Experiencing Material Christianity

Since I published Material Christianity in 1995, it is impressive to see how the study of devotional objects and spaces has matured. This is a fascinating array of case studies that thoughtfully demonstrate not only the breadth of the field but how one cannot understand Christianity without considering the physical dimension of belief. The finely crafted and accessible chapters speak to the endless creativity of the human imagination as people encounter and interact with the divine. * Colleen McDannell, Professor of History, University of Utah, USA *
This extraordinary volume, with contributions stretching across medieval to modern Christianity, is strikingly personal in its fusion of autobiographical reflections and scholarly reconstruction, each chapter focusing on a historical object of personal importance to a contributor who clusters the familiar, sometimes prosaic motifs of lived religion into symphonies of subjective apprehension and the physical agency of places and things in past and present. A gorgeous book. * Christopher Ocker, John Dillenberger Professor of the History of Christianity, Graduate Theological Union, USA *
An imaginative and empathetic study of lived Christian practice viewed through personal experiential engagement with ‘things.’ The authors have succeeded in producing an affective scholarship of the relationship between people, objects, places and the Divine, using engaging ‘exempla’ or case studies. The reader is drawn sympathetically into understanding the embodied, sensory experiences of devotion, and their continuities and changes over time. * Elizabeth Tingle, Professor Emerita in History, De Montfort University, UK *