The Word Made Flesh: Lutheran Bodies, 1600 –1720

Karin Sennefelt (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

232 Seiten

2025
Routledge (Verlag)
978-1-032-84158-8 (ISBN)

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From children’s visions of angels to the cancerous belly of a king, this book shows how the body was at the centre of religious experience in seventeenth-century Lutheran culture. It explores what it was like to live in a body that was situated between the heavenly and earthly realms in the century following the Reformations, how faith shaped the experience of the body, and how the body shaped religious experience. Lutherans fasted and fortified their bodies through asceticism or exposure to harsh conditions. People of all types could feel the Holy Spirit entering their bodies and follow its movement within. Early modern Lutherans used their bodies to understand the complexities of their world, and by knowing about their physiology we come closer to grasping it.

Based on a varied set of sources from the expansive Swedish empire, with connections from Lapland to the North American colonies, this book shows how spiritual experience played out in relation to gender and age, revealing the powerful resemblances that connected bodies spiritually, politically, socially and emotionally. This book challenges received notions that Lutheranism implied a removed corporeality, mediated by an abstracted faith, and offers new insights into studying early modern corporeality.

The Word Made Flesh will be of interest to scholars and students in history, religion, history of medicine, gender and body studies.

Karin Sennefelt is Professor of History at Stockholm University.

Chapter 1

All flesh is grass

Can bodies be Lutheran?

The materiality of the Word

Lutheran senses and emotions

Real bodies

Chapter 2

Bare feet: the body and the weather

Weather reports

Finding the way

The great chill

Battering storms

The Fall and God’s fatty footprint

Sweetness of the earth

Being human

Chapter 3

Tending carnality: spiritual hygiene

The worldliness of the body

Relieving oneself of emotion

Digesting the sacrament

Making material bodies

Chapter 4

Blushing cheeks: prophecy and possession

First sensations

Wrestling with the devil

In bed and out of body

Knowledge, truth and the word

The blush of truth

Chapter 5

Aching bellies: the body politic

The King’s illness

Putrid intestines and a healthy heart

The King and his people wasting away

The second coming of Charles

The King’s belly and the law

Body politic

Chapter 6

Wide awake: bodies in dissent

Stiff necks and angry souls

The bounds of inward attention

A journey into the wilderness

Spiritual and conjugal unions

Attention and the separation of body and soul

Chapter 7

Down to earth

Erscheinungsdatum	12.09.2025
Zusatzinfo	12 Halftones, black and white; 12 Illustrations, black and white
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	156 x 234 mm
Gewicht	620 g
Themenwelt	Geschichte ► Allgemeine Geschichte ► Neuzeit (bis 1918)
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Regional- / Ländergeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Kulturgeschichte
	Geschichte ► Teilgebiete der Geschichte ► Religionsgeschichte
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Religion / Theologie ► Christentum
	Studium ► Querschnittsbereiche ► Geschichte / Ethik der Medizin
ISBN-10	1-032-84158-3 / 1032841583
ISBN-13	978-1-032-84158-8 / 9781032841588
Zustand	Neuware