Raisa Maria Toivo

Sari Katajala-Peltomaa

"This study is an exploration of lived religion and gender across the Reformation, from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Combining conceptual development with empirical history, the authors explore these two topics via themes of power, agency, work, family, sainthood, and witchcraft. Lived Religion and Gender covers a wide geographical area in western Europe including Italy, Scandinavia, and Finland, making this study an invaluable resource for scholars and students concerned with the history of religion, the history of gender, the history of the family, as well as medieval and early modern European history"--

Lived Religion and Gender in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe

Demonic possession was a spiritual state that often had physical symptoms; however, in Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe, Sari Katajala-Peltomaa argues that demonic possession was a social phenomenon which should be understood with regard to the community and culture. She focuses on significant case studies from canonization processes (c. 1240-1450) which show how each set of sources formed its own specific context, in which demonic presence derived from different motivations, reasonings, and methods of categorization. The chosen perspective is that of lived religion, which is both a thematic approach and a methodology: a focus on rituals, symbols, and gestures, as well as sensitivity to nuances and careful contextualizing of the cases are constitutive elements of the argumentation. The analysis contests the hierarchy between the 'learned' and the 'popular' within religion, as well as the existence of a strict polarity between individual and collective religious participation. Demonic presence disclosed negotiations over authority and agency; it shows how the personal affected the communal, and vice versa, and how they were eventually transformed into discourses and institutions of the Church; that is, definitions of the miraculous and the diabolical. Geographically, the volume covers Western Europe, comparing Northern and Southern material and customs. The structure follows the logic of the phenomenon, beginning with the background reasons offered as a cause of demonic possession, continuing with communities' responses and emotions, including construction of sacred caregiving methods. Finally, the ways in which demonic presence contributed to wider societal debates in the fields of politics and spirituality are discussed. Alterity and inversion of identity, gender, and various forms of corporeality and the interplay between the sacred and diabolical are themes that run all through the volume.

Demonic Possession and Lived Religion in Later Medieval Europe

Using "lived religion" as its conceptual tool, this book explores how the Reformation showed itself in and was influenced by lay people's everyday lives. It reinvestigates the character of the Reformation in what later became the heartlands of Lutheranism.

Sari Katajala-Peltomaa

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