Fear created religion: so Lucretius. Fear of death, of sin, of the other world, but also and above all of the brevity and precariousness of life. Hence devotion, that bargained donation of self that man makes to the divine powers. The term embraces a great variety of practices, beliefs, traditions, united by a common character, that of moving on Jacob's biblical ladder that, resting on the earth, reached with its summit all the way to heaven. We therefore call ‘devotions’ the infinite number of practices invented over the centuries by pre-industrial society to exorcise the evil that hangs over human lives, populating with remorse the space that separates heaven from earth, the living from the dead.

The field of devotions has always been a battleground, the site of a contest between old and new where the new often overlapped with the old without erasing it, as happened in Christianity's encounter with a tradition rooted in the ancient world and finding expression in a word of pagan origin, pietas. But in the transition from the late Middle Ages to the early modern age, confronting devotions also means examining the way in which doctrines and models descended from above come into contact with beliefs, expectations and the search for protection from below; Examples of this are the tortuous story of Limbo, or the use of Christian symbols in the countryside to ensure the fertility of the fields, or the spread of devotional images, crosses and Agnus Dei in Chile by Jesuit missionaries among peoples who welcomed them even though they did not understand their meaning.