Key Terms for Material Religion 2025

Reviewed by: The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age Walter S. Melion The Netherlandish Image after Iconoclasm, 1566–1672: Material Religion in the Dutch Golden Age. By Mia M. Mochizuki. (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2008. Pp. xxiv, 399. $124.95. ISBN: 978-0-754-66104-7.) This important book provides an extended analysis—pictorial, functional, contextual, and theological—of the six scriptural tekstborden (text panels) installed in the Great Church of Haarlem between 1580 and 1585, where they served as confessional statements avowing the conversion of this formerly Roman Catholic cathedral into a purified Temple of the Word. Painted onto columns, hung from piers, elevated above the choir screen, and inserted into the stone armature that once supported the high altarpiece, these panels, also known as tekstschilderijen (text paintings), consist of biblical citations and paraphrases that substitute divinely sanctioned litterae for the Catholic figural images recently despoiled by iconoclasts and then systematically (and carefully) removed by civic authorities. The subjects—the Last Supper, Ten Commandments, Passages from Matthew and from John, supplemented by the biblical compendia assembled in the Greengrocers’ and Linen Weavers’ Paintings, as well as by the commemorative Siege of Haarlem on the reverse of the Last Supper—constitute a programmatic statement of Reformed religious identity, as Mochizuki amply demonstrates. The author invokes the reform theology of Erasmus, as set forth by scholars such as Carlos Eire, to explain how these text panels materialize a new kind of image-theory, at once verbal and visual, that substitutes textual simulacra for pictorial eikones, the written for the enfleshed Word, as representational indices of the transcendent and therefore incommensurable presence of God within the communal fabric of the Church. Mochizuki construes the tekstborden as specimens of what she calls Reformed aesthetics: The posticonoclastic image, she argues, swaps verisimilar imitation for indexical portrayal as the key principle of sacred image-making. The text panels respond to John Calvin’s prohibition against the corporeal representation of God, an interdict enshrined in Question 97 of the Heidelberg Catechism, by emphasizing that he has been portrayed in an emphatically mediated and referential fashion. Instead of a lifelike effigy, the worshiper is given an image [End Page 568] composed of words, either gilt or painted in oil on stone or panel, that renders doctrinal truths beyond the scope of any conventional picture. Mochizuki insists on the artifice of these indices of the Word: Composed of depicted words, they enshrine the knowledge of God to be found in Scripture, which is transmitted visually and yet verbally; at the same time, these painted texts implicitly allude to the Catholic imagery they supplant, that falsely purveyed the illusion of unmediated access to embodied divinity. Having displaced mimesis as the principle of sacred image-making, they call attention to their novel status as examples of a “symbolic or metonymic system of representation [that] changed the very idea of what decoration in churches should be” (p. 140). The question arises: Why was it so imperative to retain the vestiges of the image? Mochizuki would seem to provide several answers. First, Calvin and his Dutch adherents, well aware of the human need for outward signs of devotion, provided tangible indicators through which churchgoers could convey, or better, represent their relation to God. These expressions of congregational piety were devised to underscore the differences between Catholic and Reformed modes of worship. Second, the text image provided a “visual locus of meeting” (p. 261), differing in this respect from book texts; through engagement with the tekstborden, the community represents to itself the hermeneutic work of scriptural reading and the institutional project of fashioning the new Church of Christ. Third, text images like the Last Supper refer specifically to the Reformed understanding of the Eucharist as a sacramental commemoration (ghedachtenisse) of the memorial meal instituted by Christ to recall his redemptive sacrifice. Whereas figural altarpieces body forth the doctrine of transubstantiation, whereby the species of bread and wine are sacramentally transformed into the body and blood of Christ, the indexical tekstborden emphatically signify that the sacrament is referential and metaphorical. The calligraphic pointing of doctrinally resonant words such as bread, body, and testament, drives home this point...

Recent scholarship on material religion has demonstrated how decentralizing texts, focusing on objects, and using material culture to shape our research inquiries enhances our understanding of religious traditions. This article seeks to initiate a conversation on material religion and ancient Judaism by applying methods from the former to archaeological finds from Roman-era Palestine and the numerous references to objects in late antique rabbinic texts. Focusing on ceramic oil lamps as a test case, I argue that attention to objects and how they were manufactured illuminates the influence of materiality on early rabbinic thought. Manufacturing was an important component of the Galilee’s material environment, which had a generative influence on its inhabitants. This paper shows how focusing on material culture and broad conceptualizations of materiality (including production, performance, and sensation) can enhance our understanding of late antique Judaism and rabbinic teachings that would later become central to Jewish tradition.

This introduction to the special issue “Material Religion in Central and Eastern Europe” provides an overview of various aspects of material religion in Central and Eastern Europe. It focuses on three major issues and their interconnectivity, which have played an important role in the social, political, and religious history of this macro-region: the much-debated notion of Central and Eastern Europe as a cultural and political region of the continent, the “glocal” aspects of material religion, and the role of material religion in the field of religious studies in this region. The article discusses the major topics and methodological approaches of the contributors of this special issue, highlighting the variety of research perspectives in religious studies in the post-communist regions.

In this article, I explore the social life of Armenian Christian Gospel Books in the Matenadaran (the Mesrop Mashtots Institute of Ancient Manuscripts) in Yerevan, Armenia. In this state repository, research center, and museum, manuscript Gospel Books have become precious pieces of tangible national heritage. They have been protected, renovated, studied, and displayed as objects that exemplify the Armenian unique artistic and literary tradition. However, some of these manuscripts have resisted secularisation while preserving the traditional roles of the powerful sacred objects venerated by Armenian Christians. Consequently, they have been attracting not only visitors but also pilgrims to the Matenadaran. Furthermore, since the early 2000s, five of them have been temporarily released from the Institute to participate in religious feasts of the Armenian Apostolic Church, when they attract crowds of pilgrims. This article builds on a material religion and museum studies approach to examining what these Gospel Books are, what they do, and how they relate to people in post-socialist Armenia, where the formation of the sacred and secular is partially shaped by Soviet legacies of desecration, museumification, and heritagization of religion.

A tradition of martyr photography flourished during Mexico’s religiously motivated Cristero War (1926–29). Graphic photographic prints and postcards depicting executed Catholic activists and priests circulated widely during the conflict as a form of antigovernment propaganda, justifying comparisons of the Cristeros to the earliest persecuted Christians. Taking into account the iconographic and material features of these photographs as well as the medium’s particular ontological qualities, I explore how Cristero martyr images fulfilled comparable functions to early martyr narratives and relics by providing a compelling visual testimony and material trace of the martyr’s sacrifice. In these photographic images, the testimonial value and heightened verisimilitude of the early martyr text finds a parallel in a graphic documentary visual language that emerged with the increased mediatization of violence during the Revolution (1910–17). At the same time, these visual mementos sought to appeal to viewers on an affective level by drawing from long-standing iconographic vocabularies and material modes of devotional experience, most notably the tactile intimacy of the portable relic. Approaching the Cristero conflict from the analytical perspectives of visual culture and material religion, my research sheds new light on how Catholic activists conceptualized and justified violent sacrifice in their struggle for religious freedom while also making novel contributions to the history of Mexican photography. These complex visual artifacts reveal how Cristero propagandists utilized familiar religious images and concepts to provide a meaningful religious framework for their activism while also adapting strategies of martyr memorialization to the age of mechanical reproduction.

On September 9, 1872, retired soldier George Yeofield cut out a small disc of paper to wrap around a gold sovereign. On the outside of the disc he wrote out the Lord’s Prayer, his handwriting cramped and snaking around the paper. On the underside he wrote his name, age, the place, and his occupation, before signing off with an “Amen.” We do not know why Yeofield did this, or why this coin was later worn by another soldier during the First World War. The wrapped coin ended up in the collection of Edward Lovett, a City of London banker and an amateur collector of charms and amulets. Lovett was fascinated by working-class superstition and roamed the streets of London in search of trinkets invested with religious or folkloric meaning. Lovett’s collection, now housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, is a treasure trove for scholars interested in popular belief.1 Yet all too often scholars of religion have overlooked or devalued material objects such as Yeofield’s coin. In this case, an object with specific economic meaning was transformed into a sacred object for everyday reverence. We can only imagine that it was intended to connect its holder to the spiritual world beyond. In their general reluctance to move beyond traditional written sources, scholars of religion run the risk of missing the insights that a study of such objects might offer. This book seeks to redress the balance by asking two interrelated questions about material religion. Firstly, why should scholars of religion and spirituality study objects? And, secondly, how can a study of objects inform our understanding of Britain’s religious and spiritual landscape in historical and contemporary contexts?

In September, 2015, a unique event took place. Organized and hosted by David Morgan at Duke University, North Carolina, researchers from all over the world got together to present, discuss, and sha...

Multifaith spaces typically imply sites where people of diverse faith traditions gather to participate in shared activities or practices, such as multifaith prayer rooms, multifaith art exhibitions, or multifaith festivals. Yet, there is a lack of literature that discusses online multifaith spaces. This paper focuses on the website of an Australian multifaith organisation, the Australian Religious Response to Climate Change (ARRCC), which we argue is a third space of digital activism. We begin by outlining the main aims of the multifaith movement and how it responds to global risks. We then review religion and geography literature on space, politics and poetics, and on material religion and embodiment. Next, we discuss third spaces and digital activism, and then present a thematic and aesthetic analysis on the ARRCC website drawing on these theories. We conclude with a summary of our main findings, arguing that mastery of the online realm through digital third spaces and activism, combined with a willingness to partake in “real-world”, embodied activism, can assist multifaith networks and social networks more generally to develop Netpeace and counter the risks of climate change collaboratively.

This study analyzes the persistence of everyday sacred landscapes in the Chinese megacity of Shenzhen. It is inspired by Lefebvre’s notion of bodies in relation to space, material religion, and Chinese popular religion concerning reciprocal interactions of bodies and souls. Through a detailed examination of shrines, village temples, and a hillside cemetery using architectural ethnographic mapping and qualitative methods, the case study of Pingshan village demonstrates that various sacred spatial practices persist and actively intersect with modern interventions and urban regulations, woven into everyday life. The process of production and reproduction of sacred landscapes reveals their dual nature as both enduring and temporary, challenging the static notions of space. In conclusion, this study suggests that recognizing the intersubjectivities among human, natural, and spiritual elements allows the sacred to function as a spatial figure of landscape infrastructure, one that possesses the structuring power to reconfigure urban settlements toward inclusivity.

This paper will investigate how the miniaturisation of images of deities brings them into intimate relationship with the body, mediating communication between divine referent and believer. These artefacts serve individual religious praxis by creating personal, accessible divine images; their diminutive size invites touch and close contact. This paper takes as a case study the miniature images of gods found on the bone beads from the House of Lucius Helvius Severus (I, 13 2) at Pompeii. In the case of the jewellery and hairpins of late Hellenistic Campania, the portability of divine images creates a specific relationship between the body of the believer and the figural representation of the god. This representation is in turn transformed by the autological factors of its production -scale, material, and wearability all altering the recognisable image of the god. These miniature figures not only mediate communication between the individual and the divine, but they also serve to mediate the individual's relationship with institutional religion as the personal 'appropriation' of public religion, shaped by the motivations, beliefs, and needs of individual religious agents.

This surprising, sobering, and fascinating book is like no other. Hidden Galleries presents vivid images and artefacts from underground Christian communities collected by the secret police in inter...

Pilgrimage is one of the most significant ritual duties for Muslims, entailing the visitation and veneration of sites associated with the Prophet Muhammad or saintly figures. As demonstrated in this multidisciplinary volume, the lived religion of pilgrimage, defined by embodied devotional practices, is changing in an age characterized by commerce, technology, and new sociocultural and political frameworks. Traveling to and far beyond the Hajj, the most well-known Muslim pilgrimage, the volume’s contributors reveal and analyze emerging contemporary Islamic pilgrimage practices around the world, in minority- and majority-Muslim countries as well as in urban and rural settings. What was once a tiny religious attraction in a remote village, for example, may begin to draw increasing numbers of pilgrims to shrines and tombs as the result of new means of travel, thus triggering significant changes in the traditional rituals, and livelihoods, of the local people. Organized around three key themes—history and politics; embodiment, memory, and material religion; and communications—the book reveals how rituals, practices, and institutions are experienced in the context of an inexorable global capitalism. The volume contributors are Sophia Rose Arjana, Rose Aslan, Robert R. Bianchi, Omar Kasmani, Azim Malikov, Lewis Mayo, Julian Millie, Reza Masoudi Nejad, Paulo G. Pinto, Babak Rahimi, Emilio Spadola, Edith Szanto, and Brannon Wheeler.

ABSTRACTDramatic changes in global cultural politics are one of the sources of a new academic concern with religion in museums, and a new concern by museums to treat with religion. In this issue Brooks, Buggeln, O'Neill, and Goa address four different aspects of this new turn; when brave enough to address the great questions of meaning, museums can sometimes reach the human heart.

This clear and engaging guide introduces students to key areas of the field and shows how to apply an anthropological approach to the study of religion in the contemporary world. Written by an experienced teacher, it covers major traditional topics including definitions, theories, and beliefs, as well as symbols, myth, and ritual. The book also explores important but often overlooked issues such as morality, violence, fundamentalism, secularization, and new religious movements. The chapters all contain lively case studies of religions practiced around the world. The third edition of Introducing Anthropology of Religion is fully updated and contains additional content on material religion, visual religion, and affect theory, and a new chapter takes a closer look at medical and health topics. The author encourages the reader to engage throughout with the unifying themes of race, gender, and power, and how these themes are intertwined with anthropology of religion. Images, a glossary, and questions for discussion are included and additional resources are provided via a companion website.

Jewish children's museum a virtual roundtable on material religion