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Takes up the second theme of part I. Reform is put in the context of diocesan and parish visitation, land and people, propagation of the Gospel and a reformation of manners. Pietism is discussed as a post‐war official programme. The Christian Year in church and home, a new interest in the shape of the liturgy, a development in church architecture from Latin choir to congregational nave, and church music are major topics.

Discusses a clergy training in university theology, analyses Lutheran ‘Orthodoxy’, in particular the controversial definition given by Pietism and the reformation of manners (c.1690–1730). Examines what was taught at grammar school and university, censorship of theological and religious books, and at clergy background and recruitment.

Between 1795 and 1798 Hannah More oversaw the production of over a hundred Cheap Repository Tracts, cheap literature for the poor modelled on the existing chapbooks and broadside ballads that aimed at weaning them away from what she saw as the less decorous aspects of popular culture. Her most celebrated tract was The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain. The Riot was aimed at stopping the food riots that were endemic in 1795, which E. P. Thompson has seen as part of the moral economy of the poor. It is argued that the Cheap Repository was a success, not because it had a significant impact on the poor but because large numbers of upper-and middle-class people, especially women and clergymen, were involved. The Cheap Repository marked a significant step in the involvement of women in the reformation of manners movement.

The new regime encouraged writers to justify the regicide and the establishment of a commonwealth, and to persuade the nation to live quietly under its authority. It also set out, with considerable success, to secure control of the press. The chapter examines the writers who gave public support to the regime and the arguments they deployed, which ranged from the superiority of a free commonwealth to divine providence, the stars, and the duty of citizens to accept and obey de facto authorities. The chapter also surveys the work of preachers in promoting the reformation of manners, by putting pressure on local magistrates, and the role of pamphleteers in reaching out to a popular audience. It ends with a survey of royalist and anti-puritan counter-propaganda, and offers a reassessment of who won these propaganda wars.

Sodom's destruction was a type (or foreshadowing) of the end of the world. It was a theological commonplace that the world would end in a universal fire similar to that which had destroyed the Cities of the Plain. Future punishments such as this were intimately linked to morality in the seventeenth century. Theologians and reformers of manners argued that the best way to enforce morality was to think of divine rewards and punishments, not least the pains inflicted on Sodom and Gomorrah. Moralists were not the only ones interested in how the world would end though, as this preoccupation also informed natural philosophy. Several writers, not least Thomas Burnet, participated in a wave of cosmography, putting forward new naturalistic theories that aimed to explain the earth's geomorphology, the Noahic Flood, and the end of time. These speculations were often modeled on the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by fire and water. These theories and ideas showed the intimate connection in the late-seventeenth century between the Sodom story and the enforcement of morality.

This chapter examines debates about the dangers of fairs. In late-Stuart England, some notable and polite London men fashioned themselves into urban patriarchs. Reform movements, such as societies for reformation of manners, provided middling London reformers incentive to observe the city around them from a moral high ground. From this perspective, London’s fairs seemed dangerous – they threatened social order particularly because they encouraged behaviours contrary to reformers’ own notions of polite masculinity. Middling men had available to them two discourses that motivated their urban reform attempts: religious sermons and tracts and satirical periodical literature. Men who heard sermons or read pamphlets regarding the dangers of vice and public immorality looked around them at London’s post-fire urban landscape in disarray. Sermons calling for religious renewal or cleaning up social ills and avoiding ‘lewd’ behaviour took on a specific meaning as they were preached, printed and disseminated in a city undergoing the constant flux of post-Fire reconstruction. Men who participated in urban reform movements considered London’s fairs disorderly events that threatened their gendered ideals. Becoming ‘Heroick’ Christian informers and policing urban amusements, middling men made themselves essential to the urban environment and propagated a new style of masculinity.

The collapse of Charles I’s Personal Rule brought the swift reversal of Laudian innovations, and soon led on to the abolition of Episcopacy, Christmas and other festivals, the removal of hundreds of ministers, and the suppression of the prayer-book. The chapter explores Puritan efforts to build a reformed Church and ministry, and shows how reconstruction proved far harder than demolition, with Presbyterianism taking firm hold only in London and Lancashire. The Puritan movement became increasingly fragmented by the rise of Independents, Baptists, and Quakers. The chapter then turns to the parish experience: the ministry and services, and disputes over access to the sacraments, and over weddings and funerals. Finally, it assesses Puritan attempts to drive forward a reformation of manners, through campaigns designed to suppress blasphemy, immorality and profanation of the Sabbath.

This chapter discusses a prominent secular example of ethical codes, the early modern manuals of civil behaviour made famous by Norbert Elias’s notion of a ‘civilising process’ on the road to modernity. Focusing on early modern England, it describes how the new ideal of civility was taught primarily as a series of printed instructions on how those aspiring to gentility should conduct themselves. These rules were set out as precepts to be rigorously followed, but were not enforced by any authority. Rather they were upheld partly by social pressure and the emotions it triggered (embarrassment, shame, a sense of exclusion), partly by the voluntary actions of individuals who chose these modes of conduct for themselves and for their children. In this pedagogical and aspirational aspect, codes of civility fit well the Foucauldian concept of the care of the self. The growing prominence of civility facilitated a major shift in eighteenth-century English society: the decreasing use of legal means to regulate personal behaviour and an increasing emphasis on internal restraints inculcated through education and self-discipline. Ideas of civility meshed with the disciplinary activities of ecclesiastical and secular courts as they sought to raise standards of personal (especially sexual) morality and restrain behaviour among neighbours, at a time when political and religious divisions were undermining the ecclesiastical courts as agents of everyday social discipline.