ABSTRACT
Secular museums have long used objects to explain the religion and the culture behind them. Such explanations reflect equally strongly the philosophy, aims and interpretive techniques of their curators. Religious objects may find themselves in history museums, art galleries, folk museums, archaeology museums, anthropology museums, faith museums or even those few museums which set out to tell the story of religion as a world-wide human phenomenon. The chapter looks at two closely linked examples of religious objects explaining the stories of their societies: objects explaining popular religion, and objects explaining the history of medicine. One example of a class of religious object that is to be found in a variety of secular museums is the amulet or charm. Religious objects are often part of this, either as examples of 'folk art'—the artisan skills of a particular region—or as 'popular culture', the ways in which religion is done materially by 'The Folk'.
