The starting-point for any research into the eighteenth-century Church remains Norman Sykes's Church and State in England in the Eighteenth Century, published over half a century ago. This is a testimony to Sykes's scholarship, but it is also indicative of the relative neglect of the subject by subsequent historians. Recently, however, eighteenth-century church history has experienced a renaissance. It has attracted attention not just from practitioners of traditional ecclesiastical history, but also from others who have become aware of the significance of religion in a period still often treated as indifferentist, rationalist and secular. Some of these are political historians who recognize how religious affiliations continued to fashion political identity, not merely in the ‘Church in danger’ conflicts of Anne's reign, but long afterwards. Others are social historians, increasingly aware of the importance of religion in the formation of social and cultural identities.

The aim of this volume is to bring together some of the fruits of this research and thus, we hope, to make it more accessible to those who would not regard themselves as ‘church historians’. The volume does not claim to be a collective history of the Church of England in the ‘long’ eighteenth century. Indeed, it would be difficult at present to write a new, comprehensive survey of the Georgian Church. These essays are intended quite consciously as an interim statement.