In the seventeenth-century household, in which biblically themed decor was fashionable, many needlework projects included images of female biblical characters. Rebecca was among the most frequently embroidered. In both Protestant and Catholic traditions, Rebecca’s story, recorded in Genesis 24, was perceived as especially pertinent to the household. Depictions of her story appeared in the sixteenth-century picture Bibles which were dedicated to, and circulated among, Protestant and Catholic audiences in parts of western and central Europe. Rebecca also featured in Erhard Schön’s didactic illustrated woodcut, Zwölf Frawen des Alten Testaments (c.1530). Not all biblical stories involving female figures were included in these illustrated works, so the inclusion of her story suggests that Rebecca was perceived as a proper model for young women. Moreover, the absence of Rebecca from the large-scale tapestries which throughout the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries commonly depicted biblical scenes provides an important contrast to the popularity of her story in smaller-scale domestic needlework projects.

Among the papers of the Blundell family of Little Crosby, Lancashire, are two dramatic sketches entitled ‘An Exercise to Embolden the Children in Speaking’ and ‘Children Emboldened to Speak. By an Exercise’. They were written by William Blundell, recusant, royalist and Lancashire gentleman, in 1663 and 1665 for his daughters and their cousins to perform, probably at Christmas family gatherings. Humorously mingling Catholic catechesis, social education, the exercise of parental authority and childish misbehaviour, these sketches open a rare window onto the life of a Catholic household in the Restoration era. They offer an opportunity to explore the household as the location for the practice and appropriation of religion.

In early modern England the place where most people experienced and treated illness was the home. Medical practices were therefore invariably centred on the family, and in many cases, sufferers diagnosed and nursed their ailments without seeking advice from a practitioner, instead favouring the counsel of a family member or friend. Centred on the personal transactions between patients, kin, neighbours, and in some cases a practitioner, how might the religiously plural context of the Reformation era have shaped these close social relationships? The subjects of this study belonged to two Catholic families: Nicholas Blundell (1669–1737) of Little Crosby in Lancashire, and Catharine Burton (1668–1714) of Bury St Edmunds in Suffolk. Focusing on the sickness experiences, lay healing practices and medical treatment described at length in their diaries, this essay asks three central questions. First, in what ways did confessionally opposed families integrate or separate from one another in relation to matters of health? Second, did these subjects forge more exclusive ties with medical practitioners of their own confession, or, conversely, did they find a way to coexist comfortably with, and interact in, the ‘medical marketplace’? Third, by examining the practices through which religion and medicine interrelated within the household, I aim to challenge longstanding assumptions concerning the progressive ‘secularization’ or ‘medicalization’ of the sickbed. I hope to shed fresh light on the ways in which medical practices were embedded in social relations and community experiences; and to begin to unravel some of the complex channels through which confessional identity was experienced and expressed in relation to healing.

Over the past three decades, the study of material culture has become a pervasive feature of historical scholarship. From art to shoes, from porcelain to glass, ‘things’ are increasingly viewed as a useful medium through which to reconstruct what mattered to historical actors in everyday life. Taking its lead from this vast scholarship, this discussion examines how material culture was integrated into a programme of devotion, edification and religious instruction within England’s episcopal palaces, a group of buildings in which the relationship between the material and the spiritual was particularly fraught. Adopting a long chronological span, from 1500 to 1800, it analyses how that relationship evolved into the eighteenth century, a period noted for its proliferation of things and apparently ‘secular’ character.

Households were the basic units of society in England until well into the nineteenth century, providing the focus of much economic activity, as well as education and, as this essay will argue, religious and devotional life. Recent research has revealed the centrality of religious life in the home in early modern England, but the extensive research about eighteenth-century households over the past fifteen years has seldom made reference to the place and practice of religion in the domestic context. This essay, focusing on the corporate religious life of Anglican households rather than on the piety and devotions of individuals, suggests that religion remained at the heart of the home and family lives of Anglican laypeople throughout the period. It was not rediscovered by Evangelicals, nor was it a distinguishing feature of evangelical households, but was a continuing element throughout the period.

The late Georgian Church was not exclusively the preserve of the graduate clergyman: Oxford and Cambridge universities produced too few graduates to supply all the titles for orders. My current study of ordination records indicates that between 1780 and 1839 about one in four new entrants to the Church had no degree and that the majority of ordinands in Wales and the Northern Province were non-graduates, generally termed by contemporaries as ‘literates’. Why is this relevant to the subject of the household? The answer lies in the way in which these non-graduates prepared for ordination. There were various well-trodden routes: for instance in Wales and north-west England some grammar schools provided tertiary level study. But most non-graduate clerical aspirants followed a schoolboy classical education with private study, often assisted by a clergyman. This essay is concerned with a subsection of this type of preparation, the domestic clerical seminary, in which students prepared for ordination while residing in a clergyman’s family. It will consider the markets for such institutions, the nature of the pre-ordination training provided by them, and what a recognition of the operation of these seminaries contributes to an understanding of the channels through which emerging currents of ideology and professional practice flowed in this period.

In April 1805 the Christian Observer reviewed George Burder’s Lawful Amusements, a sermon preached earlier that year in London and recently published. Burder was a leading Independent minister, ‘a serious man, employed about serious things’, his son later recalled, and the Christian Observer might have been expected to approve. Yet it was clear that the reviewer thought he had gone too far. The sermon, he complained, ‘might more properly be entitled “Unlawful Amusements’”, given that only one out of its thirty-eight pages told readers what they could do with their leisure hours. Walking, riding, reading biography, history and natural philosophy, and music ‘in moderation’ were the only permissible pursuits. ‘Visiting the sick and poor in their abodes of penury and pain’ was, in Burder’s eyes, lawful, but the reviewer doubted whether it was, strictly speaking, an amusement. Nevertheless, to see Burder’s comments as symptomatic of a joyless religiosity in which every recreational minute was a minute wasted is to misunderstand them. For, as Evangelicalism gained a foothold in the Church of England during the 1780s and 1790s and came to thrive among well-heeled Nonconformist congregations, there was a growing consensus that leisurely pursuits were permissible and even necessary. However, not everyone agreed as to where the boundaries lay. Those who wrote for the Christian Observer, for instance, were clearly more relaxed about pastimes, but took a very dim view of Burder’s earthy vehemence. Indeed, one of the reviewer’s chief complaints about Lawful Amusements was the saltiness of its language, especially its ‘very strong, as well as coarse, Philippic against the theatre’, from which the reviewer fastidiously declined even to quote.

‘Popery is the religion of Cathedrals’, wrote J.W. Cunningham, the evangelical vicar of Harrow in his novel The Velvet Cushion (1815), ‘– Protestantism of houses’. It is a commonplace in the secondary literature that the household was the citadel of the evangelical version of Protestantism in nineteenth-century England. ‘Evangelicalism’, according to a representative comment by Ian Bradley, ‘was above all else the religion of the home.’ The head of the household conducting family prayers was the embodiment of the evangelical spirit. It is not the purpose of this essay to question that received image, but it does suggest that a clearer picture of the religious atmosphere of the evangelical home can be obtained from sources other than the manuals published for the paterfamilias to read to the assembled household. The books of family prayers tell us what was prescribed; but alternative sources show us what was practised. Spiritual journals, reflective meditations and candid correspondence can often be more revealing. Nowhere, however, is the kernel of household piety more evident than in the Bibles that some zealous believers annotated for their own benefit. The study of the Bible, as Edward Bickersteth, a leading evangelical divine, put it in his book A Scripture Help (1816), was ‘a great and important duty’. When members of evangelical families retired to the privacy of their own rooms, they might spend time in devotional reading of the Scriptures and leave a record of their reflections in the margins. Such Bibles, one of which is to be examined here, are treasuries of authentic domestic spirituality. They show something of the heartbeat of evangelical religion.

A small collection of family papers provides intimate and illuminating material on the illness and death of a much-loved teenager. Charlotte Bloomfield was the daughter of Lord Benjamin Bloomfield, confidant of the Prince Regent and from 1823 British ambassador at Stockholm. In 1825 Bloomfield had Charlotte painted with pretty golden curls by the fashionable miniaturist Anne Mee (Fig. 1). She holds her pet rabbit. Her story has rich resonances for the study of the evangelical household. This essay explores how a lingering death of this kind could produce a family crisis, which was in effect a test of faith. The case is also interesting in terms of the history of the medical treatment of children at home. Moreover, it shows how memorialization of such a death sustained the evangelical piety of the family in the decades that followed. This account gives particular attention to the particular roles and responsibilities of family and household members.

While a number of studies have highlighted the theological and social importance of the household in nineteenth-century Protestant Britain, the significance of domestic life for the leaders of the Oxford, or Tractarian, Movement remains almost completely unexplored. In a sense this is unsurprising, since the movement, which began in the 1830s, emphasized the importance of recalling the Church of England to its pre-Reformation heritage and consequently tended to stress the spiritual value of celibacy and asceticism. Whilst B.W. Young has highlighted the importance of celibacy for John Henry Newman, the movement’s main figurehead until his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1845, and other works have reflected upon the Tractarian emphasis on celibacy and tried to explain its origins, historians of the Oxford Movement have paid very little attention to the Tractarian attitude towards marriage and domestic life.

In a bleak and diseased Delhi, sometime after the wanton British decimation of the city in the wake of the 1857 rebellion, a Muslim nobleman by the name of Nasuh succumbs to the city’s recent cholera epidemic. After Nasuh falls unconscious, his father, who had recendy died in the same outbreak, appears to him in a dream. He tells his son that a day of reckoning awaits, and that as a father it is Nasuh’s duty to inculcate piety in his home. Surviving his illness, Nasuh sets about correcting the excesses of the various members of his family. These include his eldest daughter, who had such foolish habits as playing all night at cards, reading romances and singing idle songs; and his three sons, who were neglectful of their religious duties, read unsuitable poetry, flew kites and kept company with scandalous friends. Despite these blemishes in their household lives, Nasuh is able to persuade some members of his family of the rightness of his vision, turning his children into (respectively) a God-fearing wife and mother, and upstanding gendemen with right manners and good government professions. All are thus rewarded both in this world and the hereafter.

Sarah Terrett died suddenly on 25 November 1889, aged 53, after speaking at a meeting of the White Ribbon Army, the temperance organization she had founded in 1878. Following her death many people sent letters of sympathy to her bereaved husband, William. One of these, from the Rev. W. F. James, a minister of the Bible Christians, makes for especially interesting reading. The Bible Christian denomination, to which Sarah and William belonged, was one of the smaller Methodist connexions, and had its heartland in rural Devon, the area where she had grown up. James recalled the hospitality he enjoyed when visiting the Terretts’ home, Church House, in Bedminster, south Bristol:

The 1881 census took place on the evening of Sunday 3 April and provides a snapshot of the composition of virtually every household in the UK, including details of age, occupation and birthplace. In Lincolnshire the census returns for 647 ecclesiastical parishes and districts provide a valuable source of information about the households of the clergy. The range of this record, from remote rural villages to urban communities, although limited to one region of the country, can be considered as largely representative of typical clerical households in England in the late nineteenth century.

Nineteenth- and twentieth-century Protestant missionaries considered themselves exemplars of the Christian home. They devoted considerable energy to writing about domesticity and to constructing model homes in the mission field. In spite of their good intentions there was often a large gap between their ideals and the realities of life on mission stations. By means of a case study of a Pentecostal faith mission in Katanga, Belgian Congo, this essay demonstrates how models of the Western Christian home were unsustainable and examines the manner in which missionaries coped with unfulfilled domestic dreams. It shows how Western notions of the Christian home were undermined by the harshness of the tropical environment, the disparity in numbers between male and female missionary vocations, and the persistence of African notions of domesticity. The missionaries endured the material and emotional deprivations of life in the bush through faith in a providential God and by constructing intimate but tense relationships with African Christians. The essay begins with a discussion of some of the most pertinent scholarship on missionaries and domesticity.

‘We reject that morality – death to the family!’ So interjected a young female heckler during the inaugural rally of the Nationwide Festival of Light (NFOL) in Westminster Central Hall on 9 September 1971. Although press coverage of the event focused upon more dramatic interventions, such as the attempt by a group of bogus nuns to storm the platform, it was this stark proclamation of ‘death to the family’ which revealed the primary ideological battleground in the NFOL’s morality campaigns of the 1970s. Six months later, Bishop Maurice Wood of Norwich told the follow-up ‘Land Aflame’ rally in March 1972 that ‘in this day of synthetic substitutes there is no substitute for the family’. NFOL was sometimes accused of fighting simultaneously on too many fronts, ranging from pornography and blasphemy to religious education and Sunday trading, but Eddy Stride (rector of Christ Church, Spitalfields, and chairman of the NFOL executive committee) summarized the movement’s purpose as being ‘to actively promote the values of human dignity expressed in the Biblical view of family life’.

There is a significant case to be made that women are central to the secularization of the West since the midtwentieth century. This case has started to be argued in a variety of ways. A number of scholars have linked secularization to women via change to the family. In 1992, French sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger theorized secularization not as the collapse of religions but as modernity’s transformation of conventional forms of religion (especially Judaism and Christianity) into ‘the religious’ – a state of sacredness devoid of shared liturgy, even of belief in God, but characterized by belonging to new types of secular institution (notably she cited football clubs), and instigated by the collapse of the nuclear family (what she called ‘the traditional family’). In this process, she suggested, what modernity had done was to sustain a ‘chain of memory’ of religious ritual, but not of religious beliefs. At the heart of Hervieu-Léger’s narrative of causation of the ‘religious crisis’ that was ending belief, she identified the collapse of the traditional family through the coming of ultra-low fertility in the 1960s and 1970s. She wrote that the ‘collapse of the traditional family’ was ‘the central factor in the disintegration of the imagined continuity that lies at the heart of the modern crisis of religion’, pinpointing the period ‘around 1965 with the downturn in the statistics of births and marriages which had risen markedly in the period 1945-50’. With falling fertility and marriage, and rising divorce, cohabitation and births outwith marriage, ‘[i]ndividual well-being and fulfilment take precedence.’ Although the British religious sociologist Grace Davie used Hervieu-Léger’s concept in support of her thesis of Christianity’s survival through believing without belonging, the French sociologist was explicitly not sanguine about the fate of the Churches: ‘The rise of the religious does not necessarily give rise to religion.’ Hervieu-Léger regards the change in the family resulting from the 1960s as putting organized religion in a parlous state in western Europe, whilst Davie sees the secular family as relying vicariously by 2000 on religion for the enactment of a Christian or Jewish liturgy on behalf of the secular.

This essay is an attempt to explore the cultural logics behind two very different orientations towards spirits (divinities), one Chinese and the other Christian, and the kinds of religious subjects that are produced by practices informed by these two differing orientations. Specifically, I examine the role the household plays in Chinese religious life as a site and structural unit to host different categories of spirits (gods, ghosts and ancestors), and contrast this with the Christian idiom of being hosted by God. In Christianity, God is the supreme host; humans (Christians) can only be guests at God’s banquet but they cannot host God in return. It is explicitly an unequal relationship. And even though they are unworthy of such generous treatment Christians must accept this divine grace and join the communion. The eucharist, the most important Christian ritual for almost all Christians, is a constant reminder to Christians that they are guests, and that when they go to heaven, they will be God’s guests eternally. In the Chinese case, on the other hand, the household hosts the spirits by providing offerings. Gods, ghosts and ancestors are invited to the bountiful banquet at fixed times of the year and then sent off when the banquets are over. The spirits can only be guests; they do not, and indeed cannot, host human guests. In Chinese religious culture there are no accounts of spirits, be they deities, ancestors or ghosts, hosting humans. In the Chinese hosting of spirits, the guest is accorded honour and respect, but it is the host who is the most active, potent and pre-eminent agent. In other words, agency rests with humans. And the social idiom of hosting enframes the entire cluster of ritual actions.