Religious History

This chapter explains how the characteristics that defined ‘religious history’ during the closing centuries of antiquity and the opening centuries of the Middle Ages are the following: religious history orders discursive recollection of events involving human actors and institutions in accordance with certain grand narratives that are themselves derived from holy texts; religious history regularly locates the foundational truths upon which historical interpretation is grounded beyond the observable, physical world, and within a system of reality that is accessible and knowable only through revelatory contact with the divine; and religious history is most often particularly concerned with locating moments in the past in which human individuals, communities, and institutions were touched and altered by encounters with the numinous.