THE PERVASIVE WORLD-VIEW - RELIGION IN PREMODERN BRITAIN

Recent critics of the secularization thesis have questioned the extent to which premodern Britain was religious by creating a caricature of a 'Golden Age of Faith' and then showing that the reality fell short o f that image. This rejoinder stresses the need to appreciate the natur e of religion pre-Reformation and draws on the work of leading histori ans to show that, even if we accept the most jaundiced view of religio n before and shortly after the Reformation, the previous orthodoxy was more accurate than the recent revisions. In Laslett's phrase, 'the wo rld we have lost' was a religious world.