History and religion: narrating a religious past

History is one of the most important cultural tools to make sense of one’s situation, to establish identity, define otherness, and explain change. This is the first systematic scholarly study that analyses the complex relationship between history and religion, taking into account religious groups both as producers of historical narratives as well as distinct topics of historiography. Coming from different disciplines, the authors of this volume ask under which conditions and with what consequences religions are historicised. How do religious groups employ historical narratives in the construction of their identities? What are the biases and elisions of current analytical and descriptive frames in the History of Religion? The volume aims at initiating a comparative historiography of religion and combines disciplinary competences of Religious Studies and the History of Religion, Confessional Theologies, History, History of Science, and Literary Studies. By applying literary comparison and historical contextualization to those texts that have been used as central documents for histories of individual religions, their historiographic themes, tools and strategies are analysed. The comparative approach addresses circum-Mediterranean and European as well as Asian religious traditions from the first millennium BCE to the present and deals with topics such as the origins of religious historiography, the practices of writing and the transformation of narratives.

Front matter --; Table of Contents --; History and Religion --; Introduction --; The historiography of Brahmanism --; Construing ‘religion’ by doing historiography: The historicisation of religion in the Roman Republic --; The use of historiography in Paul: A case-study of the instrumentalisation of the past in the context of Late Second Temple Judaism --; Flirty fishing and poisonous serpents: Epiphanius of Salamis inside his Medical chest against heresies --; Reading sutras in biographies of Chinese Buddhist monks --; History and Heilsgeschichte in early Islam: Some observations on prophetic history and biography --; The development and formation of religious historiography in Tibet --; Medieval memories of the origins of the Waldensian movement --; The use of history by French Protestants and its impact on Protestant historiography --; Introduction --; A Perso-Islamic universal chronicle in its historical context: Ghiyās̱ al-Dīn Khwāndamīr’s Ḥabīb al-siyar --; Conditions for historicising religion: Hindu saints, regional identity, and social change in western India, ca. 1600–1900 --; Practitioners of religious historiography in early modern Europe --; Impartiality, individualisation, and the historiography of religion: Tobias Pfanner on the rituals of the Ancient Church --; ‘The gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it’: The narrative of the victorious Church in French Church histories of the nineteenth century --; Conflicting historiographical claims in religiously plural societies --; Religion and economic development: On the role of religion in the historiography of political economy in twentieth century China --; Introduction --; The notion of tradition in liturgy --; Verbs, nouns, temporality and typology: Narrations of ritualised warfare in Roman Antiquity --; Judaism: An inquiry into the historical discourse --; President de Brosses’s modern and post-modern fetishes in the historiography and history of religions --; Historia sacra and historical criticism in biblical scholarship --; A Catholic ‘magician’ historicises ‘magic’: Éliphas Lévi’s Histoire de la Magie --; Locating the history of Christianity between the history of the Church and the History of Religions: The Italian case --; Contributors --; Index