Neil J. Cummins of LSE and his co-author use the full-texts of ~36,000 English wills to generate estimates of religiosity, 1300-1850. They distinguish between pro-forma performative statements of belief in a creator God in the preamble, which they term “nominal” religiosity, from “real” religiosity, non-template religious statements in the latter part of the will, and bequests to religious entities. They code wills algorithmically for a set of religious variables, such as mentions of God, Jesus, the Saints, a Soul, separately for the preamble, and the rest of the will. They then construct unitary indices using Principal Component Analysis. The broad picture as understood by historians is confirmed by the dramatic and large rise in nominal religiosity from 1400 to 1650, from an index value ~20 to ~60, on a 0-100 scale. This rise appears to track the cultural shift of the period well and quantitatively captures the social milieu that would result in the English reformation. Even more dramatic than this long run rise is the relatively sudden decline in nominal religiosity after its 1650 peak to an index value just over 10 in 1850. This decline is coincident with both scientific and Industrial Revolutions. However, real religiosity has a very different historical evolution than nominal religiosity. Real religiosity rises ~1300 to ~1450. The Black Death of 1346 is at the right time to be considered a potential causal factor in this rise. And they demonstrate this emphatically using a separate sample of will abstracts for the 14th century. The decline in real religiosity, after 1450, of the English precedes the decline in nominal religiosity, after 1650, by about two centuries. Performative religious statements thus hid an early and previously hidden social evolution in the sincere religious belief of the English. They next divide their sample of will makers by wealth tercile. The poor are always less likely to have highly religious preambles. They show that the rise in real religiosity 1300-1400 is driven by the richest group. Thereafter the decline is also driven by the richest with a very sharp decline 1400 to 1550 that is hidden in the aggregate score by the stable real religiosity of the poor. The early decline of real religiosity amongst the rich of England represents a surprising and important new stylized fact of history. This is only detectable through the reading of the full text of wills and splitting them into a nominal and real complement as is done here.

During this Quantitative History Webinar, Neil J. Cummins will explain how this behavior change occurs at the same time as the decline in aristocratic violence (Cummins (2017)), and like violence, precedes the behavior change of the poor by many centuries. Here they find new evidence of the emergence of modern behavior, and the roots of the enlightenment, and the scientific and Industrial Revolutions.

Neil J. Cummins’s co-author: Aurelius Noble (Transkribus)

Discussant: Ji Li, Associate Professor of History, HKU School of Modern Languages and Cultures and IHSS