Religious books and pamphlets of all kinds indisputably constituted the largest part of the publishing market in the period 1695 to 1830, just as they had since the invention of printing. They fell into three main categories, namely doctrinal books, controversial books and practical books. This chapter concentrates on aspects of the third and largest category, which contained a huge range of books of different size, length and price aimed at different audiences. The writers of such books were mostly clergy or ministers of different denominations, though there were some lay authors; their readers, depending on the kind of book and how it was distributed, were the clergy and large numbers of the laity. Divinity students, clergy and ministers of different denominations were in urgent need of guides to the mass of religious publications that poured from the presses and of commentaries to help them interpret the Bible.

This chapter sketches the changing position of religious publishing within the growing mass market for books and periodicals. It shows how the leading developments in Victorian religious publishing were driven by an evangelical, conversionist imperative, which put a premium on bringing the Bible and a theology of sin and salvation to as many people as possible. The chapter analyses the theme of tensions between publishing and the conversionist project, showing how mass publishing helped inflame the controversies that bedevilled British Protestants throughout the mid-nineteenth century. It then looks at how publishing opened a space in which to challenge the popular theology of biblicist, supernatural Protestantism. Although religion had been the staple of eighteenth-century publishing, its prominence in the developing nineteenth-century mass market owed much to the evangelical revival. Bible publishing was invariably mass publishing. Tract societies experienced a similar transition from publishing to convert the nation, to publishing for a profitable market.

In publishing, as in Church and State, the 1640s and 1650s witnessed massive changes, this chapter focuses on some of the more striking changes: in broad terms and then through a specific example-the uses to which the Quakers put print in the early stages of the development of that movement. It explains some of the continuities between the edifying and instructive works published in the half century before 1640 and those published in the half century after 1640, and especially after 1660, are discussed. The religious publications of the later Stuart period were also produced in a context that embodied on the one hand the revival of patterns found before the 1640s and on the other continuity with elements of the publishing history of the 1640s and 1650s. The chapter concentrates on two aspects of those publications: patterns of production, and patterns of consumption, though it seems clear that the former were in many ways strongly shaped by the latter.

Religious books, in conventional terms, are found to have been the single most important component of the publishing trade. In England, apart from oral communication, there was a mass of both polemical and devotional material which, if published, was published scribally, surviving only in manuscript. Some of the most active preachers of the age never appeared in print, or never in their lifetimes. A large part of the story of indoctrination concerns English Bibles, and there is no better case study of the interaction of public and private interest, commerce and edification, than the English Bible. Many of the Catholic books of the devotional writers included prefaces addressed to the impartial Christian reader, and not just to the Catholics. The use of a commonplace book was typical of university-trained readers, but Nicholas Byfield's Directions for the private reading of the Scriptures, first published in 1617 or 1618, was an attempt to make the practice more widespread among lay Bible readers.