Material aspects of the early Modern religious culture and popular history: a review of British exhibitions dedicated to the jubilee of the Reformation

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the impact of recent trends in the history of religions — studies of materiality of religious cultures and the role of the senses in shaping of lived religion — on public history projects in Britain, namely, those connected to the 500th anniversary of the Reformation. The article is focused on a virtual exhibition «Remembering the Reformation», which was a product of an interdisciplinary research project that united historians, historians of art, and philologists from the Universities of Cambridge and York. The author concludes that the virtual exhibition gives a viewer a good idea of the break of traditional religion in the 16th century England. Emergence of the material and sensual aspects of new religions cultures — Protestant and post-Reformation Catholic ones — are rather poorly represented, and this reflects early stages in researching of these topics.

Keywords

• exhibitions
• religious culture
• materiality
• senses
• reformation jubilee