READING, FAMILY RELIGION, AND EVANGELICAL IDENTITY IN LATE STUART ENGLAND

Abstract

In this article we unravel family religion as a crucial strand of evangelical piety in the late seventeenth century. We show how this programme was promoted in print and manuscript by a group of evangelical clergy from both sides of the conformist divide. Using the printed and manuscript memoirs of John Rastrick, a Lincolnshire clergyman, we explore the construction of clerical sociability through the printed text. In particular, we demonstrate that its heart was the communal reading of scripture and religious literature, confirming the household as the key locus for piety in this period. Whereas historians have traditionally been eager to categorize both clergy and laity in this period as either Anglican or nonconformist, we demonstrate that such a divide was often blurred in practice, in particular as represented through family religion. By focusing on issues such as sociability, the formation of identities, and reading practices, we also reconnect the second half of the century with its early Stuart past, suggesting that its influences and refractions fed into a continuity of evangelical identity, stretching from late sixteenth-century puritanism through the Civil War and Restoration to the onset of Evangelicalism in the eighteenth century. Though they were complex, these continuities help to show that a coherent style of evangelical piety was expressed across the ecclesiastical divide throughout the long seventeenth century.