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September/October 2008 Historically Speaking 25 dencewrittenintotheverywarp andwoof of history. ConstanceM. Fureyisassociateprofessorof religious studiesatthe University of Indiana. Sheistheauthor of Erasmus, Contarmi, and the Religious Republic of Letters (Cambridge UniversityPress, 2005). She hasalso writtenarticlesfor'Church History , /AfJournal of Religion, andtheHarvard Theological Review. Fureyiscurrentlyworkingon devotionalpoetryin RenaissanceEngland. ' Dipesh Chakrabarty, ProvincialisingEurope: PostcolonialThoughtand HistoricalDifference(Princeton University Press, 2000), 16. 2 Michel de Certeau, The Writingof History, trans. Tom Conley (Columbia University Press, 1988), 269. Mbid. 4See"Making History: Problems of Method and Problemsof Meaning" in Writingof History, 19-55,esp. 35-36 and die section on limits,discussed below-,"The Historiographical Operation," in Writingof History, esp. 79-102; "Psychoanalysis and its History,"in Michel DeCerteau, Heterologies: DiscourseontheOther,trans. Brian Massumi (Universityof Minnesota Press, 1986),esp. 3-5; and "Writings and History" and "The Weaknessof Believing; From the Body toWriting, a ChristianTransit," in TheCerteau Reader, ed. Graham Ward (Blackwell Publishers, 2000), 23-36 and 214-243. 'Certeau, Writingof History, 162. 4J. Z. Smith, "What a Difference a Difference Makes," RelatingReligion :EssaysintheStudyof Religion,ed.Jonathan Z. Smith (Universityof Chicago Press, 2004), 274-76. ' Michel de Certeau, TheMysticFable: TheSixteenthandSeventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith (Universityof Chicago Press, 1995), 7; Michelde Certeau,"Mysticism,"diacritics22 (1992): 1125 ,13. •Certeau,"Mysticism," 16. 'Certeau,MysticFable, 10. "Certeau, "Mysticism," 19. " Certeau, Writingif History, 81. "Ibid, 162. "Certeau, Writingof History, 43. 14Ibid., 45. 15Ibid., 46-47. 14 RR. Ankersmit,SublimeHistoricalExperience(Stanford University Press, 2005), 14. " Slavoj Ziiek, ThePuppetandtheDwarf: ThePerverseCoreof Christianity (MIT Press, 2003), 138,italics in original. "Michel deCerteau, "The Weaknessof Believing," TheCerteau Reader, 229. A Response to the Commentary on "Abundant History" Robert A. Orsi My first steps into the worlds of learning came at a Catholic school called Immaculate Conception. Perhaps it was this, sitting there in a uniform marked with the name of an idea so at odds but also in such robust engagement with its times that has led to my enduring dissatisfaction with how scholars think about the religious experiences and practices of ordinary religious people within the limits of modern knowledge. This, or the fact that "the Immaculate " (as it was called) sat in the middle of a working-class world in which the only option presented to some of us was to get out, as if there was nothing there that might hold us, for good or bad, and as if this working-class Catholic world had nothing to do with anything else around it. The Immaculate had no destiny but to disappear. I have been writing and thinking about the Immaculate, in all its historical and theoretical variations, ever since, meaning that I have been thinking about how worlds of meaning and practice otherwise cast in implacable opposition—one world said to be "appearing," the other "disappearing"—might be crossed in order to open other ways of thinking . When the idea of this symposium first presented itself some time ago, the phrase that kept surfacing in conversations was the old advertising slogan, "where's the beef?" This was our question for those historians of culture and history who complain, sometimes in thunderous declamations in theoretical journals (and sometimes more quietly ), that the protocols of contemporary academic history do violence to (or at least do not do justice to) religious practice and experience. If this is so, then what would history done otherwise look like, concretely, in practice? How would a history of a particular instance of the more (as How would a history of a particular instance of the more (as William James named it) literally be written? William James named it) literally be written? The notion of "abundant history" is a contribution toward such an alternative historiography, using a Marian apparition as a case study. I am grateful to the commentators for joining this discussion. The point was constructive engagement with a problem that many of us historians have felt deeply in our work, a problem, moreover, that I think cuts to the heart of historical understanding generally. The idea of "abundant history" clearly builds on prior theoretical efforts to explore the more of religious events and is in conversation with contemporary theorists. But even the richest of these—I am thinking here of constructions of the "holy," for example, or "mysticism"—take leave of...

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