In Parish Clergy Wives in Elizabethan England, Anne Thompson demonstrates that the first ministers’ wives are not entirely lost to the record and, in offering an insight into their lived experience, challenges many existing preconceptions about their role and reception.

The Social Life of the Early Modern Protestant Clergy provides unexpected new insights on the lives of the early modern English and Swedish clergy through case studies and broader surveys. Rosamund Oates demonstrates how the first generations of clergy wives in England used hospitality to support their husbands in the process of reform. Jacqueline Eales examines the shift from the sixteenth-century debate about the legality of clerical marriage to a positive portrayal of women from English clerical families in the years 1620–1720. William Gibson challenges the view that the eighteenth-century English episcopate were rapacious, arguing that they were often careful custodians of episcopal estates. Jonas Lindström analyses the account books of late eighteenth-century pastor Gustaf Berg to illustrate his economic ties with his parishioners, which ran alongside their religious and social relationships. Drawing on Swedish evidence, Beverly Tjerngren charts the decline of hospitality evident in the home of widowed pastor Adolph Adde in the late eighteenth century. Finally, Jon Stobart examines the aspirations to gentility of the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Northamptonshire clergy through their domestic material culture.

Generations injects fresh energy into tired debates about England's plural and protracted Reformations by adopting the fertile concept of generation as its analytical framework. It demonstrates that the tumultuous religious developments that stretched across the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries not merely transformed the generations that experienced them, but were also forged and created by them. The book investigates how age and ancestry were implicated in the theological and cultural upheavals of the era and how these, in turn, reconfigured the relationship between memory, history, and time. It explores the manifold ways in which the Reformations shaped the horizontal relationships that early modern people formed with their siblings, kin, and peers, as well as the vertical ones that tied them to their dead ancestors and their future heirs. Generations highlights the vital part that families bound by blood and by faith played in shaping these events, as well as in mediating our knowledge of the religious past and in the making of its archive. Drawing on a rich array of evidence, it provides poignant glimpses into how people navigated the profound challenges that the English Reformations posed in everyday life.

Jane Austen was the daughter of a clergyman, the sister of two others and the cousin of four more. Her principal acquaintances were clergymen and their families, whose social, intellectual and religious attitudes she shared. Yet while clergymen feature in all her novels, often in major roles, there has been little recognition of their significance. To many readers their status and profession is a mystery, as they appear simply to be a sub-species of gentlemen and never seem to perform any duties. Mr Collins in Pride and prejudice is often regarded as little more than a figure of fun. Astonishingly, Jane Austen and the Clergy is the first book to demonstrate the importance of Jane Austen's clerical background and to explain the clergy in her novels, whether Mr Tilney in Northanger Abbey, Mr Elton in Emma, or a less prominent character such as Dr Grant in Mansfield Park. In this exceptionally well-written and enjoyable book, Irene Collins draws on a wide knowledge of the literature and history of the period to describe who the clergy were, both in the novels and in life: how they were educated and appointed the houses they lived in and the gardens they designed and cultivated; the women they married; their professional and social context; their income, their duties, their moral outlook and their beliefs. Jane Austen and the Clergy uses the facts of Jane Austen's life and the evidence contained in her letters and novels to give a vivid and convincing portrait of the contemporary clergy.

Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England is a study of the nature and extent of the education of women in the context of both Protestant and Catholic ideological debates. Examining the role of women both as recipients and agents of religious instruction, the author assesses the nature of power endowed in women through religious education, and the restraints and freedoms this brought.