Abstract
Popular religion, like other aspects of popular culture, is undoubtedly an elusive quarry. Plainly the focus of inquiry is the experiences of people below the ranks of the aristocracy and gentry and of other social and intellectual elites. But beyond this the issues are controversial, while the wide variety of existing approaches to ‘popular culture’ suggests that there can never be a single, authoritative definition. Certainly Peter Burke’s influential model of ‘elite’ and ‘popular’ culture, and his related theory of a ‘reform of popular culture’ in the three centuries after 1500, are no longer regarded as satisfactory. Although Burke built into his arguments numerous caveats and qualifications, the model remains at base a stubbornly bi-polar one that makes it hard to do justice to the infinite gradations of the social hierarchy (and in particular to the middling social groups who straddled the world of the elites and of the common people), to the cultural variations to be found at any point on the social spectrum, to regional variations or to gender differences. It also tends to obscure areas of shared meanings — elements of common culture which persisted throughout the centuries of ‘reform’. More fundamentally, the approach is vulnerable to criticisms that assume a different model of cultural diversity, for example that of the French historian Roger Chartier.
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Bibliography
Studies of the religious history of this period are legion, but few are couched specifically in terms of popular culture. Barry Reay, ‘Popular Religion’, in Barry Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1985), is a lively, wide-ranging recent survey, while Imogen Luxton, “The Reformation and Popular Culture”, in Felicity Heal and Rosemary O’Day (eds), Church and Society in England; Henry VIII to James I (London: Macmillan, 1977), was when it appeared a highly innovative piece focusing on the shifting balance between words and symbols, and still repays careful attention. Sir Keith Thomas’s magisterial Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth-and Seventeenth-Century England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1971) was written before the term ‘popular culture’ became fashionable, but the sub-title suggests a closely related conceptual framework. This giant of a book is far and away the best introduction to popular religious cultures, and has been enormously influential. However, its concentration on witchcraft, magic, astrology, popular superstition and religious ignorance, indifference and scepticism perhaps gives an exaggerated impression of their significance, while at the same time privileging ‘religion’ over ‘magic’ as an intellectual and philosophical system. Another view which has had a substantial impact is that of Keith Wrightson, presented most succinctly in his English Society, 1580–1680 (London: Hutchinson, 1982), Ch. 7, but developed in other works including Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (London: Academic Press, 1979). This interpretation, based on a contrast between the ‘godly’ minority of pious believers and the less religious ‘multitude’, relates religious change to a more general model of social and cultural polarisation. However, its terms of reference derive from the writings of contemporary Puritan moralists and are inevitably compromised by their partisan vision, while the social and cultural model is essentially a bipolar one that does not do justice to the complexities and subtleties of contemporary English religious cultures, in particular by underemphasising unspectacular orthodoxy.
An attempt to redress the balance in favour of the conforming majority, and also to reassert the centrality of religious beliefs and practices within the broad framework of the official church, may be seen in Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1570–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), esp. Ch. 3. The importance of the ‘reality of religion’ for the ‘ordinary villager’ had earlier been stressed in Margaret Spufford, Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1974), which also provides an interesting discussion of Cambridgeshire dissent. John Morrill’s ‘The Church in England, 1642–9’, in John Morrill (ed.), Reactions to the English Civil War (London: Macmillan, 1982) argues for enduring attachment to the Anglican church during the Civil Wars and Interregnum. The importance of the parish church in the religious culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries — and indeed of earlier and later periods too — is also the theme of Susan Wright (ed.), Parish, Church and People: Local Studies in Lay Religion, 1350–1750 (London: Hutchinson, 1988), which among other valuable contributions includes Donald Spaeth’s essay on the under-explored topic of late seventeenth-century popular Anglicanism.
Numerous works, with varying emphases on popular religious culture (however defined), may be consulted on specific topics and periods. The best evocation of pre-Reformation religious culture is Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England, c.1400-c.1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), but it is less satisfactory on the process of change. Moreover it says virtually nothing about the current of self-conscious dissent known as Lollardy, on which see Anne Hudson, The Premature Reformation: Wyclijfite Texts and Lollard History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). The ‘Reformation’, as a term and as a topic, is now highly contentious. A. G. Dickens, The English Reformation (London: B. T. Batsford, 1964; revised edition, 1989) argues for a groundswell of dissatisfaction with the late medieval church. The contrary view, which presents that church as ‘unchallenged’, ‘Reformation’ as a set of changes contingent on political circumstances, and the outcome of these developments as the partial failure of Protestantism at the popular level, is vigorously argued in Christopher Haigh, English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). One feature of the impact of the Reformation on English culture — popular and otherwise — is imaginatively explored by Margaret Aston, England’s Iconoclasts, Vol. I: Laws against Images (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988); another by Christopher Hill, The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution (Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 1993). Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) charts the emergence of a post-Reformation popular culture in ballads, prints and chapbooks; David Cressy, Bonfires and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1989) deals with yet another dimension of cultural change. The most interesting book on a controversial subject is John Bossy, The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (London: Darton, Longman & Todd, 1975), but for a briefer introduction and judicious survey of the debates, see Alan Dures, English Catholicism, 1558–1642 (London: Longman, 1983); unfortunately neither work pays as much attention to the lower ranks of society as might be wished. The essential guide to Puritanism is Patrick Collinson. Of his various works perhaps the most directly relevant to popular religion is The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society, 1559–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), especially Ch. 5; but see also The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: Macmillan, 1988); Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism (London: Hambledon Press, 1983); and The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967). Excellent insights into the life of a Puritan layman of relatively low status are provided by Paul Seaver, Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London (London: Methuen, 1985), which is based closely on Wallington’s personal writings. For a different and highly stimulating view of Puritanism, which contrasts it with variants of parish Anglicanism, tries to relate it to regional cultural patterns, and argues for the importance of cultural conflicts in the Civil Wars, see David Under-down, Revel, Riot and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England, 1603–1660 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); some of these themes are further explored in a particular local context in the same author’s Fire from Heaven: The Life of an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London: Harper Collins, 1992). On the explosion of religious sects in the 1640s and 1650s see J. F. McGregor and B. Reay (eds), Radical Religion in the English Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984). The standard introduction to post-Restoration dissent is Michael Watts, The Dissenters: From the Reformation to the French Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), Pt III, but see also the important findings of Tim Harris, London Crowds in the Reign of Charles II: Propaganda and Politics from the Restoration until the Exclusion Crisis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The background to the Toleration Act is explored in Ole Peter Grell, Jonathan I. Israel and Nicholas Tyacke (eds), From Persecution to Toleration: The Glorious Revolution and Religion in England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991). By 1689, of course, the role of religion in England was in many respects different from what it had been 150 years earlier: the problem for the historian of culture is how best to conceptualise these changes. For one provocative solution, see C. John Sommerville, The Secularization of Early Modern England: From Religious Culture to Religious Faith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992).
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Ingram, M. (1995). From Reformation to Toleration: Popular Religious Cultures in England, 1540–1690. In: Harris, T. (eds) Popular Culture in England, c. 1500–1850. Themes in Focus. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-23971-9_5
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