Rethinking women’s religious lives: a critique of European cultural narratives

This book review focuses on the way in which van den Brandt offers a more multidimensional understanding of how religious and racialised subjects are perceived by, and navigate their identities in Western Europe. Utilising autoethnography, women’s stories and an array of Western European cultural media illustrations, she questions and holds to account the problematic persistence of ‘religious’ stories being told in the form of a one-dimensional narrative. I will argue that she convincingly persuades the reader to rethink what we know about these normative cultural tropes and the way in which gender simultaneously implicates them and is implicated by them.