Volume 1 describes the relations of Church and State, the wealth of the Church, and its role in national life from Versailles to the scaffold. Dioceses, parishes, and the monastic structure are presented in detail, and the vocation and life-style of the clergy as in mesh with every aspect of social living.

Representations of convents and nuns assumed power and urgency within the volatile political culture of eighteenth-century France. Drawing from a range of literary, cultural, and legal material, Mita Choudhury analyzes how, between 1730 and 1789, lawyers, religious pamphleteers, and men of letters repeatedly asked, "Who should control the female convent and women religious?" These sources chronicled the conflicts between nuns and the male clergy, among nuns themselves, and between nuns and their families, conflicts that were presented to the public in the context of potent issues such as despotism, citizenship, female education, and sexuality.The cloister operated as a symbol of despotism, the equivalent of the Sultan's seraglio or the King's Bastille. Before 1770, lawyers and magistrates praised nuns as the personification of virtuous Christian women, often victims vulnerable to those who would use them to further their own political ends. After 1770, men of letters evaluated nuns according to more secular norms, and concluded that the convent had no purpose in society, except as a reminder of the problems inherent in the Old Regime. Choudhury elaborates on how nuns were not always passive entities, mere objects to be shaped by the political needs of others. But because they relied on men in order to make their voices heard, the place of women religious in the public sphere was a complex one based on negotiations between female action and male subjectivity. During the French Revolution, whatever support they had enjoyed was lost as republicans and moderates began to see nuns as potentially disruptive to the social order, family life, and revolutionary values.

This book offers a reassessment of the theology of F. D. Maurice (1805-72), one of the most significant theologians of the modern Church of England. It seeks to place Maurice's theology in the context of nineteenth-century conflicts over the social role of the Church, and over the truth of the Christian revelation. Maurice is known today mostly for his seminal role in the formation of Christian Socialism, and for his dismissal from his chair at King's College, London, over his denial of the doctrine of eternal punishment. Drawing on the whole range of Maurice's extensive published work, this book argues that his theology, and his social and educational activity, were held together above all by his commitment to a renewal of Anglican ecclesiology. At a time when, following the social upheavals of the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, many of his contemporaries feared that the authority of the Christian Church - and particularly of the Church of England - was under threat, Maurice sought to reinvigorate his Church's sense of mission by emphasizing its national responsibility, and its theological inclusiveness. In the process, he pioneered a new appreciation of the diversity of Christian traditions that was to be of great importance for the Church of England's ecumenical commitment. He also sought to limit the damage of internal Church division, by promoting a view of the Church's comprehensiveness that acknowledged the complementary truth of convictions fiercely held by competing parties.

David Hempton's history of the vibrant period between 1650 and 1832 engages with a truly global story: that of Christianity not only in Europe and North America, but also in Latin America, Africa, Russia and Eastern Europe, India, China, and South-East Asia. Examining eighteenth-century religious thought in its sophisticated national and social contexts, the author relates the narrative of the Church to the rise of religious enthusiasm pioneered by Pietists, Methodists, Evangelicals and Revivalists, and by important leaders like August Hermann Francke, Jonathan Edwards and John Wesley. He places special emphasis on attempts by the Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and British seaborne powers to export imperial conquest, commerce and Christianity to all corners of the planet. This leads to discussion of the significance of Catholic and Protestant missions, including those of the Jesuits, Moravians and Methodists. Particular attention is given to Christianity's impact on the African slave populations of the Caribbean Islands and the American colonies, which created one of the most enduring religious cultures in the modern world. Throughout the volume changes in Christian belief and practice are related to wider social trends, including rapid urban growth, the early stages of industrialization, the spread of literacy, and the changing social construction of gender, families and identities.

Eighteenth-century Europe witnessed monumental upheavals in both the Catholic and Protestant faiths and the repercussions rippled down to the churches’ religious art forms. Nigel Aston now chronicles here the intertwining of cultural and institutional turmoil during this pivotal century. The sustained popularity of religious art in the face of competition from increasingly prevalent secular artworks lies at the heart of this study. Religious art staked out new spaces of display in state institutions, palaces, and private collections, the book shows, as well as taking advantage of patronage from monarchs such as Louis XIV and George III, who funded religious art in an effort to enhance their monarchial prestige. Aston also explores the motivations and exhibition practices of private collectors and analyzes changing Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward art. The book also examines purchases made by corporate patrons such as charity hospitals and religious confraternities and considers what this reveals about the changing religiosity of the era as well. An in-depth historical study, Art and Religion in Eighteenth-Century Europe will be essential for art history and religious studies scholars alike.

This second volume begins with a Section on the religion of the people. The clergy offered the liturgical services, sermons, evangelistic missions, and the offices sanctifying birth, marriage, and death; distinctions are made between what they intended and how their ministrations werepopularly interpreted and incorporated into the social order. Statistical soundings concerning the extent of religious practice and the degree of conviction involved are evaluated. Further chapters deal with processions, pilgrimages, and popular practices and superstitions, with hermits andconfraternities, with the impact of reading the Bible and other edifying literature in an age of increasing literacy. Finally comes a view of the twilight world of magic and sorcery. Throughout this Section the comments of theologians and thinkers of the Enlightenment are recorded, whether incoincidence or contradiction. The next section deals with the efficacy of the confessional and the role of the casuistry of the Church in attempting to mould sexual mores, business practices, and in the world of the theatre. In the next two Sections, the role of religious issues in political affairs is detailed. An overview of the Jansenist quarrel and of the activities of the Jesuits brings in the story of the struggle between Crown and Parlement, while an extended portrayal of the life of the Protestant and Jewishcommunities leads to the history of the debate on toleration, involving the Gallican Church in political interventions and controversy. Throughout the two volumes the rising forces of anticlericalism and the tensions within the ecclesiastical establishment have been recorded, and these themes come to their climax in a final section on the role played by churchmen in the coming of the Revolution.

This microhistory investigates the famous and scandalous 1731 trial in which Catherine Cadière, a young woman in the south of France, accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of seduction, heresy, abortion, and bewitchment. Generally considered to be the last witchcraft trial in early modern France, the Cadière affair was central to the volatile politics of 1730s France, a time when magistrates and lawyers were seeking to contain clerical power. Mita Choudhury’s examination of the trial sheds light on two important phenomena with broad historical implications: the questioning of traditional authority and the growing disquiet about the role of the sacred and divine in French society. Both contributed to the French people’s ever-increasing disenchantment with the church and the king. Choudhury builds her story through an extensive examination of archival material, including trial records, pamphlets, periodicals, and unpublished correspondence from witnesses. The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint offers new insights into how the eighteenth-century public interpreted the accusations and why the case consumed the public for years, developing from a local sex scandal to a referendum on religious authority and its place in French society and politics.