Digital resources in the Social Sciences and Humanities OpenEdition Our platforms OpenEdition Books OpenEdition Journals Hypotheses Calenda Libraries OpenEdition Freemium Follow us
OpenEdition Search logo
You will be redirected to OpenEdition Search
Skip to content
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Members
    • Our partners
  • PhDs
  • Research posts
  • Resources
    • Podcasts
    • YouTube channel
    • HAL-SHS
  • Past Programmes (2010-2024)
    • Study groups (2021-2024)
      • Swift and modernity
        • Find all our ‘Swift’ events here
      • Lived Religion
        • Find all our ‘Lived Religion’ events here
        • Lived Religion papers
      • Texts and their afterlives
        • Find all our ‘Texts & their afterlives’ here
    • Mise en texte (2021-2023)
    • Progress (2018-2020)
    • Architecture (2014-2016)
    • Editing and translating (2012-2014)
    • Emotions (2010-2012)
  • Current programmes (2024-2028)
  • Vous avez dit moderne(s)?
  • Contacts

  • Home
  • About Us
    • Members
    • Our partners
  • PhDs
  • Research posts
  • Resources
    • Podcasts
    • YouTube channel
    • HAL-SHS
  • Past Programmes (2010-2024)
    • Study groups (2021-2024)
      • Swift and modernity
        • Find all our ‘Swift’ events here
      • Lived Religion
        • Find all our ‘Lived Religion’ events here
        • Lived Religion papers
      • Texts and their afterlives
        • Find all our ‘Texts & their afterlives’ here
    • Mise en texte (2021-2023)
    • Progress (2018-2020)
    • Architecture (2014-2016)
    • Editing and translating (2012-2014)
    • Emotions (2010-2012)
  • Current programmes (2024-2028)
  • Vous avez dit moderne(s)?
  • Contacts
  • Posts

Evidence of Lay Religious Devotion and Public Practice

by Laurence Lux-Sterritt · Published 11/04/2023 · Updated 25/01/2025

BRITAIX 17-18 welcomes you to its latest seminar on Lived Religion, which will be held via Zoom on Monday 17 April, from 16.30 to 18.30 (Paris time, or 15.30-17.30 BST).

To attend, please register via Eventbrite below.

 

W. M. JACOB, Evidence for Lay Religious Devotion and Public Practice in Eighteenth Century England


There appears to be little evidence from even the comparatively recent past of the early twentieth, the nineteenth and eighteenth centuries of religious practice in the home, or in public or private spaces. Prior to a national census of attendance at places of worship in 1851 there is little usable evidence about British church attendance. In any case, censuses of church attendance provide little evidence of people’s religiosity. Diaries and letters, when carefully read, provide indications of routines of daily household prayers and private devotional life, but such evidence is largely restricted to the ‘better-off’.  Printers’ and publishers’ lists  suggest that theological and devotional books and collections of sermons dominated the English publishing and bookselling trade during the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries. However, more oblique evidence can be gleaned from eighteenth century parish records showing the ‘middling sort’ played an active part in maintaining parish churches, levying rates to fund repairs and improving and beautifying their churches and building new churches. Much money was contributed for such purposes, and communal life in towns and villages centred on parish churches  (see W.M. Jacob, Lay people and religion in the early eighteenth century, 1996).  There is also much evidence of religiously-inspired philanthropic activities, one of the commonest of which was providing funds to teaching poor children the Catechism and to read and write, and perhaps arithmetic. Large numbers of laypeople of the better and middling sorts subscribed to or helped to endow such schools and teaching, and devoted time and care to managing them, including providing poor people’s children with Bibles and Prayer Books, and providing  for daily family prayers at home, and also overseeing children’s apprenticeship in households of devout employers. Surviving records of these ‘charity schools’, provide a window on to grass-roots religious practice in private and public spaces in towns and villages in eighteenth century England.

W.M. Jacob is the author of Lay people and religion in the early eighteenth century (1996), The Making of the Anglican Church Worldwide (1997), The Clerical Profession in the Long Eighteenth Century, 1680-1840 (2007), and Religious Vitality in Victorian London (2021) and numerous articles on the social history of religion in eighteenth and nineteenth century England and Wales. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and was a Research Fellow of King’s College London. He is an independent scholar.

Carnet de recherche https://britaix.hypotheses.org/
Twitter https://twitter.com/Britaix17_18
You Tube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXmQQ3wq7sx6jhj1TB-2E_g

REGISTER

OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Laurence Lux-Sterritt (April 11, 2023). Evidence of Lay Religious Devotion and Public Practice. Britaix 17-18. Retrieved April 19, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/m58g


You may also like...

  • Religious experience, publications

    Religious experience, publications

    23/09/2017

     by Laurence Lux-Sterritt · Published 23/09/2017

  • Welcome to Britaix 17-18 0

    Welcome to Britaix 17-18

    20/06/2014

     by Anne Page · Published 20/06/2014 · Last modified 03/08/2014

  • Our three joint events LERMA / TELEMME/ GIS Institut du genre

    10/12/2019

     by Laurence Lux-Sterritt · Published 10/12/2019 · Last modified 21/12/2020

Follow:

  • Next story 20 years of Studies on Travel Literature
  • Previous story Vivre sa religion dans la clandestinité

ISSN 2492-8569

Categories

  • Actualités / News
  • Announcements
  • Lived Religion papers
  • Posts
  • Research post

Bookmarks

  • Aix-Marseille University
  • BSECS
  • Dissenting Experience
  • E-rea
  • EMoDiR
  • Études Épistémè
  • LERMA
  • Manchester University Press (Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-centuries series)
  • Queen Mary Centre for Religion and Literature in English
  • Revue XVII-XVIII
  • SEAA 17-18

Tags

Lived Religion MA students' work Swift

Aix-Marseille University

Aix-Marseille University

LERMA

LERMA

Recent Posts

  • Making Religious Scandals Visible: a seminar cycle
  • The concept of Visibilisation through the prism of Britaix 17-18
  • Margaret Clitherow or the Construction of a Saint?
  • “Remember, remember, the fifth of November: gunpowder, treason and plot.”
  • Summer School on Early-Modern English Manuscripts

Archives

  • January 2026
  • February 2025
  • July 2023
  • May 2023
  • April 2023
  • February 2023
  • December 2022
  • September 2022
  • April 2022
  • March 2022
  • February 2022
  • January 2022
  • December 2021
  • November 2021
  • September 2021
  • July 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • March 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • December 2019
  • September 2019
  • July 2019
  • May 2019
  • March 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • July 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • February 2017
  • December 2016
  • September 2016
  • May 2016
  • March 2016
  • February 2016
  • November 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • November 2014
  • October 2014
  • September 2014
  • August 2014
  • July 2014
  • June 2014
April 2026
M T W T F S S
 12345
6789101112
13141516171819
20212223242526
27282930  
« Jan    

{{site_title}} © {{year}}. All Rights Reserved.

Powered by WordPress. Theme by Press Customizr.

A blog proposed by Hypotheses - This blog in Hypotheses catalogue - Privacy Policy - Report a problem
Syndication Feed - ISSN 2492-8569