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HISTORIES OF THE SACRED AND SECULAR, 1700 –2000

Visions of British Culture

from the Reformation
to Romanticism
The Protestant Discovery of Tradition

Celestina Savonius-Wroth
Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000

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Department of History
Oxford Brookes University
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 Celestina Savonius-Wroth

Visions of British
Culture from the
Reformation to
Romanticism
The Protestant Discovery of Tradition
Celestina Savonius-Wroth
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Urbana, IL, USA

Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000

ISBN 978-3-030-82854-7    ISBN 978-3-030-82855-4 (eBook)
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In loving memory of my father
Dr. William Henry Wroth
 Acknowledgements

Of the many debts of gratitude I have incurred in the writing of this book,
the first to be mentioned is to Dror Wahrman. When I enrolled in a gradu-
ate course with Dror a long while ago, I had no intention of becoming a
historian, but Dror’s irrepressible delight in the study of the past and mag-
ical ability to engage students drew me in. Jonathan Sheehan was also a
formative influence on my development as a historian, opening my eyes to
the fascinating world of early modern religious erudition. Sarah Knott and
Konstantin Dierks welcomed me into the guild.
During my time at Indiana University, the Libraries, the Department of
History, and the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies provided a stimu-
lating and supportive intellectual context. I am grateful to former and
current members of those interconnected circles, including Mary Favret,
Chris Ferguson, Constance Furey, Stephanie Koscak, Moira Marsh,
Catherine Minter, Ioana Patuleanu, Leah Shopkow, Joel Silver, Rebecca
Spang, and Joseph Stubenrauch. It is no doubt thanks to the interdisci-
plinary collegiality of the Center for Eighteenth-Century Studies that I
was most of the way through writing this book before it dawned upon me
that historians rarely write books about Romanticism.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign has also proved to be
a welcoming, exciting, and supportive intellectual home. This book owes
much to the good advice and support of Antoinette Burton, Clare
Crowston, Maria Gillombardo, Verena Höfig, Elizabeth Hoiem, Craig
Koslofsky, Harry Liebersohn, Dana Rabin, and Carol Symes, and my col-
leagues at the University Library.

vii
viii Acknowledgements

Of the many scholars at other institutions with whom I have had the
good fortune to discuss various aspects of this project, I am particularly
grateful to Lori Branch, William Bulman, Arthur Burns, Jeffrey Collins,
David Hopkin, Robert Ingram, Matthew Kadane, Markku Peltonen,
Richard Serjeantson, Richard Sher, Brent Sirota, Andrew Starkie,
Alexandra Walsham, Irene Whelan, and Andre Willis. I am grateful to the
organizers and attendees of conferences at which I presented work in
progress, including those of the American Folklore Society, American
Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies, Anglo-American Conference of
Historians, International Society for Cultural History, North American
Conference on British Studies, and specialist conferences “The Early
Modern Parish Church,” “European Clerics and Vernacular Culture in
the Long Nineteenth Century,” and “Religion in the Scottish
Enlightenment.”
The dedicated staff of many libraries and archives have helped make the
research for this book possible, including the British Library, the Bodleian
Library, Dundee City Archive and Record Centre (Sarah Aitken), Helsinki
University Library, Lambeth Palace Library, Lancashire Archives (David
Tilsley and John Rogan), and the Manx National Heritage Library and
Archives (Wendy Thirkettle, and researcher Phil Craine). My greatest debt
is to my former and current colleagues at the Indiana University
Bloomington Libraries and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Library.
Many thanks also to Molly Beck, Emily Russell, and Ruby Panigrahi at
Palgrave Macmillan and to the two anonymous readers, both for their
constructive criticism and for their generous encouragement.
Last but by no means least, I am grateful to those nearest and dearest
to me without whose love and support this book would never have been
written. They all bore with me with kindness and patience even when “the
book” impinged upon other life plans. Sami has been my anchor and a
generous and perceptive reader of drafts in various stages. I take it as a true
compliment that he has also been a demanding reader, resolutely holding
my work to the highest standards. It goes without saying that neither Sami
nor anyone else who has advised me is to blame for any of the book’s
shortcomings, for which I am solely responsible.
I am indebted to my parents, William and Deborah Wroth, for so much.
Dedicating this book to my father’s memory is one small tribute I can
offer, and I do so with deep gratitude to them both.
 Contents

1 Introduction  1

2 Ritual, Ceremony, and Custom in the Aftermath of the

British Reformations 19

3 “Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaism”: Erudition,

Polemic, and Apologetics in the Study of British Customs 53

4 The Antiquities of the Common People 89

5 Embodied Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain: “All

Mankind Are the Vulgar in This Respect”123

6 Religion in the Bardic Revival161

7 Against the Cold Calculus of Modernity203

8 Conclusion239

Bibliography255

Index295

ix
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

British Romanticism idealized the “common people,” especially those

dwelling in rural and remote parts of the Atlantic archipelago, as exem-
plars of sincerity and communal solidarity, and as sources of authentic
utterance. Their “lore” was seen as a font of ancient traditions and inspira-
tion for sublime poetry. Unspoiled by false education, living close to the
natural world, their responses to the impulses of emotion and sense per-
ception innocent and unmediated, they seemed to have virtues and insights
which their oversophisticated urban and elite contemporaries lacked. This
familiar constellation of ideas—what might be thought of as the “roman-
ticization of the folk”—did not appear suddenly from the blue sky to be
manifested in the preface to William Wordsworth’s and Samuel Coleridge’s
Lyrical Ballads (1798), nor was it imported ready-made from contempo-
rary continental European thought.
As is well known to literary scholars, but perhaps less obvious to histo-
rians, a prominent feature typically associated with Romanticism—the
deliberate turn away from norms drawn from Classical models towards
“native,” “primitive,” “Gothic,” and “exotic” sources of inspiration—
began well before the period usually thought of as the Romantic era.
Influential literary historians such as Marilyn Butler have demonstrated
the shortcomings of conventional periodization that draws a sharp line

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature 1

Switzerland AG 2022
C. Savonius-Wroth, Visions of British Culture from the Reformation
to Romanticism, Histories of the Sacred and Secular, 1700–2000,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-82855-4_1
2 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH

between “Enlightenment” and “Romanticism.”1 It is clear that eighteenth-­

century British poets and literary critics who are sometimes categorized as
“pre-Romantics”—including James Thomson, Thomas Percy, Joseph and
Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray, Robert Lowth, and Hugh Blair—engaged
enthusiastically in contemporary pan-European theorizing about the ori-
gins of civilization and the relative merits of antiquity and modernity.
Along with a host of antiquaries and philologists across Britain and Ireland,
they made formative contributions to new ideas about literature and cul-
ture, ideas from which the now “canonical” Romantic poets drew much of
their inspiration.
This book takes aim at another artificial boundary often imposed on the
history of Romanticism, the assumption that it replaced, or displaced, reli-
gion. In the discussion that follows, my aim is to anchor the emergence of
Romanticism firmly in the context of British religious discourse. This is a
book about the longue durée of attitudes and ideas that British Romanticism
inherited from the religious controversies of the early modern period, and
bequeathed, in turn, to modernity.
The term “Romanticism” has been defined in many ways since it was
first used in reference to contemporary literary fashions in the early nine-
teenth century. Proposals have been made to abolish the term altogether,
or at least to divest it of its initial capital letter, or to use it only in the
plural.2 If one wishes to speak about “British” Romanticism(s), the diffi-
culties are multiplied, not least because of the central role played by
“Romanticism” in defining concepts of “Britishness.”3 Although I will
illustrate some of my points with examples from “high Romantic” English
poets such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, I am using “British Romanticism”
here in a broad and loose sense to refer to the major shifts in cultural sen-
sibilities between the mid-eighteenth and early nineteenth century that are
evident not only in literature and the arts but also in ideas about the past,
the structure of society, and the concept of nationhood or nationalism.

1
Marilyn Butler, Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and Its
Background, 1760–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981); David Fairer, English
Poetry of the Eighteenth Century, 1700–1789 (London: Longman, 2003).
2
Summarized in David M. Craig, Robert Southey and Romantic Apostasy: Political
Argument in Britain, 1780–1840 (Woodridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2007), 4–6.
3
For an introduction to these issues, see Gerard Carruthers and Alan Rawes, English
Romanticism and the Celtic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), and
Murray Pittock, Scottish and Irish Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

British Romanticism, thus broadly conceived, was, I argue, both rooted

in religious culture and a major influence on subsequent religious develop-
ments. The second half of this claim has long been acknowledged, at least
as it relates to the Church of England.4 Its broader application is graphi-
cally illustrated by the fruits of the Gothic revival in Britain, Ireland, and
North America, thanks to which, by the end of the nineteenth century,
many staunch Calvinists, whose forebearers had toppled saints’ images and
smashed church windows, worshipped in spaces embellished with Gothic
tracery and pictured stained glass. (This transformation cannot be consid-
ered “merely” aesthetic, if only because the initial iconoclastic impulse did
not arise from “merely” aesthetic concerns.)5 The interplay between reli-
gion and Romanticism described in this book was not always as visible as
a new crop of Gothic churches, but it was central to the formation of
modern “British” cultural identities. It played an important role in the
preservation of the oral-literary heritage of all of the Four Nations of the
Atlantic archipelago, and of a wide array of regional vernacular cultural
practices (“folklore”), including communal memory of sacred geography
and life-affirming seasonal ritual.6
The religious upheavals in Western Europe in the sixteenth century
revolutionized the established understanding of the fundamental teach-
ings and rituals of Christianity. In so doing, they also destabilized the
long-accepted relationships between the ceremonies and symbols of offi-
cially sanctioned religious practice and the great body of vernacular cus-
toms that made up the fabric of everyday life. Polemicized by the Protestant
Reformation, what had once been largely unproblematic aspects of
European culture, such as seasonal festivities, wedding and funeral cus-
toms, and beliefs about the natural world, became the focus of intense

4
Stephen Prickett, Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth
in the Victorian Church (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); Sheridan Gilley,
“John Keble and the Victorian Churching of Romanticism,” in An Infinite Complexity:
Essays in Romanticism, ed. J. R. Watson (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1983), 226–39.
5
Keith Thomas, “Art and Iconoclasm in Early Modern England,” in Religious Politics in
Post-Reformation England, ed. Kenneth Fincham and Peter Lake (Woodbridge: Boydell &
Brewer, 2006), 16–40, defends the artistic sensibilities of the Reformation.
6
On transformations of the sacred geography of Britain and Ireland, see Alexandra
Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity, and Memory in Early Modern
Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
4 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH

religious conflict.7 This destabilization led to closer scrutiny not only of

religious ceremony and its ontological and psychological bases, but also of
all kinds of customs. A nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures and
religious psychology developed out of the turmoil, grounded in humanist
biblical scholarship and informed by the theological and pastoral problems
of the religious instability that followed the Reformation. In Britain, over
a long period stretching from the Protestant Reformation to the end of
the eighteenth century, conflict over religious concerns steered the edu-
cated elite towards an interest in the vernacular cultures of their own land
and, hence, towards a Protestant rediscovery of tradition.
Among those who devoted most careful thought to customs were the
mainstream, conformist upholders of the Church of England. A sympa-
thetic view of vernacular culture was consistent with the ideas they held
about what is now called psychology of religion—the need for external,
embodied practices, the importance of ritual language, the centrality of
sacramental symbols. It was also consistent with their interpretation of the
Bible and with the theories they favored about the origins of civilization.
They arrived at a more approving understanding of the customary behav-
ior of their less-educated fellow Britons, however, primarily in reaction to
the all-out attack on symbols, ceremonies, and customs launched by those
who sought a more thoroughgoing reformation of religion in Britain, the
“puritans” within and outside the Church of England, and their sometime
allies, the Scottish presbyterians. These ultra-reformists held the view that
no ritual acts were permitted to Christians unless literally documented in
the New Testament. To refute such an extreme position, apologists for
moderate reformation turned to the authority of custom. The appeal to
human tradition committed them to an understanding of cultural trans-
mission that legitimized aspects of vernacular culture.
It is perhaps not surprising that the initial impulse to do away with all
sorts of vernacular practices would have modulated into this more nuanced
view. For although the Protestant reformers attacked vernacular culture,

7
Key scholarship on these themes includes Philippe Buc, The Dangers of Ritual: Between
Early Medieval Texts and Social Scientific Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2001); Carlos M. N. Eire, War against the Idols: The Reformation of Worship from Erasmus to
Calvin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall
of Merry England: The Ritual Year, 1400–1700 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994);
Hutton, Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1996); David Cressy, Birth, Marriage, and Death: Ritual, Religion, and the
Life-Cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997).
 1 INTRODUCTION 5

they also elevated both the use of vernacular languages and the cultural
autonomy of national churches, through their insistence on the right of all
Christians to worship God and read the Bible in their native languages,
and on the right of nations to decide independently about non-essential
matters of religion. England’s hegemony in Britain and Ireland gave rise
to a conflict between religious ideals and political expediency. From the
point of view of religion, what justification could there be for forcing non-­
anglophone Protestants to use English? While political considerations
encouraged anglicization, the imposition of a foreign language in matters
of religion was contrary to Protestant principles. As I argue in Chap. 6, the
religious necessity of translating the Bible into the Celtic languages helped
to preserve not only the languages but their literary and oral traditions
as well.
In post-Reformation Scotland, the urgent necessity of ministering to a
large Gaelic-speaking population drew the Protestant clergy’s attention to
oral culture and to ordinary people as bearers of valuable cultural capital,
long before Gaelic heritage was co-opted by Scottish nationalism. In the
early seventeenth century, Scotland appeared to be a thoroughly and “suc-
cessfully” reformed Protestant nation, its people sober, iconoclastic,
Sabbath-observing Calvinists, averse to ceremonies and restrained by
effective presbyterian church discipline. In fact, the state of religion in
Scotland was complicated by political and cultural tensions, between the
Stuart monarchs’ preference for bishops and the Scottish Reformation’s
strong traditions of presbyterian governance, between the official aboli-
tion of the church calendar and the deeply entrenched popular attachment
to seasonal celebrations and vernacular customs, and above all, between
the cultural norms of Scots-speaking Lowlanders and those of the Gaelic
inhabitants of the highlands and islands.8
The establishment, after 1688, of official presbyterianism in the high-
lands and islands was hampered by widespread attachment to the Stuart
monarchy and the near-impossibility of finding enough Gaelic-speaking
ministers who were not Jacobites. Many parishes continued to be served

8
John McCallum, “Introduction,” in Scotland’s Long Reformation: New Perspectives on
Scottish Religion, c. 1500–c. 1660, ed. John McCallum (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 1–26; Margo
Todd, The Culture of Protestantism in Early Modern Scotland (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 2002); Jane E. A. Dawson, “The Gaidhealtachd and the Emergence of the Scottish
Highlands,” in British Consciousness and Identity: The Making of Britain, 1533–1707, ed.
Peter Roberts and Brendan Bradshaw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998),
259–300.
6 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH

by episcopalians, both legally and illegally, well into the eighteenth centu-
ry.9 The large size of parishes, sparse population, rugged geography, and
language barrier prevented the Church from exercising close control over
highland and island parishes. Under these circumstances, Protestantism in
Gaelic-speaking Scotland developed its own unique vernacular variations,
in which Gaelic oral cultures of poetry and storytelling played a central
role.10 When Gaelic poetry suddenly burst onto the anglophone literary
scene in the mid-eighteenth century, its “discovery” was the result of a
long history of interaction between religion and vernacular culture; the
Gaelic-speaking Scottish presbyterian clergy were the greatest champions
in Britain of the poems attributed to the ancient pagan bard, Ossian.
The conventional story of the formation of British cultural identities in
the Romantic era tends to ignore or downplay these foundational religious
contexts. For the most part, the birth of British Romanticism has been
told as a secular story, or a story of religious heterodoxy and individualism
more easily relatable to an ultimately secular endpoint. This has been the
case even in the work of some of the most historically minded literary
scholars. Marilyn Butler’s vision of Romanticism, for example, was so
determinedly secular that she even managed to include the deeply pious
William Stukeley (discussed in Chap. 6) in the same category as Voltaire
and Hume, as “secular intellectuals…advancing the secular case to the
public.”11
The vast body of scholarship on British Romanticism is curiously reti-
cent on the topic of mainstream Anglican and presbyterian religious belief
and practice.12 For many scholars of Romanticism, under the influence of

9
John MacInnes, The Evangelical Movement in the Highlands of Scotland, 1688 to 1800
(Aberdeen: University Press, 1951), 16–41.
10
Donald E. Meek, “The Pulpit and the Pen: Clergy, Literacy and Oral Tradition in the
Scottish Highlands,” in The Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850, ed. Adam
Fox and Daniel R Woolf (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 84–118.
11
Marilyn Butler, Mapping Mythologies: Countercurrents in Eighteenth-Century British
Poetry and Cultural History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 19; her other-
wise remarkably perceptive essay “Antiquarianism (Popular),” in An Oxford Companion to
the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832, ed. Iain McCalman, Jon Mee, and et al.
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 328–38 also presents a completely secular
trajectory.
12
Important exceptions include Murray Roston, Prophet and Poet: The Bible and the
Growth of Romanticism (London: Faber and Faber, 1965); E. S. Shaffer, “Kubla Khan” and
The Fall of Jerusalem: The Mythological School in Biblical Criticism and Secular Literature,
1770–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975); Stephen Prickett, Romanticism
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

such giants of the field as M. H. Abrams and Geoffrey Hartman, the rela-
tionship between Romanticism and religion is pre-judged because of an
assumption that “literature has essentially superseded religion’s provision
of profound thought and deep feeling.”13 While the recent “religious
turn” in the humanities has meant that cultural and historical intersections
between religion and Romanticism now attract significant scholarly inter-
est, the emphasis has been primarily on the unconventionality of Romantic
authors’ religious views.14 Little attempt has been made to anchor the
cultural movement as a whole in the omnipresent Anglican and presbyte-
rian piety and erudition which dominated British society into the nine-
teenth century. This is perhaps in part because literary scholarship, in
particular, has been slow to reap the insights of revisionist accounts of the
relationship between Enlightenment and religion, and of the recovery of
the eighteenth-century Church of England as a vital force in society, rather
than the moribund husk it had long been considered.15
My aim is to show that the cultural phenomenon that we think of as
Romanticism was rooted in religious concerns and clerical erudition—
deep learning in the service of pastoral care, religious polemic, and apolo-
getics. As William McKelvy points out, British literary Romanticism
emerged out of a milieu that was “more priest-ridden than a gothic
novel.”16 He is referring, not to Roman Catholic priests, but to the
Anglican clergy, and if his colorful image is extended to include the epis-
copalian and presbyterian clergy of Scotland (although the latter would

and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1976); William R. McKelvy, The English Cult of Literature:
Devoted Readers, 1774–1880 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007) and Sarah
Houghton-Walker, John Clare’s Religion (Burlington: Ashgate, 2009).
13
For discussion of the prevalence of secularization narratives in studies of Romanticism,
see for example, Michael Tomko, “Religion,” in Joel Faflak and Julia M. Wright, eds., A
Handbook of Romanticism Studies (Chichester: Wiley, 2012), 339–356, quotation at 341;
Introduction to William Andrew Ulmer, The Christian Wordsworth, 1798–1805 (Albany:
State University of New York Press, 2001).
14
For example, Daniel E. White, Early Romanticism and Religious Dissent (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2006); Jasper Albert Cragwall, Lake Methodism: Polite Literature
and Popular Religion in England, 1780–1830 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press,
2013); Helen Boyles, Romanticism and Methodism: The Problem of Religious Enthusiasm
(New York: Routledge, 2017).
15
For a thorough introduction to the historiography of the eighteenth-century Church of
England through the twentieth century, see William Gibson, The Church of England,
1688–1832: Unity and Accord (New York: Routledge, 2001), 4–27.
16
McKelvy, English Cult of Literature, 37.
8 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH

not, of course, have referred to themselves as priests), it can serve as an

evocation of the story to be told in this book as well. My argument goes
beyond the important and usually disregarded fact that the early (or “pre-
”) Romantics were mostly clergymen by profession, and the obvious point
that Wordsworth, Blake, and Coleridge were deeply religious individuals;
one of my primary ambitions is a reappraisal of the intellectual and cultural
sources of Romanticism that recognizes the pervasiveness of religious dis-
course in the culture of eighteenth-century Britain.
Intertwined with this is another goal, a new interpretation of the emer-
gence of elite interest in vernacular culture. The idea that “the common
people,” the “lower orders,” “the vulgar” have “rites,” “ceremonies,” and
“antiquities” of their own implies a quasi-anthropological understanding
of human society. It suggests that “the people” have an internal socio-­
cultural organization that is distinct from that imposed upon them by
their social “superiors.” This idea, however, was already widely accepted
when anthropology or ethnography as distinct fields of study existed only
in the embryonic form of local histories and travel accounts of exotic peo-
ples. From at least as early as the sixteenth century, British antiquaries and
religious polemicists alike conceived of their less-educated contemporaries
as possessing a complex system of “opinions,” “traditions,” “rites,” and
“ceremonies,” for the most part inherited from an ancient pagan past, but
with an admixture of “monkish superstition.”
This book uncovers ideas about British vernacular cultures expressed in
the apologetic, pastoral, and devotional literature of the overlapping peri-
ods of the “long Reformation” and the long eighteenth century, as well as
the relationship between those genres and the methodical documentation
of the cultural expressions that eventually came to be called folklore. I am
particularly interested in the tendency within this discussion that suggests
the assignment of a positive value to certain forms of vernacular culture, a
way of thinking about “the common people” that influenced the Romantic
idea of the “folk” as a source of ancient wisdom and cultural values. This
perspective was often closely tied to a more sacramental and “performa-
tive” religious perspective which, I argue, is one of the most significant but
widely ignored formative influences on Romanticism: a vision of “culture”
(to use today’s word) emanating from religious principles.
In British religious polemic throughout the period discussed here, both
friends and enemies of vernacular culture assumed that there was a close
affinity between ritual and custom. One striking indication of this is the
way that the everyday terminology of familiar customs could be applied
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

indiscriminately to both. Consider, for example, the word “mummery.”

Even from the handful of examples given in the Oxford English Dictionary,
the polyvalence of the word is evident: it appears just as much at home in
the context of elves and fairies or of actual “mumming” (traditional
English masked performances at Christmas-time) as in the context of criti-
cisms of Roman Catholicism or “pagan” religion. Among the wide range
of meanings of the word “mummery,” the polemical meaning seems to be
the most common, usually directed against Roman Catholicism, but
sometimes also against Anglican ritual. For the most part, the usage of
such linguistically flexible words was derogatory: calling something by the
name of a plebeian activity was a way of mocking it. Roman Catholic ritual
was routinely derided as “conjuring” or “fooling,” in the specific senses of
acting like a jester, or tricking or cheating someone.17
But the perceived fluidity between the world of “customs” and that of
“rituals” also suggests a deep-rooted sense of ontological similarity, a sense
that both customs and rituals take their force and efficacy from an inherent
correspondence between the human psyche and the external forms it
encounters. For generations of twentieth-century historians, this belief
was evidence of a worldview characterized by “enchantment,” or more
pejoratively, by “magical thinking.” Earl Wasserman, writing in 1953,
could describe a shift from a pre-Baconian world imbued with implicit
meaning to a post-Baconian world in which “these interpretive premises
had lost almost all validity” as an “obvious generalization.”18 The assump-
tion that such a shift occurred has been challenged, and it is perhaps no
longer so obvious that Western culture is characterized by an inexorable
trend towards a “disenchanted” worldview.19 Yet some kind of

17
For example, in a hostile description of the Catholic baptismal rite, the priest’s ritual acts,
such as blowing on the child’s face, exorcising devils, and anointing with oil, are described as
“fooling,” Edward Fowler, The Resolution of This Case of Conscience Whether the Church of
England’s Symbolizing so Far as It Doth with the Church of Rome, Makes It Unlawful to Hold
Communion with the Church of England? (London, 1683), 13–14. See further discussion of
this general point in Chap. 2. On the relationship between “games” and ritual, see C. L. Barber,
Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy; a Study of Dramatic Form and Its Relation to Social Custom
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1959); Naomi Conn Liebler, Shakespeare’s Festive
Tragedy: The Ritual Foundations of Genre (London: Routledge, 1995).
18
Earl R. Wasserman, “Nature Moralized: The Divine Analogy in the Eighteenth Century,”
ELH 20, no. 1 (March 1953): 39–76 (39–40). See also Keith Thomas, Religion and the
Decline of Magic (New York: Scribner, 1971).
19
Alexandra Walsham, “The Reformation and ‘the Disenchantment of the World’
Reassessed,” Historical Journal 51, no. 2 (2008): 497–528; Jonathan Sheehan, “When Was
10 C. SAVONIUS-WROTH

“disenchantment” was what late seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and

nineteenth-­century thinkers either feared or hoped for, fought to prevent,
or promoted.
The idea of a radical shift in the fundamental bases of significance, a
“disenchantment of the world,” whether as a unique historical phenome-
non that took place in Western Europe and North America between the
Renaissance and the French Revolution or as a constantly recurring con-
flict whenever any people possessing a “pre-modern” worldview have
come into contact with the disenchanted dominant culture, has survived
in the field of anthropology. It is found preeminently in the work of British
anthropologist Mary Douglas, in the notion that “sensitivity to symbols”
varies from culture to culture. In her Natural Symbols (1970), Douglas
illustrated this idea of “symbolist sensitivity” by comparing the beliefs of
twentieth-century English Catholics to those of their Irish immigrant con-
temporaries. The English Catholics, especially the clergy, were “insensitive
to non-verbal signals and dull to their meaning,” while the Irish, like all
other groups defined by Douglas as “ritualists,” lived according to a rich
fabric of “cosmic orientations and moral directives [expressed] in con-
densed symbols.”20 The legitimacy of symbols (in much the sense meant
by Douglas) was vehemently and explicitly contested in British religious
debate from the Reformation through the long eighteenth century. Thus,
in order to understand these debates as seen through the eyes of contem-
poraries, “symbolist sensitivity” is a useful concept, whether or not “disen-
chantment” is accepted as our central explanatory model today.

Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 217–42; Penelope J. Corfield, “‘An Age of
Infidelity’: Secularization in Eighteenth-Century England,” Social History 39, no. 2 (May
2014): 229–47. In contrast, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2007) and Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious
Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012). Robert
A. Yelle, The Language of Disenchantment: Protestant Literalism and Colonial Discourse in
British India (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 14–16, is a nuanced discussion that
recognizes “some social reality to the phenomenon of disenchantment.”
20
“Condensed symbols” are symbols that “condense an immensely wide range of refer-
ence” into a concretely graspable form or act. Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols: Explorations
in Cosmology, 3rd ed. (London; New York: Routledge, 2003) quotations at 10, 37, 44. I
have taken the expression “symbolist sensitivity” from the summary of Douglas’s arguments
in Howard J. Happ, “Calendary Conflicts: the Religious Structuring of Time in Renaissance
England” (PhD dissertation, Princeton, 1974), 17.
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

Perhaps it is not surprising that British Protestants who upheld this

kind of symbolist understanding of the world, who valued ceremonies,
and who tolerated customs, were accused of being “papists” by their
reformist opponents, but their defense, namely that they were following
the most venerable traditions of Christianity, cannot be dismissed out of
hand, pace Keith Thomas. Thomas saw a “magical” character in late medi-
eval religion as the result of “the notorious readiness of the early Christian
leaders to assimilate elements of the old paganism into their own religious
practice, rather than pose too direct a conflict of loyalties in the minds of
the new converts,” noting that the “consolations afforded by such prac-
tices were too considerable for the Church to ignore; if the people were
going to resort to magic anyway it was far better that it should be magic
over which the Church maintained some control…The Reformation…is
justly commemorated for having robbed the priest of most of his magical
functions.” In drawing this particular line between “magic” and “reli-
gion,” Thomas revealed the characteristically Protestant assumptions of
much “secular” history in the twentieth century.21
For the early Church, some of the practices of pre-Christian religions
had to be rejected entirely but others could be transformed into vehicles
of Christian symbolic meaning. The propriety of such transformations was
not accepted unanimously or consistently in the early Church, as countless
examples of censure and of legislation forbidding certain kinds of eclecti-
cism (later to be carefully gleaned by Protestants as evidence) amply docu-
ment. But although it was a controversial view from the earliest days of
organized Christianity, it was also a fundamentally formative one that per-
mitted a long and fruitful history of adaptation and borrowing.22
Once the Protestant Reformation was fully underway, those who held
this perspective were usually on the defensive since Reformation scholars
and polemicists had identified such “accommodation” to the needs of the
human psyche as one of the central causes of the supposed corruption of
the Roman Church. The concept of “pagano-papism”—in other words,
the accusation that the practices of the Roman Catholic Church were a

21
Thomas, Religion and the Decline of Magic, 47–48, 275. See Valerie I. J. Flint, The Rise
of Magic in Early Medieval Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 393–394.
22
On this topic generally, see John Bossy, Christianity in the West, 1400–1700 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1985); Ronald Hutton, “How Pagan Were Medieval English
Peasants?,” Folklore, no. 3 (2011): 235–49; Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 18–79;
Flint, The Rise of Magic. The concept of “inculturation” in twentieth-century Christian mis-
siology seems to conform to this pattern.
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