Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies Vol. 34 No.

4 (2011)

Religion: Faith in the Age of Reason jecs_440 435..444

J E R E M Y G R E G O RY

Abstract: This essay reviews some of the key developments in research into
religion since JECS was founded in 1978. In the late 1970s the dominant
paradigm was to view the eighteenth century as the Age of Reason, whose
principal characteristic was a secularising Enlightenment. Since then the
Enlightenment itself has been reconceptualised, and scholars are more alive
to the positive relationship between the Enlightenment and religion.
Moreover, religion is now viewed as being crucial to politics, questions of
national identity and cultural matters – in short, as being more vital to the
eighteenth century in 2011 than it was in 1978.

Keywords: religion, enlightenment, reason, secularisation, church

A useful way of assessing the current state of research into religion in the
long eighteenth century is to compare the situation now with that in 1978,
when this journal was founded. In the late 1970s religion, if thought about at
all, was generally viewed as being increasingly marginal to the period. After
all, in the most commonly used epithets for the eighteenth century, this was
‘The Age of Reason’ or ‘The Enlightenment’, where reason was deemed to
have been on the wining offensive against religion. One of the most influential
models of the century current in 1978 had been established by Peter Gay’s
two-volume blockbuster The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, whose two
individual volume titles, The Birth of Modern Paganism (1967) and The Science
of Freedom (1970), captured what were conventionally regarded as the
dominant developments of the age. In this scenario the Enlightenment
was viewed as a modernising attack on religion tout court (seeing all forms
of religion as no better than backward-looking superstition) and on
institutionalised churches and clergy more particularly, where Voltaire’s cry
‘Écrasez l’Infâme’ could be taken as representing the spirit of the century. In
this interpretation the salient characteristic of the period was the birth of
secularisation, where in all walks of life – political, intellectual, social,
cultural and economic – religious priorities were on the wane.1
This meant that in 1978 major eighteenth-century developments were seen
in largely secular terms. The ‘Glorious’, American and French revolutions, for
example, were all understood as purely political, economic or social events
and as representing the (inevitable) triumph of secular concerns over what

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436 JEREMY GREGORY

were regarded as the outmoded religious considerations of the past. Scholars

emphasised the ‘modern’ constitutional and even quasi-democratic nature of
these occurrences and all but ignored any religious motivations, justifications
or consequences. Culturally too, developments such as the rise of the novel,
the growing interest in realist and landscape painting, and musical
innovations were viewed as marking a shift from an obsession with religious
matters to a growing preoccupation with this-worldly themes and the
here-and-now.
The neglect of religious topics by mainstream eighteenth-century
historians and cultural critics in 1978 could be explained by two separate but
interrelated factors. Not only was the overarching model of the century one of
secularisation (and even historians of religion tended to subscribe to this), but
also state churches throughout eighteenth-century Europe (Catholic and
Protestant alike) and their clergy were often regarded as lethargic, if not
corrupt, and distanced from the bulk of their parishioners, or at best as just
worldly and lacking any ‘real’ sense of religion, despite the efforts of insider
historians to rehabilitate their reputations. Repeating some of the strictures of
Voltaire and other Enlightenment figures, clergy of all denominations were
frequently criticised for being pastorally somnolent and preoccupied with
lining their own pockets, and censured for falling short of the ideals of various
religious reform movements founded in both the seventeenth and the
nineteenth centuries.
Even studies of religion tended to echo the secularising interpretation
and were more concerned with questions of religious attendance than
with questions of belief, or at least tended to posit a rather simplistic
correlation between the former and the latter. French historians, for
example, were busy producing mammoth statistical and sociological
analyses of religious adherence almost always fixated on demonstrating
the de-christianisation and secularisation associated with the French
Revolution, charting how quickly this took place, how far it may have
pre-dated the events of 1789 and how far it was a popular movement
or imposed from above.2 Rather ironically, it was an Englishman, John
McManners, whose French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime:
A Study of Angers in the Eighteenth Century (1960) had brought to life the
place of the Church in French society, and who would soon publish Death
and the Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and
Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century France (1981), who would help bring the
study of religious mentalities to the eighteenth century. Perhaps the nearest
English equivalent to the French obsession with measuring and counting
religion was Alan Gilbert’s chronologically wide-ranging Religion and
Industrial Society: Church, Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914 (1976), which
used a statistical approach to argue that eighteenth-century urbanisation
and industrialisation provided the seedbed first for challenges to the
monopoly of the Church of England and then for the secularisation of
society.3

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 Religion: Faith in the Age of Reason 437

Apart from these sociologically informed studies, the bulk of research done
on religion up to 1978 tended to be carried out by insiders, documenting the
history of their own churches and religious denominations, and these were
either heavily institutionally based or concentrated on religious leaders and
professionals. But these were rarely integrated into the dominant narratives
of the period and did not impinge on the wider social, political and cultural
history of the age. Instead, religion was seen by political, social, economic
and intellectual historians as a discrete entity, held to be almost of only
antiquarian interest, with no real purchase on the broader history of the age.
As such, most felt, it could be safely left to denominational insiders. There was
in 1978 a long-standing interest in the history of John Wesley and early
Methodism, but this was virtually always written by historians who were
themselves Methodists and directed towards an internal audience. In any
case, scholars were often uncertain about how to relate topics such as the
Evangelical Revival to the general trajectory of the age. How far, for example,
should it be regarded as a countercultural reaction to the general secularising
trends of the age, or how far should it be linked to movements in the future,
such as Romanticism? Moreover, in overviews of the period, religion was
either hardly mentioned or was relegated to a separate chapter, often tagged
on to the end of the volume almost as an afterthought which readers and
students could study as an add-on extra if they so wished, but only after they
had covered the really important topics of mainstream political, social and
cultural history. For English historians the one area where social and political
historians did show some interest in religion was in the wake of the
spellbinding Chapter 11 of E. P. Thompson’s The Making of the English Working
Class (1963), on ‘The Transforming Power of the Cross’, after which a
generation of social historians of the late eighteenth century became
interested in the political and social effects of Methodism. But this interest was
a back-handed compliment, since Thompson’s view of Methodism was that it
went against the progressive story he was wanting to tell and was, for him, a
chillingly repressive force, running counter to his agency-giving account of
the rise of the working class.4
In 1978 eighteenth-century religion, reflecting the Western and European
biases of academia, invariably meant Christianity. There were some studies of
Judaism (and these focused on personalities such as Moses Mendelssohn, who
could be credited with bringing the Enlightenment to the Jewish faith), but
generally treatment of other religions was limited to perceptions of non-
Christian faiths by eighteenth-century European writers or the interactions
of Christianity and other religions, as shown, for example, in the Chinese
rites controversy. Studies such as these would soon find fruit in two
groundbreaking books: The Great Map of Mankind (1982), by P. J. Marshall and
Glwyndr Williams, and David A. Pailin’s Attitudes to other Religions (1984).5
Since the late 1970s there has been a remarkable transformation in the way
that scholars view the place of religion in the eighteenth century. One of the
most significant historiographical developments during the past thirty years

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has been the way in which what is meant by ‘the Enlightenment’ has become
broader and more complicated. Rather than seeing it as a necessarily
anti-religious force, scholars have widened their understanding and, in
particular, have suggested that there were other models than the French
version of the Enlightenment. In 1981 Roy Porter, whose vast number of
publications often celebrated this conventional version of the Enlightenment
and who certainly played up the anti-religious and a-religious voices of the
age, nevertheless, in a prescient essay on ‘The Enlightenment in England’,
recognised the part played by clergy in the Enlightenment enterprise where
reason and piety could go hand in hand.6 Porter’s emphasis on the alliance
between religion and the Enlightenment was mirrored and developed in a
number of studies, such as John Gascoigne’s Cambridge in the Age of
Enlightenment (1989), Knud Haakonssen’s edited collection Enlightenment and
Religion (1996) and Brian Young’s Religion and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-
Century England (1998).7 More lately, scholars working on British history have
argued that the Enlightenment was not necessarily anti-religious at all, and
the relationship between ‘religious’ and ‘Enlightenment’ concerns is now one
of the most fruitful areas of research. Jane Shaw’s Miracles in Enlightenment
England (2006), for example, has demonstrated how a large range of
commentators were able to balance ‘religious enthusiasm’ with ‘reason’, and
her reading incorporates elements of the supernatural into an Enlightenment
world-view that clearly challenges older models of an Enlightenment hostile
to religious sensibilities. Moreover, Phyllis Mack’s stunning Heart Religion in
the British Enlightenment (2008) sees interesting and complex links between
the evangelical religion of the heart and the ideals of the Enlightenment,
transcending older models which saw religion and Enlightenment as polar
opposites.8 Likewise, scholars of European history now talk regularly of a
‘Catholic Enlightenment’, a concept that once would have been deemed
oxymoronic, exploring how sections of the Catholic Church engaged with
enlightened thought and reform.9
If religion itself is now understood to be more central to eighteenth-century
life and thought than it was in the late 1970s, then it is not surprising that its
role in mainstream history and culture has been re-emphasised. In many
ways J. C. D. Clark’s highly revisionist English Society, 1688-1832 (1985)
remains the most overt and influential statement of why religion had to be put
back on to the centre stage of English political and social history.10 Clark’s
main argument is that, rather than seeing secularising change and
modernity as the hallmark of the century, we need to recognise the crucial
role that traditional forces such as religion, alongside the monarchy and
aristocracy, played in the period, thereby emphasising what the eighteenth
century had in common with the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rather
than, as is conventionally the case, highlighting its anticipation of modernity.
Famously, he designated eighteenth-century England as a ‘confessional state’.
In particular, Clark emphasised the role of political theology and the religi-
ous implications of the ‘Glorious’, American and French revolutions,

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 Religion: Faith in the Age of Reason 439

characterising the American struggle for independence as ‘a war of

religion’.11 Similarly, although her overall interpretation of the period differed
from Clark in that she was interested in what was novel about the period,
Linda Colley emphasised the vital importance of Protestantism in creating a
new ‘British’ identity after the 1707 Act of Union in her seminal book Britons
(1992).12
The connection between religion and national identity has continued to be
a fertile topic. A recent example is the thoughtful and wide-ranging study by
Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community (2009), which puts post-
Revolutionary Catholicism and Jacobitism within an Enlightenment context
and examines the issues for national identity raised by an international
religious movement. In similar ways, in a major series of studies, David
Hempton has integrated Methodism into the broader political and social
history of the period and has explored the relationship between religion and
national and international identity, culminating in his Methodism: Empire of
the Spirit (2005). Carla Pestana’s study Protestant Empire (2009) has stressed
the importance of religion in joining up the transatlantic world, and its
centrality to British colonial relations.13
Furthermore, where traditionally the eighteenth century had been seen as
a nadir in the history of established churches throughout Europe, their
reputations have been reconsidered during the last twenty-five years or so.14
In particular, for the Church of England there has emerged what might be
called a revisionist school of historians whose detailed work, particularly on
what the Church was doing at the local and diocesan level, has modified and
in some cases reversed the more negative opinions of some of their
predecessors.15 Rather than dwelling on the failures and shortcomings of the
established Church, they have highlighted instead its successes and strengths,
and have argued that in many respects the Church was more effective than
at any time since the Reformation. The Church is now seen as having been
more pastorally dynamic than traditional interpretations allowed, which has
raised questions about the relationship between Methodism, Evangelicalism
and ‘mainstream’ Anglicanism. Importantly, too, this revisionist view
is beginning to influence some historians writing outside the confines of
‘Church history’. Carolyn Steedman’s groundbreaking Master and Servant
(2007) is the first major study by a leading social historian to take seriously
the revisionist approaches to the eighteenth-century Church, where the
‘master’ of the title, the hero of the book, is a late eighteenth-century Church
of England cleric whose charitable attitude to his unmarried pregnant
servant, and then her daughter, made him a model of the clerical
professional.16 Since 1978 scholars have also begun to uncover much more
about the religious views of the laity, although there is much still to do here.
William Jacob’s study of lay piety (1996) was a landmark project, as in some
ways was the earlier publication of the diary of the Sussex shopkeeper
Thomas Turner, which gave a vivid portrayal of how religion and the Church
were central to his life, and which has been much quoted.17

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A further development has been to place religion within the wider forces for
change in the period, pace Clark’s emphasis on religion as a vital aspect of
the ancien régime. As evidence of religion’s engagement with the modern,
scholars have cited: the individualism and inner reflection encouraged by
many of the newer versions of Christianity developed in the period, as well as
their ability to form new religious and social communities;18 the charitable
and benevolent projects established in the name of religion, including the
crucial contribution made by religion to the abolition of the slave trade;19
the global push of eighteenth-century religion, which moved peoples around
the world;20 and the educational and publishing endeavours whereby religion
harnessed, developed and even pioneered new forms of media.21 Moreover,
cultural historians are beginning to explore some of the religious contexts of
eighteenth-century artistic and literary developments.22
All this work has added much more nuance to our understanding of
eighteenth-century religion, and certainly much of it would have surprised
readers of this journal in 1978. An excellent distillation of the latest research
on eighteenth-century Christianity can be found in volume 7 of The
Cambridge History of Christianity.23 This spans large parts of the world
(testimony not only to the global aspirations of Christianity in the eighteenth
century but also to the growing interest in non-European countries now
shown by Western historians) and places developments within Christianity in
the period firmly in their social, cultural, intellectual and political contexts.
Naturally, the eighteenth century will also be covered in the forthcoming New
Cambridge History of Islam, although The Cambridge History of Judaism has not
yet progressed beyond the early Middle Ages. It is not clear whether it will
actually reach our period, although if the eighteenth century is to be
understood globally, it will, of course, need to do so. Interesting work is also
being done on religion in Asia in the eighteenth century as well as on Native
American and African religions, moving beyond the views of Christian
missionaries to uncover, as far as we can, these differing world-views on their
own terms.24
The generally current buoyant state of the study of religion in the
eighteenth century can also be indicated by its capacity to secure grants from
funding bodies. During the last decade the UK’s Arts and Humanities
Research Council (AHRC) and Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC),
along with the Leverhulme Trust, have funded several major projects relating
at least in part to eighteenth-century religious topics. Notable examples
include the Church of England Clergy Database, the British State Prayers
Project, the Dissenting Academies Project and a prosopographical study of
English convents in exile, Who Were the Nuns?25 A hallmark of all these
projects has been the exploitation of new computer technologies. Further
evidence of the renewed centrality of eighteenth-century religion to a variety
of academic disciplines is provided by a number of UK centres recently
established to foster research in the subject. One is the Centre for Dissenting
Studies, set up by Queen Mary University, London, in collaboration with Dr

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 Religion: Faith in the Age of Reason 441

Williams’s Library. Another is the Centre for Methodism and Church History
at Oxford Brookes University. Religious topics feature much more prominently
in mainstream conferences now than they did in 1978, and in this regard the
‘religious turn’ can be dated as long ago to the History Workshop conference
in 1983, which adopted religion as its theme and where a number of
eighteenth-century papers were given. Clearly the theme has by no means
been exhausted. The British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies took
‘Religions and Beliefs’ as the theme for its 2008 Annual Conference.26
In addition, and reflecting the still growing interest in eighteenth-century
religion, a journal devoted to the subject was established in 2009: Religion in
the Age of Enlightenment (AMS Press). In broad terms, key areas that were
rarely considered in 1978 are now placed in the forefront of the latest research
on religion, such as the interest in lay religion and ‘lived religion’, and on
gender and religion, including the until recently almost totally ignored
topic of the relationship between religion and masculinity.27 All these
developments have helped to make the study of religion more central to those
who work outside the field of ‘Church history’ as traditionally conceived. In
2011 the place of religion in the long eighteenth century looks far more vital
than it did in 1978.

NOTES
1. Peter Gay, The Enlightenment: An Interpretation, 2 vols (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1967, 1970).
2. For example, Michel Vovelle, Piété baroque et déchristianisation en Provence au XVIIIe siècle:
les attitudes devant la mort d’après les clauses des testaments (Paris: Plon, 1973), and the same
author’s Religion et révolution: la déchristianisation de l’an II (Paris: Hachette, 1976).
3. John McManners, French Ecclesiastical Society under the Ancien Régime: A Study of Angers in
the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1960), and Death and the
Enlightenment: Changing Attitudes to Death among Christians and Unbelievers in Eighteenth-Century
France (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981); Alan D. Gilbert, Religion and Industrial Society: Church,
Chapel and Social Change, 1740-1914 (London: Longman, 1976).
4. E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; rev. edn, Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1968).
5. P. J. Marshall and Glwyndr Williams, The Great Map of Mankind: Perceptions of New Worlds
in the Age of Enlightenment (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1982), and David A. Pailin, Attitudes to
Other Religions: Comparative Religion in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Britain (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1984).
6. Roy Porter, ‘The Enlightenment in England’, in Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (eds), The
Enlightenment in National Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p.1-18.
Contrast this nuanced view with the more usual secularising viewpoint found in his larger
publications: for example, Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World (London:
Allen Lane, 2000).
7. John Gascoigne, Cambridge in the Age of Enlightenment: Science, Religion and Politics from
the Restoration to the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Knud
Haakonssen (ed.), Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brian Young, Religion and Enlightenment in
Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
8. Jane Shaw, Miracles in Enlightenment England (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
2006); Phyllis Mack, Heart Religion in the British Enlightenment: Gender and Emotion in Early
Methodism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).
9. See Ulrich L. Lehner and Michael Printy (eds), A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment
in Europe (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2010), Ulrich L. Lehner, Enlightened Monks: The German

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442 JEREMY GREGORY

Benedictines, 1740-1803 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), and Michael Printy,
Enlightenment and the Creation of German Catholicism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009).
10. J. C. D. Clark, English Society, 1688-1832: Ideology, Social Structure and Political Practice
during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), rev. as English Society,
1660-1832: Religion, Ideology and Politics during the Ancien Régime (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2000).
11. J. C. D. Clark, The Language of Liberty, 1660-1832: Political Discourse and Social Dynamics
in the Anglo-American World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
12. Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707-1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1992).
13. Gabriel Glickman, The English Catholic Community: Politics, Culture and Ideology, 1688-1745
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2009); David Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and
Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), The Religion of the People: Methodism and
Popular Religion, c.1750-1900 (New York: Routledge, 1996), and Methodism: Empire of the Spirit
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005); Carla Pestana, Protestant Empire, Religion and the
Making of the British Atlantic World (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
14. For France, see, John McManners, Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France, 2 vols
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).
15. Contributions to this re-assessment include: J. Walsh, C. Haydon and S. Taylor (eds), The
Church of England, c.1689-c.1833: From Toleration to Tractarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1993); Mark Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth,
1740-1865 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); Judith Jago, Aspects of the Georgian Church:
Visitation Studies of the Diocese of York, 1761-1776 (Cranberry, NJ: Associated University Presses,
1996); Jeremy Gregory, Restoration, Reformation, and Reform, 1660-1828: Archbishops of
Canterbury and their Diocese (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); J. Gregory and J. S.
Chamberlain (eds), The National Church in Local Perspective: The Church of England and the Regions,
1660-1800 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003); W. M. Jacob, The Clerical Profession in the Long
Eighteenth Century, 1680-1840 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Robert G. Ingram,
Religion, Reform and Modernity in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Secker and the Church of England
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2007).
16. Carolyn Steedman, Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
17. W. M. Jacob, Lay People and Religion in the Early Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1996); David Vaisey (ed.), The Diary of Thomas Turner, 1754-1765 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1984).
18. Mack, Heart Religion; Hempton, Methodism. See also, for the end of the long eighteenth
century, the important work done by scholars involved with the Oxford University Prophecy
Project, notably Deborah Madden, The Paddington Prophet: Richard Brothers’s Journey to Jerusalem
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010).
19. For example, see Mark Goldie, ‘Voluntary Anglicans’, The Historical Journal 46 (2003),
p.977-90.
20. For the example of the global push of Methodism, see Hempton, Methodism.
21. For one example, see Barbara Prosser, ‘“An Arrow from a Quiver”: Written Instruction for
a Reading People. John Wesley’s Arminian Magazine (January 1778-February 1791)’, PhD thesis,
University of Manchester, 2008.
22. For example, E. Derek Taylor, Reason and Religion in ‘Clarissa’: Samuel Richardson and ‘the
Famous Mr Norris, of Bemerton’ (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009), and Nigel Aston, Art and Religion in
Eighteenth-Century Europe (London: Reaktion, 2009). See also Kathryn Duncan (ed.), Religion in
the Age of Reason: A Transatlantic Study of the Long Eighteenth Century, AMS Studies in the
Eighteenth Century, 53 (New York: AMS Press, 2009).
23. The Cambridge History of Christianity, vol. 7: Enlightenment, Reawakening and Revolution,
1660-1815, ed. Stewart J. Brown and Timothy Tackett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
24. Will Sweetman, Mapping Hinduism: ‘Hinduism’ and the Study of Indian Religions, 1600-1776
(Halle: Franckesche Stiftungen zu Halle, 2003); Kwang-Chung Liu and Richard Shek (eds),
Heterodoxy in Late Imperial China (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2004); Joel W. Martin,
The Land Looks after Us: a History of Native American Religion (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001).

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 Religion: Faith in the Age of Reason 443

25. Church of England Clergy database: http://www.clergydatabase.org.uk; British

State Prayers Project: http://www.dur.ac.uk/history/research/research_projects/british_
state_prayers; Dissenting Academies Project: http://www.sussex.ac.uk/cih/research/
dissentingacademies/; Who Were the Nuns? A Prosopographical Study of the English Convents
in Exile, 1600-1800: http://www.history.qmul.ac.uk/wwtn/index.html [accessed 6 May 2011].
26. Some of the contributions to the 1983 History Workshop conference were published in
Jim Obelkevich, Lyndal Roper and Raphael Samuel (eds), Disciplines of Faith: Studies in Religion,
Politics and Patriarchy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1987). Papers from the 2008 BSECS
conference were published in JECS, including my ‘Transforming “the Age of Reason” into “an
Age of Faiths”; or, Putting Religions and Beliefs (Back) into the Eighteenth Century’, Journal for
Eighteenth-Century Studies 32:3 (2009), p.287-306.
27. William Van Reyk, ‘Christian Ideals of Manliness in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth
Centuries’, The Historical Journal 52 (2009), p.1053-73.

jeremy gregory is Professor of the History of Christianity and Head of the School of Arts,
Histories and Cultures at the University of Manchester. He has written widely on religious topics
in the long eighteenth century, particularly on the Church of England and on Methodism. He is
currently researching the Church of England in Colonial British North America.

© 2011 British Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies