Religious Typologies and Popular Religion in Restoration England

There have been numerous studies of the religious leaders of early modern Europe, but accounts of the religious attitudes and interests of the general public have been highly impressionistic. It might seem a hopeless task to try to reconstruct a profile of the religious mind of such a remote period, and yet historians are not deterred from making broad characterizations, and other disciplines sometimes build on them. The question is not so much whether we must give up such descriptions entirely, but how rigorous we can be in making them. For instance, what can one say of the popular religious mentality of Restoration England-the time when the various processes of secularization began in the country. It was in the late seventeenth century that social and cultural life began to grow away from mnanifestly religious assumptions, and it became possible to discuss politics, economics, and philosophy without reference to Christian doctrine. To what extent was society at large receptive to these trends? What was the character of popular piety? How could the populace have been swept up in the religious revivals of the next century? Two things make a rigorous study of this period (1660-1710) possible. First, there was a regulation in the publishing industry that limited an edition to 3,000 copies. The type then had to be redistributed and set up again for a new edition -a laborer's "feather-bedding" rule. We may conclude from this that the works with the greatest number of editions were roughly the most popular works. There are sometimes questions as to what constituted a new edition, and whether a certain edition was merely a reissue of older sheets. But the inflation of edition numbers for promotional purposes should not have been as necessary for genuine best-sellers as for others. And it does not appear that free distribution of religious books and pamphlets or the founding of the first lending libraries need affect our calculations on the distribution of this literature.' Even the existence of censorship until half-way through this period (1695) need not affect the inference that religious best-sellers represented the popular mentality. Freethought and immodesty regularly passed the censors in the form of translations of classical literature, and yet they were no competition for religious works. Secondly, seventeenth-century best-sellers had a distribution comparable to that of twentieth-century best-sellers. The most popular of them-The Whole Duty of Man, The Christian Monitor-apparently sold sufficient copies that every tenth family in the kingdom could have owned one. Today in the United States that would require 5,500,000 copies, and only a handful of cookbooks, atlases, dicA version of this paper was read in the Religion and Social Sciences section at the annual meeting of the American Academy of Religion in Oct,ber 1974. 1. On the points in this paragraph, see my studies: C. John Sommerville, "On the Distribution of Religious and Occult Literature in Seventeenth-Century England," The Library, 5th ser., 29 (1974): 221-225, and idem., "Popular Religious Literature in England, 16601711: A Content Analysis" (Ph. D. diss., University of Iowa, 1970). A revision of the dissertation will be published in the Social Science Monograph Series, University of Florida Press.