Just as Emile Durkheim in the early twentieth century had discovered in the seemingly private worlds of suicide and religious experience a profoundly social phenomenon, so also did historians find emotional per- formances to be central to religious life in both official and unofficial settings. They accordingly inquired into the performance of emotion in religious practice as it was evidenced in harvest festivals, at dinner tables, and on pilgrimages as much as in religious ceremony, public worship, or otherwise before the alt