Introduction

Historians of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century religion have the luxury of their subject being regarded as integral to the wider history of their eras. From the Protestant Reformations through the Civil Wars and on to the Glorious Revolution, religion served as one of the driving motors of historical change in Britain. Rightly, few would ask Diarmaid MacCulloch, Patrick Collinson, or Peter Lake to justify a study of the Edwardian Reformation, Edmund Grindal, or Puritanism in early Stuart England. Yet scholars of religion in eighteenth-century Britain have often felt compelled to prove their subject's very worth. The reasons for this extra burden of proof are various and have been considered in detail by others, but three stand out as particularly important. In the post-revolutionary calm of the eighteenth century when religious strife did not spark internecine war, religious conviction recedes from the centre stage of historical causation. Likewise, the centrality of religion to the nation's political, cultural, and social life fits uneasily into the prevailing grand narratives of the period, which stubbornly continue to understand the eighteenth century as a jumping-off point for the modem (hence, secular) world.1 And, finally, the established Church of England-which, until the late eighteenth century, commanded at least the nominal support of nearly 90 per cent of the population-has come in for sustained criticism from many of those who have written its history: anticlericals attacked its privileged legal position, later high churchmen found it too latitudinarian, Tractarians thought it too erastian, evangelicals faulted it for its intolerance of Methodism, and Victorian church reformers thought it corrupt and negligent.2 Indeed, the

1 See, for instance, Alan Houston and Steve Pincus, "Introduction: Modernity and later-seventeenth-century England', in idem (eds.), A Nation Transformed: England after the Restoration (Cambridge, 2001). pp. 1-19 and Roy Porter, The Creation of the Modern World: The Untold Story of the British Enlightenment (New York and London, 2000). For Europe more generally, see Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity, 1650-1750 (Oxford and New York, 2001). B.W. Young, 'Religious History and the EighteenthCentury Historian', Historical Journal 43:3 (September 2000), pp. 849-68 illumines the increasing secularization of the historiography of religion in eighteenth-century Britain.