Research Aims 

This research group conceives of Europe as a space marked by religious plurality and analyses how religion articulates itself here as knowledge, experience and interaction. The study of the emergence of knowledge of and about religion is part of the history of a European epistemics of comprehending the world, one that always took place in dialogue with the non-European world. The focus here is on the generation and mobilisation of religious knowledge by historical actors. Religious knowledge is created, secured and constantly renegotiated in the conflict between religious experts and laypeople. The dynamic exchange with other fields of knowledge – such as (natural) philosophy, medicine, economics or politics – contributes to the fact that religious knowledge is not only constantly repositioned but also constantly reformulated.
 
The research group "Religion" focuses on the generation and mobilisation of religious knowledge, the analysis of religious experiences and the significance of religious interactions for social processes, structures and hierarchies in Europe as a religiously plural space. The research area initially focuses on religious experiences and interpretations of upheaval from the point of view of historiographical interpretations as well as from the perspective of historical actors. Furthermore, shifts in the knowledge regimes of historical actors will be accentuated and the level of experience included. In addition, the research at the IEG asks what effects the strategies of breaking with tradition and norms postulated by the historical actors themselves have on religious and social interaction.
 
Religious experience and interaction are closely interwoven, but are to be kept analytically separated. Experience is primarily understood as inwardly oriented aspects and practices of lived religion, for instance mysticism, spirituality and piety, aesthetics, self-cultivation and individualisation, including the role of the senses and emotions. The differentiated examination of religious experiences makes it possible to grasp historical ruptures but also individual and collective re-positioning as well as their identity-forming function.

Religion as interaction considers the pragmatic dimension of religion and thus reveals how and by what means religious knowledge and religious experience become socially relevant. In this way, religion comes into view as a social fact and fundamental form of human communication that characterises, establishes and maintains human communities. Religious interactions are therefore fundamental to how groups and individuals understand time, their origins and their future. They mediate and legitimise structures and hierarchies that are historically characterised by constant change, new arrangements and syncretism. Mission, migration and diaspora, but also expulsion and enslavement act as constitutive but ambivalent factors in these processes. The IEG’s research agenda therefore includes the investigation of the role of complex religious constellations in the internal configuration of Europe on the one hand and in the resulting ways of relating to the world since the early modern period on the other.
 

Key Research Topics for 2024/2025 

Based on the approaches outlined here, it is planned initially to focus on and record religious upheavals and interpretations of upheaval, both from the point of view of historiographical interpretations and from the perspective of the historical actors. For researchers in the early modern period, the narrative of upheaval that frames this period takes centre stage. With regard to the “Reformation” at the beginning of the period, the question arises as to the effects of the confessional differentiation of Latin Christianity on traditional religious practices and orders of knowledge; for the “Enlightenment” at the end of the period, the supposed overcoming of religious antagonisms and scholastic culture of dispute through emerging rationalism, utilitarianism and faith in reason is up for discussion. Beyond the “saddle period” and up to the present day, modernisation and technologisation can also be identified as challenges for the historiographical definition of which the notion of steady secularisation seems inadequate.
Shifts in the knowledge regimes of historical actors are to be accentuated on a chronologically and thematically broad basis. One project will analyse early modern sermons as means of approaching the genesis and popularisation of environmental knowledge, thereby making this corpus of sources fruitful for discussions of environmental history. The little-noticed revival of the traditional medieval university discipline of logic in the Enlightenment is at the centre of a project that corrects and questions established narratives of upheaval. The printing and distribution of treatises in logic will be catalogued and mapped using digital methods, while the content analysis will explore the significance of the discipline for the culture of religious debate and the development of new target audiences (women; courtiers). Finally, the relationship between theology and political economy is a field of investigation that ties in with existing discussions on sacralisation while at the same time opening up new connections to questions on the Anthropocene from a historical perspective. The investigation of how lay people and religious experts have dealt with the challenges of the technologisation of life since the mid-twentieth century fits in here, with the focus of the analysis being on the adaptation and updating of canonised texts and religious knowledge.

At the level of experience, one project takes the actors’ perspective to enquire into the adaptation and reactivation of late medieval spirituality following the Council of Trent, underscoring that the change being stipulated here took the form of a gradual process. How the Enlightenment’s emphasis on economic rationality redefined religious experiences of time is illustrated in the example regimes of fast and feast-days, and how they in turn affected people’s relationship with their environment. The emergence of “green” spirituality and the sacralisation of experiences of nature exists in dialectical tension with accelerated experiences of modernity, which are explored in another strand. It seems likely that feedback effects between experience and knowledge as well as the transformations of the religious field will be particularly in evidence here.

What effects do the strategies of breaking with tradition and norms postulated by the historical actors themselves have on religious and social interaction? One project examines this problem with reference to the example of the Anabaptists, who explicitly made “non-interaction” with the world their ideal during the Reformation. Internal group coherence and everyday social interaction with the outside world, but also their agency with regard to secular and religious authorities, are at the centre of research. The consequences of the rupture marked by the Reformation for interactions between Aristotelian scholars or for the extent to which Aristotelianism could function as a platform for encounters across confessionalising tendencies is a further strand of the projected research, which will place particular emphasis on the circulation of texts and questions of the sociability of scholars. Focusing on the phenomena known under the heading of “Enlightenment”, attempts to increase economic efficiency and the resulting extension of working hours not only challenged old fasting regimes and other religious practices, they also had an impact on social interaction between the laity and elites as well as between different religious groups. At the same time, this research will build a bridge between labour history and the history of religion.