Saints and Shrines
Saints and Shrines
This chapter contends that it remains far easier to make general statements about the pervasiveness of things religious than either to apprehend them at close quarters or to grasp their meaning for those who experienced them in one form or another. “Everything” was connected to “everything” precisely because social and cultural life in the widest sense was suffused with religious imagery, language, sounds, and gestures, which made it impossible for all but a handful of people to view the world as other than governed by supernatural forces. Rather than attempting an impossible analysis of all of these phenomena, the most a historian can do is focus on a selection of examples which best illustrate the range of contemporary practices as well as the efforts made to distinguish between what was religious and what was not.
Keywords: religious gestures, religious sounds, religious langauge, religious imagery, supernatural forces, contemporary practices
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