Expressed Experience in Early Modern Northern Europe : Curating Conflicts in the Sphere of Lived Religion

‘Experience’ has become a catchword in scholarly as well as political debates. Raisa Maria Toivo convincingly contends in this open access book that while it is often used to denote something ‘simple and real’ instead of something theoretical or idealistic, experience is in fact much more than self-evident truth.

Toivo makes the case that people have different experiences depending on their situation in life – be that their age, gender, social status, wealth, ethnicity and more; that as they try to express their experiences, they often find that not everyone is allowed to experience in the same ways. For example, in 17th-century Finland it was accepted that a young girl of 12 talked with angels, but an old woman of 50 was sentenced of witchcraft and a farmhand of 25 was deemed delusional when they all said they had met with divine spirits: experience was guided by identity and social status, but also by power relationships and cultural scripts.

Expressed Experience in Early Modern Northern Europe explores different ways of communicating and curating experience. The first part of the book explores how experiences were spoken and written of in lower court records, while the second part looks at visual communication in church murals. The book goes on to examine spatial settings of experience in landscapes and public buildings, such as churches and public roads or private houses. The fourth part explores embodied experience and corporeality. Toivo draws all this together in a conclusion which reflects on how experience was curated through a combination of communication means.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by Tampere University Library.