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

Abstract

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. The collection presents the state-of-the- art within the emerging field of history of “lived religion,” exemplifying its differences from earlier notions of “popular religion.” The articles take a step forward in the field of lived religion by approaching it from the perspective of experience as an analytical category. The issue considers experience as it occurs in three fundamental stages: (1) ways in which individual people and communities encounter the world; (2) the simultaneous relational, inter-subjective process making sense of those encounters; and (3) the social and physical structures born from the repetition of these processes so as to pro-duce knowledge of the “real” world. Approaching the topic in terms of these stages of experience allows the articles to investigate negotiations between individual and communal or shared experience in the field of lived religion within various geographical contexts of medieval and early modern Europe. Such an approach helps to better identify the drivers of historical change across medieval and early modern periods.