This chapter considers the event perceived as the culmination of a good religious life – the final days and hours. The analysis considers deathbed prayers and the taking of sacraments, along with the presence of a priest, minister, and other visitors of the same faith or congregation. It argues that the deathbed – as both a site and an occasion – was an important prompt for communal religion within the home. The final days, hours, and moments of an individual’s life were recognised as a significant opportunity for religious expression for those belonging to all confessions. While some scholars have argued that post-Reformation deathbeds were increasingly secular, this chapter analyses numerous descriptions of Catholic, Jewish, and Protestant deathbeds which emphasise that an individual’s piety and composure in their final hours were interpreted as a reflection of their piety in life. Dying was a process which required witnesses, participants, and visitors, both to provide spiritual comfort to the dying individual and to observe and learn from their example.

This chapter examines rituals which took place after childbirth, uncovering evidence of baptisms, circumcisions, and even churching ceremonies that were held in domestic spaces. It suggests that a range of ceremonies we would now associate with public places of worship were frequently located in domestic spaces. It moves beyond studies which have argued that domestic baptism primarily took place in the home out of necessity, demonstrating that elective domestic baptism was more commonplace than has previously been acknowledged. Domestic ceremonies could also take place in networks of homes, being accommodated not in the family home, but in the home of a midwife, rabbi, or lay co-religionist. These ceremonies, and associated processions from the home to the place of public worship, marked the symbolic ending of the lying-in period, the departure of the mother from the home, and the welcoming of the child into the religious community. They emphasise the significance of the home as a setting of communal sociability and religious practice, and provide an important opportunity to consider the central place of the individual household within its congregation.

This chapter examines religious practices which took place in the home immediately after death: from the laying out, washing, and watching of the body, and domestic gatherings such as ‘wakes’, to the removal of the body from the home, its transfer to a burial place, and the attendant rituals associated with the disposal of the body and mourning for the deceased. It also identifies evidence of cases where the home itself was used as the location for the funeral rites. While the watching and disposal of the body necessarily catered to social and biological needs, religious aspects were closely intertwined with many seemingly practical decisions. The washing and laying out of the body, for example, would generally be performed by members of the parish or local religious community. This chapter makes use of wills, personal writing, burial records, and congregational records which provide an insight into the relationships between individual households and a wider congregation, including its designated burial ground. It argues that the home facilitated acts of communal religion in the hours and days after death, as it became the setting for gatherings and acts of charity to the body.

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 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.

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 Conclusion sets out the key findings of the book: that the home was a significant site of communal religious practice for those of all faiths who lived and died in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century London, and that this was particularly true at occasions of childbirth and death. It suggests that domestic religion should not be equated solely with ‘everyday’ or household religion; the home was the setting of both the daily round of prayer as well as significant life events, and their attendant ceremonies, some of which, such as churching or funeral services, it had been largely assumed had taken place only in sites of public worship. It makes the case for what it terms the cyclical permeability of the urban home, demonstrating that connections between the individual household and the religious community it was part of were strengthened at moments of birth and death. This focus reveals the continued vitality of collective religious life into and throughout the eighteenth century, and the relative authority of women both within and beyond their own households.

The Introduction sets out the rationale for focusing on the home as a neglected setting within histories of London’s religious life, as well as the importance of the book’s comparative approach in bringing together the experiences of households belonging to different faiths. It establishes the parameters of the book’s scope: the focus on London in its unique religious diversity, and as a densely populated political centre, and the period 1600–1780 (roughly bookended by the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Gordon Riots of 1780). It sets out the book’s interventions in key areas of scholarship, including its contributions to understandings of London lives and domestic space, complicating understandings of public and private space in the densely populated and diverse City of London. It establishes how it moves beyond existing scholarship on domestic religion, and the relationship between religion and the life cycle, which has tended to focus upon conforming Protestant and almost entirely on Christian experiences. It also surveys the broad range of sources analysed in the book, including letters, diaries, court cases, wills, and material culture.