Join our virtual workshop on new directions in the social history of religion.
The history of religion has often occupied a historiographical space of its own, and has been unevenly integrated into wider analyses of social, cultural and economic history. This workshop aims to break down disciplinary and thematic barriers between these historiographical schools, and to provoke discussions about the methodologies and sources historians use to uncover belief, the role of religion in narratives of long-term change, the interaction between faith and the mainstays of social history – gender, race and class – and why it is useful for historians to take seriously the beliefs of people in the past. This workshop is inspired by the AHRC-funded project ‘Faith in the Town: Lay Religion, Urbanisation and Industrialisation in England, 1740-1830’, which analyses the transformation of urban society through the lens of lay belief.
The workshop will be run over two afternoons, from 2-5pm on Thursday 14 and Friday 15 January 2021. The workshops will be hosted by the John Rylands Research Institute at the University of Manchester and will be held online, with pre-recorded papers and discussions over Zoom.
Please register to attend on our Eventbrite page: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/new-directions-in-the-social-history-of-religion-tickets-122447185829 by Friday 8 January 2021. Attendance is free but numbers may be capped to facilitate discussion, so please register early if you can.
Programme
Day 1: Thursday 14 January, 2-5pm
Session One: Epistolary Narratives of Family and the Body
2pm-2.55pm
Ann Hughes, Keele University. ‘My mothers angry letter’: the Gells of Hopton: Family Tensions and Religious Divisions, 1660-1730
Karen Harvey, University of Birmingham. ‘went off like a Lamb at Eight O Clock on Friday Morning’: Faith, Illness and Embodiment in Eighteenth-Century British Letters
5-minute break
Session Two: Histories of Childhood and Care
3pm-3.55pm
Mary Clare Martin, University of Greenwich. Childhood, Youth and Faith in Context: Home, Institution and Religious Community in the London Hinterland, 1740-1870
Kate Gibson, University of Manchester. ‘Ellen went to church for the first time she behavd very well’: Children and the Imperatives of Care in Urban Northern England, 1740-1830
10-minute break
Session Three: Language and Textual Analysis
4.05pm-5pm
Laura McCormick Kilbride, University of Cambridge. Verse History and Secularism: The Case of Chartist Poetry/ Hymnody
Barbra Mann Wall and Rebecca Draughon, University of Virginia. Race, Religion, and Segregation in the American South, 1845-1898: A Textual Analysis
Day 2: Friday 15 January, 2-5pm
Session One: Civic, Sociable and Religious Space
2pm-3.25pm
Gareth Atkins, University of Cambridge. Thinking with Stained Glass
Carys Brown, University of Cambridge. Sociable Piety and Pious Sociability: Protestant Dissenters and Drinking Spaces, ca. 1689-1750
Hannah Barker, University of Manchester. Faith and the Urban Landscape in Northern English Towns, 1740-1830
10-minute break
Session Two: Round Table: New Directions in the Social History of Religion
3.35pm-5pm
Led by Jeremy Gregory, University of Nottingham
