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In 1615 the clergyman Jeremiah Dyke exclaimed ‘surely wee never beginne to know Divinitie or Religion, till wee come to know our selves’. His clarion call, and the ‘devotional turn’ in early modern historiography, urges us to look anew at how ordinary men and women lived out their faith in painstaking and sometimes painful ways. People and Piety is an interdisciplinary edited collection that investigates Protestant devotional identities in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. Divided into two sections, it examines the ‘sites’ where these identities were forged (the academy, printing house, household, theatre and prison) and the ‘types’ of texts that expressed them (spiritual autobiographies, religious poetry and writings tied to the ars moriendi), providing a varied and broad analysis of the social, material and literary forms of religious devotion during England’s Long Reformation. Through archival and cutting-edge research, a detailed picture of ‘lived devotion’ emerges. From the period’s most recognisable religious authors (Richard Baxter, George Herbert, Oliver Heywood and Katherine Sutton) to those rarely discussed and recently discovered voices (Isaac Archer, Mary Franklin and Katherine Gell), this book reveals how piety did not define people; it was people who defined their piety. Contributors include internationally recognised scholars from either side of the Atlantic: Sylvia Brown, Vera J. Camden, Bernard Capp, John Coffey, Ann Hughes, N. H. Keeble and William Sheils. To those studying and teaching religion and identity in early modern England, and anyone interested in the history of religious self-expression, this book will be a rich and rewarding read.
This essay examines how lay scribal practices of sermon note-taking linked individual spiritual crises to collective experience and became a family project. Examining the sermon notes kept by the Gell household from the 1640s to the 1710s reveals them as devotional prompts that sustained the family’s Presbyterianism across two generations. In evaluating the figure of Katherine Gell, this essay also demonstrates the crucial role played by women within the home in sustaining a nonconformist devotional culture both before and after the Restoration.
for the margin.6 Each page has twenty lines on fols 3–10, and between twenty-nine and thirty lines from fol. 11 onwards; the layout changes from very spacious to a more dense one. Except for one bifolium at the end (123/128) the manuscript has been written by a single hand, which uses only few abbreviations and ligatures, is characterised by a frequent use of uncial N and nt-ligature, and a peculiar shaped capital H that resembles a K rather than an H. These two features have contributed to the scribal practices of Auxerre.7 Since Reims and Auxerre were closely
within Metz. Yet since the documentation for her activities is claimed by separate academic disciplines, Catherine’s influence has remained unexplored. Moreover, modern expectations about scribal practice and genre have obscured the identification of her performances beyond the jeu, such as the reception.13 In Metz, female performance is depicted in local chronicles and listed in household accounts, but also exists in less familiar formats: parish sculpture and windows, monastic histories and cartularies, and formal written correspondence. These records testify to
perceived the internal structure of a work and could have influenced how that work was navigated in the context of both private and public reading. Noonan suggests that the interpretive licence with which scribes punctuated thus provides us with valuable information regarding delimitations of acceptable scribal practice, voicing and the evolution of vernacular reading habits during the fourteenth and fifteenth