The main theme of this book is religion and identity - not only national identity, but also regional and local identities. David Hempton penetrates to the heart of vigorous religious and political cultures, both elite and popular, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He brings to life a diverse and variegated spectrum of religious communities in all of the British Isles. With so much new British history really an extended version of old English history, Hempton has devoted more attention to the Celtic fringes, especially Ireland. It is an exercise in comparative history, but he also shows how richly coloured is the religious history of these islands. He demonstrates that even in their cultural distinctiveness, the various religious traditions have had more in common than is sometimes imagined. The book arises from the 1993 Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham.
The benefits of using an international lens to understand both the complexity and the essence of religious movements have been well demonstrated in a number of important recent studies. In fact it has become quite unusual to write about early modern puritanism and Protestantism without taking at least a transatlantic, if not a global, perspective. Philip Benedict’s important book, Christ’s Churches Purely Reformed: A Social History of Calvinism (2002) has shown that only by looking at Calvinism as an international movement taking root in France, the Netherlands, the British Isles, the Holy Roman Empire, eastern Europe and New England can one properly identify the distinctive aspects of Calvinist piety and begin to answer bigger questions about Calvinism’s alleged contribution to the emergence of modern liberal democracy. He shows, for example, that while no post-Reformation confession had a monopoly of resistance to unsatisfactory rulers, Calvinists, because of their deep hostility to idolatrous forms of worship and unscriptural church institutions, were generally speaking more unwilling than others to compromise with or submit to religious and political institutions antithetical to their interests. Similarly, although Benedict is sceptical about the supposed connections between Calvinism and capitalism and Calvinism and democracy, he does show that Calvinism was a midwife of modernity through its routinization of time, its promotion of literacy, and its emphasis on the individual conscience.
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