Religious texts played a central role in the historical development of English. Harnessing corpus linguistic techniques, historical pragmatics, and the history of the English church, this book interrogates the keywords that have dominated English religious expression from the end of the medieval period to the eve of the Darwinian age. Exploring a number of historical religious works from the late medieval period to the nineteenth century, it shows how changes in the deployment of key words reflected their evolving socio-cultural functions, and how their usage subsequently moved beyond religious texts to shape contemporary literary and political works. It includes numerous case-studies involving prophetic women, pamphleteers, preachers and philosophers, alongside prominent theologians, literary authors and other well-known figures. Offering new insights into the growing cross-disciplinary enterprise of theolinguistics in an engaging and accessible way, this study is essential reading for both English historical linguists and historians of English Christianity.

‘Combining fascinating analyses of the words used by this person, in this place, at this time with the latest methods in corpus linguistics, this book is for everyone who cares about how we study the English of the past.’

Wendy Scase - Emeritus Professor of Medieval English Literature, University of Birmingham

‘In this elegantly written, detailed, and completely original study, Jeremy Smith combines historical criticism with corpus linguistics to demonstrate an entirely new way to approach language history and literary interpretation. Showing how topic, genre, and register shaped the lexis of religious texts across centuries, he also provides ground-breaking illustrations of a humanistic linguistics that melds the innovations of new technologies with the precision of historical philology.’

Tim William Machan - Mary Lee Duda Professor of Literature, University of Notre Dame

‘Jeremy J. Smith offers us an impressive and profound assessment of religious language use from medieval times to the present, not only in the mainstream but in dissident sects, too. His outstanding achievement provides a historical pragmatics overview with contextual assessment, combined with digital humanities methods.’

Irma Taavitsainen - Professor Emerita of English Philology, University of Helsinki