Believing in Belief: Gibbon, Latour and the Social History of Religion

Abstract

The article engages with the legacy of Edward Gibbon and with Bruno Latour's Rejoicing (2002) to present reflections on how social historians might grapple analytically with Christian religious belief. Using examples from southern France across the high middle ages, the article engages with a variety of modern anthropological perspectives, and suggests that we might consider a variety of 'belief acts' - understood in a performative sense, as an extension of J L Austin's notion of 'speech acts' - as a way of getting at the combination of subjective experience, communal framing, and material conditions within which 'belief' takes place.