A couple of years ago, Guy G. Stroumsa convincingly argued that the emergence of religious studies in seventeenth-century Europe could legitimately be interpreted as an intellectual revolution: the ‘discovery’ of the New World, the Renaissance with its interest in ancient Greece and Rome, and the so-called wars of religion, had created decisive structural conditions for new ways of thinking about religion.¹ From late antiquity up until that time, religion was usually interpreted as an internalized belief system, as something belonging to the inner life of the believer: ‘True religion … was … orthodox Christianity, while all other forms of religion...