Lived Religion and the Long Reformation in Northern Europe puts Reformation in a daily life context using lived religion as a conceptual and methodological tool: exploring how people "lived out" their religion in their mundane toils and how religion created a performative space for them. This collection reinvestigates the character of the Reformation in an area that later became the heartlands of Lutheranism. The way people lived their religion was intricately linked with questions of the value of individual experience, communal cohesion and interaction. During the late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era religious certainty was replaced by the experience of doubt and hesitation. Negotiations on and between various social levels manifest the needs, aspirations and resistance behind the religious change.
Contributors include: Kaarlo Arffman, Jussi Hanska, Miia Ijäs, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Jenni Kuuliala, Marko Lamberg, Jason Lavery, Maija Ojala, Päivi Räisänen-Schröder, Raisa Maria Toivo
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa, Ph.D is a Research Fellow at the University of Tampere. She has focused on late medieval hagiography and particularly canonization processes, and published on religion, family and gender, including the monograph Gender, Miracles and Daily Life (Brepols 2009).
Raisa Maria Toivo, Ph.D. is an Academy Research Fellow at the University of Tampere. She has published widely on early modern religious history and witchcraft, her works including Faith and Magic in Early Modern Finland (Palgrave 2016).
Preface
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa & Raisa Maria Toivo: Religion as Experience
Section I Lived religion in daily life
Sari Katajala-Peltomaa: Devotional Strategies in Everyday Life: Laity Interaction with Saints in the North in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries
Jenni Kuuliala: Disability and Religious Practices in Late Medieval Prussia: Infirmity and the Miraculous in the Canonization Process of St. Dorothea of Montau (1404–1406)
Raisa Maria Toivo: Protestantism, modernity and the Power of Penetration: Saints and sacrifice in 17th century Lutheran Finland
Päivi Räisänen-Schröder: Appeal and Survival of Anabaptism in Early Modern Germany
Section II Religious Economics: Charity and Community
Jussi Hanska: Poverty and Preaching between the Middle Ages and Early Modern Period. The Case of Ericus Erici, Bishop of Turku
Maija Ojala: Urban Funeral Practices in the Baltic Sea Region
Marko Lamberg: Religiosity and Readiness for the Reformation among Late Medieval Burghers in Stockholm, c. 1420–1570
Section III Religion, Politics and Contested Identities
Jason Lavery: Mikael Agricola: Father of the Finnish Language, Builder of the Swedish State
Miia Ijäs: Reformation at the Election Field. Religious politics in the Polish-Lithuanian royal elections, 1573–1576
Kaarlo Arffman: Resistance to the Reformation in 16th-century Finland
Bibliography
List of contributors
Index
Scholars and students interested in history of religion, church history, social and cultural history, or Medieval and early modern history and the methodology of the performative.