‘A Godly Forme of Household’: Reading Reformed Religion in the Protestant Home

Abstract

For Protestants – especially those of a ‘hotter’ disposition (often, and still persistently, known as ‘puritans’) – religion and faith started in the household. The foundations of a truly godly person were, it was believed, laid at home – and especially in the building blocks set down in childhood. Household manuals, or ‘conduct books’, formed an influential genre of literature which sought to advise early modern households on correct familial order, discipline and godly religion. Works of this kind not only reflect Protestant ideas (and ideals) about how a family should be constructed and what it should look like; they also, in the very acts of their publication, purchase and reading, helped to construct early modern visions of family. For this and other reasons, household texts and other similar forms of conduct literature are fundamentally important if we are truly to understand the workings of reformed Protestant religion. As this chapter will demonstrate, such texts offer strong evidence for the recent historiographical contention that early modern Protestant faith in England existed on a continuum, and that the beliefs of the ‘hotter’ Protestants were relevant to reformed communities more broadly. Furthermore, household manuals and familial literature, often the focus primarily of historians of the family or household – and generally less considered by historians of wider Reformation culture – have much to tell us about the role that women and their lives played within the formation, and the lived experience, of godly culture. Excluding these texts, or confining them to the historiography of family life, creates a blind spot in our understanding of early modern Protestantism, a means for the filling of which this chapter will propose. 1 For further reading on the history of the early modern household, see Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie, Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012).