Sacred and Profane
Idolatry, Antiquarianism and the Polemics of Distinction in the Seventeenth Century
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4954640 |
|---|---|
| Authors | J Sheehan, Jonathan H Sheehan (0000-0002-9641-7577, University of Michigan, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2006 |
| Volume | 192 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 35-66 |
| Publication date | 2006-08-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Past & Present (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0031-2746 • E-ISSN: 1477-464X |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1093/pastj/gtl005 |
| OpenAlex | W2088758840 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 23 |
| References cited | 30 |
Everyday life is not a place for the sacred. Instead, the sacred stands apart from ordinary, profane affairs: it finds its home in churches, mosques and synagogues, spaces sanctified by their connection to the world of the transcendent and dedicated to its honour. If this seems a rather pedestrian distinction, it is not. At the very least, it has been a distinction vital to the anthropological description of the world. ‘In every primitive community . . .’, the social anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski argued in 1925, ‘there have been found two clearly distinguishable domains, the Sacred and the Profane’.1 Despite their magically infused lives, the Trobriand islanders that he so famously studied never lost sight of these two domains. Ask any of these Melanesian farmers whether magic alone grew his crops and ‘he would simply smile on your simplicity’: if fields are parched, if fences break, ‘he will have recourse not to magic, but to work, guided by knowledge and reason’.2 This distinction between the ordinary world of work and the sphere of the sacred is thus primal to human existence: in anthropological terms, Malinowski insisted, all communities, all peoples, at all times, have used it to establish what the religious sociologist Mircea Eliade later called a ‘fixed point’ to guide action, organize internal life and establish societies.3 The French pioneer of sociology and anthropology Émile Durkheim was emphatic. ‘In all the history of human thought’, he declared, ‘there exists no other example of two categories of things so profoundly differentiated’ as that of the sacred and the profane.4
Honour · Idolatry · MAGIC (telescope · Sociology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Philippine History and Culture · Philosophy · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Religious studies
From Sukkot to Saturnalia
Loving Stones
The Union and Divorce of Classical Philology and Theology
Whose Handmaiden? ‘Hellenisation’ between Philology and Theology
Virgil, Creator of the World
Black Saints in Early Modern Global Catholicism
Survivals, Debris, and Relics
Classical Philology and Theology
Con Uno Inbasamento Et Ornamento Alto’
Polemical Comparisons in Discourses of Religious Diversity
Paganism, natural reason, and immortality
Enlightenment and Religious Politics in Restoration England
Sidney Montagu and the Sacramental Sign
Alexander Ross’s Pansebeia (1653), religious compendia and the seventeenth-century study of religious diversity
The idea of religion and sacrifice from Grotius to Diderot’s Encyclopédie
Arguing with the Heathens
Diseased Bodies, Defiled Souls
From Sacred History to the History of Religion
The Incas and the Enlightenment
Genealogy of Colonial Discourse
The Idolaters Never Eat Anything Cut by Us
Robert Nelson's Festivals and Fasts and the Problem of the Sacred in Early Eighteenth-Century England
Greek divination from an Amerindian perspective
Islam and the West
The English Bible and the seventeenth-century revolution
The elementary forms of the religious life
The meaning and end of religion
'Religion' and the Religions in the English Enlightenment
Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays
Studies in the History of the Near East
Calvinist Preaching and Iconoclasm in the Netherlands, 1544-1569
M. Tulli Ciceronis scripta quae manserunt omnia, Fasc 45, De natura deorum
Anti-Calvinists
Exodus and Revolution
On religion
The Differentiation of Society
Taking Paganism Seriously
John Seldens De Diis Syris
Genealogies of Religion
The Dangers of Ritual
Sin and Fear
War Against the Idols. The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to Calvin
French Calvinists As the Children of Israel
The Interpretation of Cultures
Hugo Grotius's Dissertation on the Origin of the American Peoples and the Use of Comparative Methods
John Spencer and the Roots of Idolatry
The Natural History of Religion
The American Jeremiad
The apostles in the new world
| Unique citing works | 23 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1,35 |
| Citation span | 2009 - 2026 (18) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 22 |