Vanity Fair and the Celestial City

Vanity Fair and the Celestial City
Author: Isabel Rivers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2018-07-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019254263X

In John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, the pilgrims cannot reach the Celestial City without passing through Vanity Fair, where everything is bought and sold. In recent years there has been much analysis of commerce and consumption in Britain during the long eighteenth century, and of the dramatic expansion of popular publishing. Similarly, much has been written on the extraordinary effects of the evangelical revivals of the eighteenth century in Britain, Europe, and North America. But how did popular religious culture and the world of print interact? It is now known that religious works formed the greater part of the publishing market for most of the century. What religious books were read, and how? Who chose them? How did they get into people's hands? Vanity Fair and the Celestial City is the first book to answer these questions in detail. It explores the works written, edited, abridged, and promoted by evangelical dissenters, Methodists both Arminian and Calvinist, and Church of England evangelicals in the period 1720 to 1800. Isabel Rivers also looks back to earlier sources and forward to the continued republication of many of these works well into the nineteenth century. The first part is concerned with the publishing and distribution of religious books by commercial booksellers and not-for-profit religious societies, and the means by which readers obtained them and how they responded to what they read. The second part shows that some of the most important publications were new versions of earlier nonconformist, episcopalian, Roman Catholic, and North American works. The third part explores the main literary kinds, including annotated bibles, devotional guides, exemplary lives, and hymns. Building on many years' research into the religious literature of the period, Rivers discusses over two hundred writers and provides detailed case studies of popular and influential works.

Established Church, Sectarian People

Established Church, Sectarian People
Author: Deryck W. Lovegrove
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 272
Release: 2004-08-19
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780521520232

This book examines the operation of itinerant preachers during the period of political and social ferment at the turn of the nineteenth century. It investigates the nature of their popular brand of Christianity and considers their impact upon existing churches.

The Forge of Vision

The Forge of Vision
Author: David Morgan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2015-10-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0520961994

Religions teach their adherents how to see and feel at the same time; learning to see is not a disembodied process but one hammered from the forge of human need, social relations, and material practice. David Morgan argues that the history of religions may therefore be studied through the lens of their salient visual themes. The Forge of Vision tells the history of Christianity from the sixteenth century through the present by selecting the visual themes of faith that have profoundly influenced its development. After exploring how distinctive Catholic and Protestant visual cultures emerged in the early modern period, Morgan examines a variety of Christian visual practices, ranging from the imagination, visions of nationhood, the likeness of Jesus, the material life of words, and the role of modern art as a spiritual quest, to the importance of images for education, devotion, worship, and domestic life. An insightful, informed presentation of how Christianity has shaped and continues to shape the modern world, this work is a must-read for scholars and students across fields of religious studies, history, and art history.

The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain

The Evangelical Age of Ingenuity in Industrial Britain
Author: Joseph Stubenrauch
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2016
Genre: History
ISBN: 019878337X

It demonstrates that developments in technology, commerce, and infrastructure in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were closely linked to theological shifts and changing modes of religious life as British evangelicals developed new methods of spreading the gospel and new forms of personal religious practice.

Beating against the Wind

Beating against the Wind
Author: Calvin Hollett
Publisher: McGill-Queen's Press - MQUP
Total Pages: 468
Release: 2016-05-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0773599010

There are many analyses of Tractarianism – a nineteenth-century form of Anglicanism that emphasized its Catholic origins – but how did people in the colonies react to the High Church movement? Beating against the Wind, a study in nineteenth-century vernacular spirituality, emphasizes the power of faith on a shifting frontier in a transatlantic world. Focusing on people living along the Newfoundland and Labrador coast, Calvin Hollett presents a nuanced perspective on popular resistance to the colonial emissary Bishop Edward Feild and his spiritual regimen of order, silence, and solemnity. Whether by outright opposing Bishop Feild, or by simply ignoring his wishes and views, or by brokering a hybrid style of Gothic architecture, the people of Newfoundland and Labrador demonstrated their independence in the face of an attempt at hierarchical ascendency upon the arrival of Tractarianism in British North America. Instead, they continued to practise evangelical Anglicanism and participate in Methodist revivals, and thereby negotiated a popular Protestantism, one often infused with the spirituality of other seafarers from Nova Scotia and New England. Exploring the interaction between popular spirituality and religious authority, Beating against the Wind challenges the traditional claim of Feild’s success in bringing Tractarianism to the colony while exploring the resistance to Feild’s initiatives and the reasons for his disappointments.

Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, Part II vol 7

Nonconformist Women Writers, 1720-1840, Part II vol 7
Author: Timothy Whelan
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 574
Release: 2024-08-01
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040250408

These volumes will present, in some cases for the first time, the lives and works of a coterie of Nonconformist women writers from the West Country.

British Philanthropy in the Globalizing World

British Philanthropy in the Globalizing World
Author: Roshan Allpress
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2024-02-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 0198887213

Between 1756 and 1840, philanthropy in the British world grew from the domain of small, associational committees to a vast enterprise of philanthropic and humanitarian societies with global reach. British Philanthropy in the Globalizing World tells the story of this movement, from its inception in small networks of mercantile and religious entrepreneurs to its signal projects and achievements in the abolition of slavery, in evangelical missionary societies, Bible societies, and in the early indigenous rights movement. It traces the lives and networks of hundreds of philanthropists across four generations, showing how their social, religious, economic, intellectual, and cultural worlds intersected to foster philanthropic innovation through organisational models, transnational networks, and the creation of a unique formative culture. It shows how groups such as the Clapham Sect -- including William Wilberforce, Henry Thornton, Hannah More, James Stephen, and others -- emerged in an intergenerational context, and how they sought to effect social and cultural change across multiple spheres. For every headline achievement, there were many failed experiments, inner wrestlings, and long-running intellectual collaborations that left a wide and deep imprint on the cultural and political landscape of the English-speaking world. Drawing on the separate historiographies of metropolitan philanthropy, associational culture, anti-slavery, moral reform, Evangelicalism, colonial missions, and economic thought, the study unites into one analytical frame both the imaginative and organizational realities of philanthropy, offering a dual focus on individual philanthropists -- their inner lives, daily practices, and participation in collaborative communities -- and on mapping the networks that bound philanthropic societies and projects together in metropolitan London and at the far reaches of the British world. In doing so, it offers a very human portrait of these entrepreneurs and evangelicals, as they pursued a philanthropic global vision.