The subject of piety and religious practice has increasingly become a focus of scholarship in recent years. In order to further our understanding of this phenomena, this volume explores the lived experience of early modern religion in its domestic settings, as it was practised in England and Scotland c. 1500-1700. Its contributions are drawn from a range of disciplinary backgrounds, and includes historians, literary scholars and historians of material culture; is confessional range spans non-conformist and roman Catholic practices as well as sampling the range of English and Scottish conformities emerging in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Its themes include considerations of domestic patterns of prayer and the shift in the perception of solitude which occurs within the period; practices of scriptural reading with its attendant interpretive ambitions and anxieties; domestic uses of the psalms, including the writing of original psalms; and visual and material survivals, adaptations, innovations and cross-fertilisation is in devotional practice.In considering these issues, the interdisciplinary character of the contributors is timely, bringing together the insights of material culture, the literary tools of rhetoric, nuance and genre, along with the specificities of historical and theological detail, in order to build up a subtler, more three-dimensional picture of the religious and cultural sensibilities of early modern subjects.This collection is a sister volume to Mears and Ryrie (eds), Worship and the Parish Church in Early Modern Britain. Together these two volumes focus and drive-forward scholarship on the lived experience of early modern religion, as it was practised in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Private and Domestic Devotion in Early Modern Britain