Religion and Spirituality

Religion was never a wholly private matter in the eighteenth century, and certainly did not cease to impinge on the lives of the vast majority of Europeans and Euro-Americans. But, at least for the educated, new ways of thinking about religion, documented and to a certain extent elicited by textual and visual representations of the variety of religious practices around the world, had a deep effect. As Lynn Hunt points out, “religion became one of the many categories of thought, like politics or society, rather than being the foundation of all other categories of thought” (Hunt 2011: 12). What is more, it ultimately made it thinkable to unpack all the emotional implications thrown up by religion with regards to specific historical contexts and cultural tangles, such as, for instance, the anxieties intrinsic to practices of everyday dissimulation, or affective ties as precursors to paths of conversion or to practices of tolerance.