John Spurr - The Post-Reformation: Religion, Politics and Society in Britain, 1603-1714

To Sam, Rene and Ivor

W riting this book presented a double challenge. My account had to reveal a world that is very different from our own, especially in its religious and political preoccupations. But it also had to convey something of the seventeenth centurys dynamism, of the changes and struggles that had by 1714 left British society more recognisably modern than it was in 1603. Religion was at the heart of the story. Religious beliefs, values and practices cannot easily or helpfully be separated from the social, political and personal life of the period. But that does not mean religion can be explained in terms of something else. Religion is not a vehicle for liberty, democracy, progress, tolerance, patriarchy or the bourgeois work ethic. It is primarily the bundle of human beliefs and practices about and towards the supernatural, the creator, the next life, and the significance of this life. Religion is expressed in the personal and private form of piety. It takes on institutional form in the shape of churches, clergies, doctrines and church services. So there are numerous ways of writing the history of religion in seventeenth-century Britain. In what follows I have not pursued a narrow ecclesiastical or denominational history, but neither have I subsumed the spiritual experience of the seventeenth century to the political narrative.