The border between historical sociology and social history has become so permeable in recent years as to be nonexistent for a growing number of practitioners. Nevertheless, it is probably true that most social historians make little if any effort to test or extract explicit propositions of a more general explanatory character. Their emphasis continues to be upon making intelligible a particular sequence of social acts and relationships with reference to some aspects of a specified time period and location. Propositions and generalizations may be more or less implicit in the guise of research questions which define and guide selective criteria in terms of which a monograph is prepared. Among many historical sociologists, more or less explicit conceptual schemes adapted from earlier research on a similar range of social phenomena are often utilized as central elements defining the major variables of testable propositions which may be confirmed, rejected, or modified by the new case material.

The ambivalence I experienced in trying to decide upon a reasonably accurate title for this book may serve to illustrate the ambiguities of these rather blurred distinctions. My first but not ultimate choice, “Mass educational development and popular religious change in preindustrial Norway, 1740–1891,” provided a straightforward indication of time, place, and social historical topic. My primary concerns, however, are more general in a substantive and methodological sense. Thus, my final title became as it now reads, “Historical role analysis in the study of religious change”, sub-title, “Mass educational development in Norway, 1740–1891.”