Religion between the tenth and thirteenth centuries is a rich fabric of Buddhist and Daoist institutional warp threads interwoven with the weft of manifold local deities and religious practices. This period witnessed dramatic sectarian developments in institutionalized Buddhism and Daoism as well as an explosion of popular beliefs and practices.Official scrutiny of such religious activities at times led to suppression of what the state labeled “profane cults.” But there were few, if any, impermeable barriers between so-called “elite” and “popular” religions: clerical religions intersected with localized beliefs, and both personal and professional relationships between clergy and the scholar-official elite were commonplace. The economic and social transformations of the Song created new needs and relationships between spirits and supplicants, leading to what one scholar has called the “vernacularization” of religious practice. Buddhism intersected with empire, especially among the Khitan Liao and Tangut Xi Xia, the rulers of which promoted and patronized Buddhism. As new sectarian developments in Buddhism drew masses to congregational, faith-based practices, Chan monastic institutions also flourished. Daoism acquired influence at the Song court through patronage by more than one emperor, and experienced a renaissance through ritual reform and the transmission and canonization of religious texts.

Christianity was a growing religion in Britain from the 330s onwards, and Chapter 3 tackles the difficult question of the relationship between Christianity, Christianisation and godlings. The chapter examines the phenomenon of Christian demonisation of pagan cults, arguing that it was a more complex process than mere condemnation and suppression, which inadvertently produced the potential for the survival (and even reinvention) of some of the beings it targeted. Through comparisons with the better evidenced Christianisation of other cultures in Europe and further afield, the chapter develops an interpretative framework for the likely changes undergone by popular religion in Britain’s lengthy conversion period. The framework includes the likely ‘undemonisation’ of formerly demonised entities and the creative ‘re-personification’ of supernatural forces to account for the survival and reinvention of godlings in a Christianised society – where godlings should not be seen so much as ‘pagan survivals’ but rather as non-Christian artefacts of Christianisation.

This chapter explores popular and learned manifestations of an increasingly difficult neutral position at the height of the Reformation in Germany, in order to underscore and reassess the prevalence of third forces in sixteenth-century religion. The first two sections examine experiences of ambivalent change, at the scale of territorial Reformations and at the scale of personal and local histories. The remaining sections review sixteenth-century attempts to theorize a middle-ground position. Those attempts challenge the historian to integrate marginal, unconventional viewpoints into an otherwise “confessional” intellectual milieu.

This chapter deals with the processes of exclusion and inclusion that defined community. It deals with popular hostility to religious change, especially the ‘disciplinary revolution’ that Puritans attempted to impose. It discusses witches as the reverse of neighbourly ideals, and hostility to perceived antisocial practices such as informing. The place of the established poor is scrutinized, as are measures against the mobile poor. Dearth, famine and disease are assessed as acid tests of communal solidarities, and it is shown that in many communities the poor were excluded from ideas of neighbourhood during times of food scarcity or the circulation of infectious disease. The role of wealthier villagers and townsmen in the government of small communities receives attention. The focus of the chapter is on the hard edge of neighbourhood.

This chapter reframes the traditional dichotomy between popular and official religion and argues that ritual practices in both official and domestic settings were informed by intuitive conceptualizations of supernatural agency. As an alternative to popular and official religion, the categories cognitively optimal and cognitively costly religion are proposed as a fruitful framework for understanding the diversity of religious expression in ancient Israel. It is argued that from the standpoint of human cognition, ritual offerings performed in both popular and official contexts share deep structural features in common − whether in households, villages, local shrines, or state-sponsored temples. The final section of the chapter evaluates the recent shift to the study of family or household religion in ancient Israel. An analysis of material artifacts and religious ritual practices in domestic and official contexts reveals interesting points of continuity across these domains. Overall, a cognitive perspective suggests that the difference between home and temple, ancestors and the national deity, may not have been as great as it is sometimes imagined.

Chaucer’s God considers how characters invoke God, both in terms of the everyday language of late medieval England and in the ways that the idea of God is reflected in Chaucer’s fiction. Conventional, non-theological utterances of the names for God by Chaucer’s characters as part of their, by turns, outwardly pious and unthinkingly impious phraseologies are discussed in the opening section, God Woot – ‘God knows’. Under the heading God Forwoot – ‘God foreknows’, some of the more challenging invocations of God are considered, such as the implications of divine foreknowledge and predestination on human free will in the Knight’s Tale, the Nun’s Priest’s Tale and Troilus and Criseyde. The concluding section, God in a Cruel World, asks whether in the Clerk’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale, if Chaucer allowed his tales to reflect, and characters to reflect upon, the heretical notion of a God lacking in compassion for humanity.

Although much about holiness in Chaucer’s works remains disputed, elliptical, or even contradictory, many of his images of religious devotion and popular piety are themselves situated in a broader cultural context than is usually recognised. For Chaucer, as for most late medieval Christians of his day, holiness was instantiated in matter, present and manifest in shrines, relics, holy objects and in the natural world, and he shows himself attentive to such materiality in his images of popular religion. Many of the Tales celebrate orthodox Christian materiality in ways that align his devotional interests with those found in a broad range of English religious writings by authors with whom he is not typically connected, including Julian of Norwich and the Carthusian Nicholas Love. Other Tales offer an incisive critique of holiness in the context of contemporary practices within the Church. Chaucer’s many-sided works hold these glimmering tensions in balance.