Anglican Religious Societies, Organizations, and Missions
This chapter provides the first critical survey of those societies that worked under the rubric of the Church of England over the course of its ‘long eighteenth century’. Transcending a scholarly focus on the voluntary quality of such groups and challenging more general assumptions about the supposedly areligious nature of ‘enlightened’ sociability and learning, it shows how the Church of England revitalized its authority by utilizing extra-parochial societies to reconstitute its relationship with its national and international communion. As a reference work, the chapter seeks to inform the general reader whilst guiding specialists towards new lines of enquiry. But its insights into societies such as the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge underscore the extent to which ‘Anglican religious societies’ actively shaped the wider history of the English-speaking world.