Local Religion in Late Imperial China, with Eugenio Menegon. (April 20, 2021)

Frankfurt Lecture on Pathways through Early Modern Christianities

“Local Religion in Late Imperial China”

 Eugenio Menegon

Associate Professor of History, Boston University

Tuesday, April 20, 2021, 12 noon-2 pm US EST/Boston

(6-8 pm Central European Time)

RSVP for link at: pluralchristianities@em.uni-frankfurt.de

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 ).

Background information

Early Modern Section of the Research Group Polycentricity and Plurality of Premodern Christianities (POLY)  http://www.geschichte.uni-frankfurt.de/KFG_POLY

Introduction to the Program, April-June 2021

What is Religion? What is a Church? What is Toleration in the Early Modern Period? Why do we tend to treat religions as ideologies but simultaneously consider religious practices as their touchstone? How does religious change spread? How do multiple and competing religious centres “work” for their overlapping hinterlands, and vice versa? What is globalisation in the history of premodern Christianities, and vice versa? What is radicalism? How do religious identities emerge and linger? How do “Post-Modernity”, “Post-Colonialism”, and all that relate to the history of Early Modern Christianities? How to embrace approaches that valorise the endless plurality and multifaceted nature of intersecting religious histories as prime movers of religious change on par with centralisation and homogenisation drives privileged in classical, often Eurocentric grand narratives?

The Frankfurt Lectures on Keys to understanding Early Modern Christianities aim to offer a virtual platform for an in-depth, conceptual discussion of these and other questions with the help of elucidating case-studies. Leading scholars in the field are invited to give a talk on their “household” concept: i.e. the concept(s) they deem particularly helpful to improve our understanding of religious phenomena they researched, and that, thanks to their work, became fertile passage points for other researchers in their respective fields. Publication is envisaged as a “lemma” in the form of a sound record in an online thesaurus.

About the Research Group

The research group “Polycentricity and Plurality of Pre-Modern Christianities”, funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, aims to investigate the different currents and forms of Christianity flourishing during the pre-industrial era from the point of view of the dynamics and interconnections they generated throughout their history. The use of “Christianities” in the plural as the central focus of our research project highlights our goal to modify traditional historical narratives and their narrow focus on churches as immutable institutions with streamlined and monolithic hierarchies and bureaucracies. Christianities are instead considered to be “interaction communities”, i.e. groups that are continuously under construction through their internal and external interactions, and that, while demarcating themselves from other religions and denominations, also proved to be remarkably open to (licit or illicit) influences and contacts from outside. When and where these interactions became more dense, religious centres would surface and develop a web of highly complex and tangled relations with their simultaneously emerging peripheries. It is in this dynamic interplay, and also where these interactions dwindle, that, contrarywise, religious boundaries; frontiers; and Otherness materialise. Seen from this more fluid perspective, centres and gateways of religious change are necessarily plural and mobile, while their cultural and religious ranges of influence do not necessarily overlap with the denominational boundaries of institutional churches. This polycentricity and plurality of beliefs, identities and practices constitute pivotal dynamics of change within and across pre-modern Christianities.