The Past in Hiding: Accessing Religious History

Abstract

Historians and archaeologists, noting the catastrophic loss of continuity with previous generations, talk of the “death of the past”. Over the last two decades letters, autobiographies, diaries and family chronicles have attracted increasing attention as a window to the emotional life of the past. Clearly this is of particular interest for theology. What actually happens when thoughts, events, emotions are distilled into writing and when scratchings of quill on paper are transmogrified into print? Is it helpful to describe such fragments from the past as “Ego-documents” or “Self-representations”? What did early modern believers, and religious writers such as Erasmus, Cardinal Contarini, Martin Luther, Thomas Müntzer or Argula von Grumbach think about genre, identity, processes of communication? What are we to make of their writings, how steer a way between naive replication and impenetrable theory? Are there rituals we should be deploying to sharpen our focus and clean up our interpretive grid?