The University of Wales Trinity Saint David was originally founded in 1822 as St David’s College, Lampeter. It is now the oldest higher education collegiate institution in Wales, and in its two hundred years of history has been the recipient of many fascinating and rare manuscripts, early printed books, beautifully illustrated volumes, and rare publications from broadsheets to journals. These were largely received through the generous donations of many benefactors, including the institutio...

This volume consists of five papers selected from a corpus of material researched over the past quarter of a century. None has previously been published, and they represent the author's interest in church history, medical history and the visual arts. Three of the five papers are based on lectures given at conferences or public occasions; the other two derive from research conducted at the Oxford Centre for Methodism and Church History in 2010 and 2020.

This special issue of The Journal of Religious History, Literature and Culture comprises some of the papers delivered at the ‘George Whitefield after Three Hundred Years’ International Conference held in June 2014 at Pembroke College, Oxford, commemorating the tercentenary of George Whitefield’s birth in 1714.The Revd George Whitefield (1714–70) was a very important early Methodist leader, clergyman and writer, who has not attracted as much scholarly attention as John and Charles W...

During the medieval and early modern periods the Welsh diocese of St Davids was one of the largest in the country and the most remote. As this collection makes clear, this combination of factors resulted in a religious life which was less regulated and controlled by the institutional forces of both Church and State. Addressing key ideas in the development of popular religious culture and the stubborn continuity of long-lasting religious practices into the modern era, the volume shows how t...

The period 1689-1901 was 'the golden age' of the sermon in Britain. It was the best selling printed work and dominated the print trade until the mid-nineteenth century. Sermons were highly influential in religious and spiritual matters, but they also played important roles in elections and politics, science and ideas, and campaigns for reform. Sermons touched the lives of ordinary people and formed a dominant part of their lives. Preachers attracted huge crowds and the popular demand for s...

At the end of the eighteenth century an evangelical movement gained enormous popularity at all levels of Irish society. Initially driven by the enthusiasm and commitment of Methodists and Dissenters, it quickly gained ascendancy in the Church of Ireland, where its unique blend of moral improvement and conservative piety appealed to those threatened by the democratic revolution and the demands of the Catholic population for political equality. The Bible War in Ireland identifies this evange...

The acclaimed Penguin Monarchs series: short, fresh, expert accounts of England's rulersCharles II has always been one of the most instantly recognisable British kings - both in his physical appearance, disseminated through endless portraits, prints and pub signs, and in his complicated mix of lasciviousness, cynicism and luxury. His father's execution and his own many years of exile made him a guarded, curious, unusually self-conscious ruler. He lived through some...

Witchcraft, astrology, divination and every kind of popular magic flourished in England during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, from the belief that a blessed amulet could prevent the assaults of the Devil to the use of the same charms to recover stolen goods. At the same time the Protestant Reformation attempted to take the magic out of religion, and scientists were developing new explanations of the universe. Keith Thomas's classic analysis of beliefs held on every level of Engli...

Nowadays we believe that consenting adults have the freedom to do what they like with their own bodies. We publicise and celebrate sex; we discuss it endlessly; we are obsessed with the sex lives of celebrities. We think it wrong that in other cultures people suffer for their sexual orientation, that women are treated as second-class citizens, or that adulterers are put to death. Yet until quite recently our own society was like this too. For most of western history, all sex outside marria...

Jane Shore often gets just a byline in history. We know her name, and that she was the mistress of a king. But who was this woman caputred for the stage by Shakespeare in Richard III, fictionalised by Jean Plaidy and others? Where did she come from? And how was it that having been mistress to the most powerful man in the land, she ended her years in prison and poverty?Jane Shore was born into a family of merchants and was married early, to William Shore. H...

With a foreword by Eric Metaxas, best-selling author of Bonhoeffer and Amazing Grace.The enthralling biography of the woman writer who helped end the slave trade, changed Britain’s upper classes, and taught a nation how to read.The history-changing reforms of Hannah More affected every level of 18th-Century British society through her keen intellect, literary achievements, collaborative spirit, strong Christian principles, and colorful personality. A woman...

How should we live? That question was no less urgent for English men and women who lived between the early sixteenth and late eighteenth centuries than for this book's readers. Keith Thomas's masterly exploration of the ways in which people sought to lead fulfilling lives in those centuries between the beginning of the Reformation and the heyday of the Enlightenment illuminates the central values of the period, while casting incidental light on some of the perennial problems of human exist...