Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain, ed. Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie

Abstract

This volume is one of a pair which arises out of the activities during 2008 of an ARHC-funded research network centred around questions of worship and devotion in the early modern period, organised by Jessica Martin, Alec Ryrie, Natalie Mears and Judith Maltby. While the companion volume (edited by Mears and Ryrie, also published by Ashgate, 2012) explores Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain, this collection of essays considers the more secret world of private and domestic religion. The issue of how individuals and households actually practised their religion outside the ritual and ceremony of public worship has, the editors note, ‘been left remarkably unexplored, both by literary scholars and especially by historians’ (p. 3). This is perhaps overstating things a little, but it is certainly true that we know much less about private religion than we do about public worship, in part for obvious reasons of evidence, but also because Reformation historians have indeed been slow to ask these sorts of questions.