Church History

Table of Contents - 1976 - Volume 45, Issue 01  

Research Article

Religious Typologies and Popular Religion in Restoration England

C. John Sommervillea1

a1 Assistant professor of history in the University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida.

There have been numerous studies of the religious leaders of early modern Europe, but accounts of the religious attitudes and interests of the general public have been highly impressionistic. It might seem a hopeless task to try to reconstruct a profile of the religious mind of such a remote period, and yet historians are not deterred from making broad characterizations, and other disciplines sometimes build on them. The question is not so much whether we must give up such descriptions entirely, but how rigorous we can be in making them.