Introduction

Abstract

This volume samples from the best current scholarship on religion and politics in early modern Britain in order to highlight one future line of inquiry for the field. The goal is to draw attention to practice as an organizing category and focal point. The volume is also meant to honour Peter Lake. My aim in this Introduction is to distil the pivotal contribution that Lake himself has made to the burgeoning historiography of practice and to show how his work points to further opportunities. This Introduction has five parts. The first summarizes and conceptualizes Lake’s version of the post-revisionist commitment to the primacy of perceptions in political and religious life. The second part explains how Lake’s concern with communicative action became the basis of a burgeoning body of scholarship on the ‘public sphere’. The third part identifies some of the inevitable gaps between Lake’s work on public politics and a fully fledged history of political and religious practices. The fourth part completes the task with recourse to broader theoretical perspectives on practice, institutions, and structural transformation drawn from the work of sociologists, economists, and other historians. The Introduction’s conclusion uses this conceptual framework to connect Lake’s work with scholarship on the history of practices in early modern Britain that falls outside the subfields of political and religious history. Throughout the Introduction, I point to specific chapters in the present volume as exemplars of the developments under discussion.