This chapter analyses domestic practices associated with childbirth. It considers how urban households approached and framed childbirth as an event of religious significance, by examining prayers that were said before, during, and after the event of childbirth, as well as ritual attempts to demarcate the setting of birth or the lying-in chamber from the rest of the home. Through an examination of the ecclesiastical licensing of London midwives, it explores post-Reformation attempts to regulate the female domestic event of childbirth, amid fears that it could be associated with ‘Popish’ or superstitious practices, and concerns that Catholic midwives, if operating undetected, would attempt to perform clandestine Catholic baptism. By considering personal writing and Quaker and Jewish congregational birth records, it examines the faith of midwives and invited gossips, situating the lying-in room within the broader parish or religious community, and showing how those invited into the home could be representatives of the congregation beyond its walls. It shows that such occasions emphasisied women’s relative authority both within and outside their own households.

This chapter offers a critical narrative of the development of Arianism as a heresy from the fourth to the sixth century. It explores the changing meanings of the heresiological label, and the political and ecclesiastical contexts in which it was deployed, from the origins of controversy between Arius and Alexander in Alexandria through to the barbarian successor kingdoms of the post-imperial West.

Even by the standards of medieval heresy, the history of the Bogomils is notable for a lack of sources. This chapter bases its analysis on the long account of Kosmas Presbyter of Pop Bogomil and his followers in tenth-century Bulgaria. Understanding this helps illuminate less informative references and points to a persistent dualist tradition in the Balkans and Byzantium, well capable of exporting organisation and doctrine.

The anthropology and soteriology of western Christianity were radically reinterpreted in the fifth century CE by Augustine of Hippo, who constructed a fictional ‘Pelagianism’ to delegitimise opposition to his new theology of original sin, an absolutist account of prevenient grace, and predestination interpreted as preordainment. This chapter gives an outline of the issues involved in this attempt to relocate orthodoxy, the course of events relating to Pelagius and his defence of eastern ascetic Christianity, and the afterlife of controversy over this new account of the anthropology and soteriology of Christianity.

The iconoclast refusal to accept the use of images, particularly of Christ, in public and private worship in Byzantium, is often condemned as a heretical movement. But its emphasis on symbolic representations (the Cross and the Eucharist) and on spiritual veneration was essentially a reform of potentially idolatrous church practice.

This book is framed by two bookended revolutions, print in the sixteenth century and the internet and social media in the late twentieth century. How, then, is Christianity changing in the age of social media and international connectivity? What social and cultural changes were already underway in the decades immediately preceding the internet revolution that have a direct bearing on the generations most affected by that revolution? What is the impact of new technologies and social media on the beliefs, practices, and “lived religion” of Christian communities, organizations, and denominations? Finally, to what extent has the internet helped develop global religious networks in which the directional flows of power and influence have begun to change from a North/South trajectory to the reverse?

Whenever the story of lollardy has been told, that story has been shaped by the prevailing historical, theological and intellectual climate. This chapter surveys how lollardy has been narrated, looking at the terminology, people and communities, practices and texts, and beliefs associated with the lollard or Wycliffite movement of late medieval England.

This chapter provides an overview of the Nestorian controversy, including the background and aftermath of the Councils of Ephesus (431) and Chalcedon (451). Additionally, the chapter traces the distinct ecclesiological trajectories that emerged from these Christological debates.

Two of the most striking developments in the modern history of global Christianity have been the respective strengths of Catholic Christianity in Central and Latin America and of Protestant and Pentecostal Christianity in mostly sub-Saharan Africa. The aim of this chapter is to shed some light on these important stories by focusing on two early modern, imperial case studies, one from the Spanish conquest of New Spain and another from the British colonial project in West Africa, specifically Sierra Leone. Moreover, to what extent does the theoretical model of nuclei (the inner core of religious traditions), nodes (points of connection and exchange), and networks (transnational flows of people, ideas, and artifacts) help us understand better the various processes that produced such significant consequences for the global transmission of Christianity in the early modern and modern world?

The chapter deals with the history of the Hussite revolution in the first half of the fifteenth century in Bohemia. It focuses on the discourse of heresy, which underwent significant differentiation in the late Middle Ages as political conditions became increasingly complex.

This chapter surveys different ways in which ‘heresy’ has been conceptualised by a variety of writers, both within the periods in which it arose and in later centuries. Tracing a number of different inflections to the charge of heresy, the chapter suggests that we might see it not only as constructed by orthodox authority but as a means by which ‘authority’ itself is reaffirmed; and in conclusion suggests some ways through which modern historians might then reconceptualise their search for ‘dissent’ in past times.

This chapter provides a detailed comparative overview of domestic religion in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, setting out evidence of a range of domestic devotional activities as performed by households of different faiths, and introducing the legislation which, to varying extents, restricted the open religious expression of these different communities. It considers how larger domestic gatherings involving participants other than members of the household would have been restricted by legislation such as the Conventicle Acts (1664–89), as well as self-regulation within the recently established Jewish communities. This legislation or congregational law drew a distinction between household and family prayer and ‘gathering for worship’ in domestic spaces. The chapter suggests that domestic gatherings for worship were permitted in certain circumstances, and that these circumstances generally coincided with life-cycle events.

The chapter traces the emergence of the notion of ‘gnostics’ as a classification, from originating confusion in the use of this language by ancient Christian anti-heresy writers to ongoing debates over this category among modern scholars. Progress in understanding the relevant ancient sources may benefit from analyses of specific themes and features in individual texts but without the encumbrance of disputes over a troubled classification (‘gnosticism’) that ultimately is a relic of ancient heresiology.

While Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion suggests that collective piety, sociability, and visiting were associated with the life-cycle events of childbirth and death, connections between homes were also sustained through daily preparations for death. This chapter argues that news of sickness and death was transmitted easily out of and into urban homes, and that this news had a discernible impact on the religious practices of other households in the neighbourhood, parish, or wider religious community. It is not concerned with the event or process of dying itself, but with how a community beyond the affected household responded to that fact. It argues that death made the walls of the urban home permeable. The awareness of an individual’s death, transmitted through word of mouth, or subsequently through the printing of a funeral sermon, entered the homes of others and had a perceptible influence on their daily religious practices. This chapter seeks to bridge the gap between two important functions of the home: firstly, the home as the site of most natural deaths, and secondly, the home as an important setting for daily religion.

The Waldensians began inside the church in the 1170s, were excommunicated, went underground and survived into the sixteenth century. In our efforts to get at their past reality, how far can we penetrate the texts about them produced in the Middle Ages by a persecuting church, during the Reformation and Counter-Reformation by polemicists and in modern times by academics modelling them according to the latest intellectual fashions?