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.
When the first readers of L’Histoire de la vie et moeurs de Marie Tessonnière (1650) turned past the title page, what did they hope to find? The text is described at the beginning of the dedicatory ...epistle as “Cét ouvrage de Devotion” (de la Riviere a2), signalling that the work was intended to provide spiritual guidance for the reader as well as offering a record of the life of Tessonnière herself. In its dual purpose, this was a very typical religious biography. In common with funeral sermo...
Letters are a key source for investigating the lived experiences of early modern men and women. Though literacy rates among women were low in the earlier part of the period, those who were able to ...write did write letters.¹ Those who were not confident writers could dictate letters to trusted scribes.² Letters were thus consistently used by people across the social spectrum as channels of communication and outlets for personal feeling. Surviving letters attest to the importance people attached to sharing details of their physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being with friends as well as family members.³ The letters considered in
In January 2016, a new research initiative was established at Queen Mary University of London. In the pipeline for 2016-17 we have the continuation of our popular lunchtime sessions of informal ...presentations of research-in-progress and reading group discussions. ...we have recently launched An Inventory of Puritan and Dissenting Records, 1640-1714, by Mark Burden, Michael Davies, Anne Dunan-Page and Joel Halcomb.
From the seventeenth century onwards, English Reformed ministers engaged in lively correspondence and publishing exchanges with men from different countries and Protestant traditions. In the ...eighteenth century, appreciation of their shared intellectual and cultural heritage and a desire to sustain the patterns for religious living it encouraged inflected the content and style of textual interactions among Halle Pietists, English dissenters and New England Congregationalists. Interest in the present state of religious life was also important, and therefore news about awakenings and materials for pastoral care circulated around Europe and North America through existing channels and by new means. Their encounters and the texts that they produced were mutually generative, and the language and manner of the participants' personal interactions were important features of published works. These personal associations, publishing activities and discursive styles can be understood as aspects of the literary sociology of a religious culture that valued intellectual and emotional engagements and sought to inculcate religion through education and friendship.
This essay traces a web of exchanges between England and the Low Countries and within continental Europe in the late seventeenth century by investigating the dissemination and use of the English ...educational text Moses and Aaron (1625) in various editions and translations. The study of the text and its paratexts is placed in the context of intellectual, theological and social exchanges between writers from England and the Low Countries, focusing on the universities of the Low Countries as crucial entrepôts. The role of religious nonconformists and dissenters in the exchanges which allowed Moses and Aaron to circulate so widely is emphasised. Moses and Aaron can itself be considered an entrepôt, for it gathered together and placed in dialogue the research and ideas of scholars fromacross northern Europe. Versions of Moses and Aaron also demonstrated and disseminated a new model for scholarly debate to readers across Europe.
The articles partly stem from the on-going collaboration of the Lived Religion study group at the Laboratoire d’Études et de Recherche sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA, UR 853) and of the Queen Mary ...Centre for Religion and Literature in English (Queen Mary University of London), and partly from a separate project which explored experiences and expressions of female spirituality as a joint endeavour between the LERMA’s Lived Religion group, the history research centre TELEMME (UMR 7303 CNRS, Aix-Marseille University) and the Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique(GIS) “Institut du Genre”. As both projects matured, it became apparent that they presented some tantalisingly comparable questions; the present issue intends to offer a discussion between these two distinct yet complementary approaches to religious lives,experiences and practices. The different perspectives of contemporary sociological approaches to recovering past understanding of lived religion, case studies of female spirituality, and the methods of book history have particularly informed this project. The intersections of day-to-day life, public worship and personal belief among the clergy, the laity, and women religious are the central objects of study across this issue of E-rea. The preferred textual forms, emphasis on lived examples, and social and political preoccupations of the subjects themselves have given us our key themes: biographies, autobiographies and diaries; living examples; charity, work and care; negotiating uniformity and conformity
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