ABSTRACT
While the conceptualisations of religion and gender as lived are based on medieval and early modern evidence, it is proposed that they may have wider temporal applicability. While experience is always situated in time and culture, wider conceptualisations and analytical categories are required to explain and to understand the past as well as the present. Secular and religious values regularly supported each other and guided the construction and performance of gender. Theological theories and teaching on gender within the family were often inconsistent and even contradictory. Religion is an elaborate construction of complex and conflicting human minds, including both the somatic and the cognitive. Gender included hierarchies, but not permanently unbalanced relationships of ‘power over’. It turned into a quality — or a web of qualities — that empowered people to do things in a performative project of identity. Religion and gender were looked as experience, and experience and history as communicative and intersubjective processes of entanglement.
