Early modern letters are full of phrases like “God willing” or “By God’s grace.” Sara Budts’ analysis of 5,000 letters shows these weren’t clichés but ways to navigate faith, agency, and uncertainty. From 1450–1700, people balanced divine will with human action in shifting ways.
The secularisation of future expectations in practice: An empirical study of divine appeals in Early Modern English letters
In the wake of Reinhart Koselleck’s seminal work on temporality (1979), historians studying past futures in Western Europe have argued that our current understanding of the future dates back to the period between 1500 and 1800. The medieval, Christian conception of time was largely cyclical in nature; the future was, above all, in the hands of God. By 1800 however, the future had become open, uncertain and constructible; people were left with the feeling that time had not only been accelerating, it had also become secularised. As recent studies have emphasised the gradual nature of this shift, this paper zooms in on the pluritemporal mindscape of early modern societies by charting secular and religious types of future thought in a large body of English letters written between 1450 and 1700. Did fifteenth century people appeal to God more often than seventeenth century people did? In which domains of their lives was religious future thinking the strongest? Did the secularisation of time proceed at the same pace across all communities, despite their differences in religious practice? We address these questions by querying nearly 5000 early modern letters for divine appeals and systematically annotating them for variables like human and divine agency, temporal orientation and domain of life. Our results indicate that while the more formulaic divine appeals found in the opening and closing sections of letters were growing less popular over time, the ones in the letter bodies fluctuated in particular with the religious denominations of the letter writers. The observed rise in mentions of divine entities in the first half of the seventeenth century is mainly caused by a small group of puritan letter writers whose involvement in the civil wars throughout the 1640 made their lives particularly perilous. The other letter writers in the corpus, by contrast, displayed progressively lower rates of divine appeals as time went by, a finding that is in line with previous research that saw the early modern period as one characterised by the increasing secularisation of future thought as well as a shift from religious practice to religious faith.
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