The Township, the Pregnant Girl and the Church: Community Dynamics, Gender and Social Control in Early Nineteenth-century Scotland

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-67
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Ritchie
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Community Dynamics ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
Sexual Offences ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Female Community ◽  
The Church ◽  
Unmarried Girl

In 1814 in a small Highland township an unmarried girl, ostracised by her neighbours, gave birth. The baby died. The legal precognition permits a forensic, gendered examination of the internal dynamics of rural communities and how they responded to threats to social cohesion. In the Scottish ‘parish state’ disciplining sexual offences was a matter for church discipline. This case is situated in the early nineteenth-century Gàidhealtachd where and when church institutions were less powerful than in the post-Reformation Lowlands, the focus of most previous research. The article shows that the formal social control of kirk discipline was only part of a complex of behavioural controls, most of which were deployed within and by communities. Indeed, Scottish communities and churches were deeply entwined in terms of personnel; shared sexual prohibitions; and in the use of shaming as a primary method of social control. While there was something of a ‘female community’, this was not unconditionally supportive of all women nor was it ranged against men or patriarchal structures.

Scottish Missionaries, ‘Protestant Hinduism’ and the Scottish Sense of Empire in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-century India

2007 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 278-313 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Constable
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Western India ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of Scotland ◽  
Free Church ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Church

This article examines the Scottish missionary contribution to a Scottish sense of empire in India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Initially, the article reviews general historiographical interpretations which have in recent years been developed to explain the Scottish relationship with British imperial development in India. Subsequently the article analyses in detail the religious contributions of Scottish Presbyterian missionaries of the Church of Scotland and the Free Church Missions to a Scottish sense of empire with a focus on their interaction with Hindu socioreligious thought in nineteenth-century western India. Previous missionary historiography has tended to focus substantially on the emergence of Scottish evangelical missionary activity in India in the early nineteenth century and most notably on Alexander Duff (1806–78). Relatively little has been written on Scottish Presbyterian missions in India in the later nineteenth century, and even less on the significance of their missionary thought to a Scottish sense of Indian empire. Through an analysis of Scottish Presbyterian missionary critiques in both vernacular Marathi and English, this article outlines the orientalist engagement of Scottish Presbyterian missionary thought with late nineteenth-century popular Hinduism. In conclusion this article demonstrates how this intellectual engagement contributed to and helped define a Scottish missionary sense of empire in India.

The Shifting Discourse Culture of Methodism, 1791–1832

2019 ◽  
pp. 142-175
Author(s):  
Andrew O. Winckles
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Hannah More ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Discourse Practices ◽  
The Church

This chapter lays out some of the shifts in Methodist discourse culture that occurred during the early nineteenth century and suggests that, in response to these changes, Methodist women found new ways to reach their audiences and work around the Methodist hierarchy. In particular, it focuses on the lives and writings of Sarah Crosby, Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Mary Tooth, and other members of their circle in order to illustrate how they adapted earlier Methodist discourse practices for new and potentially subversive purposes. It then turns to the work of evangelical Anglican Hannah More in the 1790’s and early 1800’s to consider how a very well-known female evangelical within the Church of England negotiated a shifting discursive terrain, especially in her Cheap Repository Tracts and her work with the Mendip Hills Sunday Schools which led to the Blagdon Controversy.

The Anglo-Gallicanism of dom Thomas Preston, 1567–1647

1972 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 239-246 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maurus Lunn
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
General Theory ◽  
Corporate Identity ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Thin Red Line ◽  
Long Time ◽  
Literary Output ◽  
The Church

Gallicanism - the name given to the general theory that the Church, especially the Church in France, is free from the jurisdiction of the pope, while remaining Roman and Catholic - is familiar to most historians. The existence of such a thing as Anglo-Gallicanism, on the other hand, seems scarcely credible. Post-Reformation English Catholics present the image of a persecuted and retiring group of people, who, in order to preserve their corporate identity, became more Italianate in their culture than the Italians and in their theology more papalist than the popes; and of the majority of English Catholics this was true. But throughout their history there runs a thin red line of dissent, which passes from the Appellant priests in the late sixteenth century, via Blackloism in the seventeenth, to Charles Butler, Joseph Berington and the Catholic Committee at the dawn of emancipation. Gallicanism, and perhaps its English counterpart, were given a death-blow by Napoleon’s application of papal authority to the French bishops. But Anglo-Gallicanism was an unconscionably long time dying, for at Downside in the early nineteenth century William Bernard Ullathorne, later bishop of Birmingham, was taught theology from Gallican textbooks. In this tradition a prominent part, in terms of impact and literary output, was played by another Benedictine, Thomas Preston, alias Roger Widdrington.

The Anglican Origins of Newman's Celibacy

1996 ◽  
Vol 65 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
B. W. Young
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
John Henry Newman ◽  
Victorian England ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Intellectual Tradition ◽  
Robert Southey ◽  
The Church ◽  
As If

In his historical defense of the doctrines of the Church of England, published in 1826, Robert Southey assumed that “the question concerning the celibacy of the clergy had been set at rest throughout Protestant Europe.” The conclusion that Anglicanism necessarily entailed the rejection of celibacy was, in early-nineteenth-century England, decidedly premature, and the ambiguity over celibacy in the Church of England is starkly and exceptionally exposed in the life and work of John Henry Newman. Recent assessments of Newman's peculiar standing in Victorian society have often emphasized the sexual—or rather, the seemingly sexless—dimension of his image, as if to concur with Sydney Smith's celebrated witticism: “Don't you know, as the French say, there are three sexes—men, women, and clergymen?” The nature of specifically clerical celibacy, however, and its influence on the young Newman, have tended to be overlooked in favor of a general psychosexual understanding of his own unwillingness to marry. As an antidote to such readings, this essay will explore the distinctively Anglican and firmly intellectual tradition behind Newman's decision, and will thereby argue that his celibacy was not as “perverse”—a word which, in Victorian England, connoted conversion to Catholicism as well as sexual peculiarity—as it has sometimes been made to seem.

“Promoting so laudable a Design”

2020 ◽  
pp. 172-198
Author(s):  
Eric C. Smith
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rhode Island ◽  
Institutional Development ◽  
Southern Baptists ◽  
Church Discipline ◽  
The South ◽  
Baptist Churches ◽  
Brown University ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Church

The 1760s were a decade of significant institutional development for America’s Baptists, and Oliver Hart was a key figure in that advance. In the South, Hart led the Charleston Association to adopt the Charleston Confession as its doctrinal statement, setting a course for traditional Calvinism among white Southern Baptists for the next one hundred years or more. He also shaped the church government practices of Baptist churches, coauthoring the Summary of Church Discipline, which outlined the rigorous church order Baptists would become known for well into the nineteenth century. This chapter provides vivid examples of how this congregational government worked itself out in specific Baptist churches of the period. Beyond the South, Hart enthusiastically supported the Philadelphia Association project of founding Rhode Island College (later Brown University), an important signal that Baptists as a whole were becoming respectable in colonial American society. Finally, Hart’s frequent preaching excursions into the Carolina backcountry brought him into contact with the exploding Separate Baptist movement. Though they were far less sophisticated than his Charleston social circles, Hart found much to appreciate in the Separate Baptists and sought opportunities to unite them with his own Regular Baptist tribe.

Domestic Visitation: a Chapter in Early Nineteenth Century Evangelism

1973 ◽  
Vol 24 (4) ◽  
pp. 357-376 ◽  
Author(s):  
H. D. Rack
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sunday Schools ◽  
Religious Influences ◽  
Special Means ◽  
The Masses ◽  
The Church

Historians in recent years have shown considerable interest in the alienation from conventional church-going revealed by the Religious Census of 1851, as well as in the efforts of the churches to reach the masses in the second half of the nineteenth century. Less attention has been paid to special means of evangelism before 1850, the impression perhaps being given that despite awareness of the problem of the unchurched, the response to this was narrow and conventional—a matter simply of increasing and rationalising the traditional provision of churches, clergy and parish organisation or their Dissenting equivalents. It is true that Sunday Schools have been noted as devices for capturing and controlling the young; but little attention has been paid to what was probably the most characteristic device during the second quarter of the century for extending religious influences to adults outside the Church— the domestic visitation society. The purpose of the present paper is to attempt a limited inquiry into the circumstances in which these societies began; the different models they followed; and the purposes they pursued.

The Biblical Question and the English Liberal Catholics

1969 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 108-120
Author(s):  
James Tunstead Burtchaell
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
Access To Higher Education ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Irish Immigrants ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
The Church ◽  
The Catholic Church

Looking backward from the early nineteenth century, the Catholic Church in England had disappointingly little scholarly achievement of which to boast since the Reformation. Henry Holden, Charles Butler, John Lingard—all were men to be proud of, but Catholics of such intellectual bent were so few. And understandably so. The penal laws had effectively deprived the recusants of any access to higher education, and would perdure until the latter nineteenth century. Squires whose sons were barred for their faith from most schools and from the two universities had to be content to enroll them quietly at one or another of the exile schools across the channel. The Irish immigrants who later came to fill and overspill the churches in the nineteenth century had even less exposure to—and perhaps appetite for—scholarship. And the clergy who shepherded this extraordinary flock of secluded gentry and boisterous working folk pursued a highly sacramental and understandably unsophisticated pastorate. The Church naturally felt itself somewhat put upon, and fell into rather defensive postures. Scholarship would appear as a luxury at best, and at worst as a weapon that the Establishment seemed always more adept and smooth at handling.

The Rev. William Harte and Attitudes to Slavery in Early Nineteenth-Century Barbados

1979 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 461-474 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. T. Gilmore
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Early Period ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
Christian Love ◽  
The Church ◽  
Slave Population ◽  
The Way

In St Mary's Church, Barbados, there is a monument to a curate who died in 1851, and ‘whose labours as a clergyman of the Church of England for fifty years were distinguished by talent, energy & faithfulness. His efforts were unceasing to make known the truths of the Gospel to all classes in this island. At an early period in his ministry he led the way in rescuing the then slave population from spiritual bondage and darkness. In this work of Christian love he was ever resolute, singlemin-ded, Sc uncompromising’. Mr Harte's claim to our interest is further increased when we learn that he was once prosecuted by the vestry of his parish for, among other things, teaching slaves ‘doctrines of equality inconsistent with their obedience to their masters’ and for comparing the white inhabitants of his parish to those of Sodom and Gomorrah, somewhat to the advantage of the latter.

‘A Practice of a Very Hurtful Tendency’

1979 ◽  
Vol 16 ◽  
pp. 315-326
Author(s):  
W. M. Jacob
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Pastoral Care ◽  
Church Of England ◽  
Clear Pattern ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Church ◽  
Established Church

The church of England in the eighteenth century has been bitterly criticised by succeeding generations for what the high Victorian church of England regarded as two cardinal sins, firstly non-residence of the clergy on their cures and secondly, and consequently, lack of pastoral care. However, generalisations are misleading and especially these generalisations which are largely based on the evidence of opponents of the established church in the early nineteenth century and on standards of pastoral care of one man to one parish, however small the parish, that were only achieved for a period of sixty or seventy years during the later nineteenth century. How misleading these generalisations are becomes apparent when the evidence for non residence and for standards of pastoral care is examined more closely. The object of this paper is to demonstrate that from the evidence of one particular county a clear pattern of clerical residence emerges that is not entirely incompatible with contemporary expectations of pastoral care.

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