The Christian's ABC: Catechisms and Catechizing in England C. 1530-1740

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The Christian's ABC Catechisms and Catechizing in England c.1530-1740. By Ian Green. (New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press. 1996. Pp. xiv,767. $125.00.)

It has been two decades since Jean Delumeau drew attention to the parallel efforts made by Protestants and Catholics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to raise the level of religious knowledge and spiritual awareness among their co-religionists. Although he does not endorse all of the Frenchman's sweeping generalizations, Ian Green, reader in modern history at Queen's University in Belfast, has compiled and collated an enormous amount of data that support Delumeau's principal argument. He draws on Prayer …