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