Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain Edited by Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie (review)

Abstract

EARLY MODERN EUROPEAN Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain. Edited by Jessica Martin and Alec Ryrie. [St. Andrews Studies in Reformation History.] (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing. 2012. Pp. xi, 285. $134.95. ISBN 978-1-40943131-2.)This is an excellent and illuminating collection that not only deepens our understanding of lived religion in Protestant England and Scotland; it also showcases some of the innovative new directions and methodologies employed by those studying early-modern religious cultures. The volume explores the myriad ways in which people prayed when they were not in church and serves as a companion volume to Natalie Mears and Alec Ryrie's edited collection Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain (Burlington, VT, 2013). Indeed, the relationship between private devotion in the household and public worship in the parish church is a persistent refrain in the volume. For instance, in the volume's opening chapter Ian Green characterizes devotion as a blend of official or clerical recommendations with personal preferences and priorities. Jane Dawson's chapter on the Scottish context similarly demonstrates that the Christian duty to practice private devotion was closely supervised by the Kirk, whose elders sought to shape the household into a domestic seminary.Following these overviews are chapters that explore where people prayed and how they prayed, revealing the sheer variety of opportunities available to contemporaries; the volume's interdisciplinary approach allows for wide-ranging coverage of these. Literary scholars Micheline White, Jessica Martin, and Alison Shell explore the texts that people used to structure and focus their devotions, revealing strong continuities with earlier pre-Reformation practices whilst also indicating the strategies adopted by evangelicals to persuade people to adopt new devotional habits. Prayer as a means to change embedded practices is also an issue with which Ryrie engages in his admirable chapter on devout activities associated with sleep, a chapter that is also a reminder of the evangelical principle of strict spiritual discipline during every moment of life, waking or not. Many of the chapters survey the devotional aids available to the laity to assist and guide their spiritual regimeadvice literature, prayer manuals and handbooks were thick on the ground, and devotions utilizing the Psalms were evidently extremely widespread, as both Beth Quitsland and Hannibal Hamlin show. In her innovative chapter focusing on the place of visual and material artifacts in household devotion, Tara Hamling persuasively argues that practice also continued to rely on visual and material props, which served as visual emblems of godly identity and agents of comfort as well as practical aids to memory. …