Dr Joseph Hardwick was delighted to take on the role of Secretary for the EHS in summer 2023.
I am Associate Professor in modern British history at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle upon Tyne. My work explores cultures of communal prayer and worship in modern Britain and the British empire. I’m interested in the ways that large and diverse communities can, at moments of emergency and crisis, come together to pray and worship as a collective. One of the crises that has most interested me is disease amongst cows. My interest in this (albeit upsetting and grizzly) subject has led me to consider how non-human animals have been represented in prayer, and indeed how animals have become more visible in public worship in Britain, and the Church of England in particular, since the later nineteenth century.
It is perhaps appropriate that I am joining the EHS as secretary in the year when the society conferences have explored the ‘margins and peripheries’ theme. For centuries, many ecclesiastical authorities, notably in England’s national church, have sought to exclude non-human animals from that most human of spaces, the church. But it has always been difficult to separate human from non-human lives. The animal writings of the philosopher Mary Midgley have been a large influence on me; especially important has been Midgley’s simple but vital comment that all human communities have involved animals. The animals that have been exploited and eaten have also been valued as members of flourishing communities (Midgley used the word ‘mixed’ to describe such communities). I’m interested in how this intermixing of human life with the lives of a great variety of non-human animals, both wild and domesticated, has been expressed in cultures of prayer, even in eras when labouring animals began to disappear from the streets of towns and cities. In a recent journal article, I talk more about why the incorporation of animals in worship should be regarded as an overlooked element in the Church of England’s efforts to reconnect prayer and worship with the natural world.
The history of the modern Church of England has interested me for a good deal of time. My first book considered the Church of England’s relationship with settler migration and the British empire, while the second, Prayer, Providence and Empire (published in 2021), tells the story of the long-running history of ‘special worship’ or ‘national prayer’ in settler colonies from the mid-eighteenth century to the First World War. The Church of England lost its ‘established’ status in most of the overseas empire, but in both these books I try to show how the Church maintained its association with the nation and the national – or colonial – community. Particularly at times of crisis, such as during wars and epidemics, other faith groups turned to the Church of England to provide leadership. These interests in the status and authority of national religious institutions have led me to consider how animal welfare groups have looked to the Church of England to speak up for the rights and welfare of non-humans. Since the 1950s Anglican leaders have spoken on animal issues in the House of Lords and in synods and convocations. Yet a long-running nervousness among some clergy is revealing: the Church owns land, has been involved in pastoral agriculture, and has been close to hunting communities, and these competing interests pulled churchmen in many directions.
My interest in community – and particularly in what Mary Midgley has called the human-non-human ‘mixed community’ – has developed into a new project, which considers moments when diseases in animals and diseases in humans seem to correspond or overlap, such as when a cattle disease – rinderpest – preceded an outbreak of cholera in Britain in 1865-66. Clergy and other religious commentators were among the groups who paid particular attention to these apparent correspondences between sicknesses in people and animals. What the clergy said during these periods in sermons and prayers, I argue, is revealing for how contemporaries understood both the barriers that separated species, as well as the interdependencies that linked them. I hope to publish a journal article on this topic in the not-too-distant future!
Ecclesiastical History Society 