Sound faith: religion and the aural environment of towns in northern England, ca. 1740-1830

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ABSTRACT This article focuses on how sound – and hearing – shaped the relationship between religion and the urban environment in the rapidly industrialising towns of eighteenth-century northern England. Examining individual responses to sounds, it argues that not only did a religious ear help contemporaries to navigate and interpret urban space, but the sounds of the town could act as a stimulus to religiosity. It therefore challenges a prevailing historiographical tendency to associate urbanisation with declining religiosity, and instead argues for the importance of faith to how contemporaries inhabited and interpreted industrialising towns.