Gefühl und Norm

Emotions, in their various forms and expressions, reflect social and cultural norms and values, and are in turn shaped and reflected by them. As the basis of human experience and perception, they are highly relevant and consistently important for research into social reality.
Building on this insight from the emotional turn, this anthology focuses on the question of what role religion played as a shaped and shaping element in the tension between norm and emotion in the long 18th century. The term ›Pietism‹ refers to a multifaceted movement that was primarily pious but also socially reformist and which, according to both contemporaries and researchers, was essentially organised around a highly charged emotional core. This perpetuates a master narrative, circulated as early as the 1690s by Lutheran and Reformed orthodoxy as well as by the Enlightenment, of an emotionally intense Pietism that was averse to reason and scholarship.
This anthology, containing contributions to the 5th International Pietism Congress, sets out to critically examine these pejorative historical and more recent scholarly assertions and attributions from the perspective of the relationship between emotion and norm. The 45 contributions analyse emotional worlds in their religious contexts and take an interdisciplinary perspective on the reciprocal relationship between emotion and norm. Central to this are the diverse processes of negotiation and organisation as well as the lifeworld dimension of this relationship between individual actors and communities. In this volume, Pietism research connects with current emotion research, while at the same time highlighting the indispensability of Pietism research for a comprehensive history of emotions in the context of research on the long 18th century.

This book contains contributions in German and English.