Introductory description

This team-taught 1-term option complements other modules by focusing on the meanings and significance of 'religion' in a variety of historical settings. Rather than following a chronological structure or dealing with individual denominations, it examines religious issues through (a) the perspectives of different academic disciplines and (b) coverage of key themes. Students will be able to engage with the multiplicity of approaches pursued in the field more generally and by members of the History department in particular.

Module web page

Module aims

Outline syllabus

This is an indicative module outline only to give an indication of the sort of topics that may be covered. Actual sessions held may differ.

Week 1: Introduction to the Study of Global Religions
Week 2: Religion and Sociology
Week 3: Sources and Concepts
Week 4: Gender and Religion
Week 5: Religion and Science
[Reading Week]
Week 7: Religion and Violence
Week 8: Tolerance and Intolerance
Week 9: Religion and Imperialism
Week 10: Conclusions

Learning outcomes

By the end of the module, students should be able to:

• Understand the pervasive significance of religion in past societies
• Place European developments into a wider global perspective
• Recognize key approaches and interpretations which different disciplines can bring to the study of religion
• Demonstrate a conceptual and practical understanding of the skills required by Humanities scholars
• Formulate and test hypotheses in a piece of critical and reflective writing

Indicative reading list

Week 1: Introduction to the Study of Global Religions

• Alkhateeb, Firas, Lost Islamic History (London, 2014)
• Armstrong, Karen, The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam (London, 2004)
• MacCulloch, Diarmaid, A History of Christianity (London, 2009)
• Nirenberg, David, Neighboring Faiths, Christianity, Islam and Judaism in the Middle Ages and Today (Chicago, 2014)

Week 2: Religion and Sociology

• P. Berger, The Social Reality of Religion (1969)
• J. Bossy, Christianity in the West (1985)
• P. Collinson, ‘Religion, Society and the Historian’, Journal of Religious History 23 (1999), 149-67
• E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life: A Study in Religious Sociology (2nd edn, 1976)
• K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion (1974)
• M. Weber, ‘Protestant Asceticism and the Spirit of Capitalism’, in W.G. Runciman (ed.), Weber: Selections in Translation (1978), 138-73

Week 3: Sources & Concepts for Pre-Modern Religion

• T. Johnson, ‘Religion’, in: G. Walker (ed.), Writing Early Modern History (London, 2005), 139-58
• P. Marshall, ‘Religious Cultures’, in: B. Kümin (ed.), The European World 1500-1800 (2nd edn, London, 2014), 134-45
• L. Sangha & J. Willis (eds), Understanding Early Modern Primary Sources (London, 2016)
• H. Schilling, ‘Confessionalization’, in his: Religion, Political Culture and the Emergence of Early Modern Society (1992)

Week 4: Gender and Religion

• S. Apetrei, Women, Feminism and Religion in Early Enlightenment England (2010)
• S. Morgan, Women, Religion and Feminism in Britain 1750-1900 (2002)

Week 5: Religion and Science

• K. Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971)
• Thomson, The Body of Thought: Science, Religion and the Soul in the Early Enlightenment (2008)

Week 7: Religion and Violence

• Bale, Anthony, Feeling Persecuted: Christians, Jews and Images of Violence in the Middle Ages (London, 2010)
• Broomhall, Susan, 'Reasons and identities to remember: composing personal accounts of religious violence in sixteenth-century France', French History 27/1 (2013), 1-20.
• Diefendorf, Barbara, Beneath the Cross: Catholics and Huguenots in Sixteenth Century Paris (Oxford, 1991)
• Feldman, Allen, Formations of Violence: the Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago, 1991)

Week 8: Tolerance and Intolerance

• O.P. Grell & R. W. Scribner (eds), Tolerance and Intolerance in the European Reformation (2002)
• B. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (2007)

Week 9: Religion and Imperialism

• Anderson, Gerald. Biographical Dictionary of the Christian Missions (Grand Rapids, 1998).
• Bays, Daniel, ed. Christianity in China, from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (Stanford, 1996.
• Porter, Andrew, 'Commerce and Christianity': The Rise and Fall of a Nineteenth-Century Missionary Slogan', The Historical Journal, 28, 3 (1985), 597-621

View reading list on Talis Aspire

Subject specific skills

See learning outcomes.

Transferable skills

See learning outcomes.