Visions of British Culture from the Reformation to Romanticism

Celestina Savonius-Wroth is Assistant Professor, History Librarian, and Head of the History, Philosophy, and Newspaper Library at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA. She holds a doctorate in British history from Indiana University Bloomington.

• 1. Introduction.- 2. Ritual, Ceremony, and Custom in the Aftermath of the British Reformations.- 3. “Remaines of Gentilisme and Judaism”: Erudition, Polemic, and Apologetics in the Study of British Customs.- 4. The Antiquities of the Common People.- 5. Embodied Religion in Eighteenth-Century Britain: “All Mankind Are the Vulgar in This Respect”.- 6. Religion in the Bardic Revival.- 7. Against the Cold Calculus of Modernity.- 8. Conclusion.

“Visions of British Culture performs an inestimable service in bridging the classic Reformation historiography of Protestant acculturation and more literary-minded works like those of Raymond Williams and Stephen Prickett, which examine the genesis of the Victorian ideal of culture. And yet, it is a deeply original work, which restores centuries of learned writing about folk culture – in ethnography, natural history, homiletics, poetry, and social critique – to its religious context.” (Brent S. Sirota, Church History, Vol. 93 (1), March, 2024)