THIS REPLY is to a review of Albion M. Urdank. Religion and Society in a Cotswold Vale: Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, 1780-1865 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990), by Jeffrey Cox in “On the Limits of Social History: Nineteenth-Century Evangelicalism,” Journal of British Studies 31, no. 2 (1992): 198-203.

¹ Thus Cox praises Boyd Hilton for “ignor[ing] the enormous scholarly investment in the social history of religion of the last few decades” (p. 201), and for treating internal shifts within evangelical thought and practice as wholly autonomous phenomena, causally unrelated to the socioeconomic changes wrought by the Industrial Revolution.

² Urdank, Albion M., “Religion and Reproduction among English Dissenters: Gloucestershire Baptists in the Demographic Revolution,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 33, no. 3 (July 1991): 511–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.