GIS Interdisciplinary Seminar: 'Sociability and Religion'

GIS Sociabilités seminar 'The Politics of the ‘Sociable Self: Theories and Practices (1650-1850)'

Sixth thematic session on 'Sociability & Religion', 26 September 2025 (17:00 - 19:00) at Université Paris Cité, bâtiment Olympe de Gouges (room 830)

- Danielle Clarke (University College Dublin):  'Sermons, Sociability and Female Communities in Seventeenth-Century England'

- Joel Halcomb (University of East Anglia): 'A Sociable Church Government: Building Fellowship and Identity into the Puritan Gathered Church'

Session chaired by Emma Bartel (U Paris Cité) & Nicolas Guyard (Université de Montpellier Paul-Valéry)

Zoom link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/89106993073?pwd=yzvExVl37k6rFidExmb26rR2UYBGie.1

Abstracts & bios: 

'Sermons, Sociability and Female Communities in Seventeenth-Century England'

This paper argues that sermon culture - attending, listening, note-taking, summarising, copying, reading out loud and repetition -- is a key component of early modern female sociability. Drawing on a range of print and manuscript sources, the paper will present evidence not only of piety and instruction, but of emotion and pleasure. In the final part of the paper, I will give some examples of the ways in which sermon culture gives rise to other forms of textual exchange and interaction.

Danielle Clarke is Professor of Renaissance Literature at University College Dublin. Her research has focussed on early modern women's writing and key publications include The Politics of Early Modern Women's Writing (2001), a Penguin Classics edition of the poetry of Isabella Whitney, Mary Sidney and Aemilia Lanyer (2000), several edited collections including "This Double Voice": Gendered Writing in Early Modern England (with Elizabeth Clarke) and The Oxford Handbook of Early Modern Women's Writing in English, 1540-1700 (OUP, 2022, with Elizabeth Scott-Baumann and Sarah C.E.Ross). She recently edited a special issue of Women's Writing  on the work of Isabella Whitney and is currently editing the poetry of Lady Anne Southwell for The Other Voice series (with Victoria Burke and Christina Luckyj). This paper is from her monograph in progress which tracks form and process across the various genres and modes of women's writing in English 1550-1700.

- 'A Sociable Church Government: Building Fellowship and Identity into the Puritan Gathered Church'

This talk will explore how gathered churches in mid-17th-century England built puritan forms of sociability into their church polities. From the Elizabethan period, puritans were known by their intense fellowship and self-identification as the 'godly'. The religious freedom of the English Revolution provided an opportunity for puritan groups to construct the 'church' anew, and emergent gathered churches began to build new ecclesiological structures around these older puritan cultures of sociability. The results, though mixed, represent a key stage in the path from pre-Revolutionary puritanism to post-Revolutionary denominational Dissent.

Joel Halcomb is a lecturer in early modern history at the University of East Anglia. He is a scholar of religious nonconformity and dissent in the seventeenth century and has written in particular about the beliefs, practices, and social experiences of the congregational movement. He has co-edited The Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly (Oxford University Press, 2012; with Chad VanDixhoorn, Mark Garcia, and Inga Jones), Church Life: Pastors, Congregations, and the Experience of Dissent in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford University Press,2019; with Michael Davies and Anne Dunan-Page), and volume three of The Letters, Writings, and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell(Oxford University Press, 2022, with Patrick Little and David Smith). He is currently chair of the Norfolk Record Society.