JOURNAL OF RELIGIOUS HISTORY最新文献

Free church organisations were a vital part of Christian evangelical revivalism in the Nordic countries around the turn of the century in 1900. In this paper, a new piece is added to the puzzle regarding why free churches developed and survived. Against the background of a case study of the Swedish Uppsala Missionary Congregation's cultural economy 1870s–1890s, it is argued that a particular rationality — a sacrificial economy — was an important prerequisite for organisational development. The paper therefore adds a materialist explanatory factor to the organisational development of revivalism in late nineteenth-century Sweden.

Famed for its austerity, Jansenism nonetheless prompted a slew of salacious street-songs throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. If historians have increasingly examined early modern urban singing practices, underlining the social porosity and intergenerational hold of many street-songs, little research has been devoted to unpicking what songs offer to the study of religious history. The aims of this article are two-fold. First, it seeks to assess the value (and sketch out some limits) to street-songs as a source in recovering some of the more popular facets of religious controversies — here, the Jansenist movement. Second, and as a corollary of this, the article uses street-songs to emphasise the political sophistication to popular interest in Jansenism. It suggests that this antedated and ran alongside the convulsionary movement, which has been typically viewed as the apogee of popular engagement with Jansenism. This article first considers how the hold of specific literary themes and popular tunes over generations impacted discussions on the Jansenist debate, before turning to examine the suitability of songs in capturing devotional and theological content, and finally discussing the complexity of the popular political and ecclesiological ideas on the Jansenist movement that the street-songs conveyed. The article ultimately seeks to underline the value of street-songs as a source on urban popular religious expression.

This article examines issues relating to women's participation in religious cults at the local level in the fifteenth century. The research is based on the collections of Krakow's miracles. This analysis aims to show the social and cultural background to women's participation in local worship, their religious practices, and also their place in social and family structure. Research shows that women were engaged and active, which translated into the development of local cults. Local worship allowed women to fulfil their religious needs without major disturbances in their daily lives.

Charms were a commonplace form of medical intervention in late-medieval England, as they allowed afflicted and ailing devotees to seek the aid of saints and biblical figures. Those holy dead who had suffered something on earth were considered particularly adept at posthumously treating the same in their devotees, with the words used to recount their travails believed to possess curative power. This essay examines a selection of pox, earwig and worm charms circulating in England ca. 1300–1550, specifically those powered by the fifth-century saint Nicasius of Rheims and Old Testament figure Job. It begins by demonstrating how charms aligned with contemporary medicine, natural philosophy and orthodox Christian devotion, particularly regarding the use of words as material ingredients. Then, this essay reconstructs how these otherwise static texts, at the nexus of religion and medical science, could transform into living, curative performances.