In this post, Sasha Handley interviews Professor Hannah Barker about the publication of her recent book Faith in the Town: Lay Religion in Northern England, 1740-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).

Warmest congratulations to you and your co-authors on the publication of your wonderful new book, Faith in the Town: Lay Religion in Northern England, 1740-1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025).

This book examines the vital role that religious faith played in the daily lives of men, women, and children in industrialising northern towns of c.1740-1830. Drawing on letters, diaries, journals, books of religious instruction, maps, material evidence (and many other forms of evidence), the book opens our eyes to a world in which religious beliefs and practices were fundamental to every aspect of urban life: from the world of work to social gatherings, to embodied experiences within domestic households. The book is a must-read for all members of the Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective!

Thank you for agreeing to answer some questions for us today Hannah.

Sasha Handley: This book is transformative by revealing how religious faith was so deeply immersed within the daily lives of urban dwellers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. You confront longstanding debates about the character of ‘modernity’ and about the onset of ‘secularisation’ in English towns, and your readers are encouraged to think of towns as ‘incubators,’ not suppressers, of ‘religious sensibility’. Would you then characterise northern towns in this period as uniquely ‘affective’ places?

Hannah Barker: I’d be cautious about saying that towns were uniquely affective places, as I wouldn’t want to presume that rural areas – that I haven’t studied very much and which weren’t the subject of our book – were not places full of emotion. It seems likely, though, that those in the countryside might have lived in different types of emotional community. I think it probably is true that urban settings offered more expression for particular forms of religious behaviour and feeling, especially from the later eighteenth century, and particularly of the type that was linked by contemporaries to ‘enthusiasm’ or evangelicalism.

Sasha Handley: Members of the Bodies, Emotions and Material Culture Collective will be struck by Faith in the Town’s impressively wide source base, and particularly by your fascinating use of material culture evidence. Why was it so important for you to blend documentary and material evidence in this study, and does it help us to understand forms of lay piety in a new way?

Hannah Barker: We were keen to use as wide a source base as possible for the book, and to encompass many of the sorts of material that were not generally used by historians of religion. This meant that in addition to the social historian’s usual arsenal of life writings and correspondence, we sought to examine any and all sources from the period that might have something to say about lay religion, which is why you see maps and urban landscapes appearing in the study. Buildings were thus one form of material culture that we examined, alongside objects such as ceramics, samplers, embroideries, and annotated books that offered different insights into lay religious belief and expression, particularly in terms of domestic religion, since the bulk of the material culture sources we looked at appear to have been made for and/or made in the home. I’ll pick one example to illustrate how blending material culture and documentary evidence can help us understand forms of lay piety in a new way, relating to children’s piety and engagement with religious texts.

There’s been some very interesting work done on how children’s piety was framed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of it from didactic texts and written records left by parents and children. But I was struck by how often I found children’s writing, doodling and signature practicing in the annotated books we examined for the project. Drawing a picture of a boat under the story of Jonah is a sign of engagement with the text, but also of a certain irreverence towards the word of God. Like the other annotations in child and adult hands that we found, they demonstrate the degree to which religious books in domestic settings appear to have been sacred texts that were both important and highly valued, as well as being familiar objects with which household members could freely engage and upon which they could make their mark in a variety of ways suggesting a variety of meanings and uses that wouldn’t be evident from reading texts alone.

Sasha Handley: Finally, you characterise ‘religion’ as a combination of interior beliefs and embodied practices. How central are bodies/bodily practices to your story?

Hannah Barker: Many forms of lay piety put a lot of emphasis on both internal belief and external actions, and faith is often understood as a combination of the two. So, the first thing I think about in relation to this question are the sampler makers, commonly young girls, sitting patiently at home over days and weeks to combine the standard inclusion of alphabets and numerals with the religious messages which became more common in samplers as the eighteenth century progressed.  These were items that acted on those who saw them displayed within homes as a form of mnemonic for their own pious thoughts as well as a reminder that they were in a religious household, but they arguably had most impact on those who made them, bent over embroidery frames for long hours as if in prayer. I also think of the armies of church and chapel goers, all filling the urban streets on a Sunday as residents criss-crossed on their way to and from divine service, and the streets beneath their feet took on meaning not just as places for commerce, leisure, or residence, but as avenues that connected places of worship with homes, especially as many of those going to and from worship might use their journey as an extension of the act of worship.

Yet I’m also reminded of the constant refrain of ‘hearts and hands’ in many of the  religious texts and personal writings that we examined which discussed practicing piety during the working day. Here the emphasis was on the separation of mind and body, so that as one Sheffield shopkeeper put it, individuals tried to ensure that  ‘wordly’ hands in ‘the hurry of Business and Company’ which might ‘hurt the soul’ were kept separate from the spiritual heart and mind. For this reasons seventeen year old Ebenezer Smith was advised at family worship that ‘whenever we are so employed as not to require the exercise of the mental faculties, then to have some scripture text, promise or doctrine to engage the mind & thus lead it to obtaining some real Profit, remembering that it is so continually active that unless we find some proper subject to engage its attention, it will find some improper one for itself, or rather Satan’. This is, perhaps, a good example of what we might call deliberately disembodied religious practice.

Faith in the Town is now available as an Open Access title on the Oxford Academic platform and it will be published in print form later this year.

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