Introduction: Materiality and Religious History

Abstract

On September 9, 1872, retired soldier George Yeofield cut out a small disc of paper to wrap around a gold sovereign. On the outside of the disc he wrote out the Lord’s Prayer, his handwriting cramped and snaking around the paper. On the underside he wrote his name, age, the place, and his occupation, before signing off with an “Amen.” We do not know why Yeofield did this, or why this coin was later worn by another soldier during the First World War. The wrapped coin ended up in the collection of Edward Lovett, a City of London banker and an amateur collector of charms and amulets. Lovett was fascinated by working-class superstition and roamed the streets of London in search of trinkets invested with religious or folkloric meaning. Lovett’s collection, now housed at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, is a treasure trove for scholars interested in popular belief.¹ Yet all too often scholars of religion have overlooked or devalued material objects such as Yeofield’s coin. In this case, an object with specific economic meaning was transformed into a sacred object for everyday reverence. We can only imagine that it was intended to connect its holder to the spiritual world beyond. In their general reluctance to move beyond traditional written sources, scholars of religion run the risk of missing the insights that a study of such objects might offer. This book seeks to redress the balance by asking two interrelated questions about material religion. Firstly, why should scholars of religion and spirituality study objects? And, secondly, how can a study of objects inform our understanding of Britain’s religious and spiritual landscape in historical and contemporary contexts?