ABSTRACT
One of the most conspicuous themes to emerge from this collection is the assertion that the noun ‘piety’ in its singular form fails to do justice to the ‘idiosyncratic heterogeneity’ of religious belief and practice in both the pre- and post-Reformation era. One of the logical consequences of the assertion that pieties were proliferating and fragmenting in the fifty or so years before the Reformation is perhaps to reduce this knotty problem to something of an optical illusion. The final distinguishing feature of the perspective on medieval and early modern religious culture enshrined in this collection is its minute scrutiny of what Rob Lutton calls the ‘geographies and materialities of piety’. Vigorously reasserting the value of a microhistorical approach to piety, the contributors to this volume insist that large-scale studies and surveys risk skimming over the all-important subtleties that emerge when communities, families and individuals are subjected to finely grained analysis.
