This chapter contends that in Romans 2, Paul argues that the prophetic promises to make Israel obedient via the “Torah written on the heart” and the “circumcision of the heart” and a “new heart and new spirit” are presently being fulfilled. But in a startling twist, he includes uncircumcised gentiles among those receiving these things promised to Israel, building on his case in Rom 1 that Israel’s historic idolatry and immorality opened the door for gentiles to be included due to God’s impartiality.

This chapter lays out the Laudians’ view of what they took to be the currently deleterious physical and liturgical condition of the English church, which they attributed, in about equal part, to lay neglect and parsimony and puritan error. Having evoked the Laudian critique, the chapter then critically evaluates it, arguing that the Laudian account should not be taken as an accurate reflection of how things were but rather as a combination of anecdote and hyperbole, prompted, in part, by the Laudians’ own, very exalted, view of what true order should look like, and, in part, by the polemical demands of their situation and the intensity of their hatred for puritanism and all its works.

This chapter compares the European experience of violence in sacred space. Churches are not normally associated with violence. They were, after all, designed for worship. But because in most communities they were the pre-eminent site for the display of social capital, they were theatres of conflict. Although disorder inside sacred space was frequent in England and Germany in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, serious incidents such as these were relatively rare. One reason for this was the absence of urban factions. In the European league table of church murders, Italy takes the title, with France in a distant second place. Precise figures are hard to compute, but victims certainly ran into the hundreds in Italy and the dozens in France. The reasons why Italian, and to a lesser extent French, churches were so frequently scenes of violence is investigated. The comparisons and contrasts between different regions and states helps to illuminate and explain the different forms and trajectories taken by enmity. In both France and Italy churches were sites for politicised violence. The chapter considers the role of assassination, patrimonialism and anti-clericalism mainly in the French and Italian contexts, and then broadens to explore sacred space as a theatre for staging social conflict across Europe.

This chapter turns to the memory of the dissolution in the communities that had been built around monasteries and in the families who occupied them. In order to access the local and oral dimensions of this memory culture, it uses antiquarian writing to throw a sidelight onto the traditions and stories that antiquaries encountered as they traversed the country. This chapter suggests that the key concept to unlocking this memory culture is sacrilege. Stories of ghostly hauntings and strange happenings preoccupied local people living in or near former monastic places. It has sometimes been suggested that English Protestantism was hostile to oral and local cultures, but this chapter argues that, far from being the harbinger of their decline, the Reformation in fact generated and invigorated local traditions. By exploring sacrilege narratives connected to the dissolution, this chapter also makes a case for the vibrancy and longevity of local memory cultures across the seventeenth century and into the early eighteenth century and beyond. In doing so, it seeks to erode and collapse the distinctions between ‘popular’ and ‘learned’, ‘local’ and ‘national’ cultures of history and memory that continue to influence scholarship on early modern historical consciousness

‘Laudianism’ was not simply a different perspective on the Church of England’s identity from that held by other English Protestants, but a systematic attempt to impose a particular reading of the English Church on all parishes, and to privilege and prioritize certain facets and formularies over others. This chapter focuses on how the Laudians chose to situate their reforms vis-à-vis the earlier history and formularies of the Church of England. Like the Protestant Reformation itself, the Laudian Reformation framed itself as the repudiation of an impure present, and as a return to a more pure or ‘primitive church’ that had existed before the current abuses had taken hold. However, the chapter argues that the identity of that ‘primitive church’ was subject to constant change. It demonstrates how different Laudian authors found elements of the Jacobean church and Elizabethan settlement wanting, and instead selectively appropriated and sampled elements from earlier reformations, and from the medieval and patristic churches. For all their often conservative rhetoric, the chapter also explores the Laudian readiness to promote a language of progressive reformation and revelation, and to seek to change existing structures and formularies where possible.

Chapter 5 analyses the different forces working against the ‘abortive reformation’ discussed in Chapter 4. It begins with the Scottish commissioners, seeing their significance less in propelling a Presbyterian agenda than in their more circumspect undermining of the calls for reduced episcopacy. The chapter then discusses the various parliamentary forces working against episcopacy, along with the role played by more radicalizing religious discourses beyond Parliament’s immediate control. To explain why more marginal ideas were able to gain traction in public discourse about religious change, attention turns to the prestige of anti-Laudian martyrs and the disproportionate public importance of prominent Congregationalists, the format and distribution of the tracts themselves, but also the ways in which the language of religious change was also developing in this period, which opened up areas of ambiguity in which radical solutions could flourish. Here discussion centres on the languages of reformation, anti-Laudianism, apocalypse, eschatology and covenant, with detailed attention to the role played by the 1641 Protestation in particular in polarizing religious opinion. Importance is also attached to the conservative backlash that this radicalization provoked, which undermined conformist support for further reform and empowered more conservative and even Laudian figures.

Chapter 13 analyses the different forces that worked against the comprehensive religious settlement that was attempted in 1660-61. It begins with a study of conservative elements hostile to any compromise with Presbyterianism, noting their emphasis on the evils of sacrilege, and how the language of ‘restoration’ was often expressed in prophetic rather than conservative terms. It then discusses the Presbyterian opposition to a range of aspects of the new settlement – from the threat of reordination to the repudiation of the Solemn League and Covenant and the stricter imposition of liturgical conformity. While these problems were not insuperable, most puritans could find at least one feature of the new settlement that they considered non-negotiable. The chapter then analyses the settlement itself, and argues that it was not a simple restoration of the pre-war church, or of the Laudian church, but constituted a rather eclectic hybrid of different elements of the Church of England’s earlier identities. Its features could be glossed in different ways, and both the Clarendon Code and the 1667 agitation for a comprehension bill presented themselves as further rationalizations of the intended settlement. It is argued that the principles of the abortive reformation were not conclusively defeated in 1662.

Abandoning the notion that royalists were the custodians of a stable pre-war church, Chapter 8 explores some of the different trends, tensions and developments evident within royalist religious thinking in this decade. After outlining the official royalist position of support for the reforms of 1640-41, the chapter outlines some of the tensions, ranging from those divines keen to support further reforms to those ex-Laudians deploring the concessions already made. Concerns at the threat posed to episcopacy in peace negotiations led to more emphatic defences of the order as being integral to the royalist cause, and a renewed interest in Convocation. The chapter also traces new emphases in royalist thought that transcended some of the divisions between ex-Laudians and their critics, including moral reform and a providentialism which often echoed parliamentarian language. The royalist experience after defeat in the civil war is examined, tracing forms of resistance to new ministers and to the abolition of feasts such as Christmas, but also noting the ways in which royalists embraced compromise, appealing for toleration on the model of pre-war puritanism and also contemplating forms of limited conformity and liturgical adaptation. It concludes by arguing that royalist religion remained ideologically hybrid and contested.