starting point, it is the result of analyzing religious activities and interpretations given to “religion,” “faith,” or “sacredness” by various individuals. For Ammerman, this does not necessarily require a rethinking of what religion is; rather, it is a redefinition of what the scholar is interested in. McGuire, as a cultural anthropologist, and Hall, as a historian of theology, emphasize the individual.³ David Orsi, on the other hand, approaches the matter from a more clearly phenomenological angle, emphasizing not only the individual but communication between individual subjects.⁴ Most recently, scholars have concretized the study of lived religion as religion-in-action; the way religion happens in everyday life is approached with the help of practice theory.⁵

“Lived religion” as a field of study shares many areas of focus with the field of “popular religion,” such as rituals, symbols, and performances. Nevertheless, there are some clear distinctions. “Popular religion” is typically used to denote the religiosity of common people or “folkloric” elements in religion, building on the strong polarity and differences between clerical and lay culture.⁶ “Lived religion” starts from different premises. First, religiosity or culture is not seen as a top-down process or as being based on polar opposites. Secondly, it is a process rather than a category pertaining only to people of a certain social or cultural status. One may even add a third element of difference: lived religion can be seen as a methodology, a way to read the sources, while “popular religion” is closer to a label attached to certain kinds of religious practices.

However, advances in the field have not thus far focused on deconstructing what is meant by the regularly used notion “lived religious experience.” This special issue of JMEMS takes a step forward in the field of the study of lived religion by approaching it from the perspective of experience as an analytical category; the articles also contribute to the emerging field of the history of experience.

The word experience has had various meanings in both analytical and everyday usage. The word originates from classical Latin experientia, meaning a trial or proof, or knowledge acquired through repeated trials. Similarly, the earliest medieval meaning of experience referred to an event, the action of putting something to the test. As shown in the article by Alexandra Walsham, the sense of experience as producing knowledge through tests and trials extended in the early modern period to practical experiments designed to generate “evidence” for new information about the universe.

English makes no conceptual distinction between mediated, socially shared experience and “lived” experience (simple, immediate encounters with the world), in contrast to some other languages (for example, German Erfahrung and Erlebnis), but for the analytical usage of the term, both aspects are useful to keep in mind.⁷ Analytically, experience can be defined in many ways, but definitions often include aspects of three dimensions or levels of analysis. For the articles in this special issue, the meaning is two-fold: first, we study experience as a historical phenomenon and term, the meaning of which changes with time and culture. Secondly, we use it as a modern analytical category, a tool with which we as historians organize the picture we construct of the past. Although the emphasis placed on these two meanings varies among the articles, many of them start out by defining experience according to how a certain set of people used the term at a certain point in time, and then use that to build analytical categories that allow us to see how experience changed in different situations. We see experience as encompassing three fundamentally inseparable stages that take place more or less simultaneously: (1) ways in which individual people and communities encounter the world; (2) the simultaneous relational, intersubjective process making sense of those encounters, gathering them into forms of knowledge, and testing understanding of them against one's own and other people's existing explanations; and (3) the social and physical structures born from the repetition of these processes so as to produce knowledge of the “real” world.⁸

These processes and structures of experience—in this case elements of faith and practices of devotion—are social to their core. They are often based on people communicating their experiences with others—comparing them, seeking approval and confirmation for them, and receiving validation or condemnation for them. If the validation is received, it creates feelings of sameness and peerness based on the assumption of having experienced something together or having experienced the “same” thing.⁹ This cannot happen without a subject who experiences, however. Therefore, experience always combines the individual and singular with the shared and social—but the emphasis will change from situation to situation, as will the focus change according to the researcher's viewpoint.

In this special issue, the focus is on the interconnection of “lived” and shared experiences in the field of lived religion: we not only study “religious experiences” as such but how experiences—as a connection between the individual and the shared—operate in the field of lived religion. In this sense, experiences can also be those one gains of religion, with religion, or indeed in religion. In other words, religion-as-lived is the context for experiencing. We ask how the “personalived” of experience is created in communication with others; how are general theological principles and generally accepted practices (such as a sense of sin) turned into private and even intimate feelings of and within religion and vice versa?

This special issue combines articles ranging across both medieval and early modern contexts with a wide geographical coverage, and they concentrate on variations of sensual, emotional, corporeal, and material encounters with religion. The articles make use of different kinds of sources varying from the more normative, like pastoral and legislative evidence, to sworn testimonies. Even source materials that have traditionally been deemed didactic or normative, like exempla or breviaries, can reveal personal or even intimate aspects of religion when read through the lens of experience, as shown by Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Marika Räsänen. Didactic material was based on dogmas, standards, and traditions. At the same time, church teaching was a response to local needs, conflicts, and aspirations—the audience was already present in the text. Therefore, small differences—for example, personal details of ownership in the manuscript tradition of a breviary, or the emphasis in exempla put on certain topics like dancing—reveal the needs of a particular context, as argued by Räsänen and Katajala-Peltomaa, respectively.

The element that unites the contributions to this special issue is the focus on sharing an experience in situational lived religion. The question of the “individualization” of religion is the recurrent theme. Thomas C. Devaney shows how a shared vision of the Virgen de la Capilla in Jaén, Spain, was appropriated in witness statements according to the social positions of the witnesses, and how participation in devotional performances surrounding the cult of the Virgin in this city turned into a communal identity in the later centuries. John H. Arnold discusses the increasing emphasis on situationality, or whether certain deeds (adultery, premarital sex, certain sexual acts within marriage, business deals, etc.) were sins either in general or in some specific situations, so that eventually confessing sins became a way of creating the self. Raisa Maria Toivo, on the other hand, shows how the expectations of individuals sharing Communion with the whole Christian community could implicate modes of exclusion and even self-exclusion. In these articles, too, normative views of how experience should be understood are shown to change as experiences were personalized in religious practice.

The contributors explore the sharing of experience through core issues of medieval and early modern periodization: changes in the way religious experiences were produced and guided in terms of what has often been considered both a new individualization and a new public interest and visibility, plurality, and heightened control. The articles argue that the category of “experience” is a fruitful avenue for combining these themes, bridging micro and macro levels, offering a new approach to current discussions on religion, faith, and belief in the medieval and early modern period.

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The balancing of the individual and the shared has been at the center of the history of religious life since Weber and Durkheim. It has also been considered by most sociologists and many historians as the central dividing point between premodern and modern eras. Consequently, there have also been different takes on that balance, not only moving the rise of the individual and the decline of the community further or nearer in history, but also giving them nuance, more detailed exposition, and indeed new meanings.¹⁰ This collection addresses individualization and personalization within medieval cultures that aimed for uniformity and even oneness. Similarly, the articles discuss the aims and conflicts of sharedness and community-building persisting in early modern religious contexts—with varying degrees of individuality. In both medieval and early modern periods, the individual's experience was always to some extent mediated through relationships with the wider community—one can claim this pertains today just as well. The themes of “private” and “public” are also intertwined in this development, perhaps more clearly as concerns religion than some other spheres of life, but while discussions of these themes are related, the concepts are not the same.¹¹

The articles in this issue discuss the individual or personal and the shared or communal over the centuries from the central Middle Ages to the advanced early modern period of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Thomas Devaney recounts the development of devotion to the Virgen de la Capilla in the Spanish city of Jaén from original witness testimony involved in the birth of the legend in the late medieval period, to versions of the miracle as reframed and appropriated by later writers, and then to a tradition that united residents of the city in a shared identity during periods of turbulence and later political and economic marginality. Other articles tend to deal with either medieval or early modern history, yet they, too, look at developments of individuality and sharedness over longer periods of time, often over centuries. John Arnold discusses the expansion of the nature of sins confessed from the twelfth to the thirteenth centuries, turning the Christendom-wide ritual of confession into a kind of “spiritual regime of self-making.” Raisa Toivo also considers a development over two centuries after the Reformation, showing how the influence of economic and political contexts on practical theology regarding Communion persisted much longer than the often short-lived or even abrupt lifespan of local contextual phenomena. Some articles deal with shorter time periods. Even though not all the articles explicitly discuss changes from medieval to early modern periods, the collection can be used to discuss these period boundaries.

It has been noted often enough that some things take a long time to develop, while others change fast. While changes in such phenomena as the weather, politics, military successes, and at times even economics tend to be fast-paced, changes in religion and culture tend to come about much more slowly. Lived religion as a concept tends to emphasize continuity, as the cultural background of rituals and devotional actions constitute the “lived” part of lived religion. Studies of lived religion therefore often reveal societies in a conservative light valuing continuity and reacting against change. Even as the source narratives that today allow historians to study this topic often were recorded at times of disruption—such as during the Reformations—we tend to focus on continuity despite the disruption, and change itself often receives less attention. This may have led to an emphasis on concepts such as “the long Reformation” being popular among historians of lived religion. At the same time, it has been acknowledged that the need for modifications was comprehended and exploited by the medieval church. Scholars now emphasize the slowness and plurality of the Reformation—that is, the different phases of crises and ensuing changes rather than the phases of gradual adaptation and establishment—and discuss the “Reformations” in the plural.¹² This special issue may be an example of that tendency. Some of the articles nevertheless point to the possibility that the concept of experience can help bring disruption and change back into the picture by focusing on the process of experiencing and interpreting points of disruption over periods of time. The question therefore arises of whether more studies from the point of view of “experience” might affect period boundaries.

Religion-in-action—confessing one's sins, ritual participation in holy days and saints’ feasts, in liturgy and the Eucharist—was a way to participate in one's community and ascertain one's position within it. These needs did not change or disappear after the Reformation(s), but the practices and vocabulary addressing them and the tension between these changed. To study experience within the field of lived religion requires a keen eye for context and nuance. The following articles aim to provide both: a qualitative close reading of particular cases within localized settings, as well as a conceptual advancement in both the study of lived religion and the history of experience.

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This special issue operates across the Reformation and covers a wide geographical scope. Temporally it starts from twelfth-century confession practices and moves through late medieval exempla and liturgical practices to politically appropriated visions, expermimental religion, and communal ritual in the early modern era. Each article provides a context of its own, ranging over western Europe from Mediterranean cultures to the Nordic countries. The geographical coverage is a combination of the traditional focal points of English-speaking research with additions from less-often researched areas in the north: this will test established debates and add viewpoints that help make changes in time and culture visible. We have opted to look at things from the perspectives of what could be termed the mainstream Christianities of their time. The various articles point to religious conflict, as well as competition and influence between different religions: Islam and Catholicism in the medieval south, Reformation Catholicism and different forms of Protestantism and Eastern Orthodoxy in the north. Elements and experiences of faith were supposed to be shared in the realm of Christianity, not only across geographical distances but also across time and generations past, present, and future.

This special issue is built on a loose chronology. We start with John Arnold's analysis of the meanings of individuality in public and private confession practices, in “Continuity and Change in the Experience of Confession across the Central Middle Ages.” Marika Räsänen, in her article, “Signs of Shared and Personal Experience in Dominican Breviaries,” analyzes omissions and additions as signs of personalization in breviaries, which have been traditionally seen as unified markers of collective identity. Sari Katajala-Peltomaa examines exempla containing dancing in her article, “An Imagined Experience? Dancing as Intercorporeality in the Fifteenth-Century Pastoralia of Vadstena Abbey.” She analyzes how the experience of dancing was imagined by combining kinesthetic, emotional, and cognitive elements. Thomas Devaney's article, “Blinded by the Light: Experience, Narrative, and Identity in Late Medieval and Early Modern Jaén,” follows the transition over centuries of an account of a night-time vision that established an enduring tradition of the cult of the Virgin Mary. Alexranda Walsham's “The Witnessings of the Spirit: Experimental Religion and Heart Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Britain” investigates the polyvalent concepts of “experience” and “experimental predestinarianism” that underwrote both the individualization and sharedness of spirituality of Godly Protestants in the contexts of the British civil wars. Raisa Toivo's article, “Communion as Shared Experience in Early Modern Finland,” investigates the ways a limited community among laypeople of different social statuses was created through modifying the normative experience of Communion.

By starting from the central Middle Ages and advancing in time through the seventeenth century, we hope to show how experience changes over time and through culture in various situations, and to take the reader along on our journey through tensions that developed between the need for personal conviction and the public nature of Christianity. These articles point to the by now standard observations that the personal and individual were born well before modernization, already before the Fourth Lateran Council, and that religious emphasis on community and communality lasted well beyond the Reformation and even gained momentum during the age of Confessionalism. Together, these articles demonstrate that experiences of religion were deeply ingrained in, yet always contested by, the time, space, and culture in which they took place.

Experiences are always situational, as they both require and affect the cognitive and somatic aspects of an individual, connecting the body, mind, and senses. The same can be said about the individual and community. Only by sharing an event—verbally or corporeally—can it be given meaning; in other words, it is the sharedness that turns mere daily occurrence into “experience.” The interacting part is central when analyzing experiences in the field of lived religion. Shared traditions, customs, and habits affected the way certain occurrences were comprehended; and individual occurrences, in turn, contributed to common traditions, customs, and habits. Our intention is not to argue that there were no individual experiences, but in the field of lived religion, the individual and the shared are inextricably intertwined, and “experience” is the nexus between them.

This research has been funded by the Research Council of Finland Center of Excellence in the History of Experience.

Notes