This essay reconsiders the religious lives of sailors during the long eighteenth century by exploring how the unique shipboard environment influenced spiritual beliefs and practices. While historians such as Marcus Rediker have characterized seafarers as "notoriously irreligious," this study challenges such assessments by disentangling religion from institutional structures and examining it instead as a deeply personal and spatially contingent experience. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s theory of heterotopia and Vincent Patarino’s concept of shipboard culture, the essay situates the sailor within a liminal, amphibious social space— neither wholly of the land nor the sea. Through close analysis of primary sources, including an anonymous decorated sea chest from the Musée de la Marine and personal writings by figures like John Nicol and Felix Fabri, the study demonstrates that while formal religious structures were often absent at sea, individual sailors developed nuanced and introspective belief systems shaped by material culture, cultural hybridity, and spatial dislocation. By engaging critically with Rediker’s notion of "irreligion," this paper proposes an alternative framework: that of personal, decentralized religiosity grounded in the sailor’s shifting environment and identity. Ultimately, the ship is revealed not as a site of spiritual absence but as a heterotopic space that fostered informal yet meaningful expressions of faith.
Edmée Jouslin de Noray (Tue,) studied this question.