Many historians have attempted to understand the violent religious conflicts of the seventeenth century from viewpoints dominated by concepts of class, gender, and demography. But few studies have explored the cultural process whereby religious symbolism created social cohesion and political allegiance. This book examines religious conflict in the parish communities of early modern England using an interdisciplinary approach that includes all these perspectives.
Daniel Beaver studies the urban parish of Tewkesbury and six rural parishes in its hinterland over a period of one hundred years, drawing on local ecclesiastical court records, sermons, parish records, corporate minutes and charity books, and probate documents. He discusses the centrality of religious symbols and ceremonies in the ordering of local societies, particularly in local conceptions of place, personal identity, and the life cycle. Four phases in the transformation of parish communities emerge and are examined in this book.
This exploration of the interrelationship of religion, politics, and society, and the transformation of local communities in civil war, has a value beyond the particular history of early modern England, contributing to a broader understanding of religious revivals, fundamentalisms, and the persistent link between religion, nationalism, and ethnic identity in the modern world.
Daniel C. Beaver is Assistant Professor of History, Pennsylvania State University.
Table of Contents
Contents The Vale of Gloucester in the Vicinity of Tewkesbury Introduction: Church History as a Cultural System I. Social Form 1590–1690 1. Reverend Histories: Geography and Landscape 2. Parts, Persons, and Participants in the Commonwealth: Social Relations, Institutions, and Authority 3. Under the Hand of God: Parish Communities and Rites of Mortality II. Social Process 1590–1690 4. Circumcisions of the Heart: Church Courts, Social Relations, and Religious Conflict, 1591–1620 5. A Circle of Order: The Politics of Religious Symbolism, 1631–1640 6. To Unchurch a Church: Civil War and Revolution, 1642–1660 7. Astraea Redux: Religious Conflict, Restoration, and the Parish, 1660–1665 8. Bloody Stratagems and Busy Heads: Persecution, Avoidance, and the Structure of Religion, 1666–1689 Conclusion: Symbol and Boundary: Religious Belief, Ceremony, and Social Order Appendix 1: Tables Appendix 2: Accusations of Witchcraft in Tewkesbury Notes Manuscript Sources Index
A significant historical study. . . This is not simply a work of local history, as it throws considerable light on wider aspects of the great conflict that convulsed Stuart England. . .No other book that I know of covers the experience of a region (as distinct from a town) throughout the entire troubled history of seventeenth-century England in anything like this depth.
