Faith in the town: lay religion, urbanisation and industrialisation in England, 1740-1830

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

Religious affiliations and beliefs are increasingly seen as central to understanding contemporary global politics and society. This modern focus on faith stands in sharp contrast to our knowledge of, and interest in, lay religion in an earlier period of wide-scale transformation in England. Historians studying the period from the mid eighteenth to the early nineteenth centuries often overlook faith, whilst those that do consider it tend to confine themselves to the structures and leaders of organised religion, rather than its followers. Though recent scholarship by historians of religion and the supernatural has indicated the continued importance of religious faith and other forms of belief amongst lay people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, dominant interpretations of urban society continue to follow older narratives of secularisation. Most historical studies thus describe a process of religious decline between 1740 and 1830 coexisting with the advent of 'modernity'. The continued influence of this interpretive model of secularisation on social, cultural and economic historians obscures not only our understanding of the lived experience of ordinary people, but also the ways in which many of the changes that we most associate with the development of modern society were shaped. By placing lay religious belief centre-stage, this project will demonstrate the influence of faith in the formation of some of the most important interpretive categories for examining modern society, including identity, family, space and trust. This will alter our understandings of the ways in which such societies functioned and provide a broad-ranging and ambitious re-evaluation of urban historical development of interest to a wide range of academic and non-academic audiences.