Prof. Menegon to Give Lecture at Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main on April 20
Professor Eugenio Menegon will give a lecture on “Local Religion in Late Imperial China” as part of the Pathways through Early Modern Christianities Lecture Series at the Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities (POLY) research group at Goethe Universität Frankfurt am Main. The talk will take place over Zoom on Tuesday, April 20th, 2021 from 12-2pm EST (6-8pm Central European Time). Attendees should email pluralchristianities@em.uni-frankfurt.de for registration.
The notion of “local religion” as a specific academic concept in English found one of its earliest and most articulate expressions in William Christian’s 1981 book Local Religion in Sixteenth Century Spain. Christian’s work drew on his own sociological and anthropological research in the Iberian countryside during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but his thinking was also nourished by his reading of European scholarship. He found that it was often in the countryside that traditional religious ideas and practices from the medieval and early modern periods survived the longest. In Christian’s wake, scholars have increasingly focused their attention on the social and ritual life of Christian communities across the globe. What was true for post-war Spain also applies to modern China. This talk offers an assessment of recent work on Christianity as a “local religion” in late imperial China (1550-1850 ).