Crispin Paine

Material religion's first decade

For the first issue of our tenth year of publishing Material Religion, the editors wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on the first decade, and think ahead to the next one. We framed this as a conversation among the four of us who oversee the content of the journal. When the editors first met together and began to articulate the scope and aims for this new journal, we had to come up with a title and subtitle. At that time, the phrase “material religion” was not in common usage. One early response to the title was, “Material Religion? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Of course, the answer is unfortunately “Yes” if one looks at the many studies that stress the intellectual contents, arguments, doctrines of religions. “Religion” is still defined by many people— scholars and believers—as a set of abstract beliefs. And so we conceived a subtitle that was intended to work toward an inclusive view of subject matter (i.e. “objects, art, and belief”), but also provoke some curiosity. Now, somewhat due to the success of the journal, the phrase “material religion” can be used without explanation or justification. And it is a phrase that we can honestly say is used around the world, as the geographical diversity of our authors and their subject matter attests. But we have continued to wonder about the subtitle of the journal. Some of us would prefer to eliminate the reference to “art” because we do far more than art and have no interest in privileging fine art. In fact, we avoid publishing work that belongs principally in art history journals. “Objects” is problematic as a designation for our subject matter since we are quite interested in “practices.” Indeed, some of us are even more concerned with what people do with things than the things themselves. And where are “bodies” in this parsing of materiality? The task, it would seem, is not to choose between bodies, practices, and things, but to understand their hybrid as the proper focus of religious materiality. Finally, “belief” has been thoroughly critiqued for several decades as something that belongs to some religions such as Christianity, but not to others (e.g. Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism) as a primary feature of their self-understandings. Not wanting to privilege one religious tradition over another, we’ve continued to ponder the utility of any reference to “belief.” And yet believing is arguably a standard ingredient in any epistemology—if not religious belief, then certainly the belief that the earth will not slide out from beneath one’s feet from one minute to the next. David Hume spoke of belief in this sense: as the epistemological glue that keeps the world apprehensible. So perhaps it is possible to think about materializing belief. If so, if belief is more than affirming a proposition, if belief can refer to attitudes that emerge from the steady deposit of practices over time, then we can use the idea to help us understand embodiment as a learned set of behaviors, or techniques, as Marcel Mauss once wrote in a splendid essay, “Techniques of the Body.” Over the span of ten years, the journal has published work by scholars from at least twenty fields. The breakdown of the disciplines (by departmental or institutional affiliation) in which authors work is as follows:

Religion and the great exhibition of 1851 Cantor, Geoffrey

406 all-pervasiveness of gendering and gender anxiety that Coon attributes to virtually every corner of the ninth-century world. And Coon’s deliberate, liberal use of the phrase “Dark Age” in reference to this period (usage which is now seeing something of a resurgence after falling out of vogue in recent decades) might still be seen to obscure more than to enhance understanding of this era, especially for the non-specialist reader. Coon’s achievement is that she has successfully propelled the conversation of ninth-century cultural history beyond the political world of the secular aristocracy and into the experiences, both lived and imagined, of contemporary monastic men. In a discipline that still closely guards its roots in the well-worn traditions of positivist research, Lynda Coon is a leader among a coterie of Carolingian scholars who are asking new and different questions and opening new and different conversations about the cultural history of the European Early Middle Ages. Her book provides readers with far greater insight into the internal logics of ninth-century constructions of gender than scholarship has previously offered. It invites readers to see profound connections between ninth-century phenomena that have previously been categorized as disparate. And it offers some of the most erudite and creative readings of Carolingian architecture and poetry ever produced. For these reasons Dark Age Bodies stands among the most important contributions to Carolingian scholarship of the past decade.

The sacred made real: spanish painting and sculpture, 1600–1700 exhibition at the national gallery, london, 2009

active in Mexico between about 1624 and 1645, Basilio de Salazar (Museo Regional de Querétaro), conforming to the same conventions. Sacred visions play a large role in works exploiting verisimilitude, such as Antonio Montúfar’s 1628 painting of Saint Francis of Assisi Appearing before Pope Nicholas V (Los Angeles County Museum of Art). So do representations of actual images themselves, as in the case of The Miracle of Saint Dominic in Soriano by Alonso Cano (Instituto GómezMoreno, Granada) in which the Virgin Mary, Saint Mary Magdelene, and Saint Catherine are shown appearing to a Dominican friar in 1530 with a true likeness of the founder of his order in the form of a painting (Figure 3). Reflexivity in art-making takes a specifically religious turn in the Spanish tradition, and nowhere is it more possible to gain an appreciation of the intensity with which it could be pursued than in this remarkable exhibition. An amply illustrated, 400-page scholarly catalogue accompanies the exhibition, with essays by Luisa Elena Alcalá, María Cruz de Carlos Varona, William A. Christian, Jr., Jaime Cuadriello, Ronda Kasl, Javier Portús, and Alfonso Rodríguez Gutiérrez de Ceballos.

Creating the british galleries at the v&a a study in museology Wilk, Christopher and Humphrey, Nick (eds.)

388 religions), in which mediums channel the spirits of the dead. In addition to being purveyors of religious objects, botánicas reveal the sacramental imagination of operators and their clientele, and help to form networks of healing and ritual communities between clients (often immigrants) and resident specialists of familiar practices transplanted to the US. These six texts are instructive about the current state of African diaspora studies. The former search for preserved-in-amber “Africanisms” has given way, to a large extent, to the investigation of the local terms of New World hybridity. The detailed attention to historical development modeled by many of these books lends new historical depth to processes of “creolization.” For scholars of material religion, the texts offer historiographical lessons about the uses and abuses of historical archives, critical lenses for interpreting museum displays of religious objects, and ethnographic insight into the hows and wherefores of devotion which include the ritual manipulation of sacred objects—particularly as this impacts interactions between religious practitioners, and is affected by the legal-juridical processes of the nationstate, and the availability of commercially produced religious objects. Material objects are often marshaled by religious practitioners to display (or at times conceal) religious devotion, to demonstrate religious expertise to members of their community and to would-be clients, to squelch the claims of rivals, and to mark the history and boundaries of their religious practices. Notes and References 1 Brown cites recent studies by Katherine J. Hagedorn (2001), Michael Atwood Mason (2002), and Jim Wafer (1991).