Abstract
Letters between friends are a rich source for developing our understanding of the ways in which religion was enmeshed with and yet apart from everyday life for people of strong faith. This chapter introduces three pairs of correspondents whose letters collectively span the 1720s to the earliest years of the nineteenth century. In some cases, the friends were from different Protestant denominations. Sharing life-cycle events was one way of reaffirming similarities and overcoming difference in doctrines or the institutions of religion. Religious and everyday topics are not necessarily distinct for these writers, who use what Susan Whyman calls ‘epistolary literacy’ to manage complex materials in order to sustain relationships and to articulate beliefs in ways that complicate Konstantin Dierks’s thesis that epistolary competence was prized primarily as a tool for displaying refinement and facilitating social mobility. Letter-writing was an important channel for the circulation of informal literature that thematised faith and domesticity. This chapter establishes and analyses widespread practices of letter-writing that enabled correspondents to position their faith within everyday life and extraordinary life-cycle events to enable prayer, comfort and community-building.