This seeks to summarise the conclusions of the book, asserting and defending Laudianism’s status as a coherent, distinctive and aggressive ideological position, and as a coalition made up of persons of varying views and degrees of commitment, and as such a set of responses to a dynamic and changing set of political circumstances. The methodological approach of the book is defended and the compatibility of the lumping, which underpinned the first four part with the splitting that characterised the fifth, is asserted. In its second half the Conclusion looks forward to the larger significance of Laudianism for the history of ‘Anglicanism’ and ends with an account of the Tractarian use of Laudianism and the ways in which the legacy of the Tractarians has, in turn, shaped the subsequent historiography of Laudianism. The attempt here, as in the book as a whole, is to free the topic from the ongoing quarrels about the historical identity and theological and pietistic essence of the church of England, so that it can be understood in terms of the period during which it first came into existence, and which it tried (so ardently and unsuccessfully) to transform.

This essay focuses on Ancrene Wisse and the Ancrene Wisse Group of which this work is part. Ancrene Wisse survives in a significant number of manuscripts, and its place within the literary tradition of medieval women in England seems uncontroversial. However, nineteenth- and twentieth-century editors, many of whom were men, tended to focus on the linguistic significance of these texts, paying little attention to their gendered devotional context. They also placed much greater emphasis on speculation concerning the identity of the male author of Ancrene Wisse than on examining the role of its immediate audience in shaping the work addressed to them. Women scholars working on the Ancrene Wisse Group have, in contrast, tended to be more aware of the importance of the material in relation to the history of womenߣs anchoritism and more open to the possibility of womenߣs authorship of some of the works within this group. The essay suggests that Ancrene Wisse had an expansive direct and indirect influence not only on later texts but also on womenߣs devotional traditions, which, Sauer suggests, may also have extended beyond England.

Wallace “dabbled in religion,” as Matthew Gilbert put it in a 1997 interview with the author, but while he was openly intrigued by it, Wallace eschewed organized religion. Much of his work is characterized by a search for meaning that in other circumstances or periods would have constituted religious questing, and the absence of belief is generally portrayed in his work as part of the malaise of contemporary life. Religious language permeates the corpus, and religious iconography plays a significant role in several texts. Belief as a good in itself appears to be promoted in his work on politics, on aesthetics, and on culture, with the idea of faith central to his project of working against solipsism, but religion as a practice is often viewed with suspicion. This essay traces that pattern in Wallace’s writing, beginning with Broom’s connection of evangelical religion with capitalism by way of the G.O.D and the figure of John, the wasted prophet son of immense wealth, positioning a particularly American form of religious practice as pernicious and profit-driven. Don’s particular ambivalence about religion in Infinite Jest highlights a complex relationship between faith as a personal attribute and religion as a collective one. The essay argues that Wallace’s approach to religious thought bears the same ambivalent inflections as his work on art and entertainment, which can both inspire thought and suppress it. Nevertheless, the essay argues that while Wallace appeared to view organized religion with some wariness, the metanarratives of religion – belief, faith, transcendence and a sense of the sacred – constitute vital and consistent themes of his craft.

Chapter 4 provides an overview of the history and development of the Shiʿites. It defines the Shiʿa as those who elevate devotion and personal allegiance to the Prophet and his family as the most crucial element and sign of submission to God. This distinguishes Shiʿism from what is called ʿAlīd loyalism, which is devotion to the Prophet and his family that is widespread among Muslims. After reviewing the issues that led to the formation of the Shiʿites, the chapter traces the militant ghulāt movements of the early period, the Zaydīs and the Alevi and ʿAlawī movements. It then moves to consider the quietist Shiʿa, discussing the Imāmī movement before moving on to the groups that splintered off from it: both the “Twelver” (Ithnā-ʿAsharī) and Ismāʿīlī Shiʿite movements.

This chapter considers South India, in the period of 500-1500 CE, focusing particularly on the region that is today Tamilnadu. Based primarily on the evidence of stone inscriptions, as well as religious literature composed in Tamil, it argues that slavery must be understood within the framework of a large and complex system of dependency and hierarchy. Virtually all members of society – whether attached to the land or land-owners, or part of the “households” of Hindu temples or royal courts – were bound into relationship of dependency. These relationships were not systematized and caste identities and hierarchies were not fixed. Categories of persons evidently of “lowly” status, such as the paraiyar, might in some cases have been enslaved agricultural laborers but also appear in the inscriptions as temple patrons. Women who were sold to temples were assigned menial domestic duties but sometimes also performed high-status ritual services. The social reality of servitude and slavery in medieval South India, especially in connection with what was probably the extensive use of slaves in rice cultivation (from the 13th century onward), is only hinted at in the inscriptional sources, and in Hindu religious literature was transformed into an idiom of devotion.

Chatper 3 studies a unique pilgrimage society known as the Order of the Holy Sepulcher as a window into the the Holy Land as a source of spiritual and political legitimacy for Catholics in the wake of the Reformation.

Long understood as purifying the church by rejecting worship routine and devotional ceremony, pious New England settlers in fact observed formal and informal rituals that defined lived religion within the Reformed tradition. Given that access to the vernacular word was central to puritan self-definition, literacy and reading became intensely ritualized. Thus, along with life-cycle rites (birth, marriage, death), annual and occasional ceremonies (fast days, thanksgiving days, election sermons, artillery sermons), and sabbath customs (the sacraments, the public confession, the audition of preaching), ritual was derived from the experience of books. The chapter demonstrates this experience by looking at moments of cross-cultural contact during Metacom’s War, where reading seeks to stabilize tradition. It studies reader annotations of devotional works as a means to understand the meditative, recursive, and extractive practices that grounded and routinized lay piety. And it examines the visual iconography of illustrations within devotional manuals, illustrations that idealize and demonize kinds of identity for the proper pilgrim reader. Ritual, routine, and iconography are not typically associated with puritan worship, but with an ear and eye to reading habits, we better understand experiential religion in early New England.

This chapter examines the liturgical and spiritual life of the convents. It opens by outlining the daily routine within enclosure, exploring the devotional life of the women religious. This is followed by consideration of the spiritual ethos of different convents before focusing at greater length on the nuns’ attitudes towards relics and martyrdom, which was an especially strong devotional strain within the convents. The English convents considered themselves very much part of the English mission, and were committed to eventually replanting female religious life in their homeland, something very much central to the missionary impulse of early modern Catholicism. As such, though they had a natural interest in the fate of their persecuted fellow Catholics back home, the nuns in no way neglected the significance of martyrs from further afield, or relics more indicative of the wider Church, underlining their relationship with mainland European religious and spiritual trends.

The chapter examines Chaucer’s attitude to the Church, and to the demands of living the Christian life in fourteenth-century England. The seeming double-mindedness of his scathing criticism of religious professionals, and yet his deeply held faith, arose from a desire to ask what it is to be a Christian. Taking up Chaucer’s own quest, the chapter asks how Christian was late medieval society, what was required of the ordinary parishioner in terms of practice and belief, and what opportunities were available for people to go beyond these basic expectations in their efforts to attain salvation? There were choices to be made but also many limitations upon the ordinary believer. So not everyone agreed on how best to reach heaven, and there were cultural as well as social gulfs that undermined the ideal of a unified Church. These were problems of which Chaucer seems to have been acutely aware.

What is ‘heresy’? One answer would be, ‘that which orthodoxy condemns as such’; though we may also wish to consider when conscious dissent invites such a condemnation. The main ‘heresy’ in late medieval England was that usually termed Lollardy, understood to be inspired by the radical theological thought of John Wyclif (1328-1384), which among other things emphasised the overwhelmingly importance of Scripture, and of lay access to Scripture, through vernacular translation. Orthodox repression of heresy began in the late fourteenth century and developed in various ways in the fifteenth. There are small traces of these much wider battles in Chaucer’s oeuvre, but it would be very hard to say quite how he saw them. We might instead see the fluidity of attitude toward aspects of religion in Chaucer as a sign of his times. ‘Dissent’ can encompass more than that which is solidly decried as heresy, and ‘orthodoxy’ can turn out to be more than one mode of religious thought and expression.