Introduction

Religious belief was the fulcrum of individual and collective life in early modern society. The news was one phenomenon through which the collective and the individual were brought into contact with each other, and it follows that the influence of religion should be detectable in it. Scholars including Andrew Pettegree and Joad Raymond have attempted to define ‘news’, and by drawing on research from a variety of disciplines they have come up with different answers (Pettegree 2014; Raymond and Moxham 2016). We have found Raymond's definition of the newspaper to be a helpful guide: it is ‘defined by seriality, precise periodicity, physical continuity, consecutive numbering and a stable title’ (Raymond 2003: 107). The periodical press was chiefly, though not exclusively, an instrument of news. The news was polyvocal, coming to consumers in myriad forms, and to consider the periodical press as though it existed in a vacuum would misrepresent it. Not all periodicals fell into the genre of news. Between the lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 1679 and its reinstatement in 1685, for example, ninety-two periodical titles were published in London. Of these, Susannah Randall has estimated that seventy-six can be termed ‘unofficial newspapers’ (2008: 45). Publications outside the newspaper genre included scholarly works such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, book trade notices such as Catalogue of books printed/ continued and the more literary Lucian, a Dialogue (S. Randall 2008: 49–50).

Religion is vast and unwieldy. Its tendrils are so numerous and so extensive that they can be difficult to see, much less to disentangle. It can encompass such varied aspects as doctrine, practice, confessional differences, lay and ecclesiastical divisions, controversies, regional variation and much more. It is not a topic that can easily be confined to its own discrete sphere. In the early modern period religion was almost always entangled, for example, with politics and social or economic differences. In early modern Britain there were few areas of life, both for the state and the individual person, in which religion was not relevant. The entanglement of religion with all areas of life is visible when examining religion and the periodical press. Religion pervaded early modern news media: its content, censors, audiences, writers, printers and publishers. Indeed, religious books have long been acknowledged as constituting the largest category in British publishing in the early modern period.