This book is a major new contribution to the study of cultural identities in Britain and
Ireland from the Reformation to Romanticism. It provides a fresh perspective on the rise of
interest in British vernacular (or ¿folk¿) cultures which has often been elided with the
emergence of British Romanticism and its Continental precursors. Here the Romantics¿ discovery
of and admiration for vernacular traditions is placed in a longer historical timeline reaching
back to the controversies sparked by the Protestant Reformation. The book charts the emergence
of a nuanced discourse about vernacular cultures developing in response to the Reformers¿
devastating attack on customary practices and beliefs relating to the natural world seasonal
festivities and rites of passage. It became a discourse grounded in humanist Biblical and
antiquarian scholarship informed by the theological and pastoral problems of the long period
of religious instability after the Reformation and over the course of the eighteenth century
colored by new ideas about culture drawn from Enlightenment historicism and empiricism. This
study shows that Romantic literary primitivism and Romantic social thought both radical and
conservative grew out of this rich context. It will be welcomed by historians of early modern
and eighteenth-century Britain and those interested in the study of religious and vernacular
cultures.
