The term ‘religion’ covers a diverse range of thoughts and beliefs. Some people understand their religion to prohibit all acts of violence, even to the smallest animal, while others believe their religion compels them to go to war. For some people religion is central to their identity and infuses every aspect of their life while for others it is something that relates to a particular place on a certain day. Religion’s diversity makes it hard to define though we all feel we recognise religiosity when we see it.Over two days in June this year, a group of staff from the British Museum and guests took on the problem of trying to define religion and think about how religion affects, or is affected, by the sort of objects that make up the British Museum’s collection. This seminar took place as part of the Empires of Faith research project funded by the Leverhulme Trust. The project is about comparing religious objects from different cultures in the first millennium AD. This is a hugely important period for the religions we know today. Christianity and Islam both began in the first millennium, and the beliefs and rituals of many other religions (Hinduism, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism and Buddhism) took the form we recognise today at this time.It is very easy to let preconceptions get in the way of thinking about big ideas like religion. To help themembers of the research team break out of their comfort zone we invited five guests with very different expertise to speak about the topics.Averil Cameron (University of Oxford) is well-known for her work on Byzantine history. Matthew Canepa(University of Minnesota) is an art historian and expert on the Sasanian world (ancient Iran). Simon Coleman(University of Toronto) is an anthropologist and an expert on pilgrimage. Bruce Lincoln (University of Chicago) works on the history of religions. Joan Pau Rubies(Universitat Pompeu Fabra) studies the history of European missionaries. Such a diverse range of expertise helped push everybody to think in new ways.This wasn’t a conventional seminar with formal lectures. Instead, it was a discussion, sometimes a debate, about ideas that could shape the project. So, although the project team will write lots of research over its course, there will be no book of the seminar. The participants agreed instead to let their ideas and discussion be ‘sketched’; a new concept for most of us. The artistClarice Holt sat quietly in the corner while we talked at, argued and harangued each other. Clarice prepared eighteen sketches of the meeting, encapsulating different points that were raised during the discussion. You can see the full sketches in the slideshow at the end of this post.Not often is one’s mind stretched so far and in so many captivating directions. I hope very much that the images I created for the Empires of Faith Project will allow a wider range of people access to what is a vibrant and relevant area of historical research, and to gain insights into this weird and wonderful area.Clarice’s reflections on the seminar.The first day of the seminar was spent trying to find a way of defining religion. One of the disagreements was about whether a single definition of religion was useful or if what was, or was not, religious had to be defined for each historical period. The single definition makes sense to us because we live in a world where there are sharp divides between the religious and non-religious (or secular). Some people, and some places, and often certain days are ‘for’ religion but in the past religion was part of everyday life. People saw the world as constantly shaped by magical or divine forces beyond their control. Thinking ourselves back into that perspective is very hard and that made these days very useful for the project as a whole.The second day was about objects and what they tell us about religion. One topic that was discussed was the ambiguity of images. The Empires of Faith team is very interested in how the same image can represent different gods in different places. So, for example, an image of the Greek god Hercules found in modern Pakistan would probably represent Vajrapani, the protector of the Buddha, or in Iran it could be the divine being Verethragna. What did the people who made the images, or used them, think about the relationships between these different gods?The two days were tiring but enlightening. Everyone came away with plenty to think about and some more questions that the project will try to answer in the future. Can objects shape what you believe? Can they be more important than doctrines and scripture? Does a sacred object possess some intrinsic quality that sets it apart, or does sacredness only exist in our perceptions?Traditionally the study of religion in the ancient world has focused on what people wrote about regarding their beliefs or practices. The Empires of Faith project is seeking to balance that by looking at how visual culture and religious artefacts relate to religion. It feels appropriate that the thinking from our first seminar was recorded not as a series of written articles but as a set of images.Click on one of the images below to view as a slideshowMore about the Empires of Faith project on the British Museum website.
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Luther, language and faith
Alexander Weber, Department of Cultures and Languages, Birkbeck, University of London
Martin Luther (1483-1546), portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553), 1529. Oil on wood. © Deutsches Historisches MuseumWhat attracted me – to be honest, a reluctant blogger – to contribute to the British Museum’s blog, is the historical connection between Martin Luther’s translation of the Bible, the British Museum and my own profession as an academic teacher of German in England. Long before the universities discovered my discipline, German grammars and textbooks had been produced by generations of curators and librarians at the British Museum. From the eighteenth century onwards, German protestant pastors preached to emerging German communities in London on Sundays and during the week catalogued the great treasures of ancient Biblical manuscripts (such as the Codex Alexandrinus) still in the British Library today. They were leading experts on the textual history of the Old and New Testament mainly because they followed in the footsteps of Martin Luther. Luther believed in the authority of scripture and not the dogma of the Roman church and to prove his point he immersed himself in careful critical study of the best original sources available to him in Greek and Hebrew. His formula of restoring the freshness of the original and then expressing it in the spoken language of ordinary Germans of his time brought the great stories of the Bible to life.
The opening of the Book of Genesis from the Gutenberg Bible, 1455. © The British Library Board C.9.d.3, 4v-5It was Gutenberg’s invention of the printing press, however, which disseminated Luther’s writings to a mass audience. One of the best places in the world to study the link between the media revolution of the printing press and the Reformation is the British Library. The German pastors in London were also involved in building up the great collection of Luther editions. They had inherited the enthusiasm for studying and cultivating their own language from Luther and fostered it in Britain through private lessons. They taught German in the royal household.
The front end paper of Luther’s 1541 Bible with portraits of Luther and Johannes Bugenhagen and Luther’s transcription from the 21st psalm and signature. Biblia, das ist, die gantze Heilige Schrift: Deudsch auffs new zugericht. D. Mart. Luth., etc. (Wittemberg, 1541). © British Library 679.i.15.Before Luther the German language was regarded as too crude and fragmented into provincial rough dialects to be used in any cultivated discourse. In learned circles, Latin was used – both in writing and speech. The Lutheran Bible changed all this, becoming the benchmark of modern German. An unprecedented number of authorized copies and countless pirated editions were circulated in Germany. It is estimated that a very large proportion of literate households possessed a copy, and in many cases it remained the only or at least the most treasured book in the house for several generations. Even the tide of polemics against Luther had to use his language in order to reach the huge readership which the new medium had created.How did Luther overcome the strong regional differences which had emerged through waves of sound shifts during the long history of the German language? Since his childhood he had moved across these linguistic borders and managed to balance the extremes of dialect in his own speech. He also built on a common language of officialdom, the chancelleries which issued decrees which had to be understood across the whole of Germany. He looked towards areas where the population had mixed through migration and where a more common version of the German language was beginning to emerge. I am not persuaded, though, by the argument that these developments would have happened anyway. What intrigues me most about this story is that an individual can change something as universal as a whole language. In fact, we all leave linguistic traces behind through mannerisms and idiosyncrasies of our speech, our individual linguistic fingerprint, if you like. The historical circumstances may have been favourable, but Luther was a character of greatness and literary genius, possessing a truly exceptional power to coin phrases and expressions which have become the nuts and bolts of