Emily Vine, "Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion in Early Modern London" (Cambridge UP, 2025)

Summary

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Podcast Summary

Podcast: New Books Network
Host: Dr. Miranda Melcher
Guest: Dr. Emily Vine
Episode: "Emily Vine, Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion in Early Modern London" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
Date: September 24, 2025

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Overview

This episode explores Dr. Emily Vine’s forthcoming book, Birth, Death, and Domestic Religion in Early Modern London. The conversation focuses on how major life events—birth and death—were not solely religious occasions confined to public churches, but were profoundly domestic, communal, and networked processes. Dr. Vine's research centers on the lived religious experience of Londoners across multiple faiths (not just state Anglicanism) between 1605 and 1780, examining both the comparative dynamics between communities and the roles played by ordinary people, especially women, in sustaining religious life within and beyond the household.

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Main Discussion Points & Insights

1. Background and Motivation for the Book

• Dr. Vine is a social, cultural, and religious historian of Britain’s 16th–18th centuries, based at the University of Exeter.

• The book stems from her PhD research and a fascination with London’s vibrant, dangerous, and rapidly changing early modern context, marked by:

  • Population booms, epidemics (notably the plague of 1665), the Great Fire (1666)
  • Waves of migration (French, Jewish, Huguenot, etc.), and growing religious diversity

• Dr. Vine highlighted a gap in scholarship for comparative studies across London’s diversified religious communities (02:57).

  “I wanted to find out more about how all of these hundreds of thousands of people packed closely together and belonging to different religious communities, were responding to this changing world around them...”
  — Dr. Emily Vine (04:08)

2. Timeframe and Communities Studied

• Covers 17th and 18th centuries (1605–1780), from the Gunpowder Plot to the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots.
• Allows comparison of changes before and after the 1689 Toleration Act.
• Examines Jewish, Huguenot, Catholic, Protestant (Anglican and non-conformist) communities.
• Describes distinct migration stories (e.g., Sephardi and Ashkenazi Jews, Huguenots) and changing religious fortunes, opposition, and adaptation (05:52–09:21).

3. Religion in the Home: Universal, Context-Sensitive Practice

• Practicing faith at home was common for:
  • Supplementing public worship (for Anglicans, etc.).
  • Providing the only safe place for religious observance for marginalized groups (e.g., Catholics, Jews).
• Life cycle events (childbirth, death) mainly occurred at home, which was not just a site of private devotion, but a venue for vital communal religious practice—especially for those unable to worship publicly (09:59–12:35).

4. Forms of Domestic Religion: Individual, Household, & Networks

• Scholarship typically focuses on either private/family devotion or conventicles (secret religious meetings).

• Dr. Vine highlights an in-between, informal culture:

  • Visits to help with childbirth, sickness, domestic baptisms, wakes—physical movement and support among homes of co-religionists.
  • Ordinary people's homes became essential nodes in religious networks.
  • These activities were often female-led, fostering mutual assistance and community strength (13:01–16:20).

  “Domestic religion is not just about your immediate family members. It can also be about people dropping in, assisting you, praying with you. But also your own domestic religious practice is not only located within your own home, but it can also take place in the homes of other people too...”
  — Dr. Emily Vine (14:22)

5. Childbirth as Religious and Social Event

• Childbirth documentation is sparse, but evidence shows:
  • Women typically sought midwives who shared their faith/language.
  • Jewish, Huguenot, and Quaker women sought co-religionists as midwives—showing the intertwining of religious, practical, and social support.
  • The event was dangerous (no pain relief, high mortality) and theologically significant ("childbirth pain as punishment for Eve's transgressions"), with prayer and female solidarity as key features.
  • Childbirth was both deeply religious and highly social, with women in each faith reflecting on these moments as spiritual stimuli (16:55–20:01).

6. Tensions with Religious Authorities

• The Church of England mandated that baptisms occur in church (exceptions: emergencies).

• 17th-century crackdowns targeted midwives baptizing infants and unsupervised home baptisms—fear of deviation from official liturgy, especially “Papist” (Catholic) rites.

• Still, many chose home baptisms for agency: selecting preferred ministers, customizing ritual, accommodating minority faiths.

• Parish records reveal a network of homes used for religious ceremonies, not just official consecrated spaces (22:12–26:33).

  “London is very much a religious marketplace at this moment. And we have evidence that Presbyterian families, for example, would select a minister who doesn't generally make the sign of the cross during baptism because they disagree with the symbolism...”
  — Dr. Emily Vine (24:30)

7. Death and Mourning: Persistently Communal

• Despite claims that death became more private in the 18th century, Dr. Vine’s research shows continued communal practices:

  • Numerous visitors and communal prayer at the deathbed.
  • Wakes held in the home (e.g., Irish Catholics, Quakers)—dozens, sometimes hundreds, pay respects.
  • These were opportunities for collective devotion and community affirmation well into the late 18th century (26:47–29:18).

  “...after he died, they laid his body out and hundreds of people came to view his body over the course of about three days. So people were queuing up to view his body. And one person who saw his body reported that George Fox was the pleasantest corpse that ever was looked upon.”
  — Dr. Emily Vine (28:06), quoting an account of Quaker leader George Fox

8. London’s Uniqueness: Networks, Densities, and Diversities

• London’s homes were exceptionally permeable due to:
  • High-density living, multi-household buildings, regular movement between lodgings, everyday inter-faith proximity.
  • Mortality crises (e.g., plague) that deeply affected entire households.
  • A fluid “religious marketplace” with people traversing the city for worship and mutual aid (29:47–32:13).

9. Benefits for Minority Religious Communities

• Informal networks and permeability of homes were sources of resilience and cohesion, especially for non-conformist/minority groups.

• Emphasizes women’s agency and authority in religious life.

• Strengthened communities not just by formal worship, but through responsive, lay-driven aid aligning with life’s cycles (32:37–34:46).

  “If we look at religious practice from this particular angle, we’re not focused as much on meeting houses, churches or synagogues and we’re not focusing entirely on men, such as priests, ministers or rabbis, but we’re instead shifting the focus towards ordinary people, ordinary homes, and particularly the agency and authority that women has to direct some of this informal religious practice.”
  — Dr. Emily Vine (33:41)

10. Surprising & Poignant Historical Discoveries

• Many baptism records concern abandoned infants:
  • Babies left at church or synagogue steps for safe-keeping.
  • Infants often named after the parish or church.
  • A memorable instance: a child too young to give his name, found clutching a penny, was named “Henry Penny."
• These stories humanize the research, drawing emotional lines across centuries (35:13–38:09).

11. Current and Future Research

• Dr. Vine is now working on wills and bequests in early modern England, linking material culture and religious communities (38:15–39:28).

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Notable Quotes (with Timestamps)

• Dr. Emily Vine on London’s Uniqueness:
  “There are lots of unique things about London at this moment that perhaps make London homes particularly permeable... people of different faiths living cheek by jowl... multiple families or households living within one building... people moving lodgings relatively frequently.” (29:47)

• On Women’s Role in Religious Practice:
  “Women are the ones who were often called upon to help and pray with sick friends and neighbours... and of course, they’re the ones who were called upon to help out during childbirth, which was at this moment still very much a very domestic and a very female event.” (16:55)

• On Community Networks:
  “Many of these different religious communities were actually underpinned and sustained by these informal processes of visiting, mutual assistance and moving between each other's homes.” (14:45)

• On the Story of Henry Penny:
  “...the only identifying feature was that this small child was clutching a penny in his hand... so the parish named him Henry Penny. And I think that story has really, really stayed with me and I think about Henry Penny quite often.” (37:53)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 02:57 – Dr. Vine introduces her background and motivation for the book
• 05:52 – Timeframe selection and overview of religious communities and historical context
• 09:59 – Why and how early modern Londoners practiced religion at home
• 13:01 – Forms and networks of domestic religious activity
• 16:55 – Childbirth as a religious and communal event across different faiths
• 22:12 – Tensions between household practice and religious authorities
• 26:47 – Death, dying, and commemoration as communal and networked experiences
• 29:47 – What’s unique about London’s permeability
• 32:37 – The home as a source of strength for religious communities
• 35:13 – Poignant findings in church registers and the story of Henry Penny
• 38:15 – Dr. Vine’s current and future research directions

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Final Thoughts

Dr. Emily Vine’s research offers a nuanced and empathetic look into the everyday, often-overlooked settings of early modern religious life. Her findings highlight the vibrancy, adaptability, and mutuality that characterized London’s many faith communities, revealing the central role domestic spaces and ordinary people—especially women—played in shaping religious experience amid historical change. The episode is rich with surprising anecdotes, critical reevaluations of standard narratives, and resonant reminders of how life’s most universal events were navigated in the complex world of early modern London.

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Transcript

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[Dr. Emily Vine]

There.

[New Books Network Announcer]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Emily vine about her book titled Birth, Death and Domestic Religion in Early Modern London, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Now obviously the title tells us where and when we are going and, and gives us a sense of kind of the import of the topics we're going to be discussing. Because of course, what is more important than birth and death turns out really not very much in this context. And that's what's so interesting to think about what this means in the home. Because I think so often we assume that kind of birth and death are such a big deal in the medieval and early modern periods that they're kind of only done in formal churches with formal bishops and priests and, you know, ceremonies and things like that. And of course that's part of the story, but a lot of the story is at home every day, all the time. And that's exactly what this book helps us understand of kind of what are people doing normally. And we're going to be talking about lots of different kinds of people. This is not a book that just focuses on sort of state Anglican Protestantism. We've got more than that to discuss. So, Emily, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Thank you very much for having me. And thank you for that fantastic summary of some of the key points of the book as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, in fact, on that theme of introductions, I'd like you to go next, if you could introduce yourself a little bit and then tell us the backstory of why you decided to write the book.

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yes, of course. So I'm a historian of 16th, 17th and 18th century Britain. So that's Tudors, Stuarts, Georgians. I would probably describe myself as a social, cultural and religious historian. I am currently based at the University of Exeter and I currently work on a larger collaborative project which is about early modern material culture and the bequests that people made in their wills. But this book that we're talking about today is actually based on my PhD research, and I think I wanted to write it because I've always been very interested in the history of London, and particularly early modern London. It's a moment when basically so much is happening. So it's a time when the population of London explodes. You've got the turmoil of the Civil wars in the interregnum, the horror of events like the great plague of 1665 and the Great Fire of London in 1666. It's also a time when you have a huge amount of written and documentary evidence, so when people like Samuel Pepys and John Evelyn are producing very detailed diaries. Early modern London is a very dangerous place with high mortality. People are living in very densely populated streets. And it's also a moment where, due to immigration from places like France, Amsterdam, Spain and Portugal, the emergence of different Protestant denominations, you have an awful lot of religious diversity. So I think I wanted to find out more about how all of these hundreds of thousands of people packed closely together and belonging to different religious communities, were responding to this changing world around them and some of the extraordinary times that they were living through. And when I started researching this, I realized too that in the existing scholarship, there were lots of standalone community histories. For example, excellent histories of the London Huguenot community and the London Jewish community. But there wasn't really a comparative study of something that looked at the lives of all these different religious communities together. So that's what I wanted to produce with this book as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Hmm. Those are some lovely aims to have laid out early on in our conversation. And obviously in that description, you've given us a lot of specifics that help us identify kind of which bit of early Modern period you're looking at. Obviously, that can be something that's defined in lots of ways. But is there anything further we want to clarify about the time period that you cover and kind of how you decided on the range?

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yeah, so I cover basically the entirety of the 17th and the 18th centuries. So this is a period broadly covering the time from the gunpowder plot in 1605 to the Anti Catholic Gordon riots that took place in the summer of 1780. And this is a slightly unusual chronology. It sort of melds together the late early modern period with the 18th century, the long 18th century. But it's an exciting period in London's history for some of the reasons I've already mentioned. But I also chose this chronology because it meant I could compare and also chart the changing fortunes of these different religious communities that were making London their home at this time period and to sort of trace how this changes over the course of two centuries. So just briefly, for example, the Jewish community was informally readmitted to England in 1656. So we see firstly Sephardi immigration in the late 17th century. This is largely people from Spain and Portugal coming via Amsterdam. And then later we see a much larger wave of Ashkenazi immigration in the early 18th century. And we see the establishment of synagogues and burial grounds for both congregations. We see both these congregations growing predominantly in East London. And in the mid 18th century we travel to see the debates around Jewish naturalization as well. But of course, throughout this time period there's lots of waves of antisemitism. And then to take a different community, if we're thinking about this broader comparison, the Huguenot community had quite a different trajectory and timeline over the 17th and 18th centuries. So for them you have large scale immigration in the 1680s, rapid expansion of their communities and trades. They're also living in East London and they experienced some early opposition from English weavers, for example, working in similar trades. And we see some quite violent spikes of antique Catholicism throughout this time period as well. Not only during the Gordon riots that I've mentioned, which come at the end of the time period I covered, but also during the so called popish plot from 1678 to 1681. And despite all the restrictions on Catholic worship that are happening at this time period, we also see wealthier and more well connected Catholics worshipping at the chapels in various European embassies. So all these different congregations are experiencing rises and falls in fortune across the 17th and 18th centuries. And in roughly the middle of the time period that I cover in 1689, we have the Toleration act, which in theory granted freedom of worship to non conformists except Roman Catholics or non trinitarians. So the time period of roughly 1605 to 1780 allows for consideration of what, if anything, changes after the 1689 Toleration act, which falls roughly in the middle of this time period as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, it's definitely an interesting time period for looking at these questions. So thank you for giving us a bit more clarity about exactly what you're doing here. This now lets us get into some of the things you figured out. So let's talk more about early modern Londoners and practicing religion at home. There's kind of some obvious reasons of, like, that's where people spend a lot of their time. But we can, I think, get to some thoughts and motivations that go just beyond that. Why were early modern Londoners practising religion at home? And was this a thing that depended on which religion you were practising, or was it sort of everyone did this because that's where you were?

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yes, exactly. So they're practicing their faith at home for a range of different reasons. And yes, it did depend on your faith. So for some, domestic devotional practice was a supplement to weekly church attendance. So as well as going to your parish church or meeting house on the Sabbath, you might be encouraged to pray at home on Sundays and other days of the week, both individually and with other members of your household or family. You might be encouraged to write in a reflective spiritual diary too. But for those whose access to public worship was restricted, like Catholics, the home was the only place where this could safely take place. And in the book, I focus particularly on the life cycle events of childbirth and death. And you mentioned this in your introduction to the podcast. So I focus on these two events for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because childbirth and death are the only two truly universal experiences, everyone is born and everyone dies. And for all of the religious communities that I've written about in this book, being born and dying are events of extreme religious success significance. And throughout this time period, these things generally take place in the home. So this is slightly before lying in. Hospitals are being widely used. And I argue in the book that because these are events that generally require visitors, so you would have visitors to the deathbed and women who would attend and assist in childbirth, that the home at these moments became a very important setting for communal religious practice. And this was perhaps particularly important for those who didn't have these alternative opportunities for collective worship. Perhaps they didn't have safe access to A place for public worship. So yes, I sort of say that formal gatherings in a church, chapel, meeting house or synagogue were very important. These gatherings took place on the Sabbath at Easter, for example. But it's not just these gatherings driven by the ritual or liturgical year that are significant, but these more informal gatherings instigated by the needs of the laity, the rhythms of life and death. And often these things are taking place in domestic spaces.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's helpful to understand kind of what we have and don't have. Right. So that we don't fall into the traps of like, oh, but there must be hospitals. Right. Like that's not the time period we are looking at. Thinking then about practicing faith in the home. Is this something that's done sort of individually, you know, go off and find a quiet space, or is this sort of only the family around the dinner table, or is this kind of a wider social practice?

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yeah, that's, that's a great question. And it basically encapsulates all of the above, all of the things you've mentioned. So existing scholarship has tended to look at household religion from perhaps one of two angles. So firstly, they've looked at individual or family religion. So this is, as you say, when you go off and find a quiet space, perhaps you're reading the Bible or praying by yourself, you're writing in your spiritual diary, or perhaps for practice of gathering all the members of the family together. So perhaps the patriarch, the head of the household, has gathered everyone in the parlor, he's reading the Bible to you, or he's leading collective prayer or psalm singing in a gathering that includes everyone who lives under that roof, such as children, household servants or apprentices. So a full religious life might include both those aspects of individual and family religion. The scholarship has also looked at a second part of domestic religion, and this is the fears and attempts to restrict so called conventicles. So conventicles are more the sort of secret, usually non conforming meetings for worship that involved gatherings of people from lots of different households. And these were viewed as quite subversive, largely because you couldn't necessarily trace or determine what was happening at these meetings. So in the book I look at both these strands, I look at the private and family religion, I look at conventicles as well. But my main focus is actually something between the two. So I'm more interested in what I consider to be quite an informal and spontaneous culture of visiting and moving between the homes of co religionists at moments, for example, where you're visiting to help people at moments of childbirth and sickness, for example, you're attending a domestic baptism or a wake, you're bringing a neighbour childbed linen, or you're praying with them at a moment of crisis. So if we look at it from this angle, domestic religion is not just about your immediate family members. It can also be about people dropping in, assisting you, praying with you. But also your own domestic religious practice is not only located within your own home, but it can also take place in the homes of other people too. So you know when you're visiting a neighbour, when you're praying with them in their home, that is also a part of your domestic religious practice. And I suggest in the book that many of these different religious communities were actually underpinned and sustained by these informal processes of visiting, mutual assistance and moving between each other's homes. So, yes, places of public worship are extremely important in sustaining religious communities, but so too are networks of the homes of the laity as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Okay, that's really helpful to understand because this is in the home, but also moving between homes. And again, it's kind of not falling into these generalized traps. Sort of a home is like a hermetically sealed unit that doesn't interact with others. That's really not what we're talking about here. So to make that clearer, could we talk maybe about the childbirth aspect in a bit more detail? You mentioned there are some ways in which it was obviously a social experience also. Obviously, given what we're talking about, a religious experience, did that show up differently for different religious communities in this period?

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yeah. So I should start by saying the evidence we have for childbirth in this time period, for multiple reasons, we're restricted a little bit in what survives because this is often quite a private moment in some ways. And it's perhaps not a moment that lends itself to producing the same volume of documentary evidence as cultures of death and mourning, for example. But when I talk about this phenomenon of mutual assistance of people going to the homes of their co religionists, we find it's often women who take the lead on this. So it makes sense that women are the ones who were often called upon to help and pray with sick friends and neighbours. And of course, they're the ones who were called upon to help out during childbirth, which was at this moment still very much a very domestic and a very female event. So we had evidence from this time period that women would often seek out a midwife who shared their faith. We know that Jewish women often sought out Jewish midwives. We know that Huguenot women often sought out French midwives. Now Some of this makes perfect practical sense due to shared language perhaps, rather than just a shared religious life. But as another piece of evidence, we also know that Quaker women were seeking out Quaker midwives. So faith is a very important factor when choosing who to attend you when you are in labour. And of course this is a moment of relatively high maternal and infant mortality. There's no real effective pain relief and women have been taught by the Church that childbirth pain is a punishment for Eve's transgressions in the Garden of Eden. So it's by design an immensely painful but also very religious experience. And prayer was one of the main things you would turn to to get through it, essentially. So women would commonly gather to provide practical and spiritual support to pray with each other, and it meant that childbirth was both a very religious and a very sociable experience for women. And indeed for women who attended and helped out and observed at such moments were also encouraged to use the occasion to as an impetus for their own religious lives. So to learn from and reflect on the occasion, on the experience of witnessing and helping out a co religionist who was in labour as an opportunity to reflect on the mercies of God and perhaps as an impetus to live a pious life as a result of witnessing and experiencing these things as well.

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[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yes, absolutely. So as with anything at this time period, there is lots of debate and discussion. Everything is basically contested. So if we just sort of go according to the Church of England, the established church baptism, for example, could only take place in the home if the child was sick and was likely to die before a church baptism could be arranged. The concern, as with many other ceremonies, was that subversive practices would take place in settings that couldn't be supervised. For example Catholic baptism, or perhaps people adapting the liturgy in various ways. In the 17th century, we see a real attempt to crack down on the practice of midwives being able to baptize infants in an emergency. So at the beginning of the period, it was possible that midwives could baptize very sick infants in an emergency. We see this being cracked down upon because they are concerned that midwives are using superstitious or potentially Catholic practices as well. And in practice, increasingly in the 17th century, you get lots of evidence of baptisms happening at home when there was no emergency, when the child wasn't sick. So people are doing this at home in circumstances that would contravene what the established church allows. And often this does appear to have been chosen to allow the parents of the child to exercise some degree of agency over the form of baptism used. So often. Parish registers will record that a Catholic or so called Papist family had baptised their child at home and A note in the baptismal register will say that the child was baptised by a Popish priest. Or sometimes they refer to Catholic priests using the word strange. So they'll describe a Catholic priest as a stranger or a strange priest. So we know that Catholic families were having baptisms at home to allow a Catholic or strange priest to attend and baptise for child. And for Protestants too. There are a range of different Protestant denominations in London at this moment. If you baptize your child at home, you can perhaps choose the minister that you would like to attend, rather than just having your child baptised by the minister of your local parish. So London is very much a religious marketplace at this moment. And we have evidence that Presbyterian families, for example, would select a minister who doesn't generally make the sign of the cross during baptism because they disagree with the symbolism of making the sign of the cross during baptism. And on the other hand, during the interregnum, we get people like the diarist John Evelyn, who staunchly conforms to the established church, who does baptise his children at home, but for the opposite reason, so that he can include a Church of England minister who would perform the sign of the cross during the service. So it allows people with very different beliefs about the form of the liturgy to adapt it to their own preferences under different circumstances. And what's also interesting about domestic baptism is that it's not only taking place in the child's home, it's not only taking place in the home of a particular child's parents, but occasionally in the homes of other parishioners or co religionists, sometimes in the lodgings belonging to a priest or minister. So children and their families are traveling not just to the church or meeting house, but to other people's homes. And there was perhaps a real network of homes underpinning how these different religious communities were operating.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So, again, we're getting networks right, which is a fascinating thread that we sort of keep seeing. So what if we move from discussing birth to death? Was this also a communal, networked experience?

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yes. So some scholarship, some existing scholarship has pointed to an experience of death that becomes more private in the 18th century. But the research that I conducted for this book suggests that actually, throughout the 18th century, we find evidence that death remains something that involves lots of visitors, witnesses, helpers and elements of communal prayer. Now, part of this is perhaps because I've sought out these pieces of evidence of individuals and families who either belong to smaller or marginalized religious communities, or perhaps were particularly pious individuals. And, of course, lots of deathbed accounts are laudatory. They're creating quite an idealized image of the deceased. Piety and final moments often. But despite these sort of conditions where we consider these primary sources in a certain way, we do find plenty of evidence of scenes where there are lots of visitors, where people are praying and singing psalms with the deceased. It was very common throughout this time period to visit a dead body when it was lying in the home. For example, in the Irish Catholic community right to the end of the 18th century and of course far beyond, it's very common to attend awake in the home, around the body, where the body is still lying in the home. And we get similar descriptions for other denominations as well. So, for example, there's a fascinating description of the death and the funeral of the Quaker leader George Fox, who died in 1691. And this account says that after he died, they laid his body out and hundreds of people came to view his body over the course of about three days. So people were queuing up to view his body. And one person who saw his body reported that George Fox was the pleasantest corpse that ever was looked upon. So they're very much sort of communal occasions of being either visiting sick people on bed affaired or viewing bodies, and still very much important occasions of collective devotional practice as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

So that takes care then of the amount to which this is social and communal across the lifespan. What about in and outside of London? I mean, obviously the book is focused on London, so I'm not going to ask you to kind of tell us in this amount of detail for the entire rest of the country. But is what you've been telling us sort of only a London thing, or do we have any indication that this is also kind of these sorts of networks and communal movements between houses happens in other places too.

[Dr. Emily Vine]

So, yes, as you hint at in your question, I feel to a certain extent I'd need to do a comparative study with a case study outside of London to answer this properly. But I think one of the reasons why I picked London to focus on as part of this book is there are lots of unique things about London at this moment that perhaps make London homes particularly permeable. So there are sort of a conflation of circumstances, such as the densely populated nature of people's living arrangements. So you've often got multiple families or households living within one building. You've got people moving lodgings relatively frequently. You've got people of different faiths living cheek by jowl in parts of London, for example. Sorry, parts of East London, for example. You've got members of Jewish and Huguenot congregations living alongside each other. And you don't really have this in other English towns or cities at this specific time period. So a comparable European city might be somewhere like Amsterdam. And you've also got mortality crises which affect densely populated living conditions, which are important religious phenomena as well and which infect entire households, such as plague. Plague. So plague was. Was viewed in. In quite sort of religious terms by many different communities. And I think it's also the religious marketplace of London at this moment that's key. Perhaps particularly all the different Protestant denominations in the mid 17th century. People are already walking across the city to go sermon gadding, to listen to different sermons, to different ministers, preach different sermons and they're also walking across the city to visit the homes of their co religionists. So I think it's a conflation of this densely populated, very religiously diverse location and the different sort of mortality crises and circumstances of living in the city of London itself. That's making a very unique scenario that's making London homes particularly permeable at this moment in Tighe.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Yeah, that definitely makes a lot of sense, but definitely worth clarifying kind of what is specific about London at this point. And obviously this wouldn't be happening if people at the time didn't see that it was beneficial to them. So maybe we could talk about that a bit more directly, the ways in which you think this permeability was a source of strength for. For different, especially minority religious communities in London at this point.

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yeah, absolutely. So again, some of the existing scholarship, particularly for religious history at this moment, points to particularly the 18th century as a time when church attendance was declining. And this has perhaps been used to suggest that religion is less important in the lives of ordinary people at this moment. But I'd argue that religious vitality was still strong and this was partially because of what's going on in homes and these informal occasions of visiting, mutual assistance, helping each other out at moments of birth and death. That's what's sustaining these different religious communities and that's what is encouraging these different religious communities to grow alongside one another. So we know that London was a religiously diverse city and it still is today like that that has continued and different religious communities have continued to grow and make London their home. I'd argue that the home and what is happening inside homes is one of the reasons why this happens. And I think if we look at religious practice from this particular angle, we're not focused as much on meeting houses, churches or synagogues and we're not focusing entirely on men, such as priests, ministers or rabbis, but we're instead shifting the focus towards ordinary people, ordinary homes, and particularly the agency and authority that women has to direct some of this informal religious practice practice. So these different communities are being strengthened and they're growing not just because of what is happening in places of public worship, but it's a form of communal religious practice that is very responsive to the needs of the laity and very responsive to the rhythms of life and death as experienced by ordinary people in ordinary homes as well.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

And, of course, that's the part of history that's most analogous to most of us. Right. Most of us live in ordinary homes and go about our days in ordinary ways. So seeing the links across time can be really interesting and powerful and also quite surprising in a lot of senses. I know I certainly saw. Learnt many sort of details and stories of. Oh, I wouldn't have imagined it that way, necessarily. In the book, was there anything that you came across in the process of putting this all together that surprised you?

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Yes, met many things. And obviously, given the nature of the topics I was covering in this book, a lot of the documentary evidence pertaining to childbirth and death is quite poignant, and it's a real way of sort of shrinking the distance between sort of 400 years ago to the 21st century when you look at these stories of life and death. But I think some of the most surprising or poignant findings come from some of the church registers that I looked at, particularly the church registers relating to the baptism or provision of infants that had been abandoned within a parish. So if a baby or an infant was abandoned, often the parish would pay for the child's upbringing and they would make arrangements for the child to be baptized and often named as well if the child was unidentified. So it was common for babies to be left on the church steps so that they could be found and brought inside and taken to a place of safety. There's also plenty of evidence of infants being left outside the synagogue, and this appears to be all children, so not necessarily children from Jewish families. So there's a real sense of the power of the symbolic nature of a religious space. You leave the child outside the synagogue or the church and someone will care for them. So that was quite poignant. But abandoned children would often be named after the parish in which they were found. So if there was no way of finding out who their parents were or what their name was, they'd be named after parish or parish church. So in the parish church of St. Catherine Cree, you would have an abandoned female child named Catherine. In St Helen's Bishopsgate, a child might be named Helen, but there was one particular case that stayed with me, and this was a very small child who had been found wandering by himself, was too young to tell anyone what his name was or who his family were. And the only identifying feature was that this small child was clutching a penny in his hand. That was all he had, just a penny clutched in his hand. So the parish named him Henry Penny. And I think that story has really, really stayed with me and I think about Henry Penny quite often and wonder what happened to this young boy.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, is that going to be your next investigation? What might you be working on now that this book is done?

[Dr. Emily Vine]

I don't think I'll ever be able to find out what happened to Henry Penny or the many sort of hundreds of children like him. But yes. So currently, as I mentioned at the beginning of this recording, I'm based at the University of Exeter working on a much larger project entitled the Material Culture of wills England 1540-1790. That's a project that's working with the National Archives and we're looking at early modern last wills and testaments and the objects that people left in their wills, the different bequests that they made. But more broadly, I'm also thinking about combining some of the research that appears in my book, all about different religious communities and some aspects of immigration, with some of my current research on wills and bequest culture and thinking a little bit more about communities and bequests and, and how we can trace different communities over various generations as well. So that's broadly the next direction of my research.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

Well, that definitely sounds quite interesting, so best of luck.

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Thank you.

[Dr. Miranda Melcher]

While you are doing that, of course listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Birth, Death and Domestic Religion in Early Modern London, published by Cambridge University Press in 2025. Emily, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.

[Dr. Emily Vine]

Thank you very much for having me today.

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