Popular Religious Beliefs Research Articles

Inventing superstition: from the Hippocratics to the Christians

Dale Martin provides the first detailed genealogy of the idea of superstition, its history over eight centuries, from classical Greece to the Christianized Roman Empire of the 4th Century A. D. With illuminating reference to the writings of philosophers, historians and medical teachers he demonstrates that the concept of superstition was invented by Greek intellectuals to condemn popular religious practices and beliefs. Tracing the social, political and cultural influences that informed classical thinking about piety and superstition, nature and the divine, Inventing Superstition exposes the manipulation of the label of superstition in arguments between Greek and Roman intellectuals on the one hand and Christians on the other, and the purposeful alteration of the idea by Neoplatonic philosophers and Christian apologists in late antiquity.

Refashioning Festivals in Republican Guangzhou

Influenced by the concept of evolution, the Republican regime branded popular religious beliefs and practices as “superstition,” believing that the eradication of “superstition” was crucial to the making of modern citizens. Government policies not only affected the development of popular religion but also reshaped the relationship between the state and the common people. Tracing the changes of the Double Seven Festival and the Ghost Festival in Republican Guangzhou, this article aims to show the complexities of the contestations between the state and the common people in actual religious settings, particularly the interaction between official culture and traditional festivals. It argues that although new national symbols successfully found their way into common people’s religious lives, helping to give a nationalistic outlook to traditional festivals, underneath the expansion of an official culture, a rich variety of local traditions persisted. By appropriating official symbols, the common people refashioned and preserved their religious traditions.

St. Augustine's bones: a microhistory

In 1695, workers in Pavia, Italy, chanced upon a collection of bones in the crypt of the Cathedral of San Pietro in Ciel d'Oro. The workers later testified that they had seen the name of St Augustine written in charcoal on the surface of the casket they had uncovered. Yet by the time of the official inquest, all traces of the writing had disappeared. Offering insights into urban literacy and conceptions of reading, this text explores the controversy that ensued over the alleged discovery of Augustine's bones. Manuscripts, broadsides, pamphlets - even whole books - were devoted to proving or disproving the authenticity of the remains. Although these works were addressed to members of the clergy, they were also intended for the general reading public in Pavia, Milan and Venice. Their dissemination helped create a temporary public sphere in which the merits of the case were examined in a spirit of free debate. A re-examination of the dispute over St Augustine's bones illuminates aspects of Catholic spirituality in Northern Italy during the late 17th and early 18th centuries. It also reveals the different ways in which Catholic scholars, local religious leaders, and the papal administration sought to influence and direct local popular religious belief and practices. Although the controversy was officially resolved by the papacy in 1728, the debate over the relics of San Pietro continued into the 20th century. By combining methods developed in the burgeoning field of the history of the book with the tools of cultural analysis, Harold Stone not only recovers the stories surrounding St Augustine's bones, but also reconstructs the mental world of those who read or heard them.

Werewolves, witches, and wandering spirits: traditional belief & folklore in early modern Europe

Bringing together scholars from Europe, America, and Australia, this volume explores the more fantastic elements of popular religious belief: ghosts, werewolves, spiritualism, animism, and of course, witchcraft. These traditional religious belief and practices are frequently treated as marginal in more synthetic studies of witchcraft and popular religion, yet Protestants and Catholics alike saw ghosts, imps, werewolves, and other supernatural entities as populating their world. Embedded within notarial and trial records are accounts that reveal the integration of folkloric and theological elements in early modern spirituality. Drawing from extensive archival research, the contributors argue for the integration of such beliefs into our understanding of late medieval and early modern Europe.

The Politics of Culture in Provincial New England

The Politics of Culture in Provincial New England Bruce Tucker (bio) Michael P. Winship. Seers of God: Puritan Providentialism in the Restoration and Early Enlightenment. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. xiv + 225 pp. Notes and index. $34.95. In one of the most effective passages of Seers of God, author Michael Winship recounts the story of seventeenth-century Ipswich settler John Dane’s close encounter with providential meaning through the behavior of his prize pig. Dane had gone hunting to replenish an empty larder when he noticed that his pig was not far behind. Looking for signs of divine meaning in this unanticipated event, Dane determined that he should return home, and on the way he bagged a goose from a flock flying over head. Clearly God had used the pig to intervene mercifully in the ordinary affairs of Dane’s family. Winship skillfully juxtaposes this story with an account of New England theologian John Norton’s definition of providentialism—the belief that God continually intervened in people’s lives, communicating signs of their place on the road to Hell or redemption. Seventeenth-century New England was an enchanted world as David Hall has suggested in Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (1989). People had visions that gave them glimpses of the supernatural in their daily lives, and they constantly interpreted signs to learn if God was visiting them in mercy or judgment. Seers of God examines the transition from the enchanted world of Dane and Norton to the “desacralized” world of the early eighteenth century in which providentialism largely disappeared. “How and to what extent,” Winship asks, “were the imperatives of the early Enlightenment absorbed into Massachusetts culture” (p. 5)? With the exception of a handful of studies, most long outdated, the relationship between Puritanism and the Enlightenment remains largely unexplored. 1 Perry Miller, in The New England Mind: From Colony to Province (1953), argued that Puritanism in the early eighteenth century succumbed to the weight of its inner contradictions. Henry May (The Enlightenment in America, 1976) contended that New England thinkers generally accommodated the balanced cosmology of Newton and Locke without serious [End Page 25] intellectual dislocation until the middle of the eighteenth century. Robert Middlekauff’s The Mathers: Three Generations of Puritan Intellectuals, 1596–1728 (1971) suggested that although Cotton Mather experimented with rational religion in the early eighteenth century, he gradually awakened to its corrosive effect on Puritan sensibilities, and in the last years of his life he came perilously close to positing subjective experience as the only authentic test of religious truth. Images of disintegration, assimilation, excitement, and retreat appear in the literature, but there is no consensus on the fate of Puritanism in eighteenth-century culture, and the study of the American Enlightenment has not caught the imagination of American historians. Given the ambitiousness of this project, nothing less than the reinterpretation of provincial New England culture in an Anglo-American context, it is somewhat surprising that Winship chose to tell this story through an analysis of the transformation of Cotton Mather’s thinking on providentialism. Winship argues however, that Mather was subject to the same cultural pressures as other exemplars of learned culture in England and Massachusetts and that the extraordinary breadth of his intellect and unusual amount of documentation should not prevent us from seeing that his attempt to integrate the ideas of the early Enlightenment with Puritan traditions exemplifies the larger dilemmas, strategies and resolutions of the culture itself. The key to understanding this intellectual transition, Winship argues, lies in the cultural politics of post-Restoration England. The Enlightenment in England took the form of a campaign by Anglican church leaders and some Dissenters to defuse the radicalism of Puritan religious thought, to tame the enthusiasm of revolutionary ideology, and to channel belief toward deference to civil authority. Restoration thinkers believed that the Puritan insistence on the ability of the godly to interpret and act on the basis of providential meanings revealed in wonders—visions, earthquakes, and other unusual events—left radicals too free to challenge the social and political order on their own terms. Thus they set out to discredit such Puritan...

The English Reformation Revisited

I was asked by the Society to provide an introduction to current historical thinking about the English Reformation in the first talk to the 1995 Conference. The ensuing lecture was deliberately intended to provide guidance through the minefield of controversy about the success of Reformation for those with only limited knowledge of sixteenth-century history. Debates about the Reformation have always been of obvious importance to both theologians and historians: they have usually in the past been profoundly influenced by confessional ideologies. In the last thirty years the nature of the questions asked about Reformation has undergone marked change: specifically the issue of popular religious belief and practice has assumed a centrality it never before possessed. But new questions have not brought closer agreement on the nature of religious change, and in recent years fierce debate has continued to rage on such issues as the vitality of late medieval Catholicism, the popularity of the early reformers and the motives of Henry VIII and his successors. Some, at least, of these controversies are still bound up with Protestant, Catholic and Anglican identities in the late twentieth century. Since the continuities between past and present were the theme of last year's Conference, I have touched on these identities, but have left it to others, especially Dr Rowell and Dr Rex to make these connections more explicit.

:Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth-Century Paris

The religious conflicts of sixteenth-century France, in particular the St Bartholomew's Day massacres of 1572, continue to draw a good deal of attention from historians. What started as a limited coup against the Huguenot leadership became instead a conflagration that left two thousand or more Protestants dead in the streets and ushered in a series of bloody religious battles. Previous histories of the religious conflicts have been preoccupied with their political aspects, but have not examined the mass violence. Diefendorf focuses on popular religious fanaticism and religious hatred. She examines the roots and escalation of the conflicts, the propaganda of Catholic and Protestant preachers, popular religious beliefs and rituals, the role of the militia, and the underground activities of the Protestant community after the massacres. Using a wide array of published and unpublished sources, she provides the most comprehensive social history to date of these religious conflicts.

Honor thy gods: popular religion in Greek tragedy

In Honor Thy Gods Jon Mikalson uses the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides to explore popular religious beliefs and practices of Athenians in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. and examines how these playwrights portrayed, manipulated, and otherwise represented popular religion in their plays. He discusses the central role of honor in ancient Athenian piety and shows that the values of popular piety are not only reflected but also reaffirmed in tragedies. Mikalson begins by examining what tragic characters and choruses have to say about the nature of the and their intervention in human affairs. Then, by tracing the fortunes of diverse characters -- among them Creon and Antigone, Ajax and Odysseus, Hippolytus, Pentheus, and even Athens and Troy -- he shows that in tragedy those who violate or challenge contemporary popular religious beliefs suffer, while those who support these beliefs are rewarded. The beliefs considered in Mikalson's analysis include Athenians' views on matters regarding asylum, the roles of guests and hosts, oaths, the various forms of divination, health and healing, sacrifice, pollution, the religious responsibilities of parents, children, and citizens, homicide, the dead, and the afterlife. After summarizing the vairous forms of piety and impiety related to these beliefs found in the tragedies, Mikalson isolates honoring the gods as the fundamental concept of Greek piety. He concludes by describing the different relationships of the three tragedians to the religion of their time and their audience, arguing that the tragedies of Euripides most consistently support the values of popular religion.

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. By David D. Hall. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. 316 pp. $12.95 paper

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. By David D. Hall. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. 316 pp. $12.95 paper

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. David D. Hall

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewsWorlds of Wonder, Days of Judgement: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England. David D. Hall John CorriganJohn Corrigan Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 71, Number 3Jul., 1991 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/488675 Views: 9Total views on this site Copyright 1991 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England.

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England.

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England.

Introduction 1. The Uses of Literacy 2. A World of Wonders 3. The Meetinghouse 4. The Uses of Ritual 5. The Mental World of Samuel Afterword A Note on Book Ownership in Seventeenth-Century New England Acknowledgments Notes Index

Book Reviews

Western Chou Civilization. By Cho‐yun Hsu and Katheryn M. LinduffHistory/ Writing: The Theory and Practice of History in Antiquity and in Modern Times. By Albert CookThe Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece. By Victor Davis HansonSacred Biography: Saints and Their Biographies in the Middle Ages. By Thomas J. HeffemanBuddhism under the Tang, By Stanley WeinsteinMedieval Germany 1056‐1273. By Alfred Haverkamp. Translated by Helga Braun and Richard MortimerGenoa's Response to Byzantium, 1155‐1204: Commercial Expansionism and Factionalism in a Medieval City. By Gerald W. DaySt. Francis ofAssisi and Nature: Tradition and Innovation in Western Christian Attitudes Toward the Environment. By Roger D. SorrellPutting Asunder: A History of Divorce in Western Society. By Roderick PhillipsA History of Private Life. Vol. 3, Passions of the Renaissance. Edited by Roger ChartierWilliam Turner: Tudor Naturalist, Physician and Divine. By Whitney R. D. JonesGrace, Talent, and Merit: Poor Students, Clerical Careers, and Professional Ideology in Eighteenth‐Century Germany. By Anthony J. La VopaCharles Edward Stuart: A Tragedy in Many Acts. By Frank McLynnThe Arkwrights: Spinners of Fortune. By R. S. PittonThe Army of the French Revolution: From Citizen‐Soldiers to Instrument of Power. By Jean‐Paul BertaudCitizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution. By Simon SchamaTsar Paul and the Question of Madness: An Essay in History and Psychology. By Hugh RagsdaleNapoleon and Hitler; A Comparative Biography. By Desmond SewardSuicide in Victorian and Edwardian England. By Olive AndersonPapers for the Millions: The New Journalism, in Britain, 1850s to 1914. Edited by Joel H. WienerMacaulay. By Owen Dudley EdwardsFascism and the Mafia. By Christopher DugganDaughters of the Canton Delta: Marriage Patterns and Economic Strategies in South China, 1860‐1930. By Janice E. StockardThe Boulanger Affair Reconsidered: Royalism, Boulangism, and the Origins of the Radical Right in France. By William D. IrvineWomen Clerks in Wilhelmine Germany: Issues of Class and Gender. By Carole Elizabeth AdamsThe Revolution of 1905, Russia in Disarray. By Abraham AscherThe Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914‐1918. Edited by Richard Wall and Jay WinterThe Bolsheviks and the Red Army, 1918‐1922. By Francesco Benvenuti. Translated by Christopher WoodallCommunism and Collaboration: Simon Sabiani and Politics in Marseille, 1919‐1944. By Paul JankowskiNew Directions in American Indian History. Edited by Colin G. CallowayIndian Survival on the California Frontier. By Albert L. HurtadoPursuits of Happiness: The Social Development of Early Modern British Colonies and the Formation of American Culture. By Jack P. GreeneWorlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New Eneland. By David D HallColonial Chesapeake Society. Edited, with an introduction, by Lois Green Carr, Philip D. Morgan, and Jean B. RussoBrazil, The Forging of a Nation, 1789‐1852. By Roderick J. BarmanOrigins of Southern Radicalism: The South Carolina Upcountry, 1800‐1860. By Lacy K. FordThe Paddy Camps: The Irish of Lowell, 1821‐61. By Brian C. MitchellThe Politics of Individualism: Parties and the American Character in the Jacksonian Era. By Lawrence Frederick KohlSports & Freedom: The Rise of Big‐Time College Athletics. By Ronald A. SmithThe American Civil War and the Origins of Modern Warfare: Ideas, Organization, and Field Command. By Edward HagermanWinfield Scott Hancock: A Soldier's Life. By David M. JordanThe Rockefeller Century. By John Ensor Harr and Peter J. JohnsonThe Presidency of Rutherford B. Hayes. By Ari HoogenboomAmerica's First Black General: Benjamin O. Davis, Sr., 1880‐1970. By Marvin E. FletcherWorkers’Health, Workers’Democracy. By Alan DericksonDrive to Hegemony: The United States in the Caribbean, 1898‐1917. By David HealyGeorge C. Marshall: Soldier‐Statesman of the American Century. By Mark A. StolerThe World That FDR Built. By Edward MortimerThe American Conception of Neutrality After 1941. By Jurg Martin GabrielThe CIA and American Democracy. By Rhodri Jeffreys‐JonesThe American Age: United States Foreign Policy at Home and Abroad since 1950. By Walter LaFeber

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Beliefs in Early New England

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England

Worlds of Wonder, Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England

Worlds of wonder, days of judgment: popular religious belief in early New England

Worlds of wonder, days of judgment: popular religious belief in early New England

"Si quid sunt manes ..." - Aspekter af gammelromersk dødekult

On the basis of archeological and literary material from the centuries around the beginning of the Christian era, the article delineates popular religious beliefs about death. The understanding of death is reflected in the ritual burial practice and in the equipment of the grave and its significance. The grave is understood as a sacred place, dedicated to the divine “manes” of the deceased. Family graves are used, graves that function, on the one hand, as the abode of the deceased who lives according to the laws of the hereafter, and, on the other, as a place of commemoration for the bereaved who come at fixed intervals to sacrifice. Further, the grave and the tombstone with the portrait of the deceased is seen as a symbolic substitute for the deceased thus causing the grave to signify that death has usurped the community of the living and at the same time that the deceased in his grave is part of another, transcendant community consisting of the living and the dead. The dual nature of the portrait on the tombstone reflects the dual nature of the cult of death: protective measures mirroring a deep-rooted anxiety alternate with expressions of veneration, thus marking that the deceased is radically different and at the same time familiar. This duality also characterizes some present-day Italian burial practices, as outlined in the closing paragraph.

Athenian Popular Religion

Most modern studies of Athenian religion have focused on festivals, cult practices, and individual deities. Jon Mikalson turns instead to the religious beliefs citizens of Athens spoke of and acted upon in everyday life. He uses evidence only from reliable, mostly contemporary sources such as the orators Lysias and Demosthenes, the historian Xenophon, and state decrees, sacred laws, religious dedications, and epitaphs. This in no sense a general history of Athenian Mikalson writes, even within the narrow historical boundaries set. It rather an investigation of what might be termed the consensus of popular religious belief, a consensus consisting of those beliefs which an Athenian citizen thought he could express publicly and for which he expected fo find general acceptance among his peers. What emerges in Mikalson's study a remarkable homogeneity of religious beliefs at the popular level. topics discussed at length in Athenian Popular Religion include the areas of divine intervention in human life, the gods and human justice, gods and oaths, divination, death and the afterlife, the nature of the gods, social aspects of popular religion, and piety and impiety. Mikalson challenges the common opinion that popular religious belief in Athens deteriorated significantly from the mid-fifth to the mid-fourth century B.C. The error in understanding the development of Athenian religion has arisen, it seems to me, because scholars have failed to distinguish properly between the differing natures of the sources for our knowledge of religious beliefs in the earlier and later periods, Mikalson writes. difference between those sources is more than simply one of years. It a difference between poetry and prose, with all the factors which that difference implies.

Popular Belief and Practice: Papers Read at the Ninth Summer Meeting and the Tenth Winter Meeting of the Ecclesiastical History Society

1. Popular religious beliefs and the late Roman historians Arnaldo Momigliano 2. Popular religion and christological controversy in the fifth W. H. C. Frend 3. The Merovingian monastery of St Evroul in the light of conflicting traditions Marjorie Chibnall 4. Vir Dei: secular sanctity in the early tenth century Derek Baker 5. A critique of popular religion: Guibert of Nogent on The Relics of the Saints Colin Morris 6. The making of a twelfth-century relic collection Denis Bethell 7. Innocent III's treatment of the Humiliati Brenda Bolton 8. Piety and impiety in thirteenth-century Italy Alexander Murray 9. Some popular prophecies from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries Marjorie E. Reeves 10. Belief and practice as illustrated by John XXII's excommunication of Robert Bruce Rosalind M. T. Hill 11. Bacon and eggs: bishop Buckingham and superstition in Lincolnshire Dorothy M. Owen 12. 'Wilde wittes and wilfulnes': John Swetstock's attack on those 'poyswunmongeres', the Lollards Roy M. Haines 13. Protestant spirituality in the first age of the Reformation Gordon Rupp 14. Some thoughts on the development of a lay religious consciousness in pre-Civil-War England Marc L. Schwarz 15. The social teaching of archbishop John Williams R. Buick Knox 16. The puritan piety of members of the Long Parliament G. S. S. Yule (in absentia) 17. He-goats before the Flocks': a note on the part played by women in the founding of some Civil War churches Claire Cross 18. The social status of some seventeenth-century rural Dissenters Margaret Spufford 19. Methodism and the mob in the eighteenth century John Walsh 20. Evangelicalism and worldliness, 1770-1870 Michael Hennell 21. The religion of the people and the problem of control, 1790-1830 (Presidential Address) W. R. Ward 22. Papists, Protestants and the Irish in London, 1835-70 Sheridan Gilley 23. The Churches and society in nineteenth-century England: a rural perspective David M. Thompson 24. Pratique, piece et foi populaire dins la France moderne au XIXeme et XXeme siecles A. Latreille (in absentia) 25. The Welsh revival of 1904-5: a critique Basil Hall 26. Puritanicalism, sport, and race: a symbolic crusade of 1911 Stuart Mews.

Popular religious beliefs and the late Roman historians

Students of historiography have become increasingly gloomy in their evaluation of the Greek founding fathers of historiography. All the limits, the shortcomings, and the failures of conventional history writing – the histoire événementielle of French terminology – have been laid at the door of Thucydides. Herodotus has escaped obloquy, either because he offered a promise of variety, curiosity, humour and sensitiveness which Thucydides spoiled, or because (as Professor Seth Benardete says in a very recent book) ‘his foundations are not those of modern historiography’. Thucydides has become the great villain of historiography in so far as he identified history with political and military events. Professor Moses Finley and I may in the past have said some unkind words about Thucydides – so did the late Professor Collingwood. But we are now made to look like mild apologists of Thucydides by Hermann Strasburger. This most penetrating interpreter of ancient historians has treated Thucydides’s approach to history as the survival of a prehistoric mode of thinking, for which war was the most important event. According to Strasburger, Thucydides excluded das Humanum from history and therefore derived his scale of values from ‘prescientific and ultimately precivilised, prehistoric strata of thought’. Strasburger tries to show that some hellenistic historians, such as Agatharchides and Posidonius, showed more interest in the business of peaceful coexistence than Thucydides ever did, but he is under no illusion about their ultimate success. Thucydides’s historical approach prevailed: deviationists were silenced. The Romans inherited from the Greeks a type of historical writing for which war was the central theme. What Thucydides did not know was not history.