introduction: transforming ‘the age of reason’ into ‘an age of faiths’: or, putting...

Introduction: Transforming ‘the Age of Reason’ into ‘anAge of Faiths’: or, Putting Religions and Beliefs (Back)

into the Eighteenth Centuryjecs_211 287..306

J E R E M Y G R E G O RY

Abstract: This article makes a plea for putting religions and beliefs back intoour studies of the eighteenth century, which has too frequently been viewedas a period of secularisation. It highlights the varieties of religion on offer inthe century and argues that historians of religion have created a ghetto forreligious history by focusing too much on the clergy and the Church as aninstitution, and that instead much more research needs to be done on layreligion. The article also contests that religion should not be aligned solelywith the forces of tradition but was itself an agent of change.

Keywords: religion, belief, Christianity, Church, clergy, laity, secularisation

This introduction, and the articles that follow, were first delivered as papers atthe 37th Annual Conference of the British Society for Eighteenth-CenturyStudies, held at St Hugh’s College, Oxford, in January 2008, where the themewas ‘Religions and Beliefs’. The use of plurals in the terms ‘religions’ and‘beliefs’, both in the original conference theme and in the title of this volume,are a salutary reminder, even within what might regarded as BSECS’s Euro-centric and North American bias, that there were religions other thanChristianity in our period, but they are also testimony to the multiplicities ofChristianities on offer in ‘the Age of Reason’.

In emphasising this, I concur with both modern historians of the earlyChurch and with the editors of the last two volumes of the Cambridge Historyof Christianity, that we should talk of ‘Christianities’ in the plural rather thanin the singular,1 to recognise the extraordinary number of different inflectionsand articulations that Christianity had in the eighteenth century. Theseincluded Anabaptists, Augustinians, Calvinists, Carmelites, members of theChurch of England (with its High Church/ Low Church and Latitudinarianvariants), Congregationalists, Dominicans, followers of the Countess ofHuntingdon, the Hidden Christians (hidden in Japan), Huguenots, Jansenists,Jesuits, Mennonites, Methodists, Moravians, New Lights, New Sides, OldLights, Old Sides, Oratorians, Orthodox, Pietists, Presbyterians, Quakers,Remonstrants, Roman Catholics, Shakers, Southcottians, Swedenborgians,

Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 32 No. 3 (2009)

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Thomas Christians, Unitarians, Zwinglians and so on, enough to rival Heinz’s57 varieties.2

This list in itself may be taken as evidence not only of the spectrum ofChristianities extant in the period but also of the religious inventiveness of theeighteenth century, given that several of these were creations of the age, mostnotably, perhaps, the Methodists, a movement that David Hempton hasclaimed to be the most significant religious development since theReformation,3 with their own divisions into Arminian and Calvinist camps,and the spawning of sub-sets such as Primitive and Jumping Methodists – butalso the Pietists, and those groups associated with the Great Awakening,4 aswell as the Shakers,5 Swedenborgians6 and, arguably, the Unitarians.7 The listalso begs the question of how these different groups related to each other.Were these varieties of Christianity indeed rival faiths, and what was thenature of the rivalry: was it persecution, toleration or competition,8 and whatimplications did this have for political and social organisation and forbehaviour?9 Stressing the variety of faith options in the period is suggestive,too, of the ways in which, at least in some parts of Europe and NorthAmerica, religion had entered the market-place10 and would share in theconsumerism (with the implications of elements of buying and selling) thatsome historians have noted as a defining innovation of the century.11

We should also take far more account of non-Christian religious traditionsthan we generally do. Even if our focus is Europe and North America, theinteraction between Christianity and other religious traditions is, as PeterMarshall and Glyndwr Williams showed many years ago, an importanttheme, if only from the point of view of perceptions and perspectives, andfrom the global aspirations and missions of a number of versions ofeighteenth-century European Christianity, where non-Christian religionsbecame exotic examples of ‘the other’ against which varieties of Christiansdefined themselves and with which they could criticise each other.12 But thestudy of religions in the plural becomes even more vital if we aspire seriouslyto include Asia, South America and elsewhere in our view of the eighteenthcentury. This means that we ought also to explore Judaism, Islam, Buddhismand Hinduism,13 and it was good to see that some of these other religioustraditions were mentioned in the panels at the BSECS conference. However,despite these aspirations, given the nature of the articles in this volume, whatfollows in this introduction refers only to the history of Christianity, andmostly from a narrowly English context. But we need to be aware how fardifferent national experiences could shape religious practices. For example,being a Catholic in France was perhaps not only different from being aCatholic in Italy but also clearly different from being a Catholic in England.14

At the same time, we need to recognise that religious associations could cutacross national contexts and create pan-European, transatlantic and evenglobal movements.15

To begin with, I need to indulge in some ground- and throat-clearing. Thefour keywords in my title could all have separate articles or volumes to

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© 2009 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies

themselves, and in any case what do we mean by ‘reason’, ‘faith’, ‘religion’ or‘belief ’? ‘Belief ’ does not have to mean ‘religious’ belief (how far, for example,was loyalty to a national identity itself a form of ‘religion’ or a ‘belief ’?),16 andone can have faith in reason; and reason can also, as it did for some in ourperiod, become a ‘religion’ in itself.17 Are ‘faith’ and ‘belief ’ the same, or isthere, as some historical sociologists have argued, a distinction, so that ‘faith’is an optional belief system into which one has to be educated (orindoctrinated)?18 The thrust of this introduction will be concerned with thatpart of my title which comes after the colon, since what interests me most ishow dix-huitièmistes should put religions and beliefs back into the period (andby this I will mean religious beliefs, while recognising that what might betermed ‘religious’ was itself contested territory, and the dividing line between‘religion’ and ‘superstition’, for example, was one of perception, so for somein the period religious belief could include belief in, say, witchcraft ortransubstantiation, while for others it did not). My argument is that religionsand beliefs played a vital part in the eighteenth century and that for variousreasons they have been sidelined or ghettoised.

In thinking about how the place of ‘religions’ and ‘beliefs’ in the eighteenthcentury is currently conceptualised, it may be instructive to start with the‘Enlightenment Gallery’, one of the permanent galleries in the refurbishedBritish Museum, and appropriately located where the library of George IIIused to be housed.19 In attempting to re-create the world-view of themuseum’s creators, the gallery is divided into seven themes, one of which isentitled ‘Religion and Ritual’, which covers material culture from animpressive range of non-Christian religious traditions, practices and beliefs,as testimony to the increasing British interest in, and interaction with, thewider world. Of course, as the curators make clear, for many in the periodthese ‘other religions’ were often deemed not to be proper religions at all, or atbest were seen as a debased form of religion; for others they were a startingpoint for a critique of Christianity itself.20 But two points strike me about thegallery as a way into the introduction to this volume. First, although a widevariety of ‘religions’ are noted, with subsections on ‘Gods’ and ‘Magic,mystery and rites’, Christianity is actually hardly referred to, as though theorganisers – in some sense echoing the older label of ‘comparative religion’once used in university departments of Theology and Religious Studies21 –have taken the term ‘religion’ to refer to non-Judaeo-Christian religions,without recognising that the eighteenth-century collectors of these artefactswere themselves Christians, or without realising that the anthropological andsociological approaches to other religions could be applied to Christianity aswell (as indeed they were in the eighteenth century itself).22 It seems a verycurious approach to have an exhibition on the way in which ‘Religion’ wasviewed in eighteenth-century Britain where Christianity scarcely features.The second point is the way in which ‘Religion and Ritual’ is treated as adiscrete and self-contained theme, whereas, in truth, ‘religion’, and moreparticularly the Christian religion, influenced, and was influenced by, all the

Introduction: Transforming ‘the Age of Reason’ into ‘an Age of Faiths’ 289


other themes within the gallery: ‘the natural world’; ‘the birth ofarchaeology’; ‘art and civilisation’; ‘classifying the world’; ‘ancient scripts’;and ‘trade and discovery’ (and to reflect this would entail re-designing theexhibition).

Putting ‘religions’ and ‘beliefs’ back into the long eighteenth century, as inthis hypothetical reorganisation of the ‘Enlightenment Gallery’, involvessome kind of re-conceptualisation of the period. It is not enough to say thatour paradigms of the period can remain the same, and that we simply add‘religions’ or ‘beliefs’ as just one more ingredient into the pot; rather, likeadding salt or sugar, adding religion transforms the whole dish, and hence thepart of my title before the colon. In using the terms ‘age of reason’ and ‘age offaiths’ as my co-ordinates, I am employing conceptual shorthand for long-running debates about how we should conceive of the eighteenth century. Ifcalling the eighteenth century ‘the age of reason’ was once a commonplace,this period tag has been challenged during the last century in a number ofways, most recently perhaps by Jonathan Clark in his plenary address to theBSECS conference in 2007.23 In any case, packaging the eighteenth centuryas ‘the Age of Reason’ (or perhaps it should be ‘age of reasons’, in the plural)was, some scholars would now assert, a particular period marker from aspecifically Western European and North American perspective, and as acentury label it marginalised what might be seen as even stronger currents ofthe age, embedded in my ‘age of faiths’, a phrase that embraces not only whatmight for want of a better term be called ‘traditional Christianity’ but also thenew movements of pietism and Evangelicalism which, according to someaccounts, so transformed the period, from Germany, Scotland, Wales andEngland to North America and elsewhere.24 One of the issues for the dix-huitièmiste is to reconcile and give due weight to what have sometimes beenseen as the opposing tendencies of ‘reason’ and ‘faith’.

There are various models that have sought to account for the place ofreligion and belief in the eighteenth century and which might be deemed tobe central in weighing up whether the eighteenth century was bettercharacterised by ‘reason’ or by ‘faith’. The dominant model has been the‘secularisation thesis’, whereby in the history, literature and culture of theage religion is reckoned to have been of increasingly marginal, or of no,significance; this is the conscious (or unconscious) assumption of many ofwho study the period, and it is certainly true of many of our students.

Of course, the matter is complex. There were some who lived in theeighteenth century who argued that religion should be of no importance, butthe fact that they did so suggests that, as far as they were concerned, it was oftoo much importance, and this could be taken as a sign of the strength ratherthan of the weakness of religion in our period. But the number of those whocould be classified as ‘atheists’ is very small; as Rowland Weston indicatesbelow, even people such as William Godwin were more fascinated by religionthan the epithet ‘atheist’ would suggest. It is one of the tasks of the historianto decide what matters in any period, and that judgement is the stuff of

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historical controversy. If only to play the numbers game, for every follower ofDiderot or Voltaire there were (hundreds of) thousands of followers of JohnWesley, George Whitefield, Nicholas Zinzendorf et al., let alone the popes,saints or archbishops of the period, or those who claimed that they werefollowers of men named Jesus or Mohammed, or whomever they understoodto be ‘God’ or gods. In some ways, too, both religious professionals in theeighteenth century and historians of religion themselves have played a largepart in creating the image of the eighteenth century as a time when religionwas marginal. The moans of people such as John Wesley, who often lambastedthe age in which he lived, have been seen by historians as evidence that theperiod was indeed bereft of religion (perhaps even secular), while ignoring thefact that clerical jeremiahs had, since Christianity began, always believed thatthe ‘age of faith’ was somewhere in the past.

The literature on secularisation is itself now extensive, and not least theliterature on what that term actually means.25 The ‘secularisation thesis’,whereby the eighteenth century, with its ‘enlightenment’, was considered tobe a, if not the, crucial step on the ladder, has now been criticised from severaldirections; some have argued that for England, for example, this onlyoccurred in the 1960s,26 and what was once assumed to be the ‘inevitable’trajectory, not only of Western European but of world history, looks lessconvincing in the early twenty-first century.27 In any case, is secularisation alinear trajectory, or are there periods of reverse secularisation, or evensacralisation? Where, for example, does the Great Awakening fit into themodel of a secularising eighteenth century?

Allied to the model of secularisation are concepts that have frequently beenused in support of that thesis. One is ‘de-Christianisation’, perhaps most fullyworked out for France.28 In addition, historians have commented on the ‘anti-clericalism’ displayed in the period29 and the loss of institutional Churchpower. According to Hans Gross, the eighteenth-century papacy suffered froma ‘post-Tridentine syndrome’, a lack of energy and dynamism and a growinginertia and atrophy in contrast to the vigour of the previous centuries,30 andsome would say this is true of other institutionalised Christian churches aswell (although it has to be said that the whole concept is highly debatable).31

But movements of anti-clericalism, and even de-Christianisation, haverecently been re-conceptualised, at least in some quarters, as evidence not ofirreligious or anti-religious forces but actually as attempts to purify religionand to restore primitive Christianity. At the start of our period JustinChampion’s free-thinkers, who attacked ‘priestcraft’ in the decades after1660, saw themselves as operating within a radical Christianity,32 and,towards the end, Joseph Clarke has emphasised the Christian messages in thecommemoration of the dead at the height of de-Christianisation in France inthe 1790s.33 As such, both developments can be seen as efforts to create apurer Christianity, which not only makes their relationship to ‘secularisation’problematic; in their quest for ‘primitive Christianity’, there are also curiousharmonies with Halle, Wesley and the Great Awakening, so that the two



apparently opposing tendencies of the age (‘reason’ and ‘faith’) are in factintertwined.

As a counterpoint to these secularising models, there have been models ofreligious awakening and Evangelical revival, although there has been somedebate as to how far these were merely reactions or counterpoints to thedominant secularising forces of the age (and in that sense represent a last gaspof religious fervour or a kind of religious death rattle), or how far they too werepart of the Enlightenment agenda, participating for instance in the age’seducational mission and in the creation and dissemination of print culture. Atone level the Arminian theology, by which all had the potential to be saved,of Wesleyan Methodism can be considered to have elective affinities withmore conventional Enlightenment characteristics of equality, optimism andpotential.34 In transforming ‘the age of reason’ into ‘an age of faiths’, I am notsuggesting by any means that we should jettison or obliterate reason from ourstory. In obvious ways, from John Locke’s Reasonableness of Christianity to JohnWesley’s concern for ‘evidence’ and ‘testimony’, ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ werebound up with each other, which may be obscured by the polarity implicit inmy title, and which begs the question of whether there was any necessaryantagonism between ‘reason’ and ‘faith’. Of course, people in the perioddiffered hugely about the precise nature of the relationship between religionand reason, but nevertheless, what is in many ways striking are the efforts ofreligious believers of all hues to associate themselves with reason andreasonableness. Where Nicholas Rogers has used discussions of earthquakesin the mid-eighteenth century to emphasise the secularising tendencies ofthe period and to see ‘reason’ and ‘faith’ as competing discourses,35 I wouldrather think of ‘faith’ and ‘reason’ as complementary and accommodatinglanguages, and what interests me is the ways in which they were in factharmonised. In this I agree with Jane Shaw, who in her recent Miracles inEnlightenment England demonstrated how some commentators at least wereable to balance ‘reason’ with ‘religious enthusiasm’; her article below teasesout some of these issues further.36 In short, perhaps by a sleight of hand, my‘age of faiths’ can encompass, and contain, the ‘age of reason’.

Some of what I have said so far has been said by others, and the footnotesto this discussion acknowledge the work of those who have been involved inputting religions and beliefs back into the eighteenth century. Indeed, thesheer range of papers at the BSECS conference that tackled the theme of‘Religions and Beliefs’ was itself testimony to that effort over the last twenty-five years or so. But here I want to push the transformation of ‘the age ofreason’ into ‘an age of faiths’ a little further by arguing that those of us whohave been involved in putting religions and beliefs back into the eighteenthcentury have not yet gone far enough. Or at least we have not yet succeededin persuading our colleagues who work on non-religious topics of howimportant religions and beliefs were in the Age of Enlightenment, so that if ithas now become almost impossible to call the eighteenth century ‘the age ofreason’ (at least not without qualifiers of various kinds), it is still hard to

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imagine conceptualising the period as ‘an age of faiths’, although PenelopeCorfield over a decade ago did point towards that possibility in a stimulatingarticle.37 As someone who has spent over twenty-five years researchingaspects of eighteenth-century religion, what strikes me is what little impactthose of us working on religious themes have actually had on the ways inwhich the eighteenth century is conceptualised and studied. Despite the hugeamount of work on various aspects of religion,38 has this really bothered thesocial, cultural and political historians of the period? So I see what I have tosay as addressing two audiences: those who work on what might be called‘religious topics’ and those do not. And these two audiences are equallyimportant to address, since if those of us who work on religious themes havenot convinced our colleagues of the significance of religions and beliefs, thenwe will have failed in our task. How, then, should we put religions and beliefsback into the eighteenth century, and if we did so, what difference would itmake?

My first point concerns the way we write the history of religion, and whoshould write it. What I think is noticeable is the way in that ‘history ofreligion’ is often ghettoised, or put into a discrete category, which otherscholars feel they can ignore, happily leaving ‘religion’ to the historians ofreligion. But what I would want to urge is that ‘religion’ is too weighty to beleft to those of us who may consider ourselves to be, or who are termed,‘religious historians’. Keith Wrightson has talked about the ‘enclosure ofsocial history’, where he thinks other types of historians have fenced ‘socialhistory’ off from their studies;39 I would argue even more so for the enclosureof ‘religious history’. And whatever the case with Wrightson’s ‘social history’enclosure (which may be a problem peculiar to Cambridge), the ‘religioushistory’ enclosure has been created by both historians of religion and byother kinds of historians. Those who have been drawn to research religion inthe eighteenth century have frequently themselves been ‘religious’ and,moreover, could be allied to the religious organisations and movements theystudy. To take my own narrow field of the eighteenth-century Church ofEngland: until fairly recently almost all who researched the topic wereAnglicans, and most of them ordained clergy, keen in the nineteenth centuryto emphasise the weaknesses of the eighteenth-century Church or torehabilitate it in the twentieth. Again, the bulk of research into Methodismhas been carried out by Methodists (even E. P. Thompson, whose famouscritique of Methodism was one of the moments when Methodism jumped thefence of the Methodist enclosure and became a topic that, for a time,fascinated social historians, was a lapsed Methodist).40 All this may not besurprising, but it has served to create a ghetto, giving the impression thatreligious history has to be done by ‘religious’ people, and in any case theresearch has sometimes been so internally driven that it has often seemedinaccessible, or irrelevant, to scholars who work on other kinds of history.41

But if historians of religion can sometimes be accused of self-ghettoisation,there is no doubt that historians of other subjects have ignored the religious



context and content of their subject matter. Of all the interesting research ongender that has been done by eighteenth-century scholars over the lastcouple of decades, it is significant that very little work has been done on thereligious context of the prescriptive literature for masculinity and femininityprior to the 1780s. Moreover, that work has almost solely concentrated onEvangelicalism,42 without situating it within a broader nexus of religion andgender. However, William van Reyk has recently examined the huge numberof eighteenth-century texts that explored ‘manliness’ in overtly Christianterms, and his article in this volume is a taster for his forthcomingmonograph.43 Similarly, research into topics such as health and medicine,‘the family’, ‘politeness’, ‘sociability’, ‘travel’ and ‘the natural world’ could allbenefit from being placed within a religious context.44 Sometimes themarginalisation of religious content is because scholars are blinkered by notlooking at religious sources. But at another level it is because the religiousframework and substance of a text may not be obvious. One of the difficultiesin putting religions and beliefs back into the eighteenth century is that thesources often take religion for granted. I have often been told by fellowhistorians who want to take seriously my claims about the centrality ofreligion in the period that their particular records have nothing to say aboutreligion, and of course they may very well be right. But my point is thatreligious priorities and assumptions so shaped what was said that they did notneed to be overtly expressed to be present. Religious concerns could often lie inwhat was left unsaid, in what was implicitly understood and in the unspokenassumptions that defined habits of mind, attitudes and modes of behaviourand action. Taking religion, belief and faith seriously means that we need tobecome, in Weber’s phrase, ‘religiously “musical” ’,45 alive to the religioussensibilities and motivations of past actors.

Second, we need to have a much broader understanding of what we meanby ‘religion’ than some recent high-profile studies have had. At least withinEnglish historical circles, it is sometimes claimed that Jonathan Clark was thefirst to put religion back into the study of the eighteenth century, although Iam not actually sure he would claim this for himself. In any case, I think theclaim is rather misleading; not only had a number of historians during thetwentieth century stressed some of the points made by Clark,46 as far asreligion is concerned, but one can hardly read the numerous studies of theWesleys and Methodism without seeing its importance to the period. In widerterms, I wonder whether Clark does indeed talk about religion at all – at leastas faith, belief, piety, devotion or spirituality. His interest in English Society is,as I am sure he would be the be the first to acknowledge, really in politicaltheology, which, while no doubt a product of faith and belief, does, I wouldargue, convey little sense of the energy and shaping dynamic of religion in theperiod. There is little sense of how religion actually moved people, of religiousexcitement and fervour, and how they could affect, inform and mould people’sthoughts, actions, assumptions and behaviour, including giving them anagency that they were unlikely to have found elsewhere – something that

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seems to have been particularly true for women (who feature little in Clark’saccount). In short, Clark’s concentration on political theology and his focuson a group of Anglican High-Churchmen has had the unfortunateconsequence of giving the impression to those of our colleagues who are nothistorians of religion that that is what religion is all about. I think those goingto Clark’s works – and particularly the much cited English Society – for whatreligion meant in the period will get a rather limited view, which is regrettablesince a far richer sense of religion is found in Clark’s study of Samuel Johnson,a book that has failed to be read as widely as English Society but whichdeserves to be as widely known.47 While many who lived in the eighteenthcentury would have recognised something of Clark’s picture as developed inEnglish Society, they would have been surprised that this is all that can be saidabout religion. In his version of the ‘confessional state’ there is a danger thatreligion has been reduced to political theology and ‘deference’.

Third, and following from this, a broader understanding of religion willentail much more engagement with the religion of the laity, which will helphistorians of religion connect with social history and vice versa.48 Those of usworking on the history of religion have tended to concentrate – perhapsunderstandably – on religious professionals and organisations, which meansthat too much of the revisionist programme has focused on Church historyand not enough on wider religious history.49 We know a great deal moreabout the functioning of the churches as institutions, and an increasingamount about eighteenth-century theology,50 but surprisingly little about theways in which religion affected the lives and moved the hearts and minds of itsadherents. One consequence of this is that, despite the enormous amount ofwork on aspects of church organisation, it has had very little impact on thewider cultural and social history of the period. Not enough is known abouthow eighteenth-century men and women experienced religion, about what itwas like to be a lay member of the Church of England, a Methodist or amember of any other religious grouping. Seventy-five years ago NormanSykes, in an aside of which the implications have not yet been properlythought through, claimed that the eighteenth century was bettercharacterised as one of ‘laicisation’ rather than ‘secularisation’;51 and hispoint could be made for a number of European countries. John McManners,for instance, maintained that the French laity in the eighteenth century knewmore about the fundamentals of Christianity than ever before.52 Of course, inlarge measure this is testimony to the enormous efforts by churches acrossEurope and North America to train and educate (or indoctrinate) the laity,through catechisms, sermons, tracts and pamphlets, and as such this can betaken as evidence of the diligence of pastors of all denominations.53 But,crucially, laicisation could involve lay religious initiatives (which could workhand in hand with Church leaders but which might also be independent ofthe churches), resulting, for example, in the ‘voluntary Anglicanism’ referredto by Mark Goldie, but which can be found in most of the religiousdenominations mentioned at the start of this introduction and which stood



behind the huge number of charitable, fundraising and benevolent projects(ranging from hospitals to workhouses, orphanages and schools etc.) that canbe seen as a hallmark of eighteenth-century European and North Americanlay religiosity.54

Focusing more than we have on the laity entails studying what David Hallhas termed ‘lived religion’,55 what it meant to them and how it influencedtheir lives. Here I would signal Phyllis Mack’s magisterial study Heart Religionin the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early Methodism.56 Mack, asecular Jew, has captured the essence of Methodism. Hers is a study ofMethodism as ‘lived religion’, which analyses what it was like to live, thinkand feel as an early Methodist. In pursuing this agenda, Mack discussesMethodist views on, and experience of, love, death, the body, sex, asceticism,marriage, illness, family, friendship, childbirth and dreams. This ensures thatit will be important for social and cultural historians who, at first sight, maynot think that a book on Methodism would be of interest to them. What is alsostriking is the ways in which Mack brings out the differences by which womenand men reacted to, interpreted and ‘owned’ the Methodist message. Mack’swomen developed a far greater level of introspection than her men, andshe emphasises the fact that women were able to use the language ofsanctification and perfection with greater ease than men. In short, Mackargues, women seem to have had a profound affinity with Methodist doctrines(although she refrains from giving an easy explanation for why this may havebeen so). In following this through, Mack recreates the female friendshipnetworks that were so significant in early Methodism, and she emphasises thecrucial role women played in sustaining early Methodist communities,leading her to see them as the ‘chief pastoral workers’ of early Methodism.Joanna Cruickshank’s article in this volume is a further exploration of someof these themes.

But of course, issues of lay agency are not confined to Methodism, and thestudy of lay religiosity could provide a significant research agenda for anyoneworking on our century. It is clear, for example, that people could respond tothe message of the Church of England in very different ways (another reasonfor the significance of the plurals in my title), and this can be demonstrated bythe uses of the Book of Common Prayer, the most frequently used Englishreligious manual of the century. At one level the Church and its prayer bookservices no doubt played a large part in making English society between 1662

and 1832 into a ‘confessional state’.57 This understanding of the prayer bookas an orthodox and establishment text could be supplemented by the fact that,with its stress on ‘Common Prayer’, and the frequent use of ‘we’ in itspetitions, it also implied an organic community. The ways in which the parishcommunity was seated inside the church, for prayer book services, oftenreflected notions of order and deference.58 Prayer book services could also, nodoubt, exhibit a form of social control. Addison’s portrayal of Sir Roger in TheSpectator (9 July 1711) is suggestive: ‘He has often told me, that on his comingto his Estate he found his Parishioners very irregular; and that in order to

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make them kneel and join in the responses he gave every one of them aHassock and a Common-Prayer book.’59

But was the received social message of the prayer book necessarily onlyabout control and deference? Thirty-five years ago E. P. Thompson arguedthat legitimising eighteenth-century food riots was a ‘moral economy’, areciprocal sense of community, often gleaned from Biblical statements, whichthe rioters were trying to re-create by reminding their superiors of thecommunal model and encouraging them to lower prices.60 What Thompsondid not point out, however, is that in imparting notions of a moral economy,the prayer book, and its associated rituals, may have had a role, withits collective language and where the emphasis was ‘on the harmony ofsocial relations’.61 Furthermore, the prayer book’s injunction that at theCommunion service the ‘best and purest Wheat Bread’ should be used went tothe heart of some of the issues raised by Thompson’s thesis, where wheat wasviewed as the most nutritious cereal for bread and whose price was most likelyto rise during times of scarcity.62 And it is worth noting as an instance of thatreciprocal community envisaged by Thompson’s moral economy that a largeamount of parochial charity was administered after a prayer book service.Prayer book assumptions about the importance of the community – perhapseven its vision of an alternative society – might also serve as a rationale formore rebellious action if it was perceived that the community had brokendown. Barry Reay has shown that when much of southern rural England wasfacing an economic crisis and food shortages in the 1820s and 1830s, theleaders of agricultural riots were often loyal members of the Church whosang in the parish choir and who owned copies of the prayer book.63 That theBook of Common Prayer could inspire both deference and riot surely saysmuch about its social life and purchase during the long eighteenth century. Itis also indicative of the complex ways in which religion shaped and influencedsocial history.

What happens to the eighteenth century if we put religions and beliefs backinto it? Perhaps the most fundamental result is to link our period much morecentrally with the previous two centuries than we are often inclined to do. Ina very real sense, people in the eighteenth century viewed themselves as livingunder the glare of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation; they indeedself-consciously saw themselves alternatively as upholding, participating in,continuing, returning to and in some cases furthering the ideals of theProtestant and Catholic Reformations, and this is true, in their variousways, of all the religious groupings I mentioned at the start of this article.Historians of the Counter-Reformation have long recognised that it was onlyin the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries that the fruits of theTridentine project were being seen in the dioceses and parishes of CatholicEurope. Only then, it has been argued, were priests trained, and the laityeducated, to the standards expected at Trent.64 Likewise, among historians ofProtestantism, a move can be seen from studying the first century of theReformation to the study of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.



The ‘confessionalisation thesis’ has encouraged attention to the role ofreligion in European states in the century after 1648;65 and exciting work isbeing done on Pietism, and the religious and social initiatives developed atHalle, which were transported to various parts of Europe and North Americain the eighteenth century.66

Putting the ‘Reformation’ and ‘Counter-Reformation’ within theeighteenth century begins to shake up how we view the period we study. Thisis not, of course, to argue that the eighteenth century was the same as thesixteenth and seventeenth centuries (which might mean the end of BSECS),but it is to suggest that there is a broader period of, say, 1500 to 1800 to whichour century belongs. Moreover, there might be something distinctively‘eighteenth-century’ about the ways in which men and women in our perioddealt with the issues thrown up by the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, which does mark it off from the previous two centuries. Thepan-European reaction to the ways that the persecuted Salzburgers in 1730swere treated is a good case in point, where persecution was increasinglydeemed intolerable.67 Those who do not work on religious themes might usethese examples as proof indeed that historians of religion are working on abackward-looking and marginal area. But in actual fact, there are somerecent works that suggest that preoccupation with these matters associatedwith the Reformation spilled out into parliamentary debates and foreignpolicy, as in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries Catholicresurgence in Europe made it look as if the security of the Reformation wasunder threat.

In any case, the long shadow of the Reformation and Counter-Reformationon the eighteenth-century world should not imply that the function ofreligion in our period was to be merely ‘backward-looking’. Again, it isunfortunate that some of the attempts to put religion back into the eighteenthcentury have been taken to imply that ‘religion’ was only part of a‘traditional’ or ‘old’ order’.68 Placing religion on the side of the ‘traditional’,‘conservative’ and ‘backward-looking’ forces misses the point. It is too easy toset up the historiographical battleground as one between ‘ancients’ and‘moderns’, where religion is on the side of the ancients, since religion could bea modernising force and an agent of change.69 Indeed, rather than the word‘tradition’ (which can give the impression of something left over from aprevious period almost quaintly, if not perversely, out of date), we should talkof the persistence and vitality of religion in the eighteenth century;something of this can be seen in Andrew Starkie’s article in this volume,which looks at William Law’s use of ‘modern’ techniques to challengeBernard Mandeville. What is still missing from our accounts of religion in theeighteenth century is the way that religion could be the dynamic and thedriving force for new ways of doing things. This is not to say that religion wasthe only dynamic, but it was certainly one, and it is often the one that isignored in the accounts of change and innovation in our period; how religionoperated with other forces for change would be a fruitful area for future

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research. As evidence of religion’s engagement with the modern, I could citethe individualism and inner reflection encouraged by many of the versions ofChristianity with which I began,70 as well as religion’s ability to form newsocial communities,71 the charitable and benevolent projects established in thename of religion,72 various movements for the reformation of manners,73

the global push of eighteenth-century religion which moved peoples aroundthe world,74 and the educational and publishing endeavours whereby religionharnessed, developed and even pioneered new forms of media.75 I have arguedelsewhere that eighteenth-century religion was remarkably adept at using thenew genres and media of the age, and that ‘religious’ genres themselves, suchas ‘the sermon’, continued to create a huge amount of media attention andcontroversy.76 Moreover, although cultural historians are often tempted to talkof the new genres developed within the eighteenth century in a secularframework, we might profitably unearth the ways in which the shape andresonance of ‘secular’ genres and forms were often dependent on, or informedby, religious texts and contexts, and the articles by Bonnie Latimer and EvertJan van Leeuwen explore some of these issues. Of course, students ofRomanticism have long noted the ‘religious’ resonance within Romanticwriting,77 but the point is that ‘Romantic’ writers are too frequently viewedas reacting against dominant eighteenth-century styles (and indeed aresometimes viewed as more ‘nineteenth-century’ than ‘eighteenth-century’),78

and thus religious tropes in eighteenth-century discourse are frequentlybracketed as ‘pre-’ or ‘proto-’ Romantic, suggesting that they do not fit into thesupposedly hegemonic secular frame of mind. But in actual fact, eighteenth-century writers of all hues can be seen to have drawn on religious ways ofthinking, as evidenced, for example, in the didactic moralising of much of theliterature and art of the period.

What has been interesting to witness are the ways in which, during the lastcouple of years or so, a number of books, written from outside the history ofreligion as usually understood, have not only demonstrated an engagementwith the scholarship produced by historians of religion but have explored thereligious structure and dynamic of topics that have not conventionally beenstudied within a religious paradigm, or where it has commonly been assumedthat religion was of increasingly marginal, or indeed of no, importance. Theseexamples are all from England, but they have resonance with work beingcarried out on other countries. For the world of political ideas and foreignaffairs, there is Tony Claydon’s Europe and the Making of England, 1660-1760,79

which argues that even in foreign policy terms this was not an age ofsecularisation, and that defending Christendom and the Reformation werevital factors propelling England’s engagement with Europe; for visual history,Clare Haynes’s Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660-176080

explores the paradoxical fascination of the English protestant elite withcontinental Catholic paintings; and, from social history, Carolyn Steedman’s,Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age, where themaster of the title, and the hero of the book, is a late eighteenth-century



Church of England clergyman whose charitable attitude to his unmarriedpregnant servant, and then her daughter, makes him almost a model of theclerical professional.81 Significantly, however, Cambridge University Presswould not let either Professor Claydon or Professor Steedman have the word‘Religion’, or any variant thereof, in their titles, presumably for fear of puttingpotential readers off and sending the wrong kind of signals, although thissays more about the assumptions and marketing strategies of the publishinghouse than of the concerns of these historians, who actually wanted somemention of religion upfront. Claydon, Haynes and Steedman are, of course,writing for different specialist academic audiences and are addressingquestions and issues within their own particular fields, but taken togetherthey are eloquent testimony that the study of religions and beliefs in theeighteenth century is at last coming out of the ghetto of ‘religious history’.

The articles in this volume develop some of these points further in helpingto embed religions and beliefs into the period. Andrew Starkie’s exploration ofthe High-Churchman William Law’s critique of Mandeville’s Fable of the Beesnot only reveals a religious reaction to the perceived secularising tendenciesof the age but also suggestively examines various ways in which religiousdiscourse drew on, and utilised, the ‘modernising’ discourses of reason,science and satire to subvert and critique Mandeville. Jane Shaw’sinvestigation into the ways in which satirical treatment of ‘miraculous’events also demonstrated the age’s fascination with the supernatural and thewondrous proposes that the distinction between reason and revelation wasnot fixed or clear. Bonnie Latimer and Evert Jan van Leeuwen analyse ways inwhich the imaginative literature of the age was suffused with Christianconcerns. Latimer focuses on the use of Anglican homiletics in SamuelRichardson’s novels, and in particular the role of a pragmatic theology andan instrumental ends-oriented morality that justified the ‘pious frauds’ ofsome of his leading protagonists. Van Leeuwen explores the relationshipbetween funeral sermons and graveyard poetry, and maintains that thepoetry ought to be understood within this religious and spiritual (and oftencomforting) context and not simply as a branch of gloomy Gothic fiction.Joanna Cruickshank argues that friendship networks among Methodistwomen should be seen as spiritual sets of contact, suggesting that we shouldtake more seriously than we have done the religious framework andsignificance of friendship circles. Julia List and Rowland Weston consider, intheir different ways, the interaction between religion and materialism in the1790s. List studies the reception by religious readers of one of ErasmusDarwin’s nature poems, indicating the manner by which scientific advanceswere interpreted in a religious light, and the ways in which potentiallysubversive scientific claims could be de-radicalised or marginalised. Westonevaluates the increasingly subtle and dynamic role of religion in the thoughtof William Godwin, which was part of his developing Romantic sensibility,where he understood humanity as having a religious nature, and which wentbeyond atheism. In the final article William van Reyk looks at the attempts to

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inculcate Christian manliness at public schools and the universities duringthe entire period and demonstrates that these efforts were not the prerogativeof Evangelicals or of Victorian reformers but loomed large in Georgianeducational thinking. As a collection, therefore, the articles that followrepresent intriguing ways in which religions and beliefs, broadly conceived,were central to the long eighteenth century.

NOTES1. For ‘Christianities’ in the early Church, see Karen L. King, What is Gnosticism?

(Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003); for the use of the term by historians of the modern period, seeBrian Stanley and Sheridan Gilley (eds), The Cambridge History of Christianity, vols VIII and IX:World Christianities c. 1815-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), and HughMcLeod (ed.), World Christianities c. 1914-c. 2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2006).

2. For some of these, see The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. VII: Enlightenment,Reawakening and Revolution, 1660-1815, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 2006).

3. David Hempton, Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (New Haven and London: Yale, 2005), p.1.4. W. R. Ward, The Protestant Evangelical Awakening (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1992).5. Richard Francis, Ann the Word: The Story of Ann Lee, Female Messiah, Mother of the Shakers,

the Woman Clothed with the Sun (London: Fourth Estate, 2000).6. Cyriel Odhner Sigstedt, The Swedenborg Epic: The Life and Works of Emanuel Swedenborg

(London: The Swedenborg Society, 1981).7. Although doctrinally the Unitarian position may have been regarded as one of the earliest

Christian heresies, it was only in the eighteenth century that anything like a religiousdenomination existed: see Ruth Watt, Gender, Power and the Unitarians in England, 1760-1860(Harlow: Longman, 1998).

8. See Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500-1700(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006).

9. For some suggestions, see Jan Albers, ‘ “Papist Traitors” and “Presbyterian Rogues”:Religious Identities in Eighteenth-Century Lancashire’, in The Church of England, c. 1689-c. 1833:From Toleration to Tractarianism, ed. John Walsh, Colin Haydon and Stephen Taylor (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1993), p.317-33.

10. Jeremy Gregory, ‘Anglicanism and the Arts: Religion, Culture and Politics in theEighteenth Century’, in Culture, Politics and Society in Britain, 1660-1800, ed. Jeremy Black andJeremy Gregory (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991), p.82-109.

11. Neil McKendrick, John Brewer and J. H. Plumb (eds), The Birth of a Consumer Society: TheCommercialisation of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,1982); John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London:Routledge, 1993); John Brewer and Ann Bermingham (eds), The Consumption of Culture, 1660-1800: Image, Object, Text (London: Routledge, 1995); John Brewer and Susan Staves (eds), EarlyModern Conceptions of Property (London: Routledge, 1995); Timothy Hall Breen, The Market Placeof Revolution: How Consumer Politics Shaped American Independence (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2004); and Helen Berry and Jeremy Gregory (eds), Creating and Consuming Culture inNorth-East England, 1660-1800 (London: Ashgate, 2004).

12. P. J. Marshall and Glyndwr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: British Perceptions of theWorld in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. M. Dent, 1982).

13. For some of the recent scholarship on aspects of this, see Kwang-Chung Liu and RichardShek (eds), Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004).

14. See the essays in William J. Callahan and David Higgs (eds), Church and Society in CatholicEurope of the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); John Bossy, TheEnglish Catholic Community, 1570-1850 (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1975).

15. Hempton, Methodism; Mark A. Noll, David W. Bebbington and George A. Rawlyk (eds),Evangelicalism: Comparative Studies on Popular Protestantism in North America, the British Isles, and



Beyond, 1700-1990 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); W. R. Ward, EarlyEvangelicalism: A Global Intellectual History, 1670-1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,2006).

16. Robert Bellah, Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World (New York:Harper and Row, 1970). See Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven:Yale University Press, 1994).

17. François-Alphonse Aulard, Le Culte de la raison et le culte de l’être suprême (1793-1794)(Paris: Alcan, 1892); Michel Vovelle, The Revolution against the Church: From Reason to theSupreme Being, trans. Alan José (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).

18. Christina Larner, Witchcraft and Religion. The Politics of Popular Belief (Oxford: BasilBlackwell, 1984), p.121.

19. http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore/galleries/themes/room_1_enlightenment.aspx,accessed 1 March 2009.

20. Kim Sloan (ed.), Enlightenment: Discovering the World in the Eighteenth Century (London:British Museum Press, 2003).

21. See William E. Paden, ‘Comparative Religion’, in The Routledge Companion to the Study ofReligion, ed. John R. Hinnells (London: Routledge, 2005), p.208-26.

22. Classically, see Edward Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), Chapters15 and 16.

23. J. C. D. Clark, ‘The Enlightenment: The Creation, Functions, and Decline of a Category’(BSECS lecture, 3 January 2007). See also his ‘Providence, Predestination, and Progress: Or, Didthe Enlightenment Fail?’, Albion 35 (2004), p.559-90.

24. Noll et al., Evangelicalism.25. Bryan Wilson, Religion in Secular Society; A Sociological Comment (London: Watts, 1966);

David Martin, A General Theory of Secularisation (Oxford: Blackwell, 1978); Steve Bruce (ed.),Religion and Modernisation: Sociologists and Historians Debate the Secularisation Thesis (Oxford:Clarendon Press, 1992).

26. Callum Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularization, 1800-2000(London: Routledge, 2001); Hugh McLeod and Werner Ustorf (eds), The Decline of Christendom inWestern Europe, 1750-2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).

27. David Nash, ‘Reconnecting Religion with Social and Cultural History: Secularisation’sFailure as a Meta-Narrative’, Cultural and Social History 1 (2004), p.302-25.

28. Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle (Paris: Plon,1973); Michel Vovelle, Religion et révolution: la déchristianisation l’an II (Paris: Hachette, 1976).

29. Nigel Aston and Matthew Cragoe (eds), Anticlericalism in Britain, c. 1500-1914 (Stroud:Alan Sutton, 2000).

30. Hans Gross, Rome in the Age of Enlightenment: The Post-Tridentine Syndrome and the AncienRégime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

31. See, for example, Anthony David Wright, The Early Modern Papacy: From the Council ofTrent to the French Revolution, 1564-1789 (Harlow: Longman, 2000).

32. Justin Champion, The Pillars of Priestcraft Shaken: The Church of England and Its Enemies,1660-1730 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Justin Champion, RepublicanLearning: John Toland and the Crisis of Christian Culture, 1696-1722 (Manchester: ManchesterUniversity Press, 2003).

33. Joseph Clarke, Commemorating the Dead in Revolutionary France: Revolution andRemembrance, 1789-1799 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

34. For a thoughtful discussion, see Bernard Semmel, The Methodist Revolution (London:Heinemann, 1974). See David Bebbington, Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the1730s to the 1980s (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989).

35. Nicholas Rogers, ‘The London Earthquakes of 1750: Panic, Providentialism, and thePublic Sphere’, unpublished paper.

36. Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven and London: Yale UniversityPress, 2006).

37. Penelope Corfield, ‘Georgian England: One State, Many Faiths’, History Today (April1995), p.14-21.

38. The fruits of some of that research have been gathered together in Vol. VII of theCambridge History of Christianity (see note 2).

39. Keith Wrightson, ‘The Enclosure of English Social History’, Rural History 1 (1990), p.73-81.

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40. For Thompson’s provocative view of Methodism, see ‘The Transforming Power of theCross’, Chapter 11 of The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968).For a thoughtful discussion of Thompson’s views, see David Hempton and John Walsh, ‘E. P.Thompson and Methodism’, in God and Mammon: Protestants, Money and the Market, 1790-1860,ed. Mark Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p.99-120.

41. See my comments in ‘Wesley’s Tercentenary and the State of Wesley Studies’, in JohnWesley. Tercentenary Essays, ed. Jeremy Gregory, special edition of the Bulletin of the John RylandsUniversity Library of Manchester 85 (2005), p.17-29.

42. In particular, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of theEnglish Middle Class, 1780-1850 (London: Hutchinson, 1987), which showed little understandingof the relationship between religion and gender before 1780. Although their work was criticised(famously) by Amanda Vickery, even she accepted the view that Evangelicalism represented anew departure for gender roles: ‘ “Golden Age to Separate Spheres”: A Review of the Categoriesand Chronology of English Women’s History’, Historical Journal 36 (1993), p.383-414.

43. William van Reyk, ‘Christian Ideals of Manliness during the Period of the EvangelicalRevival, c. 1730 to c. 1840’ (D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2007).

44. For some illuminating forays into the religious context of some of these topics, seeDeborah Madden, ‘A Cheap, Safe and Natural Medicine’: Religion, Medicine, and Culture in JohnWesley’s ‘Primitive Physic’ (New York and Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), and Lawrence E. Klein,‘Shaftesbury, Politeness and the Politics of Religion’, in Political Discourse in Early Modern Britain,ed. Nicholas Phillipson and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),pp, 283-301. But much more could be done.

45. Weber famously saw himself as ‘religiously “unmusical”’: letter to Ferdinand Tönnies, 19

February 1909, quoted in L. A. Scaff, Fleeing the Iron Cage (Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress, 1989), p.225-6.

46. John Cannon, Aristocratic Century: The Peerage of Eighteenth-Century England (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1984); J. A. W. Gunn, Beyond Liberty and Property: The Process ofSelf-Recognition in Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (Kingston: McGill-Queen’s UniversityPress, 1983).

47. J. C. D. Clark, Samuel Johnson: Literature, Religion, and English Cultural Politics from theRestoration to Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

48. See W. M. Jacob, Lay Piety and Religion in Early Eighteenth Century England (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996). See my ‘ “For all sorts and conditions of men”: The SocialLife of the Book of Common Prayer in the Long Eighteenth Century: or, Bringing the History ofReligion and Social History Together’, Social History 34 (2009), p.29-54.

49. For example, the essays in Walsh, Haydon and Taylor (eds), Church of England, and JeremyGregory and Jeffrey S. Chamberlain (eds), The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church ofEngland and the Regions, 1660-1800 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2003).

50. For example, Isabel Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religionand Ethics in England, 1660-1780, 2 vols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 and2000).

51. Norman Sykes, Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1934), p.379.

52. John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, Vol. 1: The ClericalEstablishment and its Social Ramifications (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p.3.

53. For some of this, see the essays in Tackett and Brown, Enlightenment, Reawakening andRevolution, especially Joris van Einjaten, ‘Reaching Audiences: Sermons and Oratory in Europe’,p.128-46, and Dominique Julia, ‘Christian Education’, p.147-65.

54. See Louis Châtellier, Europe of the Devout: The Catholic Reformation and the Formation of aNew Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).

55. David Hall (ed.), Lived Religion in America: Towards a History of Practice (Princeton:Princeton University Press, 1997).

56. Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in EarlyMethodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

57. J. C. D. Clark, ‘England’s Ancien Regime as a Confessional State’, Albion 21 (1989), p.450-74.

58. On seating see W. M. Jacob, ‘ “This Congregation Here Present ... ”: Seating in ParishChurches during the Long Eighteenth Century’, in Elite and Popular Religion, ed. Kate Cooper andJeremy Gregory, Studies in Church History 42 (2006), p.294-304.



59. R. Steele and J. Addison, Selections from The Tatler and The Spectator, ed. A. Ross(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), p.229.

60. E. P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’,Past and Present 50 (1971), p.76-136.

61. Ramie Targoff, Common Prayer: Models of Public Devotion in Early Modern England(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), p.33.

62. Thompson, ‘Moral Economy’, p. 80-83.63. Barry Reay, The Last Rising of the Agricultural Labourers. Rural Life and Protest in Nineteenth-

Century England (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1990), p.64-68, 147; Barry Reay, ‘The LastRising of the Agricultural Labourers: The Battle in Bossenden Wood, 1838’, History WorkshopJournal 26 (1988), p.86, 95.

64. Ronnie Po-Cha Hsia, The World of Catholic Renewal, 1540-1770 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998).

65. For example, Heinz Schilling, Konfessionskonflikt und Staatsbildung: eine Fallstudie über dasVerhältnis von religiösem und sozialem Wandel in der Frühneuzeit am Beispiel der Grafschaft Lippe(Gutersloh, 1981). For an analysis of the Germanic comparison, see Andrew C. Thompson,‘Early Eighteenth-Century Britain as a Confessional State’, in Cultures of Power in Europe duringthe Long Eighteenth Century, ed. Hamish Scott and Brendan Simms (Cambridge University Press:Cambridge, 2007), p.86-109.

66. Ward, Protestant Evangelical Awakening.67. See Andrew Thompson, Britain, Hanover and the Protestant Interest, 1688-1757

(Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2006), especially Chapter 5.68. To some extent, Clark’s use of the label ‘Ancien Régime’ encouraged his readers to link

religion only with the forces of continuity. See, for example, Joanna Innes, ‘Jonathan Clark,Social History, and England’s Ancien Régime’, Past & Present 115 (1987), p.165-200.

69. See W. A. Speck, ‘Will the Real Eighteenth Century Stand Up?’, Historical Journal 34

(1991), p.203-6.70. See Mack, Heart Religion.71. Hempton, Methodism. See also Robert F. Wearmouth, Methodism and the Common People of

the Eighteenth Century (London: The Epworth Press, 1945), and his Methodism and the Working-Class Movements of England, 1800-1850 (London: The Epworth Press, 1937).

72. For example, see Goldie, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’.73. From a wide literature, see, in particular: ‘David Hayton, ‘Moral Reform and Country

Politics in the Late Seventeenth-Century House of Commons’, Past and Present 128

(1990), p.48-91; Dudley W. R. Bahlman, The Moral Revolution of 1688/9 (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1957); Tony Claydon, William III and the Godly Revolution (Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1996), esp. p.110-22; Eamon Duffy, ‘Primitive ChristianityRevived; Religious Revival in Augustan England’, in Renaissance and Renewal in ChristianHistory, ed. Derek Baker, Studies in Church History 14 (1977), p.287-3000; Shelley Burtt,Virtue Transformed. Political Argument in England, 1688-1740 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1992); Andrew G. Craig, ‘The Movement for Reformation of Manners, 1690-1715’ (PhDthesis, University of Edinburgh, 1980); Tina Issacs, ‘Moral Crime and the Reform of the State:A Study in Piety and Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England’ (PhD thesis, University ofRochester, New York, 1979); Mary Fissell, ‘Charity Universal? Institutions and Moral Reformin Eighteenth-Century Bristol’, in Stilling the Grumbling Hive: The Response to Social andEconomic Problems in England, 1689-1750, ed. Lee Davison et al. (Stroud: Ashgate, 1992). p.121-44; and Joanna Innes, ‘Politics and Morals. The Reformation of Manners Movement in LaterEighteenth-Century England’, in The Transformation of Political Culture, England and Germanyin late Eighteenth Century, ed. Eckhart Hellmuth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990),p.57-118.

74. For the example of the global push of Methodism, see Hempton, Methodism.75. For one example, see Barbara Prosser, ‘ “An Arrow from a Quiver”: Written Instruction for

a Reading People: John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine (January 1778-February 1791)’ (PhD thesis,University of Manchester, 2008).

76. Gregory, ‘Anglicanism and the Arts’. See also Tony Claydon, ‘The Sermon, the “PublicSphere” and the Political Culture of Late Seventeenth-Century England’, in The English SermonRevised: Religion, Literature and History, 1600-1750, ed. Lori Anne Ferrell and Peter McCullough(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p.208-34. See also Jeremy Gregory,‘Christianity and Culture: Religion, The Arts and the Sciences in England, 1660-1800’, in

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Culture and Society in Britain, 1660-1800, ed. Jeremy Black (Manchester: Manchester UniversityPress, 1997), p.102-23.

77. Robert M. Ryan, The Romantic Reformation: Religious Politics in English Literature, 1789-1824 (Cambridge; Cambridge University Press, 1997).

78. Note that Romanticism and Religion: From William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, ed. GavinHopps and Jane Stadler (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), is in a nineteenth- rather than aneighteenth-century series.

79. Tony Claydon, Europe and the Making of England, 1660-1760 (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2007).

80. Clare Haynes, Pictures and Popery: Art and Religion in England, 1660-1760 (Aldershot:Ashgate, 2006).

81. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant. Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

jeremy gregory is Senior Lecturer in the History of Modern Christianity at The University ofManchester. He has published widely in eighteenth-century religious and cultural history,including The Speculum of Archbishop Thomas Secker (Boydell and Brewer, 1995); Restoration,Reformation, and Reform, 1660-1828: Archbishops of Canterbury and their Diocese (2000); and(with John Stevenson), The Longman Companion to Eighteenth-Century Britain, 1688–1820 (rev.edn, 2007). He has also edited and co-edited a number of essay collections, including Culture,Politics and Society in Britain, 1660-1800 (1991); The National Church in Local Perspective: theChurch of England and the Regions, 1660-1800 (2003); and John Wesley: Tercentenary Essays(2005).



introduction: transforming ‘the age of reason’ into ‘an age of faiths’: or, putting...

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