Honorable Mention, PROSE Award
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year
A Junto Favorite Book of the Year

Summary:
"One of the greatest sources of violence in modern history has been the question of what Jesus meant when he told his disciples at the Last Supper to eat the bread of his body and drink the wine of his blood and to do so always in remembrance of him. It erupted in Europe in the sixteenth century and was carried around the globe by colonizers, missionaries, explorers, and scholars. In its opening chapters, History and Presence examines the power of this question in modernity, arguing that it shaped how religion itself as the object of critical scholarly inquiry came to be understood. The experience of the gods really present was consigned to the premodern, first in the figure of the Catholic, then elaborated as the heuristic for the religions of "primitives," dark-skinned people, women, children, the poor, both in the metropolitan centers of an ever-changing Europe and in its colonies. The distinction between those who live with the gods really present and others who do not retains broad normative force even today, evident, for example, in hierarchical models of psychological health and human maturity. Orsi goes on to ask what if the gods were restored to 'religion'? Using case studies drawn from Catholic devotional practices Orsi examines the relationships men and women form with supernatural beings and the consequences of these bonds for everyday life."

Beginning with metaphysical debates in the sixteenth century over the nature of Christ's presence in the host, the distinguished historian and scholar of religion Robert Orsi imagines an alternative to the future of religion that early moderns proclaimed was inevitable.

"This book is classic Orsi: careful, layered, humane, and subtle... If reformed theology has led to the gods' ostensible absence in modern religion, History and Presence is a sort of counter-reformation literature that revels in the excesses of divine materiality: the contradictions, the redundancies, the scrambling of borders between the sacred and profane, the dead and the living, the past and the present, the original and the imitator...History and Presence is a thought-provoking, expertly arranged tour of precisely those abundant, excessive phenomena which scholars have historically found so difficult to think."
--Sonja Anderson, Reading Religion

"With reference to Marian apparitions, the cult of the saints and other divine-human encounters, Orsi constructs a theory of presence for the study of contemporary religion and history. Many interviews with individuals devoted to particular saints and relics are included in this fascinating study of how people process what they believe."
--Catholic Herald

Contents: Introduction: Real presence --
The obsolescence of the gods --
Abundant history --
Holy intimacies --
Printed presence --
The dead in the company of the living --
The happiness of heaven --
Events of abundant evil --
Epilogue: A metric of presence.