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READING, FAMILY RELIGION, AND EVANGELICAL IDENTITY IN LATE STUART ENGLAND

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2004

ANDREW CAMBERS
Affiliation:
Keble College, Oxford
MICHELLE WOLFE
Affiliation:
Ohio State University

Abstract

In this article we unravel family religion as a crucial strand of evangelical piety in the late seventeenth century. We show how this programme was promoted in print and manuscript by a group of evangelical clergy from both sides of the conformist divide. Using the printed and manuscript memoirs of John Rastrick, a Lincolnshire clergyman, we explore the construction of clerical sociability through the printed text. In particular, we demonstrate that its heart was the communal reading of scripture and religious literature, confirming the household as the key locus for piety in this period. Whereas historians have traditionally been eager to categorize both clergy and laity in this period as either Anglican or nonconformist, we demonstrate that such a divide was often blurred in practice, in particular as represented through family religion. By focusing on issues such as sociability, the formation of identities, and reading practices, we also reconnect the second half of the century with its early Stuart past, suggesting that its influences and refractions fed into a continuity of evangelical identity, stretching from late sixteenth-century puritanism through the Civil War and Restoration to the onset of Evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Though they were complex, these continuities help to show that a coherent style of evangelical piety was expressed across the ecclesiastical divide throughout the long seventeenth century.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
2004 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

The research for this article was funded by two Huntington Library Fellowships and the authors would like to thank the staff of the library for all their help. Earlier versions of the article were presented at York and Washington and we are grateful to all those who commented on it, especially Lori Anne Ferrell, Mark Jenner, and Bill Sheils. We would also like to thank Peter Mandler and the referees for this journal for their helpful suggestions.