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In this introductory chapter Katajala-Peltomaa & Toivo analyse historiographical changes from the history of popular religion to the history of religion as lived. They lay out the framework and discuss the tradition of studying the history of experience and religion as a cultural and time-bound phenomenon. The chapter introduces three analytical levels, namely everyday experience, experience as a process and experience as a social and societal structure arguing for a situational nature of experience. The three levels of experience are approached via the concepts of cultural scripts, communities, embodiment, materiality and agency. Finally, the introduction explains the structure of the rest of the volume.

Pihko examines inquisition records from medieval Languedoc in order to investigate experiences related to the ritualized and allegedly heretical practice of blessing bread. The chapter provides an overview of the evidence regarding this often noted but insufficiently researched phenomenon. It highlights the materiality of lived religion and the active part played by lay people as participants in religious rituals, as well their role as consumers, interpreters, and distributors of blessed bread. The case study is inserted into wider discussions related to the history of medieval lived religion and the history of experiences. To illuminate their inner dynamics, the chapter proposes that historical experiences and lived religion can be understood as complex, emergent phenomena.

This chapter discusses the role of lived religion in interpreting and forming the experience of illness, disability, and pain. The focus is on two cultural scripts that were inherent to early modern Italian culture: miracles and witchcraft. By using canonization process records and records of the Roman Inquisition as the source, the analysis focuses on the ways the veneration of saints and the belief in miraculous healing as well as the idea that witchcraft could make a person ill played into the lived religion of the period.

Markkola examines religion as lived and shared by working-class women in an industrial town in Finland. Her chapter explores women’s daily practices as well as various Lutheran and nonconformist revivalist arenas to practice religion at the turn of the twentieth century. These arenas constituted scenes of experience where individual experiences were acquired, interpreted, shared, confirmed, and turned into collective resources. The scenes of experience provided working-class women an institutional setting to give meaning to their religious experiences and taught them how to talk religion. The chapter shows that religious experiences and meanings given to faith by urban working-class women were full of nuances. Lived religion might have brought about obedience to authorities, as the labour movement assumed, but it could also encourage resistance.

In this chapter the various levels of experience are scrutinized within the context of interaction with a saint, namely Saint Birgitta of Sweden. The focus lies on a case of a punishment miracle leading to demonic possession and eventually conversion to penance. The chapter combines the analysis of intimate sensorial elements, embodied enculturation, and a production of a cultural script scrutinizing how a model for experiencing was produced in the context of Vadstena Abbey’s miracle recording and later preaching.

The protagonist of the chapter Sarah Wheeler, daughter of British Quaker family lived in Russia near St. Petersburg at the beginning of the 19th century until the year 1838. Using as a source material Sarah Wheeler’s correspondence the chapter analyses her spiritual life, her faith on the God and how she lived through her bereavements and how her emotions like sorrow and fear gradually evolved into an experience which gave a direction and security in his life. This is the first study in which the correspondence between Sarah Wheeler and Margaret Finlayson has been utilized.

Johanna Annola opens up a view on a modernizing society by analysing the ways in which the experience of a ”good death” was negotiated in two early twentieth-century Finnish poorhouses. In particular, the chapter focuses on procedures that took place in the liminal stage between death and burial. Exploring two different poorhouses, Annola discusses the intersection of a traditional and modern experience of death.

Toivo’s chapter systematizes prayer as experience on three levels, as everyday encounters, as social processes and as structures. It shows the material and the corporeal nature of the early modern prayer to play an essential part in the ways the religious experience of a prayer was simultaneously constructed and personalized and shared. Praying was ‘doing’ in a much more holistic sense than merely saying words or even less thinking thoughts to God. The body and the material surroundings of the prayer form a space where the experience takes place, even ‘a tool’ to experience with.

‘Parricide in Nineteenth-Century Finland’, by Raisa Maria Toivo, places nineteenth-century parricide cases in the context of changing concepts of authority and masculinity, and the devaluation of traditional forms of authority.

The essay shows a remnant of Catholic practice in early modern Finland that only a hundred years after the reformation slowly began to be treated as ‘papist superstition’. It discusses how such practices were, in the beginning of the seventeenth century considered reprehensible but essentially harmless superstitions, but by the middle of the century began to be treated as forms of magic or even witchcraft. The rosary practices are looked at as a crossroads of the beginnings of history of the Confessionalist Lutheran church in Sweden and the religious life of early modern lay people. The essay uses church popular education material from the early seventeenth century with the model sermon collection of Bishop Ericus Erici Sorolainen to see what it teaches about Catholicism and Rosaries and then contrasts it with (secular) court records in order to look at popular attitudes in practice. These are then put in the context of historiography on magic and superstition in Sweden and Finland.

This chapter discusses the process of constructing religious experiences as pathological and ‘mad’ in early modern Sweden, during an era of great religious plurality but also strict Lutheran orthodoxy. By using two case studies of envisioned angelic encounters from early 18th century as examples, it shows the participation of several actors and discursive authorities in shaping and negotiating personal spiritual experiences. Medicalization of deviant religious experiences was one way of controlling faith and upholding the discursive hegemony of the Swedish Lutheran state Church over religion. The focus is on the process-nature of experiencing and the power dynamics in play in invalidating norm-breaching experiences.