Pieties In Transition: Religious Practices And Experiences

Description:
This significant and innovative collection explores the changing piety of townspeople and villagers before, during, and after the Reformation. It brings together leading and new scholars from England and the Netherlands to present new research on a subject of importance to historians of society and religion in late medieval and early modern Europe. Contributors examine the diverse evidence for transitions in piety and the processes of these changes. The volume incorporates a range of approaches including social, cultural and religious history, literary and manuscript studies, social anthropology and archaeology. This is, therefore, an interdisciplinary volume that constitutes a cultural history of changing pieties in the period c. 1400-1640. Contributors focus on a number of specific themes using a range of types of evidence and theoretical approach. Some chapters make detailed reconstructions of specific communities, groups and individuals; some offer perceptive and useful analyses of theoretical and comparative approaches to transition and to piety; and others closely examine cultural practices, ideas and tastes. Through this range of detailed work, which brings to light previously unknown sources as well as new approaches to more familiar sources, contributors address a number of questions arising from recent published work on late medieval and early modern piety and reformation. Individually and collectively, the chapters in this volume offer an important contribution to the field of late medieval and early modern piety. They highlight, for the first time, the centrality of processes of transition in the experience and practice of religion. Offering a refreshingly new approach to the subject, this volume raises timely theoretical and methodological questions that will be of interest to a broad audience.

Table of Contents:
Introduction, Robert Lutton and Elisabeth Salter. Part 1 Orthodoxies and Heterodoxies: Geographies and materialities of piety: reconciling competing narratives of religious change in pre-Reformation and Reformation England, Robert Lutton; Martyrs of the marsh: Elizabeth Barton, Joan Bocher and trajectories of martyrdom in Reformation Kent, Andrew Hope. Part 2 Institutions as Evidence for Transitions in Piety: The poor, hospitals and charity in 16th-century Canterbury, Sheila Sweetinburgh; 'There hath not bene any gramar scole kepte, preacher maytened or pore people releved, other then... by the same chauntreye': educational provision and piety in Kent, c. 1400-1640, G.M. Draper; The continuum of resistance to Tithe, c. 1400-1600, Paula Simpson; A quantitative approach to late medieval transformations of piety in the Low Countries: historiography and new ideas, Annemarie Speetjens. Part 3 Reading and Representation: Material Cultures of Piety: 'Some tomb for a remembraunce': representations of piety in post-Reformation gentry funeral monuments, Claire Bartram; 'The days moralised': reconstructing devotional reading, c. 1450-1560, Elisabeth Salter; Writing and silence: transitions between the contemplative and the active life, Emily Richards. Afterword, Alexandra Walsham; Bibliography; Index.

Author Biography:
Robert Lutton is Research Administrator at the London College of Fashion, UK. Elizabeth Salter is from the Department of English, University of Wales-Aberystwyth, UK.