This article examines how the lived religious practices of early seventeenth-century English women were presented and memorialised, through an analysis of biographical writing and printed funeral ...sermons. Focusing on both Catholic and Protestant women who lived and died in London between 1600 and 1660, it suggests that women’s charity work, particularly that which involved active labours such as feeding the poor, tending the sick, and assisting with childbirth, was presented as a key aspect of their lived religion. In this chapter I take ‘lived religion’ to mean practices which individuals, in this case, women, deliberately implemented as a means of having agency over their religious practice. These sources depict charitable acts as being instigated by the individual women themselves, acts which were performed electively, in addition to routines of prayer and contemplation, and acts which were accordingly viewed as an expression of piety and ownership over their religious lives. These descriptions are also moulded to the unique attributes of these individual women; they emphasise the deployment of proficiency in medicine or skill in garment-making, they accentuate the hospitality of these women and occasions where the poor or hungry were invited into the home. These elective charitable works are consequently presented as important forms of ‘active piety’ – as central to and as an important means of acting out one’s faith.
Religion and life cycles in early modern England assembles
scholars working in the fields of history, English literature and
art history to further our understanding of the intersection
between ...religion and the life course in the period c .
1550-1800. Featuring chapters on Catholic, Protestant and Jewish
communities, it encourages cross-confessional comparison between
life stages and rites of passage that were of religious
significance to all faiths in early modern England. The book
considers biological processes such as birth and death, aspects of
the social life cycle including schooling, coming of age and
marriage and understandings of religious transition points such as
spiritual awakenings and conversion. Through this inclusive and
interdisciplinary approach, it seeks to show that the life cycle
was not something fixed or predetermined and that early modern
individuals experienced multiple, overlapping life cycles.
This article explores how writers, predominantly adhering to a variety of different Christian denominations but also including Jewish writers, discussed religion and the body in letters throughout ...the long eighteenth century. It draws on a corpus of over 2,500 familiar letters written by men and women of different denominations between 1675 and 1820. That these letters were not chosen because of their religious content makes them a good ‘test’ of the role of faith in everyday understandings of the body. This article underscores the continued centrality of religious discourse and devotional practice in eighteenth-century everyday life. Our research finds that religion was a commonplace register deployed when discussing bodily matters throughout the long eighteenth century. Significantly, this was the case for individuals who otherwise made scant reference to their faith. Discussion of the physical body encouraged recourse to providence, a public discussion of doctrine, and the shared expression of devotion. The ongoing force of religion in people’s lives was thus intimately tied to their embodied experiences. Letters not only expressed but actively maintained this widely shared religious framework for understanding the body.
In this essay, Emily Vine traces the emergence, re-emergence, and impact of a distinct anti-Semitic narrative of Jewish infanticide and sacrifice by fire that appeared in print in London several ...times between 1674 and 1732. She identifies and links the versions of this specific narrative and directly connects the re-emergence of the narrative to outbreaks of anti-Semitic violence against the London Jewish community. This essay considers the published accounts themselves alongside evidence of their reception, situating this narrative within the context of the Jewish readmission to England (after 1656) and a wider proliferation of anti-Semitic literature. It analyzes the origins of this rumor, suggests ways in which the accusation was fueled by the misinterpretation of Jewish rituals, and demonstrates the direct effect that it had on Judeo-Christian relations in late seventeenth-and early eighteenth-century London. It argues that the repeated resonance of this particular narrative, unlike other anti-Semitic literature, lay in the geographical immediacy of the events described, events purported to take place within the streets and alleyways of London, in domestic spaces that ostensibly coexisted with the homes of Christian readers.
This article re-evaluates the experiences of and perspectives towards religious minority communities in early modern London through a consideration of minority homes and the negotiation of private ...space. It considers the juxtaposition between the necessity of observing 'private religion' for those whose outward practice was restricted and the distrust of nonconforming acts which took place behind closed doors. It argues that the concern with regulating 'appropriate behaviour' in private spaces - in this instance, religious practice within the home - prompted a widespread desire to locate the streets and neighbourhoods where potentially subversive religious practices were taking place. Furthermore, the acknowledgment that certain parishes were inhabited by French, Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant Nonconformist communities - groups that were by definition dislocated from the religious and administrative functions of the parish - acted to shape the means by which public and private spaces of early modern London were experienced.
Samuel Rutherford's letters draw on biblical imagery and idiomatic metaphors, including contemporary discourses of illness and medicine, to diagnose and promote the spiritual and physical health of ...individual believers and the Scottish Kirk. This essay examines how Rutherford used language to care for his correspondents enacting a form of literary cure through the letter as a communication technology. Interrogating Rutherford's use of language theologically, politically, and practically to negotiate God's providential care for his people, the traumatic splintering of the church and state in England and Scotland, and caregiving within covenanting communities, reveals how his epistolary practice expands knowledge of the church's historical provision of care, and the intersection of religious and medical caregiving in early modern Scotland. Rutherford's lexical and metaphorical creativity, rendering complex theological concepts emotionally intelligible and rhetorically effective, ensured his letters provided comfort to covenanted godly communities and underwrote their posthumous publication as a devotional and literary classic.
In 1655 Menasseh Ben Israel, a Portuguese rabbi and diplomat, wrote a petition to Oliver Cromwell on behalf of ‘The Hebrews at Present Reziding in this citty of London’ which pleaded for, alongside ...the freedom to worship in their own houses, a place to bury their own dead. Ben Israel wrote: ‘And being wee ar all mortall wee allsoe Humbly pray your Highnesse to graunt Us Lisence that those which may dye of owr nation may be buryed in such place out of the cittye as wee shall thinck Convenient with the Proprietors.’¹ This was a petition for a distinct,
Introduction Bowden, Caroline; Vine, Emily; Whitehouse, Tessa
Religion and Life Cycles in Early Modern England,
10/2021, Letnik:
14
Book Chapter
In 1704 Benjamin Levy, a prominent member of the London Ashkenazi Jewish community, recognised that he was increasingly ‘weak and infirme in body’ and set about making his will. He left detailed ...instructions for how his estate should be dispersed after his death, as well as his desire to be ‘decently buryed according to the Jewish Rites and Cermonyes’. Yet in addition to using the approaching end of his life to settle practical and financial affairs, Levy also made specific directions to guide his children’s religious observance in the years after his death. Among other stipulations, he desired that his
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