History of Religion

This book explores religious transformation in the lives of ex-slaves and their descendants living in the Arkansas and Mississippi Delta between the end of Reconstruction and the start of the Great Migration. It argues that Delta blacks, who were overwhelmingly rural sharecroppers and tenant farmers, developed a rich and complex sacred culture during this era. They forged a new religious culture by integrating their spiritual life with many of the defining features of the post‐Reconstruction South, including the rise of segregation and racial violence, the emergence of new forms of technology like train travel, the growth of black fraternal orders, and the rapid expansion of the consumer market. Experimenting with new symbols of freedom and racial respectability, forms of organizational culture, regional networks of communication, and popular notions of commodification and consumption enabled them to survive, make progress, and at times resist white supremacy. The book then evaluates the social consequences of these changes and shows in particular how the Holiness‐Pentecostal developed in large part as a rejection of them. It ends by probing how this new religious world influenced the Great Migration and black spiritual life in the 1920s and 1930s.

Altars are powerful symbols, fraught with meaning, but during the early modern period they became a religious battleground. Attacked by reformers in the mid-16th century because of their allegedly idolatrous associations with the Catholic sacrifice of the mass, a hundred years later they served to divide Protestants due to their reintroduction by Archbishop Laud and his associates as part of a counter-reforming programme. Moreover, having subsequently been removed by the victorious puritans, they gradually came back after the restoration of the monarchy in 1660. This book explores these developments over a 150 year period, and recaptures the experience of the ordinary parishioner in this crucial period of religious change. Far from being the passive recipients of changes imposed from above, the laity is revealed as actively engaged from the early days of the Reformation, as zealous iconoclasts or their Catholic opponents — a division later translated into competing protestant views. This book integrates the worlds of theological debate, church politics and government, and parish practice and belief, which are often studied in isolation from one another. It draws on hitherto largely untapped sources, notably the surviving artefactual evidence comprising communion tables and rails, fonts, images in stained glass, paintings and plates, and examines the riches of local parish records — especially churchwardens' accounts.

The collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 left all Austrians in a state of political, social, and economic turmoil, but Jews in particular found their lives shaken to the core. Although Jews’ former comfort zone suddenly disappeared, the dissolution of the Dual Monarchy also created room for cultural innovation and change. Jews eagerly took up the challenge to fill this void, becoming heavily invested in culture as a way to shape their new, but also vexed, self-understandings. By examining formative events in both Vienna and the provinces, this book demonstrates that an intensified marking of people, places, and events as “Jewish” accompanied the crises occurring in the wake of Austria-Hungary’s collapse, leaving profound effects on Austria’s cultural legacy. By examining the role Jewish difference played in the lives, works, and deeds of a broad range of Austrians, this study reveals how the social codings of politics, gender, and nation received a powerful boost when articulated using the terms of Jewish difference.

The Greek Christians expelled from Anatolia between 1912 and 1924 often spoke about earlier times when they ‘lived well with the Turks’. They yearned for the days when they worked and drank coffee together, participated in each other’s festivals, and even revered the same saints and miracle-working shrines. Historians have never given serious regard to such oral traditions, given the refugees had been victims of horrific ‘ethnic’ violence that appeared to reflect deep pre-existing animosities. This book considers the rationality of such unlikely nostalgic traditions, which happen to be common among refugees from dismembered multi-ethnic societies. It claims that intercommunality, a mode of everyday living based on the accommodation of cultural difference, normally played a stabilizing function within societies like the Ottoman Empire. Along with a genuine longing for lost homelands, the refugees were nostalgic for moral environments in which religious communities claimed to have lived in accordance with their respective religious and ethical values. Although these traditions depicted worlds that were implausibly pristine, the intention was to counter the dominant but spurious national narrative, which reviled Turks as irredeemable barbarians and dismissed these refugee histories of coexistence as pure fantasy. Drawing largely from an oral archive containing 5,000 interviews, the book investigates the mentalities, cosmologies and value systems of these ordinary Anatolians, and shows how their popular perspectives pose serious challenges to the historiography. The book also examines the role of political violence in destroying this Ottoman society, and the way it effectively transformed these Anatolians into Greeks and Turks.

What did early-modern Britons know about Muslim peoples and societies, Islam as a theology, and Islamic lands? This book explores interactions between Britain and the Islamic world from 1558 to 1713, showing how scholars, diplomats, traders, captives, travellers, clerics, and chroniclers developed and described those interactions. Queen Elizabeth I initiated diplomatic and commercial relations with the Islamic world. The early trading Companies received her royal charter, taking Britons to Islamic states in North Africa and the Islamic empires of the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. We end with the Peace of Utrecht of 1713, by which time the British had become masters of the sea routes that made future empire possible. During this period Britons met Muslims for the first time since the Crusades and re-examined their understanding of Islam. These encounters brought about changes in British national identity and Britain's international role. This book illustrates the wide range of interactions and exposures, sources and texts, people and objects, that were instrumental in that process. It examines Islam and Muslims in English thought, and how British monarchs dealt with supremely powerful Muslim rulers. It documents the importance of diplomatic and mercantile encounters, and shows how captives spread unreliable information about Islam and Muslims. It investigates observations by travellers and clergymen who reported meetings with Jews, eastern Christians, Armenians and Shi'ites. And it traces how trade and the exchange of material goods with the Islamic world shaped how people in Britain lived their lives and thought about themselves.

The purpose of this book is to explore the relationship between British Jewry and Zionism from 1936 to 1956, during a, if not the, crucial period in modern Jewish history, encompassing both the shoah and the establishment of the State of Israel. The book attempts to provide an answer to what, at first sight, appears as a contradiction, the undoubted prominence Zionism had reached among British Jews by the end of the period under investigation on the one hand and its diverse expressions, ranging from aliyah to making a donation to a Zionist fund, on the other. The main argument put forward in this book is that the ascendancy of Zionism in British Jewry is best understood as a particularly complex, but not untypical variant of the nineteenth- and twentieth‐century trend to reimagine communities in a national key. The book explores the relationship between British Jewry and Zionism on three levels, the transnational Jewish sphere of interaction, the British‐Jewish community, and the place of the Jewish community in British state and society. The introduction adapts theories of nationalism so as to provide a framework of analysis for diaspora Zionism. Part I addresses the question of why British Jews became Zionists, Part II how the various quarters of British Jewry related to the Zionist project in the Middle East, Part III Zionist nation-building in Britain, and Part IV the impact of Zionism on Jewish relations with the larger society. The Conclusion modifies the original argument by emphasizing the impact that the specific fabric of British state and society, in particular the Empire, had on British Zionism.

This is the first book to examine one of Europe's largest Protestant communities in Hungary and Transylvania. It highlights the place of the Hungarian Reformed church in the international Calvinist world, and reveals the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society. Calvinism attracted strong support in Hungary and Transylvania, where one of the largest Reformed churches was established by the early seventeenth century. Understanding of the Hungarian Reformed church remains the most significant missing element in the analysis of European Calvinism. The Hungarian Reformed church survived on narrow ground between the Habsburgs and Turks, thanks to support from Transylvanian princes and local nobles. They worked with Reformed clergy to maintain contact with western co-religionists, to combat confessional rivals, to improve standards of education and to impose moral discipline. However, there were also tensions within the church over further reforms of public worship and church government, and over the impact of puritanism. This book examines the development of the Hungarian church within the international Calvinist community, and the impact of Calvinism on Hungarian politics and society.