The eighteenth century in England has long been associated with increasing consumption, trade, luxury, and intellectual exchange. In contrast with the religiously-fueled tumult of the previous century, it is frequently portrayed as a polite, enlightened and even secularising age. This thesis questions this picture. Taking the ambiguous legacies of the so-called "Toleration Act" of 1689 as its starting point, it explores the impact of the complex and uncertain outcomes of the 1689 Act on social relations between Protestant Dissenters and members of the Established Church in England in the first half of the eighteenth century. In connecting broader legislative change with developing social discourses and the practicalities of everyday life, it demonstrates the extent to which the Toleration Act made religious questions integral to the social and cultural development of the period. As a result, it stresses not only that developing modes and norms of sociability were essential to determining the nature of religious coexistence, but also that the changing religious landscape was absolutely integral to the evolution of multiple different social registers in eighteenth-century England. It therefore demonstrates how previously disparate approaches to eighteenth-century England are mutually illuminating, creating an account of the period that is better able to attend to both religious and cultural change. With this in mind this thesis pays particular attention to the language through which contemporaries described their sociability, suggesting that they have great potential to illuminate the nature of religious coexistence in this period. Starting from the premise that the words an individual chooses are in some way both reflective and constitutive of their ways of thinking, several of the chapters that follow draw on and analyse the language contemporaries employed at the intersections between religion and sociability. The thesis as a whole suggests that doing so can give us insight into how their religious lives were socially organised, how groups were formed, bounded, and transgressed, and how that in itself fed back into the structures of sociability.

This dissertation explores how feeling was of central importance to the religiosity of Protestants in the north west of England between 1660 and 1740. It demonstrates how in their personal, familial, public and voluntary religious practices these Protestants understood the cultivation of emotions, or more precisely 'affections', as indispensable for the fulfilment of their devotional exercises. Each of these practices was constructive of communities that were linked by feeling and within which different forms of affective norms were expected. These communities preserved much of that godly culture which had otherwise characterised English Protestantism in the earlier seventeenth century. Moreover, by doing so they frequently minimised in part the importance of conformity to the Church of England. Friendships were maintained between conformists and nonconformists and they shared in a culture of religious feeling, which drew on the same topoi in their religious activities. This thesis will make original contributions to a number of debates. It challenges the prevailing narratives of a 'reaction against enthusiasm' dominating the religious discourse of the period. In contrast, it suggests that through the cultivation of feeling, Protestants in the period between the re-establishment of the Church of England and the Evangelical Revival continued to experience a vital religiosity. It thus also questions the suitability of describing some religious movements as inherently more 'emotional' than others. A more viable exploration can be found in differing forms of emotionality in different religious cultures. By examining the north west of England the thesis also revises the notion that the region was spiritually impoverished before the rise of Methodism, or that the religion provided by the Church of England and Protestant nonconformity failed to engage its attendants. The thesis is divided into five chapters which explore the affective communities to which English Protestants of the period and region belonged. These communities were concentric and sequential, in that the individual Protestant might pass between all of them depending upon their devotional practice. Chapter One examines personal religious devotion, conducted mostly alone. It demonstrates the unity between feeling and reason in personal experience of God. Chapter Two examines family religion and how it was defined by a meditative affect and engaged in by a broad spectrum of Protestant affiliation. Chapter Three explores public worship and its central role within the devotional economy; being both the affective crescendo of devotional practice and being a source of pious affections. Chapter Four looks at voluntary religious practices, showing how friendship was defined by its devotional nature and how the various religious societies of the period continued to promote an affective religiosity. Chapter Five considers clerical communities and how these were maintained across lines of conformity and also provided significant spiritual succour to the ministers of conformity and nonconformity in the region.

Le Congrès Eucharistique International est l’un des événements de masse les plus significatifs du catholicisme contemporain. À mi-chemin entre la modernité et la tradition, il s’agit d’un phénomène de mobilisation des fidèles comparable à des événements de masse laïcs, tels que l´Exposition Universelle, les congrès scientifiques et politiques, et même les Jeux Olympiques. Notre travail fait une étude comparative de deux des trois Congrès Internationaux qui ont eu lieu en Espagne (Madrid 1911 et Barcelone 1952). Ces assemblées catholiques sont un vaste et riche champ pour la recherche du point de vue des études transdisciplinaires, et en particulier de la perspective de l’histoire culturelle, car chaque célébration implique une convergence particulière d’intérêts multiples (religieux, politiques, économiques, spatiaux, symboliques, etc.). Tandis que pour la première partie de la thèse nous avons fait une contextualisation historique approfondie de chaque congrès (locale, nationale et internationale), pour la deuxième partie, nous avons opté pour une perspective comparative et diachronique autour de deux thématiques essentielles pour l´étude des faits religieux contemporains : catholicisme espagnol et modernité (chapitre 5), et catholicisme espagnol et espace urbain (chapitre 6). La perspective spatiale de notre sixième chapitre est très importante, car, dans le cadre espagnol, il n’existe à ce jour que très peu d’études approfondies sur la religion comme un facteur de transformation de la ville, et inversement, de la ville comme un élément de modernisation du catholicisme contemporain. / The International Eucharistic Congress is one of the most striking mega events organized by the Catholic Church in late modernity. Its hybrid nature (both traditional and modern, secular and spiritual), the fact that it has been celebrated since the end of the XIXth century in all five continents, and the imposing multitudes it gathers, make it an extraordinary object of study for the field of Religion and History. Despite its being mainly conservative in nature, its celebration has also allowed for restricted, but fundamental, religious innovation, gradually allowing the Church to creatively face the challenges of an increasingly less observant modern society. Spain has celebrated the IEC on three occasions: Madrid 1911, Barcelona 1952 and Seville 1993. Our work wishes to establish a rich comparison between the first two. We will first situate the 1911 and 1952 celebrations in their local, national and international historical contexts. Then, in the second part of our work, we will study both celebrations from a diachronic and thematic perspective, namely, the relation of Spanish Catholicism both to Modernity (to the emergence of mass culture and society) and to Urban Space. Taking a postsecular point of view, we will emphasize the fact that the place, role, meaning, and identity of religion in Spain have changed in tandem with modernity’s social, economic, political and cultural transformations. Ultimately, inspired by both by S. Juliá´s revision of the historical metanarrative that considered Spain as Modernity´s failure/“anomaly”, and by F. Montero´s call to develop a Cultural History of Spanish Catholicism, our study wishes to critically reevaluate the role that History has traditionally ascribed to Catholicism in Contemporary Spain.