ABSTRACT

The title of this volume, Getting Along, is borrowed from one of W.J. Sheils’ more recent articles – ‘“Getting on” and “getting along” in parish and town: Catholics and their neighbours in England’ – published in a collection of essays on Catholic communities in Britain and the Netherlands from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries.1 Analysing the place of Catholics in communities in Yorkshire, the Midlands and London, Sheils underscored how harmonious relations between supposedly embattled confessions proved to be, even at times of political turmoil. Noting that early modern people belonged to families, kin, trades, professions and parishes as much as confessional groupings, Sheils posited that we could better understand the complexities of the ‘ecumenicity of the everyday’ if

we were to eschew the language of religion in favour of one of community, replacing discussion of ‘toleration’ with one of ‘neighbourliness’.2 That is to say, by focusing on how religious minorities ‘got on’ – seeking to improve their social, political and cultural standing – whilst ‘getting along’ – maintaining cordial relations – with their neighbours. To do so is to present a more holistic vision of the parish, placing inter-relations between faiths in the fuller complement of the forces, constraints and obligations acting upon early modern people. By arguing that social relationships and pragmatism often outweighed confessional divisions in early modern communities, this article contributes to a burgeoning field of scholarship which highlights the cordial interactions between groups of different faiths. This trend serves as a corrective to narratives of post-Reformation history which continues to be written from a national-confessional standpoint.3 Social historians of the Reformation period are increasingly moving away from understanding the church and confessional groups as monolithic and rigid entities towards an appreciation of the diversity, complexity and unpredictability of shifting religious faiths in situ.4 The impact of the emergence of environments with a multiplicity of religious identities is best characterized at the local level, rather than in the doctrinal statements of states and their churches. Admittedly, the deep-set impulse towards peace and harmony which formed the ‘moral tradition’ underpinning European society was strained by the multiplication of religious groups.5 Nonetheless, recent historiography has underscored the mutual cooperation of differing

confessional groups, arguing that neighbourly accommodations and compromises forged a social peace in the face of officially prescribed intolerance. These researchers recognise that the polemical divisions of early modern theology were not necessarily replicated in the practicalities of ordinary life amongst contending confessional groups of Christians. Rather, what emerges is an integrationist account of the means by which communities mitigated the seismic upheavals of the Reformation. A linear, empiricist understanding of church history has given way to the portrayal of the early modern parish as a civil-spiritual organism constantly negotiated and re-imagined. Historians have labelled this process ‘cooperative confessionalism’, ‘practical rationality’ or ‘the ecumenicity of the everyday’.6 Such terminology more accurately reflects the fact that ‘confessional relations were ambiguous and shaped more by [everyday] contingencies than the higher principles of faith’.7