Spirituality and the Material World in Post-Medieval Europe

Abstract

This chapter explores the relationship between spirituality and ­engagement with the material world in post-medieval Europe. Spirituality is often understood as the subjective experience of religion and the supernatural, but that may be too narrow a view and a different perspective is pursued here on the basis of a relational ontology and epistemology. It will be proposed that spirituality is embedded in and arises from the everyday experience of and engagement with the material world. This means that the archaeology of spirituality involves more than just identifying and interpreting particular types of finds and phenomena in the archaeological record. The relevance of spirituality to the study of various material practices in post-medieval Europe is considered through examples which range from Renaissance urban planning to the history and archaeology of a small town in the northern periphery of seventeenth-century Sweden.