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Sources & Concepts


Concepts & Sources for the Study of Religion

(Naomi Pullin)

This class will take place in the Modern Records Centre Seminar Room

Alongside the thematic sections of the module, this session addresses the study of religion from two complementary perspectives: the essential issue of identifying / working with appropriate source materials on the one hand, and prominent conceptual approaches to the study of religion on the other. The former will be facilitated by a joint session between the Library and the Modern Records Centre on the sources available at Warwick to conduct research into religious history. The remainder of the class will be focused on how explanatory accounts of religious belief and experience developed in the West from the 18th century, and will ask a series of questions about whether such approaches are defensible and can assist historians in their understanding of religious phenomena.

Seminar Questions

  • What kinds of sources do historians have for engaging with religious beliefs and practices in the past?
  • Which concepts and theories help us to make sense of religion?
  • How has the ‘social’ explanation of religion developed?
  • How, if at all, does pre-modern religion differ from its manifestations today?
  • Is functional explanation of belief a legitimate category of explanation or understanding?

Seminar Tasks

  • Find a genre / type of primary source illuminating aspects of religious beliefs or practices. Come to the seminar prepared to explain it to the group. You may find it useful to consult this webpage on some of the library sources/MRC collections on the study of religious culturesLink opens in a new window, or Laura Sangha and Jonathan Willis, Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (2016).
  • Read EITHER T. Johnson, ‘Religion’, in: G. Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History (London, 2005), 139-58 OR André Droogers, 'Defining Religion: A Social Science Approach', in Peter B. Clarke (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (2011), pp. 263-279.
  • Read ONE of the sociological studies of religion on the list below. Prepare some thoughts and ideas on the value and shortcomings of the perspective presented. You may find it useful to do a bit of wider research into the theorist if you have not come across them before and their views.

The Sociology of Religion (Read at least one)

1. Feuerbach, The Essence of Religion (2004) see: https://rowlandpasaribu.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/ludwig-feuerbach-lectures-on-the-essence-of-religion.pdfLink opens in a new window

'Introduction: Durkheim in Disciplinary Dialogue', in Durkheim in Dialogue: A Centenary Celebration of the Elementary Forms of Religious Life', pp. 1-16.

3. Durkheim

4. John Raines, 'Introduction: Marx on Religion', in Marx on Religion (2002), pp. 1-14.

5. Max Weber, ‘Protestant Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism’, in W.G. Runciman (ed.), Weber: Selections in Translation (1978), 138-73.

The Sociology of Religion: Overview texts

Peter Clarke, The Oxford Handbook of the Sociology of Religion (Oxford Handbooks in Religion and Theology) (OUP, 2011).

Bryan S Turner, The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion (2010).

Link opens in a new windowLink opens in a new window

Further Reading

Peter Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (1969).

J. Bossy, Christianity in the West (1985).

P. Collinson, ‘Religion, Society and the Historian’, Journal of Religious History 23 (1999), 149-67.

Ingrid Creppell, ‘Secularisation’ in I Katznelson and G Stedman-Jones, Religion and the Political Imagination (CUP, 2010).

N.Z. Davis, ‘Some Tasks and Themes in the Study of Popular Religion’, in C. Trinkhaus & H.A. Oberman (eds), The Pursuit of Holiness in Late Medieval and Renaissance Religion (1974).

C. Scott Dixon, 'Reformations', in: idem & B. Kümin (eds), Interpreting Early Modern Europe (2019), 121-49 [pre-print versions of main text, excerpts from sources and appendices from relevant secondary literature]

E. Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400-c. 1580 (2nd ed., New Haven, 2005), esp. ch. ‘Corporate Christians’.

C. Ginzburg, The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller (English trans., 1980).

D. Hacke, ‘Church, space and conflict: Religious co-existence and political communication in 17thC Switzerland’, German History 25 (2007), 285-312

Joel F. Harrington; H. Smith, ‘Confessionalization, community and state building in Germany 1555-1870’, in: Journal of Modern History 69 (1997).

L. Hunt, M. Jacobs, and W Mijnhardt, The Book that Changed Europe: Picart & Bernard’s ‘Religious Ceremonies of the World’ (Harvard, 2010).

D. Leopold, The Young Karl Marx (CUP, 2007) ch. 4 ‘Human Flourishing’

D. Mayes, Communal Christianity: The life and loss of a peasant vision in early modern Germany (Leiden: Brill Academic, 2004).

G. Parker, ‘Success and Failure During the First Century of the Reformation’, Past & Present, 136 (1992), 43-82.

W. Reinhard, 'Pressures towards Confessionalization? Prolegomena to a Theory of the Confessional Age', in Scott Dixon (ed.), The German Reformation (1999), 169-192

H. Schilling, ‘Confessionalization’, in his: Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society (1992)

R.W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany (1987).

G. Strauss, ‘Success and failure in the German Reformation’, Past & Present 67 (1975)

K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (1971), chs 1-9.

Click on our Reading ListLink opens in a new window for electronic access to texts.