Religion and Cultural Studies

Abstract

The study of religion, the reader is informed at the outset of this essay collection, is “now a ‘cutting edge’ field of research,” and the measure of its newfound importance is that literary critics and cultural studies scholars are increasingly paying attention to it. The growing consideration of religion beyond the usual circle of attendants is a significant intellectual development, and this book, which takes its inspiration from a panel at the Modern Language Association annual meeting in 1997, is a fine embodiment of that trend. Still, in being framed as an interdisciplinary awakening to religion, the volume carries with it a certain innocence. Major historians who studied and wrote on religion from the 1960s through the 1980s—one thinks of Henry May, Edmund Morgan, Sydney Ahlstrom, William McLoughlin, and Edwin Gaustad, among many others—would probably be disheartened to learn of the negligible attention paid to religion in that generation. (It is a qualifying point about “this period of eclipse” that the editor rightly acknowledges in a footnote.) Also, the bid to understand religion's “inextri-cability from culture” and the play between popular and elite forms sounds less like an innovation of cultural studies than a return to the once new, now venerable cultural history set out by Natalie Zemon Davis, Greg Den-ing, David Hall, and Rhys Isaac.