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

宗教归属和信仰越来越被视为理解当代全球政治和社会的核心。这种对信仰的现代关注与我们对英国早期大规模变革时期的世俗宗教的认识和兴趣形成了鲜明的对比。研究18世纪中期到19世纪早期这段时期的历史学家往往忽视了信仰，而那些确实考虑信仰的人往往将自己局限于有组织宗教的结构和领导人，而不是其追随者。虽然宗教和超自然历史学家的最新研究表明，宗教信仰和其他形式的信仰在18世纪和19世纪的普通人中仍然很重要，但对城市社会的主流解释仍然遵循着更古老的世俗化叙述。因此，大多数历史研究都描述了1740年至1830年间宗教衰落的过程，同时伴随着“现代性”的到来。这种世俗化的解释模式对社会、文化和经济历史学家的持续影响，不仅模糊了我们对普通人生活经验的理解，也模糊了我们与现代社会发展最相关的许多变化的形成方式。通过将世俗宗教信仰置于中心舞台，该项目将展示信仰对现代社会一些最重要的解释类别形成的影响，包括身份，家庭，空间和信任。这将改变我们对这些社会运作方式的理解，并为广泛的学术和非学术受众提供对城市历史发展的广泛而雄心勃勃的重新评估。

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.