Lucy Grig: Reconsidering ‘popular religion’ for a new era

The concept of ‘popular religion’ has been rightly derided in modern scholarship. In 1981 in The Cult of the Saints Peter Brown delivered a particularly elegant and influential coup de grâce to what he termed the ‘two-tiered’ model of religion, which opposed the enlightened view of the elites to the limitations of the ‘vulgar’ masses. In the years that have followed a much more nuanced approaches to (for instance) ‘lay’ ,‘everyday’ and ‘domestic’ religion have indeed been advanced. Most recently a new focus on ‘lived religion’, looking at the role of appropriation in the construction of religious practice, has been particularly interesting. However, I am going to suggest today that we have tended in the meantime to occlude several important aspects of the social history of religion, in particular, in the history of non-elites. Re-asserting the ‘popular’ dimension of religion (influenced by recent studies of popular culture) will bear new dividends. Considering the siting of religious practice in their social and economic contexts as well as the ways in which religion could play a role in social struggle will bear fruit for our understanding of late ancient religion and history alike.