262 notes to pages 148–149
“Clifford Geertz’s Long- Lasting Moods, Motivations, and Metaphysical Concep-
tions,” Journal of Religion 79 , no. 4 ( 1999 ): esp. 617 : “The frequency with which
scholars continue to cite Geertz’s 1966 essay and endorse its definition of religion
uncritically is surprising.”
44. Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” 9 – 11.
45. Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles,” 11 : “[T]hey must
speak either in a cynical and nearly sociopathic detachment from the truth- content
of their words, or in a nearly delusional bondage to interests they do not even rec-
ognize as the source of those words.”
46. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 8 : “Agency, in this form of analysis, is under-
stood as the capacity to realize one’s own interest against the weight of custom,
tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles (whether individual or collec-
tive). Thus the humanist desire for autonomy and self- expression constitutes the
substrate, the slumbering ember that can spark to flame in the form of an act of
resistance when conditions permit.” See also Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 47.
47. Glenn Olsen, “The Middle Ages in the History of Toleration: A Prolegom-
ena,” Mediterranean Studies 16 , no. 1 ( 2007 ): 8 , speaking of Robert Moore: “Such
a perspective as his, we might conclude, both radically under- describes the unend-
ing variety of circumstance and motive actually found in the Middle Ages, and,
because it essentially is a moral tale told according to the categories of modern
liberalism, is not very interested in the reasons people give for being intolerant,
the ‘logic’ of their thought.”
48. Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and
Empire; and Asad, Genealogies of Religion, 14 : “O’Hanlon sympathizes with the
Subaltern historians’ wish to recover suppressed histories but points to the theo-
retic danger such an agenda conceals of slipping into ‘essentialist humanism.’ ”
49. Cole and Smith, “Outside Modernity,” 46 – 64 ; Davis, Periodization and Sov-
ereignty, 3 , 14 , and 98. As Cole and Smith argue, even “New Medievalism,” which
sought to challenge this periodization, has only reconfigured its relationship to
modernity.
50. Hans Blumenberg, “Affinitäten und Dominanzen,” in Ein mögliches Selbst-
verständnis: Aus dem Nachlaß, 161 – 68 , as cited in Gordon, Continental Divide, 350.
51. Lazier, God Interrupted, 3 ; Sheehan, “Sacrifice Before the Secular,” 26.
52. Cf. Justice, “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles,” 9 , who argues
differently.
53. Buc, Dangers of Ritual, 194.
54. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers,
trans. Richard Crouter. See also Thomas Albert Howard, Protestant Theology and
the Making of the Modern German University, 28 ; Lazier, God Interrupted, 5 – 6 ;
Sheehan, “Enlightenment, Religion, and the Enigma of Secularization,” 1075 ; and
M. B. Pranger, “Religious Indifference: On the Nature of Medieval Christianity,”
in Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept, 514.