The importance of household religious observance in early modern England has long been recognized. Historians have discussed domestic devotional practices, the sharing of authority and responsibilities between husband and wife within the “little commonwealth” of the family household, and their roles in the upbringing of children and servants. Growing religious divisions during the centuries following the Reformation made “spiritualized” family households natural bases or refuges for some religious dissenters. The established Church sought to regulate domestic religion so as to prevent the development of “conventicles” that might threaten its doctrine and worship. Emily Vine believes that concern with religious practice within the household, on the one hand, and conventicles on the other, has led to a relative neglect of contacts between households and of the supportive networks to which they belonged. “It was at the points of personal and family crisis at the beginning and the end of the life cycle, the occasional disruption of childbirth and death, that the home became an important and accepted setting for acts of communal religion” (30).
Vine’s study focuses on early modern London, where alongside the established Church, there were “semi-clandestine Catholic networks, coexisting Jewish and foreign Protestant communities, and a plurality of Protestant nonconformist denominations” (p. 2). Two milestones of Catholic experience – the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Gordon Riots of 1780 – determine the span of Vine’s survey. Her work is exceptional in its integration of the observances of the Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish congregations established in London during the later seventeenth century alongside those of the diverse Christian churches in a broad comparative framework.
The chapters devoted to religious practices preceding and following childbirth address such topics as the lying-in room, the role of the midwife and her companions, prayer for the expectant and newly delivered mother, the visitors she received, private baptisms, circumcisions, churchings, and other post-natal thanksgivings and celebrations. “Dying was a process which necessitated witnesses, participants, and visitors, both to provide spiritual comfort to the dying individual and to learn from their example” (160–161). The Communion of the Sick has an especially important place in Vine’s account. The laying out of the deceased, followed by their enclosure in a shroud and coffin, was, even among Protestants, “a devotional act which foregrounded the site of the home, and often the work of women, as important means of sustaining religious kinship” (201). The body became, briefly, the “central presence” in the household, visited by neighbors, friends, and kinsfolk. The procession from the house to the burial, and the hospitality that those who attended the funeral received from the family of the deceased, reaffirmed membership of the congregation.
From the first page of her account, Vine illustrates a wide variety of observances with numerous instructive and colourful examples. The experience of respectable adherents of the established Church, whether gentry, “middling sort,” or artisans, was very different from that of the more radical Protestant sects for much of the period before 1689, or those of the Roman Catholics, who suffered sudden, unpredictable outbreaks of persecution. The situations of the two non-Protestant religious groups also stood in marked contrast with each other. Roman Catholic networks depended on the support of foreign embassy chapels and royal and aristocratic households. The initially tiny Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jewish congregations, on the other hand, came to enjoy, in a cluster of synagogues in the heart of the City of London, a secure freedom of worship, albeit one without a formal statutory basis. The prominence of each religious group’s experience in Emily Vine’s account inevitably depends on the availability of evidence. The comparatively well-documented Jewish congregations, for example, loom rather larger than their size alone might seem to warrant. Readers will, however, think their relative prominence amply justified by the interesting comparisons Vine draws between their practices and those of Christian confessions.
Active participation in the full range of domestic and communal life cycle rites and customs described by Emily Vine depended upon the possession of at least modest means. Poor lodgers, mothers delivered in the workhouse, the recipients of funeral doles or aristocratic charity, all make brief appearances in this account, but the sources tapped by means of diligent research are, for the most part, too impersonal to allow us more than a glimpse of their lives.
How far the domestic performance of religious rites normally celebrated in the parish church was truly “communal” may be questioned. The Communion of the Sick was a “domestic religious act which actively required a gathering of people within the home” (62). However, the three or at least two communicants deemed essential could have been members of the same household. Private baptism was more common in London than elsewhere, and did not require more than a small number of “external participants including godparents, ministers, or priests” (101). At different moments in the life cycle, the household family might draw on the support of a number of different individuals and groups besides the clergy – professional experts, paid helpers, neighbors, friends, and kinsfolk, including individuals who came from outside, sometimes far outside, the family’s parish of residence. The assistance received from each of these categories differed in the extent to which it might be considered “communal.” Hospitality after christenings, churching and funerals, assistance to women in childbed, and visits to newly delivered mothers: all these made the family household a focus of larger gatherings. Their widespread practice is well attested. However, the extent to which many participants in such occasions bore their religious significance in mind as much as seeing them as opportunities to ‘make merry’ is a more open question.
Emily Vine’s period saw a growth of confessional diversity barely imaginable in 1600. Did the family household become more private and more secular, especially in the eighteenth century, in ways that adversely affected the practice of domestic religion? Vine is confident that any such development has been exaggerated. She may well be right, though it is difficult to reach a firm conclusion in the absence of quantifiable evidence.
In conclusion, this valuable study, the fruit of research in an impressive range of primary and secondary sources, will be indispensable reading for historians of the life cycle, household religious practice, and early modern London. It is both intriguing and thought-provoking, and will no doubt stimulate fresh research.
