The unexpectedly entertaining story of how the Church of England lost its place at the centre of English public life - now updated with new material by the auth

For most people in England today, the church is simply the empty building at the end of the road, visited for the first time, if at all, when dead. It offers it

Both a detailed, wide ranging history of the church in the eighteenth century and a fresh and stimulating re-evaluation of the nature of Anglicanism and its rol

Shows how some of the ideas about the afterlife presented by spiritualism helped to shape popular Christianity in the period.

After decades of neglect there has been a resurgence of interest in the history of the Church of England in 'the long eighteenth century'. This volume of essays