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This chapter offers an interpretation of extended families as communities of experience in a rural area close to the eastern border of the Swedish realm. Through a case study of lower court records, Kuha examines the social and religious life in a 17th-century farm culminating in the crisis of an extended family. The chapter explores how practices of lived religion shaped the relationship of the community and the individual, and how experiences were negotiated within families and local communities. The analysis highlights the importance of protecting the boundaries of the household as well as the meaning of religious practices in creating cohesion within the community.

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 book breaks with three common scholarly barriers of periodization, discipline and geography in its exploration of the related themes of heresy, magic and witchcraft. It sets aside constructed chronological boundaries, and in doing so aims to achieve a clearer picture of what ‘went before’, as well as what ‘came after’. Thus the volume demonstrates continuity as well as change in the concepts and understandings of magic, heresy and witchcraft. In addition, the geographical pattern of similarities and diversities suggests a comparative approach, transcending confessional as well as national borders. Throughout the medieval and early modern period, the orthodoxy of the Christian Church was continuously contested. The challenge of heterodoxy, especially as expressed in various kinds of heresy, magic and witchcraft, was constantly present during the period 1200-1650. Neither contesters nor followers of orthodoxy were homogeneous groups or fractions. They themselves and their ideas changed from one century to the next, from region to region, even from city to city, but within a common framework of interpretation. This collection of essays focuses on this complex.

Mitä väliä on historialla? – kirja kartoittaa historian ja historiantutkimuksen mahdollista impaktia, merkitystä ja yhteiskunnallista tai tieteellistä relevanssia. Toimittajien (Tiina Miettisen ja Raisa Maria Toivon) yleistajuisen johdannon jälkeen kirja tarkastelee erilaisten tapausesimerkkien kautta, mitä hyötyä erilaisista historiantutkimuksista voi olla erilaisille historian käyttäjille. Kirja on poleeminen keskustelunaloitus: pikemmin kuin kattamaan kaikki mahdolliset historian alat se pyrki tarjoamaan odottamattomia näkökulmia ja uhkarohkeita vertailuja. Mitä väliä on historialla (“What good is history?”) is edited by Dr. Tiina Miettinen and Dr. Raisa Maria Toivo. Can history be useful and if so, what is it useful for? This book explores the impact of history and historical research. It gives a general introduction and various case studies – together with a piece of fiction – on how different parts of society can benefit, or have used, the study of history.

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.