History of Religion
Summary
The history of religion traces the evolving ways in which human societies have sought to understand the sacred, organise communal life and negotiate moral order. Early evidence emerges in the ritual practices and cosmological myth-making of hunter-gatherer bands, followed by more elaborate polytheistic systems in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley and Mesoamerica. These systems wove together pantheons, temple cults and priestly hierarchies to legitimise emerging states and codify social roles. The turn to monotheism in ancient Israel and Zoroastrian Persia introduced new emphases on moral law, covenant and universal divinity, influencing successive strands of Christian, Islamic and Jewish thought. Over the medieval and early modern periods, religious reformations, schisms and missionary encounters fostered both doctrinal innovation and global exchange. Colonial expansion and the transatlantic slave trade carried belief systems across continents, giving rise to syncretic traditions in the Americas, Africa and Asia. The Enlightenment then prompted critical scrutiny of supernatural claims, catalysing movements for secularisation while also sowing the seeds for new spiritualities in Romantic and nationalist discourses. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, rapid globalisation, digital media and interfaith dialogue have reshaped religious identities, generating novel forms of practice, activism and scholarship. Methodological advances in archaeology, philology, anthropology and digital humanities now enable scholars to reconstruct ritual landscapes, analyse religious texts in their original languages and map networks of belief on a planetary scale. Together, these approaches illuminate how religion has both reflected and driven political power, ethical debate and cultural resilience across millennia.
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History of Religion publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in history of religion across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Biosemiotics: The study of sign processes in living systems, here applied to reveal how non-human actors contribute to religious meaning-making.
Intra-action: A concept denoting the mutual constitution of components within a relational network, rather than interaction between separate entities.
Performance criticism: An analytical approach that treats texts and rituals as live communicative events involving speaker, audience and contextual conditions.
Posthumanities: A theoretical paradigm that decouples scholarly inquiry from purely human perspectives by integrating other-than-human agencies and knowledges.
References
- Undisciplining the study of religion: critical posthumanities and more-than-human ways of knowing. Religion (2023).
- Biblical Performance Criticism: Survey and Prospects. Religions (2019).
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