Saku Pihko (University of Turku), Riikka Miettinen (Tampere University), Godelinde Perk (Tampere University), Johanna Annola (Tampere University), Tessa Whitehouse (Queen Mary, University of London) and Raisa Maria Toivo (Tampere University)
https://doi.org/10.58077/V2XV-MW68
Historical experience unfolds across multiple layers of time. This article advances a temporal approach to lived religion, arguing that attention to the plurality of temporalities at work in everyday religious engagement reveals both the contingency of lived time and the ways temporal orientations actively shape experience. Religious lives are formed through inherited pasts, embodied presents, imagined futures, cyclical practices, and encounters with divine or otherworldly time. Examining these temporalities of lived religion shows that no beginning was ever the only beginning, no end the only end, and no middle untouched by a wealth of other times – for the temporality of religion-as-lived is always plural, and its plurality is bound up with the recursive formation of experience, as past experiences, present practices, and anticipated futures continually reshape one another.
In its treatment of time and temporality, the history of experience has drawn primarily on Reinhart Koselleck’s concepts of the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. The field has also engaged with the phenomenological tradition, which understands temporality as a fundamental structure of human experience and emphasizes the close interrelation between past, present, and future.[1] Building on these insights, historians approach experience as a process shaped not only by accumulated pasts, mediated through memory and tradition, but also by imagined futures.
Even so, temporality has rarely been addressed as an explicit analytical category by historians of experience and remains under-theorized within the field. Historical theory offers useful conceptual resources for addressing this gap, as temporality has become a central concern of recent historiographical reflection. Sometimes described as the ‘temporal turn’, this development has challenged earlier assumptions that treated time as a neutral, homogeneous, and measurable medium in which historical events unfold. Instead, time is increasingly approached as a dynamic and historically situated phenomenon, closely bound up with human experience and worthy of analysis.[2] It has also been theorized as a vehicle for power in the form of chronopolitics (temporal regimes), consisting, for instance, of hierarchical relationships between different temporalities in colonial settings.[3] When emphasizing the plurality and cultural variability of time, historians have drawn on phenomenological and anthropological approaches. Rather than assuming a single unified temporal framework, they have drawn attention to the coexistence of – and occasional tension between – multiple temporalities within any given context.
The study of historical lived religion reveals the effects of such temporal plurality and heterogeneity. Multiple, coexisting temporalities shape religious thought and action, structuring everyday religious experience and leaving discernible traces in historical sources.
Lived religion involves the adoption and reworking of inherited traditions, cultural repertoires, and habitual forms of practice through which the past remains operative in the present. Religious traditions, communities, and commitments are sustained through private and collective acts of commemoration, imitation, and ritual reenactment that allow significant past events, important persons, and sacred histories to continually shape religious beliefs and practices. Shared narratives of, for example, creation, foundation, prophecy, or exemplary figures provide models, obligations, and meanings through which religious actors orient themselves in the present. The past is therefore both remembered and repeatedly reactivated in present practice.
Lived religion also foregrounds orientations toward anticipated and imagined futures. Many religious traditions entail beliefs about afterlives, otherworldly futures, reincarnation, or continued relations between the living and the dead, encouraging preparations in the present for futures beyond ordinary earthly time. Religious traditions may also place human life within expansive narrative or cosmological frameworks, imagining temporal existence as extending from an original beginning towards an eventual end. Christianity offers a particularly clear example of a strongly future-oriented religious temporality. In Christian belief, an expansive timeline spans from Creation towards the Last Judgment, and beyond to eternal life in heaven or hell.[4] The exact route to and the proximity of the end have been debated throughout the history of Christianity, for instance during the Protestant and Catholic Reformations and the rise of Evangelical Revivalism; nonetheless, the general eschatological framework remained widely accepted.[5] Intrinsic to Christian thought, orientations towards the future, such as awaiting the Rapture or the Second Coming, shape meaning-making and experiences within earthly time.[6] The promise of the Second Coming has validated believers’ emotional and material investment and ascetic renunciation, as did, for instance, the porosity of time in medieval appearances of the souls of the departed. Such convictions not only provided temporal horizons opening out onto the otherworldly and transcendental realm, but also encouraged action, such as preparations for one’s own death or intercessory prayers for souls in Purgatory.[7]
Alongside orientations toward past and future, people have also lived within temporal frames bound to natural cycles and everyday observations and norms, such as days, months, and seasons, as well as eras and ages. Events and processes that repeated themselves cyclically also contributed to such a reiterative temporal frame. For example, periods of religious ritual, such as times of fasting, Easter, and major feasts, structured Christian experiences and recurred every liturgical year.[8] Religious traditions thus informed the rhythms of daily life.
Moreover, although individual human lives unfolded within cosmic, linear, cyclical, and everyday temporalities, the same did not necessarily apply to divine beings, spiritual beings, or the dead. In Christianity, for example, God resides beyond the bounds of time, in the ‘forever’.[9] Likewise, the dead are often thought to exist outside ordinary human time.[10] Studying the history of lived religion, including relationships and communications between people and deities, angels, spirits, or ghosts, thus reveals the pluralities, discrepancies, and conflicts involved in experiencing time.
Attending to lived religion reveals the contingent and temporally situated character of experience at the micro level. Analysing the ways people lived out religion offers insight into broader temporal configurations, such as the interaction, overlap, and occasional tension of different temporal regimes within a given historical context. For this reason, lived religion is not merely one field in which temporal plurality can be observed. It is a particularly generative ground for considering the temporal thickness of experience, inviting further exploration of how religious lives unfold across shifting rhythms, durations, and moments, and how experience is woven through layered, time-bound practices.
Notes
[1] Reinhart Koselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, trans. Keith Tribe (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004) [German original 1979]; Nicolas de Warren, ‘Time’, The Routledge Companion to Phenomenology, eds Sebastian Luft, Soren Overgaard (London: Routledge, 2011), 190–201; Sari Katajala-Peltomaa and Raisa Maria Toivo, ‘Three Levels of Experience’, Digital Handbook of the History of Experience (2022). For a recent Koselleckian approach to temporality and historical experience, see Heikki Kokko and Minna Harjula, ‘The Scene of Experience’, Digital Handbook of the History of Experience (2022); Heikki Kokko and Minna Harjula, ‘Towards a Socio-Cultural History of Experience: A Theoretical-Methodological Framework’, Cultural History, Online Supplement (2024): 74–99.
[2] Matthew S. Champion, ‘The History of Temporalities: An Introduction’, Past and Present, 243 (2019): 247–54; David Carr, Historical Experience. Essays on the Phenomenology of History (London: Routledge, 2021); Zoltán Boldizsár Simon and Marek Tamm, The Fabric of Historical Time (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023); Lucian Hölscher, ‘What are “Temporalities” in History?’, History and Theory, 63, No. 3 (2024): 444–51.
[3] Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008);
Nadia Altschul, Politics of Temporalization (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
[4] Jacques Le Goff, The Birth of Purgatory, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) [French original 1981]; Caroline Walker Bynum, The Resurrection of the Body in Western Christianity, 200–1336 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995).
[5] On uncertainties regarding the exact time of the Second Coming, see e.g. Johanna Annola, ‘“Tehe minusta itselles kunnian astia!” Kuuluminen ja kutsumus saarnaaja Antti Mäkisen elämässä 1800- ja 1900-lukujen vaihteessa’, Eletty historia: Kokemus näkökulmana menneisyyteen, eds Johanna Annola, Ville Kivimäki, Antti Malinen (Tampere: Vastapaino, 2019), 160–63.
[6] See e.g. Matthew S. Champion, The Fullness of Time: Temporalities of the Fifteenth-Century Low Countries (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017); Sally M. Brasher ed., A Companion to Popular Apocalypticism in the High and Late Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill, 2025).
[7] See e.g. Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to womanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 108–36; R. N. Swanson, ‘The Burdens of Purgatory’, Medieval Christianity, ed. Daniel E. Bornstein (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007), 353–380; Peter Marshall, Beliefs and the Dead in Reformation England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002); Saku Pihko, ‘Heretical Hope: Striving for Salvation and the Good Death in Medieval Languedoc’, Pursuing Hope in the Premodern World, eds Ville Vuolanto, Oana-Maria Cojocaru (Palgrave Macmillan: Cham, 2025), 215–35.
[8] Jacques Le Goff, Time, Work & Culture in the Middle Ages (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Kristen Poole & Owen Williams eds, Early Modern Histories of Time: The Periodizations of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019).
[9] Aurelius Augustinus, Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
[10] For recent research on ghosts, see e.g. Kathryn A. Edwards, ‘The History of Ghosts in Early Modern Europe: Recent Research and Future Trajectories’, History Compass 10 (2012): 353–66.