This chapter examines the lexicons of texts in Early Modern English from the 1520s through the 1560s: the turbulent decades spanning the English Reformation. On the one hand are works that look to the world of Catholic Christendom, such as books by the politician, philosopher, propagandist, and martyr Sir Thomas More and – later in the century – the polemical texts written by Jesuit exiles. On the other are outputs by reformers such as William Tyndale – also a martyr – and of later Protestant controversialists. Among the latter group is a royal figure whose writings have in recent years attracted increasing attention: Henry VIII’s last queen, Katherine Parr. The chapter begins with an examination of versions of a key work of the English Reformation: the Book of Common Prayer. Protestant and Catholic lexicons are identified, and shown to align with distinct confessional/theological orientations.

This chapter sets out the book’s aim: an attempt to map the changing lexicons of Christian expression in the English language from the end of the Middle Ages to the early Victorians. It is thus a contribution to historical theolinguistics, drawing on the one hand on corpus linguistics and, on the other, the history of the many varieties of English Christianity that existed during this period. The methodology to be adopted in the body of the book is then illustrated with reference to two contrasting groups of female writers active in the middle of the seventeenth century, a period of exceptional religious turmoil: Fifth Monarchists and Quakers. The special analytic tools and resources harnessed include the Oxford English Dictionary, Semantic EEBO, Glasgow’s Historical Thesaurus of English, UCREL’s Log-Likelihood Calculator, and Sheffield’s Linguistic DNA. The remainder of the chapter defines notions and addresses issues that will recur later in the book: notions of register and genre, and questions to do with the handling of corpora, and with the structuring of religious ‘communities of practice’.

In this chapter attention turns to the Early Modern English lexicons of texts written by radical Protestants (and some of their opponents) from the late sixteenth century up to and including the civil wars: pamphleteers such as ‘Martin Marprelate’ and Richard Overton, whose usages demonstrate remarkable linguistic creativity, and revolutionary thinkers such as the ‘Digger’ Gerrard Winstanley. The chapter concludes with an examination of the language of the Putney Debates of 1647, in which the soldiers of the New Model Army, victorious in the civil wars between king and parliament, discussed how the country should be governed. The Debates were a remarkable event in the history of democracy, in which religious expression was linked intimately to the holding and handling of political power.

The long eighteenth century saw two opposed tendencies in Christian expression in the English-speaking world. On the one hand was the religion of the Enlightenment, which emphasised reason and tolerance, while on the other hand were those sometimes called ‘enthusiasts’, who valued emotion in their relation to the deity. In this chapter texts by major religious writers of the period – Joseph Butler, John Wesley, and George Whitefield – are examined, with a view to determining how their distinctive lexical choices aligned with their theology. All three were at one time members of the Church of England, but their thinking diverged markedly as the century progressed; Wesley and Whitefield are now recognised as leaders in the emergence of Methodism, although they too came to differ about basic matters of belief. The chapter ends with an examination of the ‘language of feeling’ in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, showing how ‘exemplary fiction’ was impacted by the contemporary religious lexicon.

This chapter deals with the English religious lexicon at the end of the fourteenth/beginning of the fifteenth century. This period saw the appearance of religious reformers – condemned by many as heretics – who are known as Lollards, a ‘movement’ associated with the fourteenth-century academic theologian John Wyclif that has been called a ‘premature reformation’. A special ‘Lollard language’ was identified – albeit somewhat vaguely – at the time, and an attempt is made here to establish the details of this distinctive lexicon, comparing the usage of selected Lollard sermons with other more orthodox works in the same genre by the Augustinian canon John Mirk. The ‘reformist’ usages thus distinguished are then compared with those found in other works from the period, notably Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Parson’s Tale and the C-text of William Langland’s Piers Plowman.

The final chapter brings together the themes of the book, exemplified through two case studies located diachronically: the development of the lexeme spirit , and the theological writings of the seventeenth-century poet and thinker Lucy Hutchinson. The chapter concludes with some observations on how the insights presented in this book can be aligned with a wider reimagining of the philological enterprise along pragmatic lines, taking on board interdisciplinary perspectives.

In the first half of the nineteenth century a great deal of polemical writing on religious issues was published, notably from two radical groups within English Christianity. Both groups aimed ‘to make religion a living power in a cold and gloomy age’, but adopted very different approaches, expressed not only in formal theological treatises but also in more ‘popular’ formats such as the periodical press. John Keble, John Henry Newman, and Edward Pusey – leaders of the Oxford Movement that emerged in the 1830s – tried to bring their own imagined version of the Middle Ages into the Church of England: a ‘vision glorious’ that to many smacked of Roman Catholicism. At the same time, others, who might be described as ‘evangelical’ (such as Edward Bickersteth, ‘the Keble of Victorian Evangelicalism’, or the charismatic Edward Irving), insisted on their own understanding of the sixteenth-century Reformation. In this chapter it will be demonstrated that the Late Modern English lexicons of both groups were profoundly impacted by Romanticism, as expressed most comprehensively in the writings of Samuel Taylor Coleridge.